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      Democrats train fire on Musk as unelected billionaire dips in popularity

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      For most of the 17-minute interview, Elon Musk stuck to a script. He was just a tech guy on a mission to “eliminate waste and fraud” from government.His slash-and-burn cost-cutting crusade was making “good progress actually”, he told the Fox Business commentator Larry Kudlow on Monday, despite sparking a backlash that has reverberated far beyond Washington.“Really, I just don’t want America to go bankrupt,” he said.But then Kudlow asked Musk to look forward. Would the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) still be in place in a year? He thought so – his assignment wasn’t quite complete. Musk, the world’s richest man, then pointed to social security, a widely popular federal program that provides monthly benefits to retirees and people with disabilities, and other social safety net programs: “Most of the federal spending is entitlements. That’s the big one to eliminate.”For weeks, Donald Trump and Republicans have insisted that social security, Medicaid or Medicare would not “be touched”. Now Musk was suggesting the programs would be a primary target. Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, Democrats pounced.“The average social security recipient in this country receives $65 a day. They have to survive on $65 a day. But you want to take a chainsaw to social security, when Elon Musk and his tens of billions of dollars of government contracts essentially makes at least $8m a day from the taxpayers,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a floor speech the following day. “If you want to uncover waste, fraud or abuse, start there.”As the second Trump era comes into focus, Democrats have found a new villain: an “unelected billionaire” whose bravado – and sinking popularity – they believe may offer their party a path out of the political wilderness.“There’s nowhere in America where it is popular to cut disease research, to gut Medicaid and to turn off social security,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “So it’s hard to see a place where what Musk is doing for Trump doesn’t become an albatross for Republicans.”The White House has championed Doge’s work while reiterating that Trump would “protect” social security and other entitlement programs. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.The Social Security Administration , which serves more than 70 million Americans, has announced plans to reduce its workforce by more than 10% and close dozens of offices nationwide as part of Doge’s federal overhaul. Officials with the group have been installed at the agency since early last month.Despite mounting criticism of Musk, the president has embraced his beleaguered ally, who spent close to $300m helping elect him to the White House. This week, Trump hailed Musk as a “patriot” as he showcased Teslas from the south lawn of the White House. The president selected a red sedan, hoping to boost the electric car company, which has suffered a sharp decline in sales and stock prices since its chief executive launched his Doge operation. The White House has said that if conflicts of interest arise, “Elon will excuse himself from those contracts”.But Musk and his chainsaw-wielding approach to downsizing government is playing a starring role in early Democratic ads and fundraising appeals. Progressive activists have staged “nobody elected Elon” protests across the country while other groups are targeting Tesla showrooms and dealerships. On a “fighting oligarchy” tour across the country, Senator Bernie Sanders pointed to Musk’s growing political influence as a central threat to American democracy.“Most American people, they can’t name us. They don’t know who Chuck Schumer is, but they do know what this administration and Elon Musk and the GOP are planning for them,” Katherine Clark, the House minority whip, said on Friday. “It’s why you’re seeing this uproar in town halls.”While Democrats have much to say about Musk, they are less sure of how to stop him.Many of Doge’s actions have been halted or stopped in the courts. This week two federal judges ordered government agencies to rehire tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired as part of Doge’s purge of the federal workforce.Locked out of power in Washington, Democrats are under enormous pressure to use any leverage they have to block Trump and Musk. A Republican-authored bill to fund federal agencies through September and avert a shutdown fiercely divided Democrats this week. House Democrats and progressive activists erupted in anger at Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who ultimately relented and helped pass the measure rather than risk a funding lapse and, in his words, give Musk and Doge an opportunity to “exploit the crisis for maximum destruction”.Public polling underlines Democrats’ interest in Musk. A new CNN survey found that just 35% of Americans held a positive view of the billionaire Trump adviser, a full 10 percentage points lower than the president. The poll also found that he is notably better known and more unpopular than the vice-president, JD Vance.More than six in 10 Americans said Musk had neither the right experience nor the judgment to carry out a unilateral overhaul of the federal government, though views broke sharply along partisan lines. Roughly the same share said they were worried the reductions would go “too far”, resulting in the loss of critical government programs.A survey conducted by the left-leaning Navigator Research polling firm late last month found that views of Doge as a standalone cost-cutting initiative were marginally favorable, in line with other polls that have found Americans are broadly supportive of its stated mission to root out waste and improve efficiency. But there are signs Americans don’t like the approach or implementation so far.When the effort was framed as “Elon Musk’s Doge”, views turned sharply more negative. The poll also captured the far-reaching impact of the cuts: 20% say they or someone they know has lost access to a federal service, 19% say they or someone they know has lost access to a federal grant, and 17% say they or someone they know has quit or been laid off from a federal government job.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Musk is the face of everything that people are worried about in the Trump administration,” Ferguson said, adding: “To a lot of people, putting Elon Musk in charge of protecting the middle class is like putting Jeffrey Dahmer in charge of protecting a morgue.”Democrats believe Musk’s comments on entitlement programs are particularly potent – the world’s wealthiest man advocating for steep cuts to programs designed to help retirees and vulnerable Americans.In the Fox Business interview, Musk claimed the programs were rife with waste and fraud, suggesting as much as $600bn to $700bn – or nearly a quarter of their budget – could to be cut. Federal watchdogs have long identified improper spending as a problem, but Musk’s figure exceeds their estimates.Musk has derided social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”. As evidence of widespread fraud, Musk repeated a debunked theory, favored by Trump, that social security benefits are being paid to dead centenarians. The head of the agency has rejected the premise. Democrats have warned that Trump and Musk were using false or exaggerated claims of fraud as a “prelude” to slash the program or privatize it, as many conservatives have long desired.After Musk’s comments aired, the White House swiftly issued a “fact check” insisting that Musk had only advocated for eliminating waste and highlighted several occasions in which Trump has vowed to protect Americans’ benefits.Republicans also rushed to clarify Musk’s comments. “Look, Elon Musk is a brainiac with an IQ that I cannot even fathom. He is not a master of artful language,” Mark Alford, a Republican representative of Missouri, said on CNN. “We are not going to eliminate social security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s sheer nonsense.”It was a rare break with Musk, whom Republicans have been loath to cross, well aware that he not only has the president’s full support and ear but a fortune to squash any dissent within the ranks. During Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month, Republicans gave Musk a standing ovation as the president heaped praise on his work. They publicly warn that Democrats oppose Musk’s fraud-and-waste removal efforts at their own political peril.Yet there are signs that Republicans are beginning to worry. Despite Trump’s close alliance with Musk, even he seemed to indicate it was time to rein him in. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet’,” the president wrote in a social media post.House Republicans have reportedly been advised not to hold in-person town halls after several widely publicized confrontations with constituents furious over loss of government jobs and services. At the few meetings that did take place this weekend, constituents confronted Republican members of Congress with their concerns about possible cuts to social security.Republicans are weighing deep cuts to entitlement programs as a way to offset the cost of extending Trump’s sweeping tax cuts aimed largely at the wealthy. Trump has praised the House plan.“The Republican party at this point has wrapped both arms around the third rail and is holding on as the electricity flows,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic party in Wisconsin, where a contest next month will provide an early test of the party’s anti-Musk strategy.On Thursday night, Wikler hosted a People v Musk grassroots event to discuss the billionaire’s impact on the 1 April state supreme court race, which will determine the balance of power between conservative and liberal justices on Wisconsin’s highest bench. Musk has spent millions of dollars through his America Pac in an effort to tip the scales in favor of Brad Schimel, a county judge and former Republican attorney general. Democrats are supporting Susan Crawford, a county judge and former attorney for Planned Parenthood.Wikler said Musk’s ascendancy in Washington – and his influence in the race – has turned liberal voters in the state from “concerned to panicked to outraged with the heat of 1,000 suns”.“If Susan Crawford wins this race, and Musk and Schimel lose,” he said, “then that will be a big bat signal in the sky to Democrats everywhere that fighting back is not only the right thing to do, it’s good politics.” More

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      Black Medal of Honor recipient removed from US Department of Defense website

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      The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base.According to the West Virginia military hall of fame, Rogers was the highest-ranking African American to receive the medal. After his death in 1990, Rogers’s remains were buried at the Arlington national cemetery in Washington DC, and in 1999 a bridge in Fayette county, where Rogers was born, was renamed the Charles C Rogers Bridge.As of Sunday afternoon, a “404 – Page Not Found” message appeared on the defense department’s webpage for Rogers, along with the message: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”A screenshot posted by the writer Brandon Friedman on Bluesky on Saturday evening showed the Google preview of an entry of Rogers’s profile on the defense department’s website.Dated 1 November 2021, the entry’s Google preview reads: “Medal of Honor Monday: Army Maj Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers.” Below it are the words: “Army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers served through all of it. As a Black man, he worked for gender and race equality while in the service.”“Google his name and the entry below comes up. When you click, you’ll see the page has been deleted and the URL changed to include ‘DEI medal,’” Friedman wrote.The Guardian has asked the defense department for comment.Since taking office in January, Donald Trump has moved his administration to roll back DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – efforts across the federal government.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne executive order sought to terminate all “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government”, which the Trump administration deems “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility’ (DEIA) programs”.In a win for the Trump administration on Friday, an appeals court lifted a block on executive orders that seek to end the federal government’s support for DEI programs. More

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      US deports 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador despite court ruling to halt flights

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      The US deported more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador despite a US judge’s ruling to halt the flights on Saturday after Donald Trump controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime.El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 had arrived and were in custody as part of a deal under which the US will pay the Central American country to hold them in its 40,000-person capacity “terrorism confinement centre”.The confirmation came hours after a US federal judge expanded his ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority that allows the president broad leeway on policy and executive action to speed up mass deportations.The US district judge James Boasberg had attempted to halt the deportations for all individuals deemed eligible for removal under Trump’s proclamation, which was issued on Friday. Boasberg also ordered deportation flights already in the air to return to the US.“Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele posted online, followed by a laughing emoji.Soon after Bukele’s statement, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, thanked El Salvador’s leader.“Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele,” he wrote on the social media site X, following up on an earlier post in which he said the US had sent “2 dangerous top MS-13 leaders plus 21 of its most wanted back to face justice in El Salvador”.Rubio added that “over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars”.On Friday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to order the deportations of suspected members of the Venezuelan gang he has accused of “unlawfully infiltrating” the US. The US formally designated Tren de Aragua a “foreign terrorist organization” last month.View image in fullscreenHe claimed the gang members were “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” against the US.The Alien Enemies Act has only ever been used three times before, most recently during the second world war, when it was used to incarcerate Germans and Italians as well as for the mass internment of Japanese-American civilians.It was originally passed by Congress in preparation for what the US believed would be an impending war with France. It was also used during the war of 1812 and during the first world war. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, slammed Judge Boasberg’s stay on deportations. “This order disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump’s power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk,” Bondi said in a statement on Saturday night.But lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union contend that the Trump does not have the authority to use the law against a criminal gang, rather than a recognized state.On Sunday, the Republican senator Mike Rounds questioned whether the deportation flights had ignored Judge Boasberg’s order to turn around. “We’ll find out whether or not that actually occurred or not,” Rounds told CNN. “I don’t know about the timing on it. I do know that we will follow the law.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEl Salvador’s multimillion-dollar “terrorism confinement centre” – which is known by its Spanish acronym Cecot – is the centerpiece of Bukele’s highly controversial anti-gang crackdown which has seen tens of thousands of people jailed since it was launched in March 2022.The 40,000-capacity “mega-prison” was opened at the start of 2023 and has since become an essential destination for rightwing Latin American populists keen to burnish their crime-fighting credentials with voters. “This is the way. Tough on crime,” Argentina’s hardline security minister, Patricia Bullrich, enthused last year after posing outside Cecot’s packed cells.A succession of social media influencers and foreign journalists have also been invited to tour the prison to document its harsh conditions and help Bukele promote his clampdown, which has helped dramatically reduce El Salvador’s once sky-high murder rate.“The conditions in there are like something you’ve never seen … Depending on which side of the argument you fall on, it’s either the ultimate deterrent or it’s an abuse of human rights,” the Australian TV journalist Liam Bartlett reported after visiting El Salvador’s “hellhole” prison recently.“There’s no sheets [and] no mattresses. [Prisoners] sleep on cold steel frames and they eat the same meal every single day. Utensils are banned so they use their hands [to eat]. There’s just two open toilets in each of these massive cells and the lights stay on 24/7,” Bartlett added. “Imagine how long you would last in these conditions.”Human rights activists have decried how the mass imprisonments have taken place largely without legal process. More than 100 prisoners have died behind bars since Bukele’s clampdown began.Neither the US nor El Salvador offered any immediate evidence that the scores of Venezuelan prisoners sent to Cecot this weekend were in fact gang members or had been convicted of any offense. More

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      Russell T Davies: gay society in ‘greatest danger I’ve ever seen’ after Trump win

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      Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said.“I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”“I’m not being alarmist,” he added. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”Since his inauguration, Trump has ended policies giving LGBTQ+ Americans protection from discrimination. He has also restricted access to gender-affirming healthcare, said the US would only recognise two sexes, and barred transgender people from enlisting in the military.Davies also used his keynote speech at the awards ceremony, which rewards the efforts made to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, to criticise Trump, and the president’s ally Elon Musk.“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime,” he told the audience, which included the singers Louise Redknapp and Katy B, and the Traitors contestants Leanne Quigley and Minah Shannon.Davies said he had turned 18 and left home in 1981, adding: “And that is exactly the year that rumours and whispers of a strange new virus came along, which came to haunt our community and to test us in so many ways.”“The joyous thing about this is that we fought back,” he said. The community “militarised, campaigned, marched and demanded the medicine”.He added: “We demanded the science. We demanded the access.”When he wrote the TV series Queer As Folk in the late 1990s, he said, it was part of a movement, with writers “fomenting ideas” and putting gay and lesbian characters on screen.Had he been asked to imagine then what life for LGBTQ+ people would be like in 2025, “I want to say it’s going to be all rainbows,” he said, “skipping down the street hand-in-hand, equality, equality, equality.”But the peril the gay community now faced, he said, was even greater than that in the 1980s.“The threat from America, it’s like something at The Lord of the Rings. It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil,” Davies said.“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he added.Musk, the de facto head of the “department of government efficiency”, bought the social networking site Twitter, which he renamed X. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found hate speech on the platform rose by 50% in the months after it was bought by the billionaire.“We have never had this in the history of the world,” Davies said. “It is terrifying because he and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”But Davies said the gay community would do “what we always do in times of peril, we gather at night”, and would once again come together, and fight against this latest wave of hostility and oppression.“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done,” he told the Guardian, “which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march.”“If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again,” he added, “which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.” More

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      Trump says the economy ‘went to hell’ under Biden. The opposite is true

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      Donald Trump keeps saying he inherited a terrible economy from Joe Biden and many Americans believe him, even though that’s not true. During his White House marketing event for Tesla on Tuesday, Trump said the US and its economy “went to hell” under Biden. Last week, in his national address to Congress, Trump said: “We inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.”But the truth is that by standard economic measures, the US economy was in excellent shape when Biden turned over the White House keys to Trump, even though most Americans, upset about inflation, told pollsters the economy was in poor shape.When Biden left office, the unemployment rate was a low 4.1%, and during Biden’s four years in office, the average jobless rate was lower than for any president since the 1960s. Trump has repeatedly railed against the high inflation under Biden, but the fact is that by the time Biden left office, the inflation rate had fallen to just 2.9% – down more than two-thirds from its peak and near the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal.Not only that, the nation’s GDP growth has been impressive, rising at a solid 3.1% rate at the end of Biden’s term. Ever since the pandemic ended, economic growth in the US has been considerably stronger than in the UK, France, Germany and other G7 nations. Shortly before election day, the Economist magazine ran a story saying the US economy was “the envy of the world” and had “left other rich countries in the dust”.Trump often says job growth under Biden was terrible, but the fact is that the US added 16.6m jobs during Biden’s presidency, more than during any four-year term of any previous US president. Under Trump, job growth was far worse – during his first four-year term, the nation lost 2.7m jobs overall, making Trump’s presidency the first since Herbert Hoover’s during which the nation suffered a net loss in jobs. The pandemic was largely responsible for this, but even during Trump’s first three years in office, before the pandemic hit, job growth was only half as fast as it was under Biden.Recently, Trump has repeatedly boasted how his tariffs will bring back manufacturing. Trump fails to note, however, that Biden had considerable success in bringing bring back manufacturing and factory jobs. Under most recent presidents, the US lost manufacturing jobs, but under Biden, the nation gained an impressive 750,000 factory jobs, the most under any president since the 1970s. A big reason for this was that as a result of Biden’s green jobs legislation and the Chips Act to boost semiconductor production, manufacturing investment boomed, more than doubling during Biden’s four years in office.Biden took considerable pride about how the economy performed under him, even though he failed to persuade most Americans that the it was doing well. In December, Biden wrote: “Incomes are up by nearly $4,000 adjusted for inflation [since he took office], and unions have won wage increases from 25% to 60% in industries like autos, ports, aerospace, and trucking. We’ve seen 20 million applications to start small businesses. Our economy has grown 3% per year on average the last four years – faster than any other advanced economy. Domestic energy production is at a record high.”Many economists vigorously disagree with Trump’s claim that he inherited a poor economy. Paul Krugman wrote that in January, when Biden left office, the US had what was “very close to a Goldilocks economy, in which everything is more or less just right”. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, had even more glowing words. “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” he said. “The US economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than pre-pandemic.”Trump pays attention to one measure of the economy above all others: how the stock market is doing. During Biden’s four years, Wall Street did very well. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 39% and the S&P 500 soared by 55.7%, including a 28% jump during 2024. In contrast, the stock market is down overall since Trump took office as investors have grown alarmed about the president’s tariff war against the US’s trading partners.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo be sure, there were some serious economic problems under Biden. Housing affordability was a major problem, and inflation rose to uncomfortable levels. The spike in prices was caused largely by two factors: the pandemic, which gave rise to worldwide supply chain problems, and Putin’s war in Ukraine, which pushed up food and fuel prices. But Trump, in denouncing Biden on inflation, ignores all that.As Trump’s trade war spooks the markets and makes nervous CEOs rethink their investment plans, many economists are saying it’s more and more likely the US will stumble into recession this year.Trump has a long history of refusing to accept blame for mistakes and problems, and by repeatedly claiming he inherited a horrible economy, he seems to be laying the groundwork to blame Biden if the country slides into a painful recession. More

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      Farage reportedly met Cummings for ‘friendly chat about the general scene’

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      Nigel Farage has reportedly met Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s adviser turned nemesis, after the Vote Leave founder suggested voters should back Reform UK at the local elections.Cummings, who was once a sworn enemy of Farage during the EU referendum as he battled to keep control of the leave campaign, is reported to have met the Reform leader to discuss Whitehall changes, which allies said was the strongest sign yet that Farage was taking seriously the idea of becoming prime minister.Cummings and Farage were at odds for years in the run-up to the referendum and during Cummings’s time at No 10, with Farage calling him a “horrible, nasty little man”. Cummings’s Vote Leave won the official campaign designation during the referendum.According to the Sunday Times, the pair met recently for a “friendly chat about the general scene” including subjects such as US politics, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as well as “how No 10 and the Cabinet Office really work, about the catastrophe of the Tory party and about what Reform has to do to replace the Tories”. A Reform spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.Cummings was said to be in advanced talks to launch his own new party – the Start-Up party – but in February he posted on X that he believed voters should now back Reform UK.Asked by one X user on Sunday who he would vote for at the next general election, Cummings wrote: “Dunno yet but obviously everyone should vote Reform this spring … No downsides, just upsides.”In a post on his Substack, Cummings claimed Britain needed a significant political realignment including a merger of the Conservatives with Reform. He wrote: “Shove out Kemi [Badenoch] ASAP, take over Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a third force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force whose essence is a decisive break with 1992-2024 … break the coalition supporting [Keir] Starmer, take over No 10, do regime change.”Farage’s party is on course for a number of gains at the local elections in May, including potentially winning control of eight local councils, according to Electoral Calculus.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNevertheless, Reform has been in turmoil for the past fortnight due to a significant rift between Farage and Rupert Lowe, one of his former MPs who has been thrown out of the party in a battle over bullying allegations and referred to the police. Lowe had criticised Farage in a Daily Mail interview and since claimed he had been censored by the party on immigration issues. More

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      Washington worried with Trump back in town: ‘The atmosphere is toxic here’

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      It was an audience more accustomed to stifling a cough or resisting the temptation to unwrap a sweet. But when they spotted vice-president JD Vance taking his seat at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on Thursday night, classical music-goers erupted in unrestrained boos, jeers and shouts of “You ruined this place!”The noisy protest exemplified a culture clash taking place in the nation’s capital. It came in the same week that work began to remove a giant “Black Lives Matter” mural near the White House, a top political columnist quit the Washington Post newspaper and a spending bill passed by the House of Representatives sought to impose drastic budget cuts of $1.1bn on the District of Columbia (DC).Compounding it all, with Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) slashing the federal workforce, some residents fear that Washington could go the way of Detroit half a century ago: a city that loses its principal industry and goes into a downward spiral.“Everybody feels the atmosphere is toxic here and you can’t get away from it,” said Sally Quinn, an author, journalist and socialite. “People are so distraught and so down and in despair. The question is, what can we do? That’s what people are asking in Washington. The biggest feeling of all is impotence: they can’t stop it.”Trump has always been an anachronistic presence in DC, where the Republican lost last year’s presidential election to Democratic opponent Kamala Harris by 86 percentage points. During his first term, he only ventured out to one restaurant in the city – his own – and never attended the annual Kennedy Center Honors or White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.But as in other arenas, Trump’s second term is more direct, determined and intentional, and includes the cultural equivalent of precision air strikes against the mostly liberal residents of Washington.View image in fullscreenOn Monday crews started work to remove a giant yellow “Black Lives Matter” slogan painted on a street one block from the White House. DC mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, had ordered the painting and renamed the intersection Black Lives Matter Plaza in June 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Its erasure five years later amounts to a public acknowledgement of how vulnerable DC is now that Trump is back in the White House and Republicans control both houses of Congress. The work is expected to take about six weeks and the words will be replaced by an unspecified set of city-sponsored murals.Among those who gathered to witness the work on Monday was Megan Bailiff, chief executive of Equus Striping, the pavement marking company that originally painted the letters. She told the Associated Press its presence was “more significant at this very moment than it ever has been in this country” and described its its removal as “historically obscene”.Trump has seized control of the Kennedy Center, the crown jewel of the city’s performing arts scene, installing himself as chair and loyalist Ric Grenell as president. Numerous artists and producers have cancelled shows, including Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, while ticket sales reportedly dropped roughly 50% week-over-week after Trump announced his takeover.The backlash against Vance at this week’s National Symphony Orchestra concert was a palpable demonstration of the anger. Coming just weeks after the vice-president publicly berated Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, some could not help but note the irony that he was attending all-Russian programme that included Stravinsky’s Petrushka, the story of three puppets brought to life by a charlatan.The booing incident prompted a retort from Grenell, who wrote on the X social media platform: “It troubles me to see that so many in the audience appear to be white and intolerant of diverse political views. Diversity is our strength.” Meanwhile this week Trump added Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo to the Kennedy Center’s board.Quinn observed: “They’re being very imaginative in their atrocities. They trashed the Kennedy Center and threw everybody out and put Laura Ingraham on the board. The Kennedy Center has been so much a part of the city for so long and suddenly it’s gone. They’ve lost in the first couple of weeks 50% of their ticket sales. They’re not getting the donations they used to get. All kinds of acts are cancelling and people I know say they won’t ever set foot in that place.”View image in fullscreenThe Trump International hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue is no more but the Maga (Make America great again) movement is gaining a foothold in other parts of the city. Butterworth’s, a bistro on Capitol Hill, has drawn Trump allies including Musk and Kash Patel and has been dubbed “Steve Bannon’s restaurant”.Bannon, who lives nearby but has no formal connection to Butterworth’s, said in a text message it reminds him of one of his favourite areas in London. “It’s Mayfair come to Capitol Hill,” he explained.Co-owner Raheem Kassam, a former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News UK and ex-aide to British rightwing populist Nigel Farage, insisted in an online message: “We are a Capitol Hill restaurant that welcomes everyone and refuses to discriminate based on politics. Our investors come from a range of backgrounds, and includes left-liberals, apolitical-types, LGBT+ people, and minorities.“But frankly, we’re not really interested in ticking boxes. We’re interested in great food and good vibes. If you fancy that, we’re the place for you, no matter who you are. Just please, no hats for dinner service.”Washington has often had a tenuous peace with the federal government when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House. It is now facing its most urgent threat since it was given the power of home rule during the Richard Nixon administration.This week the House passed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government that includes a provision treating DC as a federal agency for budget purposes. This would force DC to revert to its fiscal year 2024 spending levels, resulting in an estimated $1.1bn cut to its current 2025 budget over the remaining six months.The funds are locally raised taxpayer dollars, not federal subsidies. City officials warned of “calamitous reduction in services ranging from schools to public safety”. Washington could face potential hiring freezes, layoffs across various agencies, renegotiation or termination of leases and decreased security and janitorial services.Paul Strauss, shadow US senator for DC, said: “I’m shocked that it’s now House Republicans that are taking steps to defund the police, which was normally a position staked out by extreme members of the far left. To have the House vote to cut the police budget so substantially seems difficult to understand.”After final passage of the continuing resolution, the Senate unanimously passed a bill by voice vote to restore the $1.1bn in spending cuts to the DC government. The DC bill, which Trump supports, must still be approved by the House when it returns on 24 March.Democrats and DC officials view the proposed budget cuts as politically motivated, potentially aimed at undermining the self-governance of the predominantly Democratic city. Trump has previously suggested that DC would be better off under total federal control.View image in fullscreenSuch is the concern that Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, even floated the idea that Washington could be temporarily incorporated into Maryland. Raskin said on the City Cast DC podcast: “If you guys want to think about coming back to Maryland for this period, you would definitely be safer in the free state than you’d be under the brutal thumb of Maga colonialism.”Simultaneously, Washington is facing economic headwinds due to deep federal job cuts orchestrated by Doge under the Trump administration. Unemployment claims recently rose 25% in one week and are four times as high as one year earlier. Glen Lee, the district’s chief financial officer, has forecast that DC could lose 40,000 federal jobs – down by a fifth – and projected a loss of revenue of $1bn over the next three years.Bill Galston, a chair in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank, noted that the federal government is a vast establishment with 2.3 million workers spread across the country, of whom 80% are not in Washington. “So I don’t think that life in Washington DC has been upended yet,” he said.“What there has been and of course is is a pell-mell replacement of a sense of security with a pretty near total sense of insecurity. The sense of what might happen to an individual is a larger effect than the actual firings. People are hunkering down.”The shift in Trump’s second term has been more dramatic than anyone expected, added Galston, a resident of 43 years. “There’s an element of incredulity. People who tried to imagine in the starkest possible detail what could happen almost universally concede that, while they have let their imaginations run riot, they feel they didn’t go far enough.“There is something slightly surreal about all of this, but I wake up in the morning and I walk down the driveway in a very old fashioned way for my three newspapers and I open up the package and it’s very real.”As Doge downsizes the government, the Trump administration has considered offloading numerous federal properties, raising concerns about vacant buildings and a decline similar to that of Detroit after the car manufacturing industry was gutted. An essay in the New York Times newspaper this week was headlined: “DC Is Becoming Another Hollowed-Out Company Town.”View image in fullscreenQuinn said: “It is a one industry town, and basically what they’re doing is destroying the government, which is what Trump said he would do. Even Trump supporters are stunned. I know from some of my friends on the Hill that Republican senators and congressmen are freaking out, too, because they’re hearing from their constituents.”Quinn was married to the late Ben Bradlee, who was editor of the Washington Post when it reported on the Watergate scandal, which forced Nixon’s resignation. Long a vital part of the fabric of the city, the storied newspaper has been in freefall, financially and editorially, over the past year.Billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who donated to and attended Trump’s inauguration, recently ordered that the paper narrow the topics covered by its opinion section to personal liberties and the free market. Opinions editor David Shipley resigned because of the shift. This week Ruth Marcus, who had worked at the Post since 1984, also quit. Several star reporters have left in recent months.David Maraniss, a former associate editor of the Post who recently resigned after 48 years at the paper, said: “What’s happening at the Post is connected to Trump and that’s very disturbing to me. I don’t think Bezos genuflecting to an autocrat is something I want to have any part of. I consider the Post a public trust almost. That sounds sort of idealistic and naive but it’s larger than an owner; it’s an identity.“What it represents in terms of journalistic ethics and integrity has been damaged almost beyond repair and this is a time when newspapers of that sort are needed more than ever. For us to recede from that push for freedom of speech, the First Amendment, for the search for truth is depressing to me.”For many of Trump’s critics, Washington feels like a city under occupation. Maraniss added: “It’s the second occupation but it seems more pronounced than the first. My feelings are complicated by a double whammy of what’s happening in my newspaper and in the city, in the country and in the world. It all seems wrapped together. In terms of Washington there’s anxiety, a feeling of a darkness coming over the city and enormous uncertainty about what people should do.” More

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      ‘Maga since forever’: mercenary mogul Erik Prince pushes to privatize Trump deportation plans

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      Silicon Valley has played a sizable part in the early days of Donald Trump’s new administration, but another familiar face in the Maga-verse is beginning to emerge: businessman Erik Prince, often described by his critics as a living “Bond villain”.Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror”, racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond.Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants.In an appearance on NewsNation, he immediately tried to temper that his plan had any traction.“No indications, so far,” said Prince about a federal contract materializing. “Eventually if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector.”But the news had people wondering, how is Prince going to factor into the second Trump presidency?Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who has advised the Pentagon and the CIA, said: “Erik Prince has always been politically connected to Maga, the Maga movement, and that’s going back to 2015.”Prince, himself a special forces veteran and ex-Navy Seal, is a known business associate of Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first electoral win. Prince even appeared with him last July at a press conference before Bannon surrendered to authorities and began a short prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena.“He comes from a wealthy Republican family,” said McFate, who has authored books on the global mercenary industry and is familiar with Prince’s history. “His sister, Betsy DeVos, is the former education secretary, and he’s been a Maga, not just a Maga, he’s been a Steve Bannon, Maga Breitbart Republican, since forever.”Beginning during the two Bush administrations, Blackwater was a major recipient of Pentagon money flowing into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of his contractors led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and blacklistings of the firm.Years later, Trump would come to the rescue: pardoning all of the Blackwater mercenaries involved in the massacre.Now, with the current administration, which is doling out free advertising to Elon Musk and other Maga loyalists, Prince has a new and familiar ally in Washington.“This is a big market time for him,” said McFate. “He’s very quiet when there’s a Democrat in the White House and gets very noisy when a Republican, especially Trump, is in the White House; I expect this to be one of many things he will try to pitch.”Do you have tips about private military contractors or the world of Erik Prince? Tip us securely here or text Ben Makuch at BenMakuch.90 on Signal.McFate said Prince is nothing if not an “opportunist” and an “egotist” with a penchant for getting into media cycles.“If Trump or somebody says ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ he will pump out a PowerPoint slideshow proposing an idea, whether or not he can do it,” he said. Prince also has the ear of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and was a character witness for her Senate confirmation.There’s no denying Prince is a relentless pitchman, offering world governments billion-dollar plans to privatize wars or other less expensive espionage activities. For example, he was recently named to the advisory board of the London-based private intelligence firm Vantage Intelligence, which advises “sovereign wealth funds” and other “high-net-worth individuals”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPost-Blackwater and under new companies, he has proposed missions in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Congo, Libya and, purportedly, Venezuela – a country he often mentions as ripe for overthrow on his podcast, Off Leash.A senior commander in an alliance of former Venezuelan soldiers who defected from the Chavista regime told the Guardian his organization has been asking Prince for help against the country’s current president, Nicolás Maduro.“We have sent messages to Mr Erik Prince to try to see if we can meet,” said Javier Nieto Quintero, a Florida-based former captain in the Venezuelan military and leader of the Venezuelan dissident organization Carive. “If he wants, we can provide help, support in terms of information, intelligence, or any other area based on the freedom of our country.”Nieto Quintero, who said Prince has yet to respond, and Carive was used in a failed operation against Maduro in 2020 led by a former Green Beret. In what is notoriously known as the “Bay of Piglets”, six of Nieto Quintero’s men were killed and close to 100 captured, including two former US servicemen recruited for the job who were freed two years ago from a Caracas prison.Prince’s eye has undoubtedly been focused on Venezuela, a country with vast oil reserves that has long been in the crosshairs of Trump’s retinue. In recent months, Prince has supported a Venezuelan opposition movement called Ya Casi Venezuela, claiming to have raised more than $1m for it over the summer. The Maduro regime is now investigating Prince’s links to the campaign, which it paints as a sort of front for western governments fostering its downfall.Venezuela has reason to fear Prince and his connections to American spies: the CIA, with a rich history of covert actions in Latin America, was at least aware of a plot to overthrow Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez in 2002.“We were in contact with Ya Casi Venezuela, but a meeting never took place,” said Nieto Quintero. “We have continued to grow and strengthen our ranks and our doctrine, our plans, our institutional, military, security and defense proposals.”Prince is officially active in the region. Last week, Ecuador announced it would be partnering with Prince in a “strategic alliance” to reinforce the country’s controversial “war on crime” with his expertise.Prince did not respond to a request for comment sent through his encrypted cellphone company, Unplugged. Ya Casi Venezuela did not answer numerous emails about its relationship with Prince. As of now, no business deal between the Trump administration and Prince has been signed or publicly disclosed.But across his career as both a shadowy contractor and a political figure, who just graced the stages of the latest Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to applause and then spoke to Harvard Republicans, the public and private sides of Prince remain somewhat antithetical.“He likes to be in the news, which makes him a very bad mercenary,” said McFate. “Frankly, most mercenaries I talk to in Africa, the big ones, despise him.” More