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      in US Politics

      Plastic surgeons wrestle with requests for ‘Mar-a-Lago face’: ‘You’re going to look like Maleficent’

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      Picture a plastic surgeon’s office. You might imagine a sleek Los Angeles practice, with discreet entrances meant to conceal celebrities from the paparazzi. Maybe a Dallas high-rise, where monied housewives spend on postpartum “mommy makeovers”. Or a Miami location, where influencers and OnlyFans stars film TikToks of their BBLs. One city you might not think of is Washington DC. But its buttoned-up reputation belies a newly buzzing industry.Much has been made of the so-called “Mar-a-Lago face”, or the uncannily smooth and artificially voluminous features seen on the likes of Maga elite such as Kristi Noem, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Laura Loomer and Matt Gaetz. The bee-sting puffy lips, frozen brows and taut necks have been compared to Real Housewives stars, sleep paralysis demons and – ironically, considering the Republican party’s anti-LGBTQ+ culture war – drag queens (minus the campy fun).As of January, plastic surgeons in Washington DC have seen a “surge in ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ requests from Trump insiders”, Axios recently reported. Surgeons told the outlet that more Washingtonians want their procedures to be not unnoticed but obvious and overdone.Axios attributed the aesthetic shift to the influx of transplants from south Florida (where Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s gaudy private club, is located), who are no strangers to nip-tuck tune-ups. Others theorize that going through these procedures is a calculated act of political deference to Trump’s preferred (and unnatural) beauty standards.Dr Anita Kulkarni is a plastic surgeon who practices out of DC’s West End neighborhood and specializes in postpartum body contouring. Enter her office, and you will be greeted by staff who look good, but not worked on – and that is the effect most of her clients have gone for. “Before this second Trump term, I just didn’t see a lot of patients coming in making unreasonable requests,” Kulkarni says. But since the inauguration, she has fielded half a dozen or more – not a large sample size, but enough for the surgeon to take note.She says nobody comes in asking for Mar-a-Lago face by name; the most obvious clue is when a patient with visible lip filler comes in wanting more. “I have to say: ‘I cannot put any more in there safely.’” Or they will want more cheek or jawline filler. “‘To my eye, if I put any more in there, you’re going to cross over from looking like the best version of yourself to looking like Maleficent.’ I have to say no in a way that I have never seen before.” And still patients will try to talk their way into more. But placing fresh filler over an existing layer too soon can cause lumpiness, and Kulkarni does not want to risk being known for that look.“My aesthetic doesn’t necessarily have to be your aesthetic for me to give you what you want,” she says. “But when you go outside the range of what a normal human face should look like, that’s not a place I’m willing to go.”More still might shrug their shoulders and say Mar-a-Lago face is part of society’s wider embrace of body contouring. Kris Jenner’s ageless, 70th-birthday facelift may look less garish than Laura Loomer’s balloonish attributes, but both are just as fake. It comes at a time when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reports there were more than 28.5m minimally invasive procedures done in 2024; lip augmentation, dermal fillers and neuromodulator treatments (such as Botox) cracked the top five.Dr Troy Pittman, a plastic surgeon based in DC, says that across the country, people are more willing to talk about the work they have had done. “That’s not a bad thing,” he sys. “But in a town like DC, there is this glamming up of Washington with this new administration, so it’s become more prevalent. They’re OK with looking enhanced.”Dr Kelly Bolden is also a DC-based plastic surgeon. Most of her clients are people of color – she is the medical director of Cultura Dermatology, a practice that specializes in cosmetic treatments for deeper skin tones – and she is not seeing a boom in Mar-a-Lago face requests. But she has noticed a shift, especially among her younger clients in their 20s and 30s.View image in fullscreen“They come in and actually tell me that they like the artificial look. A couple of my patients have said those exact words to me,” Bolden says. Some of the most visible Trump officials are young, such as press secretary Karoline Leavitt and her deputy Anna Kelly (both 28, and the latter is a former pageant queen), and they’re always camera-ready. “I think most of [Trump’s] administration is on the younger side compared to traditional ones, so that’s probably a little bit of where the trend comes from.”Those who want a Mar-a-Lago face have to be able to handle needles: Bolden says it is most often achieved via shots and injectables underneath the skin. “It’s overdone filler and Botox that gives them that mask-face type of appearance.”This is not a look Bolden is known for. Sometimes, she outright denies these requests. Or she will compromise. “Usually I’ll look at them and say: ‘Let’s balance you out, let’s make it more even.’ It’s almost like just as long as they get a little bit more, it will satisfy them,” she says.After the Duchess of Sussex announced her engagement to Prince Harry in 2017, Pittman said women would bring photos of Meghan to appointments and ask for her nose. “That’s a trap,” Pittman says. “We’re not trying to make people look like clones of each other.” He would similarly talk down someone who brought in a picture of Ivanka or Melania Trump. “Whenever people come in asking for a branded look, that can lead to either very unrealistic expectations or artificial results.”Other plastic surgeons advertise Mar-a-Lago face. A practice out of Boca Raton, Florida – less than an hour away from Mar-a-Lago – calls it a procedure that “doesn’t scream surgery. Instead, it whispers refinement.” Dr Shervin Naderi, based in the DC area, described the look as “a modern aristocratic mask” in his practice’s blog.When does a patient know it’s time to ease up on the procedures? Bolden says it’s common not to; the industry term is perception blindness. “The first time someone gets filler, the majority of the time, it looks good,” she said. “Then people get used to it, and they see a wrinkle come back or some sagging, and they’re like, ‘I need more.’ They’re chasing after something without realizing it. A little bit more, a little bit more, and you can’t really see the evolution.”The aesthetics of politics have long been an uneasy topic, especially as it relates to women. Nicole Russell, a columnist at USA Today, called jokes about Mar-a-Lago face “cruel attacks” on conservative women. To others, the face has come to symbolize an allegiance to Trump and his policies. See Noem wearing full glam to an ICE raid, beach waves tumbling over her bulletproof vest. Or Leavitt at the press podium, insisting Trump’s name in Jeffrey Epstein’s emails means nothing, as she purses overlined pink lips to match her shimmery eye shadow.Men are not spared the political aesthetic shift either. Ninety-two per cent of surgeons report treating male patients, with facelifts and sculpted jawlines being top picks. Pittman told Axios his male patients want to look “younger … more virile and masculine” like Pete Hegseth, via Botox, liposuction and eyelid rejuvenation. A fitting counter to Maga’s leading women.But, just like trends, administrations ebb and flow. Mar-a-Lago face won’t last forever – literally. “Nothing in plastic surgery is permanent,” Bolden says. “Filler goes away. Most people will say you get a good eight to 10 years out of a facelift. Everything has a lifespan.” More

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      in US Politics

      Will Marjorie Taylor Greene turn the Maga movement against Trump? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      There are 535 members of Congress; only a dozen or so are household names. If you want to achieve that sort of brand name recognition, there are a few tried-and-tested ways to do so. You can spend years working your way up the ranks until you’re a power-broker like Nancy Pelosi. You can burst on to the scene and dramatically unseat an incumbent like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did. Or you can go the Marjorie Taylor Greene route and achieve notoriety by being utterly unhinged.Since becoming a congresswoman for Georgia in 2021, Greene has kept herself in the news by spouting conspiracy theories, fighting with colleagues, and being one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. In recent months, however, something strange has been happening. Greene has continued to generate headlines, but largely because she has turned on her party and is part of a growing Maga civil war. Greene was the first Republican lawmaker, for example, to say that there is a genocide in Gaza and has been one of the loudest voices demanding that the Epstein files be released. She has also criticised the Maga movement for not focusing on affordability or putting America first. Now, things have escalated to the point where Greene is making Trump see red; the pair are in a full-blown feud.On Friday the president, who stood by Greene when she voiced conspiracy theories about school shootings and claimed that wildfires were started by space lasers, announced on Truth Social that he was finally withdrawing his endorsement of the congresswoman. “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” he complained. Adding: “I can’t take a ranting Lunatic’s call every day.”Greene, meanwhile, has said that Trump’s comments are “hurtful” but she still supports his administration and hopes they “make up”. She has also said she believes that his comments have fuelled threats against her safety. When asked on Sunday about these threats, Trump said: “I don’t think her life is in danger … I don’t think anybody cares about her.”But that last bit isn’t quite true. If Greene learned anything from her apprenticeship with Trump, it’s how to generate media coverage. The congresswoman’s face is everywhere. And while she may no longer be buddies with the president, she is building bridges with former foes. On Sunday, for example, she appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and apologised for her role in “toxic politics”. And earlier this month, she went on the high-profile talkshow The View and criticised her party for not having a health care plan. “You are a very different person than I thought you were,” the presenter, Sunny Hostin, said.So is Greene a different person? I’d love it if that truly were the case; it would be heartening to believe that some of the most toxic people in US politics might be capable of introspection and change. Alas, I don’t think this is some sort of road to Damascus moment. Rather, as Ocasio-Cortez has posited, this is more likely a case of sour grapes. AOC’s theory is that the Trump administration shut down Greene’s ambitions to run for Senate and she “has been on a revenge tour ever since”. Greene said at the time that she didn’t believe she could make a difference as a senator and wanted to continue to serve her congressional district.She’s not alone in her revenge tour. The Republican congressman Thomas Massie, who along with the Democrat Ro Khanna is leading a bipartisan push to release the Epstein files, has also been trading barbs with the president. In a dramatic U-turn, Trump has now had to concede defeat on the files, declaring on Sunday that he’s happy to have a vote on the issue, as “we have nothing to hide”.Trump has bounced back from scandals that would have buried most people. He is, let’s not forget, the first convicted criminal elected to the presidency. But it’s not just the Epstein files and traitorous deputies that he’s battling at the moment. According to a recent NBC News poll, 63% of registered voters, including 30% of Republicans, said that Trump has fallen short of their expectations on the economy. The president has been building ballrooms and blowing up boats instead of lowering the price of bread. While his base is still loyal, his approval ratings are eroding. Whatever Greene’s motives, her political instincts are sharp: there’s a real opportunity now to turn the Republican party against Trump. May the revenge tour roll on. Perhaps, with all this infighting, Greene will turn the electoral map blue. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead More

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      in US Politics

      Mahmood Mamdani on Zohran, Uganda and forced expulsion: ‘Who is part of the nation and who is not?’

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      The night before Mahmood Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972, a senior professor from the university where he had been employed as a lowly teaching assistant wandered into his family home, looking for spoils. The rest of the family had already left – for the UK, the US and Tanzania – but 26-year-old Mamdani had decided to remain until the final day of the three-month period that Idi Amin, the Ugandan president, had designated for all Asians to leave the country. Passing over the furniture and other remnants of decades of family life, the professor hit upon a carton of Johnnie Walker Red, which Mamdani invited him to take home.The next day, reunited with his parents at a transit camp in London, Mamdani learned that the bottles had in fact held nothing but cooking oil, and he amused himself imagining the professor serving them at a party to celebrate the forced departure of tens of thousands of south Asians. It was only later that the “loneliness, anxiety [and] depression” of expulsion set in. Mamdani would go on to join the vibrant intellectual community in Dar es Salaam, where his superfluity of study groups was populated by a who’s who of pan-African scholars and politicians; his parents settled in Wembley, in north-west London, where for several years their “favorite pastime” was greeting the weekly flight from Uganda to Gatwick airport in hopes of meeting a former acquaintance.“Every place we lived in after the expulsion, we lived as if we were guests, our houses or rooms stamped with the feeling of being transients,” Mamdani writes in his book Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, published this October. “With the loss of Uganda, we lost a sense of belonging, and of rootedness.”The question of who belongs in a political community has animated Mamdani’s scholarship ever since. Now a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Mamdani has gained recent notoriety (alongside his wife, film director Mira Nair) as the father of Zohran Mamdani, the New York City political phenomenon and mayor-elect. But his long career and extensive bibliography attest to a lifetime interrogating the colonial categories that continue to define and divide postcolonial politics: race, tribe, Indigeneity; citizen, settler, subject.View image in fullscreenIn Slow Poison, Mamdani turns his attention back to the nation that he has always considered his home, even when it wouldn’t have him. The book combines memoir, history and political theory to reassess two men who have defined Uganda since it achieved independence from the UK in 1962: Amin and Yoweri Museveni. It also grapples with big questions with contemporary relevance: who chooses our global villains, and why? How do notions of Indigeneity operate in a world where people always have migrated – and always will? Who gets to decide which people belong, and deserve rights, in a given country?Amin is primarily known to westerners as a brutal dictator and rumored cannibal, but he enjoyed significant popular support in Uganda from the time he took power in a 1971 coup until he was overthrown in 1979. Mamdani attributes this in part to his expropriation and expulsion of the country’s 80,000 Asian people – most of them the descendants of Indian immigrants who arrived during British colonial rule – in an act of racial nationalism that helped unite Uganda’s disparate ethnic groups and tribes in a shared Black identity.Museveni, a onetime Marxist and devotee of Frantz Fanon who frequented the same intellectual circles as Mamdani in Dar es Salaam, took power in 1986 and has yet to relinquish it. His increasingly authoritarian regime has been characterized by extreme corruption, regional conflicts and human rights violations, Mamdani argues, but “whereas the British propaganda machine turned Amin into a monster and Asians his global victims, Museveni became a Washington poster boy”.The disparate treatment is a result of the two men’s stances toward the west, Mamdani argues. Amin seized power with the backing of the UK and Israel – the UK maintained a strong interest in its former colony, while Israel sought an ally that would allow it to build a military base to the south of Egypt – but turned on them soon after taking power. This about-face saw Amin align himself with Muammar Gaddafi to support Palestinian rights and the boycott of apartheid South Africa, and thumb his nose at the west. By contrast, Museveni acceded to the neoliberal demands of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and signed on to the US’s “war on terror”, providing it crucial regional support in east Africa.View image in fullscreenBut Mamdani’s larger concern is with Museveni’s “continuous fragmentation of the subject population” of Uganda into ever smaller tribal divisions, with people designated “Indigenous” or “non-native” within ever smaller parcels of land. The 1993 Uganda Constitutional Commission defined “Indigenous” groups as those that could trace their presence in Uganda to three or four generations back and could also “indicate ancestral burial grounds and land within Uganda”; Museveni’s program of subdivision saw more and more Ugandans recast as “settlers” if they lived outside their assigned district – a designation that deprived them of the right to own land or hold high political office.Whereas Amin had united Uganda’s ethnic and linguistic groups into one racial category, Museveni has used those differences to fragment the populace and keep any threat to his power at bay. This process is the “slow poison” that Mamdani asserts is killing Uganda’s body politic.There is a clear connection between Mamdani’s appeal for a politics that respects cultural difference while preserving universal equal rights, and the campaign run by his son, who prevailed despite his steadfast refusal to support Israel’s political system, which denies equal rights to millions of Palestinians who are subject to its rule.“The challenge is how to reconcile cultural identity with political belonging, and a common past with a shared future,” Mamdani writes. “Not all who share a common past necessarily share a common future: some may migrate and become part of a diaspora. At the same time, people with different pasts can commit themselves to building a common future in the same place. This is why those who wish to build a future under a single political roof – no matter how different their pasts – belong to the same political community and thus deserve the same political rights.”A week after Zohran’s triumph in the New York City mayoral election signaled a new generation of Americans’ embrace of such universalist values, the elder Mamdani spoke with the Guardian about his history, his politics and his hopes for the future.The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.In your new book, you are asking people to reconsider Amin and the way that he has been portrayed as a kind of Hitler-esque figure. Why was it important to you to return to this history now?The western media in particular has been central to describing Amin as “the cannibal Amin”, etc – and without going to the other extreme of providing an apology [for Amin’s regime], as the Wall Street Journal thinks, I thought it was important to situate Amin in a context and to get a sense of him. Amin is trained as a child soldier by the British. He becomes a specialist in counter-terrorism, which is really a polite term for state terrorism.The worst of Amin’s killings, which are in the hundreds, and you might even say in the thousands, take place in the first year after he takes power. Those killings are informed, guided by the British and the Israelis. The British advise Amin to assassinate [then president Milton] Obote on arrival. The Israelis disagree. They say: “No, [if] you do that you will leave the military power structure intact, and there will be a reckoning down the road.” So Amin follows the Israeli advice and he carries out massacres in barracks. That’s Amin at his most brutal. [Note: estimates of Amin’s death toll range from 12,000 to 500,000; in Slow Poison, Mamdani argues that western sources inflated Amin’s brutality for political reasons.]View image in fullscreenAt the same time, Amin is disturbed at the general lawlessness spreading throughout the country, and appoints a commission of inquiry into disappearances. It’s the first truth commission that I know in the contemporary era. The commission recommends that the police take charge of civil order, and that army control of key institutions be negated.So that’s Amin: a complicated character. The shift between these two phases is informed by Amin’s understanding. After his first visits to Israel and London, it dawns on him that neither the British nor the Israelis take him seriously. They both think that he should be grateful and act as a stooge. That’s his big turning point. The British try to overthrow him. The Israelis try. The important point is that Amin becomes very popular in the country and the attempts to overthrow him from the outside do not work.Why is it important to scrutinize Israel’s role in this history?Israel’s role in Uganda in particular was critical. Israel cultivated Amin right from the beginning. Israel thought he would be their man. They built houses for him. They anointed him in Hebrew. They trained the forces which were central in making the coup. They advised him to use those forces and only those forces. They advised him on how to deal with the Obute military opposition.And then, of course, they were completely surprised when he [switched allegiances]. This is a very central role. This is not singling out Israel. If one didn’t talk of Israel, you would have no explanation of what happened.You describe Uganda under Museveni as a junior version of Israel. Can you explain what you mean?What I mean by junior version of Israel is a state which carries out, in particular, military missions in the region, in one country after another at the urging of or with the approval of the US, and in return gets a clean pass on everything else, and is guaranteed impunity. That’s Israel on a larger scale, and that’s Museveni on a regional scale.Many of us are accustomed to thinking of “Indigenous rights” as an important counterweight to the legacy of colonialism, but you have long questioned the meaningfulness of the distinction between “Indigenous” and non. Why is it important to you to interrogate the concept of Indigeneity as you think about who belongs in a political community?I first encountered this question in a book I wrote several decades ago called Citizen and Subject. I was puzzled by the political architecture that Britain created in its colonies to govern. The census tagged every person living in a colony as belonging either to a race or to a tribe, and I was curious: what’s the distinction? I realized that a race was anybody who had come from outside, who was not Indigenous, and a tribe was anybody who was Indigenous. So I asked myself: “What difference does it make?” Well, it made a difference in how they were governed under the law. All races, whether they came from Europe or from south Asia, anywhere, were governed under the same law, civil law. To be governed under the same law meant that you were supposed to have a common future.Tribes were not governed under the same law. First of all, there was the fiction that each tribe had a homeland. I call this a fiction because it’s not true. Before colonialism, not only Africans, but humans have been migrants. You cannot peg humans to a particular piece of territory over centuries and millennia. You can’t. They’ve moved. This fiction that every tribe had a homeland was extended so that every homeland had a customary authority. Cultural authorities were turned into political authorities. And then the British created something called customary law, which could be enforced by customary authorities with British power standing behind them. This made for a separate future for the tribes, unlike the races. I understood this to be the political, legal essence of what we normally call “divide and rule”.When I went to South Africa in 91, I was writing a book on Africa. Every chapter was written, except one chapter on south Africa, because south Africa was supposed to be the exception. Apartheid was supposed to be the exception. And after just a very little time in South Africa, I realized that I’d been totally mistaken. I’d been misled. South Africa was not an exception. I knew this beast. I had grown up under it in Uganda, although you may call it an informal version of apartheid. It was the same thing where the state used law to divide the population into different groups and privileged one section of the population at the expense of the other. I began to come to a conclusion that every modern colony was an apartheid state.The book deals with your personal history and how your identity cuts across the lines that have been drawn to divide groups for various reasons, whether as an Asian within Uganda or a Muslim from Gujarat in India. The policing of those lines was brought home in a particularly personal way this summer, when the New York Times ran an article seeking to scandalize the fact that your son had attempted to reflect his identity as African and Ugandan on his college application.I was pretty shocked to see that the Times had contacted you to ascertain whether you had any ancestry from Black Africans. It seemed to invoke the “one drop” rule of Blackness, which is very American, as well as Amin’s view that Asians are not really Ugandan. What did you make of that controversy? How do you see the policing of identity categories in the US compared to Uganda and other post-colonial states?In 2013 we formed an organization in Kampala called the Asian African Association. We said in our opening declaration Asian Africans are people whose past is Asian, but whose future is African. They are Africans of Asian descent. We said that in the past we had always lived as visitors, or even worse, as refugees, which meant that we had neither rights nor responsibilities. We were permanently on vacation or permanently entrepreneurs.The formation of this organization was part of a much larger quest which runs through African nationalist struggles, which was: who belongs? Who is part of the nation and who is not? The whole South African conception which ends with the notion of a non-racial South Africa – obliterating the boundary between Indigenous and non-Indigenous – is a fruit of that struggle, and it’s a legacy that we embraced.Now the New York Times – it was scandalous to me that they were resurrecting this dividing line between the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, and that that line could only be crossed through miscegenation, blood mixing. It was shocking. I didn’t have to have any African ancestry, and yet, I thought of myself as a man from Africa. I was an African.I remember Thabo Mbeki’s speech in parliament defining who is an African. And I remember Afrikaner politicians standing up, one after another, each one saying, “I’m an African.” “I’m an African.” That was the fruit of the anti-apartheid struggle. The Times was so narrowly preoccupied with marginalizing one candidate that it seemed to have forgotten everything else.You wrote in the book that despite having been raised in a pretty segregated society in Kampala that your political awakening occurred in the US. What was it that you saw in the US that changed how you understood where you had come from?The big highlight was the civil rights movement and my going to the south, to the march on Montgomery. Then the anti-Vietnam war movement, and indirectly, through my girlfriends, the feminist movement. It was not an individual experience. There was a cultural revolution happening in the US. There was a wholly different mindset which was being born. Everybody I knew, more or less, shared this anti-racist orientation.When I went to Dar es Salaam, I was involved in an intellectual environment which gave me reasons for understanding this transformation and informed me of the larger anti-colonial movement, beginning with the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam Revolution, the Cuban Revolution.Today in New York – the New York experience keeps changing, and now with the election of my son as mayor, it’s changing even more. The sense of possibilities is broadening. I was quite surprised to see Zohran embrace where he came from openly and directly. “I’m a Muslim. I was born in Africa. I’m of south Asian descent,” and so on and so forth. New York continues to be a lived experience.At the same time we are seeing calls on the national level for mass deportation and efforts to carry out the expulsion of disfavored groups from the US. Do you see parallels with the expulsion of Uganda’s Asians?All the threads which led to the Asian expulsion in 1972 and, before that, the expulsion of the Luo [people], are present in the US now: birthright citizenship, Indigeneity. There are resonances, even similarities, but they’re not the same.The big difference, I think, is that there is a counterthrust here, and it’s just beginning. I think this election in New York City is a possible beginning. I don’t want to be too optimistic, but it’s a possible beginning because it’s had resonances, not just throughout the country, but even outside the country.View image in fullscreenCan you say a little bit more about that? My perception of Zohran’s campaign was that he spoke about universal values even as he celebrated in a very specific way his own identity and the identities of his supporters. It was a very different kind of politics than what we get from the Democratic party these days, which often seems to shy away from openly embracing immigrants or Muslims.I understand the contemporary situation in the US as being a product of decades-long encounters, which we call cultural wars, that were played out in the academy, in the intelligentsia. The key cultural war was around the notion of affirmative action. Should affirmative action be a temporary phase, or should it be a permanent phase? If it becomes a permanent phase, does not the quest of justice turn into revenge? Are you not holding children responsible for the deeds of their ancestors? If the children are going to be beneficiaries of the deeds of their ancestors, do they carry a measure of responsibility? I don’t think there is any clear-sightedness on whether affirmative action in the US should be permanent or not, but it’s a big issue, and it’s now coming to the fore.One of the ideas in the book that I was drawn to was the idea of federation – a system that “bases the notion of political belonging on where one lives rather than where one comes from”.My first encounter with the notion of federation was in the thinking of Abraham Lincoln and the amendments which changed the notion of citizenship. Before the civil war, you were a citizen of the state in which you were born. After the Civil war, you could be born in Alabama and move to California, and you would have the same rights as somebody born in California. This federal arrangement – a common citizenship, but not a centralized order – is under threat now. Both parts of it are under threat. Common citizenship is under threat and a federated [non-centralized] order is under threat, with Trump occupying cities with the national guard.In the African context, federation was always seen as a colonial maneuver. Federation was a name for emasculating the newly born independent governments and for empowering erstwhile privileged groups. But now federation is increasingly being embraced as part of an agenda against authoritarian regimes, dictatorial regimes, regimes like Musaveni’s.One theme of the book is how neoliberalism challenged and damaged Uganda’s university. How would you compare what happened there with the turmoil at Columbia in recent years? What do you make of the school’s capitulation to the Trump administration?There’s a definite connection. On the surface – not just superficially, but immediately – it is seen as an ideological confrontation, not as a confrontation about the structure of the university. But the background to 7 October 2023 and Minouche [Shafik’s] administration at Columbia was the [Lee] Bollinger era [from 2002 to 2023]. Bollinger brought about structural changes at Columbia. By the end of it, we got a bloated bureaucracy at the heart of which was the financial bureaucracy. That bureaucracy understood Colombia as a business enterprise with pluses and minuses, gains and losses. It was not really interested in Colombia as an academic institution.Minouche was brought here from the World Bank to [lead] that bureaucracy. She had no understanding of American academia. She had no experience in a large university. Poor Minouche comes and finds herself facing an encampment for which she was completely ill prepared.At the time we were blaming Minouche as the central character in what happened here. I now think that her lack of experience, her ignorance, was taken advantage of by others. She was more or less locked up in her office, and she resigned as an honorable way out, in a sense.She’s like an Idi Amin character; I’m trying to understand her. I’m not apologizing for her. If you print this, the Wall Street Journal will come back.Are you planning to return to campus to teach, given the systems that have been put in place to police the academic content of scholarship at Columbia?I’m definitely planning to come back and teach. I want to be involved in the kind of future we craft. I’m not willing to give up now.You were asked by Museveni to take an active role in his government on multiple occasions and declined. I was looking at the hardcover of Slow Poison last night and realized that you had added a final paragraph that wasn’t in the galley that addresses some of the complications that arise when intellectuals interact with power – the potential for corruption, the desire for “clean hands”. You end on an ambiguous note: “For now at least, we explore for an answer in the realm of practice.”Your son is going to be in power in New York City. Are you interested in playing a role in or influencing his administration?We have been very close as a family: Mira, Zohran and I. This book would have been like one of my other books, which is me standing at a distance and narrating what happened to others, not to me, but both Zohran and Mira kept telling me: “You have to insert yourself as a character in this. You were alive. You were involved. Take responsibility, but tell us. Tell us the part of the story which nobody else will be able to tell us.” So different versions of the book insert me more and more and compel me to understand the difference between the claim to objectivity and an understanding of positionality – that you are a limited witness who is looking at events from a particular vantage point, and that vantage point is both your strength and colors you.That ambiguity is an admission that I haven’t found an answer to the question. I don’t believe one should just stay away from power, but I don’t think we should embrace it. Power is a fatal thing for intellectuals. It corrupts intellectuals. I’ve seen many, many, many a friend get corrupted in the process.As to how I will relate to Zohran’s administration: I think initially at least both Mira and I will have the relationship we did during the campaign, which is to stay at an arm’s length but always be available. Always be available for discussion, for sharing our point of view, but not mistaking ourselves for being him. More

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      ‘Deeply ashamed’ Larry Summers steps back from public life over Epstein links

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      The Harvard professor and economist Larry Summers said he would be stepping back from public life after documents released by the House oversight committee revealed email exchanges between Summers and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who called himself Summers’ “wing man”.Politico reported on Monday that Summers, a former treasury secretary, expressed deep regret for past messages with Epstein.“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” he told Politico in a statement.“I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr Epstein. While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”The left-leaning thinktank Center for American Progress told the Guardian that Summers is ending his position as “distinguished senior fellow”.His comments come after lawmakers on both sides of the aisle urged companies and institutions to cut ties with Summers. Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN that Summers should be held accountable for his years-long relationship with Epstein.Besides Summers, the emails released last week revealed how Epstein maintained contact with other business executives, reporters, academics and political players despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.“For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment,” Warren said to CNN.“If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers and institutions – or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.”A senior Trump administration official told Politico that institutions should end their association with Summers, given the relationship he had with Epstein, who referred to himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man”.“It’s shocking that Larry Summers remains a paid contributor to Bloomberg News, on the board of OpenAI and tenured at Harvard,” the anonymous source told Politico. “What more revelations about him and his “wing man” will it take for institutions to cut him loose? The British government immediately sacked their ambassador to the US over much less.”Summers did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.Summers is now the subject of a new investigation that Donald Trump started last week. The US president instructed attorney general Pam Bondi to launch an inquiry into several Democrats and institutions after their names appeared in the latest tranche of documents, which included emails that seemed to suggest Trump himself might have known about Epstein’s conduct.The exchanges, from 2013 to early 2019, showed Summers and Epstein sharing personal views about politics and relationships. Summers lost his position as president at Harvard in 2006 after making sexist comments about female academics, and the emails released last week have reignited debates about his relationship with the late sex offender.“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote to Epstein in a 2017 email. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSummers added: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51% of population.”Other emails reveal Summers approached Epstein for romantic advice. In November 2018, Summers seemed to forward an email from a woman to ask for Epstein’s advice on when to write back.“Think no response for a while probably appropriate,” Summers wrote. Epstein replied: “she’s already beginning to sound needy 🙂 nice.”Summers reiterated his regret to the Harvard Crimson last week.“I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgment.”The college newspaper also reported that Harvard professors were outraged by the revelations made by the trove of emails released last week.“The cozy friendship between Epstein and Summers on display in the emails is disgusting and disgraceful,” statistics professor Joseph K Blitzstein told the Crimson.The relationship between Summers and Epstein was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2023. According to the outlet, in 2014, Summers had asked Epstein for advice on getting $1m in funding for his wife’s poetry project. More

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      Trump news at a glance: in a U-turn, president tells Republicans to vote to release Epstein files

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      Donald Trump has told his fellow Republicans in Congress to vote for the release of files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in a sudden reversal of his earlier position.The US president’s post on his Truth Social website came after the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said previously that he believed a vote on releasing justice department documents in the Epstein case should help put to rest allegations “that he [Trump] has something to do with it”.Late on Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.“And it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” he added.Trump’s surprise reversal on releasing Epstein filesThe White House has struggled to contain suspicion within Trump’s usually loyal Make America Great Again (Maga) base that the administration is hiding details of Epstein’s crimes to protect the rich elite with whom the financier associated, including Trump.Despite continued releases of files by Republicans this year, including a cache of more than 20,000 pages that were published last week, pressure has grown to disclose more information from Epstein’s estate, as well as FBI investigation documents.The US House of Representatives is expected to vote on the legislation regarding the release of more Epstein files this week, possibly as soon as Tuesday.Read the full storyUN security council votes to endorse Trump’s Gaza planThe resolution, passed by a vote of 13-0 with abstentions by China and Russia, charted “a new course in the Middle East for Israelis and Palestinians and all the people of the region alike”, the US envoy to the UN, Mike Waltz, told the council chamber.The price of passing a resolution was vague language which left many issues uncertain. It gives overall oversight authority to a “board of peace” chaired by Trump, but of uncertain membership.Read the full storyUS will label supposed Venezuelan drug cartel ‘headed by Maduro’ as terrorist organizationThe US has said it will designate a putative Venezuelan drug cartel allegedly led by Nicolás Maduro as a foreign terrorist organization, as the Trump administration sent more mixed messages over its crusade against Venezuela’s authoritarian leader.The move to target the already proscribed group, the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), was announced by Marco Rubio on Sunday.Read the full storyUS judge finds evidence of ‘government misconduct’ in federal case against ComeyA US judge on Monday found evidence of “government misconduct” in how a prosecutor aligned with Donald Trump secured criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey and ordered that grand jury materials be turned over to Comey’s defense team.Last week, prosecutors were ordered to produce a trove of materials from the investigation, with the court saying it was concerned that the US justice department’s position on Comey had been to “indict first and investigate later”.Read the full storyTrump has ‘blurred’ line between military and politics, ex-officers warnWith months of escalation between US cities and the Trump administration amid the deployment of national guard troops, former military officials released a report on Monday about the risks of politicizing the country’s armed forces.The report warns that increasing domestic military deployments, such as using national guard troops for immigration enforcement in the US, and removing senior military officers and legal advisers have made the armed forces appear to serve partisan agendas.Read the full storyCharlotte, North Carolina, reels as 81 people arrested in immigration raidsMany communities in Charlotte, North Carolina, were reeling after federal Customs and Border Protection teams descended on the city at the weekend and arrested at least 81 people – while normally-thriving immigrant enclaves and business districts came to a standstill. Federal agents were deployed in what the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), calls Operation Charlotte’s Web, sparking protests.Read the full storyTrump signals he may soon meet with Zohran MamdaniThe president told reporters that New York City’s mayor-elect “would like to meet with us”, adding, “we’ll work something out” despite trading sharp words for each other previously.“He would like to come to Washington and meet, and we’ll work something out,” Trump said late on Sunday, referring to Mamdani, the 34-year-old Democratic socialist and former state assemblymember who won the New York City mayoral election earlier this month. “We want to see everything work out well for New York.”Read the full storyNew international student enrollments in US plunge this year, data showsThe number of international students enrolling in US colleges and universities plunged this year as the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown on higher education began to bite, data released on Monday reveals.Read the full storySupreme court to review Trump policy of limiting asylum claims at borderThe US supreme court agreed on Monday to hear a defense by the Trump administration of the government’s authority to limit the processing of asylum claims at ports of entry along the US-Mexico border.The court took up the administration’s appeal of a lower court’s determination that the “metering” policy, under which US immigration officials could stop asylum seekers at the border and decline to process their claims, violated federal law.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      In the underworld of accelerationist neo-Nazis, where talk of attacks against western governments are commonplace, the spread of illegal weapons manuals and tradecraft on drone warfare are proliferating. Experts say, in some cases, that classes are being taught online with the input of leadership from proscribed terrorist groups with links to Russian intelligence.

      A powerful atmospheric river weather system has mostly moved through California but not before causing at least six deaths and dousing much of the state.

      Eswatini has confirmed for the first time that it had received more than $5m from the United Statesto accept dozens of people expelled under Washington’s aggressive mass deportation drive.

      Lawyers for Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor, called Trump administration allegations of mortgage fraud against her “baseless” on Monday and accused the administration of “cherry-picking” discrepancies to bolster their claims.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened Sunday 16 November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

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      Why are US border agents in Charlotte, and are they allowed to operate there?

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      What is happening in Charlotte? North Carolina’s largest city is reeling from a series of immigration raids that have arrested more than 100 people, leading to alarm and protests.US Customs and Border Protection has called it Operation Charlotte’s Web, and border agents have been seen near churches, apartment complexes and stores. Greg Bovino, a hardline Border Patrol chief who has led agents in a similar effort in Chicago and Los Angeles, has also been spotted.Over the weekend, Bovino – known for posting highly stylized videos of enforcement actions – touted his work on X. “From border towns to the Queen City, our agents go where the mission calls,” he said, referring to Charlotte.Josh Stein, the governor of North Carolina, has criticized the crackdown as simply “stoking fear”.Why are we seeing more border agents in US cities?Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which encompasses the Border Patrol, is about 60,000 agents strong – making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country.The department has long had the authority to conduct patrols further inland, but it has until recently been highly uncommon to see agents stray far from the south-western border. During Donald Trump’s second term, however, agents have become ubiquitous foot soldiers in the administration’s mass deportation agenda.Under a 1946 statute, Border Patrol agents have the ability to conduct warrantless searches within a “reasonable distance” – or up to 100 miles – from any international boundaries. Those boundaries include international land borders as well as coastlines – so in effect, their range encapsulates most US major cities, including LA, New York and Washington DC. Cities such as Chicago falls within this 100-mile zone, because the Great Lakes are considered a maritime boundary.Nearly two-thirds of the US population lives within the zone.Can Border Patrol operate in places such as Charlotte that are not near the border? The short answer is yes.That’s according to Deborah Anthony, a professor of legal studies at the University of Illinois Springfield with an expertise in constitutional law and the legality of Border Patrol operations. She clarifies that within 100 miles of an international border or US coastline, Border Patrol operates with expanded authority that other law enforcement agencies do not have. Within that perimeter, agents can run immigration checkpoints that require every motorist to stop, even without reasonable suspicion, and can board buses, for example, for immigration inquiries.But once agents are outside the 100-mile perimeter, Border Patrol loses those exemptions and must follow the same constitutional limits as any other law enforcement agency. For instance, agents cannot indiscriminately stop cars or pedestrians or set up checkpoints.They also cannot detain or question people without reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation. To arrest or detain someone, Border Patrol agents would need probable cause, just like any other law enforcement agency. Therefore, if agents in Charlotte conduct stops, detain people without cause, or operate checkpoints inland without reasonable suspicion, that is technically a violation of the constitution.“I think that their presence in Charlotte is something that the community should pay close attention to, because whether they’re operating legally depends on the specifics of how things are playing out,” Anthony said.Who is Greg Bovino, the border chief in charge of these efforts? Until recently, he was an unheralded regional Border Patrol agent from southern California. But since the summer, Bovino, 55, has become the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and now Charlotte.View image in fullscreenBovino, a 29-year Border Patrol veteran who formally headed the El Centro sector in southern California, has frequently broadcast his operations in social media videos that resembles action films.Bovino is not without controversy: he has come under fire for making misleading statements about immigration raids, and Border Patrol operations in Chicago and Los Angeles have triggered lawsuits over the use of force, including widespread deployment of chemical agents.Last month, a federal judge ordered Bovino to regularly appear in court with updates about operations in the city, an effort to create more oversight over the Trump administration’s militarized immigration crackdown. Bovino was also ordered to get a body camera and complete training on the use of a body camera.In August, the New York Times reported that two undocumented people died trying to flee from Bovino’s agents. A Mexican farm worker fell from a greenhouse and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle following a raid at a Home Depot.What does Border Patrol say about the scope of its operations? In response to questions from the Guardian about Border Patrol’s operations in Charlotte, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “While the US Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 air miles of the border, the legal framework provided by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), title 8, title 19 of the US Code, and other laws allows them to operate anywhere in the United States.”She added: “Their ability to operate nationwide ensures Border Patrol can enforce immigration laws, combat smuggling and address national security threats anywhere in the United States, and that immigration enforcement is not limited to border regions when individuals who evade detection at the border can still be apprehended.”Lawyers and human rights advocates, however, have said that the agents, who are trained to block illegal entries, drug smugglers and human traffickers at the country’s borders, may be ill-suited to conduct civil immigration enforcement in urban communities.“The Border Patrol is certainly quite cavalier, and has been very aggressive historically as it goes about its enforcement responsibilities,” César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, previously told the Guardian.Robert Tait and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Trump has ‘blurred’ line between military and politics, ex-officers warn

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      With months of escalation between US cities and the Trump administration amid the deployment of national guard troops, former military officials released a report on Monday about the risks of politicizing the nation’s armed forces.The report warns that increasing domestic military deployments, such as using national guard troops for immigration enforcement in the US, and removing senior military officers and legal advisers have made the armed forces appear to serve partisan agendas.“The use of troops, bases, and ceremonies in partisan settings has blurred the line between military service and political messaging, eroding morale and public trust in the military’s apolitical character,” the report reads.The report, The Perils of Politicizing the US Military, was authored by six former service secretaries and retired four-star admirals and generals, including former army secretary Louis Caldera, former air force secretary Deborah Lee James, former navy secretary Sean O’Keefe, retired navy admiral Steve Abbot, retired coast guard admiral Thad Allen, and retired army general George Casey.The white paper comes as the Trump administration continues to battle the courts over deploying the national guard in Portland. In Washington DC, where the president has more control over the guard than in states, troops were ordered to remain there through at least February.After sending troops to the nation’s capital, Trump sent others to Chicago and threatened to send more to other Democratic-run cities such as San Francisco and New York.Meanwhile, months of upheaval at the defense department have been a hallmark of Pete Hegseth’s tenure. Last month, Hegseth, the US defense secretary, abruptly fired the navy chief of staff. In May, he ordered the military to cut 20% of its four-star generals and admirals, while Hegseth and Trump have fired more than half a dozen top generals since January.The Trump administration has also fired the only two women serving as four-star officers. In February, Hegseth also fired air force general CQ Brown Jr, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff and the second Black man to serve in that role.Monday’s report warns about the consequences of such efforts, most acutely the “erosion of the armed forces’ apolitical character”.“When service members, senior leaders, or military symbols are perceived as aligned with political agendas, the public begins to see the institution as partisan rather than national – and once eroded, that trust is difficult to rebuild,” reads the report. “This loss of trust makes it harder to recruit across the political spectrum, harder to retain talent, and harder to reassure allies and deter adversaries abroad.”Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, urged members of Congress last month to put a halt to Trump’s efforts to deploy national guard troops in US cities without the consent of local leaders, as well as to consider the implications such actions will have for trust in the military.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Congress has the Constitutional authority and moral obligation to stop this,” Reed said in a statement. “We are not powerless. We control the purse. We have oversight authority. We can pass legislation. And we must act now.”Reed called on lawmakers to pass legislation that requires the administration to publicly explain to and notify Congress when it removes senior generals or admirals, as well as measures that would “establish clear standards requiring congressional approval for domestic military deployments except in genuine emergencies”.The report by former military leaders outlines similar recommendations to Congress, calling on lawmakers to require “clear justification and post-action review of significant domestic deployments and high-level personnel changes”. More