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      US judge allows Trump’s AP Oval Office ban to stand over Gulf of Mexico name

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      A federal judge on Monday denied a request by the Associated Press to immediately restore full access to presidential events for the news agency’s journalists.The US district judge Trevor McFadden declined to grant the AP’s request for a temporary injunction restoring its access to the Oval Office, Air Force One and events held at the White House. The Trump administration barred the outlet earlier this month for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage after the president renamed it the “Gulf of America”.McFadden, a Trump appointee, said the restriction on “more private areas” used by Trump was different from prior instances in which courts have blocked government officials from revoking access to journalists.“I can’t say the AP has shown a likelihood of success here,” McFadden said.But he also described the ban as “problematic” and advised the government that “case law in this circuit is uniformly unhelpful to the White House”. McFadden said the issue required more exploration before ruling. Another hearing in the case has been set for next month.The AP filed a lawsuit over the ban last week, in which it named three senior Trump aides and argued that the decision to block its reporters from certain locations violates the US constitution’s first amendment protections against government abridgment of speech by trying to dictate the language they use in reporting the news.“The constitution prevents the president of the United States or any other government official from coercing journalists or anyone else into using official government vocabulary to report the news,” Charles Tobin, a lawyer for the AP, said during a court hearing.The outlet’s attorneys argued the AP would face “irreparable harm” if the ban was not immediately lifted.Trump administration lawyers argued in a court filing before the hearing that the AP does not have a constitutional right to what they called “special media access to the president”.Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, had called the AP lawsuit a “blatant PR stunt” while Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has said: “We feel we are in the right in this position.”Leavitt is one of the three White House officials named as defendants in the lawsuit. The other two, Susan Wiles, the chief of staff, and Taylor Budowich, the deputy chief of staff, have not responded to requests for comment.Trump signed an executive order last month directing the US interior department to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.The AP said in January it would continue to use the gulf’s long-established name in stories while also acknowledging Trump’s efforts to change it.The White House banned AP reporters in response, preventing the AP’s journalists from seeing and hearing Trump and other top White House officials as they take newsworthy actions or respond in real time to news events.“We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Trump said last week.The White House Correspondents’ Association said in a legal brief backing the AP in the case that the ban “will chill and distort news coverage of the president to the public’s detriment”.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Judge blocks Trump immigration policy allowing arrests in churches for some religious groups – live

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      A federal judge blocked immigration agents from conducting enforcement operations in houses of worship for some religious groups, the Associated Press reported. US district judge Theodore Chang found that the Trump administration policy could violate their religious freedom and should be blocked while a lawsuit challenging it plays out.

      Trump said the US and Ukraine are “very close” to coming to terms on a rare earth minerals agreement, in comments made during a visit from French president Emmanuel Macron amid European concerns over the US position on Ukraine. Follow the latest from the leaders’ joint press conference here.

      The Trump administration said it was placing all but a handful of USAid personnel around the world on paid administrative leave and eliminating about 2,000 of those positions in the US, as the rapid dismantling of the organization appears to move into its final phases.

      Attorneys for federal workers said in a lawsuit that billionaire adviser to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, had violated the law with his weekend demand that employees explain their accomplishments or risk being fired. An updated lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in California and was provided to the Associated Press, is trying to block mass layoffs.

      Many federal government departments, including the FBI, have told staff not to comply with the Musk directive to list their accomplishments in the past week by 11.59 pm ET tonight. But the US Transportation Department has told workers they should respond to the demand by Donald Trump’s adviser.

      A federal judge has blocked the government downsizing team Doge from accessing sensitive data maintained by the US Education Department and the US Office of Personnel Management. US district judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland issued the temporary restraining order at the behest of a coalition of labor unions.
      Although a US-based Associated Press reporter was barred from the joint news conference between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron, a France-based AP reporter was allowed it.The French press corps decided the France-based AP reporter should be allowed to ask the first question.The administration blocked AP reporters from the White House press pool after the news agency said it would continue to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” in its articles, instead referring to the body of water as the “Gulf of America,” following Trump’s order to rename it.The AP has sued over its exclusion from the press conferences, but a judge denied the AP’s emergency motion to restore its access.A federal judge who blocked the Federal Bureau of Prisons from carrying out Donald Trump’s executive order that would transferred three incarcerated trans women into men’s facilities earlier this month, has extended protections for nine additional women.US district judge Royce Lamberth in Washington said the court “sees no reason to change its legal conclusions” from its previous order. On 4 February, Lambeth issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s executive order seeking to erode trans rights behind bars.My colleague Sam Levin reported earlier this month:
      Lambeth ruled that Trump’s order discriminates against transgender people and violates their constitutional rights.
      The Federal Bureau of Prisons must “maintain and continue the plaintiffs’ housing status and medical care as they existed immediately prior to January 20”, he wrote.
      The judge said the trans women had “straightforwardly demonstrated that irreparable harm will follow” if they are denied healthcare and forced into men’s institutions.
      US officials “have not so much as alleged that the plaintiffs in this particular suit present any threat to the female inmates housed with them”, the judge added. The family of one plaintiff said her life would be threatened if she were moved.
      The judge said there were only 16 trans women housed in women’s facilities, and the ruling applies to all of them.
      On 26 January, a federal judge in Boston issued a restraining order in a separate challenge to the same executive order. That order was limited to one transgender woman in a woman’s prison.
      The Washington Post reports that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) which functions as the the government’s HR department, has told federal agency leaders they can ignore Elon Musk’s threat to fire employees who do not send in the bullet-pointed list of accomplishments that he requested.The Post, citing anonymous sources, reports that OPM told agency chief human capital officers on a Monday call that they could ignore Musk’s threat. Per the Post:
      Another person briefed on the call said that OPM is also looking at weekly reporting for government departments, the person said. But the person said that OPM was unsure what to do with the emails of employees who responded so far, and had “no plans” to analyze them.
      As my colleagues at the Guardian reported earlier, Musk’s ultimatum to federal workers has been causing chaos.
      Musk’s ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the office of personnel management (OPM), one of the first federal organs Musk and his team on the so-called “department of government efficiency” infiltrated after Trump was sworn in. The message gave all the US government’s more than 2 million workers barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points, and in a post on X, Musk indicated that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.
      The order provoked instant chaos across the government, with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways. Workers in the Social Security Administration and the health and human services department were told to comply with the email, and CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all its employees to respond to the Musk email by its deadline. That included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents.

      A federal judge blocked immigration agents from conducting enforcement operations in houses of worship for some religious groups, the Associated Press reported. US district judge Theodore Chang found that the Trump administration policy could violate their religious freedom and should be blocked while a lawsuit challenging it plays out.

      Trump said the US and Ukraine are “very close” to coming to terms on a rare earth minerals agreement, in comments made during a visit from French president Emmanuel Macron amid European concerns over the US position on Ukraine. Follow the latest from the leaders’ joint press conference here.

      The Trump administration said it was placing all but a handful of USAid personnel around the world on paid administrative leave and eliminating about 2,000 of those positions in the US, as the rapid dismantling of the organization appears to move into its final phases.

      Attorneys for federal workers said in a lawsuit that billionaire adviser to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, had violated the law with his weekend demand that employees explain their accomplishments or risk being fired. An updated lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in California and was provided to the Associated Press, is trying to block mass layoffs.

      Many federal government departments, including the FBI, have told staff not to comply with the Musk directive to list their accomplishments in the past week by 11.59 pm ET tonight. But the US Transportation Department has told workers they should respond to the demand by Donald Trump’s adviser.

      A federal judge has blocked the government downsizing team Doge from accessing sensitive data maintained by the US Education Department and the US Office of Personnel Management. US district judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland issued the temporary restraining order at the behest of a coalition of labor unions.
      House Republicans face a major test this week as the fractured and narrow caucus tries to unify around a plan to advance Donald Trump’s agenda for trillions in tax cuts and new spending on defense and border security, Reuters reports.With only a 218-215 majority in the House of Representatives, Speaker Mike Johnson can afford to lose just one vote on any measure that all Democrats vote against. He faces resistance from as many as a dozen Republicans over a budget resolution that would allow congressional committees to begin crafting full-scale legislation to enact the Trump agenda.The House budget Ccmmittee was due to take up the measure on Monday, with the possibility of a floor vote as early as Tuesday. But Johnson said timing would also depend on the outcome of Monday night meetings with wavering lawmakers.“We expect to get it done this week,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters in the Capitol. “There’s a couple of folks who just have lingering questions. But I think all those questions could be answered and we’ll be able to move forward,” he added. “We’re very optimistic. We’ll get this thing done.”The House resolution calls for $4.5tn in tax cuts – a concern to lawmakers worried about the nation’s growing $36tn in debt – and calls for $2tn in cuts to spending, which have worried some lawmakers that their constituents could lose out on key services.Republicans in both the House and Senate need to pass the measure to unlock a key part of their strategy: a parliamentary tool allowing them to circumvent the Senate filibuster and opposition from Democrats.But that is only one feat awaiting lawmakers over the coming weeks. Congress also needs to avert a partial government shutdown after 14 March, when funding runs out and then raise the nation’s debt ceiling or risk a catastrophic default at mid-year.Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who leapt on to the back of John F Kennedy’s limousine after the then president was shot, then was forced to retire early because he remained haunted by memories of the assassination, died on Friday. He was 93.Although few may recognize his name, the footage of Hill, captured on Abraham Zapruder’s chilling home movie of the assassination, provided some of the most indelible images of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963.Hill received Secret Service awards and was promoted for his actions that day, but for decades blamed himself for Kennedy’s death, saying he didn’t react quickly enough and would gladly have given his life to save Kennedy.In an interview with David Smith in 2023, Hill recalled:
      From that point on, my life changed. Before that day, before I attempted to put my body up on top of the car to protect President Kennedy and Mrs Kennedy, I was just Clint Hill. But afterward, because of photographs and the Zapruder film, I was no longer just Clint Hill. I was that guy that got on to the back of the presidential vehicle and I went through life from that point on with that being said about me and of me.
      It has bothered me a great deal. I had a serious guilt complex about not being able to help him more than I did and that just grew and grew and grew from that point on.
      It was only in recent years that Hill said he was able to finally start putting the assassination behind him and accept what happened.You can read more on the remarkable story here:*scrambles to change the subject* Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron are now holding a joint news conference following bilateral talks at the White House. Trump said his meeting with Macron was an “important step forward” to achieving a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.I will post a summary here with the main lines once it’s over, but my colleague Léonie Chao-Fong is posting live updates here:An AI-generated video of Donald Trump licking Elon Musk’s toes briefly played on video screens at a US government office as staff returned to work on Monday.With a caption emblazoned over it reading “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING”, the fake footage, played on loop for several minutes throughout the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Washington headquarters, according to Marisa Kabas, an independent journalist who posted a video of the incident to social media citing an agency source.Washington Post journalist Jeff Stein also said on social media that the department’s televisions had been hijacked.Reuters was unable to establish the provenance of the video.“Another waste of taxpayer dollars and resources. Appropriate action will be taken for all involved,” department spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in an email.Just an observation; if you look closely at the fake footage, you can see it features two left feet. Was this deliberate, multi-layered messaging? I mean, equally, if you just want to keep scrolling and try to forget you ever saw this, that’s okay too.A group of Democratic and Republican US senators will offer a resolution backing Ukraine on Monday, amid fears that Donald Trump could make a deal with Moscow that leaves Kyiv on the sidelines three years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.The resolution, seen by Reuters, expresses solidarity with the people of Ukraine, offers condolences for the loss of tens of thousands of its citizens and seeks a role for Kyiv in any ceasefire talks.The resolution was led by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the foreign relations committee, and Republican Senator Thom Tillis. The two lawmakers visited Ukraine last week, along with Democratic Senator Michael Bennet.It has at least 12 backers, including such senior Republicans as Mitch McConnell, the party’s former Senate leader; Roger Wicker, chairman of the armed services committee, and Chuck Grassley, chairman of the judiciary committee, as well as Democrats Dick Durbin, a member of the party’s leadership, and Bennet, a Democratic foreign relations committee aide said.The resolution says:
      The Senate emphasizes that Ukraine must be a participant in discussions with the Russian Federation about Ukraine’s future.
      The measure does not specifically back Nato membership, but reaffirms US support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and “supports Ukraine’s efforts to integrate into Euro-Atlantic structures”.In an emailed statement, Shaheen said:
      As Vladimir Putin’s illegal and brutal full-scale invasion enters its fourth year, I’m proud to introduce this bipartisan resolution that clearly states our unwavering support for and solidarity with the Ukrainian people and condemns Russia’s aggression.
      In a loss for abortion opponents, the US supreme court on Monday declined to take up two cases involving “buffer zone” ordinances, which limit protests around abortion clinics and which anti-abortion activists have spent years trying to dismantle.The two cases dealt with buffer zone ordinances passed by the cities of Carbondale, Illinois, and Englewood, New Jersey. In filings to the supreme court, which is dominated 6-3 by conservatives, anti-abortion activists argued that these ordinances ran afoul of the first amendment’s guarantees of free speech. They also asked the justices to overturn a 2000 ruling called Hill v Colorado, which upheld a buffer zone law in Colorado.The justices didn’t explain why they declined to hear arguments in the cases, but the far-right justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said they would have preferred to take them up. In a dissent outlining his desire to take the Carbondale case, Thomas wrote that he believed Hill “lacks continuing force”, in part due to recent rulings such as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the federal right to abortion.“I would have taken this opportunity to explicitly overrule Hill,” he wrote. “Following our repudiation in Dobbs, I do not see what is left of Hill. Yet, lower courts continue to feel bound by it. The court today declines an invitation to set the record straight on Hill’s defunct status.”Here is more detail on our earlier post on Donald Trump’s remarks in defence of Elon Musk’s chaos-inducing demand that federal workers document what they do, from the AP.Trump voiced support for Musk’s demand that federal employees explain their recent accomplishments by the end of Monday or risk getting fired, an edict that has spawned new litigation and added to turmoil within the government workforce.“What he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’” Trump said in the Oval Office during a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron. “And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people aren’t answering because they don’t even exist.”The president claimed that Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” has found “hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud” as he suggested that federal paychecks are going to nonexistent employees. He did not present evidence for his claims.“If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person, or they aren’t working,” Trump said. More

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      Elon Musk demand that federal workers document what they do causes chaos

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      A top labor union has condemned Elon Musk’s ultimatum to federal workers as an “unclear and unlawful distraction”, after the Tesla billionaire turned White House-sanctioned cost-cutter demanded federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet points or face dismissal.The Saturday email sent to millions of employees was the latest salvo in Musk’s campaign, authorized by Donald Trump, to dramatically downsize the federal government. Over the weekend, a coalition of groups opposed to the mass layoffs asked a court to prevent reprisals against employees who fail to reply by the deadline of Monday at midnight.“This request, and the resulting confusion, is not just inappropriate – it is disruptive to essential government functions,” wrote Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal union and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit originally filed to stop the mass firings of probationary workers.He warned that the demand pulled “federal employees away from their critical duties without regard for the consequences. As just two examples, a VA surgeon’s attention belongs in the operating room and an air traffic controller’s attention on keeping the skies safe, not on dealing with this unclear and unlawful distraction.”Musk’s ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the office of personnel management (OPM), one of the first federal organs Musk and his team on the so-called “department of government efficiency” infiltrated after Trump was sworn in. The message gave all the US government’s more than 2 million workers barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points, and in a post on X, Musk indicated that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.The order provoked instant chaos across the government, with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways. Workers in the Social Security Administration and the health and human services department were told to comply with the email, and CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all its employees to respond to the Musk email by its deadline. That included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents.Several others agencies told their employees to refrain, including the FBI, where the new director, Trump loyalist Kash Patel, asked agents to “please pause any responses”. At the homeland security department, employees were similarly informed that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time”.All employees at the Department of Defense, who now answer to the former Fox News host and Trump acolyte Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, were ordered to pause responding to the OPM missive. Employees in other federal departments were told to await further orders or to simply ignore Musk’s edict.“I’m a frontline supervisor and haven’t received any communication as to whether or how to evaluate this,” said a Department of Education employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. At the US Forest Service, where thousands were dismissed last week, workers told the Guardian the email added new layers of fear and confusion, with no clear instructions on whether they needed to comply.“I am afraid that if I answer wrong I will get fired,” said a forest service scientist, speaking on condition of anonymity.Other workers said the weekend email together with its short deadline for reply amplified the atmosphere of siege that has set in since Trump took office.James Jones, a North Carolina-based maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service and AFGE member, said he was on sick leave on Monday to take care of his son, but now had to decide whether to leave him and drive into his office to respond to the email.“It makes me angry, but I was expecting it,” said Jones, who described the email as “another shenanigan” but said he did not think there would be repercussions for not responding.Latisha Thompson, a social worker with the Department of Veterans Affairs and AFGE member, said the drumbeat of emails from OPM, including an attempt to coax federal workers to resign en masse, had undercut her productivity.“This kind of onslaught of intimidation and bullying via email has caused me and my colleagues a lot of distress,” she said.“I’m not able to concentrate as much as before, or I’m getting little anxieties every time an email comes from some authoritative channel whereas I once did not feel that way.”Trump has not weighed in on OPM’s latest email, but over the weekend posted on social media a meme that signaled support.Lawmakers in Congress’ Republican majorities have mostly acquiesced over the past few weeks as Trump has appointed loyalists to key positions and attempted to dismantle entire agencies. But the latest salvo against federal workers prompted a rebuke from the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, who has a history of squabbles with Trump.“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform. The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it,” she wrote on X.At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration, most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations.The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock-on effect on the American economy.Gabrielle Canon and Michael Sainato contributed reporting More

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      Ukrainians in New York commemorate anniversary of Russia’s invasion: ‘three years of our resistance’

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      New York City officials, foreign dignitaries and members of the city’s Ukrainian community gathered in New York on Monday to raise the Ukrainian flag above lower Manhattan, marking three years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.The anniversary this year follows escalating tensions between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Last week, the US president falsely claimed that Ukraine started the war and labeled Zelenskyy as “a dictator”, while the Ukrainian president expressed frustration over being excluded from US-Russia negotiations to end the war and accused Trump of living in a Kremlin “disinformation bubble”.Several dozen people, holding Ukrainian flags and dressed in blue and yellow, stood in the crowd at Bowling Green park on Monday morning, and observed a moment of silence in between remarks delivered by representatives and organizers to commemorate the anniversary.“Today we mark three years of Russian barbaric invasion of Ukraine and unprecedented of a large-scale war that [Vladimir] Putin unleashed on the European continent,” Serhiy Ivanchov, the consulate general of Ukraine in New York, told the crowd. “Three years of our resistance”.“Unfortunately, the Russian unprovoked war continues and Ukraine still needs international support more than ever,” Ivanchov said. “Ukraine needs a reliable and clear system of security guarantees.”View image in fullscreenNew York City is home to the largest Ukrainian community in the United States, with around 150,000 Ukrainian New Yorkers.The city’s mayor, Eric Adams, who attended the Ukrainian flag raising last year, did not attend Monday’s ceremony, but sent two representatives from the mayor’s office of immigrants affairs in his place.Dilip Chauhan, the deputy commissioner for the mayor’s office for international affairs, read out a statement sent from Adams in which he said that Ukrainians “throughout the five boroughs have long enhanced life in our diverse city and they will continue to play a key role as we take bold steps to grow our economy and afford a safer, fairer and more prosperous future”.The mayor proclaimed Monday, 24 February 2025, as Ukrainian Heritage Day, and said in his statement he was “honored and deeply moved on this anniversary to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukrainian New Yorkers as we raise their flag and say in a single unified voice, united against aggression and ‘Slava Ukraine’ (glory to Ukraine)”.View image in fullscreenAt the gathering two wounded Ukrainian soldiers were present. As the national anthem of Ukraine was performed and the Ukrainian flag was raised alongside the US flag, many attendees wiped away their tears.“We have gathered to remember a very solemn day that many of us will never be able to wrench from our hearts, hearts that many of us will never be able to put together,” Andrij Dobriansky, director of communications and media for the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America said.Among those in the crowd was Dasha Wilson, who had a Ukrainian flag wrapped around her shoulders.“I’m very proud of my country that we have withstood for three years,” said Wilson, who moved to New York 10 years ago. “I’m very appreciative for Americans for helping Ukraine.”Given the recent rising tensions between Trump and Zelenskyy, Wilson said that she hopes that the US and Ukraine will “remain good partners” and continue to “work together”.Last week’s geopolitical events shocked many Ukrainians at home and abroad as well as US lawmakers and allies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis week, members of New York’s Ukrainian community told the Guardian that they were feeling a mix of disillusionment, betrayal, defiance and acute uncertainty about what the future holds for Ukraine amid the unprecedented rise in tension between the US and Ukrainian leaders.On Monday, the New York state assemblyman Michael Novakhov – a Republican who represents Brighton Beach, home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of immigrants from the former Soviet Union – spoke directly to Trump.“Mr President, I voted three times for you. I am a Republican, but Mr President, Putin is the dictator, not Zelenskyy. Russia started the war, not Ukraine,” he told the crowd.Another speaker, Oleksandr Taran – president of Svitanok NYC, a New York-based organization that advocates for Ukraine’s sovereignty and combats disinformation – recalled his memories of the day that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.View image in fullscreen“The evening of February 23 I was going about my usual chores when I glanced at the television,” said Taran, who moved to New York eight years ago. “Suddenly, the breaking news banner appeared, explosions in Kyiv, my hometown, my heart stopped. Ukraine was under attack.”“And so it began,” he continued, “the war that upended millions of lives in a matter of hours, Friday morning, and the war that we as Ukrainian Americans have been fighting in our own way ever since”.He added: “The world soon learned, this war would not be over in days or weeks, and it would demand relentless courage from the Ukrainians and support from our allies worldwide.“If this tragedy has shown us anything, it is the immeasurable strength and unity of our people in crisis; our identity becomes an anchor.”Julius Constantine Motal contributed reporting More

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      Lester Holt to exit NBC Nightly News as MSNBC cuts Ayman Mohyeldin’s show

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      NBC’s Lester Holt is stepping down as anchor of its Nightly News show, and MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin is stepping down from a similar role at his namesake weekend evening show as the liberal networks’ owners continue a major programming shake-up on Monday.Others at MSNBC affected by changes revealed on Monday include Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart, the New York Post reported.Holt, who has served as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for a decade, is leaving the broadcast early this summer, the network reported.A successor for Holt on the program is yet to be named. He will reportedly continue to work with NBC, which shares an owner with MSNBC, as the principal anchor at Dateline, a role he has held for nearly 15 years.At the same time, staff of Mohyeldin’s show, named Ayman, learned on Monday that the last episode of Ayman is likely to air on 20 April. Another source at the network said Mohyeldin would anchor a new program yet to be announced.The New York Post reported learning that Phang and Capehart’s shows were also being canceled but would remain at the network. The plan is for Capehart, like Mohyeldin, to host a new show, and Phang would continue as a legal correspondent.In a recording of a meeting about the cancellation of Mohyeldin’s show, an MSNBC official said the network was “making several changes to our programming lineup”.The official subsequently said that the network had “hit success” with ensemble shows and was looking to invest in shows with the ensemble format in order to meet “audience needs”.Those remarks came a day after news broke that MSNBC had canceled the longstanding anchor Joy Reid’s show, The ReidOut. The network plans to replace Reid’s show with a new one led by three co-anchors: Symone Sanders-Townsend, Alicia Menendez and Michael Steele, who have been co-hosting MSNBC’s The Weekend Show.Mohyeldin has hosted several shows at MSNBC, including Morning Joe First Look, an early morning pre-show for one of the network’s flagship shows. In 2021, his namesake show was given a prime-time weekend evening slot.The anchor also served as a correspondent for NBC in Gaza during a monthlong conflict in 2014, receiving praise from media critics for reporting that departed from “the standard pro-Israel coverage that dominates establishment American press coverage”.The changes affecting Reid and Mohyeldin result from a reshuffling by the network’s new president, Rebecca Kutler, who took over the role in February.Kutler, who was previously MSNBC’s senior vice-president for content strategy, succeeds the former MSNBC president Rashida Jones.According to a statement given to the Guardian by MSNBC, the network will also introduce a new trio of co-hosts to anchor a morning and evening edition of The Weekend on Saturdays and Sundays at 7am and 6pm ET.Jonathan Capehart, an MSNBC host and Washington Post associate editor, will serve as one co-anchor of the morning edition.Mohyeldin will serve as anchor of a different group on the evening addition. Ali Velshi will also expand his namesake program, Velshi, to three hours on the weekends.MSNBC confirmed that Joy Reid will be leaving the network. Rotating anchors will host the hour in the coming weeks.The network also confirms that it will sunset its broadcasting operation in Miami. This affects the Miami-based shows José Díaz-Balart Reports and The Katie Phang Show.According to a source, the entire staff of The ReidOut, José Díaz-Balart Reports and The Katie Phang Show are being let go. Staff will be given the option to reapply for a job on one of the shows or take severance and quit. They have six weeks to decide which option to take, the source said.That source added that the changes are due in part to MSNBC no longer wanting to use Telemundo, the Spanish-language network that is headquartered in Miami.In November last year, the Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski faced backlash after meeting with Trump to discuss “a new approach” after his election in November to a second presidency.Also in November, Comcast announced plans to spin off several cable networks, including MSNBC, as the TV networks faced declining ratings, which only further declined following election fatigue.Chuck Todd, a prominent anchor and former host of Meet The Press, announced in January that he was leaving NBC, another Comcast company, after 18 years. The announcement followed Todd’s pushback against NBC’s decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican National Committee chairperson during Donald Trump’s first presidency, in March 2024. McDaniel was eventually removed from her position.Trump, who has previously described news media as “the enemy of the people”. celebrated the cancelation of Reid’s show on his platform Truth Social, saying she should have been “canned long ago”. More

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      Julianne Moore’s freckles? How Republican bans on ‘woke’ books have reached new level

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      When the actor Julianne Moore learned her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, a tale of a girl who learns to stop hating her freckles, had been targeted for a potential ban at all schools serving US military families, she took to Instagram, posting that it was a “great shock” to discover the story had been “banned by the Trump Administration”.Moore had seen a memo that circulated last week revealing that tens of thousands of American children studying in about 160 Pentagon schools both in the US and around the world had had all access to library books suspended for a week, while officials conducted a “compliance review” to hunt out any books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”.Although whether Moore’s book would be selected for “further review” or banned entirely remains unclear, the episode brought into stark relief that the movement to ban books in the US – which has been bubbling up for several years, mostly in individual states – had reached a whole new level: the federal one.Donald Trump’s re-election, and his subsequent crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, has many campaigners fearing that the Pentagon move to scrub its libraries of anything it opposes ideologically could be the first of a series of broad attempts to eliminate any discussions of race, LGBTQ+ issues, diversity and historical education from public schools.The Trump administration has scoffed at the idea that it is banning books, and last month it instructed the Department of Education to end its investigations into the matter, referring to bans as a “hoax”. Indeed, many deny that banning books is censorship at all – a disconnect that stems not just from the historical context of book banning, but from a semantic dispute over what it means to “ban” something.In the early 20th century, books such as Ulysses by James Joyce and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck were banned due to “moral concerns”.Likewise, the red scare of the 1950s saw increased censorship of materials perceived as sympathetic to communism, while the 1980s saw attacks against books dealing with race and sexuality, such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker, which was nearly banned two years after its release in 1984 after a parent petitioned against its use in an Oakland, California, classroom.The difference today, however, is that instead of coming primarily from conservative community organizers, the book banning movement is now coming from government – school boards, local governments and now, with the Pentagon move, even the federal government, increasingly working in lockstep.The modern wave of book bans could be said to have started with a backlash against The 1619 Project, a journalistic anthology by Nikole Hannah-Jones published by the New York Times. The project aimed to reframe US history by centering the contributions of Black Americans, but conservative politicians – including Trump – claimed it taught students to “hate their own country”.View image in fullscreenIn response, Republican lawmakers moved to ban the work in schools, marking the beginning of an intensified campaign against so-called “anti-American” literature.According to PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to defending free expression in literature, more than 10,000 book bans occurred in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year. Books that address racism, gender and history were disproportionately targeted.“The whole principle of public education is that it is not supposed to be dictated by particular ideologies that aim to censor what other people can learn and access in schools,” Jonathan Friedman, the managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America, said.Rightwing politicians, however, have increasingly used book banning as a rallying cry, portraying certain books as tools of “indoctrination” – failing to note the irony that indoctrination is the process of carefully limiting ideas, like banning books.One key figure has been the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. He has echoed Trump’s dismissal of book bans as a “hoax”, and spearheaded multiple attempts to reshape education to reflect only conservative values, including the Stop Woke Act, which restricts discussions on systemic racism, and the Parental Rights in Education Act, widely known as the “don’t say gay” law, which limits discussions of gender identity and sexuality in classrooms.Banned titles in Florida schools now include Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.What DeSantis and other rightwingers often say is that these efforts don’t truly constitute “bans” because they only remove books from schools, rather than totally outlawing them from being bought in the US, and therefore don’t encroach on free speech. John Chrastka, the executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, argued that this is faulty reasoning.“The private marketplace is protected by the first amendment in ways that the government is not beholden to,” he said. “The idea that because a book is still available for sale means that it’s not being banned outright is only the difference between a framework that was in place prior to the 1950s” and today.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe noted that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was first published in 1928 in Europe, was banned in the US for several years before finally getting its American publication in 1959 in what was a watershed affirmation of the right to free speech. Realizing that the first amendment prevented them from blocking the book from US bookstores, critics turned their attention to libraries instead, a grayer area in terms of constitutional protections.DeSantis and other rightwing politicians have taken the lesson: if the constitution prevents you from banning a book from being bought or sold in Florida, the next best thing is to ban it from the places most people would have the easiest access to it – schools and libraries.“It doesn’t add up,” Chrastka added, “the idea that a teenager in a state where it’s impossible for them to get to an independent bookstore because they don’t exist any more somehow has enough liberty to buy the book when the school library is blocked from having it available for them.”Another key distinction is between banning books from classroom curriculum versus removing them from school libraries – which, unlike classrooms, are historically protected spaces for free access to ideas.“What you read for a class supports the curriculum,” says Chrastka, whereas “the school library is supposed to support independent reading. One of them is required reading and the other one isn’t, but [the reading material] is meant to be available.”The landmark supreme court case Island Trees School District v Pico in 1982, when a school board in New York removed books from its libraries it deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy”, established that school boards cannot restrict the availability of books in their libraries simply because they don’t like or agree with the content.Critics contend the new wave of book bans, although not yet about preventing sales at bookshops, fails to meet the intended purpose of libraries: to preserve and provide a variety of ideas and information that may not be readily or equally accessible to everyone.Now, many fear that once certain books are established as unacceptable in schools, the censorship could spread to colleges, bookstores and eventually nationwide bans. Even if that does not happen, experts say one of the most reliable ways to ensure ideas are suppressed is to dismantle the education system, making Trump’s repeatedly stated goal of eliminating the Department of Education a particular concern.“The vast majority of the budget for the Department of Education and the laws and regulations that make sure that the department is functional go to help students succeed and protect students who are otherwise vulnerable,” said Chrastka.With the education system having been chipped away at for decades with budgets cuts, low literacy rates and high dropout rates, book bans only make it weaker.“What we need in this country is for students to feel supported and to find their own identities, and reading is a core component of that,” Chrastka said. “Let’s let the kids discover themselves and discover their own path forward in the process.” More

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      The ugly truth of American violence has never been plainer

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      View image in fullscreenAmong my hazier memories of early adolescence in Qatar is a screening, at a friend’s home, of an obviously pirated Betamax copy of Red Dawn. My friend’s father – most everyone’s father or mother or uncle, whoever – would, while on business trips overseas, visit the occasional video store or flea market and return with whatever films or books or albums they happened to find. It’s a haphazard, incomplete thing to consume the culture of a faraway place in this manner, like trying to divine the contours of a mouth from the texture of spittle.Red Dawn is a bad movie. Bad in a special, sincere kind of way. It’s about a bunch of teenagers who fight back against a Soviet invasion of the United States. Released in the early 80s, it belongs to a large fraternity of films in which scrappy underdog Americans fight back against the seemingly insurmountable but of course ultimately very surmountable power of the Soviet empire. In a couple of decades, the Russians would pass the baton of villainy to people who look like me, though in our case there was no real empire to speak of, and so we were mostly small-batch insidious, our specialty less tank-and-jet and more suicide-bomb-level violence. It didn’t much matter; Red Dawn with Arabs instead of Soviets for villains would have still been shit.In 2012, almost 30 years after I first watched the original, someone decided to remake Red Dawn. This time, there was no Soviet empire to invade the mainland, and so instead the Chinese would have to do. Again, it didn’t much matter – the point isn’t geopolitical fidelity, the point is 90 minutes of rah-rahing American tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds. Never back down, never surrender, that sort of thing.Problem is, China is a big market for movies. And so, at the last minute, for fear of missing out on millions in potential box office returns, the producers decided to change the villain. In the final cut of the Red Dawn remake, it’s North Korea that invades the United States. It’s always the sign of a well-crafted movie when you can change a central narrative beam in post-production and it doesn’t make any difference at all. I’m reminded of a guy in one of my old writing groups who, fearing his story didn’t have enough female representation, did a find-and-replace and changed every instance of “Sam” to “Samantha”, then went through and changed the pronouns accordingly, leaving everything else the same.View image in fullscreenAgain, it didn’t much matter. Except that it does, over time – this glaring disconnect between cultural self-image and pragmatic reality. In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire.A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one’s nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else.I’ve seen this person many times – they occupy a hallowed place in American culture, catered to by so many of the nation’s dominant cultural forces, from Monday Night Football to the Country Music Awards to the entirety of AM radio. It’s the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wild – and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. I’ve seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there’s no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn’t conformity or nonconformity – it’s self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them. The man in the action movie looks one way, the man the cops just shot in a traffic stop another.View image in fullscreenToward the end of December 2023, the South African government brings charges of genocide against Israel at the international court of justice. The case rests on Israel’s wholesale destruction of health facilities and the blocking of aid as evidence that what is being destroyed here isn’t a single terror organization, but a whole people. Much of the initial South African brief relies on the words of Israeli officials themselves, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s referencing of the complete destruction of Amalek in the Bible.Among those who have been calling for an end to the relentless killing, the development inspires a set of conflicting emotions. First, there is the basic relief of watching some official entity – any entity – do something. Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the wellbeing of the Palestinian people demands this continue – it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.Second, there is the realization that of course it would be a country like South Africa that would take this step – a country deeply versed in the ugly mechanics of apartheid, for whose citizens checkpoints and forcefully sealed-off towns are not abstractions, but the very recent past that, from the safety of the present, everyone now claims they always opposed.Beyond relief and recognition, there is a more complicated thing – an understanding that the machinery of the west has never had much of a capacity for self-diagnosis. Who does? Who that achieves power of this scale ever does?Waiting on a western judicial institution to cast judgment on a killing spree financed and endorsed by the west means, inevitably, watching a disjointed ballet of impossible reconciling. The narrative – as enshrined in countless constitutions and declarations and charters which are so often held up as the differentiating marker of superiority of this world over the other – demands moral purity, opposition to injustice, adherence to the principle that all innocent lives are equal and deserving of dignity. The reality is that an ally of the west is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine.View image in fullscreenAnd so we must watch the impotent pantomime of a Canadian prime minister declaring that while his government absolutely supports the international court of justice, it doesn’t support the premise of the South African case, whatever that tortured rhetorical construction is supposed to mean. We must watch the German government – whose police forces, in the name of fighting antisemitism, arrested Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire – come to Israel’s defense at the court.In time there will be findings of genocide. There will be warrants issued, even. The structures of international law, undermined at every turn, will nonetheless attempt to operate as if law were an evenly allotted thing. As though criminality remains criminal even when the powerful support, bankroll, or commit the crime.It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.In the summer of 2014, I began writing the first draft of my debut novel, American War. It’s a piece of speculative fiction set in the 2070s and covers the aftermath of a second civil war. I never thought of it as a particularly American book, but rather an attempt to superimpose stories from the other side of the planet onto the heart of the empire. It didn’t seem like a particularly clever narrative trick on my part.Three weeks or so after I finished the first draft, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. The novel would end up being published in April 2017 and come to be almost universally read as an exclusively American story, a literal prediction of where this country might be headed. A bidding war breaks out for the film rights. Time and again, various production company executives tell me how perfectly the novel has managed to capture this moment in American life, and I can’t help but think that the exact opposite is true. Something of American life has captured the novel. The word “dangerous” is used quite often, always as a compliment.Then, in January 2024, I receive an email from the director who was set to work on the American War adaptation, letting me know he and the production company are stepping away from the project. “Prudence suggests this is not the time for making movies about freedom fighters or terrorists (no matter which side of that argument one is on),” he writes.A few weeks earlier, a novelist I know tells me her appearance at a small book club has been canceled – the organizer tells her it’s because they “stand with Israel”. My friend is an American of half-Egyptian, half-Scottish descent. A Palestinian artist’s retrospective at the University of Indiana is shuttered. People who call for a ceasefire are demoted, fired, called antisemites and terrorist-supporters.View image in fullscreenIt all feels so petty, the stakes so low. On the other side of the planet entire bloodlines are being wiped out and here in the sheltered world we are subject to relatively pathetic indignities – loss of income, disinvitations, cold shoulders from people who in a different time might have been quite proud of themselves for having a Brown friend. Every now and then we hear about those instances when the stakes turned out not to be so low, when this passive punishment transformed into something much more active, sometimes deadly. But for the most part it’s just a constant trickle of reminders of one’s place in the hierarchy – and it is precisely because of this that it becomes so tempting to just shut up, let what’s going to happen happen to those people over there and then, when it’s done, ease into whatever opinion the people whose approval matters deem acceptable.I start to see this more often, as the body count climbs – this malleability of opinion. At a residency on the coast of Oregon, I read the prologue to this book; a couple of days later, one of the other writers decides to strike up a conversation.“I’m not a Zionist,” she says. “But you know, I’m not anti-Zionist either. It’s all just so complicated.”I have no idea what to say. I feel like an audience at a dress rehearsal.There’s a convenience to having modular opinions; it’s why so many liberal American politicians slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel. Should the violence become politically burdensome, they can simply expand that part of the statement as necessary, like one of those dinner tables you lengthen to accommodate more guests than you expected. And it is important, too, that this amoral calculus rise and fall in proportion to the scale of the killing, so that one might always be able to say, “Well, we could never have known it would get this bad, but now, now everything has changed.”It’s almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die. And whatever disgust this equation, laid bare, might inspire, many know it to be true. This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.How long can the fabric of a pleasing story hold? Presented the facts of the situation without label, without real-world anchor, like actors asked to read the screenplay and pick a role, how many Americans would instinctively choose that of the Palestinian calling for an end to occupation? The South African calling for an end to apartheid? The Haitian calling for self-rule? How many would want to believe, as so much of the culture here has always strained to believe, that they side with the underdog, the downtrodden who refuses to give up, the rebel in the face of empire? And then, should the scenes be transposed back to the unforgiving reality of the world as it is, how many, knowing the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves, would just as instinctively retreat into the comforting fold of empire?One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is out now in the UK published by Canongate. It will be released tomorrow, 25 February, in the United States by Knopf, and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart.

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      ‘I’m sitting on the side that’s launching bombs’: author Omar El Akkad on the hypocrisy of the west

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      Omar El Akkad grew up believing in an idealized America. Born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, and transplanted as a teenager to Canada, the writer saw the west for its freedoms – a place where, unlike at home, he could check out a William S Burroughs book from the library and where the naked baby on the cover of the Nirvana album he had on repeat hadn’t been blacked out by a censor.He’d go on to build a career as a reporter with the Globe and Mail, covering the US occupation of Afghanistan, the prison at Guantánamo Bay and the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011, before moving to the US and publishing two award-winning novels – American War, an account of a future US ravaged by war and climate disaster, and What Strange Paradise, a story of a Syrian boy who survives a shipwreck off Greece.Despite El Akkad’s front-row seat to some of the worst manifestations of American power, he didn’t stop believing. But that changed with Israel’s bombardment of Gaza after the 7 October attacks. The scale of the US taxpayer-funded offensive spurred a crisis of faith El Akkad narrates in a new, non-fiction book: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.View image in fullscreenThe title stems from a tweet El Akkad published on 25 October of that year, decrying what he saw as the complicity of political and cultural power centers in the violence, whether through silence, justification or active support. After completing a draft of the book, he says his editor recommended repurposing the tweet for the title. “I’m on this mission to try and convince people that I didn’t just take a tweet and expand it out to 250 pages,” he said.The result is a searing journey through El Akkad’s own history and relationship with the so-called free world, punctuated with descriptions of horrors livestreamed from Gaza.We are still living in the cataclysm, and it’s anyone’s guess what world will emerge from it. But for El Akkad, the moral bankruptcy of western liberalism, with its addiction to material comfort at any expense, is beyond salvation. The bombardment of Gaza, he writes, “will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the west, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.”The Guardian spoke with El Akkad while he toured the UK to launch the book. We covered Gaza, American indifference, Donald Trump – and why despite it all, he still has hope.NY: You write that the book is “an account of a fracture”. It really does read that way – as though your relationship to this part of the world, which had picked up some minor cracks over the years, shattered into pieces during the bombardment of Gaza. How did you manage to write through that crisis?OEA: I’ve been going to British and American schools since I was five years old. I’ve been very much attuned to this part of the world from a very young age. One of my formative childhood experiences was holding up magazines to the light to try to read past the censors’ black ink.Over the last year and a half, there’s been an element of personal complicity that renders all these relatively tiny fractures that I’d seen growing up or over the course of my life, part of a bigger break. I’m sitting on the launching side of the bombs. My taxpayer money is paying for this, and I’m watching it in almost real time. Those factors make it much more difficult to think of this as just another fissure that I can Band-Aid together with my overarching thoughts about what the west is. It’s an account of a severance: there’s been something that I’ve been anchored to for most of my life. Now I feel unanchored from it, but I don’t know what I am on the other side of that.View image in fullscreenNY: You reported on the “war on terror” for years, including in Guantánamo and Afghanistan. Why do you think it was Gaza that brought on a fracture of this magnitude?OEA: I think the short answer is threefold: immediacy, scale and cowardice, the latter being my own. In the context of being a journalist during the “war on terror” years, and covering a place like the prison at Guantánamo Bay, I was still able to impose a kind of distance between myself and my role in this part of the world, and what I was seeing. That’s to say I was able to think of it as a kind of anomaly – that underneath it, there was a bedrock of something good and something fundamental that would hold.I have personally found that impossible to do when every morning I wake up conditioned to know that if I open up my social media feed and I see a picture of a smiling Palestinian kid, it’s almost certainly because that kid has just been killed. It makes that particular form of psychological self-defense unavailable to me. And of course, there’s the scale [of the violence], which I think is pretty self-evident. All of these things are intertwined, I think, with my own cowardice in my ability to have been able to look away for so long. I can’t do that any more.NY: It seems like a lot of your most scathing critiques are reserved for the “western liberal” – the person who might express sympathy with the oppressed but doesn’t want to speak out, whether because of the cost or for other reasons of inconvenience.OEA: For me there’s been a difficult reckoning with where to direct my rage politically, in terms of the rational versus the visceral. Rationally, I know on almost any spectrum that the current administration is worse, maybe than any administration in my lifetime.But viscerally, what brought us to this moment inspires a different kind of rage, because of the chasm between the performance and the reality. You watch a presumably liberal, progressive administration send you fundraising emails talking about Donald Trump as an existential threat to American democracy, and then you watch the leaders of that same Democratic party pal around with this guy a few weeks after the election at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. You receive fundraising emails talking about the climate crisis as an existential threat to the planet, and then you see a campaign predicated on not doing very much about it at all. You see press secretaries talk about the desire for a lasting peace while funding an endless war.View image in fullscreenI think that this chasm between the performance of a particular kind of virtue and a cold, calculated reality is part and parcel of how we end up in this situation. Whatever I may think of someone like Donald Trump, that gap between the performance and the reality is, by any account, substantially smaller.NY: Trump is demolishing the federal government as we speak. Is that part of the same story you tell, of a system collapsing under the weight of its own myths?OEA: I think that one of the very few fairly reliable trajectories in American politics over the last quarter century is to take whatever was on the fringes of the Republican party 10 or 15 years ago and see whether it’s in the center today. One of the things that terrifies me about someone like Donald Trump is not the inherent extremism of every facet of his political being, but the likelihood that he will be considered tame by the standards of whatever the Republican party is becoming.Any system that at its heart is insatiable is going to lead us to a place like the one we’re in. Any system predicated on endless taking – the taking of land, the taking of resources, the taking of lives of people who get in the way – is going to take us to these kinds of places. I find myself less and less concerned with trying to moderate the speed with which we are racing towards a particular conclusion, than actually trying to change the system that leads us to that conclusion.NY: I think a lot of people, the same people you might have indicted six months ago for not speaking out, are really panicked at the moment. Can that complacent liberalism be directed into more urgent action?OEA: Yeah, absolutely. Look toward the solidarity networks that have been created at the ground level in response to both the last year and a half and to whatever the Trump administration is doing. And as cynical as I have become about the west’s institutions – be they political, academic, cultural, whatever – I’ve had the exact opposite reaction to the immense amount of courage shown at an individual and communal level. Those systems are in place. Yes, they’re fighting an uphill battle, but they exist.Any proposed solution would need the middle-of-the-road, liberal power structures – which in the United States, is overwhelmingly the Democratic party – make a firm decision one way or another on whether they want to undertake an overhaul to fight this directly, or whether they want to continue as a kind of diet version of something centrist, when the center continues moving to the right further and further every day.NY: Does that mean you have some hope?OEA: Yes! This is a very weird thing to say about a stone-cold bummer of a book but I do think of it as a profoundly hopeful book. I’m watching doctors fly into the middle of a killing field and perform surgery. I’m watching dock workers refuse to load missiles on to ships. I’m watching students at Ivy League universities who have been handed a free pass to the good life hand that pass back in the form of protest for a people who can offer them essentially nothing in the way of material reward.I wrote a book – in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Other people are out there doing the work, and I am leeching courage from them. And to me that is incredibly hopeful, because otherwise I would just be left having turned away from all of these institutions and their immense resources, and facing what? Facing nothing, essentially.This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity

      Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is out in the US on 25 February More