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      Trump news at a glance: President reportedly orders military to target drug cartels; plans to meet Putin on Ukraine

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      Donald Trump has reportedly given a secret directive to the Pentagon to use the military to target Latin-American drug cartels that his administration has designated terrorist organisations.The order “provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels”, according to the New York Times, which first reported the directive, citing people familiar with the matter. A US official later confirmed the signing of the directive but said military action did not appear imminent and it was unclear exactly what type of operations they would carry out.The order has forced Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum to calm fears in her country of a US invasion. The directive potentially opens the door for unilateral American military assaults across Latin America, an unprecedented escalation of tactics by a US administration in the region.Trump has made going after Latin American drug-trafficking organizations a priority of his administration: in February, the state department designated seven organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations, including five powerful cartels in Mexico.Meanwhile, Trump is planning a meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday next week to discuss the war in Ukraine, and said that ending the conflict would have to involve “some swapping of territories”.Mexico rejects US ‘invasion’ as Trump orders military to target cartelsPresident Sheinbaum has rejected the idea that the US might invade Mexico after reports of Trump’s secret directive to the military.“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military,” she said during a daily news conference on Friday. “We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will be no invasion. It’s off the table, absolutely off the table.”Read the full storyTrump to meet Putin to discuss war in UkraineTrump has said he will meet with Putin to discuss the war on Friday next week in Alaska, saying that an end to the three-and-a-half-year war would have to involve “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both” Ukraine and Russia.Trump made ending the war in Ukraine part of his election campaign and boasted that he would be able to end the conflict in his first 24 hours in office. In more than six months, however, he has failed to prove he has any leverage with his Russian counterpart, who has ignored Trump’s deadlines and continued to strike Ukraine.Read the full storyTrump ambassador to Israel taunts British PM The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has launched an undiplomatic attack on Keir Starmer, comparing Israel’s war in Gaza to the allied bombing of Dresden after the British prime minister criticized the Israeli security cabinet’s decision to expand the war in Gaza.“So Israel is expected to surrender to Hamas & feed them even though Israeli hostages are being starved?” Huckabee wrote on social media in response to a post by the British prime minister calling for an immediate ceasefire and lamenting the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as well as the fate of the remaining Israeli hostages being held by Hamas.Read the full storyTexas house again fails to meet quorumThe Texas House of Representatives reconvened without the necessary number of lawmakers to conduct business on Friday, the deadline set by top state Republicans before the Democrats who have left for blue states face arrest or removal from office.Read the full storyNo contempt for Trump officials over deportationsAn appeals court on Friday tossed out a judge’s finding of contempt against the Trump administration in a case over the notorious deportations of Venezuelans from the US to an El Salvador prison without due process.The decision from a divided three-judge panel based in the nation’s capital vacates a finding from US district judge James Boasberg.Read the full storyTrump demands $1bn from UCLA to restore federal fundingThe Trump administration is seeking a $1bn settlement from the University of California, Los Angeles, a White House official said Friday. The administration suspended $584m in federal research funding over allegations of civil rights violations related to antisemitism and affirmative action following protests on campus in 2024.Read the full storyKristi Noem responds to South Park episodeSouth Park’s recent satirical depiction of Kristi Noem as having undergone a defective cosmetic procedure and shooting dogs has rankled the US homeland security secretary, she said in a new interview.“It’s so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look,” Noem remarked on Thursday’s episode of the Glenn Beck Program podcast – a little more than a year after her disclosure in a memoir that she shot and killed her family’s dog on a farm.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Donald Trump ordered federal officers to start patrolling Washington DC, launching what the White House is calling a seven-day crackdown on “violent crime”.

      The justice department has issued two subpoenas to Letitia James, the New York attorney general who Trump has repeatedly criticized, according to reports.

      The price of gold futures soared to a record high after it emerged that the US would put tariffs on imports of 1kg bars, in a further trade blow to Switzerland.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 7 August 2025. More

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      Texas house again fails to meet quorum as governor threatens to add more Republican seats to gerrymandered map – live

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      The Texas legislature failed to meet quorum for a third time today, after only 95 of the 100 representatives needed were present. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers defied Governor Greg Abbott’s demands to return, and remain out of state in protest over a new GOP-drawn congressional map.Speaker Dustin Burrows attempted to reconvene the house today and meet quorum after it failed earlier this week.The Texas Democratic party chairman has responded to the lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, seeking to remove 13 Democratic lawmakers from office, saying in a statement:
      Texas Democrats are exercising a long-standing, constitutionally protected right of the minority party to block extreme agendas – in this case, gerrymandering to keep Trump in power. These lawmakers have taken significant risks and sacrifices to stop Trump’s agenda, and despite all the threats they face, they remain undeterred, just like the rest of us. If Ken Paxton wants a fight, we will give him one.”
      Paxton has sought to enforce arrest warrants against the Democratic lawmakers who left Texas to stop Republicans from gerrymandering the congressional map in a manner that would add five more GOP seats.Some more background on what happened at the Texas house today:Billy Long, who is stepping down as the Internal Revenue Service commissioner only two months after he was appointed, has said he will be serving as ambassador to Iceland.The New York Times reported earlier today that Trump had Long removed, and that Long had clashed with Scott Bessent, treasury secretary, who will now serve as acting commissioner.Long is a former congressman from Missouri and close ally to the president who previously pushed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.The IRS has been run by six different people this year so far.Vladimir Putin has presented the Trump administration with a proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine if Kyiv makes major territorial concessions, according to a new Wall Street Journal report that cites European and Ukrainian officials.The proposal would require Ukraine that hand over the Donbas in the east of the country, which has led European officials to express serious reservations, the Journal reported.“European and Ukrainian officials, who were briefed by President Trump and Witkoff in a series of calls this week, said they worry Putin is simply using the offer as a ploy to avoid punishing new US sanctions and tariffs while continuing the war,” the Journal reported.The report was published as Trump, in a briefing with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, suggested there would “be some swapping of territories” to end the Ukraine invasion. The president spent a significant portion of the event discussing Russia, suggesting he would have more to announce soon and that he and Putin would be meeting “very shortly”.Trump has said he will soon have an update on Russia and would be meeting with Putin “very shortly”. Today was the original deadline he had set to end the Ukraine invasion or bring new sanctions. At the event with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the president made vague remarks about next steps, saying:
      President Putin I believe wants to see peace, and Zelenskyy wants to see peace. Now, President Zelenskyy has to get … everything he needs, because he’s going to have to get ready to sign something, and I think he is working hard to get that done.
      Asked if Zelenskyy would have to give up territory, the president responded: “You’re looking at territory that’s been fought over for three and a half years. A lot of Russians have died. A lot of Ukrainians have died. So we’re looking at that, but we’re actually looking to get some back and some swapping. It’s complicated.”Trump has said he would also soon announce details on the location of a meeting.The US president and the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan have officially signed the peace agreement, establishing a so-called “Trump route for international peace and prosperity”.The corridor for transit and trade will connect mainland Azerbaijan with the autonomous Nakhchivan region, and the AP reported that the Trump administration said it was the Armenians who suggested naming it after the US president.Both leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan heaped praise on Trump and suggested he should receive a Nobel peace prize, which Trump has expressed interest in winning.In the state dining room, Donald Trump is flanked by the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, to his right, and the Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, on his left.Trump says that both nations agree to “stop all fighting forever”. But a key part of the agreement is that it establishes what will be now known as “the Trump route for international peace and prosperity”. This is a key transit corridor that will have US development rights.Trump adds that he thinks Aliyev and Pashinyan are “going to have a great relationship”.

      The Texas House failed to meet quorum for a third time today, after only 95 of the 100 representatives needed were present. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers continue to defy Governor Greg Abbott’s demands to return, and remain out of state in protest over a new GOP-drawn congressional map. The Democrats’ next stop on their tour to deny quorum is California. They’ll hold a press conference at 5pm ET today with Governor Gavin Newsom in Sacramento.

      Abbott has spent the last 24 hours ratcheting up and repeating threats against the absent Democrats. He vowed to “call special session, after special session, after special session with the same agenda items on there”, in an interview with NBC News.

      Meanwhile, the Trump administration wasted no time today. A few standout items are below.

      First, the DoJ has issued two grand jury subpoenas to the New York attorney general, Letitia James, also a longtime Trump adversary, according to various reports. One of the subpoenas is tied to a civil fraud case her office brought against Trump, and the other is reportedly tied to the attorney general’s investigation into NRA.

      The Trump administration is also demanding that UCLA pay the federal government $1bn over multiple instalments to settle claims of antisemitism. That’s according to a report from CNN. If the proposal is agreed to, it would mark the biggest settlement the government has received from a higher education institution.

      And then, according to new reporting by the New York Times, the president has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that the Trump administration considers terrorist organizations. In response Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said her government had been informed of a coming order but that it had nothing to do with the US military operating on Mexican soil.

      Finally, for now at least, the Trump administration was handed a win when it comes to its ongoing showdown with the judiciary over the president’s immigration agenda. A federal appeals court overturned Judge James Boasberg’s ruling that found probable cause to hold Trump administration officials in contempt of court over their handling of the deportations of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants under the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act.
      The New York Times is reporting that Donald Trump is replacing the IRS commissioner, Billy Long, only two months after her was confirmed.Long is a former congressman from Missouri and a notable Trump ally – who pushed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. According to the Times, Long is being primed for an ambassador nomination. It is unclear who lead the agency next, according to the Times.Long is the sixth person to run the IRS this year alone, there have been four acting commissioners since Danny Werfel’s resignation in January, following Trump’s inauguration.A senior administration official tells the Times that treasury secretary Scott Bessent will be named acting commissioner.We’ll be bringing you the latest as Donald Trump prepares to welcome the Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, followed by the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. They’re expected to sign a peace deal, which would be a landmark development in decades of tension and fighting. Pashinyan is due to arrive soon.The meeting will be certainly be an opportunity for the president to highlight his “peacemaker-in-chief” bona fides, but peace is more elusive in one of the hallmark international conflicts of Trump’s second term.Today is Trump’s original deadline for Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine, or face fresh sanctions. So far there’s been no update, but Trump has said he is ready to meet with Vladimir Putin despite the Russian leader’s refusal to sit-down with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The exact time and location remain undefined, but the UAE has been floated, given Putin’s refusal to talk in Kyiv.The Trump administration is demanding that the University of California, Los Angeles, pay the federal government $1bn over multiple installments to settle claims of antisemitism, according to a report from CNN.The settlement would also require UCLA to pay $172m to a fund for Jewish students and other individuals affected by alleged violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, per CNN. Title VII prohibits employment discrimination on the basis race, color, religion, sex and national origin.CNN notes that if the proposal is agreed to, it would mark the biggest settlement the government has received from a higher education institution. CNN has not yet received comment from the University of California system.According to CNN’s reporting, “the proposed agreement prohibits overnight demonstrations and calls on the school to revise its policies and procedures on protests. It also requires UCLA to discontinue race and ethnicity-based scholarships and provide the resolution monitor with admissions data.”Burrows is now speaking and says that he and attorney general Ken Paxton have tried to make the civil arrest warrants they have filed against Democratic lawmakers “enforceable beyond state lines”.Also, notably, Burrows is enacting a new policy that states that any member breaking quorum will no longer have their paycheck or per diem deposited electronically. While the Capitol is not withholding pay – as that violates the state’s constitution – they are now stipulating that their paychecks must now be picked up in person.Burrows said the statehouse will withhold a percentage of absent Democrats’ monthly expenses, and any administrative work that requires the House’s approval will need to be done in person.The Texas legislature failed to meet quorum for a third time today, after only 95 of the 100 representatives needed were present. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers defied Governor Greg Abbott’s demands to return, and remain out of state in protest over a new GOP-drawn congressional map.Speaker Dustin Burrows attempted to reconvene the house today and meet quorum after it failed earlier this week.In an interview with Ruthless Podcast, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, threatened to add “six, or seven or eight” new seats to the GOP-drawn congressional map that Democrats are already protesting by breaking quorum.The current proposal is a gerrymandered map that could secure Republicans five seats in Texas ahead of the 2026 midterms.When asked about how he sees this redistricting battle ending, Abbott was resolute: “One way or the other, they [Democrats] are coming back, and it’s going to end with these maps being passed.” More

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      Texas attorney general seeks to remove 13 absent Democrats from office

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      The Republican attorney general of Texas on Friday asked the state supreme court to vacate the seats of 13 Democratic legislators who have left for blue states, hours after their absence once again delayed a vote on a redrawn congressional map sought by Donald Trump.Republican leaders in Texas had set a Friday deadline for Democrats to return to the state capitol in Austin or face punishment, including arrest and possible removal from office. Dozens of Democrats left the state over the weekend to prevent a Republican redistricting effort, requested by the president, to redraw the Texas maps mid-cycle to secure a Republican House majority in the 2026 midterms.“These cowards deliberately sabotaged the constitutional process and violated the oath they swore to uphold,” the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a far-right ally of the president, said in a statement that hinted he could target more lawmakers in future litigation. Paxton’s lawsuit is the latest escalation in a fast-evolving standoff between blue and red state leaders.It comes after the Texas house speaker, Dustin Burrows, moved to enforce arrest warrants in other states and as Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, warned in an interview with NBC News that he was prepared to “arrest Democrats who may be in Texas, may be elsewhere”.During the short house session on Friday, Burrows said state authorities were working to make civil arrest warrants against the Democrats enforceable outside Texas. He also announced that the legislature was withholding the Democrats’ direct deposit payments, requiring absent members to pick them up in person at the capitol in Austin.“Each one of you knows that eventually you will come back,” Burrows said, addressing the absent Democrats from the chamber floor. “But with each passing day, the political cost of your absence is rising, and it will be paid in full.”Also on Friday, Paxton announced that he was suing the Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke for “unlawful fundraising activity” on behalf of the quorum-breaking state lawmakers. On X, O’Rourke said that his political group, Powered by People, had responded by suing Paxton in state court.Democrats have remained defiant, saying they would remain out of state for “as long as it takes” to stop Trump’s redistricting effort. But Abbott has said that they would have to stay away for years to be successful. The current special legislative session, called by the Texas governor, lasts until 19 August, but Abbott has vowed to call “special session after special session after special session”.“But I’ll tell you this also, Democrats act like they’re not going to come back as long as this is an issue,” Abbott said in the NBC News interview. “That means they’re not going to come back until like 2027 or 2028, because I’m going to call special session after special session after special session with the same agenda items on there.”In a separate interview, he said he might push for more than five seats.“What I’m thinking now is that if they don’t start showing up, I may start expanding,” he said. “We may make it six or seven or eight new seats we’re going to be adding on the Republican side.”Tensions have escalated dramatically since the Democrats left Texas and sought refuge in Democratic states. The Republican-led state house has approved civil arrest warrants for the absent lawmakers, and Abbott took the extraordinary step of filing a lawsuit with the state supreme court that seeks to remove Gene Wu, the house Democratic leader, from office.The court has asked Wu to respond by Friday to Abbott’s emergency petition to remove him from his Houston-area seat.On Thursday John Cornyn, the Texas senator, said the FBI had agreed to assist in locating the Democrats, but the FBI declined to comment and it is unclear what authority federal law enforcement would have, as they are not charged with federal crimes.“For those who have fled to Illinois or California, be reminded that the FBI’s assistance has reportedly been enlisted and their powers are not confined to a single state’s boundaries,” Burrows said on Friday.One Democratic member of the Texas state house, Claudia Ordaz, said in a statement that state troopers had showed up at a relative’s home looking for her, even though she had stated publicly that she was dealing with a “personal health matter”. In the statement Ordaz said she was sharing from a hospital waiting room, the lawmaker denounced the officers’ visit as an “deliberate abuse of power and an intimidation tactic” while also criticizing those she said had “falsely accused” her of being present in the chamber to help Republicans make a quorum.Earlier on Friday, the St Charles police department confirmed that the Illinois hotel where some of the quorum-breaking Democrats are believed to be staying had experienced a second bomb threat. It comes days after an initial bomb threat at the Q Center Hotel, in suburban Chicago.Several Texas Democrats were in Sacramento on Friday to meet with the California governor, Gavin Newsom, who has threatened to respond in kind with a new congressional map that would offset the seats Republicans stand to gain in Texas if the president’s push is successful. More

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      Trump administration demands $1bn from UCLA to restore federal funding

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      The Trump administration is seeking a $1bn settlement from the University of California, Los Angeles, a White House official said on Friday.The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the request and spoke on condition of anonymity.The Trump administration has suspended $584m in federal research funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and other agencies, the university’s chancellor, Julio Frenk, said in a message to UCLA staff and students this week.Last week, the justice department notified the university that an investigation by the department’s civil right division had “concluded that UCLA’s response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024 was deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students” in violation of federal anti-discrimination law.“This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system”, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said in a statement.UCLA is the first public university whose federal grants have been targeted by the administration over allegations of civil rights violations related to antisemitism and affirmative action. The Trump administration has frozen or paused federal funding over similar allegations against private colleges.The new University of California president, James B Milliken, who oversees a university system of 10 campuses, six academic health centers and three affiliated national laboratories, confirmed on Friday that the university had received notice from the justice department and was reviewing it.“Earlier this week, we offered to engage in good faith dialogue with the Department to protect the University and its critical research mission,” Milliken said. “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.“Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the US economy, and protect our national security,” he added.UCLA recently reached a $6m settlement with three Jewish students and a Jewish professor who sued the university, arguing it violated their civil rights by allowing pro-Palestinian protesters in 2024 to block their access to classes and other areas on campus.The university has said it is committed to campus safety and inclusivity and will continue to implement recommendations. More

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      Several people arrested at anti-Ice protest outside NYC immigration court

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      Several protesters outside New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza government building were arrested on Friday for disorderly conduct, with demonstrators accusing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency of operating a covert detention facility there, according to several reports.Protesters marched to the largest federal immigration courthouse in Manhattan on Friday morning and chanted outside the building. Demonstrators demanded access to the site, which was denied, and they later held a sit-in outside the courthouse, according to ABC7.Within a few minutes the New York City police department moved in to arrest some of the protesters for disorderly conduct, according to reports, as activists could be seen blocking the street.“No fear, no hate, no Ice in our state!” chanted demonstrators during their march to the site, where Ice agents routinely detain immigrants after immigration court proceedings, in a move that goes against previously normal practice.Demonstrators allege detainees are being held in overcrowded conditions without many basic amenities or legal access at 26 Federal Plaza’s 10th floor, where the agency denies it detains people, and are demanding unrestricted access for elected officials, journalists and faith leaders. Friday’s protest was one of several in the city this week.Last month, footage from inside 26 Federal Plaza shared by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) showed two dozen men in bare rooms, some lying on the floor with emergency blankets and with few basic provisions.“Just to be a presence, we’re here to say that the American people are opposed to these kinds of policies. And for Ice agents, maybe that will lead some of them to reconsider their career choice,” Jeffrey Courter, the chair of the Justice Ministries Committee of the Presbytery of New York City, told ABC7.Authorities insist the facility is only a processing center.Lawmakers have been denied access to the site. In June, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, was arrested while escorting an immigrant from a hearing.Several groups, including the grassroots protest movement known as 50501 and NYIC, as well as faith-based groups, were present at the protest.Courthouse detentions have become a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, which aims to arrest 3,000 people daily. Reports from cities including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Chicago and El Paso, Texas, describe routine court appearances devolving into tense encounters. A newly filed class-action lawsuit seeks to ban the practice of making Ice arrests at immigration courthouses. More

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      US court tosses judge’s contempt order over Trump’s El Salvador deportations

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      An appeals court on Friday tossed out a judge’s finding of contempt against the Trump administration in a case over the notorious deportations of Venezuelans from the US to an El Salvador prison without due process.The decision from a divided three-judge panel based in the nation’s capital vacates a finding from US district judge James Boasberg.Boasberg found in April there was probable cause to hold Donald Trump’s administration in criminal contempt of court for willfully disregarding his 15 March order barring the deportations to El Salvador of more than 250 Venezuelans from immigration detention in the US to a brutal prison in the Central American country, under an agreement with the Salvadorian leadership, without the chance to challenge their removals. The Trump administration appealed.On Friday, Washington DC circuit judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both of whom were nominated by Trump in his first term in the White House, concurred with the unsigned majority opinion. Judge Cornelia Pillard, who was appointed by Barack Obama when he was president, dissented.View image in fullscreenBoasberg had accused Trump administration officials of rushing deportees out of the country under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act before they could challenge their removal in court and then willfully disregarding his order that planes already in the air should return to the US.The Republican administration has denied violating his order.“The district court’s order raises troubling questions about judicial control over core executive functions like the conduct of foreign policy and the prosecution of criminal offenses,” circuit judge Katsas wrote in an opinion.The Trump administration claimed that all the Venezuelans it removed to El Salvador outside the normal constitutional process were violent gang members, which many of the deportees denied and critics said, regardless of any of the individuals’ criminal guilt or innocence, did not justify denying them due process in the US.The episode has been one of the most high-profile of the second Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, in addition to widespread raids and arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers in communities across the country.“The district court’s order attempts to control the Executive Branch’s conduct of foreign affairs, an area in which a court’s power is at its lowest ebb,” Rao wrote.Pillard dissented. “The majority does an exemplary judge a grave disservice by overstepping its bounds to upend his effort to vindicate the judicial authority that is our shared trust,” she wrote.The 250 migrants have since been released back to their home country in a prisoner swap with the US after months at the mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot).The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, celebrated the appeals court ruling, calling it a “MAJOR victory defending President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act” in a social media post and vowing to “continue fighting and WINNING in court”.Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represented the migrants, said there was “zero ambiguity” in Boasberg’s order about the planes.“We strongly disagree with today’s decision regarding contempt and are considering all options going forward,” he said.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      The more James Gunn’s Superman is a hit, the more the right will want its own Dean Cain of steel

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      It’s almost impossible to divide superheroes along political lines. Captain America might seem like a patriotic, commie-bashing lunatic, as he was in the 1950s comics during the McCarthy era, until you remember that he has also spent much of his fictional career telling corrupt government agencies to shove it. And, in the Marvel Comic Universe, at least, he went on the run rather than sign up for an authoritarian superhero registry. Superman was once the square-jawed poster boy for US exceptionalism, cheerfully posing on propaganda comic covers urging readers to buy war bonds, but he’s also been written as a Kansas farm boy so suspicious of concentrated power that in one storyline he renounced his citizenship to avoid being used as a pawn of US foreign policy.Bar a few outliers – Iron Man cheerleading the military-industrial complex in his earliest comics springs to mind – trying to pin a superhero to one side of the political spectrum is like trying to staple fog: most of DC and Marvel’s big beasts will drift wherever the story, or the writer’s mortgage payments, takes them. Which is why it’s been so bizarre watching the right’s disgust as a vaguely woke man of steel drives all before him at the summer box office.James Gunn’s Superman passed the half-billion-dollar mark globally this week, which hardly means we’re looking at a film to mirror the success of the early comic book movie era – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice somehow made $874m, for chrissakes – but does at least indicate that audiences quite like this new, down-to-earth, kindly and human take on Kal-El. Gunn is now producing next Wonder Woman.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, on the dystopian side of the news cycle, Dean Cain has declared himself primed and ready to join Donald Trump’s Ice agency. Cain (Kal-El in 90s TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) only recently declared his horror at how “woke” the new David Corenswet Supes has turned out to be. Are these two things connected? Is Cain trying to make the point that a real “superman” would be standing at America’s borders, demanding paperwork from asylum seekers and Frisbeeing their lunch into the nearest bin, rather than attempting to stop evil invaders from terrorising a rival nation (as Corenswet does in Superman)?It’s almost as if, in the absence of the kind of superhero movies Cain would like to see muscle their way into multiplexes, the actor sees it as his patriotic duty to bring hard-border fiction into reality. If the 74 million who voted for Trump don’t want these woke Marvel and DC superhero movies, and would really rather see films in which caped crusaders defend gated communities against suspiciously accented delivery drivers, isn’t Hollywood missing a trick? Isn’t there – somewhere – a gap in the market, or perhaps an alternative reality – Earth 45? Earth-Fox News? – where filmgoers queue around the block to watch Captain Constitution and the Stand Your Ground Squad, and the Hollywood trades wax lyrical about a new blockbuster era of paranoia and punitive zoning laws?The right has tried this already, of course. Cain was also pretty upset about Disney’s recent “woke” Snow White remake, perhaps because the princess didn’t spend the runtime pining for a man or whistling while she ironed. And so was conservative media outfit the Daily Wire, which at the height of the backlash against Rachel Zegler’s casting made a trailer for a then-forthcoming rival film titled Snow White and the Evil Queen.Plot details were thin on the ground, but presumably involved the heroine abandoning woodland animals for a concealed-carry permit and learning the value of hard work by running her own small business into the ground without government subsidies. We’ll never really know because the film appears to have been quietly cancelled, leaving a potential audience of millions bereft of the chance to see what happens when you trade magic mirrors for voter ID checkpoints.View image in fullscreenPerhaps the lesson here is that it’s just really difficult to make dreamy-eyed fantasy flicks that double as Breitbart comment threads. And it’s not just superhero movies that would creak under the strain. Imagine Star Wars if rebellions were built not on hope but on stricter border controls and mandatory midichlorian checks. Would The Lord of the Rings have really been quite the same if all those ’orrible orcs and trolls had been replaced on the battlefield by desperate migrants trying to reach the Shire, being enthusiastically biffed by an over-xcited Aragorn and Gimli counting down the number of “illegals” they just tonked?Sooner or later, someone’s going to make a superhero film or TV series that gives the Maga crowd everything: a caped crusader who fights windfarms, sues the Daily Planet for libel and pays for everything in gold bullion or crypto. (The Boys got close at times: Homelander is basically what happens when you cross Captain America with a Trump rally and a gallon of unpasteurised milk, but he was hardly a hero – and perhaps that’s the point.)Until then, the culture warriors will have to settle for grumbling about woke elves and lady Thor while the rest of us watch Superman save the world from the nastiest supervillains in the universe without checking anyone’s passport. More

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      Stephen Colbert on JD Vance’s water level raising: ‘Insane spoiled baby emperor move’

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      Late-night hosts took aim at JD Vance over his unusual birthday demand and Donald Trump over his disastrous tariffs.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert called it “a significant day for our economy” with Trump’s controversial tariffs finally kicking in. He said it’s a day to “set your clocks back to more expensive” with import taxes now the highest they’ve been since the Great Depression.Colbert said it’s “never a great sign to be compared to the worst thing ever”.Tariffs on certain countries are lower if negotiations have been successful or “if the president’s mad at you they can be much higher”.This week saw Apple announce $100bn worth of additional investment in the US, but there is a smaller pool of American workers with the skills necessary to make an iPhone. “I believe America’s children can do anything!” Colbert joked.The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, was filmed this week in the Oval Office giving Trump a gift which was partly made of 24-carat gold. Colbert called it “lavish corporate bottom-smooching”.In the same press opportunity, Trump again slammed Colbert for having “no talent” but did concede that he has better ratings than Kimmel or Fallon, whom he said also had no talent. “We’re all equally untalented,” Colbert said, before adding: “Thank you for watching, sir.”Colbert said that while we are “plunging headfirst into techno-feudalism”, the Secret Service is busy raising the water level of an Ohio river for Vance’s family boat trip to celebrate his birthday. He called it an “insane spoiled baby emperor move”.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers said that Trump “clearly has no interest in doing the job of president” and doesn’t “know or care what his own administration is doing on a daily basis”.He is too busy renovating the White House with plans revealed this week for a new $200m ballroom decked out in gold. Trump has said it’s important as there hasn’t been a president like him who has been good at ballrooms before.Meyers commented that it’s “never been a problem that our presidents weren’t good at ballrooms”.To show how little Trump knows about the day-to-day, he played a clip just after the US illegally bombed Iran in which he was told by a reporter that the intelligence community said it had no evidence that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, which the president called false.This week when he was asked about Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decision to cancel $500m in contracts for vaccine development, he also appeared confused. “For a guy who watches cable news all day, you sure seem caught off-guard by the news,” Meyers said.There are also plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon, a decision bragged about on Fox News with claims that “Trump doesn’t play by the rules”. Meyers admitted that this is true as at Nasa, rule No 1 is “don’t blow up the moon”.Ignoring the inflation that’s ballooning thanks in part to Trump’s tariffs, the administration is instead having to deal with the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump “flew into a rage again” after being asked about it this week.It’s still proving to be “explosive for Trump and his Maga base” and so this week a dinner was planned on Epstein strategy involving high-ranking loyalists. Nothing like a “secretive cabal” of powerful people to settle the conspiracy theorists, Meyers noted.It was reportedly planned by Vance, whom Trump threw under the bus when he was asked about it this week. “No matter how much you try to appease Trump or suck up to him, he’s eventually going to betray you,” he said. More