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      The power and pitfalls of protest: how to speak out without falling victim to Trump’s playbook | Jonathan Smucker

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      On Saturday I was heartened to be one of millions of Americans who took to the streets in cities and towns across the United States to stand against “the most brazen power grab in modern history”. While no official total tally of “Hands Off!” participants is yet available, the anti-Donald Trump, anti-Elon Musk actions on Saturday were certainly among the largest single-day protests in US history, with rallies in all 50 states.As we seem to be entering a new stage of popular protest movements, it’s worth assessing the strategic value of protest, as well as the limits and potential liabilities. History is full of powerful examples of consequential bottom-up protest movements. The women’s suffrage movement secured voting rights after decades of struggle. The civil rights movement dismantled Jim Crow segregation. The labor movement won the eight-hour workday, the weekend and much more. Protest was an essential tool for each of these movements. It can take many different forms, including mass demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, unruly disruption and civil disobedience.Protest is often negatively framed as naive, utopian or merely self-expressive. But it can be profoundly pragmatic. When part of a larger power-building strategy, protest can play an essential role in forcing issues onto the public agenda, changing popular opinion, delegitimizing powerholders, shifting the balance of forces and even toppling regimes. Protest movements don’t always win, of course, but history is full of stories of “Davids” defeating “Goliaths”.Only weeks into Trump’s second term, as we seek to limit the damage and, ultimately, to defeat authoritarianism and oligarchy, protest is as necessary and important as ever. How can we make our voices as powerful as possible?How Trump frames protestersProtest is also rife with peril. When powerful people and institutions feel threatened, they tend to fight dirty, using every tool at their disposal, including police and legal repression. In addition to facing threats to safety and freedom, social movement participants are characteristically slandered and stereotyped by their opponents, with slanted news coverage often parroting the messages or sharing the assumptions of the ruling class.Before exploring some pitfalls of protest (and how to avoid them), let’s get a few things clear. First, it is brave and worthy to engage in protest for just causes, against powerful actors; not only that, it’s necessary if we want to have a democracy. Second, our opponents have a vested interest in disparaging and caricaturing our protests and they will attempt to slander us no matter what we do (but this doesn’t mean we have no ability to counter their attacks). Third, peril and pitfalls cannot be completely avoided: a protest where everything goes perfectly is rare, and the likelihood of errors and excesses is a poor excuse for inaction.That said, organizers of protests do have a responsibility to do everything in our power to ensure that collective action is as effective as possible. The sociologist Max Weber argued that those who seek to intervene in politics have a responsibility not only for our own intentions, but also for the counter-responses to our actions. In other words, we have a responsibility to think a few chess moves ahead and to craft a strategy that can win.A central constraint today is the dominant narrative about protest itself. In the US, this narrative casts protesters as a special type of person, with some combination of the following features: loud, shrill, naive, counter-cultural, speaking in jargon, Marxist, anti-American, violent and economically and/or educationally privileged (AKA “elitist”). The purpose of this dominant narrative is straightforward: inoculate millions of Americans against protest movements by otherizing “protesters”. In other words, there’s a well-worn caricature of a protester that holds many everyday working people back from aligning with protest movements.Ultimately it’s on us to get more people to see us differently. To be clear, I’m not talking about our hard opponents. The point of protest is never to be palatable to everyone. I’m talking here about the millions of Americans who have a high potential to join, support or at least sympathize with protest movements.Trump didn’t invent this disparaging story, but he grafts these negative tropes about protest and protesters on to his larger pseudo-populist “anti-elite” narrative. I put “anti-elite” in quotes because Trump strategically names cultural elites as culprits, intentionally diverting attention away from the concentrated economic power (eg Wall Street, huge corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk) that is actually to blame for the hardships of tens of millions of working-class Americans. Trump’s favorite “elite” targets include academia, the news media, Hollywood and Democratic politicians. “Woke protesters” take their place alongside the rest of this elite cast in Trump’s play. Opposed to these hoity-toity, overeducated, condescending elites, Trump presents himself as hero and champion of “ordinary Americans”.This framing is effective because it taps into a real and deepening class-based cultural divide in America – between a highly educated professional class occupying roughly the top 10-20% of the spectrum, and the bottom 80% below. In his book Dream Hoarders, Richard Reeves lays out how this upper stratum has pulled away from the majority of Americans – not just economically, but socially and culturally. The complex US tax code, legacy college admissions, and housing, zoning and other policies have benefited the already advantaged. As distinct from the ultra-rich “one per cent”, many in this larger upper strata see themselves as progressive, even as they benefit from invisible moats around their neighborhoods, schools and social networks. This deepening class-based insularity creates the cultural disconnect that Trump exploits. He directs populist anger toward these cultural elites, while diverting attention away from far more powerful and destructive economic culprits, offering working-class Americans cultural revenge rather than policies that could make a real positive difference in their lives.View image in fullscreenTrump’s exploitation of this cultural-economic backdrop – and Democrats’ failure to even comprehend it, let alone come up with a counter-strategy – was central to his electoral victories in both 2016 and 2024. This same backdrop should also be of great concern to protest movements. We who are attempting to organize people into collective action must recognize how easily our movements can be portrayed as extensions of this privileged class and work intentionally to break out of that framing (and, sometimes, that reality).At Trump rallies during his 2016 campaign, I observed how he would deliberately draw attention to protesters, utilizing them as characters in his story, encouraging the crowd to chant and jeer as security removed the disruptive “outside agitators”.So it was striking to watch how dramatically Trump changed his tack when military veterans spoke out at some of these same rallies. He completely ignored them, refusing to acknowledge their presence, strategically avoiding even looking in their direction. These veterans later learned from active-duty friends that Trump had gotten quite upset by their actions, because they didn’t fit into his narrative; military veterans could easily overcome Trump’s “woke protester” framing.Breaking out of Trump’s playbookIn the first several weeks of Trump’s second term, we again see powerful examples of veterans speaking out, for example, publicly confronting their representatives about Doge cuts to the benefits they earned. Grassroots organizations of veterans, like Common Defense, are helping to prepare, support and amplify the efforts of fellow veterans as they use their powerful voices to speak up in this critical moment. Protagonists in the story of America, veterans bring a unique authority and credibility that is very difficult for their powerful opponents to caricature or disparage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSimilarly, the federal workers who are organizing and showing the real-life impacts of Musk’s reckless cuts are very effective spokespeople right now. From park rangers to USPS employees, these workers are protesting threats to their livelihoods and to the valued public services they provide, speaking up as workers about the devastation wrought by Musk’s “chainsaw” on their lives and the communities they serve. Importantly, they represent a cross-section of America: diverse in race, geography, education and political leanings. They are relaying their experiences and connecting with millions of Americans who see themselves in their stories. Using plainspoken language rather than jargon, they present themselves not as “protesters” but as parents, neighbors and workers who have a stake in their country’s future.The lesson isn’t that you have to be a military veteran or federal worker if you want to effectively protest against Trump and Musk. But if our opponents are determined to otherize us as unrelatable “protesters”, what are the familiar aspects of our identities that we can emphasize instead? The story of a worker who is so fed up that she decides to join with others in collective action is very different from the dominant story about generic protesters.It’s important to also grasp and grapple with other elements of Trump’s attack narrative; his use of “protester” tropes is not the only means he uses to otherize and dehumanize. He also attacks vulnerable people because of their immigration status, their advocacy for Palestine and their gender identity, among other pretenses. Each of these attacks warrants its own strategic counter-response and it’s vitally important that we show solidarity and narrate Trump’s targeting of any of us as an attack on all of us and on our shared values and rights – as has been on display in the popular outpouring of support for the detained Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.Another important way today’s protests are breaking out of Trump’s playbook is by consistently punching up, especially at Musk as an unelected billionaire who has taken oligarchy in America to new heights. When we name powerful economic culprits, it takes the wind out of Trump’s fake populist sails. Billionaires who rigged our economy and political system make for a more convincing culprit to millions of Americans than vulnerable scapegoats (eg immigrants, trans people, or “woke”). A central reason we got into this mess is that Democrats have been so tepid and inconsistent in picking visible fights with billionaires, Wall Street and corporate power.It’s important that we consistently punch up at billionaires and the politicians doing their bidding and refrain from punching down at people who voted for Trump. To break out of Trump’s story of the “smug and condescending affluent liberal protester”, we should avoid messages that are, indeed, smug and condescending (eg, “In this house, we believe science is real”) or that mock people for their economic struggles (eg, “How are you feeling about voting for cheaper eggs now?”). Such messages are self-indulgent and counterproductive, and we can do so much better.Organizing for powerFinally, if we are to make our protests as effective as possible, we should recognize protest for what it is: a tactic. Protest is not an end in itself. Tactics require larger long-term power-building strategies. Absent strategy, protest can sometimes still hold some short-term strategic value (eg, showing that dissent exists), but if we want to accomplish more than a flash in the pan – if we genuinely intend to shape history, as powerful movements before us have done – then we need to figure out what to do after the protest ends and everyone goes home.The key is organization. Organizations transform episodic moments of outrage into sustained campaigns that can win concrete victories. Without organization, we’re no match for the powerful forces we’re up against. It’s no accident that the five decades when labor unions and other participatory organizations have declined are the same decades when capital consolidated control of our political system and inequality grew worse and worse.To rebuild people power, we need to build organizations with structure, leadership development and capacity for sustained campaigns and struggle. There are all kinds of organizations: labor unions, place-based (local and statewide), issue-based, faith and congregation-based, and more (check out the list of partner organizations that helped plan the 5 April “Hands Off!” protests). If you’re showing up to the protest as a lone individual, let it be your on-ramp to longer-term collective action. Figure out where you fit in, what capacity you can add, what skills you can develop, how much time you can give. Even just a few hours a month, when multiplied by millions, can amount to a formidable force – the kind of people power we need to defeat authoritarianism and oligarchy.Because ultimately we’re not trying to build “protest movements”, we’re trying to build people’s movements; movements that use protest as one tool among many, whose ultimate aim is to win a real voice for working people in determining the policies that impact our lives and communities – and to make an America that works for all of us.

      Jonathan Smucker is a political organizer, campaigner and strategist who co-founded Popular Comms Institute, PA Stands Up, Lancaster Stands Up, Common Defense, Beyond the Choir and Mennonite Action. He is the author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. More

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      China raises tariffs on US goods to 125% as Xi urges EU to resist Trump ‘bullying’

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      China has raised its tariffs on US products to 125% in the latest salvo of the trade dispute with Washington, just hours after Xi Jinping said there were “no winners in a tariff war”.Xi made the comments during a meeting with the Spanish prime minister in which he invited the EU to work with China to resist “bullying”, part of an apparent campaign to shore up other trading partners.The Chinese commerce ministry announced on Friday that it was raising the 84% tariffs on all US imports to 125%, again saying that China was ready to “fight to the end”. The statement also suggested it may be Beijing’s last move in the tit-for-tat tariff raises as “at the current tariff level, there is no market acceptance for US goods exported to China”.“If the US continues to impose tariffs on Chinese goods exported to the US, China will ignore it,” it said, flagging that there were other countermeasures to come.Some markets continued to tumble on Friday, as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, described the US president’s 90-day tariff pause – which sets most tariffs at 10% until July – as “fragile”.Asian indices followed Wall Street lower on Friday, with Japan’s Nikkei down nearly 5% and Hong Kong stocks heading towards the biggest weekly decline since 2008. Oil prices were also expected to drop for a second consecutive week.Chinese officials have been canvassing other trading partners about how to deal with the US tariffs, after the country was excluded from Trump’s 90-day pause of the steepest global tariffs. Instead the US president made consecutive increases to duties on Chinese imports, which are now 145%.On Friday, Xi welcomed Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, after also talking to counterparts in Saudi Arabia and South Africa. According to the official Chinese summary of the talks, Xi said “there will be no winners in a tariff war, and going against the world will isolate oneself”, in an apparent reference to the US.“China and the EU should fulfil their international responsibilities, jointly maintain the trend of economic globalisation and the international trade environment, and jointly resist unilateral bullying, not only to safeguard their own legitimate rights and interests, but also to safeguard international fairness and justice, and to safeguard international rules and order,” the summary said Xi told Sánchez.Spain said Sánchez told Xi his country favoured a more balanced relationship between the EU and China based on negotiations to resolve differences and cooperation in areas of common interest.Xi plans to travel to south-east Asia, including Vietnam and Cambodia, next week.Macron wrote on X early on Friday that Trump’s partial tariff suspension, pausing new rates on various countries that would have risen as high as 50%, “sends out a signal and leaves the door open for talks. But this pause is a fragile one.”He added: “This 90-day pause means 90 days of uncertainty for all our businesses, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.”Battered financial markets were given a brief reprieve on Wednesday when Trump decided to pause duties on dozens of countries. However, his escalating trade dispute with China, the world’s second-largest economy, has continued to fuel fears of recession and further retaliation.The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, tried to assuage the fears of sceptics by telling a cabinet meeting on Thursday that more than 75 countries wanted to start trade negotiations, and Trump had expressed hope of a deal with China.But the uncertainty in the meantime extended some of the most volatile trading since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.The US’s S&P 500 index ended 3.5% lower on Thursday and was now down about 15% from its all-time peak in February. Some analysts believe stocks have further to fall owing to the uncertainty surrounding the US tariff policy.Bessent shrugged off the renewed market sell-off on Thursday and predicted that striking deals with other countries would bring more certainty.The US and Vietnam agreed to begin formal trade talks after Bessent spoke to the Vietnamese deputy prime minister, Ho Duc Phoc, the White House said.The south-east Asian manufacturing hub is prepared to crack down on Chinese goods being shipped to the US via its territory in the hope of avoiding tariffs, Reuters reported on Friday.Taiwan’s president said his government would also be among the first batch of trading partners to enter negotiations. Taiwan, listed for a 32% tariff, has offered zero tariffs as a basis for talks.Japan’s prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, meanwhile, has set up a taskforce led by his close aide that hopes to visit Washington next week, according to local media.View image in fullscreenWhile Trump suddenly paused his “reciprocal” tariffs on other countries hours after they came into effect this week, he did not include China, instead increasing duties on Chinese imports as punishment for Beijing’s initial move to retaliate.Trump had imposed tariffs on Chinese goods of 145% since taking office, a White House official said.Meanwhile, Trump told reporters at the White House he thought the US could make a deal with China, but he reiterated his argument that Beijing had “really taken advantage” of the US for a long time.“I’m sure that we’ll be able to get along very well,” the US president said, referring to Xi. “In a true sense, he’s been a friend of mine for a long period of time, and I think that we’ll end up working out something that’s very good for both countries.”Xi and Trump are not known to have spoken since before Trump’s inauguration. Beijing has said it has no intention of backing down to what it terms as Trump’s “bullying” with the tariffs.“We will never sit idly by and watch while the legitimate rights and interests of the Chinese people are infringed, nor will we sit idly by as international economic and trade rules and the multilateral trading system are undermined,” the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Lin Jian, said on Thursday.As well as retaliatory tariffs, Beijing has also restricted imports of Hollywood films, and put 18 US companies on trade restriction lists.The commerce ministry said China’s door was open to dialogue but this must be based on mutual respect.The US tariff pause also does not apply to duties paid by Canada and Mexico, whose goods are still subject to 25% fentanyl-related tariffs unless they comply with the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement’s rules of origin.With trade hostilities persisting among the top three US trade partners, Goldman Sachs estimates the probability of a recession at 45%.Even with the rollback, the overall average import duty rate imposed by the US is the highest in more than a century, according to Yale University researchers.It also did little to soothe business leaders’ worries about the fallout from Trump’s trade dispute and its chaotic implementation: soaring costs, falling orders and snarled supply chains.One reprieve came, however, when the EU said it would pause its first counter-tariffs. 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      Will global climate action be a casualty of Trump’s tariffs?

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      Donald Trump’s upending of the global economy has raised fears that climate action could emerge as a casualty of the trade war.In the week that has followed “liberation day”, economic experts have warned that the swathe of tariffs could trigger a global economic recession, with far-reaching consequences for investors – including those behind the green energy projects needed to meet climate goals.Fears of a prolonged global recession have also tanked oil and gas prices, making it cheaper to pollute and more difficult to justify investment in clean alternatives such as electric vehicles and low-carbon heating to financially hard-hit households.But chief among the concerns is Trump’s decision to level his most aggressive trade tariffs against China – the world’s largest manufacturer of clean energy technologies – which threatens to throttle green investment in the US, the world’s second-largest carbon-emitter.‘A tragedy for the US’The US is expected to lag farther behind the rest of the world in developing clean power technologies by cutting off its access to cheap, clean energy tech developed in China. This is a fresh blow to green energy developers in the US, still reeling from the Trump administration’s vow to roll back the Biden era’s green incentives.Leslie Abrahams, a deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC, said the tariffs would probably hinder the rollout of clean energy in the US and push the country to the margins of the global market.Specifically, they are expected to drive up the price of developing clean power, because to date the US has been heavily reliant on importing clean power technologies. “And not just imports of the final goods. Even the manufacturing that we do in the United States relies on imported components,” she said.The US government’s goal to develop its manufacturing base by opening new factories could make these components available domestically, but it is likely to take time. It will also come at considerable cost, because the materials typically imported to build these factories – cement, steel, aluminium – will be subject to tariffs too, Abrahams said.“At the same time there are broader, global economic implications that might make it difficult to access inexpensive capital to build,” she added. Investors who had previously shown an interest in the US under the green-friendly Biden administration are likely to balk at the aggressively anti-green messages from the White House.Abrahams said this would mean a weaker appetite for investment in rolling out green projects across the US, and in the research and development of early-stage clean technologies of the future. This is likely to have long-term implications for the US position in the global green energy market, meaning it will “cede some of our potential market share abroad”, Abrahams added.Instead, countries like China are likely to divert sales of their clean energy tech away from the US to other countries eager to develop green energy, Abrahams said. “So on the one hand, that should help to accelerate adoption of clean energy in those countries, which is good for emissions, but for the US, that is future market share that we’re ceding,” she said.‘Clean energy is unstoppable, with or without Trump’It’s important to distinguish between the US and the rest of the world, according to Kingsmill Bond, a strategist for the energy thinktank Ember.“The more the US cuts itself off from the rest of the world, the more the rest of the world will get on with things and the US will be left behind. This is a tragedy for the clean energy industry in the US, but for everyone else there are opportunities,” he said.Analysis by the climate campaign group 350.org has found that despite rising costs and falling green investment in the US, Trump’s trade war will not affect the energy transition and renewables trade globally.It said the US was already “merely a footnote, not a global player” in the race to end the use of fossil fuels. Only 4% of China’s clean tech exports go to the US, it said, in a trade sector where sales volume grew by about 30% last year.“Trump’s tariffs won’t slow the global energy transition – they’ll only hurt ordinary people, particularly Americans,” said Andreas Sieber, an associate director at 350.org. “The transition to renewables is unstoppable, with or without him. His latest move does little to impact the booming clean energy market but will isolate the US and drive up costs for American consumers.”View image in fullscreenOne senior executive at a big European renewable energy company said developers were likely to press on with existing US projects but in future would probablyinvest in other markets.“So we won’t be doing less, we’ll just be going somewhere else,” said the executive, who asked not to be named. “There is no shortage of demand for clean energy projects globally, so we’re not scaling back our ambitions. And excluding the US could make stretched supply chains easier to manage.”Countries likely to benefit from the fresh attention of renewable energy investors include burgeoning markets in south-east Asia, where fossil fuel reliance remains high and demand for energy is rocketing. Australia and Brazil have also emerged as countries that stand to gain.“In times like these, countries will be increasingly on the hunt for domestic solutions,” Bond said. “And that means clean energy and local supply chains. There are always climate reasons to go green, but there are national security reasons now too.”The challenge for governments hoping to seize the opportunity provided by the US green retreat will be to assure rattled investors that they offer a safe place to invest in the climate agenda.Dhara Vyas, the chief executive of Energy UK, the UK industry’s trade body, said: “Certainty has always been the thing that investors say they need. The UK is seen as a stable country with a stable government, but now more than ever we need to double down on giving certainty to investors.”“Investors do like certainty,” Bond agreed. “But they also like growth and opportunity, so that’s why there is some confidence that they will continue to deploy capital in the sector.”‘The US still matters’Although the green investment slowdown may be largely limited to the US, this still poses concerns for global climate progress, according to Marina Domingues, the head of new energies for the consultancy Rystad Energy.“The US is a huge emitter country. So everything the US does still really matters to the global energy transition and how we account for CO2,” she said. The US is the second most polluting country in the world, behind China, which produces almost three times its carbon emissions. But the US’s green retreat comes at a time when the country was planning to substantially increase its domestic energy demand.After years of relatively steady energy demand, Rystad predicts a 10% growth in US electricity consumption from a boom in AI datacentres alone. The economy is also likely to require more energy to power an increase in domestic manufacturing as imports from China dwindle.In the absence of a growing energy industry, this is likely to come from fossil fuels, meaning growing climate emissions. The US is expected to make use of its abundance of shale gas, but it is planning to use more coal in the future too.In the same week that Trump set out his tariffs, he signed four executive orders aimed at preventing the US from phasing out coal, in what climate campaigners at 350.org described as an “abuse of power”.Anne Jellema, the group’s executive director, said: “President Trump’s latest attempt to force-feed coal to the US is a dangerous fantasy that endangers our health, our economy and our future.” More

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      The big lesson for Europe? Trump backed down under pressure | Alexander Hurst

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      My condolences to everyone who spent days trying to play 5D chess with Donald Trump’s market-exploding tariff mess. Where Trump is involved, there is a cloud of malevolent chaos, and there is grift amid the chaos. What grandmasters there are to be found are almost certainly grandmasters of grift.When markets dump $10tn in three days and then gain trillions back in a single afternoon on the erratic decisions of one deeply corrupt person, you can be sure that a small number of people have made immense sums of money out of that volatility. Were the people responsible for abnormal spikes of buying into the markets (including call options on various indexes and exchange-traded funds) on Wednesday morning – and again, 20 minutes before the tariff announcement went public – extraordinarily lucky? Were they in the right Signal group? Or were they just simply following Trump on Truth Social, where he posted: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT” –just a few hours before dropping the news that he was kind of pulling back.The first takeaway for the EU – beyond the potential stock tips – is that Trump will back down under pressure. So don’t grovel: the 10% universal tariff is still there, as are last month’s tariffs on steel and aluminum, so why has the EU unilaterally stepped down its retaliatory tariffs without a corresponding step-down from the US?Trump, of course, is spinning his partial U-turn as a result of “these countries … calling me, kissing my ass”, as he bragged to a gathering of congressional Republicans on Tuesday night. I have no doubt that Trump – whom hundreds of mental health professionals have described as having such a striking and serious case of malignant narcissism that they were willing to break a professional rule and diagnose him from a distance – would have loved for that to be true. But let me go out on a limb and say that it wasn’t the ass-kissing or any “deals”. It was that investors and funds the world over were fleeing anything and everything linked to the US – including its sovereign debt.There is a longstanding phenomenon whereby Europe tends to overvalue the US’s power and underestimate its own. Europe neither “kissed ass” nor retaliated over the “liberation day” tariffs; it observed as the market carnage and threat to US Treasury bonds punched a hole in the idea of the US as impregnable. Imagine how much faster the flood away from the US and to safety elsewhere (including the euro) would have been if the EU hadimmediately used its so-called bazooka, the anti-coercion instrument – a powerful new regulation that would allow it to target US services industries such as banking and tech.The second takeaway is that the rest of the world is ready to bypass the US’s chaos and unpredictability – it just needs Europe to be the alternative. What Trump also does not understand is that the US may have a trade deficit, but it was a net exporter of trust – until it blew up an interlocking economic and security order that it had designed, built and maintained over eight decades – and of which it was the primary beneficiary. As a result, the view from Brussels now is that “there is no long-term credibility” with the US, Claus Vistesen, of Pantheon Macroeconomics, told me.Europe, on the other hand, plays by the rules. In the long run the more dents Trump pounds into the rule of law and the idea that the US is stable, rather than erratic, the stronger the euro’s argument for replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Which brings me to the third takeaway.In the face of the Trump administration’s very real animosity towards it, the EU must act as swiftly as possible to shore up its greatest weakness: its dependence on fossil-fuel imports. Sometimes, the animosity is almost laughably tragicomic, such as when US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick ranted that Europeans “hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak”. Other times, it’s more transparent, such as when Trump claimed there would be no negotiations unless the Europeans “pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis, number one for present, but also for past”. As in, in Trump’s mind, $350bn in annual purchases of US natural gas in exchange for lifting tariffs.Over the past few months, the refrain that governments should weaken climate regulation in order to promote growth has picked up. This would be a truly pyrrhic victory – primarily because Europe is acutely vulnerable to climate breakdown, the human and financial costs of which are staggeringly worse at every half-degree of heating, but also because the EU’s dependence on imported fossil fuels – from Russia, or from the US – is a glaring strategic and economic weakness. In fact, the grand irony of Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda is that he has exploded the green re-industrialisation that actually was taking place, thanks to Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, leaving the door wide open for someone else.So, to paraphrase the tech bros, if Trump is going to move fast and break things, then let’s move fast and build things.“Europe can turn this into a window of opportunity to further its edge with the US on clean tech,” says Simone Tagliapietra of the Brussels thinktank Bruegel. He advocates for a decarbonisation bank, completing the single market as urged by Mario Draghi, and issuing new eurobonds.The mantra going forward should be “whatever it takes” to fully replace fossil fuels with renewables – designed in Europe, built in Europe – so that it never spends $350bn to import gas from the US, Russia, or anywhere else.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe correspondent More

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      Noaa fires hundreds of climate workers after court clears way for dismissals

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      Letters went out to hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) on Thursday, informing them their jobs had been terminated – again.The probationary employees, many who performed important roles at the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency, have spent weeks in limbo after being dismissed in late February, only to be rehired and put on administrative leave in mid-March following a federal court order.“Well after about 3 weeks of reinstatement, I, along with other probationary employees at NOAA, officially got “re-fired” today,” Dr Andy Hazelton, a scientist who worked on hurricane modeling at Noaa posted on X. “What a wild and silly process this has been.”The fired Noaa employees were among the roughly 16,000 people terminated across the federal workforce in a sweeping move by the Trump administration that targeted workers in “probationary” status. Some were categorized that way because they were new in their careers, but others had recently received promotions or been added full-time to agencies after years of contract or temporary work.“The majority of probationary employees in my office have been with the agency for 10+ years and just got new positions,” said one worker who still had their job, and who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal in February, when the firings first happened.“If we lose them, we’re losing not just the world-class work they do day-to-day, but also decades of expertise and institutional knowledge.”This week’s news caps a rollercoaster period for Noaa employees. On Tuesday, the US supreme court struck down the March court decision that said fired probationary workers must be rehired, ruling that the nonprofit groups who sued on behalf of the workers did not have legal standing.The letters sent to Noaa staff, reviewed by the Guardian, were signed by John Guenther, acting general counsel of the US Department of Commerce, and consisted of two simple paragraphs: one reiterating that employees were reinstated and put in non-duty paid status, and a second explaining that the temporary restraining order protecting their jobs was no longer in effect.“Accordingly, the department is reverting your termination action to its original effective date,” Guenther wrote, adding that fired employees would not receive any pay beyond their termination date.It’s unclear whether those fired will receive all the pay they are owed. Hazelton told the Guardian that paychecks for the last two weeks have not been issued yet. His access to healthcare, which was terminated immediately, was never reinstated.These firings are already hampering the agency’s ability to provide essential climate and weather intelligence. Noaa is also bracing for more cuts as leaders make moves to comply with Trump’s “reduction in force”, an order that could cull 1,029 more positions.In an interview with the Guardian last month, Hazelton said the firings across the agency and the pressures felt by those still there will affect the outcome of the work. Vital work has slowed or stopped as teams try to navigate the chaos, along with the threat of severe budget cuts and political restrictions.“It’s going to create problems across the board,” he said, adding that people are going to do their best but it will be a lot harder to achieve the mission. “It may be a slow process but the forecasts are going to suffer and as a result people will suffer.”While the losses are expected to have a profound impact on the American public, it will be felt globally, too. Scientists and forecasters around the world depend on Noaa satellites, studies, and intelligence, including data-sharing that tracks severe weather across Europe, coordination for disaster response in the Caribbean, and monitoring deforestation and the effects of the climate crisis in the Amazon rainforest.The official terminations also came just days after the White House pulled funding for the national climate assessment, which summarizes the effects of rising global temperatures on the US.The crackdown on climate science comes as the dangers from extreme weather events and deadly billion-dollar disasters continue to rise. Experts say these cuts, which will do little to limit the federal government’s budget, will only add to the threats.Among 800 positions cut were workers who track El Niño-La Niña weather patterns around the world, people who model severe storm risks, and scientists contributing to global understanding of what could happen as the world warms. More

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      Trump news at a glance: no end in sight to tariff pain; wrongly deported man wins US return

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      It was another day of chaos on Thursday as markets sank again after a short-lived rally . The optimism brought about by Donald Trump’s retreat on global “reciprocal” tariffs quickly evaporated amid investor fears over ongoing uncertainty. Near the end of a wild week – with the US imposing 145% tariffs on China and Beijing looking like it won’t back down – the markets are weary.Stocks were even unresponsive to news on Thursday morning that the European Union announced it would suspend 25% retaliatory tariffs against US imports and new data showed inflation in the US cooled to 2.4% in March – both would typically be cause for optimism on Wall Street.Former US treasury secretary Janet Yellen called Trump’s economic policies the “worst self-inflicted wound” an administration had ever imposed on a “well-functioning economy”.Trump inflicts more pain on marketsUS stocks fell again on Thursday after a historic rally following Donald Trump’s shock retreat on Wednesday on the hefty tariffs he had just imposed on dozens of countries.The falls came as the president blamed “transition problems” for the market reaction and the sell-off deepened after a White House clarification noted that total tariffs on China had been raised by 145% since Trump took office.Read the full storySupreme court orders US to return wrongly deported manThe supreme court told the Trump administration it must return a Salvadorian man wrongly deported from the United States. It follows an order by a US district judge that the administration “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in response to a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his deportation.Read the full storyTrump escalates crackdown on top US university, reports sayThe Trump administration is considering placing Columbia university under a consent decree, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, a dramatic escalation in the federal government’s crackdown on the Ivy League institution.Read the full storyUS can deport activist for his beliefs, claims governmentUS secretary of state Marco Rubio has argued Columbia university activist Mahmoud Khalil could be deported for his beliefs alone.Faced with a deadline to submit evidence for its attempt to remove Khalil, the federal government instead submitted a brief memo, signed by Rubio, citing the Trump administration’s authority to expel noncitizens whose presence in the country damages US foreign policy interests. The memo does not allege criminal conduct and argues instead Khalil can be deported for his beliefs.Read the full storyCourt rules noncitizens must register with US governmentA federal judge is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with a requirement that noncitizens in the US must register with the federal government, in a move that could have far-reaching repercussions for immigrants across the country.Read the full storyHouse passes bill on proving citizenship to voteThe US House approved a bill on Thursday that would require people to prove they are citizens when they register to vote, which opponents claim could disenfranchise millions of Americans.The bill, sponsored by the Texas Republican Chip Roy, calls for people who register to vote or update their registration to show documentary proof of citizenship, which could be a passport or birth certificate. While the bill says Real IDs, which have enhanced security standards, could be used if they indicate whether the applicant is a US citizen, these IDs ordinarily do not include that information, and lawful residents who are not citizens and ineligible to vote can still get Real IDs.Read the full storySpeaker muscles through Trump budget frameworkThe House Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, muscled through a multitrillion-dollar budget framework that paves the way for Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, a day after a rightwing rebellion threatened to sink it.The resolution passed in a 216-214 vote, with just two Republicans – fiscal conservatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana – joining all Democrats in opposition.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      More than 600 international students and recent graduates in the US have had their visas revoked or their legal status changed by the state department, according to data aggregated from around the country.

      Almost $4m in federal funding has been stripped from an Ivy League university’s prestigious climate research department because the Trump administration has determined it exposed students and other young people to “climate anxiety”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 9 April. More

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      After losing homes and businesses, LA wildfire victims face a hurdle to rebuilding: Trump’s tariffs

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      Cory Singer, co-owner of the homebuilding firm Dolan Design & Build, raced to start construction as quickly as possible in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires. He was determined to stay ahead of the demand surge he saw coming and eager to help his clients begin to rebuild their lives.The firm broke ground in the Pacific Palisades on Saturday – one of the first companies to do so.But by that time, Singer had a new crisis to contend with: tariffs.Singer, whose firm is currently working on 10 homes in the Palisades, is in talks with clients to place shipping containers on their burned lots and store construction materials there, allowing him to order and stockpile materials in bulk before tariff price increases hit the market.“I’m definitely nervous,” he said.The Trump administration announced, walked back, and continually modified tariff policies in recent weeks, throwing the global stock market into chaos. The tariffs are widely expected to substantially increase construction costs in California and across the country.Singer is already dealing with tariff-related price hikes. One of his tile vendors placed a tariff surcharge on an order on 2 April, the same day the Trump administration announced sweeping tariffs, even though the materials had already been imported. Singer is especially worried about materials like plumbing, tiles and fixtures, which are often imported from China, and he is advising clients to factor in a 10% contingency to their budgets in anticipation of the costs.“If you don’t spend it, great,” he said, “but at least mentally prepare.”Three months after the worst wildfires in Los Angeles’s recent history flattened miles of city blocks and killed 30 people, signs of life are emerging. Insurance payouts have begun arriving. Contractors have plastered streets in Altadena and the Palisades with flyers and signs advertising their services. The Army Corps of Engineers is slowly clearing and flattening lots, replacing the charred and toxic mess of cars, washing machines and chimneys with the blank canvases of empty lots.View image in fullscreenBut homeowners, contractors, architects and developers across fire-ravaged Los Angeles are girding themselves for the tariffs. For homeowners seeking to rebuild, the tariffs add a new layer of stress to the uncertainties of navigating insurance, mortgages, short-term housing and piecing together plans for the future.The Trump administration is currently levying a 10% tariff on most countries, a 25% tariff on steel, aluminum and cars and car parts, and a massive 125% tariff on Chinese goods. The administration on Wednesday retreated on further planned global hikes after news of the tariffs prompted trillions in stock market losses worldwide, but Angelenos remain uncertain about what this means for their homes and plans.In Altadena, a middle-class neighborhood with fewer resources than the wealthy Palisades, the strain is especially acute. Homeowners worry tariffs will hinder their ability to afford rebuilding and exacerbate already widespread issues with underinsurance.“It’s really scary,” said Ken Yapkowitz, a longtime Altadena resident who lost his home and two rental income properties in the Eaton fire.Yapkowitz is waiting to see what his final insurance payouts will be and starting to map out how to rebuild his properties. He had already been factoring in a 25% bump in materials costs before the tariffs were announced, he said, and figured there would be a surge in demand for materials and labor. He expects tariffs to add substantial costs, and wonders if he will be able to rebuild on his lots as planned.Jose Flores, owner of JV Builders & Development, a small business in Pasadena, said many of his Altadena clients want to rebuild. But he worries that tariffs, paired with a painfully slow permitting process and other skyrocketing costs, will cause them to change their minds. He has three clients in the process of drawing up plans with architects, but many others have called him for estimates only to disappear.“By the time people are ready to start construction, I believe the prices are going to be higher,” he said. Flores has noticed the prices of lumber, copper and roofing tick up in recent months. But he can’t afford to stockpile materials, he said, and has no place to store them even if he could. He has no choice but to wait and see what happens.“I think that’s the case for most of us contractors in the area,” Flores said.Following the tariffs’ announcement, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, asked his administration to pursue independent trade relationships with other countries and to explore ways to protect access to construction materials in the wake of the California wildfires. But he did not specify what measures the state could deploy to do that.Flores, the contractor, said he doubted that the governor’s office could actually rein in prices.Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment.‘We just don’t know right now’Some residents and business owners are already seeing the tariffs affect wildfire response. Brett Taylor, an Altadena resident who owns a local window and door supplier and who lost his home in the Eaton fire, said his suppliers mostly manufacture domestically, but that many of them source parts from abroad. In late March, he reached out to approximately 10 window vendors to ask whether they would be open to providing package discounts to fire victims. Almost all of them said yes.But before the deals could be finalized, the administration announced tariffs. At least one of Taylor’s vendors walked back their commitment, citing price uncertainty, and Taylor anticipates others will do the same in coming days.View image in fullscreenOthers are tapping personal connections and devising makeshift plans to try to defray costs. James Peddie, an Altadena realtor who lost his home, has been helping develop plans for a group of homeowners hoping to rebuild collectively. He knows from his years in construction that a substantial portion of southern California’s lumber is imported from Canada, and when tariffs were announced, he understood that meant increased costs.Peddie went to high school in Montana, and has friends in the lumber industry there. He also knows a builder who personally went to Oregon to source lumber when prices soared during the rebuilding of Paradise, California, after the devastating 2018 Camp fire.So he called up his high school friends with a question: can you help me source lumber for LA?They were eager to help. They promised to keep their commissions low and to keep him updated on price fluctuations. “They’re people I can trust,” he said. “We can probably get the lumber for a really good deal.”This shift – from purchasing overseas to domestically – is exactly what the administration hopes the tariffs will prompt.But with the rebuilding process still in its earliest phases, and plans and permits far from finalized and approved, it felt premature to put a deposit down and commit to the lumber, Peddie said. Doing so would mean needing to find and pay for long-term storage, as well as betting that the cost of lumber was only going to increase.“Where is it going to be stored? Is it going to be more expensive to ship it in?” he said. “We just don’t know right now.”He estimated it would be seven months before he would be ready to order. It’s anyone’s guess what the tariff landscape – and market – would look like by then. More