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    Ice is cracking down on Trump’s own supporters. Will they change their minds? | Tayo Bero

    By now, the cycle of Donald Trump supporters being slapped in the face by his policies is common enough that it shouldn’t warrant a response. What is noteworthy is the fact that his crusade of mass deportations seems to have taken the Maga crowd by surprise in a way that makes little sense if you’ve been paying attention to Trump, his campaign promises, his party and the people he surrounds himself with.Even as they witness friends and family members hurt by this administration’s immigration clampdowns, some Trump supporters appear resistant to doing a full 180.Bradley Bartell, whose wife, Camila Muñoz, was recently detained, says he has no regrets about voting for Trump. Muñoz is from Peru and overstayed a work-study visa that expired right when Covid hit. She was trying to get permanent residency in the US when she was detained.“I don’t regret the vote,” Bartell told Newsweek. His rationale? Trump is a victim of a bad immigration system that his administration inherited. “He didn’t create the system but he does have an opportunity to improve it. Hopefully, all this attention will bring to light how broken it is.”For Jensy Machado from Manassas, Virginia, things are a bit more complex. Machado, a naturalized US citizen, was driving to work when, according to NBC 4, he was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, who brandished guns and surrounded his truck. According to Machado, a man facing a deportation order had given Machado’s home address as his, and when Machado assured agents that they had the wrong person and offered them his Virginia driver’s license, they ordered him to leave his car and handcuffed him.“I was a Trump supporter,” Machado, who is Hispanic, said. “I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be like … against criminals, not every Hispanic, Spanish-lookalike.“They will assume that we are all illegals,” he continued. “They’re just following Hispanic people.”Machado said his support for the administration had been shaken. Others have been rattled by how and where Trump’s policies are being applied.That dissonance is well articulated in a recent New York Times piece about a small Missouri town that supported Trump – and is now grappling with the effects of his decisions.Many residents of Kennett, Missouri, were stunned when a beloved neighbor, Carol, was arrested and jailed to await deportation after being summoned to Ice offices in St Louis in April. According to the government, Carol came to the US from Hong Kong in 2004, and has spent the past two decades trying to secure legal stay in the country, ultimately being granted a temporary permission to stay known as an order of supervision. Carol’s most recent order of supervision was supposed to be valid through August 2025, but on the day of her arrest, she was told it was being terminated.Now, despite the fact that she’s spent the last two decades building a life and community in this small town, getting married and buying a house, she’s spent weeks moving between jails as she awaits a final decision on her deportation.“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, who knows Carol from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves … This is Carol.”That last line – and the Kennett story as a whole – reveals a deeply American way of thinking about law and order and civil liberties: that anything is fair game once someone is considered a “criminal”. It’s an idea that has been sent into overdrive in the Trump years, where “criminal” has become a catch-all for the most evil, dangerous and undesirable in our communities, and shorthand for referencing anyone society doesn’t want to deal with.Trump ran on a campaign of hate, and the voters who helped cement that hatred and codify it into policy are now encountering the kind of state-sanctioned violence they endorsed at the ballot box.Still, to say “I told you so” in a moment like this is not only useless, it feels like a cruel understatement when the thing you were warning about is so destructive.So what can we learn from this? US leadership is clearly invested in the destruction of vulnerable American lives. If people who have been directly affected by Trump’s behaviour still find reasons to rationalize his leadership, it’s a reminder that ousting this regime will require the rest of us to speak out against tyranny and the establishment politics that got us here in the first place.

    Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist More

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    ‘What’s so controversial about kids learning?’: students compete over history in the face of Trump cuts

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    View image in fullscreenIt only took 10 minutes for the trio of eighth-grade girls to recount the life story of Carol Ruckdeschel, the alligator-wrestling environmental activist sometimes called the “Jane Goodall of sea turtles”.Inside the student union at the University of Maryland, about a 20-minute drive from Washington DC, and armed with papier-mache reptiles, they embarked on a performance that included a litany of costume changes and a pony-tailed rendition of the late president Jimmy Carter, an ally of the 83-year-old Ruckdeschel’s work.When it concluded, the scary part began. A panel of judges peppered the girls with questions.Why did some people consider Ruckdeschel to be controversial?The girls hesitated. “Sorry,” said one, “but what does that word mean?”It was the first day of National History Day (NHD). In its 51st year, the annual US-based competition invites the top middle and high school students from more than half a million competitors to present their projects: documentaries, performances, websites, papers and exhibits on any topic from history, as long it adheres to the year’s theme. The winners get cash prizes and the admiration of their teenage peers.View image in fullscreenThe students come from all over – places like Oregon, Indonesia, North Dakota, Guam, Arkansas and China. Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, competed more than 20 years ago, as did Guy Fieri, whose project on the soft pretzel’s origin helped inspire a future career as a TV star restaurateur.I also competed in NHD, reaching the Florida state competition in 2007 and 2009 with my twin brother. As I reported this year, I joked with students that I’d finally made it to nationals, just 16 years too late. Hardly any of them were even alive then, and the national reality couldn’t have changed more.In April, NHD lost $336,000 after the Trump administration and the “department of government efficiency” slashed funding for the National Endowment of Humanities, putting NHD in jeopardy.“We had so many messages from kids saying, ‘Please, please, please we can’t let History Day go down,’” said Cathy Gorn, NHD executive director since 1995 and “the Taylor Swift of history”, as one student dubbed her last year (to many, there is no greater compliment). On social media she made an impassioned plea for donations. Last-ditch fundraising followed, including contributions from students, like a group from New York that held a bake sale and sent Gorn more than $300 in proceeds.With that, the competition found new legs – for this year, at least. “It’s kids learning,” said Gorn. “What is controversial about that?” And these students want to learn the full history – both its roses and its thorns, or what Alexis de Tocqueville called “reflective patriotism”.View image in fullscreen“They have no filter,” John Taylor, the NHD state-coordinator from Maine, told me. “They’ll call anyone and ask them anything.”When I competed, the cardinal rule was to abstain from any citing of Wikipedia, a transgression that today seems nostalgically benign. Students now learn to hunt down reputable sources in an era defined by untrustworthy generative AI and revisionist histories. Some students even found that sources they had cited in their research this spring – from governmental websites, no less – had disappeared altogether.“You start to realize that many of them do more research for NHD than you did for your master’s thesis,” Taylor laughed. He told me about a 130-page bibliography a student once turned in: “That thing could have taken down a woodland creature.”These are history-defining times. Do students at NHD see the parallels, the precedence, in their projects? “Oh yeah,” said Gorn, “they get it.”The scene from the student union last Monday could have come straight from a Where’s Waldo book. In one corner, a life-size cutout of George Washington leaned against a wall, until it was scooped up by girls in colonial-era ballgowns. Four lanky boys huddled together, their traffic-cone-orange dress shirts illuminated in the morning light. I heard a boy reading through a script, his manufactured accent undulating between George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and wild west cowboy.In another hallway, lanyarded coordinators carried folders full of research papers and flash drives loaded with digital backups of student-directed documentaries (after a snafu at the state level, one group told me they had brought eight). Nervous students were tailed by teachers and nervous parents with little brothers and sisters in tow, just happy to be along for the ride.View image in fullscreenAs I walked in and out of competition rooms over the next three days, I saw a spectrum of stories that spoke to this year’s competition theme, “Rights and Responsibilities” – the Elgin marbles, birthright citizenship, lobotomies, Martin Luther King Jr, social security, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the first Black character to appear in Charlie Brown. The theme, which sought to magnify the relationship between individuals and society, seemed especially prescient, even though it is one of several that NHD has recycled over the years.At a table finishing up a meal from Chick-fil-A sat Chloe Montgomery, an eighth-grader from Indiana, with her father, Ryan. The topic she chose to research – the Salem witch trials – had been bubbling up for years. “You grow up hearing about the trials a lot,” said Chloe, “like in Hocus Pocus!”Her project had ascended from the local competition in her home town of Mishawaka, through regionals and states, all the way to nationals. Now, father and daughter were in the US capital for the very first time. She, too, was impressed by the spectrum of project topics: “I saw one about Green Day!”In the hallway after the performance about Ruckdeschel, I caught up with the eighth-grade trio. “We’ve had hundreds of sleepovers to work on this!” said Zoe Otis. Not only that, they had traveled from their homes in Knoxville, Tennessee, ferried from mainland Georgia and then biked about 35 miles roundtrip – “half of that was in the dark!” – to meet Ruckdeschel on Cumberland Island, where she lives alone in a cabin.They had spoken with the octogenarian recluse, who still keeps a research lab with jars of turtle guts and bugs. For the girls, it was an eye-opening experience that at times bordered on gut-wrenching. “There was a giant, dead boar on the side of her house,” said Gemma Walker. “She hunts, and eats roadkill.”“We always tell ourselves to ‘embrace the cringe’,” said Addy Aycocke, laughing. This, it turned out, was part of the reason Ruckdeschel was considered controversial, along with her decades-long jousting with the National Park Service and the Carnegie family over environmental protection of the island and its sea turtles.It’s this flavor of research – active, firsthand, hands-dirtying – that history professors at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who started NHD in 1974, saw as the antidote to the traditional textbooks and multiple choice repetition that often went hand in hand with learning history. A science-fair-like competition, they hoped, would propel students to both dig into dusty archives and track down primary accounts – to feel history, rather than to memorize it.View image in fullscreenLater on, I heard stray conversation about Trump’s deployment of the national guard and marines in Los Angeles. Less than 10 miles away, tanks were arriving in Washington for a military parade. “You look at the news, and all you see is negativity,” Gorn told a room of volunteer judges. “But spend a couple of days at National History Day and it’ll give you hope.”It was true. There was an attitude of genuine, mutual encouragement that seems difficult to come by these days. The students seem to understand that nothing is a zero-sum game, that striving for excellence and being amiable with competitors are not mutually exclusive.When I spoke to Gorn a week before, we had discussed the critical role of history, and its sometimes precarious place in the school curriculum.“No Child Left Behind left history education behind,” she said of the 2001 congressional act that, in a quest for equality and accountability in schools, shifted focus to standardized testing and left less time for the humanities. Meanwhile, the national emphasis on Stem subjects could be traced to the National Defense Education Act that followed the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. These subjects are important – she doesn’t argue that – but “not at the expense of history”.“It’s a real disservice to our democracy,” said Colleen Shogan, who works with NHD and was archivist of the United States until February, when she was dismissed by Trump without reason. “We are not teaching kids how the constitution functions and what the principles are that we all agree upon as Americans.”View image in fullscreenThe politicized situations that some history teachers find themselves facing are a marked difference from when Gorn began in education in the 1980s. Disgruntled parents and school boards sometimes seek repercussions if lessons don’t align with their own interpretations of history, often along the lines of race and equity. “I’ve heard many [teachers] say, ‘If I can’t teach complete history, I can’t teach any more,” Gorn said.Not only that, she lamented the attitude that learning the thorny parts of the nation’s past is somehow teaching kids “to hate America”. Not true, she said. “Kids are resilient and they know when you’re pulling it over their eyes.” Young people need to understand that there has been struggle. “That’s how we develop empathy,” she said. “Learning history does that.”It was 6.58pm on Monday, and a crowd had gathered around flat screens throughout the student center. In a few minutes, they would display the list of competition finalists. Students were anxious. Some killed time by doing each other’s hair.At 7pm, several shrieks sounded. A little brother covered his ears and mouthed “Oww!” while student faces split into a telling binary of smiles and frowns. Teachers and parents – quite a respectful bunch when compared with the kind you might find on a suburban soccer field – squinted to read the tiny font. “Maybe that judge wasn’t so bad after all,” said one mother.Three of the smiling students were from Minnesota. Sara Rosenthal and Helen Collins had been selected to move on for their documentary about Radio Free Europe, the American soft-power station begun during the cold war to spread democratic influence to communist countries. Their friend, Jack Grauman, was also advancing. For months, he had researched Frank Kameny for his one-person performance about the astronomer who had been removed from the US army in 1957 for being gay.It was “powerful” to be headed to the finals, Grauman said, and just miles away from Washington, no less, where the current administration is targeting LGBTQ+ rights. Meanwhile, funding for Radio Free Europe is on the Doge chopping block, as are press freedoms around the world. Their teacher told me the girls had to update the ending of their documentary several times to keep up.Even here, students and educators sometimes hesitated before answering my questions. One group of students, from Singapore, was talkative until I asked about their projects’ relevance to today – one was specifically about American borders. In my periphery, I saw their classmates miming the slit-throat gesture, as if to say “don’t answer that one”.Later, I spoke with a group of judges inside the forest of elaborate poster board presentations. One of them kindly declined to go on the record: “I’m a federal worker. I don’t want any attention.”View image in fullscreenBack with the Minnesotans, the outlook was rosy. How would they be celebrating? “We’re going to the dance!”Before leaving campus for the evening, I poked my head into what I’d expected to be an awkward affair. Bass of early 2000s hits – oldies to this crowd – pounded through the walls. I passed two middle-schoolers outside.“It’s weird to talk about your exes to your new boyfriend, you know?”“But I want to know everything!”Inside, hundreds of students were cherishing their success or drowning their relative disappointment with fruit juices and soda. It was a mocktail of hoodies, high heels, recycled homecoming dresses, black-suited vests, and one especially-civic-minded student in a T-shirt that said “Support Local Music”.The trading of pins – each state or country delegation had brought their own – provided much of the necessary social lubrication.And then it was Thursday: results day. Across the hardwood of an indoor arena, delegations marched in like at an Olympic closing ceremony, some carrying flags and inflatable animals and wearing bedazzled top-hats.View image in fullscreenOnce everyone took their seats, Gorn stepped up to the microphone, pumped her hands in the air and roared: “Happy History Day everybody!” Then she teed up a special treat: a congratulatory video from a real-life Thunderbird pilot and NHD alum.Finally, it was time to hear the results. It was a successful day for the Minnesotan contingent. Grauman won a special prize for “equality in history”, climbing the steps to the stage wearing a large smile and a pair of Crocs. Almost two hours of nervous waiting later, Rosenthal and Collins heard their names announced at last – the silver for middle school documentary was theirs. The gold went to a pair of students from Chiang Mai, Thailand, for their look into the UK miners’ strike of 1984.If funding comes through, next year’s NHD theme – “Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History” – will again seem especially relevant. If there was a silver lining to the uncertainty, Gorn said, it was that students felt how a decision made far away in the nation’s capital could directly affect them.As Vritti Udasi, a high schooler from Florida, told me: “The place where we are today didn’t come out of thin air. If we study history, dissect it, then we can progress.” More

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    A US senator’s X posts after the Minnesota shootings were horrific – and predictable | Austin Sarat

    National tragedy used to bring national unity. If only momentarily, partisanship was put aside, and people of all political persuasions came together.No more. The nation received a startling reminder of that sad fact on Sunday when the Republican senator Mike Lee went online to share his reaction to the weekend’s horrible shooting of two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses.“This is what happens,” Lee wrote in a since-removed post on X, “When Marxists don’t get their way.” Accompanying this ugly, unfounded comment was a photo of the suspect in the shooting, Vance Boelter, wearing what appears to be a latex face mask.As if that wasn’t enough, Lee posted another picture of Boelter under the caption “Nightmare on Waltz Street”, an apparent reference to the Minnesota governor and former Democratic nominee for vice-president, Tim Walz. During the 2024 campaign, Republicans accused him of being soft on crime and mishandling the riots after the murder of George Floyd.So why not suggest that he is somehow to blame for the shootings?Shameful. Lee has dishonored the institution in which he serves, and he knows it.Republican Senate leaders should censure their colleague. If they do not, they will further shred whatever dignity is left in that body.Put in context, Lee’s posts show how far we have come from the vision and hopes of the founders of the American republic. Recall that James Madison, co-author of the Federalist Papers and fourth president of the US, warned that government by the people could become what he called a “spectacle … of turbulence and contention”, driven by passions to make decisions “adverse to the rights of others or the permanent and aggregate good of the community”.Madison preferred what he called a republic, a government in which representatives would display the wisdom necessary to “discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations”.Oddly enough, in October 2020, Lee channeled Madison when he insisted “that our form of government in the United States is not a democracy, but a republic … Insofar as ‘democracy’ means ‘a political system in which government derives its powers from the consent of the governed’, then of course that accurately describes our system”. He continued: “But the word … is often used to describe … the view that it is the prerogative of government to reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens.“Our system of government,” Lee noted, “is best described as a constitutional republic. Power is not found in mere majorities, but in carefully balanced power.” In that system, the job of the Senate, Lee suggested – citing Thomas Jefferson – is to cool “hot passions … It’s where consensus is forged, as senators reach compromise across regional, cultural, and partisan lines.”Perhaps the senator has forgotten those lines.His posts about the Minnesota shootings seem designed to further fuel the “hot passions” of our political moment, rather than to “cool” them. They surely do not help build consensus across party lines.Now Lee’s agenda seems different. He wants to show his Maga scapegoating bona fides by conjuring leftist plots as an explanation for every problem.And he is not the only member of the Maga crowd to do so. He was joined by Elon Musk, who wrote on X: “The far left is murderously violent.” Musk reposted the following from a person who identifies herself with these words: “GOD | #MAGA | Freedom |#Trump2024 | Constitutionalist | America First | Shall Not Be Infringed | USMC Wife”.“The left kills the CEO of United Healthcare. Kills two Israeli ambassadors staffers. Attempts twice to assassinate the President. Doxes and attempts to murder federal ICE agents and Police – all week. And now kills a MN state rep and her husband and injures a Senator and his wife. The left has become a full blown domestic terrorist organization.”Madison must be turning over in his grave.And, as to the evidence that supports Lee’s or Musk’s claims about the Minnesota suspect? There is none.Don’t forget that the president himself has frequently demonized “radical left lunatics” and labelled people Marxists. Last September, he blamed a “violent, radical-left monster” for the second attempt on his life.Using tragedy to demonize others and stoke fears about adversaries has become a new normal. No more rallying around the flag and doing the job that Madison thought political leaders in a representative democracy should and would do.In 2016, the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, writing in the wake of what was then the deadliest mass shooting in American history, suggested that “not since 9/11 has a moment like this brought the nation together, and that evaporated quickly. Since then, calamity seems only to drive the left and the right further apart, while faith in the nation’s institutions deteriorates further.”We know that Lee knows better than to do what he did on Sunday. He demonstrated that in 2020.So why, five years later, would he go after Walz or Marxists after a national tragedy? We can only speculate.Politicians like Lee live for and on social media. Legislating is hard; accumulating “likes” with a quick post is easier.Getting attention by being outrageous or provocative is the name of the game in what is now referred to as the attention economy. Madison, who thought that any damage done by what he called “fractious leaders” would be limited to their local area, could never have imagined the gravitational pull of that economy or its global reach.Sadly, Lee’s posts are making him a winner in that economy. By Monday morning, the first of them had been viewed 5.3m times, and the second attracted 7.8m views.Not bad for someone with 799,000 followers on X.In a deeply divided nation riven by political sectarianism, Lee did what his partisan supporters expect him to do. Give no quarter. Be on the offensive. Push your point.These are the rules, even when a tragedy occurs. In fact, it increases the “opportunity for free publicity” that people like Lee crave.But let’s be clear. While we can understand the forces that might explain why Lee turned tragedy into disinformation, that doesn’t mean we should accept or forgive him for doing so.In the kind of constitutional republic that Madison imagined and Lee once praised, tragedies like the murders in Minnesota should bring out the best in our leaders. Their duty was, when Madison wrote, and remains today: “to remind us of our shared humanity, not deepen our political divides.”

    Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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    The US is woefully underprepared for wildfire season, say insiders: ‘The stakes are life and death’

    Summer temperatures are rising and the US is bracing for another hot, dry and hectic wildfire season. But with the promise of extreme conditions in the months to come, federal fire crews are also growing concerned that a series of changes brought on by the Trump administration have left them underprepared.Severe cuts to budgets and staff have hamstrung the agencies that manage roughly 640m acres of the nation’s public lands, leaving significant gaps in a workforce that supports wildfire mitigation and suppression. The administration’s crackdown on climate science and the dismantling of departments that provided world-class research and weather forecasting, may also undermine early warning systems, slowing response and strategic planning.Donald Trump has championed firefighters and called for bolstering preparedness for the a year-round fire season, using the devastating fire storms that leveled communities across Los Angeles at the start of the year as a call to action. But in the six months since, the administration has only added obstacles to addressing the key issues.There are also fears that Trump’s new wildfire directive to bring the country’s federal firefighters together under a new agency will be rushed, adding another layer of uncertainty and chaos just as crews are trying to prepare for another grueling season.Many areas have had an exceptionally warm spring following a dry winter. The south-west and Pacific north-west are already experiencing sizzling heatwaves, and on landscapes across California, Montana and Texas, there’s a high danger for ignitions to turn into infernos. Climate forecasters are predicting the potential for forest fires is higher this year than in the previous two years.“If this turns out to be a major fire year, it’s going to be a shit show,” said Dr Hugh Safford, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Davis, who spent more than two decades working for the US Forest Service (USFS) before retiring in 2021.Five federal firefighters, who spoke with the Guardian under the condition of anonymity because they are barred from speaking publicly, echoed Safford’s unease. When asked if their agencies were ready for the season ahead, the answer was a resounding “no”.And it’s already getting busy.Homes and businesses were lost to the flames in Oregon this week, and dozens of blazes are tearing through Canada – where more than 8.5m acres have already been consumed by fires – brought the rising risks forming across the continent into sharper focus.During a Senate appropriations committee hearing last week, Tom Schultz, the chief of the USFS, which currently employs the bulk of the US government’s fire workforce, said his teams are well-positioned for the months ahead.Many fire experts, firefighters and lawmakers don’t agree.“The reality is on the ground we have lost workers whose jobs are absolutely essential,” Patty Murray, a US senator, said during the hearing, sharing that an estimated 7,500employees have been pushed out of the USFS this year. That includes scientists, maintenance staff and administrators who support wildfire response, and workers who had qualifications to fill in as firefighters on blazes when they were needed.“The stakes are life and death here – and this raises serious alarms about this agency being ready for this critical fire season.”A fraying firefighter workforceFears are mounting that the loss of support staff could mean a range of needs, from meals to medical services, will not be in place during large fires when they are needed most.“Those agencies were already understaffed,” Lenya N Quinn-Davidson, director of University of California Agricultural and Natural Resources Fire Network, said. “Now they are skeletal.”Already, there have been reports of crews being left without power for weeks due to cut maintenance workers, paychecks being late or halved because administrative roles were left empty, or firefighters having to mow lawns outside their offices, manage campsites, and do plumbing work at their barracks in addition to their other duties.Access to purchase cards that teams typically rely on for everything from bathroom supplies to fuel for chainsaws were revoked. District offices couldn’t buy ink or paper for their printers. Others struggled to get safety and tactical supplies for the season, including radios and fire shelters.A squad leader for the USFS said some newly hired firefighters had had to go for months without healthcare and seasoned ones were left waiting on backpay because the human resources department has less than a quarter of the staff it did previously. Another firefighter said thousands of cases are lagging in HR because people haven’t gotten paid properly and promotions aren’t being processed.“I think we have taken those people for granted for a long time,” the squad leader added. “Now that they aren’t around we are going to be in for a shock.”View image in fullscreenCapacity will probably be crunched on the fire line too.The forest service is going into the summer with fewer firefighters and teams than it had last year, when overwork led to an increase in injuries and burnout.Schultz confirmed the agency has hired 11,000 firefighters, roughly 900 fewer than last season, and that there are 37 incident management teams, down by five. Those teams are a crucial need for responding to complex and large-scale disasters, and there may not be enough to go around.“It is just another example of the administration making these kneejerk reactions and truly not understanding what it takes to respond to wildfires and other disasters,” said Riva Duncan, a former manager and firefighter in the USFS and vice-president of ​​Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a non-profit advocacy group. “Come August, when more geographic areas are on fire, I think we are going to see some glitches in the system.”Roughly 4,800 USFS workers have signed on to a program offering workers paid administrative leave through September if they opted to resign or retire, pushed by the Trump administration as a way to rapidly shrink the federal government. That figure includes 1,400 people with so-called “red cards”,trained to join operations on the fire line if needed.Schultz told senators that, because the offer to leave was voluntary, the USFS didn’t do an analysis ahead of time to strategically make cuts or keep staff who might be needed when emergencies strike. Now in an effort to get some of those workers back, the Department of Agriculture, which the USFS falls under, has called for volunteers willing to take fire assignments until their contracts end.A spokesperson for the USDA said it was a top priority for Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, to “ensure the entire agency is geared to respond to what is already an above normal summer fire season”, and claimed the forest service was well on its way with 96% of its hiring goals met. They cited the program to bring those on administrative leave back to active duty as an indication that the USFS “is operationally ready for the fire season ahead”.Even if some do opt to sign on for the summer, time is running short to reposition resources and get them ready.“A lot of those folks have missed their fire refreshers, they have missed taking their fitness tests, they are behind the curve,” Duncan said “And, not everybody is willing to come back.”A fire planner at the USFS, who also asked not to be named, said he did not expect many to sign up. He said the loss will result in heavy “brain drain”, as people with decades of experience are now missing from the agency’s roster.View image in fullscreenTeams are bracing for another round of cuts expected to come. An executive order signed by Trump last week directing the government to combine federal firefighters under a new agency in the Department of Interior is shaking up the workforce just as the season enters full-swing. The order gives departments just 90 days to formulate plans.Federal firefighters have spent years advocating for the move, but there are concerns the process will be rushed and mismanaged. Leaders were told the consolidation wouldn’t happen until next year.“It seems like a joke if you can’t even pay my guys or get them insurance,” the squad leader said of the administration’s aim to merge departments while pressing needs of their crews go unaddressed. He added that the idea of a new agency – one that puts firefighters in positions to make key decisions – is promising. “But I don’t have faith in these people putting it together.”It’s a feeling the other firefighters who spoke to the Guardian share.There have long been challenges at the agencies they work for, especially at the USFS. Now there are fears that the administration’s answers to those problems are ignoring firefighters’ needs. Morale has continued to plummet.One USFS firefighter said the lack of workforce planning “could be catastrophic”: “I am not seeing our interests being represented.”An anti-science agendaBeyond the personnel shortage, grants that support important forest health and fire mitigation work are being phased out, leaving more landscapes vulnerable to burning.Schultz told senators during the hearing that those grants – including funds that support wildfire risk reduction on state, local and tribal lands, as well as a program that helps private landowners maintain their trees – were halved this year so that more than $43m could go toward the program incentivizing early resignations and retirements. In next year’s budget, the grants are completely closed out.Some funds appropriated by Congress were not distributed at all. Murray, the senator, highlighted that $97m budgeted to support state, rural and volunteer fire departments in wildfire reduction work was withheld by the agency this year.The effects of these deep cuts are expected to be far-reaching and long term, especially due to the loss of science and research capacity that support land management work and wildfire mitigation.“The administration’s budget for Forest Service research is $0 – this for the world’s most important forest research organization,” Safford said. It’s not just new research being squashed; Trump has enforced an anti-science agenda across the government that will leave the US less prepared as the climate crisis unfolds.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), which saw large-scale layoffs earlier this year, may also be less able to provide important forecasts and data used to plan prescribed burns, warn the public and pre-position crews during extreme weather events. National Weather Service stations no longer have the staff for round-the-clock monitoring, especially in high fire-prone regions in California and the Pacific north-west. The overhaul of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) could leave gaps in response and recovery.View image in fullscreenThe USFS is also returning to a “full-suppression” ethos that has shocked ecologists and firefighters alike. Rather than letting some backcountry blazes burn – wildfires that can be healthy for forests that evolved with fire – Schultz ordered the agency to revert to a strategy widely recognized as a key culprit in the increase in catastrophic fire. The USFS chief has also placed higher restrictions on prescribed burning.“We have known since the late 1960s that full-tilt suppression is reactive and does nothing to solve the underlying issues,” Safford said. A push to put all fires out immediately, regardless of their ecological benefit or risks to communities, “wastes extraordinary amounts of money, puts firefighters at risk, and additionally has all sorts of negative environmental and ecological repercussions in both the short and long term”.Plugging the shortfallsStates are now scrambling to fill the gaps left by the federal government.California issued nearly $72m in May to support land management projects in the state and fast-tracked projects in partnership with tribes, private landowners and local districts.In Colorado this spring,Jared Polis, the governor, issued $7m in state wildfire mitigation grants. “Forest fires aren’t going to take four years off just because of who’s in the White House,” he told Politico at the time. “So it’s really important that states up the bar on preparation.”This is, in part, by design.“There’s going to be a shift to put greater reliance on state and local governments to cover those costs on their own without direct federal support,” Schultz told lawmakers at the hearing.For Quinn-Davidson, these moves speak to the importance of community-based work and leadership. With less federal support, it will fall to individuals and local groups to do the important work needed in their own backyards to prevent the worst fires.Quinn-Davidson, who oversees programs helping communities conduct prescribed burns, thinks they will be up for the challenge. She lamented the loss of passionate federal workers but said people were jumping at the opportunity to get involved and do what’s required to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire in their own backyards.“The more involved people can be at the local level, and the more we can empower communities to have leadership on fire,” she said, “the more resilient we will be in the face of disaster.” More

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    Were the No Kings protests the largest single-day demonstration in American history?

    The scale of last weekend’s “No Kings” protests is now becoming clearer, with one estimate suggesting that Saturday was among the biggest ever single-day protests in US history.Working out exactly where the protest ranks compared with similar recent events has been a project of G Elliott Morris, a data journalist who runs the Substack Strength in Numbers, calculated turnout between 4 million and 6 million, which would be 1.2-1.8% of the US population. This could exceed the previous record in recent history, when between 3.3 million and 5.6 million people showed up at the 2017 Women’s March to rally against Trump’s misogynistic rhetoric.View image in fullscreenMorris estimated the No Kings Day protest turnout in two steps. First, his team gathered data at events for as many locations as possible, defaulting to tallies published in local newspapers. Where that wasn’t available, they relied on estimates from organizers and attenders themselves.To come up with a rough approximation of nationwide numbers, he then estimated the attendance in each unreported protest would be equal to the median of the attendance in places where data did exist. “That’s a tough approximation, but at least an empirical one,” Morris wrote in an email. “We use the median instead of the average to control for outliers, [such as the fact that] big cities pull the average up, but most events are not huge urban protests.”Morris stressed that the Strength in Numbers tally remains unofficial, and he hopes that researchers will “build” on his data when they conduct more studies. But his estimation is similar to that made by Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive non-profit that organized the event. He estimated that 5 million people across the globe took to the streets.Not everyone is ready to call it the biggest protest ever. Jeremy Pressman of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint Harvard University/University of Connecticut project that estimates political crowds, told USA Today it would take “some time” to get an official tally.Meanwhile Steven Cheung, Trump’s director of communications, unsurprisingly called the protests “a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance” on X. (No Kings took place on Donald Trump’s birthday, which coincided with a parade the president threw in celebration of the US army’s 250th anniversary.)Omar Wasow, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s department of political science, told the Guardian that the demonstration was “without question, among the largest single-day protests in history”.Wasow compared protest movements to standing ovations given at a theater. “We see a cascade effect: if one person stands after the curtain drops, then more follow,” he said. “If 1.8% of the US adult population showed up to protest on Saturday, those are the people who stood up to clap first. It sends a signal to all these other people that you can stand up, too.”The 1963 March on Washington, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr made his famous “I have a dream” speech was at the time one of the largest protests in history, with up to a half a million people in attendance. It was dwarfed in size by the first Earth Day protests in 1970, in which 20 million people helped spark the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. “At the time this was about 10% of the US population, possibly the largest we will ever realistically see – unless the political environment deteriorates significantly, prompting more backlash,” Morris said.View image in fullscreenIn 1986 at the Hands Across America fundraiser, an estimated 5 million Americans formed a human chain to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness (each person was asked to donate $10, though many participants didn’t end up paying and the politics of the Coca-Cola-sponsored event were murky). More than a million people took to the streets in 2006 for a boycott called “A Day Without Immigrants” in protest of stricter immigration laws. Polls taken during the summer of 2020 found that between 15 and 26 million Americans protested against the murder of George Floyd during the month of June (though day-by-day numbers were smaller).Gloria J Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of A Protest History of the United States, said that it was difficult to compare crowd sizes for various protests, especially ones that take place over the course of several days and span various locations. “There are different processes that have been used over the years, from eyeballing things to actually counting the number of people per square mile,” she said.In the days following No Kings, an idea put forth by the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan called the 3.5% rule spurred social media discussion. Chenoweth, a Harvard professor and Stephan, a political scientist who covers nonviolent movements, studied 323 revolutionary campaigns around the world that took place from 1900 to 2006. They found that all nonviolent movements that had the support of at least 3.5% of a population always succeeded in triggering change. No Kings, with its massive turnout, could be seen as a turning point.There are caveats to this rule, which was published in the team’s 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works. “The 3.5% rule is descriptive, not prescriptive – and has been revised significantly since being originally published to allow for exceptions,” Morris wrote. “Chenoweth now is clear that hitting 3.5% does not guarantee success, especially in political regimes where change is harder, and that movements can accomplish their goals with much smaller mobilization, through things like media coverage and alliances with elites.”Organizers and attenders of No Kings feel invigorated enough to continue the demonstrations, with another round of coordinated protests to fall on 17 July, the fifth anniversary of the death of John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader.But they admit there are limits to these events. “We’re not going to win if a lot of people show up at a protest one day,” Levin said. “We need people actually taking democracy seriously, and that’s not going to be done through a top-down action. It has to be done from the bottom-up. When pro-democracy movements succeed, it’s because of a broad-based, ideological, diverse, geographically-dispersed, grassroots organizing – not just mobilizing.” More

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    Were the No Kings protests the largest single-day demonstration in American history?

    The scale of last weekend’s “No Kings” protests is now becoming clearer, with one estimate suggesting that Saturday was among the biggest ever single-day protests in US history.Working out exactly where the protest ranks compared with similar recent events has been a project of G Elliott Morris, a data journalist who runs the Substack Strength in Numbers, calculated turnout between 4 million and 6 million, which would be 1.2-1.8% of the US population. This could exceed the previous record in recent history, when between 3.3 million and 5.6 million people showed up at the 2017 Women’s March to rally against Trump’s misogynistic rhetoric.View image in fullscreenMorris estimated the No Kings Day protest turnout in two steps. First, his team gathered data at events for as many locations as possible, defaulting to tallies published in local newspapers. Where that wasn’t available, they relied on estimates from organizers and attenders themselves.To come up with a rough approximation of nationwide numbers, he then estimated the attendance in each unreported protest would be equal to the median of the attendance in places where data did exist. “That’s a tough approximation, but at least an empirical one,” Morris wrote in an email. “We use the median instead of the average to control for outliers, [such as the fact that] big cities pull the average up, but most events are not huge urban protests.”Morris stressed that the Strength in Numbers tally remains unofficial, and he hopes that researchers will “build” on his data when they conduct more studies. But his estimation is similar to that made by Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive non-profit that organized the event. He estimated that 5 million people across the globe took to the streets.Not everyone is ready to call it the biggest protest ever. Jeremy Pressman of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint Harvard University/University of Connecticut project that estimates political crowds, told USA Today it would take “some time” to get an official tally.Meanwhile Steven Cheung, Trump’s director of communications, unsurprisingly called the protests “a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance” on X. (No Kings took place on Donald Trump’s birthday, which coincided with a parade the president threw in celebration of the US army’s 250th anniversary.)Omar Wasow, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s department of political science, told the Guardian that the demonstration was “without question, among the largest single-day protests in history”.Wasow compared protest movements to standing ovations given at a theater. “We see a cascade effect: if one person stands after the curtain drops, then more follow,” he said. “If 1.8% of the US adult population showed up to protest on Saturday, those are the people who stood up to clap first. It sends a signal to all these other people that you can stand up, too.”The 1963 March on Washington, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr made his famous “I have a dream” speech was at the time one of the largest protests in history, with up to a half a million people in attendance. It was dwarfed in size by the first Earth Day protests in 1970, in which 20 million people helped spark the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. “At the time this was about 10% of the US population, possibly the largest we will ever realistically see – unless the political environment deteriorates significantly, prompting more backlash,” Morris said.View image in fullscreenIn 1986 at the Hands Across America fundraiser, an estimated 5 million Americans formed a human chain to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness (each person was asked to donate $10, though many participants didn’t end up paying and the politics of the Coca-Cola-sponsored event were murky). More than a million people took to the streets in 2006 for a boycott called “A Day Without Immigrants” in protest of stricter immigration laws. Polls taken during the summer of 2020 found that between 15 and 26 million Americans protested against the murder of George Floyd during the month of June (though day-by-day numbers were smaller).Gloria J Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of A Protest History of the United States, said that it was difficult to compare crowd sizes for various protests, especially ones that take place over the course of several days and span various locations. “There are different processes that have been used over the years, from eyeballing things to actually counting the number of people per square mile,” she said.In the days following No Kings, an idea put forth by the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan called the 3.5% rule spurred social media discussion. Chenoweth, a Harvard professor and Stephan, a political scientist who covers nonviolent movements, studied 323 revolutionary campaigns around the world that took place from 1900 to 2006. They found that all nonviolent movements that had the support of at least 3.5% of a population always succeeded in triggering change. No Kings, with its massive turnout, could be seen as a turning point.There are caveats to this rule, which was published in the team’s 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works. “The 3.5% rule is descriptive, not prescriptive – and has been revised significantly since being originally published to allow for exceptions,” Morris wrote. “Chenoweth now is clear that hitting 3.5% does not guarantee success, especially in political regimes where change is harder, and that movements can accomplish their goals with much smaller mobilization, through things like media coverage and alliances with elites.”Organizers and attenders of No Kings feel invigorated enough to continue the demonstrations, with another round of coordinated protests to fall on 17 July, the fifth anniversary of the death of John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader.But they admit there are limits to these events. “We’re not going to win if a lot of people show up at a protest one day,” Levin said. “We need people actually taking democracy seriously, and that’s not going to be done through a top-down action. It has to be done from the bottom-up. When pro-democracy movements succeed, it’s because of a broad-based, ideological, diverse, geographically-dispersed, grassroots organizing – not just mobilizing.” More

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    Attorney general warns UK joining war on Iran may be illegal

    Britain’s attorney general has warned ministers that getting involved in Israel’s war against Iran could be illegal beyond offering defensive support, it has emerged.Richard Hermer, the government’s most senior legal officer, is reported to have raised concerns internally about the legality of joining a bombing campaign against Iran.An official who has seen Hermer’s official legal advice told the Spectator, which first reported the story, that “the AG has concerns about the UK playing any role in this except for defending our allies”.Keir Starmer is considering whether to provide the US with military support if Donald Trump decides to bomb Iran, and whether to approve the use of the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean for the attack. Hermer’s advice could limit the degree of UK support for the US.A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said: “By longstanding convention, reflected in the ministerial code, whether the law officers have been asked to provide legal advice and the content of any advice is not routinely disclosed.“The convention provides the fullest guarantee that government business will be conducted at all times in light of thorough and candid legal advice.”The prime minister chaired an emergency Cobra meeting on Wednesday to discuss a range of scenarios and ongoing diplomatic efforts. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, is to meet his US counterpart, Marco Rubio, in Washington DC on Thursday as the US weighs up its options.Trump has yet to make a final decision on whether to launch strikes against Iran. The Guardian reported that the president had suggested to defence officials it would make sense to do so only if the so-called bunker buster bomb was guaranteed to destroy the country’s critical uranium enrichment facility, which is between 80 and 90 metres inside a mountain at Fordow.Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire for days after Israel launched airstrikes which it said were aimed at preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials claim the country’s nuclear programme is peaceful and that Israel has caused hundreds of civilian casualties.Taking Fordow offline – either diplomatically or militarily – is seen as central to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons after the International Atomic Energy Agency found the site had enriched uranium to 83.7% – close to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons.Miatta Fahnbulleh, an energy minister, said Starmer would take any decisions with a “cool, calm head” and be guided by international law.“Legal advice is for the prime minister, and I think that’s where it will stay – and you can understand why I won’t comment on that. But what I will say is that we have a prime minister who is a lawyer and a human rights lawyer, he will obviously do everything that is in accord with international law,” she told Times Radio.“No one wants an escalation. No one wants this to erupt into a major conflict in the region that is hugely destabilising for every country involved, and for us globally. So the most important role that the prime minister can play, and is playing, is to be that cool, calm head to urge all partners around the negotiating table and to find a diplomatic route out of this.”However, the shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, said the UK could “hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis”.Asked if she believed Hermer was right to sound a warning, Patel told Times Radio: “I don’t think we can hide behind legal advice at a time of crisis and national security when we have to work alongside our biggest ally in the world, the United States, when they look to us for potentially … setting out operational activities through our own military bases.”The UK had not received a formal request from the US to use Diego Garcia in the south Indian Ocean or any of its other airbases to bomb Iran as of Wednesday night.Diego Garcia was recently the subject of a new 99-year lease agreement with Mauritius that left the UK in full operational control of the military base. In practice, Diego Garcia is mainly used by the US, but the fact that it is ultimately a British base means that Starmer would have to approve its use for an attack on Iran.The US is also thought likely to want to request the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus for its air tankers, used to refuel B-2 bombers. The UK has deployed 14 Typhoon jets at Akrotiri to protect its bases and forces and to help regional allies, such as Cyprus and Oman, if they come under attack. More

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    ‘He’s moving at a truly alarming speed’: Trump propels US into authoritarianism

    It reads like a checklist of milestones on the road to autocracy.A succession of opposition politicians, including Alex Padilla, a US senator, are handcuffed and arrested by heavy-handed law enforcement for little more than questioning authority or voicing dissent.A judge is arrested in her own courthouse and charged with helping a defendant evade arrest.Masked snatch squads arrest and spirit people away in public in what seem to be consciously intimidating scenes.The president deploys the military on a dubious legal premise to confront protesters contesting his mass roundups of undocumented migrants.A senior presidential aide announces that habeas corpus – a vital legal defence for detainees – could be suspended.The sobering catalogue reflects the actions not of an entrenched dictatorship, but of Donald Trump’s administration as the president’s sternest critics struggle to process what they say has been a much swifter descent into authoritarianism than they imagined even a few weeks ago.“Trump is throwing authoritarian punches at a much greater rate than any of these other cases in their first year in power,” said Steven Levitsky, Harvard political scientist and author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of How Democracies Die. “But we don’t yet know how many of those punches will land or how society will respond.”Five months after Trump’s inauguration, seasoned analysts with years of studying one-time stable democracies degenerating into autocracies are voicing alarm at the speed of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on institutions and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of expression. They are unnerved by the deployment of masked Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents – dressed in plain clothes and without identifying official insignia – to arrest people on the streets for deportation, a tactic critics say is evocative of dictatorships and designed to provoke fear among the general population.Some voice doubts about the judiciary’s capacity to act as a democratic safeguard, despite a wave of legal challenges to the president’s executive orders. They cite the 6-3 conservative majority of the US supreme court, which has a history of issuing rulings friendly to the president, who appointed three of its justices to the bench during his first administration.Trump has tried to propel the US in an authoritarian direction with greater intensity than noted autocrats like the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, or Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, according to Levitsky.Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador to Bulgaria and acting ambassador to Moscow, said Trump was outpacing Vladimir Putin, the Russia president for whom he had often voiced admiration.“This is going faster than Putin even came close to going in terms of gradually eliminating democratic institutions and democratic freedoms,” said Rubin, who witnessed Putin’s early years in power at close quarters. “It took him years. We’re not even looking at six months here.”Bright Line Watch, a survey of political scientists, recently gave the US a score of 53 – the lowest since it started collecting data in 2017 – on a spectrum ranging from 0 for total dictatorship to 100, denoting a perfect democracy, according to Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College, one of the institutions conducting the study.Academics commissioned said they expected the country to fall further, forecasting a score of 48 by 2027.“We’re in the range of countries like Brazil and Israel, but well above countries like Russia,” said Nyhan. “I do expect things to get worse. The potential for further democratic erosion is very real.”Key to whether Trump can tilt America decisively into authoritarianism will be his efforts to assert control over the armed forces, argued Levitsky.“Trump’s ramping up of the effort to politicize the military can still go in multiple directions,” he said. “It could be really ugly and bad, because the only way that you can get from where we are to real authoritarianism like Nicaragua or Venezuela or Russia is if Trump has the military and security forces on his side, and he’s taken steps in that direction.”Padilla’s manhandling – after he tried to question homeland security secretary Kristi Noem at a news conference – drew fierce scrutiny. It took place against a backdrop of Trump’s deployment of 4,000 national guard troops on to the streets of Los Angeles, later augmented by 700 active marines, against demonstrators protesting against the administration’s anti-migrant crackdown, who did not appear to be present an undue challenge to local law enforcement authorities.View image in fullscreenThe decisions took place against the opposition of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who would normally be empowered to deploy the national guard in the state but whose role Trump usurped as he sought to make an example of a state with a large immigrant population and whose Democratic stranglehold he wishes to break.The deployments, denounced by opponents as an attempt to foment violent confrontation, took place in the run-up to a military parade staged in Washington last Saturday. Ostensibly held to honor the US army’s 250th anniversary, the event was held – perhaps not coincidentally – on the president’s 79th birthday. Opponents said it was redolent of autocracies like China, North Korea and Russia and reflected a desire by Trump to turn the military into his personal tool.Amid speculation that the parade might be disrupted by an anti-Trump No Kings protest on the same day, the president threatened to use “very big force” against demonstrators, in apparent contradiction of the US’s tradition of tolerance of peaceful dissent. In the event, no clashes between government forces and protesters were reported at the Washington parade on a day when an estimated 5 million demonstrators turned out at 2,100 locations across the US, according to organizers. However, there were sporadic reports of violence elsewhere; in northern Virginia, a man drove his car through a crowd of No Kings protesters, striking one, in what police said was an intentional act.But in a much worse portent for democracy on the same day, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was shot dead at her home along with her husband Mark in what was called a targeted political assassination allegedly carried out by 57-year-old Vance Boelter, whose friends say was a Christian nationalist Trump supporter.Boelter, who is now in police custody, is suspected of then shooting and wounding another politician, John Hoffman – a Democratic member of the Minnesota senate – and his wife, Yvette. He is said to have had a list with more than 45 targets, all of them Democrats, at the time of his arrest.Rubin said the shootings created a climate of fear comparable to that of Weimar Germany before the rise of Hitler.“Fear is powerful and pernicious,” he said. “People won’t be willing to to be candidates for these positions because they’re afraid. The general public is intimidated. I’m somewhat intimidated.“You can say passivity is immoral in the face of evil, that it is complicity, all the things that were said about Nazi Germany. Well, it’s easy to say that. In Nazi Germany, there were some courageous people, but not very many, because they were afraid.”Equally significant, analysts say, is the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the legal boundaries of the president’s powers – the fate of which will be decided by the supreme court, which issued a ruling last year that effectively granted Trump vast prosecutorial immunity for acts committed in office.“Has Trump solidified his power? Have we reached a point where we have an out-of-control president who controls all the institutions? No, but we’re at the 11th hour,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology and international affairs professor at Princeton University. “He’s moving at a truly alarming speed and pressing all the authoritarian buttons. We’re a few supreme court decisions away from having a president we can’t get rid of.”Trump’s national guard deployments in Los Angeles may have been aimed at establishing a legal precedent enabling him to deploy troops at will when state authorities tried to defy him.“He wants to establish that he can disable the governors from fighting back against him [by using] military force,” Scheppele said. “The Los Angeles deployment was perceived as an escalation but in reality, the military haven’t done that much. However, there’s a legal infrastructure underneath it all that’s scarier.”Levitsky, said the administration – spearheaded by Stephen Miler, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff – had adopted a practice of declaring emergencies to acquire potentially dictatorial powers.“In the US constitution, almost every existing constraint on executive power can be circumvented in a state of emergency,” he said. “And it’s becoming clear that the administration is learning that emergencies are the easiest route to circumvent the law and not be blocked by the courts. The supreme court is very reluctant to say, ‘No, that’s not an emergency, Trump, you lied. You made that up.’ It’s sort of a free pass for circumventing the rule of law.”The White House used economic emergency legislation to impose sweeping trade tariffs, while invoking the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act, passed in anticipation of a war with France, to justify summarily deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. Miller repeatedly called last week’s protests in Los Angeles an “insurrection”, implicitly justifying the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which enables a president to use military forces to quash a rebellion on US soil.Writing in the Atlantic, David Frum, an anti-Trump conservative commentator, warned that the penchant for emergencies could be applied to next year’s congressional elections, when the Democrats hope to regain control of the House of Representatives, an outcome that could curtail his authoritarian power grab.“Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried,” Frum wrote.“He might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him – and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.”Even if Trump were to suffer an election reverse, his ability to wreak further havoc will remain, Nyhan warned, simply because Senate Republicans are unlikely to vote in sufficient numbers to remove him from office in the event of him being impeached by a Democratic-controlled House.“The Founding Fathers anticipated Trump precisely,” he said, referring to the constitutional provision to try and remove a president and other officials for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.“It was just assumed that Congress will jealously guard its prerogatives and impeach and remove any president who exceeded the boundaries of the constitution. But in our current political system, that is a seemingly impossible task.“So we face the prospect of a lawless authoritarian continuing to act for the next three and a half years, and there’s a great deal of damage he can do in that time.” More