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Trump says drug cartels operating in the Caribbean are ‘unlawful combatants’
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 18:22
Donald Trump has said that drug cartels operating in the Caribbean are “unlawful combatants” and says the United States is now in a “non-international armed conflict”, according to a White House memo obtained by the Associated Press on Thursday.A US official familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly told the AP that Congress was notified about the designation by Pentagon officials on Wednesday.The story was first reported by the New York Times.It comes after the US military conducted strikes on three boats in the Caribbean Sea last month that killed 17 people and triggered widespread international outrage, especially in Central and South America.The administration is required by law to report to Congress the US government’s use of armed forces. The Times reports that the administration’s memo cites that statute and also repeats its past justifications that the strikes were conducted in self-defense and accusing the boats of containing members of a Venezuelan drug gang. But the memo also reportedly goes further and frames the US military’s attacks on the boats to be part of a sustained conflict.The memo also reportedly states that Trump has deemed cartels engaged in smuggling drugs as “non-state armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States”.The Trump administration has been increasing its military presence in the Caribbean in recent months, deploying a number of ships and military personnel to Puerto Rico. It has justified the military action as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the US. But some lawmakers as well as human rights groups have questioned the legality of the attacks.The notice to Congress is an aggressive escalation in the US government’s attempts to stop the flow of narcotics. The US government’s drug war in recent years has increasingly focused on political targets, and this latest escalation may be seen as an attempt by the administration to further place pressure on the Venezuelan government.Earlier this year, the Trump administration determined several criminal groups to be “terrorist” organizations. The designation by the administration included a number of Mexican cartels, the MS-13 gang, the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan so-called Cartel de los Soles.For years, the US government has accused the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro of being involved in drug trafficking. The Trump administration earlier this year accused Maduro of directing the activities of Tren de Aragua, and used it as a justification to expel hundreds of immigrants to a notorious Salvadorian prison under the Alien Enemies Act.Intelligence assessments have determined there is little proof of Maduro’s links to Tren de Aragua.Maduro and members of his cabinet and military also stand accused by the US of running the Cartel de los Soles and seeking to traffic cocaine to the US. The infrastructure of the cartel has been disputed, with drug trafficking analysts and experts saying that the Cartel de los Soles is a loose network of lower-ranking military officials without a strict hierarchical structure.Earlier this year, the US government raised its bounty for Maduro to $50m. There is an active indictment in a Manhattan federal court related to the Cartel de los Soles case. A co-defendant and former top Venezuelan military intelligence chief pleaded guilty earlier this year to narco-terrorism crimes.The three vessels that were targeted by the US in recent weeks were traversing through the Caribbean. Trump administration officials, without proof, have said the vessels were carrying members of Tren de Aragua with drugs destined for the US.The administration has been adamant in escalating its fight against fentanyl trafficking into the US. However, fentanyl typically arrives across the southern US border from Mexico. More
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Trump sees ‘unprecedented opportunity’ to punish Democrats as shutdown enters day two
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 17:45
As the US government shutdown stretched into its second day, Donald Trump on Thursday hailed the funding lapse as an “unprecedented opportunity” to further his campaign of firing federal workers and downsizing departments.The president announced on social media that he would sit down with Russell Vought, the White House office of management and budget chief and architect of the mass firings and buyouts of federal workers.“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”The government shutdown on Wednesday at midnight, after Democrats refused to support a Republican plan to continue funding unless it included a series of healthcare-focused concessions. Vought has threatened to use the shutdown to conduct further layoffs of federal workers, and on Wednesday announced the cancellation of billions of dollars in federal funding for projects tied to Democrats.About $18bn was frozen for infrastructure projects in and around New York City over “unconstitutional DEI principles”, Vought said, referring to the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that Trump has sought to stamp out from the federal government. The projects for which money was held include the Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan and the Hudson River tunnel project connecting the city to New Jersey.The cancellations sparked a furious reaction from Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives, respectively, both of whom are New Yorkers.“Donald Trump is once again treating working people as collateral damage in his endless campaign of chaos and revenge,” they said in a joint statement.Vought also announced that around $8bn in funds for 16 states – all of which are run by Democrats – was put on hold. Vought did not specify the projects, but called it “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda”.The Democratic senator Adam Schiff, who represents California, one of the states for which funding was slashed, responded: “Our democracy is badly broken when a president can illegally suspend projects for Blue states in order to punish his political enemies. They continue to break the law, and expect us to go along. Hell no.”Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator representing Oregon, another state that lost funding, said: “Ripping funding away from only blue states will raise utility bills for EVERYONE. It’s not rocket science. Vought is unfit to serve in this or any administration.”At the White House on Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt warned that “layoffs are imminent”, but gave no further details. That’s a shift from past shutdowns, when federal workers were furloughed or told to work unpaid, with back pay coming once funding is restored.Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate appropriations committee, on X replied: “If the president fires a bunch of people, it’s not because of his shutdown–it’s because HE decided to fire them. People aren’t negotiating tools & it’s sick that the president is treating federal workers like pawns.”Some Republicans signaled they were uncomfortable with using a shutdown as an opportunity to further slash the federal workforce, which has already lost hundreds of thousands of workers through firings and buyouts.“This is certainly the most moral high ground Republicans have had in a moment like this that I can recall, and I just don’t like squandering that political capital when you have that kind of high ground,” Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator of North Dakota, told CNN, when asked about the layoff threats.The broader effects of this shutdown remain to be seen. Many national parks have remained open, but with reduced services, as have the Smithsonian museums in Washington DC.There has been no indication of a breakthrough in the funding dispute in Congress, where both parties have refused to back down from their demands in the day since the shutdown began.“I quite literally have nothing to negotiate,” Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, said on Thursday. The Republican-controlled chamber has passed a bill to fund the government through 21 November, but it needs at least some Democratic support to clear the 60-vote threshold for advancements in the Senate.On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of senators was seen huddling on the Senate floor, but it is unclear if that brought the two sides any closer to a deal.The House remains out of session, with no vote planned in the Senate today due to the Yom Kippur holiday. More
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LA 2028 Olympics: fears of mass displacement and homeless sweeps as Trump threat looms
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 14:00
In the lead-up to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the city deployed 30 police officers on horseback to rid downtown of unhoused people and, in the words of a captain, “sanitize the area”.Some people were arrested and transported to detox centers. Others were forced from public view while their possessions were trashed.Now, as the city prepares to host the games once more in 2028, civil rights advocates are fearful history will repeat itself, and authorities will again banish unhoused communities in ways that could exacerbate the region’s humanitarian crisis.Karen Bass, Los Angeles’s Democratic mayor, has vowed not to bus unhoused people out of the city and repeat the tactics of 1984, telling the Los Angeles Times her strategy will “always be housing people first”. But the scale of the problem in LA is larger than it was four decades ago, and the Trump administration’s forceful stance on homelessness could increase pressures on Bass and the unhoused population.LA county is home to an estimated 72,000 unhoused people, including 24,900 people in shelters and 47,400 people living outside in tents, makeshift structures and vehicles. In the last two years, Bass and county leaders have reported some progress in moving people indoors, which they attributed to their strategy of targeting people in encampments with shelter options and resources.But the dramatic shortage of affordable housing in the region will make it difficult to get tens of thousands of people stably housed in less than three years and stop new encampments from rising up.Meanwhile, Trump, who appointed himself White House Olympics taskforce chair, has made it clear he wants to see encampments disappear from American cities, signing an executive order in July to push local governments to clear encampments and making it a point of focus during the federal crackdown in Washington DC.Combined with a supreme court ruling allowing governments to fine and jail unhoused people when no shelter is available, Trump’s ongoing deployment of troops to Democratic cities, significant support from California residents for tougher policies towards the unhoused, and California governor Gavin Newsom’s push for aggressive sweeps, experts fear the Olympics could force out many of LA’s poorest residents.“The pressures are going to come from the White House, from the state and from local government as we get closer to the Olympics,” said Pete White, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an anti-poverty group that advocates for unhoused people and is based in Skid Row, a downtown area with a high concentration of homelessness. “My fears come from being an Angeleno and seeing our communities attacked and displaced when major events come our way.”‘I remember the arrests’There is a long history of Olympics host cities trying to get rid of their most disenfranchised communities.In Moscow in 1980, organizers pledged to “cleanse” the city of “chronic alcoholics” and dumped people outside city limits. In Atlanta in 1996, officials arrested thousands of unhoused people under anti-loitering and related ordinances. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, more than 70,000 people were displaced. And last year in Paris, thousands of unhoused people, including asylum seekers, were bussed out.The 1984 LA games led to the increased militarization of the LA police department (LAPD) and an escalation of racist and aggressive policing that targeted Black and Latino youth, experts say.“I remember the pre-Olympics arrest of my older cousins,” said White, 56, who grew up within walking distance of the Coliseum, a stadium that served as an Olympics venue then and will be used for the 2028 opening and closing ceremonies. “Young Black and brown men were afraid to be in the streets, because they were sweeping people up under the pretext of addressing gang violence.”View image in fullscreenThe games helped LAPD acquire flashbang grenades, specialized armor, military-style equipment and an armored vehicle, which it used a year later to ram a home where small children were eating ice cream, Curbed LA reported. The Olympics-fueled law enforcement expansion also paved the way for LAPD’s notorious Operation Hammer, a crackdown that led to mass arrests of Black youth.In 2018, after LA won the 2028 bid, then-mayor Eric Garcetti said the games would present an opportunity to improve homelessness, which he said could be eliminated from the streets by the games.“Garcetti kept saying: ‘We’ll end homelessness in LA,’” said Eric Sheehan, a member of NOlympics, a group founded in 2017 to oppose the Olympics in LA. “And we have been warning that the only way they can actually end homelessness is by disappearing people.”Increasing sweepsCalifornia, LA and LA 2028 officials have not released plans for a homelessness strategy.But on the streets, there are already fears that sweeps of people living outside are escalating due to the Olympics – and as LA prepares to also host the World Cup next year.In July, the city shut down a long-running encampment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in the San Fernando valley, north-west of downtown and visible from the 405, a major freeway. The site, which residents called the Compound, was across from the Sepulveda Basin where the Olympics is planning events. The sweep displaced roughly 75 people. The city said it offered 30 motel rooms to the group and other shelter options.Carla Orendorff, an organizer working with the residents, said she was aware of at least 10 displaced people now back on the streets, including several who had been kicked out of the motels, which have strict rules. Residents were dispersed to eight motels, and in one, staff ran out of food and people were left hungry, she said.Those still out on the street “are just forced further underground, in places that are harder to reach, which makes it incredibly dangerous for them”, Orendorff said.Giselle “Gelly” Harrell, a 41-year-old displaced Compound resident, said she lost her motel spot after she was gone for several days. She was temporarily staying in a hostel with help from a friend, but would soon be back in a tent, she said. Before the Compound, she was at another major encampment that was swept.View image in fullscreen“They’re strategically cleaning out the area for the Olympics,” Harrell said. “They’re destroying communities. It’s traumatizing … I wish all that money for the Olympics could go toward housing people … but they are not here to help us.”It was hard to imagine the Olympics taking place in an area where so many people were living outside and in cars, Orendorff added: “The city has all these plans, but our people don’t even have access to showers.”Bass denied that the Compound closure was Olympics-related, with the mayor telling reporters the site was a hazard. Officials had worked to shelter everyone and keep people together and would aim to transition residents into permanent housing, she said, while acknowledging some “might be in motels for long periods”. “I will not tolerate Angelenos living in dangerous, squalor conditions,” she added.The mayor’s office continued to defend the Van Nuys operation in an email last week, saying an outreach team had built relationships with encampment residents over several months and offered resources to all of them: “Coming indoors meant access to three meals a day, case management and additional supportive services.”Zach Seidl, Bass’s spokesperson, did not comment on the city’s Olympics strategy, but said in an email that since the mayor took office, street homelessness had decreased by 17.5% and placements into permanent housing had doubled: “She is laser-focused on addressing homelessness through a proven comprehensive strategy that includes preventing homelessness, urgently bringing Angelenos inside and cutting red tape to make building affordable housing in the city easier and more efficient.”Inside Safe, Bass’s program addressing encampments like the Compound, has brought thousands of people indoors and “fundamentally changed the way the city addresses homelessness by conducting extensive outreach, working with street medicine providers and offering other supportive case management services while they are in interim housing”, he continued. “This is why she ran for office and this is progress she would’ve made regardless of the Games.”The White House did not respond to inquiries about the Olympics, and a spokesperson for Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (Lahsa), the lead public agency responsible for addressing homelessness in the region, declined to comment.‘Legal restraints are gone’Advocates’ concerns are partly fueled by a supreme court ruling last year that gave local authorities significantly more leeway to criminalize encampments.“The legal restraints are gone, to the extent they were meaningful, and there is broad policy-level agreement by liberals and conservatives that sweeps are an acceptable approach,” said John Raphling, associate director of Human Rights Watch, a non-profit.He authored a report last year on LA’s policing of unhoused people, which found that unhoused Angelenos were routinely subject to aggressive LAPD crackdowns, misdemeanor arrests and sweeps that destroy their belongings.Homelessness-related arrests and citations, such as anti-camping violations, increased 68% in LA in the six months after the supreme court ruling, a recent CalMatters analysis found. The crackdowns are happening even as LA has vowed to not rely on criminalization and has promised a more restrained approach than other California cities.View image in fullscreenSheehan said he was concerned LAPD would work with federal authorities to target people during the Olympics, especially after officers aggressively attacked protesters and journalists during demonstrations against Trump’s immigration raids in June, in violation of the department’s own protocols.Newsom, meanwhile, has pushed California cities to ban encampments by adopting ordinances that make it a violation to camp in the same spot for three days, and advocates fear his presidential ambitions could lead him to continue to push punitive strategies as the Olympics approaches.“We’re already seeing a contest between Trump and Newsom as to who is going to appear tougher on homelessness, with tough being defined as how one responds to visible homelessness,” said Gary Blasi, professor of law emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, who co-wrote a report last year on the 2028 Olympics in LA and the unsheltered population. “There aren’t good signs from either of them. Newsom offers the promise of alternatives he doesn’t identify and Trump offers the promise of some equivalent to incarceration.”In a statement to the Guardian, Newsom said the state has a “strong, comprehensive strategy for fighting the national homelessness and housing crises” and was “outperforming the nation”. “I’ve emphasized that our approach is to humanize, not criminalize – encampment work is paired with shelter, services [and] behavioral health support,” he said, citing his Care court program, which is meant to compel people with severe psychosis into treatment.“Bottom line: encampments can’t be the status quo. We’re cleaning them up with compassion and urgency, while demanding accountability from every level of government. There is no compassion in allowing people to suffer the indignity of living in an encampment for years and years,” the governor added.Tara Gallegos, Newsom’s spokesperson, said the governor’s approach was distinct from the president’s, writing in an email: “The Trump administration is haphazardly bulldozing and upending encampments without creating any sort of supportive strategy to go along with it. It is about fear, not support … California’s strategy pairs urgency with dignity and care, creating wrap-around services addressing the root causes of homelessness.”An LA 2028 spokesperson did not comment on homelessness, but said in an email: “We work closely with our local, state and federal partners on Games planning and operations, and remain committed to working collaboratively with all levels of government to support a successful Games experience.”Organizers and providers prepareHomelessness service providers and advocates said they hoped LA officials would pursue bold solutions that quickly get people housing and resources without the threat of criminalization.A key part of the region’s strategy during the early pandemic was getting people out of tents and into motels, but those programs are costly and not a good fit for all of LA’s unhoused residents; it can also be challenging to transition participants into permanent housing. Blasi noted that that approach would become even harder during the Olympics when hotels face an influx of tourists.Blasi advocated for direct cash payments to unhoused people, akin to the 2020 stimulus checks, which could help some unhoused people get off the streets at a faster and cheaper rate than the traditional process, he argued: “There are a lot of people who can solve their own homelessness if they just have a little bit more money.”Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said LA has seen success with rapid rehousing programs that offer people rental subsidies, and that he hopes those efforts can be scaled up: “We know how to move people back into housing and do it quickly. It’s just a matter of whether we can marshal the political will to bring the money to make that happen.”Funding cuts, including from Trump’s slashing of federal homelessness resources, will be a barrier.The Union Rescue Mission, a faith-based group that runs the largest private shelter in LA, has recently seen an influx of people needing services as other providers have faced cuts, said CEO Mark Hood. Hood, however, said he has had productive conversations with the Trump administration and remained optimistic the Olympics would provide an “opportunity to collaborate with our city, county, state and federal government in ways that we never have before”.He said he hoped the Olympics would lead to increased funding for providers, but was so far unaware of any specific plans.White, the longtime organizer, said he expected grassroots groups to come together to defend unhoused people, especially as mutual-aid networks have grown in response to Trump’s raids: “The kidnappings of immigrants and the attempted clearing of houseless people as we get closer to the Olympics gives us an opportunity to bring various communities together, and that’s when we can build the power necessary to push back.” More
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James Comey’s real ‘crime’? Daring to put the law before loyalty to Trump | Lawrence Douglas
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 12:00
In 1931, an exceptionally talented young Berlin attorney named Hans Litten summoned Adolf Hitler to testify in a criminal case. Litten represented four victims of a brutal assault perpetrated by members of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, or SA, on a dance hall frequented by leftist workers; by the time the assault ended, three people were dead. At trial, the defense sought to portray the SA as a disciplined political organization, under orders from Hitler to use force only as self-defense.In his three-hour cross-examination of the head of the Nazi party, Litten managed what precious few dared to attempt. Hitler had expected the young lawyer to be intimidated; instead, Litten aggressively and skillfully dissected him under oath, reducing the supposedly gifted orator to a stammering rage. In trapping Hitler in contradictions and exposing him as an inveterate liar, Litten also made clear the Nazis’ goal of destroying the Weimar Republic. Hitler left the witness stand rattled and humiliated, henceforth forbidding Litten’s name to be uttered in his presence.Hitler’s revenge came two years later, barely a month after he had been installed in power. In the wake of the Reichstag fire – an arson attack on the parliament building – and relying on a hastily drafted emergency decree for the “protection of people and state”, Hitler ordered the arrest and “protective custody” of numerous perceived political enemies, including Litten. Over the next five years, as he was shuttled from concentration camp to concentration camp, Litten was repeatedly beaten and tortured. In 1938, with no prospect of release, he took his own life. His crime: trying to protect the role of law and a constitutional democracy from a would-be authoritarian.The United States in 2025 is not Germany in 1933. That said, Litten’s experience has a disturbingly familiar ring. Last week, the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of Virginia (EDVA) announced that the former FBI director James Comey had been indicted for allegedly lying under oath to a congressional committee. The case against Comey is so flimsy that Erik Siebert, Trump’s hand-picked chief federal prosecutor for the post, balked at filing charges. Siebert’s fair assessment predictably earned him the ire of the president. “I want him out,” Trump fumed, and so Siebert resigned before he could be fired, vacating the position he had occupied for barely eight months.Trump hastily named a replacement: Lindsey Halligan, a member of Trump’s coterie of personal lawyers who now occupy some of the most pivotal positions within the Department of Justice. Never mind that Halligan has no prior prosecutorial experience and that the head of the EDVA oversees the prosecution of many of the nation’s most complicated and sensitive cases involving national security and financial crimes; Halligan’s great qualification was apparently her willingness to do what Siebert would not: indulge Trump’s hankering for revenge. Her indictment of Comey, handed down scant days before the five-year statute of limitations on the alleged crimes was to expire, only confirmed Siebert’s doubts. Law students invariably learn the old canard that any decent prosecutor can get a grand jury “to indict a ham sandwich” – but maybe not Halligan: the grand jury refused to indict on one of the three counts that the prosecutor submitted.Trump greeted the news of the two-count indictment by crowing on Truth Social: “JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” – which might be an apt, if inadvertently Orwellian, description of the present state of the rule of law in our nation. The case is certainly about score-settling, but it’s also far more disturbing than that. Let’s assume for the moment that Trump was unfairly targeted for investigation during his first term; it would still be unseemly for a sitting president to respond to one injustice with another. But the fact is that the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election – the source of Trump’s crusade against Comey – was not a politically motivated “witch-hunt” (Trump’s favorite go-to term of impugnment to discredit attempts to hold him to account). Instead, it revealed a “sweeping and systematic” campaign to interfere with the 2016 election.Comey’s true “crime” recalls Hans Litten’s. He dared to show fidelity to his office and to the law, and not to the Great Leader. This is not to say that Comey risks sharing the fate of the intrepid German lawyer. In publicly declaring Comey “guilty as hell” and in transparently interfering in the legal process, Trump has handed the judge a reason to simply dismiss the case as an exercise in vindictive prosecution. Should Comey go to trial, the case’s obvious weaknesses might well result in an acquittal. And even if Comey were to be convicted and sent to prison, the US does not, at present, operate a system of concentration camps where political opponents face systematic torture.But that is cold comfort. The fact remains that Comey is being persecuted, not prosecuted, for putting service to the nation above obedience to a man. As if following a script from the authoritarian playbook, Trump is making Comey pay for his act of constitutional fidelity. What should disturb all Americans is the ease with which Trump, aided by his craven and opportunistic legal lackeys, has turned the proudly independent justice department into a tool of authoritarian consolidation.
Lawrence Douglas teaches at Amherst College. His newest book, The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice, will be published in the spring of 2026 More
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Trump revives family separations amid drive to deport millions: ‘A tactic to punish’
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 11:00
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The Trump administration has revived the practice of separating families in order to coerce immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US, attorneys and former immigration officials allege.In several cases, officials have retaliated against immigrants who challenged deportation orders by forcibly separating them from their children, a Guardian investigation found. The officials misclassified the children as “unaccompanied minors” before placing them in government-run shelters or foster care.The new practice has taken effect as the administration has also issued stringent new limits on who can take custody of unaccompanied minors – which advocates say keep thousands of children away from their relatives.“This is a tactic to punish people for not acquiescing,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, head of external affairs at the legal aid group Raíces. “It’s a tactic to get immigrants to relent, to agree to self-deport.”The recent separations echo the “zero tolerance” policy of the first Trump administration, when the US systematically separated more than 5,600 migrant children from their parents and caregivers at the US-Mexico border. Images of agents pulling children from their parents’ arms and placing them in overcrowded metal cages sparked domestic and international outrage, and Donald Trump ended the policy.But seven years later, hundreds of parents have still been unable to reunify with their children; the administration lost track of many of the families it tore apart. Though the new separations so far appear less pervasive than the original policy, experts and attorneys said that it could result in another crisis of prolonged, permanent separations.“I would say that the main difference is just that the separations are now happening all over the country, as opposed to at the border, concentrated in areas where you could visibly go see it,” said Michelle Brané, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official who served under the Biden administration. “But the rest of it is not that different. The objective is still to be cruel and send a message that people should not come to the US – that they should leave.”Family separation is one of several ways in which the US government is, increasingly, moving immigrants around the country – shuffling detainees through a vast, chaotic system that advocates say is intentionally cruel.An analysis of leaked flight records and US government detention data, as well as interviews with immigrants, attorneys and former officials, revealed that immigrants are increasingly moved without notice away from their families, communities and legal counsel – leading to apparent violations of constitutional due-process rights.The Guardian reviewed leaked flight data from Global Crossing Airlines, the charter company that operates the majority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) flights, and found that the vast majority of these trips during the first three months of the second Trump administration were between domestic US airports. The airline transported nearly 44,000 immigrants – including 1,000 children – during that time. US detention data revealed that since the inauguration, nearly 2,350 kids under the age of 18, including 36 infants, have been booked into immigration detention centers around the country.In cases reviewed by the Guardian, parents were moved between detention centers several times after being separated from their children – and in the process were unable to coordinate calls with their kids or their lawyers. Amid the chaos, immigration experts and advocates have the raised alarm that the government could, as it did during the first Trump administration, lose track of where it is sending parents and children – resulting in indefinite or permanent separations.View image in fullscreenThe Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.For LW, a 37-year-old mother who came to the US with her 10-year-old son in April seeking political asylum, returning to China was not an option.LW told her lawyers and immigration officers that she had been sexually assaulted by multiple high-ranking government officials in China. After reporting an assault to the police, Chinese government operatives threatened her with imprisonment – or death. That’s what was awaiting her in China, she told US immigration agents.In a sworn declaration in her immigration case that her lawyers shared with the Guardian, LW alleged her pleas to allow her and her son to remain together while they applied for asylum were ignored by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in San Diego, California, who forced the mother and son into an unmarked vehicle, and began driving them toward the local airport. According to her sworn declaration, agents told her if she refused to get on a flight back home, the government would take her son away from her.At the airport, the agents tried to drag LW toward the terminals. “I said I needed a lawyer, but they refused, telling me that nobody would want to help me,” she said in her declaration. “Desperate and terrified of what might happen, I dropped to the ground and the officers let me go.”Later that day, she said they drove her and her son back to a CBP facility in San Diego – and then moved them to an Ice facility in Texas. But a month later, she said, immigration agents followed through on their threat: they took her son away and placed him in foster care.Her lawyers said that she and her son have now been separated for nearly five months. He turned 11 in the interim.LW remains detained at an Ice facility in New Mexico, while her son has been placed at a government shelter for unaccompanied minors in New York.Her lawyers from Raíces have repeatedly petitioned for her release, arguing that her prolonged separation from her son was in violation of a court settlement that had blocked family separations during the first Trump administration. But Ice told LW’s lawyers that the settlement did not apply in this case. LW said agents told her she could be reunited with her son if she agreed to accept deportation to China.The DHS has said it always gives parents a choice. “Rather than separate families, Ice asks parents if they want to be removed with their children or if the child should be placed with someone safe the parent designates,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the DHS, told the Guardian in September.But in each of the cases reviewed by the Guardian, lawyers said their clients weren’t offered a real choice. In some instances, parents were not fully informed of their options prior to being separated from their children. In others, none of the available options were safe, or possible.LW couldn’t choose to leave her son with another parent or guardian, her lawyers said. Though her boyfriend was already in the US and had offered to act as a legal sponsor, he wasn’t the boy’s biological father and it was unclear that he could fulfill the government’s steep requirements to take custody of him.New policies the Trump administration enacted in January require that anyone seeking to take custody of unaccompanied minors in government-run shelters or foster care must provide proof of their income source, show a US identification and in many cases take a DNA test.A federal lawsuit on behalf of several migrant youths and the legal aid groups representing them alleges that these new requirements have disqualified many parents, siblings and other family members from taking custody of children who have been classified as “unaccompanied minors”.“We’re seeing separation being used as a punitive measure,” said Al-Juburi. “A punitive measure for not acquiescing, for demanding access to legal counsel, and for staking claim to her and her son’s rights to apply for asylum.”As the Trump administration attempts to make good on the president’s campaign promise to enact mass deportations and expel 1 million people each year, legal aid groups and immigration experts say that it appears to be using the threat of separation as one of many aggressive strategies to speed up the removal of migrants from the country.View image in fullscreenIn Texas, which is home to Ice’s sole detention facility currently designated specifically for family units, Raíces has served approximately 250 families this year to date, according to Al-Juburi. Of these families, about 10% have endured some kind of separation while in Ice custody.“This pattern is deeply troubling,” said Elora Mukherjee, a lawyer and the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, who has been advocating on behalf of several clients threatened with separation.Among Mukherjee’s clients are a two-year-old and a seven-year-old. “An Ice officer has threatened to separate each of these children from each other and from their mother and their father, detain them in separate facilities, and put them on four different deportation flights,” she said. “This is unnecessarily cruel.”Many of the migrant families threatened with separations have already made long, dangerous journeys to the US.For Muhammad, a 24-year-old father of four, the journey out of Afghanistan included stopovers in Pakistan, Brazil (where his seven-year-old stepdaughter was kidnapped for ransom) and Mexico (where he had to pay a smuggler to help his family make their way across the US’s southern border).Muhammad’s wife had worked in human rights prior to the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Once the Taliban took power, she began receiving death threats. Her father – a military general under the prior government – was killed, as was Muhammad’s uncle. The couple knew that they and their children had to leave.They first fled to Pakistan, then got a temporary visa to Brazil. But after Muhammad’s seven-year-old stepdaughter was kidnapped and held for ransom there, he and his wife knew they couldn’t stay.Finally – in February 2025, about a month after Trump was sworn in as president – they arrived at the US-Mexico border. By then, the Trump administration had shut down nearly all avenues to apply for asylum at the southern border, so Muhammad and his wife felt they had no choice but to pay a smuggler to bring them into the US, where they turned themselves over to immigration authorities.“We have traveled far in search of safety,” said Muhammad, in a sworn declaration in his immigration case that was shared with his permission by his lawyers at Raíces. “I believe that the US is the safest place to raise my family and provide them with all that they deserve and need.”But he hasn’t been able to hold them in nearly six months. His one-year-old, who was born in Brazil, has been growing up rapidly without him.Initially, immigration officials detained the family together, at a CBP facility and then at a family detention center in Karnes, Texas. Then, on 31 March, Muhammad was told he would be escorted to the medical center for an evaluation. It was odd, because he hadn’t made an appointment or asked to see a doctor.“I asked for a moment to say goodbye to my family, but the officer told me I would see them the following day, and not to worry,” Muhammad said. He was handcuffed and placed in a dark room. The next day, he said he was moved to a different detention center in Pearsall, Texas, and then another facility in Conroe, Texas.View image in fullscreenHis wife and children were released from detention and allowed to reunite with Muhammad’s brother-in-law, who was acting as the family’s sponsor, in Utah.Muhammad’s lawyers said Ice informed them that the agency had deemed him a “national security risk”, and that the agency did not need to provide any further details about why he had been separated from his family. The agency also repeatedly restricted him from speaking with lawyers, without explaining why.Former officials and attorneys told the Guardian that Ice is increasingly using national security concerns as a catchall excuse for not providing clear information about why certain individuals are being detained, or denied access to their families and legal counsel.As the weeks wore on, Muhammad consented to be deported to Brazil. He was hesitant – shaken by the episode when his daughter was kidnapped – but it felt like a safer choice than Afghanistan. But Brazil wouldn’t accept him.So he kept asking to speak to his lawyers, and kept asking to apply for asylum in the US.“I feel like I am alone and nothing of my future is within my control,” he said, after two months of detention.His lawyers, meanwhile, were scrambling to schedule a meeting with him. They submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to multiple immigration agencies, seeking to review Muhammad’s case files. Ice maintained that because it had deemed Muhammad a security risk, it did not have to comply with a court-ordered policy to make sure that parents and children who are separated by Ice are allowed regular calls and visits.Finally, after nearly five months in detention, Ice referred Muhammad to the US Immigration and Customs Agency (USCIS) for an interview to determine his eligibility for asylum. Muhammed said officials there told him they were doing so in order to “cover their asses” – so they could check off the box and finally deport him back to Afghanistan.“I miss the days that I would take [my children] out for ice-cream and walk through the park,” he said. “I also miss playing with them before bedtime to make sure that they would sleep well.”Prolonged separations, including those lasting longer than five or six months, could cause a child welfare crisis, experts said.In the aftermath of the family separation crisis during the first Trump administration, pediatricians, psychiatrists and other experts decried the deep psychological scars that the policy would leave on children.A 2021 study found that the impacts of the separations persisted for weeks or months after families were reunited. “The longer the separation lasts, the more harmful it can be,” said Brané, the former DHS official, who led a taskforce charged with finding and reuniting separated migrant families and is now the executive director of the advocacy group Together and Free.During 2018’s period of zero tolerance for migrant families, images of bawling children being ripped away from their parents at the southern border and forced into overcrowded makeshift shelters quickly began to raise public outrage and alarm. But now, Brané said, few asylum seekers are appearing at the southern border – and most of the separations seem to be occurring out of public view.“But the intent is the same, and the impact is the same,” she said. “And I don’t know that they’re tracking this any better than they were before.”Years after Trump ended the zero-tolerance policy, hundreds of children remained separated from their parents – though advocacy groups said it is impossible to know exactly how many, due to a lack of government records or tracking.In some cases, parents were deported while their children remained in foster care. In other cases, when very young children were taken from their parents and spent years in foster care, parents have made the difficult decision to allow their children to remain in the US without them, rather than risk relocating and re-traumatizing them.Amid a new wave of separations this year, attorneys have said the government in several cases has not complied with a 2019 court settlement – known as the “Ms L Settlement” – designed to prevent a second family separation crisis.“It appears that families are not always receiving the notifications that they’re supposed to receive,” Brané said. “The government hasn’t been following certain norms and procedures.”In the three cases reviewed in detail by the Guardian, parents had no idea where their children were being taken. Often, the parents didn’t know where they were themselves, either, and said that they were frequently denied access to calls with their lawyers. According to attorneys at Raíces and other legal aid groups, this has also been the case for other clients.“The reality is that these are scenarios where there are no grounds for [separation], you know, based upon that settlement agreement,” said Al-Juburi. “And it’s much harder to keep families together when they are separated like this and for such extensive periods of time.”Even after separating families, Al-Juburi noted, Ice has been moving parents around from one detention center to another, without advance notice to their lawyers or other family members – setting attorneys on a “wild goose chase” to find out where their clients have been moved.After LW was separated from her child and moved from a detention center in Texas to another in New Jersey, attorneys at Raíces had to wait three weeks to schedule a phone call to consult on her case. On the day of her scheduled call, she was moved again without explanation or notice to El Paso, Texas, into the custody of CBP, and then two days later back to Ice custody in New Mexico.View image in fullscreenIce has told people in its custody, including LW, that they will be reunited with their children if and when they accept deportation, Al-Juburi noted. “But that should be taken with a grain of salt.” As the government increasingly moves immigrants around the country, often in chaotic and irregular ways, there’s a risk that families will be lost in the shuffle.For some parents, the separations – and the subsequent confusion – were too much to bear. SP and her husband agreed to sign deportation papers after more than two months apart from their son.The family had fled Mongolia in April this year, their lawyers said. After SP and her husband had attempted to expose public corruption and money-laundering allegations, they said their 11-year-old son was sexually harassed and physically abused at school – under the watch of administrators the parents believed were allied with Mongolia’s government.The family arrived in Chicago on tourist visas, and were stopped straight away by immigration agents. Almost immediately, they were sent to an Ice facility for families in Texas – where they each struggled with the mental and physical toll of detention.At one point, SP’s husband attempted suicide. At another, her son developed a persistent rash. Neither received sufficient care, her lawyers said.A month later, Ice flew the family to New York – from where they were meant to be deported to Mongolia. But SP and her husband resisted – saying they would be in danger if they returned.View image in fullscreenThat’s when the government threatened to take their son away, according to a sworn declaration from SP in the family’s immigration case. A week later, it did just that. The family was called into a meeting, and they said no Mongolian interpreter was provided – so the 11-year-old was forced to translate for his parents.“My child told me that Ice officers informed him they were going to take him ‘to a place in San Antonio’,” said SP in a sworn declaration in the family’s immigration case. “Neither my husband nor I understood why our child was being taken from us.”The officers had whisked him away without explaining why or where he was being sent. They had left behind his inhaler. SP and her husband were shackled at their hands and feet and taken to another detention center, and separated from each other – again, without explanation – and only allowed to see each other once every three weeks.“I am devastated by this situation,” SP told her lawyers a few days later. “I still do not understand … Ice officers have not explained anything to me.”Her son turned 12 while he was staying with a foster family. Ice ignored repeated notifications by SP’s lawyers that the agency was violating a court settlement regarding family separations.In the end, the agency said it would deport each family member back separately – and SP’s lawyers fought to ensure that, at least, the family could board the same plane out of the country.Her lawyers have not been able to confirm that the family is still safe, back in Mongolia.The Guardian has used first names or initials, rather than full names, in this article to protect people in Ice or CBP custody or who have been deported back to their countries of origin.ContributorsAdditional reporting: Will Craft
Illustrations: Angelica Alzona
Photo research: Gail Fletcher
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Do you know about shitposting? It’s cheap humour, rage bait – and now, it seems, US government policy | Robert Topinka
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 10:31
On 24 September, a White House communications adviser posted a video on X of a new presidential Walk of Fame, captioned: “Wait for it”, with a pen and eyes emoji. The video pans over a succession of presidential portraits to reveal – in place of Joe Biden’s portrait – a framed photograph of an autopen signing his name. The sight-gag references the Maga conspiracy theory that, unbeknownst to “Sleepy Joe”, unscrupulous aides used the autopen to sign pardons in his name. The post delighted supporters and outraged critics, which only further delighted supporters.And that was precisely the point. This combination of cheap humour and rage bait is the province of the shitpost, a genre of low-effort social media content designed to amuse insiders and annoy outsiders. Like so much of internet culture, shitposting was pioneered on the message board 4chan – but Donald Trump is a natural. On the 12th anniversary of 9/11, he tweeted: “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.” The shitpost forces a choice: undermine public decorum by laughing along, or get offended, outing yourself as a hater and a loser.The deliberate impropriety of the shitpost makes good-faith engagement impossible. Like a children’s game of made you look, responding means either sinking to the level of the shitpost or looking ridiculous by responding earnestly to a low-effort provocation, which only proves the shitpost has had its intended effect.Refusing to abide by discursive norms can signal a refusal to abide by political norms. After Trump dubbed him “Low Energy” Jeb Bush during the 2016 Republican primaries, the more professorial younger brother of George W Bush made the mistake of arguing that he was, in fact, dynamic and busy, as if Trump were making a political claim that could be contested. But this was nicknaming as shitposting. Instead of clever metaphors, Trump’s nicknames are low-effort direct literalisms. From “Little Marco” Rubio to “No Talent” Jimmy Kimmel, their purpose is not to make a substantive claim or offer an accurate description of reality, but to titillate allies and bait enemies.Unencumbered by the establishment strategists who urged decorum during his first administration, Trump has elevated shitposting to a national strategy in his second term. Two days before the Walk of Fame announcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a video of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents hauling civilians into unmarked vans, cut to the opening credits of the Pokémon television series. As the theme song’s refrain has it: “Gotta Catch ’Em All”.On 4chan, home to the small but significant crossover of anime fans and the extreme right, posters debated whether the video was “based” (internet slang meaning authentically cool and irreverent) or “cringe” (shamefully straining for the approval the “based” attain with ease). But the real target audience was liberals outraged not only by state violence but by its shameless public celebration. If the right dominates meme culture, it is less because the “left can’t meme” than because it is far easier to “own the libs” who remain committed to rational political discourse. Where liberals seek earnest debate, the shitpost offers a polemic without a point, an opportunity to indulge in cruelty.At best, shitposts function as satire. The hopecore genre on TikTok combines motivational speeches with slideshows of mountain lakes and island sunsets over a soundtrack of atmospheric strings and lo-fi guitar scales. Hopeless core shitposts adopt the same format but with comedically clumsy speeches that render the inspirational slideshow absurd, mocking the vacuousness of online inspo culture. A day after the Pokémon shitpost, the DHS turned hopeless core satire into a schoolyard taunt, posting a clip of podcast bro Theo Von saying, in his trademark laconic style, “Heard you got deported dude – bye” followed by Ice arrest videos cut to a soundtrack of reverb-soaked introspective guitar scales. The DHS deleted the post over Von’s objections, but just as “Low Energy” Jeb’s protests guaranteed his nickname would stick, Von’s complaint only attracted more attention to the video.In recent days, the vice president, JD Vance, has called one prominent liberal pundit a “dipshit” and told critics to “go straight to hell”. Vance is too much of a try-hard to succeed as a shitposter, but his comments revel in the chaos shitposting creates. This chaos can have dire consequences. The 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter described his attack as moving from shitposting to effort posting, by which he meant from trolling to taking meaningful action. But political violence itself has begun taking the form of the shitpost. Charlie Kirk’s assassin inscribed a furry meme to bait newscasters into reading it aloud, and friends of the Dallas ICE facility shooter described him as an “edgelord” and speculated that he signed a bullet “anti-Ice” as an irony-poisoned provocation. Liberal encomiums to civil discourse can feel pious, but as shitposting stretches public decorum to breaking point, what remains is an incoherent politics of cruelty that licenses outrage for its own sake.
Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London More
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Democrats finally have some leverage in the shutdown fight. They should use it | Robert Reich
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 10:00
The United States government is officially closed.Starting on Wednesday at 12.01am Washington time, the federal government ran out of money.Agencies and departments designed to protect consumers, workers and investors are now officially closed, as are national parks and museums.Most federal workers are not being paid – as many as 750,000 could be furloughed – including those who are required to remain on the job, like air-traffic controllers or members of the US military.So-called “mandatory” spending, including Social Security and Medicare payments, are continuing, although checks could be delayed. The construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom won’t be affected.Shutdowns are symptoms of a government off the rails.I’ve been directly involved in two, one when I was secretary of labor. It’s hard for me to describe the fear, frustration and chaos that ensued. I recall spending the first day consoling employees – many in tears as they headed out the door.There have been eight shutdowns since 1990. Trump has now presided over four.But this shutdown is different.For one thing, it’s the consequence of a decision, made in July by Trump and Senate Republicans, to pass Trump’s gigantic “big beautiful bill” (which I prefer to term “the big ugly” bill) without any Democratic votes.They could do that because of an arcane Senate procedure called “reconciliation”, which allowed the big ugly to get through with just 51 votes rather than the normal 60 required to overcome a filibuster.The final tally was a squeaker. All Senate Democrats opposed the legislation. When three Senate Republicans joined them, JD Vance was called in to break a tie. Some Republicans bragged that they didn’t need a single Democrat.The big ugly fundamentally altered the priorities of the United States government. It cut about $1tn from healthcare programs, including Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, meaning that health insurance premiums for tens of millions of Americans will soar starting in January.The big ugly also cut nutrition assistance and environmental protection, while bulking up immigration enforcement and cutting the taxes of wealthy Americans and big corporations.Trump and Senate Republicans didn’t need a single Democrat then. But this time, Republicans couldn’t use the arcane reconciliation process to pass a bill to keep the government going.Now they needed Senate Democratic votes.Yet keeping the government going meant keeping all the priorities included in the big ugly bill that all Senate Democrats opposed.Which is why Senate Democrats refused to sign on unless most of the big ugly’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act were restored, so health insurance premiums won’t soar next year.Even if Senate Democrats had obtained that concession, the Republican bill to keep the government going would retain all the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations contained in the big ugly, along with all the cuts in nutrition assistance, and all the increased funding for immigration enforcement.There’s a deeper irony here.As a practical matter, the US government has been “shut down” for more than eight months, since Trump took office this second time.Trump and the sycophants surrounding him, such as Russell Vought, the director of the office of management and budget, and, before him, Elon Musk, have had no compunction about shutting down parts of the government they don’t like – such as USAID.They’ve also moved to fire, furlough or extend buyouts to hundreds of thousands of federal employees doing work they don’t value, such as those working at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.They’ve impounded appropriations from Congress for activities they oppose, ranging across the entire federal government.On the first day of the shutdown, Vought announced that the administration was freezing $18bn that Congress had appropriated for funding infrastructure in New York City (home to the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries).All of this is illegal, but it seems unlikely that courts will act soon enough to prevent the administration from harming vast numbers of Americans.Vought threatened to permanently fire more federal employees if the Democrats didn’t vote to continue funding the government. But nothing stopped Vought from doing it before the shutdown, and the shutdown presents no greater opportunity for him to do so.In fact, the eagerness of Trump and his lapdogs over the last eight months to disregard the will of Congress and close whatever they want of the government offers another reason why Democrats shouldn’t have caved in.Had Democrats voted to keep the government going, what guarantee would they have had that Trump would in fact keep the government going?Democrats finally have some bargaining leverage. They should use it.If tens of millions of Americans lose their health insurance starting in January because they can no longer afford to pay sky-high premiums, Trump and his Republicans will be blamed.It would be Trump’s and his Republicans fault anyway – it’s part of their big ugly bill – but this way, in the fight over whether to reopen the government, Americans will have a chance to see Democrats standing up for them.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now More
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American democracy might not survive another year – is Europe ready for that? | Alexander Hurst
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 04:00
Fascism is supposed to look a certain way: black-clad, uniformed, synchronised and menacing. It is not supposed to look like an overweight president who can’t pronounce acetaminophen and who bumbles, for a full minute, about how he would have renovated the UN’s New York headquarters with marble floors, rather than a terrazzo. But as Umberto Eco remarked in his timeless essay on identifying the eternal nature of fascism: “Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.”Historians, scholars and even some insiders from the first Trump administration have seen through the comedic quality of the disguise. They appear to have seen in Donald Trump himself and those around him, Eco’s core criteria: the call to tradition and the rejection of reason, the fear of difference, the hostility towards disagreement, the ressentiment, the machismo, the degradation of language into newspeak, the cult of a “strong” leader. Almost a year ago, the historian Robert Paxton, in explaining why he had changed his mind about employing the word to describe Trumpism, remarked: “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.”Since then, the Trump administration has deployed the US military and National Guard to cities against the will of their state governors. It has put pressure on state legislatures to disenfranchise opposition voters in extraordinary ways, and floated the idea of disenfranchising all voters residing outside the US by ending mail-in voting. It has used the power of the state to censor books, bully the media and “cancel” comedians who regularly make fun of Trump. It has seized executive power in alarming and potentially illegal ways, including the use of tariffs, immigration policy and targeted exemptions to generate subservience among powerful corporate actors.An over-fixation on whether actions are legal or not misses the forest for the trees: constitutionality is, practically speaking, whatever the supreme court decides. If the supreme court acquiesces to fundamental changes in the nature of what the US is, that is merely one more sign of how deep the rot goes. And from concrete policy to the decision to publicly venerate the Confederacy, the intended direction of travel is clear.The disguise dropped a little bit more, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder – one more tragic datapoint in the merging of the US’s epidemic of gun violence and its growing political violence. At his strange funeral-rally-spectacle, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, gave a speech dripping with everything Eco sought to warn us against, raging against a diffuse “they” who “cannot conceive of the army they have arisen in all of us”. “You are nothing,” Miller continued. “You have nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing.”In the past year, as Trump and those behind him have dismantled the institutions of US democracy with incredible speed, the European conversation finally moved from denial to attempts at bargaining, with some acceptance of US disengagement and disinterest going forward. But there has been almost no space for a high-level, public conversation about what to do when the US government is, for the foreseeable future, in the hands of actors hostile to the EU’s basic raison d’être and its values.I understand why European leaders don’t want to have this conversation openly with voters. They fear that alienating Trump, even slightly, will lead him to drop US support for Ukraine. The cleverest think they can buy time by flattering Trump, manipulating him just long enough to find a better footing, while the blindly optimistic look to the 2026 midterms as an inflection point, and some sort of “return to normal”. But the midterms will not save us. As the Democrats’ elections attorney Marc Elias laid out in detail for The New Yorker, the 2026 elections will probably not be wholly free and fair, and even where they are, Trump’s prior history of insurrection indicates that the results very well might not be honoured. And Trump is already laying the groundwork to drop Ukraine fully into Europe’s lap.During the first Trump administration, we heard, ad nauseam, that he should be taken seriously, but not literally. It was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now. When Trump says, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them”, we in Europe (“a foe,” remember?) should take him literally. The radical authoritarian agenda the Trump administration is pursuing domestically matters to Europe. A US with a new, masked, secret immigration police with nearly unlimited funds, whose “red” government deploys its military to “blue” cities, and uses the criminal justice system to exact retribution on political opponents at the president’s behest – in short, the end of the rule of law – necessarily affects European democracy. Not least, because the Trump administration is engaged in a culture war against Europe, promoting forces that seek to destroy it as it currently exists.European voters are out in front of the politicians on this one. The spring Eurobarometer survey showed that large majorities of citizens want the EU to protect them from crises and security risks, think the EU needs more financial means to do so, and support that new funding coming from the EU as a whole, rather than member states alone. A survey of the EU’s five biggest states, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland, found that 52% think the EU was humiliated in the recent trade deal with the US. They blame the commission for not “defending” Europe more ardently, with a strong minority of 39% wanting the bloc to become more “oppositional” to Trump.Timothy Garton Ash recently gave Americans 400 days to save their democracy. As an American, I don’t think the country has that long. As Europeans, we should assume that it does not.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEuropeans are ready for an honest conversation about the challenge Europe faces from Trump – the same way they’ve solidified in the face of aggression from Vladimir Putin. The danger lies in Europe’s leaders fudging, hesitating and avoiding this conversation. If they cannot lead with candour, voters will conclude that European democracy and its institutions are too weak to withstand the pincer move that is building against it.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist More

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