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      As key Israel allies threaten action over Gaza catastrophe, Washington is largely unmoved

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      As Israel orders Palestinians to evacuate Khan Younis in advance of what it calls an “unprecedented attack” on Gaza, much of Washington remains largely unmoved, even as Canada and European countries threaten “concrete actions” if Israel does not scale back its offensive.Despite reports of growing pressure from the Trump administration to increase aid into Gaza, where widespread famine looms, the White House continues to publicly back Israel. National security council spokesperson James Hewitt told the Guardian in an email: “Hamas has rejected repeated ceasefire proposals, and therefore bears sole responsibility for this conflict,” maintaining the policy stance inherited from the previous Biden administration despite mounting evidence of humanitarian catastrophe.The Israeli military on Monday instructed residents of southern Gaza’s Khan Younis to “evacuate immediately” as it prepares to “destroy the capabilities of terrorist organizations” – signalling plans for intensified bombardment in a war that has already claimed more than 53,000 Palestinian lives, according to Gaza’s health ministry.Despite Israeli promises to “flatten” Gaza, opposition from Congress – and mainstream Democrats more broadly – has been largely muted. While the besieged territory faces what the World Health Organization (Who) calls “one of the world’s worst hunger crises”, more than three dozen members of Congress from both parties recently appeared in an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) video in celebration of Israel’s 77th birthday. In New York, leading mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo held up an Israeli flag in the city’s annual Israel Day Parade on Sunday.This political genuflection comes as a March Gallup poll shows American support for Israel has dropped to 46% – its lowest point in 25 years – while sympathy for Palestinians has risen to a record 33%. Democrats reported sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis by a three-to-one ratio.On a recent episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Senator Bernie Sanders blamed Washington’s reluctance to change course on the financial muscle of lobbying groups. “If you speak up on that issue, you’ll have super Pacs like Aipac going after you,” Sanders said, noting Aipac’s record $14.5m campaign to unseat Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman after he accused Israel of genocide.A small contingent of progressive lawmakers continue to voice opposition despite being largely iced out from public discourse in Washington. Representative Delia Ramirez of Illinois condemned the “lethal, unaccountable, extremist duo” of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump. “Americans have said they do not want to be complicit in their barbaric campaigns. It is time for us in Congress to exercise our power and take action. Not one more cent, not one more bomb, not one more excuse,” she told the Guardian.Representative Ilhan Omar similarly decried the latest chapter of the lopsided war on Gaza, calling it “another unconscionable moral stain”.“Despite the fanfare of Donald Trump’s trip [to the Middle East last weak], they’re not closer to a ceasefire,” Omar said. “It is deeply shameful that innocent civilians are continuing to pay the price.”Vermont senator Peter Welch recently led 29 Senate colleagues in introducing a resolution calling on the Trump administration to end the blockade of humanitarian aid. “It’s been over two months since the Israeli government has been using its power to withhold food, medicine, lifesaving cancer treatments, dialysis systems, formula, and more from starving and suffering families across Gaza,” he said.Resolutions, however, are symbolic gestures meant to publicize opinions and do not have the force of law.While the lawmakers voice their concerns, their impact on policy remains limited, representing the growing disconnect between Washington policymakers and public sentiment. That the grassroots movement for Palestinian rights in the US has grown more subdued – in large part due to an aggressive crackdown by the Trump administration against the universities that were host to last year’s protests – may take some of the pressure off for them to act.One insider familiar with discussions between the US and Israel told the Washington Post that the Americans have been hitting Israel with a tougher stance over the last few weeks. Haaretz has also reported growing pressure by the US on Israel to agree to a framework for a temporary ceasefire.“Trump’s people are letting Israel know: ‘We will abandon you if you do not end this war,’” the insider said. Trump and JD Vance both skipped over Israel on recent trips abroad, widely interpreted as a snub of Netanyahu.Netanyahu has announced the resumption of “minimal” humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the UN said on Monday that nine aid trucks were authorised to enter Gaza, a “drop in the ocean” given the scale of desperation.Whether US voices calling for change in US policy and a wind-down of the catastrophic war are just shouting in the void, may become clearer in the coming days. More

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      JP Morgan chief warns of ‘complacency’ as markets look past credit downgrade

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      JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon warned on Monday that investors were being too complacent as markets shook off news that the US has lost its last triple-A credit rating amid fresh concern over the federal government’s burgeoning debt pile.Credit ratings agency Moody’s dealt a blow to Washington on Friday when it stripped the US of its top-notch rating, downgrading the world’s largest economy by one notch to AA1 and become becoming the last of the big three agencies to drop its triple-A rating for the US.The announcement unnerved markets on Monday morning, but stock markets had recovered by the end of the day.Speaking at JP Morgan’s annual investor day meeting in New York, Dimon warned against complacency. “We have huge deficits; we have what I consider almost complacent central banks. You all think they can manage all this. I don’t think [they can],” he said.Dimon said he saw an “extraordinary amount of complacency” and added that he believes the possibility of stagflation – a recession with rising prices – was far higher than investors believe.Moody’s downgrade came as Donald Trump struggles to push his “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill through Congress, Moody’s said it expected the US budget deficit to keep rising.“Successive US administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s said, announcing its downgrade. “We do not believe that material multi-year reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from current fiscal proposals under consideration.”Trump administration officials sought to play down the significance of the setback. “Moody’s is a lagging indicator,” Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told Meet the Press on NBC on Sunday.The US president has himself remained silent on the downgrade. On Monday morning, he used posts on his Truth Social platform to criticize celebrities including Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen, who castigated Trump on stage in Manchester last week, for supporting his political rivals.During a rare Sunday night vote, House Republicans advanced Trump’s tax cut and spending package out of a key committee. It has been estimated that the proposed bill could add as much as $5tn to the US’s $36.2tn debt pile over the next decade.On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 fell during early trading, before recovering its losses to close marginally higher, while the tech-focused Nasdaq also closed broadly flat after reversing early declines. The FTSE 100 rose 0.2% in London.Bond markets also came under pressure, with the yield on 30-year US treasury bonds climbing 13 basis points to 5.026%. Yields rise as bond prices drop; an increase signals that investors are seeking a higher return for holding US debt. The dollar weakened against a basket of currencies.“Over the next decade, we expect larger deficits as entitlement spending rises while government revenue remains broadly flat,” said Moody’s. “In turn, persistent, large fiscal deficits will drive the government’s debt and interest burden higher. The US’s fiscal performance is likely to deteriorate relative to its own past and compared with other highly rated sovereigns.” More

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      Trump officials reportedly reach $5m settlement in January 6 wrongful death suit

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      The Trump administration has reportedly reached an agreement to pay nearly $5m to the family of the woman who was fatally shot by police while participating in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol carried out by the president’s supporters.Citing multiple sources, the Washington Post reported on Monday that the Trump administration had agreed to pay the family of Ashli Babbitt to settle the wrongful death lawsuit they filed after the attack.Babbitt was attempting to force her way into the lobby of the US House speaker at the time, Nancy Pelosi, when the Trump supporter was shot dead by a Capitol police officer. The payment of about $5m at the center of the settlement is meant to resolve the litigation from Babbitt’s estate, which initially sought $30m in damages.Attorneys for both Babbitt’s family and the federal government each informed a judge earlier in May that they had agreed to settle the case in principle. The case was scheduled to be tried in July 2026.Although a binding agreement had not yet been signed and details of the settlement were not revealed during a court hearing on 2 May,Judge Ana Reyes of the US district court in Washington DC instructed both parties to provide an update by Thursday.Sources with knowledge of the agreement told the Post that Trump’s justice department would pay just less than $5m, with approximately one-third allocated to the family’s legal team, which includes Judicial Watch, a politically conservative organization, and attorney Richard Driscoll of Alexandria, Virginia. These sources requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing case, the Post reported.Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, reacted to the news of the settlement by calling it a “slap in the face” to the American people.Jeffries said that the settlement was “totally done without any communication to the chief of the Capitol police or his lawyers, and appears solely the result of a political determination that Donald Trump and Republicans are going to try to whitewash what happened on January 6.“This settlement is just an extension of what they’ve previously done, which is to pardon violent felons who violently attacked the Capitol on January 6, including police officers, and now have all been pardoned and sent back to communities across the country where in some cases they’re re-engaging in criminal activity,” he added.“Donald Trump and the extreme Maga Republicans are not going to be able to erase what happened on January 6, no matter how hard they try.”The January 6 Capitol attack that Babbitt chose to partake in was a desperate attempt by a pro-Trump mob to keep him in the White House despite his first presidency ending in defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The attack has been linked to at least eight other deaths, including the suicides of police officers who were left traumatized having defended the Capitol that day.Babbitt’s social media activity showed that she was deeply engaged for months with a conspiracy theory that painted Democratic lawmakers as evil pedophiles with whom Trump was locked in mortal combat. And she also believed lies from Trump and his allies that electoral fraudsters had handed Biden the 2020 election.For weeks before she joined the mob in DC, Babbitt had been retweeting those false claims from Trump himself, as well as the pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, alleging massive voter fraud before his decisive electoral loss to Biden.Trump then clinched a second presidency after defeating Kamala Harris in November’s election. More

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      Judge blocks Trump officials’ efforts to dismantle US Institute of Peace

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      A federal judge on Monday blocked efforts by the Trump administration and its so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to dismantle the US Institute of Peace, at least temporarily.Doge, initially overseen by billionaire Donald Trump supporter Elon Musk, took over the congressionally created and funded thinktank in March and had fired most employees by a late-night email after the US president targeted the institute and three other agencies with an executive order.The takeover prompted a couple of lawsuits against Doge and the Trump administration, including from fired employees, trying to impede the institute’s dismantling. The White House claimed the thinktank was in “non-compliance” with Trump’s executive order, whose purported aim was to shrink the federal government’s size. And Doge staff forcefully entered the thinktank’s building after cancelling its contract for private security.US district court judge Beryl Howell on Monday ruled that Doge illegally took over the institute through “blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers from three separate local and federal agencies”.The judge ruled as “null and void” all actions against the US Institute of Peace – including the removal of its board and the transfer of its property to the government services administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe institute employed about 300 people. Besides human resources staffers and a few overseas employees, most at the institute were fired.A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, claimed in an email that the institute was taken over and most of its employees dismissed because it “has failed to deliver peace” – and that Trump “is carrying out his mandate to eliminate bloat and save taxpayer dollars”.A statement from an attorney who filed the dismissed US Institute of Peace’s employees suit said their workplace’s takeover “was a case of egregious government overreach”.The statement added: “Armed agents forcing their way into an independent nonprofit’s privately-owned headquarters, seizing its assets, and destroying records – all in the name of so-called ‘efficiency.’”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      The Guardian view on Romania’s presidential election upset: a vote for stability and the west | Editorial

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      As Romanians voted on Sunday in arguably the most consequential election in the country’s post-communist history, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will have been preparing to welcome a fellow disruptor to the European stage. The first round of a controversially re-run presidential contest had been handsomely won by George Simion, a Eurosceptic ultranationalist who views Donald Trump as a “natural ally” and opposes military aid to Ukraine. On the back of a 20-point lead, Mr Simion, a 38-year-old former football ultra with a taste for violent rhetoric, was so confident of winning that he made a confrontational visit to Brussels in the last days of his campaign.Those expectations were confounded in remarkable fashion at the weekend. In a dramatic reversal of fortunes, Nicușor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest, benefited from the highest voter turnout in 30 years to triumph comfortably. One of the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mr Dan was a relieved Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who, in Hungary and Slovakia, already has to contend with two Putin-friendly governments on Ukraine’s western border.First and foremost, the stability promised by Mr Dan’s victory is good news for Romania, which has been in political turmoil since the original presidential election was cancelled amid allegations of Russian interference. Having made his name as a politically independent anti-corruption campaigner, he must now attempt to unite a deeply polarised country in which inequality, graft and poor public services have proved to be, as elsewhere, a launchpad for far-right populist insurgents.More broadly, the size of the second-round turnout – which included a huge diaspora vote – suggests that hitching a ride on the Trump bandwagon is as liable to motivate a mainstream backlash in Europe as generate Maga-style momentum. Given the global volatility unleashed by Mr Trump’s reckless, bullying style, and the dark shadow cast over eastern Europe by Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical ambitions, the strategic attractions of hugging the EU and Nato close are more readily apparent than they used to be. Handed the opportunity to turn east, a substantial majority of Romanian voters looked west.Elsewhere though, on a “super Sunday” of three European elections, outcomes were more ambivalent and less uplifting from a progressive perspective. The centre also held in Poland, where the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, narrowly won the first round of another crucial presidential election, ahead of the nationalist historian Karol Nawrocki. But the high combined vote for hard- and far-right candidates suggests that result may be reversed in two weeks’ time. One and a half years after Donald Tusk was given a prime ministerial mandate to bring Poland back into the European mainstream, Eurosceptic ultranationalism remains a force to be reckoned with.In Portugal, a snap election triggered by the centre-right governing party saw it retain power, but was notable mainly for the record number of votes cast for the far-right Chega party. Postal ballots could yet propel Chega to second place, ahead of the Socialist party, after a dismal night for the Portuguese left.Mr Dan’s famous victory was undoubtedly the story of the night, confounding a narrative of an inexorable rightwards shift in central and eastern Europe. But amid an ongoing cost of living crisis, and as mainstream parties echo far-right agendas on migration, the politics of Europe continue to feel anxious, polarised and alarmingly unpredictable.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump once condemned Qatar. How things have changed | Mohamad Bazzi

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      On his tour of the Middle East last week, Donald Trump was treated like royalty by the leaders of the wealthiest countries in the Arab world. The US president was feted in gilded ballrooms, his motorcade was flanked by dozens of men riding white Arabian horses and he was awarded an elaborate gold medal necklace. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates went out of their way to show Trump that they respect him more than his predecessor, Joe Biden.While Trump frequently praised Saudi and UAE leaders during his first term, he was highly critical of Qatar, a small emirate that is rich in natural gas but usually overshadowed by its two larger and more powerful neighbors. In June 2017, Trump said Qatar “has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level” and he supported a blockade against the country, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Qatar’s neighbors accused it of financing terrorism by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and being too cozy with Iran. The blockade, which disrupted the lives of thousands of people across the Persian Gulf, stretched until early 2021.Today, Qatar has emerged as the unlikely success story of Trump’s first state visit of his second term. It was no accident that the Qatari royal family recently offered to donate a $400m luxury jet – a “palace in the sky” Boeing 747 – that the president could use as Air Force One for the rest of his term. The plane’s ownership would then be transferred to Trump’s presidential library, meaning he would be able to continue using the jet after he leaves office. Despite the administration’s convoluted effort to frame this as a donation from Qatar to the US government, it would in effect be a gift for Trump’s personal benefit.It’s yet another way that Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and his family business, which has ongoing deals for Trump-branded real estate projects and golf resorts worth billions of dollars in the three wealthy Gulf petrostates that Trump visited last week. So far, neither Congress nor US courts have tried to sanction Trump over the US constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which forbids the president from accepting gifts or payments from a foreign government without congressional approval.Qatar seems to have won Trump’s respect with its lavish gift and a charm offensive built around its role as a global mediator that is able to bring enemies together. During the first Trump administration, Qatar brokered a peace agreement between the US and Taliban leaders, which was supposed to lead to a phased withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. During the Biden administration, Qatar hosted indirect talks for a prisoner swap between Iran and the US, which included unblocking $6bn in frozen Iranian oil funds – an agreement that Washington later rescinded.But Qatar’s most high-stakes mediation role has been to serve as the main conduit for negotiations between Israel and Hamas, after the October 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s devastating war on Gaza. The Qataris helped broker a one-week ceasefire in November 2023, and a two-month truce that started this past January and collapsed in March.Yet since the emirate emerged as a primary mediator in Gaza, politicians in both the US and Israel ratcheted up their attacks on Qatar. They accused its leaders of supporting terrorism by hosting members of Hamas’s political leadership in Doha, the Qatari capital, where several settled after they were forced out of Damascus for turning against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was facing a popular uprising. Throughout the stalled Gaza negotiations, several members of Congress demanded that the Biden administration pressure Qatar to close the Hamas offices and expel its leaders. The Qataris resisted those demands and consistently pointed out that Barack Obama’s administration had asked Qatar in 2012 to establish an indirect channel that would allow the US to communicate with Hamas.After news broke of Qatar’s plan to donate the luxury jet to Trump, some figures in the president’s Maga movement revived complaints about the emirate’s support for Hamas and other Islamist groups. “We cannot accept a $400 million ‘gift’ from jihadists in suits,” Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who last month convinced Trump to fire six White House national security staffers, wrote on X. She added: “I say that as someone who would take a bullet for Trump. I’m so disappointed.”But most of the Republicans in Congress who had urged Biden to punish Qatar for its support of Hamas have so far stayed quiet about Trump’s decision to accept the $400m plane and cozy up to Qatar’s rulers. That’s partly an indication of how Trump has successfully banished or ignored many hawkish Republicans and neoconservatives during his second term, preferring to negotiate with Iran and other US adversaries. Qatar’s role as a mediator that can resolve regional conflicts is particularly attractive to Trump, who sees himself as the ultimate dealmaker.In this term, Trump has surrounded himself with longtime friends as top advisers, including Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate developer who is serving as the president’s Middle East envoy and all-around troubleshooter. Witkoff has been publicly praising Qatar’s leaders for their mediation efforts with Hamas since he took office in January – and the envoy’s praise is clearly resonating with Trump, who has dramatically changed his approach toward Qatar. “They’re good, decent people,” Witkoff said of the Qataris during an interview in March with Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media host and Maga figure. “What they want is a mediation that’s effective, that gets to a peace goal. And why? Because they’re a small nation and they want to be acknowledged as a peacemaker.”Witkoff’s comments echoed the strategy of Qatar’s ruler, the 44-year-old Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who took power in 2013 when his father abdicated the throne. The emir has tried to position Qatar as a force in global geopolitics not just for prestige, but also as a way to ensure his ruling family’s survival amid sometimes aggressive neighbors. (Those neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have tried to impose their own foreign policy directives on Qatar, as they did during the blockade that Trump supported in his first term.) Qatar still walks a tightrope of proving itself crucial to the US and western powers by being one of the world’s largest and most reliable suppliers of liquified natural gas, and also maintaining ties with non-state groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban.Qatar has tried to hedge its bets by positioning itself to play an outsize role as a dealmaker, one that a country of its size would not normally take on. That policy began under the current emir’s father, who launched the state-owned Al Jazeera satellite network in 1996 as part of Qatar’s soft-power campaign to increase its influence in the Middle East. And while Qatar directly funded Islamist groups soon after the 2011 Arab uprisings in Syria, Libya and Egypt, the emirate’s leaders became more cautious in recent years and shifted toward cementing their role as global negotiators.For decades, Qatari leaders have also worked to solidify a military alliance with the US. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, they allowed Washington to use Al-Udeid Air Base outside Doha to launch air strikes against Afghanistan. Qatar later invested $8bn to upgrade the base, which has become the largest US military installation in the Middle East, housing up to 10,000 troops. On Thursday, as Trump wrapped up his visit to Qatar, he delivered a meandering, campaign-style speech to US troops stationed at the base. He bragged about economic agreements he had signed with Qatari leaders the previous day, which the White House valued at more than $243bn.Trump also expounded on the value of Qatar’s loyalty: “I don’t think our friendship has ever been stronger than it is right now.” Earlier on Thursday, he praised Qatar’s emir and told a meeting of business leaders: “We are going to protect you.”For Trump, who sees all diplomacy as transactional, that is the ultimate favor he can bestow: US protection for a foreign leader who is trying to resolve regional conflicts – and also happened to offer the president an extravagant gift.

      Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      Megyn Kelly puts Trump clash behind her to ride the Maga media wave

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      It was the night before a US presidential election that Donald Trump had called the most important in history. Who could close the deal at his campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? The answer was Megyn Kelly. Trump “will keep the boys out of girls’ sports where they don’t belong”, the rightwinger podcaster said to rapturous applause. “And you know what else? He will look out for our boys, too. Our forgotten boys and our forgotten men.”Turning around and pointing at Trump supporters wearing hard hats, Kelly eulogised guys “who’ve got the calluses on their hands, who work for a living, the beards and the tats, maybe have a beer after work, and don’t want to be judged by people like Oprah and Beyoncé, who will never have to face the consequences of her [Kamala Harris’s] disastrous economic policies. These guys will. He gets it. President Trump gets it. He will not look at our boys like they are second-class citizens.”It was a remarkable intervention by a former cable news anchor whom Trump branded “nasty” when they feuded bitterly during his bid for the White House in 2016. Now Kelly and the former president understood their value to one another. Both knew what it is to be at rock bottom but, 24 hours after the Pittsburgh rally, both were celebrating their own unlikely comebacks.Kelly, 54, has become one of the most influential figures in rightwing media. Her eponymous podcast moves with rare dexterity from heavyweight political interviews – such as the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard – to topics such as Joe Biden’s cognitive decline to celebrity gossip about the likes of Halle Berry, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Meghan Markle and the Kardashians.Clearly the formula works. The Megyn Kelly Show posted a record-breaking 176% year-over-year surge in subscribers in the first quarter of 2025, according to TheRighting, a media company that tracks rightwing outlets. She trails Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson but has pulled ahead of Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Steve Bannon.This makes her one of the most prominent cheerleaders for Trump and shapers of his Maga (Make America great again) agenda, most especially its hostility to immigrants and transgender rights. Kelly is even emerging as a rival to her former employer Fox News, which dominated the narratives of Trump’s first term in office.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Megyn Kelly’s various transformations can make you dizzy if you follow them. The days when she had credibility as a truth-seeker are over, and now she’s strictly in the business of following clicks.“Her campaigning with Trump, including on the last night, confirms what the business model is. She is trying to establish herself as the preferred media outlet for the Maga movement. She is demonstrating that even Fox is now vulnerable and is being picked apart by the podcasters who become the viewer choice.”Kelly started out as a lawyer and has described the environment at her early law firms as having a “kill or be killed” mentality. She transitioned to journalism after being inspired by reporters who were cool under pressure. Raised in a Democratic household, she has said she was “really wasn’t political” when she joined Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Fox News network in 2004.Kelly became a leading prime-time personality and star of the right’s culture wars. But a question to Trump during the 2016 primary debate about his past comments on women provoked him to unleash crude and misogynistic attacks, including: “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”Meanwhile her accusations of unwanted sexual advances by Fox News’s chief executive, Roger Ailes, helped lead to his firing. The difficult environment led Kelly to leave for NBC in 2017. She admits her time there “ended disastrously” after just a year when she created a furore by suggesting that it was fine for white people to wear blackface on Halloween.But like Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan, Kelly has reinvented herself for the new age of fragmented digital media where tie-wearing authority figures are out and smash-mouth influencers are in. In 2020 she launched a daily podcast then switched to a live radio format in a deal with SiriusXM. A video version streams on YouTube with clips shared on various platforms gaining hundreds of millions of views a month.Frank Luntz, a political and communications consultant and pollster, said: “She had an audience on Fox that was undeniable. She didn’t succeed on network television because that audience is too broad.“Now, once again, she’s gone back to what she’s particularly good at, which is appealing to a segment of the population that wants to hear her explanation for what’s going on in a more detailed and factual fashion than what you might get on cable. It’s the right medium at the right time and she’s the right host.”In a world where newspaper reporters can be frowned upon for expressing an opinion in a tweet, Kelly is unabashed about owning her own bias. “Yes, I’m still a journalist,” she told the New York Times newspaper in March, “but I’m in this new ecosystem where the old rules don’t apply. I’m in this world with, yes, Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro, but my world is also Joe Rogan and Theo Von.View image in fullscreen“It’s a very large world, and how the consumer receives it is by going on YouTube.com on their television screen, or going to the vertical integrations on Instagram or TikTok and just taking in content. What’s the content that you want to receive? I’m on the list of content creators, and so the fact that I’m also a journalist who breaks news and reports on news is an extra. But what’s most important in my business now is authenticity.”Kelly’s renaissance is impossible to divorce from “owning the libs” mentality of Trump and his Maga movement. She told the New York Times: “It’s one of my core missions in life to defeat wokeism.” Her podcasts have foregrounded anxieties over illegal immigration and transgender children taking part in school sports.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTransgender people are a particular obsession for Kelly. In a 2023 interview she forced Trump on the defensive when she grilled him over whether a man can become a woman. In a Republican primary debate, she caricatured the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s stance on gender-affirming care for minors and demanded: “Aren’t you way too out of step on this issue to be the Republican nominee?”And when another Republican candidate, Nikki Haley, said children should not be allowed to transition but those who are 18 and older should “live any way they want to live”, Kelly responded furiously on X: “This is utter bulls***. The WRONG ANSWER & an unnecessary weird pander to the rabid trans lobby. The answer is NO, A MAN CANNOT BECOME A WOMAN.”Ari Drennen, LGBTQ programme director at Media Matters for America, a non-profit watchdog, said: “Megyn Kelly is very good at understanding where her audience is and where they want her to be and that’s part of why she’s been able to be so successful in this new media environment. There’s no doubt that throughout the 2024 presidential campaign she was a voice who was pushing GOP candidates to move further to the right on trans issues.”But Kelly is far from a one-trick pony. She has gained particular traction this year with a topic far from Washington: the rancorous legal battle between the actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively stemming from the film It Ends With Us. Media Matters’ research found that between 1 January and 20 March, Kelly mentioned Baldoni or Lively 440 times, an average of more than five times a day.She also interviewed Baldoni’s lawyer in a video that has 10m views on TikTok. Drennan said: “She’s leading the way with this celebrity gossip type stuff that has proven to be fertile ground for a lot of these rightwing creators this year.”Other examples include the Daily Wire alumni Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, Drennan noted. “The right has figured that out much better than the left. I feel like on the left there tends to be more of a separation between the types of podcasts and shows that are covering celebrity gossip and the types of shows that are covering daily stuff that’s happening with the Trump administration.”The right is also cashing in. In February Fox Corp acquired Red Seat Ventures, a production company that manages Kelly and Carlson’s shows. In March Kelly announced plans for her own podcast network, MK Media, another sign of how she is riding the Maga wave and adapting to the evolving media landscape.Dan Cassino, author of Fox News and American Politics and a government and politics professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, said: “The economics of cable TV or broadcast TV and the economics of podcasting are very different. Essentially this allows her to be her own boss. The fact that other people have decided she shouldn’t be on TV or can’t attract the audience that would allow her to be on TV any more is irrelevant because you can be profitable at a much lower scale.“Part of this is also a reflection of the realities of media. Nobody has huge audiences any more. The days when you’ve got a 20 share or 30 share are gone and are never going to happen again. Podcasting is not different in type; it’s different in extent.”Meanwhile, after all the years of their chequered relationship, Kelly would not describe herself as a Trump surrogate but is playing that role to great effect. As the president, who has spurned the neocon wing of the Republican party, toured the Gulf region this week, she remarked with bracing candour: “I feel like when I was on Fox News, all we did was cheerlead these wars – and kind of dismiss, or express disdain, for people who had serious questions about them … With the benefit of all this hindsight, that was wrong.”The unholy alliance reminds David Litt, an author and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, of the old observation that in politics there are no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends, only permanent interests.Litt commented: “The crux of Trump’s argument was I’m a bad guy but you need me in the White House anyway. Nobody could speak to that argument – both Trump’s personal lack of character and, by endorsing him, say we need him anyway – better than Megyn Kelly. He knew that and she knew that. They saw a moment of symbiosis.” More

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      Republicans are attacking childcare funding. Their goal? To push women out of the workforce | Moira Donegan

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      Last month, the White House issued a proposed budget to Congress that completely eliminated funding for Head Start, the six-decade-old early childhood education program for low-income families that serves as a source of childcare for large swaths of the American working class.The funding was restored in the proposed budget after an outcry, but large numbers of employees who oversee the program at the office of Head Start were laid off in a budget-slashing measure under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. On Thursday, Kennedy said funding for the program would not be axed, but more cuts to childcare funding are likely coming: some Republicans have pushed to repeal a five-decade-old tax credit for daycare. The White House is entertaining proposals on how to incentivize and structurally coerce American women into bearing more children, but it seems to be determined to make doing so as costly to those women’s careers as possible.That’s because the Republicans’ childcare policy, like their pro-natalist policy, is based on one goal: undoing the historic gains in women’s rights and status, and pushing American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society – and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.The New York Times reported this week that the White House is now not only looking for ways to make more women have children, but to encourage “parents” to stay home to raise them. “Parents” here is a euphemism. Roughly 80% of stay-at-home parents are mothers: cultural traditions that encourage women, and not men, to sacrifice their careers for caregiving, along with persistent wage inequalities that make women, on the whole, lower earners than their male partners, both incentivize women, and not men, to drop out of the workforce and stay home when they have children.This state of affairs has been worsened by the dramatic rise in the cost of childcare, which is prohibitively expensive for many parents. The average cost of childcare per child per year in the US is now well north of $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, an industry advocacy group. In major cities such as New York, that price is significantly higher: from $16,000 to $19,000 per year. Existing tax credits need to be expanded, not eliminated, to reduce this burden on mothers and their families and to enable women to join the workforce at rates comparable to men and commensurate with their dignity and capacities. Currently, 26% of mothers do not engage in paid work, a figure that has barely budged in 40 years. Largely because of the unequally distributed burdens of childcare, men participate in the paid labor force at a rate that is more than 10% higher than women.One might think that the solution would be to invest more in high-quality childcare, so that providers could open more slots, children could access more resources, and women could go to work and expend their talents in productive ways that earn them money, make use of their gifts and provide more dignity for women and more stability for families. This is not what the American right is proposing: Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who promotes traditional family and gender relations, has called such policy initiatives “work-ist”. Conservatives are proposing, instead, that women go back to the kitchen.The Trump administration, and the American right more broadly, wants the rate of women’s employment to be even lower, because it is advancing a lie that women are naturally, inevitably, uniformly and innately inclined to caregiving, child rearing and homemaking – and not to the positions of intellectual achievement, responsibility, leadership, ingenuity or independence that women may aspire to in the public world. “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hardwired to bond with Mom,” says Janet Erickson, a fellow at the rightwing Institute for Family Studies, who once co-authored an op-ed with JD Vance calling on “parents” to drop out of the workforce to raise children. “I just think, why should we deny that?”This kind of vague, evidence-free gesturing toward evolutionary psychology – the notion that babies are “hardwired” to prefer mothers who are not employed – is a common conservative tick: a recourse to dishonest and debunked science to lend empiricism to bigotry. There is in fact no evolutionary reason, and no biological reason, for mothers, and not fathers, to abandon independence, ambition or life outside the home for the sake of a child. The only reason is a sexist one.Over the past decade, the left launched few vigorous defenses of a feminist politics that seeks to advance and secure women’s access to public life, paid work and fair remuneration. The American left has launched vigorous criticisms of the “girlboss”, a figure of malignant female ambition who seemed to make the exploitations of capitalism more offensive by virtue of her sex, and it has instead offered critiques of women’s ambition and romantic defenses of the labor of “care” that just happens to overlap with women’s traditional – and traditionally unpaid – roles in the home. This leftwing rhetoric has at times mirrored the similar romanticization of the unpaid housewife of yesteryear from the right, which has embraced tradwives, homesteading fantasies and an aestheticized rustic simplicity that aims to contrast feminist gains in the workforce with a fantasy of women’s rest. Together, these strains of rhetorical opposition to women in the workforce have made anti-feminism into a new kind of “socialism of fools” – a misguided misdirection of anger and resentment at the rapaciousness of capitalism towards a social justice movement for the rights of an oppressed class.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut what is on offer from the political right is not about the refashioning of work and life to be less extractive and exploitative for women, and particularly for mothers. It is instead about a sex segregation of human experience, an effort to make much of public life inaccessible to women. Combined with the right wing’s successful attack on the right to abortion, the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to Title X programs that provide contraceptive access, and the rescinding of federal grants aimed at helping working women, what emerges from the rightwing policy agenda is an effort to force women out of education, out of decently paid work and into pregnancy, unemployment and dependence on men.Theirs is an effort to shelter men from women’s economic competition, to revert to the regressive cultural modes of an imagined past, and to impose an artificially narrow vision of the capacities, aspirations, talents and desires of half of the American people.Murray Rothbard, the paleoconservative 20th-century economist whose ideas have had a profound influence on the Trumpist worldview, once vowed: “We shall repeal the 20th century.” As far as the Republican right is concerned, it seems to want to repeal the gains of 20th-century feminism first.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More