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      In this age of rage, it’s easy for Trump to keep stoking people’s anger | Henry Porter

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      Donald Trump and the Republican party may have won a decisive victory, but do not expect the anger that has blighted America since Trump announced he was running for office nine years ago to subside. Anger and grievance are the fuel rods of Maga populism, and they must be kept at dangerously high temperatures for the movement and a second Trump term to operate.Watching the last four weeks of the campaign, the uninhibited rage of Trump and his supporting acts at rallies was very striking. There was no attempt at decent norms. As the election neared, speeches became louder and more laced with vitriol, to the degree that commentators believed they had gone too far for the American public.First lesson of the Democrat defeat is that most US voters lapped it up. This is what they want. America is a very angry place, much more so that than its neighbour to the north, Canada. In the US, dissatisfaction with opportunities, the state of the country and the government have risen sharply since the Reagan era, whereas in Canada dissatisfaction has only increased over the government’s failure to protect the most vulnerable in society. That says a lot about the wildly differing tone of the two societies as well as levels of available empathy.Road rage in the US doubled between 2019 and 2022, with 44 people killed or wounded by gunfire on the roads every month, a ­figure that bucks the trends of violent crime and murder that have been generally declining in the US since 1990.There are a lot of people walking around with the bewildering, hair-trigger rage of John Goodman’s character Walter Sobchak in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Trump echoes the craziness, amplifies it, then uses the energy tha t it returns to him.This is a feedback loop, but the anger doesn’t just circle with the same intensity between Trump and his people; it steadily increases.At a Trump rally you became aware of the exuberant high of the outrage, that this is a fix enjoyed across America both by those who tend towards unreflective negativity, racism and misogyny and by people who have a genuine complaint about their lives. In both cases they have acquired the habit of rage, and it has become a meaningful and gratifying part of their identity.The anger is not simply going to evaporate when Trump takes over in January, not only because it’s too important to people’s sense of political self but also because the communication channel between the president and his supporters works only at this level. There is no exchange of ideas, of course, no sense that he leads with a vision other than the one that meets their anger with a promise of destruction.The early evidence of this political wrecking machine comes with the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, all of whom cannot fail to vandalise and degrade the institutions they take over. Indeed, that appears to be their brief.When he moves back into the White House with the Senate, Congress and supreme court in the control of the Republican party, he will be one of the most powerful presidents ever to have governed and he will be 100% responsible for the fortunes of Americans.How will his supporters, so used to reflexively blaming Washington and the government, confront his responsibility when he fails to improve their lives, as he certainly will because of a suicidal tariff regime, tax cuts to the rich and corporations that will increase national debt, cuts to Medicaid and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants that will severely damage growth as well as cause unbelievable pain to separated families across America?His failure will be a problem for his supporters, who can’t lose faith in their idol, and also for Trump, who must not let their support fall away. The solution for both parties will be to maintain the anger but divert it away from Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd this is where we should fear for America. Trump has been lining up scapegoats. He has promised to persecute “the enemies within” and “radical left communists” like Adam Schiff, the new senator for California, and the former speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has made threats to Michelle Obama and Liz Cheney, who endorsed Democrat candidate Kamala Harris, and has demanded that CBS’s broadcast licence be revoked. He has suggested “one really violent day” and “one rough hour” against petty criminals.He will resort to this list whenever he needs to, but it will be America’s undocumented immigrants who will initially suffer, for next to the economy they topped the concerns of Republican voters. Trump will always be able to satisfy Maga anger by promising new and more cruel actions against immigrants, among which measures are likely to be privately run detention camps.There is no telling where this will end, no sense where national resistance will come in a society that is unused to dealing with an authoritarian who exploits dark and violent emotions as expertly as Trump does.The Democrats are plunged in a round of recriminations about the defeat, but they need to find new leadership and a strategy to deal with the anger that now threatens America and its institutions of government. When fuel rods overheat in a nuclear reactor, the result is usually meltdown. More

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      Trump’s shock-and-awe approach to transition is both shocking and awful

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      “Welcome back,” Joe Biden told Donald Trump, his predecessor and successor, as the pair shook hands in the Oval Office. For Biden, it was important to show the world that America can still conduct a peaceful transfer of power. “A transition that’s so smooth it’ll be as smooth as it can get,” Trump said.It was an outward show of permanence and stability. But behind the two men a fire was burning fiercely in the grate. TV comedian Stephen Colbert observed: “I do think it was fitting that they held the meeting in front of a roaring metaphor for the future.”Trump will not be president for another two months but he is already dominating the Washington agenda again. This week a flurry of controversial and extremist picks for his cabinet and other high-ranking administration positions came at a hectic pace and with a level of provocation that made heads spin.The choices included a Fox News host, a tech billionaire, an anti-vaccine activist, an alleged apologist for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and a congressman once embroiled in a sex-trafficking investigation. The lineup raised fears of authoritarianism or chaos – or both – once Trump and his allies are back in the Oval Office.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Their entire political brand is shock and awe. Prior to Trump’s re-election it was notional. Now they have the power to execute all of their depravity with the full backing of American government power virtually unchecked. I don’t think the people who voted for Donald Trump, allegedly because of economic angst, have a full appreciation for what that means.”Trump, who has promised not to be a “dictator” except on “day one”, will enter office with far fewer guardrails and checks on his power than last time. He will return to Washington with a Republican-controlled Congress and a conservative supreme court, containing three justices he appointed, that ruled he is largely immune from prosecution.View image in fullscreenHe has said of his day one plans: “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.” The immigration issue animated his successful election campaign, often coupled with racist rhetoric and falsehoods. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News: “We know that on day one he is going to launch the largest mass deportation of illegal immigrants in American history.”To make it happen he is bringing back Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his first administration, as his “border czar”. Homan, 62, has said he will prioritise deporting immigrants illegally in the US who posed safety and security threats as well as those working at job sites.He will receive zealous ideological backing from Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy. An immigration hardliner, the 39-year-old was a vocal spokesperson during the presidential campaign for Trump’s priority of mass deportations. At a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, he adopted nativist language as he asserted that only Trump would stand up and say “America is for Americans and Americans only.”Trump also announced that Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, will serve as the next homeland security secretary, responsible for everything from border protection and immigration to disaster response and the Secret Service. Noem, 52, rose to national prominence after refusing to impose a statewide mask mandate during the coronavirus pandemic.View image in fullscreenA mass deportation effort could face logistical problems as well as a barrage legal challenges from immigration and human rights activists. But when Trump takes the oath of office on 20 January, his team will be expected to hit the ground running.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The world needs to strap in because the first day of the Trump administration has been in the planning for at least a couple of years and so the white papers, the executive orders are already in files and ready to be pulled out.“We can expect certainly that some of the most radical ideas about curtailing immigration into the United States and then the expelling of unauthorised immigrants within the United States will get a boost from the president making a speech or a press conference followed up with directives to the executive branch. That’ll be off and running day one.”Jacobs added: “We can also expect a pretty sharp attack on the independence of the judiciary. This is going to be a rupture in the generations-old practice of political independence in terms of the Department of Justice. That’s coming to an end.”Trump has long said the biggest mistake of his first term was choosing the wrong people. He had arrived in Washington as the first president without prior political and military experience and relied on others for personnel recommendations. He felt frustrated at and betrayed by officials who slow-walked or ignored directives they saw as ill-advised.Having beaten Vice-President Kamala Harris in the 5 November election, Trump is determined to avoid that mistake second time around. His blitz of announcements this week shows the premium he places on absolute loyalty.His early to-do list could include imposing sweeping tariffs on imported goods, pardoning supporters involved in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement, reversing protections for transgender students in schools and fulfilling his campaign promise to end the war between Ukraine and Russia “in a day”.Some have been relatively mainstream selections reassuring to the political class. They include Susie Wiles, 67, who will be the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff, and Senator Marco Rubio, 53, now in line to become the first Latino in the role of secretary of state. Rubio is seen as a foreign policy hawk who has previously taken a hard line on foes including China, Iran and Cuba.View image in fullscreenElise Stefanik, 40, a Republican congresswoman and staunch Trump supporter, has been named as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. Mike Waltz, 50, a Republican congressman and retired Army Green Beret, is set to be his national security adviser. And John Ratcliffe, 59, a former director of national intelligence, will serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.But other picks have almost seemed to be political performance art, designed to goad and outrage Democrats (“owning the libs”) and impose a loyalty test on the Senate Republicans who will have to decide whether to confirm or reject Trump’s cabinet members, judges and ambassadors.On Tuesday night Trump picked Pete Hegseth as his defence secretary. The 44-year-old is a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend on Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Fox News network and once said he “hasn’t washed hands in 10 years” because “germs are not a real thing”. Hegseth, a military veteran, has opined that women should not serve in combat and expressed disdain for the so-called “woke” policies of Pentagon leaders.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn his recent book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth wrote: “The next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired.”A day later Trump named Tulsi Gabbard, 43, a former Democratic congresswoman and critic of the Biden administration, as his director of national intelligence. Gabbard served in the army national guard for more than two decades, deploying to Iraq and Kuwait. But she secretly met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017 and blamed the US and Nato for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.View image in fullscreenRick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “So far the candidates range from the unserious to the terrifying. Tulsi Gabbard is going to send a shock wave through the intelligence community and not in a good way. I can tell you that her Putin sympathies being rather evident to everyone around her is going to become a major issue. I’m not sure Tulsi Gabbard can be confirmed.”Perhaps most outlandish, Trump selected Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman and “Make America great again” provocateur, for attorney general. The position of America’s top law enforcement official is potentially central to his plans to carry out mass deportations, pardon January 6 rioters and seek retribution against those who prosecuted him over the past four years.The decision prompted howls of derision and doubts over whether Gaetz, 42, will receive Senate confirmation. He was once the subject of a justice department investigation into sex-trafficking allegations involving underage girls, although it ended last year with no federal charges against him.The staunch Trump loyalist was also under scrutiny by the House ethics committee over allegations including sexual misconduct, although that investigation in effect ended on Wednesday when Gaetz resigned from Congress. Republican and Democratic senators on the judiciary committee that would review Gaetz’s nomination are calling for the findings to be made available to them.Senator Dick Durbin, the Democrat who currently chairs the judiciary committee, said Gaetz “would be a disaster” in part because of Trump’s threat to use the justice department “to seek revenge on his political enemies”. John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, described it as “the worst nomination for a cabinet secretary in American history”.Then, on Thursday, Trump delivered the coup de grace by saying he will nominate Robert Kennedy Jr, 70, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the world. Long advancing the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, he has said vaccines have caused a “holocaust” and travelled the world spreading false information about the Covid-19 pandemic.View image in fullscreenKennedy, the nephew of President John F Kennedy, has also said he would recommend that water agencies stop adding fluoride to drinking water and made a variety of other claims not backed by science, such as questioning whether HIV causes Aids and suggesting antidepressants lead to school shootings.Adding to the mix, Trump named Mike Huckabee, 69, as ambassador to Israel. He has rejected a Palestinian homeland in territory occupied by Israel, calling for a so-called “one-state solution”. He has also denied that the West Bank, seized by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 six-day war, is under military occupation.Meanwhile the tech billionaire Elon Musk, 53, a campaign surrogate and increasingly close ally, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, 39, will lead lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency. Trump said the pair will reduce government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut waste and restructure federal agencies.Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, defended Trump’s team selection as an effort to bypass the establishment. “Einstein once said, thinking there’ll be a different outcome by doing the same thing over and over again is a sign of insanity,” he said.“We’ve been told now for decades that the American people think we’re on the wrong track. We keep hiring people who are marginally more off the track a half-inch and we get the same result. Well, Trump is going to move the track by many feet.”But the rapid-fire onslaught has left many in Washington dazed and confused about the prospect of Trump’s first day in office. Setmayer, co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, said: “I expect chaos and a series of constitutionally questionable actions exponentially worse than what we saw on day one last time. It’s already started. There will be many of us who said, we warned you.”She added: “The Trump administration is going to plunge America into a cross between The Hunger Games and The Celebrity Apprentice, unfortunately at great expense to the future of our democracy and the humanity of millions of Americans who will suffer at the hands of this gallery of degenerates. The American electorate fucked around and now they’re going to find out.” More

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      Is this (finally) the end for X? Delicate Musk-Trump relationship and growing rivals spell trouble for platform

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      Was that the week that marked the death of X? The platform formerly regarded as a utopian market square for exchanging information has suffered its largest exodus to date.Bluesky, emerging as X’s newest rival, has amassed 16 million users, including 1 million in the course of 24 hours last week. Hundreds of thousands of people have quit the former Twitter since Donald Trump’s election victory on 6 November.The catalyst is X’s owner, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who transformed the social media site and used it as a megaphone to blast Trump into the White House.The US president-elect said Musk would head the new Department of Government Efficiency, the acronym for which, Doge, is a pun on the dog internet meme and the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, started as a joke by its creators, which jumped in value after Musk dubbed it “the people’s cypto” in 2021.Musk now sits at the heart of the US government, yet requires no Senate approval for his actions and can continue to work in the private sector. He’s allowed to keep X and his 204 million followers, as well as head his electric car company Tesla and rocket company SpaceX. For the first time in history, a big tech billionaire is now shaping democracy not just indirectly, via his media, but directly.“I’m not aware of any precedent for this approach,” said Rob Enderle, president of the technology analyst firm Enderle, who has worked with companies including Microsoft, Sony and Dell.View image in fullscreenAs recently as 2022, Musk tweeted that “for Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” He tweeted that “Trump would be 82 at end of his term, which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.”Months later, when Musk bought Twitter for $44bn, he fired content moderators and charged for account verification, which meant people could buy influence. Twitter was rebranded to X, shed millions of users and reinstated Trumps’s account, suspended after the White House insurrection in January 2021.The proliferation on X of alt-right diatribe, hate speech and bots, as well as Musk’s own clash with the UK government during the riots in August, have led to mounting disquiet among X users. The Guardian and Observer announced last week that their presence on the site was now untenable and they would no longer post. Stephen King, the author, left, saying it had become “too toxic”. Oscar-winners Barbra Streisand and Jamie Lee Curtis have departed the platform.“X has become effectively Truth Social premium,” said Mark Carrigan, author of Social Media for Academics, referring to Trump’s hard-right social media platform. And the talk in technology circles is that Trump’s Truth Social could be folded into X.If that happens, whose interests take priority? Would Musk suppress criticism of the authoritarian governments he does business with, or promote it? In the Donald and Elon media show, who is the puppet or paymaster?“If that happens, it will be the ultimate amplification machine for Trump’s ideas – a political super-app masquerading as social media,” said James Kirkham of Iconic, which advises brands including Uber and EA Sports on digital strategies. “Forget Facebook or Fox News; the true heart of the GOP’s digital strategy could be X.”“I’m expecting X and Truth Social to merge,” said Enderle. “But this could be one of the efforts that will come between Musk and Trump, given how overvalued Truth Social now is.”The bromance between the world’s two biggest egos is mutually beneficial only as long as the two transactional, power-hungry and impulsive men play nice. Trump is hawkish on China, one of Tesla’s most lucrative markets. Trump essentially campaigned against electric car manufacturing. Trump is protectionist; Musk opposes tariffs. On climate change, they are opposed.Jonathan Monten, a political science professor at UCL, is sceptical over the durability of their relationship.“Musk’s use to Trump was both private money and providing a platform, or using a platform, to a more favourable pro-Trump line,” he said.“It’s unclear what continued purpose or use Musk actually has to him. Yes, it’s sort of this celebrity story, but that’s Trump’s brand. He has one celebrity story today and tomorrow we’ll have another.”The early 2010s were the halcyon days of Twitter when activists, artists, lawyers, academics, policymakers, journalists and specialists of every flavour could connect, share information, exchange ideas and follow events in real time.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenIt would be easy to portray Musk as the bogeyman, but some argue that it was TikTok and the advent of the algorithmic timeline that fundamentally destroyed Twitter. As social media began optimising for scale and for profit at the expense of user experience, algorithms prioritised the “best” content – the content that shouted loudest or was most specifically tailored to users. Curated accounts to follow, and “most recent” content, fell by the wayside.“As much as I think Musk has acted in harmful ways, I think part of this is about the logic of social media platforms as they evolve,” said Carrigan. “The consequences of an advertising-based model incentivise certain ways of organising the platform that create negative effects.”Bluesky, which became the most popular app on the app store on Friday, is the choice for X refugees, although its 16 million users pale in insignificance compared to Meta’s Threads, which reported reaching 275 million monthly active users, and X with about 317 million..View image in fullscreenFor some tech nerds, the X-odus is not something to mourn, but could herald the era of decentralised social networks they have been dreaming of known as the “Fediverse”.Advocates of the “Fediverse” argue that there should be one account for any social media network in the same way that Gmail accounts can email any email addresses, or mobile numbers call users on any other network.In walling off social networks so users can’t leave, the platform has the power. Instead, newer social networks including Bluesky are being built on “ecosystems” that enable them to interconnect.No one knows what will happen to X, with predictions ranging from collapse, to flipping to an anti-Trump platform if Musk and the president lock horns, to becoming a training ground for Musk’s xAI venture. AI could gobble up social media, and xAI is valued at $40bn – almost the price Musk paid for Twitter. More

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      How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world | Carole Cadwalladr

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      1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan.  Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate.5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.12 Don’t buy the bullshit. A Securities and Exchange judgment found Facebook had lied to two journalists – one of them was me – and Facebook agreed to pay a $100m penalty. If you are a journalist, refuse off the record briefings. Don’t chat on the phone; email. Refuse access interviews. Bullshit exclusives from Goebbels 2.0 will be a stain on your publication for ever.13 Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion14 Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”16 Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter David Davis. Find threads of connection and work from there.17 There is such a thing as truth. There are facts and we can know them. From Tamsin Shaw, professor in philosophy at New York University: “‘Can the sceptic resist the tyrant?’ is one of the oldest questions in political philosophy. We can’t even fully recognise what tyranny is if we let the ruling powers get away with lying to us all.”18 Plan. Silicon Valley doesn’t think in four-year election cycles. Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.19 Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that. More

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      Rightwing settlers in Israel welcome ‘dream team’ of Trump and his hardline appointments

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      Rightwing settlers and extremist nationalist Zionists in Israel have described top officials in Donald Trump’s new administration as a “dream team” which will offer a “unique and special opportunity” to expand Israel’s hold on occupied territory and permanently end any prospect of a Palestinian state.Palestinian groups and leftwing NGOs in Israel have been shocked by Trump’s appointment of outspoken supporters of the projects of far-right Israeli activists and say the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has been emboldened by Trump’s victory.“The series of appointments announced by US president-elect Donald Trump should worry everyone who cares about Israel’s future,” an editorial in the leftwing newspaper Haaretz warned.Since the US election, authorities have pushed ahead with demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which were occupied in 1967.Last week, Palestinian residents of al-Bustan in East Jerusalem were sifting through debris caused by the recent demolition of nine houses by municipal authorities after an Israeli court ruled their construction illegal.Fakhri Abu Diab, a veteran activist who for years has led resistance to efforts to demolish the homes of Palestinian families in al-Bustan, said bulldozers had returned on the day of the US elections to destroy the part of his house left standing by municipal demolition teams earlier this year.Abu Diab, 62, said 40 people, including children, had been left homeless and that 115 homes were now threatened.“Israel has wanted to demolish here for 20 years and are now seizing the opportunity. This is just a way to punish us and make us leave. I am here, where my parents and grandparents were, and will stay here,” Abu Diab said. His wife, Amina, said that with Trump in power there was “nothing to restrain Israel”.The Jerusalem municipality said the buildings were located on land designated as an open public area.The Israeli rights group Ir Amim argued that the true aim of the demolitions was to connect Israeli settler pockets implanted in Palestinian ­neighbourhoods to west Jerusalem and said local authorities had been emboldened by Trump’s win. The demolitions in al-Bustan “could serve as a portent of what is to come”, Ir Amim said.Also last week, a Bedouin village in the Negev desert was demolished to make way for a new Orthodox Jewish community on the orders of Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right national security minister, and 25 Palestinian structures in the West Bank were knocked down, according to the UN.Trump’s picks have surprised even hardliners. The nominee for secretary of state, Republican senator Marco Rubio, has said he opposes a ceasefire in Gaza and believes Israel should destroy “every element” of Hamas, whom he described as “vicious animals”, while Elise Stefanik, proposed as ambassador to the United Nations, has called the UN a “cesspool of antisemitism” for its condemnation of deaths in Gaza.The new US ambassador to Israel is set to be Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who backs the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and has called a two-state solution in Palestine “unworkable”. During a visit to Israel in 2017, Huckabee said: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. There’s no such thing as a settlement – they are communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”Pete Hegseth, the likely defence secretary, is another evangelical Christian who has tattoos of Christian symbols and slogans often associated with the Crusades and the far right.“Israel could never have asked for anything more than this,” said Daniel Luria, a director who speaks for Ateret Cohanim – an NGO which describes its aims as reclaiming and rebuilding a united Jerusalem for the Jewish people, and is behind a number of controversial projects in the city, including the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes to make way for Jewish families or religious students.“There’s no such thing as an Arab country on the land of Israel. The fact that there’s been many attempts over the years to do something different is irrelevant,” Luria said. “So we’ve got a very unique situation now … to really have literally a new Middle East, and readjust everything.”Some rightwing radicals have compared Trump to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who conquered Babylon in 539BC, allowing exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem.Pro-settler parties hold key posts in Israel’s coalition government, the most rightwing the country has known. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and an outspoken advocate of expanded settlements, last week said that 2025 would be “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria”, referring to the West Bank in the biblical terms used by rightwing Israelis and their US supporters, and signalling a hope of annexing the occupied territories.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionExpansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem has surged throughout the war that followed the Hamas attacks into Israel on 7 October, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. More than 43,000 have died in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, also mostly civilians.Several Israeli ministers, including Smotrich, were present at a conference last month which called for the return of Jewish settlements in Gaza.View image in fullscreenHuckabee, who has refused to use any terms other than Judea and Samaria to describe the West Bank, is an enthusiastic supporter of the City of David Foundation, a government-funded archeological park in a Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem. It is run by Elad, an Israeli settler group accused of displacing Palestinian families from Jerusalem by buying Palestinian houses and using controversial laws that let the state take over Palestinian property.An EU report in 2018 said Elad’s projects in parts of East Jerusalem were being used “as a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimise and expand settlements”.The foundation refused to discuss the projects’ support from the Israeli government and overseas.Last week, tourists sat under the olive trees and heard lectures at the City of David information centre, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls.Jack Holford, a 62-year-old retired software engineer visiting Jerusalem with his wife, Debbie, said: “We believe that … God has a plan for Israel and that God said they own the land. We consider ourselves believers and we are part of God’s plan revealed through Israel for the whole world. There are Arabs, Palestinians and Jews and they are all Israelis.”Trump’s first term saw unprecedented steps to support Israel’s territorial claims, including recognising Jerusalem as its capital and moving the US embassy there, and recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights.Pro-settlement activists believe Trump’s picks mean the new administration will go much further.“They’ve spoken about Jews having the right to live everywhere, that it’s impossible to divide [Jerusalem] into two, that you can’t allow hatred and evil on your back doorstep and terror … and that comes from a biblical background … Just like I see King David and Abraham, they see them also,” Luria said. More

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      Second Trump reign could make life ‘a lot harder’ for EU’s far-right leaders

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      In the end Viktor Orbán didn’t, as he’d promised, celebrate Donald Trump’s win with “several bottles of champagne”. He was in Kyrgyzstan, he apologised, “where they have different traditions” – so it was vodka. But it was still a “fantastic result”.“History has accelerated,” Orbán crowed at an EU summit in Budapest last week. “The world is going to change, and change in a quicker way than before. Obviously, it’s a great chance for Hungary to be in a close partnership and alliance with the US.”Hungary’s illiberal prime minister – and the EU’s disrupter-in-chief, lauded by Trump as a “very great leader, a very strong man” – was not the only figure on Europe’s nationalist right to hail the president-elect’s larger-than-expected victory.Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim firebrand whose Freedom party finished first in last year’s elections and is the senior partner in the ruling coalition, also posted his congratulations, jubilantly urging Trump to “never stop, always keep fighting”.Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, commended a “historic friendship” which “will now grow even stronger”, while Alice Weidel of Alternative for Germany (AfD) hailed a defeat for “woke Hollywood”, adding that Trump “is a model for us”.Europe’s fast-advancing far-right parties, in power in eight EU member states and knocking at the doors in more, have long seen in Trump a powerful ally who shares their populist, nation-first, conservative, Eurosceptic and immigration-hostile views.View image in fullscreenBut what can they actually expect to gain from Trump 2.0? For all their enthusiastic words, analysts and diplomats say, Europe’s mini-Trumps will probably not get much – and may even find themselves worse off. What’s more, some appear to realise it.Certainly, there may be some political upside to basking in reflected Trumpian glory. “The coming Trump presidency will most probably embolden Europe’s far right and illiberal actors,” concluded experts at the Centre for European Reform thinktank.“Trump will strengthen far-right parties not just by normalising and amplifying their ideas, but by boosting their electability.” His win legitimises their grievances and rubber-stamps their sovereigntist vision; history seems to be moving their way.Besides Orbán, Meloni, Wilders and Weidel, Europe’s longstanding Trump admirers include Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally (RN), Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico, Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić.They may well be joined after elections next year by Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic, and – with both France and Germany, the EU’s traditional powerhouse, weakened by domestic political crises – their influence is plainly on the rise.Some experts argue selected European far-right leaders could be strengthened personally by Trump’s win: Meloni, for example, has put in the groundwork, praising his brand of politics as a model for Italy and regularly travelling to his rallies.Common views on issues ranging from immigration to abortion, and her flourishing rapport with Elon Musk, could see her become Trump’s “main interlocutor in Europe”, said Lorenzo Castellani of Rome’s Luiss University.Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, expressed much the same ambition for Orbán. “We can have a good hope that Hungarian-American political cooperation will return to its peak form,” he said: Orbán and Trump have “similar thoughts”.But the dynamics are a lot more complicated than that. While Europe’s far-right leaders may align comfortably with Trump in their hostility to immigration and international institutions, there are also significant differences.View image in fullscreenMeloni’s staunch support for Nato and continued international aid to Ukraine in its struggle against Russia’s full-scale invasion, for example, will not be greeted with enthusiasm by the more isolationist voices in the incoming US administration.Similarly, Orbán’s cosy “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China, which Hungary has welcomed with open arms as a key economic partner and foreign investor, is a long way from Trump’s aggressively hardline approach to Beijing.As US Republican Mitch McConnell put it, “when Chinese state enterprise says jump, Hungarian officials ask how high”. Those words “caution against any guarantee of deeper [US-Hungary] collaboration”, foreign policy expert Zsuzsanna Szelényi said.Trump’s promised America first trade policies could also prove complicated to negotiate for Europe’s far-right parties. As members of the EU’s single market, they could not respond individually to US-imposed tariffs and a likely trade war.Le Pen’s lukewarm response to Trump’s second triumph – in marked contrast to her joy at his first in 2016, which she hailed even before he had officially won – reflects widespread concern over the consequences of Trump 2.0 for EU industry and jobs.“Americans have freely chosen their president,” Le Pen said. “This new political era should contribute to the strengthening of bilateral relations and the pursuit of constructive dialogue and cooperation on the international stage.”Her protege, Jordan Bardella, even echoed French president Emmanuel Macron, saying that for “us French and Europeans, this US election should be a wake-up call … an opportunity to rethink our relationship with power and strategic autonomy”.Far-right voters in Europe are far from uncritical of Trump’s brand of politics, polls suggest: a pre-election YouGov poll found, for example, that people who backed Le Pen would rather have Kamala Harris in the White House than Trump.View image in fullscreen“Trump’s attitude towards Europe … will be harmful to far-right parties’ core electorate – think inflation, de-industrialisation, job losses,” said Catherine Fieschi of the European University Institute. “Trump is bad news for them.”The idea that Trump himself “gives a damn about building relationships with these people strikes me as very very unlikely”, Fieschi added. “He will think about them on a case-by-case basis, and see whether he can extract something.”Faced with the concrete threats to the continent posed by a second Trump presidency that promises to be even more radical than the first, the EU that Europe’s far-right parties have so long reviled may start to look a little less unattractive.Orbán may be strong at home, said Szelényi, “but Hungary is small, deeply integrated in the EU, and its people like being Europeans. The country’s progress and success is far more dependent on the success of the EU than on anything else.”Like other far-right leaders, said Catherine de Vries of Bocconi University in Milan, Orbán has “tried to play both sides, be strategically ambiguous. The thing about Trump is, he’s not going to let you do that. He’ll force you to make a choice.”Europe’s populists will continue to “say Trumpian things, especially if they have an election coming up”, De Vries said. “But when push really comes to shove – Europe’s security in Trump’s hands, Nato not guaranteed – then maybe quite a few are going to say, maybe we need to work on this in Europe.”Far from uniting Europe’s far right in triumph, Trump’s return could actually deepen the conflicts between them. Ultimately, concluded Fieschi, Trump “is going to make the lives of Europe’s far-right leaders, as Eurosceptics, a lot harder. They’re going to be caught between staying Eurosceptic, lining up with Trump and hurting their base – or lining up with the EU, shedding their specificity and losing voters. They’ve been ‘out-populist-ed.’”Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida in Rome More

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      Kevin Rudd will remain as Australia’s ambassador to US, Anthony Albanese says

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      Anthony Albanese says Kevin Rudd will remain as Australia’s ambassador to Washington despite the apparent disquiet about Rudd’s past commentary on president-elect Donald Trump among some in Trump’s inner circle.Albanese is digging in against media speculation that Trump could demand Rudd’s withdrawal or that others in his administration could make the ambassador’s position untenable, insisting he will stay in the job no matter what.“That’s what we’d expect,” he told ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.

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      “He’s Australia’s appointment,” Albanese said, speaking from the Apec summit in Peru. “And it says something about the importance of the United States that we have appointed a former prime minister. That’s a sign of how seriously we take this relationship, which is a relationship between our peoples based upon our common values.”Albanese declined to say whether Rudd should apologise for past remarks, which included social media posts calling him “the most destructive president in history” and a 2021 interview in which he described Trump in a 2021 interview as “the village idiot” and “not a leading intellectual force”.“We’re focused on the future, and I’m sure President Trump will be as well, and that is the important thing,” Albanese said.The emergence last week of video of the 2021 remarks this week coincided with a social media post from Trump’s now newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, depicting sand running through an hourglass, above a screenshot of the congratulatory message Rudd had issued about Trump’s election win.But Albanese said Rudd had been doing “a terrific job” and would continue in the role.He praised the former prime minister’s work building bipartisan relationships and boosting Australia’s ties in the US capital.“Ambassador, Rudd has been working with people across the political spectrum. He attended both the Republican and the Democrat national conventions and engaged with people across the board. I know that he was in regular contact with the head of the Republican campaign committee as well, as well as the Democrats.”In a separate interview with Sky News, also from Peru, Albanese said his 10-minute congratulatory phone conversation with Trump had been “very constructive and positive” and Rudd was not mentioned.“He’s Australia’s ambassador to Washington, and he’s doing a very important job,” Albanese said. “The work that he did with Aukus was a difficult task to get that through the Congress and the Senate. But when I was there, one of the things that struck me was just how extensive the links that Kevin Rudd had developed at the US, Congress and the Senate were.” More

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      Trump picks oil and gas industry CEO Chris Wright as next energy secretary

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday that Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry executive and a staunch defender of fossil fuel use, would be his pick to lead the US Department of Energy.Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield services firm based in Denver, Colorado. He is expected to support Trump’s plan to maximize production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost generation of electricity, demand for which is rising for the first time in decades.He is also likely to share Trump’s opposition to global cooperation on fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year.Wright, who does not have any political experience, has written extensively on the need for more fossil fuel production to lift people out of poverty.He has stood out among oil and gas executives for his freewheeling style, and describes himself as a tech nerd.Wright made a media splash in 2019 when he drank fracking fluid on camera to demonstrate it was not dangerous.US oil output hit the highest level any country has ever produced under Biden, and it is uncertain how much Wright and the incoming administration could boost that.Most drilling decisions are driven by private companies working on land not owned by the federal government.The Department of Energy handles US energy diplomacy, administers the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – which Trump has said he wants to replenish – and runs grant and loan programs to advance energy technologies, such as the Loan Programs Office.The secretary also oversees the aging US nuclear weapons complex, nuclear energy waste disposal and 17 national labs.If confirmed by the Senate, Wright will replace Jennifer Granholm, a supporter of electric vehicles and emerging energy sources like geothermal power, and a backer of carbon-free wind, solar and nuclear energy.Wright will also likely be involved in the permitting of electricity transmission and the expansion of nuclear power, an energy source that is popular with both Republicans and Democrats but which is expensive and complicated to permit.Power demand in the United States is surging for the first time in two decades amid growth in artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies.Trump also announced on Saturday that he had picked one of his personal attorneys, Will Scharf, to serve as his White House staff secretary. Scharf is a former federal prosecutor who was a member of Trump’s legal team in his successful attempt to get broad immunity from prosecution from the supreme court.Writing on Twitter the day after Trump’s election, Scharf greeted the news that Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted the former president for his attempt to subvert the 2020 election, was winding down the Trump case and planned to resign with the words, “Bye Jack.” More