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      Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards? | Alexander Hurst

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      “Courage is seeking the truth and speaking it,” Jean Jaurès, the French philosopher and Socialist party leader, told a group of high school students in 1903. “It is not yielding to the law of the triumphant lie as it passes, and not echoing, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, mindless applause and fanatical jeering.”When the first world war reared its ugly, pointless head, Jaurès refused to give in to mindless fanaticism and attempted to coordinate a Franco-German general strike to stop the rush to war. In 1914, he paid for those efforts with his life when a 29-year-old French nationalist shot him twice in the back.Courage among ordinary people is not in short supply. The doctors and humanitarian workers who rush to war zones and refugee camps to care for those who need it. Rümeysa Öztürk, the PhD student who was arrested in the US for voicing an opinion against the relentless bombing of Gaza. Israeli conscientious objectors and an increasing number of other refuseniks. The protesters in Tbilisi, Belgrade and Istanbul who have repeatedly faced down their governments’ attempts at repression.Examples of political courage from those in power, though? These feel less numerous. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has displayed it endlessly. French judges did too, when they upheld the rule of law – which in normal times would simply be doing their duty, but in our times meant facing death threats. Pope Francis pushed reforms of the Catholic church to make it more compassionate and inclusive, and didn’t veer from them. He didn’t “change strategy” when attendance failed to pick up, because he didn’t have a strategy – he was simply doing what was right.View image in fullscreenOn the other hand, we’ve witnessed so many high-profile examples of political cowardice in recent months that I can only talk about them in broad categories. The US supreme court justices who, last summer, bent over backwards to create a monarchical presidency with impunity to break the law as it desires. The law firms that have offered up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of pro bono work to an administration busy dismantling the rule of law.The CEOs and companies that have turned on the money tap and tripped over themselves to cancel inclusion initiatives to placate a president who is tanking their share prices. An almost comically conspicuous level of grift, alleged corruption and insider trading. Congressional Republicans who have sold out their country’s constitutional principles in order to avoid primaries – or perhaps, as the senator Lisa Murkowski put it, because “we are all afraid … because retaliation is real”.What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?Left with basically no other choice, Harvard University finally made the decision to oppose the Trump administration’s outrageous demands. That is not to downplay the moral courage in the decision; other universities might have and did make different choices when they were in the same bind. As a result of Harvard’s stand, hundreds of college and university presidents have decided that sticking together is better than falling one by one.But perhaps in this moment, Harvard and other elite schools like it might take the opportunity to reflect on exactly what kind of virtues they have been instilling in their students. For years, nearly half of Harvard’s graduates have stepped straight from campus into roles at consulting firms and investment banks. It’s disheartening but perhaps not surprising, given that according to its newspaper, the Crimson, for the past four decades far more first-years have been concerned with “being well-off financially” than with “developing a meaningful life philosophy”.When the primary metric becomes “success” in amassing something – money, followers, territory, votes – society loses its moral centre. As Pankaj Mishra wrote in his 2017 book, Age of Anger, part of the crisis of the current moment is that commercial society has unleashed individuals who are unmoored from each other or from some greater social fabric.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt may sound quaint, almost conservative, to denounce a breakdown in society’s engagement with morality in public life. But I reject that. Without an ability to think and speak in real moral language, we end up in a place where there is no more shame in hypocrisy, no dishonour in rapacious greed; where if something is true or false matters less than how many people believe it. We end up in a place where the world’s wealthiest man has overseen a series of devastating aid cuts that will indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of children and sentence millions more to death from disease. There is an appropriate descriptive word for that: the word is evil.Much of the media – US media, most certainly – have a lot to answer for in the ways that they have oriented public conversation. Far too frequently, they have approached politics primarily as a horse race. What does this or that mean for a candidate’s electoral chances? How will it play out in the polls? Who is up, who is down? Who agrees, who disagrees, and what is each party saying about the other? What the media don’t like to do, because it’s far more difficult and far riskier, is to talk about whether the policies being proposed and the decisions being taken are morally commendable, just, honourable, courageous.A focus on speaking the truth, of the kind that Jaurès extolled, opens wide other doors. Among them, the ability to move from a political question – what do we want? – to a more courageous one: is this what we should want?

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist

      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’s massive tax and spending bill clears hurdle to advance to House vote in coming hours

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      The Republican-controlled House of Representatives will attempt to pass President Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending bill in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, following weeks of intra-party divisions of how deeply to cut spending.The bill cleared an important procedural hurdle in the House on Wednesday evening, when a gatekeeper committee approved the measure and set up a floor vote for passage to occur within hours. Shortly before midnight in Washington, the full House reconvened to consider Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill”, opening the floor for debate and a series of procedural votes.Republicans have been deeply divided over the bill, which would extend Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts, create new breaks for tipped income and auto loans, end many green-energy subsidies and boost spending on the military and immigration enforcement.It would pay for those changes by tightening eligibility for food and health programs that serve millions of low-income Americans.The nonpartisan congressional Budget Office estimates the bill will add $3.8tr to the US’s $36.2tr in debt over the next decade.The House Rules Committee voted 8 to 4 to advance the bill late on Wednesday after a marathon session that lasted nearly 22 hours. Republican leaders later scheduled two votes, one to begin debate and a second to pass the bill, before sunrise on Thursday.House passage would set the stage for weeks of debate in the Republican-led Senate.A handful of party hardliners, angry that the bill did not contain more spending cuts, met with Trump and house speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday, a day after Trump’s visit to the Capitol failed to unify the narrow 220-212 majority.Johnson expressed confidence that the bill would pass the House. “I believe we are going to land this airplane,” he told reporters.Representative Dusty Johnson, who leads the chamber’s Main Street Caucus, said he believed the speaker had reached a deal that could pass the House.“The speaker has been working with a broad cross section of the conference,” he told reporters. “We have every expectation, the speaker has every expectation, that we will get there.”Credit rating firm Moody’s last week stripped the US government of its top-tier credit rating, citing the nation’s growing debt. US stocks fell on Wednesday amid investor concern about the mounting debt.The Medicaid health program for low-income households had proved to be a major sticking point, with fiscal hawks pushing for cuts to partly offset the cost of the bill’s tax components, which moderate Republicans say would hurt voters whose support they will need in the 2026 midterm congressional elections.The rules committee approved an overall amendment package containing deals between Johnson and various Republican factions.The revisions included imposing work requirements for the Medicaid program at the end of 2026, two years earlier than previously planned. It also penalized states that expand Medicaid in the future and raised the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal income taxes.The amendment package also exempted firearm silencers from registration requirements under the National Firearms Act and eliminated a $200 tax on the firearm accessories, changes demanded by Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia.Democrats railed against the legislation.“Republicans are kicking millions of Americans off their healthcare and (food) benefits in order to finance tax cuts that will help billionaires,” said Representative Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee.“Cutting benefits means families will go hungry, farmers will suffer and health care costs will go up,” he said.Trump visited Republican lawmakers at the Capitol on Tuesday to try to persuade holdouts to get in line on what he calls a “big, beautiful bill.”Johnson has little room for error on the House floor, as a handful of Republican “no” votes could scuttle the bill.Republican lawmakers have said they do not believe the nonpartisan analysts’ projections and accused Moody’s of deliberately timing its downgrade last Friday to try to block the bill’s passage.Lawmakers must act to address the debt limit by this summer or risk triggering a devastating default.“Deficits aside, this bill is ugly because it is ultimately a betrayal of the contract that we have made with the American people, and especially to our babies and to our working people,” said Democratic Representative Gwen Moore. More

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      Trump’s ‘white genocide’ claims ignore the reality of life and crime in South Africa

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      It was an ambush crafted straight from a reality-TV playbook. The Oval Office meeting with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, started with exchanges of pleasantries, before Donald Trump shouted “turn the lights down” and a video was played to support his false claims that white South African farmers are being murdered for their race.Ramaphosa came prepared with champion white South African golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, whom the golf-mad Trump referred to as “friends”, as well as South Africa’s richest person, Johann Rupert.Ramaphosa, who led the African National Congress (ANC) party’s delegation in the talks that ended apartheid white-minority rule three decades ago, needed to play his strongest cards.In February, Trump signed an executive order cutting aid to South Africa, accusing it of “unjust racial discrimination” against the white Afrikaner minority, which ruled the country during apartheid. The order criticised a South African law allowing land expropriation in limited circumstances and set up a program to bring Afrikaners to the US as refugees. The first group arrived earlier this month.South African media had speculated whether Ramaphosa was walking into a televised trap, like Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had just a few months before.The White House video was likely a surprise for the South Africans. It spliced together clips of Julius Malema, the leader of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) opposition party, saying “We are going to occupy land” and “We must never be scared to kill”, before singing the controversial Kill the Boer song (“Boer” is another name for Afrikaners and means “farmer” in Afrikaans).Malema, whose populism is designed to shock – and whose EFF won just 9.5% of the vote in South Africa’s 2024 election – will probably be thrilled with the attention, after being buoyed up by South African courts ruling that Kill the Boer is not meant to be taken literally.Former South African president Jacob Zuma, now leading his own opposition party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), also featured in the video, singing in Zulu: “We are going to shoot them. They are going to run.”The video ended with a drone shot of white crosses lining a road where vehicles were queued. Trump said they were paying respects to more than 1,000 murdered white farmers. Ramaphosa said he had never seen the video, which South African-born billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk reshared after it was posted on X in March.Trump then whipped out a sheaf of printed-out news articles, intoning, “Death … death … death,” before handing it over to Ramaphosa.It was not immediately clear where the white crosses were filmed or even if the footage is real. The Whitkruis Monument is a memorial to dead South African farmers, but the crosses are clustered on a hillside on private land.While there have been farm murders involving horrific violence, killers interviewed in jail told Rudolph Zinn, a University of Limpopo professor, that they targeted victims of all races for cash and valuables. In the last quarter of 2024, South African police recorded 12 murders on farms, including Black-owned smallholder plots, out of almost 7,000 murders across the country.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSouth Africa’s agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, the Afrikaner leader of the ANC’s main rival, the Democratic Alliance – which gets the bulk of its support from white South Africans – said most farmers wanted to stay in South Africa. He also defended the DA’s coalition with the ANC to keep out the “rabble” EFF and MK parties.The two golfers’ words were perhaps less helpful. Els was cryptic: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Goosen spoke of his brother’s “constant battle” with people trying to burn down and take away his farm.However, their presence could snap Trump out of attack mode. “I respect champions,” he said. “I think the country is very lucky. They really wanted to be here, these two, they could have been on a beautiful fairway.”South Africa’s most potent defender was Rupert, whose luxury goods conglomerate Richemont owns Cartier. Referring to Malema and Zuma, he said: “I’m their No 1 target.”Rupert pointed out that all South Africans are targets of crime. He said how much his wife loved JD Vance’s autobiography and begged for Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service at police stations.It remains to be seen, though, whether a fellow billionaire and a few rounds with South Africa’s finest golfers will be enough to mollify Trump and persuade him to attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg in November. More

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      Maga Catholics are on a collision course with Leo XIV. They have good reason to fear him | Julian Coman

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      In the outer reaches of the Magasphere, it would be fair to say the advent of the first pope from the US has not been greeted with unbridled enthusiasm. Take Laura Loomer, the thirtysomething influencer and conspiracy theorist, whose verdict on Leo XIV was as instant as it was theologically uninformed: “Anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.” Also doing the rounds on X was a short summary of Leo’s supposed transgressions before ascending to St Peter’s chair: “Trashed Trump, trashed Vance, trashed border enforcement, endorsed DREAMer-style illegal immigration, repeatedly praised and honored George Floyd, and endorsed a Democrat senator’s call for more gun control.”So far, so tedious. The comic-book casting of the new pope as a globalist villain in the US culture wars is traceable back to his predecessor’s impact on liberal opinion a decade ago. Pope Francis’s sometimes lonely championing of progressive causes, such as the rights of migrants, gave him a kind of liberal celebrity and led Time magazine to name him “person of the year” in 2013. Pope Leo, born in Chicago, has been pre-emptively caricatured by much of the Maga right as a continuity pontiff who will, in effect, front up the religious wing of the Democratic party.Leaving the simplistic conflation of religious perspective and political positioning aside, the truth is far more interesting than that. It may also be more challenging for Catholic Maga luminaries such as the vice-president, JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump’s sometime adviser Steve Bannon if they are serious about their faith.Bannon and Vance – a Catholic convert – are representatives of a traditionalist movement in the church, which sought to undermine Francis’s papacy at every turn and has become a kind of theological vanguard for the “America first” era. In January, Vance notoriously invoked St Augustine to justify the Trump administration’s decision to cut international aid and impose a brutal immigration crackdown. One of Francis’s last acts was to refute the vice-president’s reduction of the Augustinian concept of neighbourly love to a version of “charity begins at home” (though delivering a papal rebuke was not enough to spare him from a visit from Vance the day before he died).But it would be too easy (and too reminiscent of their own performatively aggressive approach) to simply dismiss the Maga Catholics as theologically beyond the pale. Many Catholics might, for example, legitimately sympathise with Bannon’s analysis of the neglect of working-class interests in 21st-century western liberal democracies. The deepening inequality and corrosive individualism of our times is seriously at odds with Catholic social teaching, which has historically promoted the dignity of labour, social solidarity and a just wage.The problem is that, in the absence of a leftwing economic populism to challenge the injustices of the globalised era, a rightwing version has filled the gap in the US and beyond. Its form of solidarity is nationalistic and insular, its cultural outlook is xenophobic and its political style is authoritarian and deliberately confrontational. The Maga critique of “globalism” is not limited to the neoliberal economic world order, also condemned by the last three popes; it extends to a repudiation of the foundational Catholic commitment to universality, expressed through compassion for the stranger and a sense of the world as a shared common home.Enter Pope Leo. The most geographically diverse conclave in church history was surely aware that in choosing an American to succeed Francis, it was setting up a potential showdown between the Vatican and Trumpian nationalism. The new pope’s choice of name is a sign that he recognises the scale and the novelty of the challenge that the rightwing populist turn represents.The last Leo, a patrician Italian elected to the papacy in 1878, made it his mission to confront the ruthless laissez-faire economics unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the emerging Marxist response to its cruelties. In Rerum Novarum, his groundbreaking 1891 papal encyclical, Leo XIII laid out swingeing criticisms of the greed that placed profit before people and allowed extreme divides in wealth to undermine the common good. At the same time, in terms that were to prove tragically prescient, he identified in early communist movements a dangerous idolatry of the state and a lack of respect for individual autonomy and rights.Last weekend, before his first mass in St Peter’s Square, Leo XIV explicitly set himself the task of following in his 19th-century predecessor’s footsteps. That would mean, he told a Rome conference, addressing “the dramatic nature of our own age, marked by wars, climate change, growing inequalities, forced and contested migration, stigmatised poverty, disruptive technological innovations, job insecurity and precarious labour rights”.The daunting length of that list, and the interlocking, global nature of its crises, should be viewed as an early critique of the Maga worldview. In Leo XIII’s day, the burgeoning Marxist movement incubated a totalitarian strain that would go viral in the 20th century. The success of Trumpian nationalism is also in part a response to the depredations of capitalism, this time in the context of globalisation. But its authoritarian evangelists have hijacked the working-class cause to inflict new injustices on migrant “invaders” and have lost sight of the need for global cooperation to prevent an environmental catastrophe that threatens the poor most of all. The strategy has proved electorally astute. But as Leo will surely make clear, it has nothing to do with Catholicism.In a column published at the weekend, the American Catholic commentator Sohrab Ahmari referenced a sermon by Leo from last year, in which the future pope acknowledged that the issue of migration “is a huge problem, and it’s a problem worldwide” that needed to be solved. This recognition, Ahmari suggested, could at least open up the possibility of fruitful future dialogue with the Maga Catholics in and around the White House.He failed, however, to quote the sermon’s next passage: “Every one of us, whether we were born in the United States of America or on the North Pole, we are all given the gift of being created in the image and likeness of God, and the day we forget that is the day we forget who we are.” Words for Vance and Rubio, who met Leo after Sunday’s inaugural mass in Rome, to ponder.

      Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor More

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      Trump officials deported Vietnamese and Burmese migrants to South Sudan, say lawyers

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      Immigrant rights advocates have accused the Trump administration of deporting about a dozen migrants from countries including Myanmar and Vietnam to South Sudan in violation of a court order, and asked a judge to order their return.The advocates made the request in a motion directed to a federal judge in Boston who had barred the Trump administration from swiftly deporting migrants to countries other than their own without first hearing any concerns they had that they might be tortured or persecuted if sent there.Lawyers for a group of migrants pursuing the class action lawsuit before US district judge Brian Murphy said they learned that nearly a dozen migrants held at a detention facility in Texas were flown to South Sudan on Tuesday morning.Those migrants included an individual from Myanmar whose lawyer received an email on Monday from an official with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing the attorney of the intent to deport his client to South Sudan.The migrant’s lawyers said they learned their client had been flown to South Sudan on Tuesday morning.The spouse of a Vietnamese man who was held at the same detention center in Texas emailed his lawyer, meanwhile, saying he and 10 other individuals were deported as well, according to the motion.The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSouth Sudan, the world’s youngest country, gained independence from Sudan in 2011, and has since struggled with armed conflict and poverty. Between 2013 and 2018, fighting between factions loyal to the current president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, and his vice-president, Riek Machar, killed nearly 400,000 people. More

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      Trump visits Capitol to urge House Republicans to pass ‘big, beautiful bill’

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      Donald Trump traveled to the Capitol on Tuesday to insist that the fractious House Republican majority set aside their differences and pass his wide-ranging bill to enact his taxation and immigration priorities.In a speech to a closed-door meeting of Republican lawmakers in Congress’s lower chamber, the president pushed representatives from districts in blue states to drop their demands for a bigger State and Local Tax (Salt) deduction, and also sought to assuage moderates concerned that the legislation, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, would hobble the Medicaid health insurance program.“I think we have unbelievable unity. I think we’re going to get everything we want, and I think we’re going to have a great victory,” Trump said as he left the meeting.But it is unclear if the president’s exhortations had the intended effect ahead of the Monday deadline that House speaker Mike Johnson has set to get the bill passed through the chamber, which Republicans control by a mere three votes. Following his meeting, at least one key lawmaker said he remained opposed to the bill as written, while others announced no changes to their position.“As it stands right now, I do not support the bill,” said New York congressman Mike Lawler, one of the Republicans representing districts in Democratic-led states that are demanding a larger Salt deduction.The next test of the bill’s prospects is scheduled for 1am on Wednesday, when the rules committee convenes for a procedural vote that, if successful, clears the way for consideration of the measure by the full House of Representatives.The nearly 1,100-page legislation is Trump’s top priority in Congress, and would codify several of his campaign promises, including making permanent or extending tax cuts enacted during his first term, temporarily ending the taxation of tips and overtime and paying for a wall along the border with Mexico and the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.To offset its costs, House Republicans have approved slashing federal safety net programs like Medicaid, which covers poor and low income Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap). But even with those cuts, the bill is estimated to cost $3.8tn through 2034, rankling rightwing fiscal hardliners who want to see the measure reduce the government’s large budget deficit.Johnson and other Republican leaders have spent weeks trying to square their demands with the blue-state Republicans and moderates wary of slashing safety net programs. As he arrived at the Capitol on Tuesday morning, Trump quickly made it known who he favored in the negotiations, insisting that “we’re not touching” Medicaid and that cuts would only hit “waste, fraud and abuse”.While Salt taxes were once fully deductible on federal returns, the tax cuts Trump signed in 2017, imposed a $10,000 cap . The president said he opposed increasing the deduction, because “we don’t want to benefit Democrat governors.”At his meeting with lawmakers, “he was emphatic, we need to quit screwing around. That was the clear message. You all have tinkered enough, it is time to land the plane,” South Dakota congressman Dusty Johnson told reporters.“Ninety-eight percent of that conference is ready to go. They were enthused. They were pumped up by the president, and I think with the holdouts, he did move them. I don’t know that we are there yet, but that was a hugely impactful meeting.”Under the bill, Medicaid would receive a $715bn budget reduction, mostly by imposing work requirements on recipients. After the meeting, Don Bacon, a Nebraska moderate who had warned against cutting Medicaid too deeply, signaled approval of the bill, saying: “We did as well as we could do.”But David Valadao, whose central California district has one of the large shares of Medicaid recipients nationwide, said he was “very concerned” about the impact of the cuts.The Democratic minority is largely powerless to stop the bill from advancing in the House, and the GOP’s use of the budget reconciliation procedure means the bill cannot be blocked by a filibuster in the Senate. Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and James McGovern, the ranking member on the rules committee, called for the panel’s consideration of the bill to be rescheduled, noting it is currently set to take place “during the dead of night”.“It is deeply troubling that you would attempt to jam this legislation down the throats of the American people. What else are you hiding? It is imperative that you immediately reschedule the meeting so that it may be debated in the light of day,” they wrote in a letter to Johnson and the rules committee’s Republican chair.House GOP leaders cast the president’s visit as a sign to their members that it was time to stop quibbling.Majority leader Steve Scalise told a press conference after Trump departed: “President Trump had a strong and clear message to a packed House Republican conference, and that is, after months of long, intense discussions over really important differences and issues, this One Big, Beautiful Bill has come through the committee process, and it’s time to end the negotiations, unify behind this bill and get it passed on to the Senate.”Yet it was plain that there are kinks left to iron out. Johnson declined to take questions at the press conference, saying he had to leave to “gather up the small subgroups in the House Republican Conference and tie up the remaining loose ends. I’m very confident that we’ll be able to do that.” More

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      Rubio clashes with Democrats over decision to admit white South Africans

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      Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has defended the Trump administration’s controversial decision to admit 59 Afrikaners from South Africa as refugees after Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, claimed they were getting preferential treatment because they were white.Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, challenged Rubio to justify prioritising the Afrikaners while cancelling long-standing refugee programmes for other groups that have been more documented as victims of conflict or persecution.The clash between the two men was Rubio’s most combative exchange in his first appearance before the Senate foreign relations committee since his unanimous approval by senators in confirmation hearing in January.It came a day before South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was due to meet Donald Trump at the White House in an encounter that promises to be highly charged thanks to the backdrop surrounding the incoming Afrikaners.“Right now, the US refugee program allows a special program for Afrikaner farmers, the first group of whom arrived at Dulles airport in Virginia not long ago, while shutting off the refugee program for everyone else,” said Kaine, who was a candidate for vice-president alongside Clinton in her unsuccessful 2016 presidential election campaign against Trump. “Do you think Afrikaner farmers are the most persecuted group in the world?”In response, Rubio said: “I think those 49 people that came surely felt they were persecuted, and they’ve passed … every sort of check mark that had to be checked off in terms of meeting their requirements for that. They live in a country where farms are taken, the land is taken, on a racial basis.”Trump has falsely asserted that white farmers in South Africa are undergoing a “genocide” and deserving of special status. By contrast, he suspended the US’s refugee resettlement programme on his first day in office in January, in effect stranding 100,000 people previously approved for resettlement.Kaine asked why Afrikaners were more important than the Uyghurs or Rohingyas, who have faced intense persecution in China and Myanmar respectively, and also cited the cases of political dissidents in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, as well as Afghans under the Taliban.“The problem we face there is the volume problem,” Rubio said. “If you look at all the persecuted people of the world, it’s millions of people. They can’t all come here.”Kaine called the claims of persecution against Afrikaner farmers “completely specious” and pointed to the existence of an Afrikaner minister in South Africa’s coalition government.He also contrasted the refugee designation of Afrikaners to the absence of such a programme for the country’s Black majority during the apartheid era.“There never has there been a special programme for Africans to come in as refugees to the United States,” Kaine said, pointing out that special designations were allowed for people being persecuted for religions reasons under communist regimes.Referring to the US statutory standard of recognising a refugee claim as being a “well-justified fear of persecution”, Kaine asked: “Should that be applied in an even-handed way? For example, should we say if you’re persecuted on the grounds of your religion, we’ll let you in if you’re a Christian but not a Muslim?”Rubio replied that US foreign policy did not require even-handedness, adding: “The United States has a right to allow into this country and prioritise allowance of who they want to allow to come in. We’re going to prioritise people coming into our country on the basis of what’s in the interests of this country. That’s a small number of people that are coming.”Kaine responded: “So you have a different standard based on the color of somebody’s skin. Would that be acceptable?”Rubio replied: “You’re the one talking about the colour of their skin, not me.”Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen said he regretted confirming Rubio as secretary of state, after recalling that the two had spent more than a decade working together in Congress, and accusing him of “making a mockery” of the US asylum system.Van Hollen echoed Kaine, drawing attention to the decision to reject refugees from war-torn countries in Africa and Asia while granting asylum status to white Afrikaners, which Van Hollen said was turning the US’s refugee process into a system of “global apartheid”.“You try to block the admission of people who have already been approved as refugees, while making bogus claims to justify such status to Afrikaners. You’ve made a mockery of our country’s refugee process turning it into a system of global apartheid,” Van Hollen said.More than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system that enshrined white minority rule, white South Africans typically own 20 times more wealth than their Black compatriots, according to an article in the Review of Black Economy.Unemployment among Black South Africans currently runs at 46.1%, compared to 9.2% for white South Africans.According to the 2022 census, white people account for 7% of South Africa’s population of 63 million, while Black people account for 81%.Faisal Ali contributed additional reporting More

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      Ron DeSantis’s fall from grace: ‘He’s completely crashed to the ground’

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      These are challenging days for Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who would have been king. Barely two and a half years since his landslide re-election and anointment as “DeFuture” of the Republican party in a fawning New York Post cover, he stands isolated from the national political stage, feuding with his once blindingly loyal Florida legislature, and limping towards the finish line of his second term with an uncertain pathway beyond.It has been, in the view of many analysts, a fall of stunning velocity and magnitude. And while few are willing to completely rule out a comeback for a 46-year-old politician who was the darling of the Republican hard right until he dared to challenge Donald Trump for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, it is also clear that everything has changed.“He’s completely crashed to the ground at this point and is certainly being treated like a more standard, average governor now,” said Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.“He’s lost the ability to push things through. He’s lost that luster he had that at one time seemed like he could do no wrong in Republican conservative circles. He’s definitely come back down to earth and some of it is his own doing because if you govern with an autocratic style, that doesn’t usually make you a lot of allies.”DeSantis’s once vise-like grip on Florida’s lawmakers has weakened, replaced by open dissent, bitter hostility and a hurling of slurs over a number of issues as the two Republican dominated legislative chambers try to reverse six years of passivity and reestablish themselves as a co-equal branch of government.DeSantis, in the words of Florida’s Republican House speaker, Daniel Perez, has begun to tell “lies and stories that never happened”, and has become increasingly prone to “temper tantrums”.The governor, meanwhile, hit back at what he sees as a “pathetic” agenda being pursued by the majority. He has also lashed out at their investigation of a charity scandal enveloping his wife, Casey DeSantis, as she mulls whether to run in next year’s election to succeed him when he is termed out of office in January 2027.Some Republicans, including Perez, want to know how $10m of a $67m legal settlement intended for Florida taxpayers ended up channeled through Hope Florida, a non-profit that Casey DeSantis founded, to political action committees operated by her husband’s allies to help quash ballot amendments last year on abortion and marijuana.“At one point Casey looked like she was going to be the heir apparent to Ron DeSantis and she was going to run, and he certainly seemed like he was trying to position her to do so,” Jewett said.“That would extend his legacy and help keep him around for some more years, he can be the first husband and people would say he’s an equal partner or whatever. That would take away some of his lame-duck status.”It is that drift towards political irrelevance, particularly on the national stage, that stings DeSantis the most, some analysts believe.If events had transpired differently, he could be sitting in the White House. Instead, the influence of the one-time prince of Maga (Trump’s make America great again movement) is limited to regular guest appearances on Fox News, and “press conferences” he hosts around Florida almost on a daily basis to assail judges whose rulings displease him and expound his hardline positions on immigration enforcement, higher education and drag show performers.More galling, Jewett says, is that DeSantis has seen himself eclipsed by rising newcomers in Trump’s firmament, notably vice-president JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator and current secretary of state, both named by the president this month as potential successors.“It’s notable that when Trump was asked who might follow him, he didn’t mention DeSantis at all,” Jewett said. “When DeSantis challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, it ticked Trump off and it ticked off a lot of Trump supporters, who up until then generally liked him.“It came out while he was running that he doesn’t have the great personality that a traditional politician has. He just didn’t seem well suited for shaking hands, eating hot dogs and kissing babies, the kind of typical American political things. It destroyed his air of invincibility.”View image in fullscreenOther observers see the same aloofness and confrontational manner behind DeSantis’s fallings out with Republican erstwhile allies in Florida, and a reason why many are rushing to support Trump-endorsed congressman Byron Donalds for governor even before Casey DeSantis has made a decision to run.“I don’t know that they necessarily think Donalds is the greatest thing since sliced bread – I think it’s, ‘Well, we got to block Casey from getting in’,” said Michael Binder, professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida.“The DeSantis-Trump feud appears to have mellowed but there are absolutely people in both camps, on both sides, that have not forgotten and will not forget. DeSantis’s political style in some ways is similar to Trump in that he makes a lot of enemies. The difference is Trump can make amends with enemies when it benefits him – think of Marco Rubio.“With Ron DeSantis you don’t see that. Once you’re on the outs with DeSantis, you stay on the outs. They burn those bridges.”DeSantis’s office did not respond to a number of questions submitted by the Guardian about the remainder of his term in office, or plans thereafter.His predecessor as governor, Rick Scott, successfully challenged Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson for his US Senate seat in 2018 and remains an influential Republican voice in Washington. Such a pathway appears blocked for DeSantis, a former congressman who in January appointed Florida’s former attorney general Ashley Moody to Rubio’s vacant Senate seat for the duration of his term.DeSantis would need to challenge a close ally who has already filed to defend it in the 2026 election.Still, Jewett said, the final chapters of DeSantis’s political career are yet to be written.“It doesn’t look good and his political prospects are definitely more dim than they were, his road seems that much more difficult right now,” he said.“But you just never know. One big wild card is how people view Trump in another year. It’s a decent assumption the Maga movement will continue and if Trump really falters then maybe DeSantis’s distance from Trump actually ends up being a positive in the longer run.“Even if he doesn’t get too much more accomplished in the next year and a half, he had a five-year run that was unprecedented in pushing through a very conservative agenda and changing Florida from the most competitive battleground to a heavily Republican state. So yeah, he’ll remind everyone of all the things he did that they liked on the Republican side.” More