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      Trump officials to cut Planned Parenthood family planning funds

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      The reproductive health provider Planned Parenthood said the Trump administration would cut federal family planning funding as of Tuesday, affecting birth control, cancer screenings and other services for low-income people.Planned Parenthood said that nine of its affiliates received notice that funding would be withheld under a program known as Title X, which has supported healthcare services for the poor since 1970.The Wall Street Journal reported last week the US Department of Health and Human Services planned an immediate freeze of $27.5m in family planning grants for groups including Planned Parenthood.Planned Parenthood says more than 300 health centers are in the Title X network and Title X-funded centers received more than 1.5m visits in 2023. It not say how much funding would be halted by the Trump administration.The White House and HHS did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. An HHS spokesperson said last week the department was reviewing grant recipients to ensure compliance with Donald Trump’s executive orders.Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, predicted that cancers would go undetected, access to birth control would be severely reduced, and sexually transmitted infections would increase as a result.“President Trump and Elon Musk are pushing their dangerous political agenda, stripping health care access from people nationwide, and not giving a second thought to the devastation they will cause,” McGill Johnson said in a statement.Trump has named billionaire Musk, who helped the president get elected, to head up an initiative to target government agencies for spending cuts.Conservatives have long sought to defund Planned Parenthood because it also provides abortions. However, US government funding for nearly all abortions has been banned since 1977. More

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      Trump administration deports more alleged gang members to El Salvador

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      The 17 additional people the US shipped off to a prison in El Salvador on Sunday and accused of being tied to transnational gangs were sent there from immigration detention at Guantánamo Bay, a White House official confirmed to the Guardian on Monday afternoon.The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced the overnight military transfer, asserting that the group included “murderers and rapists” from the Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gangs, which the Trump administration has recently labeled foreign terrorists.The 17 now-deported individuals were Salvadoran and Venezuelan nationals. Fox News was first to report the names and crimes allegedly committed that the White House has since confirmed.El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, posted on social media that the deportees were “confirmed murderers and high-profile offenders, including six child rapists”.Immigration officials announced in mid-March they had removed all migrants being held at Guantánamo Bay and returned them to the US, just weeks after sending the first batch to the US military base in Cuba. Donald Trump had pledged to carry out the largest deportation operation in US history, and controversially, Guantánamo was considered to be a staging ground for the actions, with options to expand the facilities used for immigration-related detention.Approximately 300 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, were recently deported to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), a mega-prison notorious for brutal conditions.Family members have repeatedly denied gang affiliations, while the administration has refused to provide evidence, invoking “state secrets” privilege.Questions about the accuracy of these gang allegations have intensified as more information has emerged about some of them, such a 23-year-old gay makeup artist with no apparent gang affiliations who was deported to the Cecot prison without a hearing. His attorney, Lindsay Toczylowski, said officials had previously misinterpreted his tattoos as gang symbols, and that his client was scheduled to appear at an immigration court appearance in the US before he was suddenly sent to El Salvador.The deportations come amid legal challenges to Trump’s use of the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act, which a federal appeals court has blocked. A federal judge has ordered “individualized hearings“ for those targeted for removal.Intelligence agencies reportedly contradict Trump’s claims linking the Tren de Aragua gang to the Venezuelan government, undermining a key justification for the deportations, according to the New York Times.Still, the Trump administration has vowed to continue the deportation strategy through other means, and is currently petitioning the supreme court to lift the block on its use of the wartime deportation powers. More

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      Trump officials to review $9bn in Harvard funds over antisemitism claims

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      The Trump administration announced a review on Monday of $9bn in federal contracts and grants at Harvard University over allegations that it failed to address issues of antisemitism on campus.The multi-agency Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said it will review the more than $255.6m in contracts between Harvard University, its affiliates and the federal government, according to a joint statement from the education department, the health department and the General Services Administration. The statement also says the review will include the more than $8.7bn in multi-year grant commitments to Harvard University and its affiliates.“Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination – all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry – has put its reputation in serious jeopardy. Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus,” education secretary Linda McMahon said.Any institution that is found to be in “violation of federal compliance standards” could face “administrative actions, including contract termination”, the statement says.The General Services Administration has been asked to facilitate the review of federal funding received by Harvard, including grant and contract reviews across the federal government, according to the statement.The news comes as the Trump administration is in negotiations with Columbia University over $400m in federal funding over alleged similar failures to protect students from antisemitic harassment. The administration initially froze funding to the school before offering preconditions for the institution to be granted the money back.The announcement also comes just two days after at least 94 professors at Harvard Law School signed a letter addressed to students that condemned the Trump administration’s “challenge” to the rule of law and the legal profession.Harvard University did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      ‘We weren’t stuck’: Nasa astronauts tell of space odyssey and reject claims of neglect

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      In the end, whatever Elon Musk and Donald Trump liked to insist, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were never stuck, nor stranded in space, and definitely not abandoned or marooned.The world heard on Monday, for the first time since their return to Earth two weeks ago, from the two Nasa astronauts whose 10-day flight to the international space station (ISS) last summer turned into a nine-month odyssey. And their story was markedly at odds with the narrative painted from the White House.Wilmore and Williams were speaking to reporters at a press conference in Houston, hours after a joint appearance on Fox News, and reaffirmed that they never felt neglected or in need of the rescue the president insisted was necessary.Instead, they said, they calmly assumed duties as members of the space station crew – “planning for one thing, preparing for another”, Wilmore said – while a political firestorm over their status raged back on the ground.If anything, the pair of veteran space flyers appeared slightly bemused by, or largely ignorant of the furore that followed their enforced and protracted stay on the orbiting outpost 250 miles above Earth, caused by technical failures on board their pioneering Boeing Starliner spacecraft that returned in September without them.At the press conference Nasa had called to discuss the science activities the astronauts performed during their time in space, Williams and Wilmore gave diplomatic answers to questions designed to elicit their thoughts.“The stuck and marooned narrative … yes, we heard about that,” Wilmore said, before reverting to a carefully worded explanation of how their training and preparations allowed them to pivot seamlessly from the roles of new spacecraft test pilots to routine ISS crew members who splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on 18 March on a routine crew rotation flight.“The plan went way off for what we had planned. But because we’re in human spaceflight, we prepare for any number of contingencies. This is a curvy road. You never know where it’s going to go,” he continued.Earlier, in the Fox interview, he pushed back on Musk’s false claim, amplified by Trump, that the astronauts were “abandoned in space by the Biden administration”. Had they felt stuck, stranded or marooned, the interviewer, Bill Hemmer, wondered.“Any of those adjectives, they’re very broad in their definition,” Wilmore said.“So in certain respects we were stuck, in certain respects, maybe we were stranded, but based on how they were couching this, that we were left and forgotten in orbit, we were nowhere near any of that at all.“Stuck? OK, we didn’t get to come home the way we planned. But in the big scheme of things, we weren’t stuck. We planned and trained. Let me comment back on this other [claim], you know, ‘They failed you’. Who? Who’s they?”Williams, too, was reluctant to kick the political football. In orbit, she said, her focus was solely on the work she needed to do.“You sort of get maybe a little bit tunnel-visioned … you do your job type of thing, right, and so you’re not really aware of what else is going on down there,” she said.“I hate to say that maybe the world doesn’t revolve around us, but we revolve around the world, something like that. But I think we were just really focused on what we were doing and trying to be part of the team. Of course, we heard some things … ”The third US astronaut at the press conference, Crew 9 commander Nick Hague, who returned to Earth with Williams and Wilmore, backed up his crewmate.“The politics, kind of, they don’t make it up there when we’re trying to make operational decisions,” he said. “As the commander [I’m] responsible for the safety of this crew and getting them back safely.”Musk, the founder of SpaceX, a key Nasa contractor, has continued to push the story, with no evidence, that the astronauts were effectively held hostage in space by Biden for political advantage. It was a SpaceX Dragon capsule that eventually brought them back to Earth, but it was a spacecraft that had been attached to the ISS for months, not one Trump said he directed Musk to “go get the two brave astronauts”.The billionaire became embroiled in a heated online dispute with Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen over the claims, and later attacked Mark and Scott Kelly, both retired astronauts and the former now Democratic senator for Arizona, for calling him out.As for the troubled Starliner, whose future is questionable as Boeing and Nasa engineers continue to evaluate the helium leaks and thruster control issues that brought its maiden crewed mission to a premature end, both Williams and Wilmore said they would be happy to fly on it again.Wilmore, as the Starliner mission commander, said there were questions he wished he’d asked during the flight that he believed might have brought a different outcome, and “some shortcomings in tests, shortcomings in preparation, that we did not foresee”. The astronauts will meet Boeing leadership on Wednesday to give first-hand testimony.The whole experience, he said, was a learning curve familiar to those in “the difficult job we all take part in”.“Could you point fingers? I don’t want to point fingers. I hope nobody wants to point fingers. We don’t want to look back and say, ‘shame, shame, shame’. We want to look forward and say, ‘Let’s make the future even more productive and better’.“That’s the way that I look at it. And what I think the way the nation should look at.” More

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      As Trump rewrites even America’s history, institutions have two choices – submit or find ways to resist | Charlotte Higgins

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      It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US’s ensemble of 21 great national museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald Trump. “Distorted narratives” are to be rooted out. There will be no more of the “corrosive ideology” that has fostered a “sense of national shame”. The institution has, reads the order, “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. The vice-president, JD Vance, is, by virtue of his office, on the museum’s board. He is charged by Trump to “prohibit expenditure” on programmes that “divide Americans based on race”. He is to remove “improper ideology”. The order is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. George Orwell lived too soon.The move is deeply shocking, but predictable. After Trump’s insertion of himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center and his railing against the supposed wokeness of the national performing arts venue, the federally funded Smithsonian was bound to be next in line. Those who imagined the Kennedy Center was a one-off, attracting the president’s ire for personal reasons, were deluding themselves about the scale of Trump’s ideological ambition. Picked out for opprobrium in the executive order are the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum for celebrating transgender women (the museum, it should be pointed out, has yet to be built); the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and an exhibition titled The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the American Art Museum.I visited the Museum of African American History for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It is a vast book of a museum, heavy with text. It was full, when I visited, of mostly Black families seeking out an encounter with a narrative that has long been a footnote to, or erased completely from, the main national story. You could spend days absorbing the web of stories that the museum offers, beginning in its basements with the transatlantic slave trade, where one of the most moving objects is, unexpectedly and profoundly, a piece of iron ballast that took the place of a human body after a ship’s cargo of enslaved people had been disgorged on the triangular route between Africa, the Americas and Europe. The whole strikes a fascinating balance between an unflinching gaze on systems of oppression, and a sense of Black achievement and cultural richness that has nevertheless effloresced.Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the museum, gave a talk at the House of Lords in 2011 about the institution, which was still in the planning, and would open five years later. I can still recall how moving it was to hear about the difficulties of making a museum – a place where a story is told through objects – from communities traditionally poor in material things. The institution had put out a call for loans and donations. Precious, carefully treasured objects – a bonnet embroidered by someone’s enslaved grandmother, for example – were arriving into the new collection.Fast forward to the present, and Bunch is in charge of the entire Smithsonian Institution. This is a man who believes, as he told Queen’s University Belfast last year, that history can be used to “understand the tensions that have divided us. And those tensions are really where the learning is where the growth is, where the opportunities to transform are.” That compassionate vision of the past, as a means through which the citizens of the present can better understand each other, is completely opposed to the monolithically triumphalist spirit of Trump’s executive order, in which history is reduced to “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness”. How much easier it is, to sink into this pillowy, comforting notion of glorious progress than to grapple with the kind of knotty, often upsetting and confronting history that the Museum of African American History offers its visitors. But it makes me wonder: can the museum survive this government?I visited, too, the American Art Museum, whose show The Shape of Power is targeted in the executive order as emblematic of the Smithsonian’s decline into “divisive, race-centered ideology”. The exhibition, which was years in the careful making, points out what is surely obvious, once it has been given a moment’s thought: that race is not an inherent and prepolitical category, but rather a constructed set of ideologies that served (and still serve) a set of economic and political interests. (One way to tell that race is a socially constructed category, in fact, is by looking to the Greeks and the Romans – the people who established, in the minds of many on the US right, “western civilisation”. They were xenophobic in their own way, and enslavement was a fact of their societies. But as is obvious from their literature, whiteness and Blackness were for them simply not operative categories.) The exhibition is an eye- and mind-opening look at how race ideology has translated into and been reinforced, or deconstructed, by sculpture – that peculiarly lifelike and thus “truthful”-seeming artform.The catalogue quotes Toni Morrison, who once wrote that “I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World.” Such intellectual adventuring is not what is wanted by the White House now. Trump’s world is more like Viktor Orbán’s, under whose government the school history curriculum has been rewritten to glorify Hungary, or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, where the novelist Elif Shafak, as she recalled in a Guardian Live event last week, was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”, her lawyer obliged to defend in court the views of her fictional characters. The Smithsonian and all who work there have an unenviable choice, one that has already been put before other great or formerly great institutions such as Columbia University: to comply with Trump’s dark demands; or to find ways to defy them.

      Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer More

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      Tesla investors brace for global sales data amid consumer backlash over Elon Musk

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      Tesla investors are bracing for evidence of declining global demand this week as the electric carmaker battles headwinds including a consumer backlash against its chief executive, Elon Musk.On 2 April, the US company will release data for first-quarter deliveries – a proxy for sales – that is expected to show a dip on the same period last year. The figures follow global protests on Saturday against Musk and Tesla, targeting the carmaker’s showrooms.Analysts have been lowering their forecasts amid evidence that Musk’s senior role in the Trump administration has damaged the Tesla brand.Dan Ives, managing director at the US financial firm Wedbush Securities and a self-avowed Tesla “core bull”, forecast deliveries to come in at between 355,000 and 360,000, a fall of 7% on the same period last year and down from initial predictions across Wall Street of 400,000.View image in fullscreenIves, who recently warned investors that Tesla was facing a “brand tornado crisis moment”, said 30% of the anticipated decline was due to brand damage associated with Musk and his involvement in the so-called department of government efficiency (Doge). The advisory body has targeted federal agencies with cost-cutting policies and redundancies.Other issues affecting Tesla’s figures during the first three months of the year include consumers waiting for an update to the top-selling Model Y. The US is Tesla’s biggest market.In a note to investors last week, Ives said that while “much of this softness is related to customers waiting for Model Y refreshes along with a lower-cost new model set to be launched by the summer … the anti-Musk and brand issues are clearly at play”.Matthias Schmidt, a Berlin-based electric car analyst, said Musk was “hitting his liberal consumer demographic exactly where it hurts”.“He has become the core toxic issue behind the disintegration of the brand and should step-aside before it explodes like one of his rockets,” added Schmidt, who is expecting first-quarter deliveries in western Europe to come in at just under 70,000 for the first time since the end of 2022.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenAmong Tesla owners, the Democrat owner group has fallen from 40% during the Biden administration to 29% now, with the Republican group averaging about 30% since 2021, according to market research firm Strategic Vision.Last week, Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on cars from overseas, with Tesla also expecting to be affected despite making its cars for the US market in America. The company imports some parts for its US-made cars. Last week, Musk wrote on X, his social media platform, that Tesla is “not unscathed” by tariffs. He added: “The tariff impact on Tesla is still significant.”The tariffs threaten to plunge the global auto industry into “pure chaos”, according to Ives. “Every auto maker in the world will have to raise prices in some form selling into the US and the supply chain logistics of this tariff announcement heard around the world is hard to even put our arms around at this moment,” he said in a note to investors last week.However, on Saturday, Trump said he “couldn’t care less” if carmakers raise prices in response to the tariffs on foreign-made vehicles. Indeed, the US president told NBC News that he hoped foreign carmakers raise prices as it means “people are gonna buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” More

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      Will Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ be the start of a trade war – or another climbdown?

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      Donald Trump won back the White House with a promise to transform the US economy. Millions of Americans, struggling with higher prices and bigger bills, elected a president who pledged to revive his country’s industrial heartlands – and leave the rest of the world to pick up the bill.On Wednesday – a day dubbed Liberation Day by the president and his aides – Trump has vowed to pull the trigger and impose an historic barrage of tariffs on goods from overseas he claims will fund an extraordinary revival.Ten weeks after obtaining power, Trump has said he will raise tariffs on all products from countries that charge tariffs on US exports; hit goods from Canada and Mexico with sweeping duties; introduce steep tariffs on foreign cars, computer chips and drugs; and target countries importing oil from Venezuela with duties on their US exports.This is “the big one”, according to the president. Business leaders and economists are certainly worried about the scale of his trade strategy, which the Tax Foundation already estimates could knock US gross domestic product (GDP) by roughly 0.7% and cost about 500,000 US jobs.“The escalating tariffs are a body blow to the global trading system,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University, and a former official at the International Monetary Fund.Wherever you stand, a move on this scale would constitute a radical shake-up – and set the stage for a fundamental overhaul of the US economy. And yet, even as he ramped up the rhetoric, Trump has appeared to tread carefully.“I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families,” the president declared at his inauguration in January. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”While the threats were immediate, the action was not.Take Canada and Mexico. The administration has adopted a strikingly hardline stance against the US’s largest and nearest trading partners, but its imposition of blanket tariffs has been hit by a dizzying array of shifting deadlines, delays and reversals.An initial pledge to impose tariffs from “day one” shifted, without explanation, to February. When February rolled around, a last-ditch deal kicked the can to March. When the tariffs were finally imposed, it was a little over 24 hours before carmakers were granted a temporary exemption, and 48 hours before all goods covered by an existing trade deal between the US, Mexico and Canada were spared for another month.All the while, Trump and his most senior officials have slowly, but surely, accepted the risks they are raising in pursuit of the rewards they have vowed to obtain.“Tariffs don’t cause inflation,” the president claimed in January. OK, prices “could go up somewhat short term”, he conceded in February. “There’ll be a little disturbance,” he added in March, stressing that he was alright with that.The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, acknowledged earlier this month that there may well be a “one-time price adjustment” as a result of Trump’s tariffs. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” he argued.While Trump predicts that slapping high US tariffs on foreign goods will prompt an influx of international companies to make products inside the US, rather than out, companies and investors worldwide are already struggling to keep up with his administration’s erratic trade policymaking.So far, since his return to office, Trump has hiked tariffs on Chinese exports to the US and raised tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium to 25%.The average US tariff rate has already shot up from 2.5% to 8.4% this year, the highest level since 1946, according to the Tax Foundation.Alex Durante, its senior economist, said the country is “inching towards” the kind of tariffs last seen since the 1930s, when the Smoot-Hawley bill, among the most decried pieces of legislation in US history, introduced tariffs on thousands of goods.“With each tariff action we’re rapidly approaching a universal tariff that would be damaging to the economy,” said Durante. “Behind the scenes, I think there is probably some concern, even among some of [Trump’s] staff, that they’re rapidly approaching the point of no return.”As his administration grappled with the fallout from the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about secret military plans last week, the president summoned reporters to the Oval Office to pre-announce tariffs on foreign cars. “This is very exciting,” he told them.The excitement is far from universal. Prasad, at Cornell, said: “We are shifting to a world where a commonly accepted set of rules is being displaced by unilateral actions that ostensibly promote a fair trading system, but will instead create volatility and uncertainty, inhibiting the free flow of goods and financial capital across national borders.”The car tariffs would be “a hurricane-like headwind to foreign (and many US) automakers”, said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who suggested they would push up prices by as much as $10,000 in the US. “We continue to believe this is some form of negotiation and these tariffs could change by the week,” he added, “although this initial 25% tariff on autos from outside the US is almost an untenable head-scratching number for the US consumer”.Such action is also widely expected to prompt retaliation – with US exporters in the firing line.While a spokesperson for the European Commission stressed it was too early to detail the European Union’s response to actions “still not implemented” by the US, they added: “I can assure you that it will be timely, that it will be robust, that it will be well calibrated and that it will achieve the intended impact.”Trump is watching closely. As countries and markets hit by new US tariffs consider how to hit back, the president publicly warned the EU and Canada that he would hit them with “far larger” duties if they worked together on their response.Some doubt whether the federal government has enough capacity to execute the trade onslaught which Trump has said is coming. “I simply just don’t think that [the US Trade Representative] right now has enough staff to even figure out how to implement some of these tariffs,” said Durante.But after myriad false starts and much fluctuation, the lingering question – despite all the shots, warnings and vows – is not how far Trump can take his trade wars, but how far he will.The president is, at heart, a salesman. In business, he sold real estate – with mixed success. In television, and then politics, he sold stories – with extreme success.Millions of Americans bought the image he constructed on The Apprentice of himself as a phenomenally successful entrepreneur. Millions more bought his promise on the campaign trail to share this phenomenal success with the rest of the nation.Trump is no longer selling a promise, but his strategy to deliver it. He won the White House twice by using stories, sometimes unbound by truth, to bend perceptions, break norms and build support. But rhetoric – however bold, and brash – can’t change reality.The president says unleashing a wave of tariffs, and triggering an abrupt surge in costs in the US and across the world, would cause just a “little disturbance”.Should Wednesday’s action prove as drastic as billed, businesses and consumers may struggle to reconcile this description with what they encounter.Liberation Day is the moniker coined by this administration. Liability Day might prove more apt. More

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      Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous | Timothy Snyder

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      No one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit of his office.” – Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes
      Elon Musk and Donald Trump inherited a state with unprecedented power and functionality, and are taking it apart. They also inherited a set of alliances and relationships that underpinned the largest economy in world history. This too they are breaking.The American vice-president, JD Vance, visited a US base in Greenland for three hours on Friday, along with his wife. National security adviser Mike Waltz and his wife also went along. Fresh from using an unsafe social media platform to carry out an entirely unnecessary group chat in which they leaked sensitive data about an ongoing military attack to a reporter, and thereby allegedly breaking the law, Waltz and Vance perhaps hoped to change the subject by tagging along on a trip that was initially billed as Vance’s wife watching a dogsled race.The overall context was Trump’s persistent claim that America must take Greenland, which is an autonomous region of Denmark. The original plan had been that Usha Vance would visit Greenlanders, apparently on the logic that the second lady would be an effective animatrice of colonial subjection; but none of them wanted to see her, and Greenland’s businesses refused to serve as a backdrop to photo ops or even to serve the uninvited Americans. So, instead, the US couples made a very quick visit to Pituffik space base. (Pete Hegseth, another group chatter, stayed home; but his wife was in the news as well, as an unorthodox participant in sensitive military discussions.)At the base, in the far north of the island, the US visitors had pictures taken of themselves and ate lunch with servicemen and women. They treated the base as the backdrop to a press conference where they could say things they already thought; nothing was experienced, nothing was learned, nothing sensible was said. Vance, who never left the base, and has never before visited Greenland, was quite sure how Greenlanders should live. He made a political appeal to Greenlanders, none of whom was present, or anywhere near him. He claimed that Denmark was not protecting the security of Greenlanders in the Arctic, and that the US would. Greenland should therefore join the US.It takes some patience to unwind all of the nonsense here.The base at Pituffik (formerly Thule) only exists because Denmark permitted the US to build it at a sensitive time. It has served for decades as a central part of the US’s nuclear armoury and then as an early-warning system against Soviet and then Russian nuclear attack.When Vance says that Denmark is not protecting Greenland and the base, he is wishing away generations of cooperation, as well as the Nato alliance itself. Denmark was a founding member of Nato, and it is already the US’s job to defend Denmark and Greenland, just as it is Denmark’s job (as with other members) to defend them in return.Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked article 5, the mutual defence obligation of the Nato treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita, almost as many Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war as were American soldiers. Do we remember them? Thank them?The threat in the Arctic invoked by Vance is Russia; and of course defending against a Russian attack is the Nato mission. But right now the US is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. No one is doing more to contain the Russian threat than Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine is in effect fulfilling the entire Nato mission, right now, by absorbing a huge Russian attack. But Vance opposes helping Ukraine, spreads Russian propaganda about Ukraine, and is best known for yelling at Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office. On the base, Vance blamed the killing in Ukraine on Joe Biden rather than on Vladimir Putin, which is grotesque. Vance claimed that there is now an energy ceasefire in place between Russia and Ukraine; in fact, Russia violated it immediately. Russia is now preparing a massive spring offensive against Ukraine; the response of Musk-Trump has been to ignore this larger reality completely while allowing Biden-era aid to Ukraine to come to an end. Denmark, meanwhile, has given more than four times as much aid to Ukraine, per capita, than the US.Greenland, Denmark and the US have been enmeshed in complex and effective security arrangements, touching on the gravest scenarios, for the better part of a century. Arctic security, an issue discovered by Trump and Vance very recently, was a preoccuption for decades during and after the cold war. There are fewer than 200 Americans at Pituffik now, where once there were 10,000; there is only that one US base on the island where once there were a dozen; but that is American policy, not Denmark’s fault.We really do have a problem taking responsibility. The US has fallen well behind its allies and its rivals in the Arctic, in part because members of Vance’s political party denied for decades the reality of global warming, which has made it hard for the US navy to persuade Congress of the need to commission icebreaker ships. The US only has two functional Arctic icebreakers; the Biden administration was intending to cooperate with Canada, which has some, and with Finland, which builds lots, in order to compete with Russia, which has the most. That common plan would have allowed the US to surpass Russia in icebreaking capacity. This is one of countless examples of how cooperation with Nato allies benefits the US. It is not clear what will happen with that arrangement now that Trump and Vance define Canada, like Denmark, as a rival or even as an enemy. Presumably it will break down, leaving Russia dominant.As with everything Musk-Trump does, however, the cui bono question about imperialism in Greenland is easy to answer: Russia benefits. Putin cannot contain his delight with US imperialism over Greenland. In generating artificial crises in relations with both Denmark and Canada, America’s two closest allies these last 80 years, the Trump people cut America loose from security gains and create a chaos in which Russia benefits.View image in fullscreenThe American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous. The US has nothing to gain from it, and much to lose. There is nothing that Americans cannot get from Denmark or Canada through alliance. The very existence of the base at Pituffik shows that. Within the atmosphere of friendship that has prevailed the last 80 years, all of the mineral resources of Canada and Greenland can be traded for on good terms, or for that matter explored by American companies. The only way to put all of this easy access in doubt was to follow the course that Musk-Trump have chosen: trade wars with Canada and Europe, and the threat of actual wars and annexations. Musk and Trump are creating the bloodily moronic situation in which the US will have to fight wars to get the things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking. And, of course, wars rarely turn out the way one expects.Much effort is spent trying to extract a doctrine from all this. But there is none. It is just senselessness that benefits America’s enemies. Hans Christian Andersen told the unforgettable tale of the naked emperor. In Greenland, what we saw was American imperialism with no clothes. Naked and vain.As a parting shot, Vance told Greenlanders that life with the US would be better than with Denmark. Danish officials have been too diplomatic to answer directly the insults directed at them from their own territory during an uninvited visit by imperialist hotheads. Let me though just note a few possible replies, off the top of my head. The comparison between life in the US and life in Denmark is not just polemical. Musk-Trump treat Europe as though it were some decadent abyss, and propose that alliances with dictatorships would somehow be better. But Europe is not only home to our traditional allies; it is an enviable zone of democracy, wealth and prosperity with which it benefits us to have good relations, and from which we can sometimes learn.So consider. The US is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is No 2 (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom – and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free healthcare; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark, university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Denmark has children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen. The US has children’s story writer JD Vance. American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five.

      Timothy Snyder is the Richard C Levin professor of history at Yale University, and the chair in modern European history supported by the Temerty endowment for Ukrainian studies at the University of Toronto. His latest book is On Freedom. This post originally appeared on his Substack, Thinking About More