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      ‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors

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      Advocates for academic freedom are bracing for what they expect to be the next phase of the government’s effort to reshape higher education: an overhaul of the system accrediting institutions of higher learning.Donald Trump has made no secret of such plans. During the campaign, he boasted that accreditation would be his “secret weapon” against colleges and universities the right has long viewed as too progressive.“I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” Trump said last summer. “We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once for all.”In recent weeks, the government has taken aggressive actions against US universities in the form of funding cuts, a ban on diversity initiatives, and the targeting of international students. Dismantling the accreditation system would be a powerful tool to further erode the separation between the government’s political ideology and what US students are taught.While it’s unlikely that Trump can delist currently recognized accreditation agencies, which are controlled by a bipartisan body enshrined in federal law, there are several ways in which the administration could weaken their authority to enforce schools’ compliance with a series of standards. Project 2025 and efforts to curtail accreditors’ power in some conservative states offer a blueprint for what several education professionals who spoke to the Guardian, along with officials at the Department of Education, fear may be an impending executive action on the issue.Targeting accreditation – the peer-review system guaranteeing quality assurance on learning institutions – is part of the right’s broader strategy to undermine higher education as a whole, advocates warn. Because accreditation by a recognized agency is required for students to be eligible for federal financial aid, the government has huge financial sway over how the system works.“The Trump administration unfortunately doesn’t care about quality assurance in higher education,” said Tariq Habash, a former education department official. “If colleges and universities do not align with this administration on diversity policies, on immigrants’ or trans rights, or on speech supporting Palestinian rights, Donald Trump wants them to suffer the consequences, by illegally cutting off access to federal funds.”Getting rid of the guardrailsAccreditation has been in place for centuries, but the government tied it to federal funding in the aftermath of the GI bill of 1944, when countless veterans were essentially defrauded by sham schools. Since the 1960s, degree-granting institutions have been overseen by a so-called “triad” regulatory mechanism involving federal and state authorities and independent accrediting agencies. Today, there are dozens of accreditors recognized by the Department of Education, including many specialised in technical subjects and six major regional accreditation agencies.One way in which Trump may seek to undermine the current system – and one of several proposed by Project 2025 – would give states the authority to approve institutions for federal aid purposes, bypassing accreditors altogether. That’s a troubling prospect for the ability of universities to remain independent of political pressure.“If a state wanted to force institutions to act in certain ways to achieve accreditation, this would be a huge cudgel that could be used to make really fine-level changes in colleges and universities across the state,” said Timothy Cain, a professor of higher education at the University of Georgia who has researched accreditation practices. “At the core of it, it’s a real problem for American democracy.”Project 2025 also outlines how the government could prohibit accreditors from requiring universities to adopt diversity policies, from “intruding” upon the governance of state schools, and from enforcing standards that “undermine religious beliefs”. Such prohibitions would severely weaken accreditors’ authority to ensure quality and serve as guardrails for education institutions’ autonomy from government.Trump is also expected to expand long-existing conservative attacks on the accreditation apparatus, which rightwing activists and legislators have often referred to as a “cartel”.In 2023, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, argued in a lawsuit against the Biden administration that the government had “ceded unchecked power” to accrediting agencies. Florida and North Carolina have passed legislation seeking to weaken accreditation standards. And during Trump’s first term, the then secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, loosened accreditation regulation in the name of free-market competition, introducing policies that critics said would give schools an option to “shop” for more friendly accreditors.Some Republican senators, including Marco Rubio before Trump appointed him secretary of state, also introduced legislation at the federal level seeking to prevent accreditors from requiring universities to adopt what Rubio called “woke standards”.“The endgame is always about controlling the curriculum, and controlling what takes place within the classroom,” said Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College, whose research focuses on conservative efforts to undermine higher education. “In order to remake the institution, you need to get rid of the guardrails that would prevent you from exerting that much external interference.”But there is an additional risk in Trump’s suggestion that he would pave the way for “new accreditors” more aligned with the administration, Kamola noted.“You’re going to see a bunch of fly-by-night, grifty, Trump University-style colleges that are going to appear,” he said.“And without accreditation, and federal funding being tied to accreditation, you’re going to see a massive exodus of federal funds into the hands of a higher education mass grift economy. Student loan money will be spent in institutions that under the current regime would never be accredited.” More

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      China raises tariffs on US goods to 125% as Xi urges EU to resist Trump ‘bullying’

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      China has raised its tariffs on US products to 125% in the latest salvo of the trade dispute with Washington, just hours after Xi Jinping said there were “no winners in a tariff war”.Xi made the comments during a meeting with the Spanish prime minister in which he invited the EU to work with China to resist “bullying”, part of an apparent campaign to shore up other trading partners.The Chinese commerce ministry announced on Friday that it was raising the 84% tariffs on all US imports to 125%, again saying that China was ready to “fight to the end”. The statement also suggested it may be Beijing’s last move in the tit-for-tat tariff raises as “at the current tariff level, there is no market acceptance for US goods exported to China”.“If the US continues to impose tariffs on Chinese goods exported to the US, China will ignore it,” it said, flagging that there were other countermeasures to come.Some markets continued to tumble on Friday, as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, described the US president’s 90-day tariff pause – which sets most tariffs at 10% until July – as “fragile”.Asian indices followed Wall Street lower on Friday, with Japan’s Nikkei down nearly 5% and Hong Kong stocks heading towards the biggest weekly decline since 2008. Oil prices were also expected to drop for a second consecutive week.Chinese officials have been canvassing other trading partners about how to deal with the US tariffs, after the country was excluded from Trump’s 90-day pause of the steepest global tariffs. Instead the US president made consecutive increases to duties on Chinese imports, which are now 145%.On Friday, Xi welcomed Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, after also talking to counterparts in Saudi Arabia and South Africa. According to the official Chinese summary of the talks, Xi said “there will be no winners in a tariff war, and going against the world will isolate oneself”, in an apparent reference to the US.“China and the EU should fulfil their international responsibilities, jointly maintain the trend of economic globalisation and the international trade environment, and jointly resist unilateral bullying, not only to safeguard their own legitimate rights and interests, but also to safeguard international fairness and justice, and to safeguard international rules and order,” the summary said Xi told Sánchez.Spain said Sánchez told Xi his country favoured a more balanced relationship between the EU and China based on negotiations to resolve differences and cooperation in areas of common interest.Xi plans to travel to south-east Asia, including Vietnam and Cambodia, next week.Macron wrote on X early on Friday that Trump’s partial tariff suspension, pausing new rates on various countries that would have risen as high as 50%, “sends out a signal and leaves the door open for talks. But this pause is a fragile one.”He added: “This 90-day pause means 90 days of uncertainty for all our businesses, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.”Battered financial markets were given a brief reprieve on Wednesday when Trump decided to pause duties on dozens of countries. However, his escalating trade dispute with China, the world’s second-largest economy, has continued to fuel fears of recession and further retaliation.The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, tried to assuage the fears of sceptics by telling a cabinet meeting on Thursday that more than 75 countries wanted to start trade negotiations, and Trump had expressed hope of a deal with China.But the uncertainty in the meantime extended some of the most volatile trading since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.The US’s S&P 500 index ended 3.5% lower on Thursday and was now down about 15% from its all-time peak in February. Some analysts believe stocks have further to fall owing to the uncertainty surrounding the US tariff policy.Bessent shrugged off the renewed market sell-off on Thursday and predicted that striking deals with other countries would bring more certainty.The US and Vietnam agreed to begin formal trade talks after Bessent spoke to the Vietnamese deputy prime minister, Ho Duc Phoc, the White House said.The south-east Asian manufacturing hub is prepared to crack down on Chinese goods being shipped to the US via its territory in the hope of avoiding tariffs, Reuters reported on Friday.Taiwan’s president said his government would also be among the first batch of trading partners to enter negotiations. Taiwan, listed for a 32% tariff, has offered zero tariffs as a basis for talks.Japan’s prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, meanwhile, has set up a taskforce led by his close aide that hopes to visit Washington next week, according to local media.View image in fullscreenWhile Trump suddenly paused his “reciprocal” tariffs on other countries hours after they came into effect this week, he did not include China, instead increasing duties on Chinese imports as punishment for Beijing’s initial move to retaliate.Trump had imposed tariffs on Chinese goods of 145% since taking office, a White House official said.Meanwhile, Trump told reporters at the White House he thought the US could make a deal with China, but he reiterated his argument that Beijing had “really taken advantage” of the US for a long time.“I’m sure that we’ll be able to get along very well,” the US president said, referring to Xi. “In a true sense, he’s been a friend of mine for a long period of time, and I think that we’ll end up working out something that’s very good for both countries.”Xi and Trump are not known to have spoken since before Trump’s inauguration. Beijing has said it has no intention of backing down to what it terms as Trump’s “bullying” with the tariffs.“We will never sit idly by and watch while the legitimate rights and interests of the Chinese people are infringed, nor will we sit idly by as international economic and trade rules and the multilateral trading system are undermined,” the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Lin Jian, said on Thursday.As well as retaliatory tariffs, Beijing has also restricted imports of Hollywood films, and put 18 US companies on trade restriction lists.The commerce ministry said China’s door was open to dialogue but this must be based on mutual respect.The US tariff pause also does not apply to duties paid by Canada and Mexico, whose goods are still subject to 25% fentanyl-related tariffs unless they comply with the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement’s rules of origin.With trade hostilities persisting among the top three US trade partners, Goldman Sachs estimates the probability of a recession at 45%.Even with the rollback, the overall average import duty rate imposed by the US is the highest in more than a century, according to Yale University researchers.It also did little to soothe business leaders’ worries about the fallout from Trump’s trade dispute and its chaotic implementation: soaring costs, falling orders and snarled supply chains.One reprieve came, however, when the EU said it would pause its first counter-tariffs. 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      Will global climate action be a casualty of Trump’s tariffs?

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      Donald Trump’s upending of the global economy has raised fears that climate action could emerge as a casualty of the trade war.In the week that has followed “liberation day”, economic experts have warned that the swathe of tariffs could trigger a global economic recession, with far-reaching consequences for investors – including those behind the green energy projects needed to meet climate goals.Fears of a prolonged global recession have also tanked oil and gas prices, making it cheaper to pollute and more difficult to justify investment in clean alternatives such as electric vehicles and low-carbon heating to financially hard-hit households.But chief among the concerns is Trump’s decision to level his most aggressive trade tariffs against China – the world’s largest manufacturer of clean energy technologies – which threatens to throttle green investment in the US, the world’s second-largest carbon-emitter.‘A tragedy for the US’The US is expected to lag farther behind the rest of the world in developing clean power technologies by cutting off its access to cheap, clean energy tech developed in China. This is a fresh blow to green energy developers in the US, still reeling from the Trump administration’s vow to roll back the Biden era’s green incentives.Leslie Abrahams, a deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC, said the tariffs would probably hinder the rollout of clean energy in the US and push the country to the margins of the global market.Specifically, they are expected to drive up the price of developing clean power, because to date the US has been heavily reliant on importing clean power technologies. “And not just imports of the final goods. Even the manufacturing that we do in the United States relies on imported components,” she said.The US government’s goal to develop its manufacturing base by opening new factories could make these components available domestically, but it is likely to take time. It will also come at considerable cost, because the materials typically imported to build these factories – cement, steel, aluminium – will be subject to tariffs too, Abrahams said.“At the same time there are broader, global economic implications that might make it difficult to access inexpensive capital to build,” she added. Investors who had previously shown an interest in the US under the green-friendly Biden administration are likely to balk at the aggressively anti-green messages from the White House.Abrahams said this would mean a weaker appetite for investment in rolling out green projects across the US, and in the research and development of early-stage clean technologies of the future. This is likely to have long-term implications for the US position in the global green energy market, meaning it will “cede some of our potential market share abroad”, Abrahams added.Instead, countries like China are likely to divert sales of their clean energy tech away from the US to other countries eager to develop green energy, Abrahams said. “So on the one hand, that should help to accelerate adoption of clean energy in those countries, which is good for emissions, but for the US, that is future market share that we’re ceding,” she said.‘Clean energy is unstoppable, with or without Trump’It’s important to distinguish between the US and the rest of the world, according to Kingsmill Bond, a strategist for the energy thinktank Ember.“The more the US cuts itself off from the rest of the world, the more the rest of the world will get on with things and the US will be left behind. This is a tragedy for the clean energy industry in the US, but for everyone else there are opportunities,” he said.Analysis by the climate campaign group 350.org has found that despite rising costs and falling green investment in the US, Trump’s trade war will not affect the energy transition and renewables trade globally.It said the US was already “merely a footnote, not a global player” in the race to end the use of fossil fuels. Only 4% of China’s clean tech exports go to the US, it said, in a trade sector where sales volume grew by about 30% last year.“Trump’s tariffs won’t slow the global energy transition – they’ll only hurt ordinary people, particularly Americans,” said Andreas Sieber, an associate director at 350.org. “The transition to renewables is unstoppable, with or without him. His latest move does little to impact the booming clean energy market but will isolate the US and drive up costs for American consumers.”View image in fullscreenOne senior executive at a big European renewable energy company said developers were likely to press on with existing US projects but in future would probablyinvest in other markets.“So we won’t be doing less, we’ll just be going somewhere else,” said the executive, who asked not to be named. “There is no shortage of demand for clean energy projects globally, so we’re not scaling back our ambitions. And excluding the US could make stretched supply chains easier to manage.”Countries likely to benefit from the fresh attention of renewable energy investors include burgeoning markets in south-east Asia, where fossil fuel reliance remains high and demand for energy is rocketing. Australia and Brazil have also emerged as countries that stand to gain.“In times like these, countries will be increasingly on the hunt for domestic solutions,” Bond said. “And that means clean energy and local supply chains. There are always climate reasons to go green, but there are national security reasons now too.”The challenge for governments hoping to seize the opportunity provided by the US green retreat will be to assure rattled investors that they offer a safe place to invest in the climate agenda.Dhara Vyas, the chief executive of Energy UK, the UK industry’s trade body, said: “Certainty has always been the thing that investors say they need. The UK is seen as a stable country with a stable government, but now more than ever we need to double down on giving certainty to investors.”“Investors do like certainty,” Bond agreed. “But they also like growth and opportunity, so that’s why there is some confidence that they will continue to deploy capital in the sector.”‘The US still matters’Although the green investment slowdown may be largely limited to the US, this still poses concerns for global climate progress, according to Marina Domingues, the head of new energies for the consultancy Rystad Energy.“The US is a huge emitter country. So everything the US does still really matters to the global energy transition and how we account for CO2,” she said. The US is the second most polluting country in the world, behind China, which produces almost three times its carbon emissions. But the US’s green retreat comes at a time when the country was planning to substantially increase its domestic energy demand.After years of relatively steady energy demand, Rystad predicts a 10% growth in US electricity consumption from a boom in AI datacentres alone. The economy is also likely to require more energy to power an increase in domestic manufacturing as imports from China dwindle.In the absence of a growing energy industry, this is likely to come from fossil fuels, meaning growing climate emissions. The US is expected to make use of its abundance of shale gas, but it is planning to use more coal in the future too.In the same week that Trump set out his tariffs, he signed four executive orders aimed at preventing the US from phasing out coal, in what climate campaigners at 350.org described as an “abuse of power”.Anne Jellema, the group’s executive director, said: “President Trump’s latest attempt to force-feed coal to the US is a dangerous fantasy that endangers our health, our economy and our future.” More

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      The big lesson for Europe? Trump backed down under pressure | Alexander Hurst

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      My condolences to everyone who spent days trying to play 5D chess with Donald Trump’s market-exploding tariff mess. Where Trump is involved, there is a cloud of malevolent chaos, and there is grift amid the chaos. What grandmasters there are to be found are almost certainly grandmasters of grift.When markets dump $10tn in three days and then gain trillions back in a single afternoon on the erratic decisions of one deeply corrupt person, you can be sure that a small number of people have made immense sums of money out of that volatility. Were the people responsible for abnormal spikes of buying into the markets (including call options on various indexes and exchange-traded funds) on Wednesday morning – and again, 20 minutes before the tariff announcement went public – extraordinarily lucky? Were they in the right Signal group? Or were they just simply following Trump on Truth Social, where he posted: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT” –just a few hours before dropping the news that he was kind of pulling back.The first takeaway for the EU – beyond the potential stock tips – is that Trump will back down under pressure. So don’t grovel: the 10% universal tariff is still there, as are last month’s tariffs on steel and aluminum, so why has the EU unilaterally stepped down its retaliatory tariffs without a corresponding step-down from the US?Trump, of course, is spinning his partial U-turn as a result of “these countries … calling me, kissing my ass”, as he bragged to a gathering of congressional Republicans on Tuesday night. I have no doubt that Trump – whom hundreds of mental health professionals have described as having such a striking and serious case of malignant narcissism that they were willing to break a professional rule and diagnose him from a distance – would have loved for that to be true. But let me go out on a limb and say that it wasn’t the ass-kissing or any “deals”. It was that investors and funds the world over were fleeing anything and everything linked to the US – including its sovereign debt.There is a longstanding phenomenon whereby Europe tends to overvalue the US’s power and underestimate its own. Europe neither “kissed ass” nor retaliated over the “liberation day” tariffs; it observed as the market carnage and threat to US Treasury bonds punched a hole in the idea of the US as impregnable. Imagine how much faster the flood away from the US and to safety elsewhere (including the euro) would have been if the EU hadimmediately used its so-called bazooka, the anti-coercion instrument – a powerful new regulation that would allow it to target US services industries such as banking and tech.The second takeaway is that the rest of the world is ready to bypass the US’s chaos and unpredictability – it just needs Europe to be the alternative. What Trump also does not understand is that the US may have a trade deficit, but it was a net exporter of trust – until it blew up an interlocking economic and security order that it had designed, built and maintained over eight decades – and of which it was the primary beneficiary. As a result, the view from Brussels now is that “there is no long-term credibility” with the US, Claus Vistesen, of Pantheon Macroeconomics, told me.Europe, on the other hand, plays by the rules. In the long run the more dents Trump pounds into the rule of law and the idea that the US is stable, rather than erratic, the stronger the euro’s argument for replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Which brings me to the third takeaway.In the face of the Trump administration’s very real animosity towards it, the EU must act as swiftly as possible to shore up its greatest weakness: its dependence on fossil-fuel imports. Sometimes, the animosity is almost laughably tragicomic, such as when US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick ranted that Europeans “hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak”. Other times, it’s more transparent, such as when Trump claimed there would be no negotiations unless the Europeans “pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis, number one for present, but also for past”. As in, in Trump’s mind, $350bn in annual purchases of US natural gas in exchange for lifting tariffs.Over the past few months, the refrain that governments should weaken climate regulation in order to promote growth has picked up. This would be a truly pyrrhic victory – primarily because Europe is acutely vulnerable to climate breakdown, the human and financial costs of which are staggeringly worse at every half-degree of heating, but also because the EU’s dependence on imported fossil fuels – from Russia, or from the US – is a glaring strategic and economic weakness. In fact, the grand irony of Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda is that he has exploded the green re-industrialisation that actually was taking place, thanks to Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, leaving the door wide open for someone else.So, to paraphrase the tech bros, if Trump is going to move fast and break things, then let’s move fast and build things.“Europe can turn this into a window of opportunity to further its edge with the US on clean tech,” says Simone Tagliapietra of the Brussels thinktank Bruegel. He advocates for a decarbonisation bank, completing the single market as urged by Mario Draghi, and issuing new eurobonds.The mantra going forward should be “whatever it takes” to fully replace fossil fuels with renewables – designed in Europe, built in Europe – so that it never spends $350bn to import gas from the US, Russia, or anywhere else.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe correspondent More

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      Noaa fires hundreds of climate workers after court clears way for dismissals

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      Letters went out to hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) on Thursday, informing them their jobs had been terminated – again.The probationary employees, many who performed important roles at the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency, have spent weeks in limbo after being dismissed in late February, only to be rehired and put on administrative leave in mid-March following a federal court order.“Well after about 3 weeks of reinstatement, I, along with other probationary employees at NOAA, officially got “re-fired” today,” Dr Andy Hazelton, a scientist who worked on hurricane modeling at Noaa posted on X. “What a wild and silly process this has been.”The fired Noaa employees were among the roughly 16,000 people terminated across the federal workforce in a sweeping move by the Trump administration that targeted workers in “probationary” status. Some were categorized that way because they were new in their careers, but others had recently received promotions or been added full-time to agencies after years of contract or temporary work.“The majority of probationary employees in my office have been with the agency for 10+ years and just got new positions,” said one worker who still had their job, and who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal in February, when the firings first happened.“If we lose them, we’re losing not just the world-class work they do day-to-day, but also decades of expertise and institutional knowledge.”This week’s news caps a rollercoaster period for Noaa employees. On Tuesday, the US supreme court struck down the March court decision that said fired probationary workers must be rehired, ruling that the nonprofit groups who sued on behalf of the workers did not have legal standing.The letters sent to Noaa staff, reviewed by the Guardian, were signed by John Guenther, acting general counsel of the US Department of Commerce, and consisted of two simple paragraphs: one reiterating that employees were reinstated and put in non-duty paid status, and a second explaining that the temporary restraining order protecting their jobs was no longer in effect.“Accordingly, the department is reverting your termination action to its original effective date,” Guenther wrote, adding that fired employees would not receive any pay beyond their termination date.It’s unclear whether those fired will receive all the pay they are owed. Hazelton told the Guardian that paychecks for the last two weeks have not been issued yet. His access to healthcare, which was terminated immediately, was never reinstated.These firings are already hampering the agency’s ability to provide essential climate and weather intelligence. Noaa is also bracing for more cuts as leaders make moves to comply with Trump’s “reduction in force”, an order that could cull 1,029 more positions.In an interview with the Guardian last month, Hazelton said the firings across the agency and the pressures felt by those still there will affect the outcome of the work. Vital work has slowed or stopped as teams try to navigate the chaos, along with the threat of severe budget cuts and political restrictions.“It’s going to create problems across the board,” he said, adding that people are going to do their best but it will be a lot harder to achieve the mission. “It may be a slow process but the forecasts are going to suffer and as a result people will suffer.”While the losses are expected to have a profound impact on the American public, it will be felt globally, too. Scientists and forecasters around the world depend on Noaa satellites, studies, and intelligence, including data-sharing that tracks severe weather across Europe, coordination for disaster response in the Caribbean, and monitoring deforestation and the effects of the climate crisis in the Amazon rainforest.The official terminations also came just days after the White House pulled funding for the national climate assessment, which summarizes the effects of rising global temperatures on the US.The crackdown on climate science comes as the dangers from extreme weather events and deadly billion-dollar disasters continue to rise. Experts say these cuts, which will do little to limit the federal government’s budget, will only add to the threats.Among 800 positions cut were workers who track El Niño-La Niña weather patterns around the world, people who model severe storm risks, and scientists contributing to global understanding of what could happen as the world warms. More

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      Whatever Donald Trump does next, this chaos will soon be shaping ordinary lives for the worse | Gaby Hinsliff

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      If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s black, fight back. If it’s white, say goodnight.The rhyme we learned hiking as a family through Yellowstone national park last summer is meant as a cheery reminder of how not to get eaten, if you meet a bear. Brown bears are best appeased by playing dead; black bears need to know this will hurt them more than it hurts you; and luckily there aren’t any polar bears in Yellowstone, because nothing deters them.Until this week the world remained unsure what kind of bear Donald Trump was. Keir Starmer treated him like a brown bear, dropping to the floor when threatened with tariffs and offering up a trade deal. China saw a black bear, to be met with maximum aggression. Though one day we may have to contemplate the prospect of a polar bear president – one who actually means what he said about invading his neighbours – for now what we actually seem to be facing is a crazy bear. There’s no discernible strategy or pattern here: just untrammelled ego, dragging the global financial system to the brink of meltdown and vaporising his own supporters’ retirement savings for no obvious reason beyond the pleasure of seeing impoverished allies desperately “kissing my ass”. And though this bear has lumbered back into the woods for now, seemingly spooked by a concerted revolt in the bond markets, the damage is done.What is still for the cheerfully news-avoidant just a faintly incomprehensible story about rising and plummeting stock markets will, in coming weeks, start shaping everyday lives for the worse. British businesses who have barely been able to work out if they’re coming or going for the last few weeks will pause big decisions while they try to calculate their losses. Our car and steel industries still face job-destroying higher tariffs, while Trump has talked ominously of new tariffs on pharmaceuticals to come (British drug companies rely heavily on US export markets). Along with all countries that did not retaliate against Trump, we remain saddled with a random 10% tariff on all exports, which could presumably still change on a whim. And if the US keeps up its self-harming tariff on China – now an eye-watering 145%, according to the White House, which is adding Wednesday’s 125% to the pre-existing 20% – then before long it won’t just be a case of prices rising for American shoppers but of trade between them breaking down completely, leaving American shelves empty. All this makes nervous consumers worldwide less inclined to spend and employers less likely to hire or invest, raising the risk of recessions – one reason that on Thursday, the markets fell again. There’s no security for working people in any of this, and vanishingly little prospect of growth. For a Labour government elected to deliver both, that is an existential challenge.You can either be the disrupter or the disrupted, Starmer warned his cabinet in February, rather startlingly for someone whose watchword was caution. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has however concluded that the new political divide isn’t left v right but “smash the system” v “look like the system and get smashed”. The obvious disruptive influence then was Nigel Farage’s resurgent Reform UK party, not a trade war, but one may now feed the other.Farage has gone very quiet lately about his now toxic friendship with Trump, but his local election message to England’s post-industrial heartlands is a blatantly Trumpian one about the glory days of manufacturing. This week he went to the pub with workers from British Steel’s endangered Scunthorpe plant – though it was Labour ministers who put in the unsung hours on a deal to save jobs there – before visiting a long-closed colliery to explain that he always thought the miners were betrayed. (Let’s just say that must have been an unusual view in the City, where at the time of the miners’ strike, Farage was working as a commodities trader.) It’s preposterous – Reform’s blend of tax cuts for the rich and dead-end nostalgia for everyone else would do nothing to revive former coal and steel communities – but Trump posing as the rust belt’s saviour seemed preposterous once, too. Farage knows where the electoral sweet spot is, in the seats where Reform is nipping at Labour heels: tacking right on issues such as immigration but left on economics. And while Starmer’s government is quick to compete with Reform on the former, it is more wary of the latter, even though ageing “red wall” voters now complain in focus groups of markets being rigged against them in ways that uncannily echo the disenchanted, Green-leaning southern young.But if Trump is really killing growth, meaning there will be no generous rising tide to lift public services and living standards, the only remaining options are either redistribution or accepting inexorable decline. Time, in short, to pick some enemies; to disrupt something before getting disrupted.Which markets genuinely are stacked against consumers? Who is making profits that can’t be justified? If Trump really has broken the old model, could it be built back better? This can’t mean uncosted, utopian leftwing populism but serious-minded, rigorous reforms that demonstrably put money back in ordinary pockets.What voters seem to want, the American data scientist David Shor and the writer Ezra Klein argued recently in a podcast on the confused desires underpinning American politics, is an “angry moderate”: someone who sounds as furious as they are about the state of things without seeming too frighteningly radical. There is plenty a British angry moderate could attack: from the ongoing debacle of Thames Water to the bafflingly opaque “surge pricing” now operated by everyone from concert-ticket vendors to pubs and hotels; from inequities in the tax system, or the way linking electricity prices to gas keeps them frustratingly high, to the outsourcing of social services that has left private equity firms running children’s homes and nursing homes for profit. (Not entirely alien territory to Rachel Reeves, who once told me that investigating the collapse of the outsourcing company Carillion as a backbencher changed her politics, and who has long embraced the idea of an activist state working to make life less precarious.) But whatever form it takes, offering people “shelter … from the storm”, as Starmer rightly has this week, should mean more than corporate bailouts. If not, anger with Trump could easily morph into anger with domestic governments’ inability to protect their own people from the fallout.He won’t be president for ever. But the mess he’ll leave behind, the jobs lost, the dreams smashed, the neighbourhoods spiralling downwards? That’s the polar bear, the thing that really eats governments. Fight, or say goodnight.

      Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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      Pentagon chief says US could ‘revive’ Panama bases

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      The US defence secretary has floated the idea of the country’s troops returning to Panama to “secure” its strategically vital canal, a suggestion quickly shot down by the Central American country’s government.Pete Hegseth suggested during a visit to Panama that “by invitation” the US could “revive” military bases or naval air stations and rotate deployments of its troops to an isthmus the US invaded 35 years ago.He also said his country was seeking free passage through the canal for its navy ships – which Donald Trump had said were “severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form”.Trump, since coming to power in January, has repeatedly claimed that China has too much influence over the canal, which handles about 40% of US container traffic and 5% of world trade.His administration has vowed to “take back” control of the strategic waterway that the US funded, built and controlled until 1999.Hegseth suggested on Wednesday the former US military bases that dot Panama could be used again to host American troops.He said a deal signed with Panama this week was an “opportunity to revive, whether it’s the military base, naval air station, locations where US troops can work with Panamanian troops to enhance capabilities and cooperate in a rotational way”.While Hegseth cited the possibility of joint exercises, the mention of a rotational force was likely to raise the hackles of Panamanians, for whom sole ownership of the canal is a source of national pride.The US has long participated in military exercises in Panama. However, a longer-term rotational force – such as the force the USmaintains in Darwin, Australia – is politically toxic for Panama’s centre-right leader, José Raúl Mulino.His government quickly slapped down the idea. “Panama made clear, through President Mulino, that we cannot accept military bases or defence sites,” said Panama’s security minister, Frank Abrego, in a joint public appearance with Hegseth.Hegseth also said the US was seeking an agreement under which its warships could pass through the canal “first, and free”.Jose Ramón Icaza, Panama’s minister for canal affairs, said: “We will seek a mechanism by which warships and auxiliary ships can have a compensation system for services, that is, a way to make them cost-neutral but not free.”The independent Panama Canal Authority (PCA) that manages the waterway said on Wednesday that it was seeking a “cost-neutral scheme” to compensate services rendered in security matters for warship tolls.Under current treaties, the canal is open to all countries and vessels must pay the same rates according to their capacity and cargo, regardless of their country of origin or destination.The PCA said the US recognised Panamanian sovereignty over the waterway, although Hegseth did not mention it in the news conference.The Pentagon chief’s two-day visit has been peppered with comments about China and its influence in Latin America. He said the US was not looking for war with China but would counter Beijing’s “threats” to the region.“We do not seek war with China. And war with China is certainly not inevitable. We do not seek it in any form,” Hegseth said. “But together, we must prevent war by robustly and vigorously deterring China’s threats in this hemisphere,” the former Fox News anchor said.China hit back after Hegseth’s comments, saying Washington officials “maliciously attacked China … exposing the US’s bullying nature”.Trump has zeroed in on the role of a Hong Kong company that has operated ports at either end of the canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for decades.Hegseth asserted that China-based companies were also capturing Latin American land and infrastructure in strategic sectors, such as energy and telecommunications, and that China had too large a military presence in the hemisphere.“Make no mistake, Beijing is investing and operating in this region for military advantage and unfair economic gain,” he said.Under pressure from the White House, Panama has accused the Hong Kong-backed Panama Ports Company of failing to meet its contractual obligations and pushed for it to pull out of the country.The company rejected an audit on Wednesday that suggested it had failed to pay $1.2bn due under its concession.The ports’ parent company, CK Hutchison, announced last month a deal to offload 43 ports in 23 countries – including its two on the Panama canal – to a consortium led by the US asset manager BlackRock for $19bn in cash. A furious Beijing has since announced an antitrust review of the deal.The US invaded Panama in 1989 to oust the dictator Manuel Noriega, killing more than 500 Panamanians and razing parts of the capital. More