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    The Observer view: Vengeful and reckless, Donald Trump must not go unchallenged | Observer editorial

    The 47th president of the United States is a danger to his country, Britain and the world. Who would have thought that sentence would ever be written? And yet, less than three weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, it is barely controversial to many people looking on from shell-shocked democracies beyond America’s shores. By his destructive, vindictive, illegal and irrational actions, Trump sets himself beyond the pale. In place of American exceptionalism, the world must now learn to manage, and if necessary confront, a gross American objectionablism.Proof of these assertions is to be found in the White House’s daily outpourings. Seeking revenge against those who tried to punish his attempted 6 January 2021 electoral coup, Trump is weaponising the justice department by executive order. Political opponents, FBI agents, prosecutors, media outlets and journalists are in his sights. In contrast, about 1,500 convicted Capitol Hill rioters have been pardoned. He has even had the gall to withdraw the security clearance of his predecessor, Joe Biden, citing mental incapacity.Trump is treating federal government agencies like enemy territory to be stormed and purged of deep state, so-called woke and liberal elements. To this end, he has recruited the sycophantic billionaire, Elon Musk, and teams of youthful, unaccountable acolytes to physically take over offices and computer systems, suspend, lock out or sack civil servants and seize control of programmes and budgets. The treasury, the education department, the federal election commission and independent government watchdogs are all under the hammer wielded, principally, by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”. Nor has the CIA and the wider “intelligence community” escaped Trump’s vendetta. It, too, faces mass firings under the proposed leadership of Tulsi Gabbard, a Russia apologist. Putting the anti-vax conspiracy theorist, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in charge of health and human services demonstrates how little Trump really cares about ordinary people’s welfare.Trump’s arbitrary, often unlawful orders indulge other far-right obsessions. Diversity, equity and inclusion polices, in particular transgender rights, are under siege. He has demanded a halt to the rollout of EV charging stations, declared open season on wildlife and the environment by relaxing oil and gas drilling regulations, and withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. He even wants to ban paper straws, preferring plastic. From an immediate international perspective, Trump’s decision to eviscerate USAid, the world’s biggest foreign aid provider, and the attempted sacking of nearly all its staff, is the most savagely objectionable misdeed of all.His freezing of USAid’s $42.8bn (£34.5bn) budget spells death or renewed suffering for millions of dependent people, from Sudan to Bangladesh to Ukraine. The US accounts for about $4 in every $10 spent globally on humanitarian aid. To the instant human toll, as Britain’s former prime minister Gordon Brown points out, must be added a loss of US global influence that will benefit authoritarian rivals China and Russia. “The era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end,” Brown wrote. His view was echoed by foreign secretary David Lammy, who described Trump’s mindless aid vandalism as a “big strategic mistake”.Trump’s egotistic rampage is causing widespread additional international damage and confusion. His on-off tariff wars with China, Canada and, prospectively, the EU; his militarisation of migration policy along the US border with Mexico; his imperialistic vow to seize Greenland by force from Nato ally Denmark; and his disdain for the UN, typified by his withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, are all decisions underscoring his broader contempt for the multilateralist, rules-based international order. Nothing more damningly illustrates that contempt than yet another outrageous executive order sanctioning the international criminal court (ICC).Trump’s ICC attack was prompted in part by a wish to protect Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and court-indicted war crimes suspect, who was feted at the White House last week. He used this occasion to unveil his most absurd, most dangerous idea to date: a forcible “clean-out” of the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza and a US-owned “Riviera” real estate development amid the ruins of their Palestinian homeland. This wheeze is too ignorant, too insulting and too inhumane to be taken entirely seriously. Yet that has not stopped Israeli and US rightwingers using it as potential justification for wrecking the ceasefire, resuming the war and laying the ground for annexations in Gaza and the West Bank.Trump, the convicted felon, proves each day that he is unfit for the high office he holds. He aims to destroy the fundamentals of American democracy: the separation of powers, civil and voting rights, secularism, free speech and equality under the law. He is a menace to global peace, stability and prosperity. Pushback has begun, largely through the courts. Yet a few defiant judges cannot win this huge, rapidly developing struggle. The Democrats, stunned into virtual silence, must wake up. Meanwhile, Britain and the western democracies must take a united stand. So far, Keir Starmer and his ministers have been too circumspect. They must be bolder and braver in their criticism and in upholding British values.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe rise of Trump and like-minded far-right populists, lawless bullies and anti-democratic autocrats around the world is the great challenge of our age. Trump the objectionable is setting the world on fire. More

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    US equality chief fired by Trump condemns ‘demonization of the term DEI’

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    View image in fullscreenSeven days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Jocelyn Samuels received a message from the White House saying that the president – who had first appointed her as a commissioner to the US government agency tasked with fighting workplace discrimination – now wanted her gone.Like so many other officials Trump has axed since retaking office, Samuels was informed she was being terminated from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) because of her “support for radical Biden administration guidance, DEI initiatives and a refusal to defend women against extreme gender ideology”.The order appeared to fly in the face of the legal precedent governing her appointment to the commission, but Samuels also sees her firing as part of a greater strategy to create a Republican majority on the five-member commission that will roll back protections for transgender employees in particular, and retaliate more generally against businesses that attempt to address inequity in their workforce.“What I observed from the outside is that there is a real desire to decimate the federal government’s ability to provide the level of services that it has to the American people,” Samuels told the Guardian as she sat in a cafe earlier this week across the street from the White House, where her firing was orchestrated.“With regard to the EEOC, I think that these terminations were in service of the administration’s agenda to eliminate whatever they mean by DEI programs, and to erase the existence of trans people, because those are issues that fall directly under the EEOC jurisdiction, to the extent that they result in discrimination in the workplace.”A longtime civil rights lawyer who has been a senior official in the departments of justice and health and human services, Samuels was appointed to the commission during Trump’s first term, and then reappointed by Joe Biden.On 27 January, she, along with fellow commissioner Charlotte Burrows and the EEOC’s general counsel, both Democratic appointees, received an email from the White House presidential personnel office, saying they “unsuitable to be members of this administration”, Samuels recalled.View image in fullscreenThe termination “makes a mockery of the whole structure of these independent agencies,” she said. “I do think that this was an unlawful action on his part, and it is a real disservice to workers across the country for me not to have been able to serve out my term.”A Trump administration official described Samuels and Burrows as “far-left appointees with radical records of upending longstanding labor law, and they have no place as senior appointees in the Trump administration, which was given a mandate by the American people to undo the radical policies they created”.Samuels is one of many targeted in the firing spree Trump embarked on after returning to power last month, which the president has justified as necessary to root out supporters of policies he opposes, such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives supported by Biden.The president has ordered the axing of the leaders of the US Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and 18 independent federal agency watchdogs, allowed Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” to attempt to entice millions of federal employees into quitting their jobs and tried to pause all government loans and grants. Democrats say the campaign is an attempt to remove dissenters and ensure a compliant federal bureaucracy, while his spending freeze and mass buyouts have faced setbacks in court.The president has also gone after Democrats appointed to independent agency positions that are meant to be insulated from political interference. In addition to his dismissals from the EEOC, Trump fired three Democratic members of the Private Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a presidential advisory body, as well as a Democrat on the National Labor Relations Board, who this week filed a lawsuit alleging an “unprecedented and illegal” dismissal by the president. He is also attempting to fire the chair of the Federal Election Commission, who has thus far refused to leave her post.Created by the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and tasked with enforcing protections against the discrimination of job applicants and employees, the five-member EEOC is intended to be bipartisan, with no more than three commissioners belonging to a sitting president’s party.Among its tools is litigation against companies that it claims allow discrimination, including against transgender workers. Under Biden, the commission brought suits against a New York bar and restaurant where a transgender employee was told he “wasn’t a real man”, and a Michigan restaurant chain that allowed a transgender employee to be misgendered by a co-worker, then fired him and his colleagues when they complained.Samuels’s term was not to expire until July of next year, and she expected to have “another 18 months on the commission, along with my fellow Democratic commissioners, to continue to advance our interpretations of the law”.Instead, she was sent an email full of conservative buzzwords as justification for her dismissal. But Samuels says Trump and his acolytes have never spelled out what they mean by DEI, and instead believe they are using their dislike of it as cover for a regulatory offensive intended to stop all efforts to address inequity.“I think that this demonization of the term DEI is really misrepresenting the nature of the important work that needs to be done to really create a level playing field,” Samuels said. “And my concern is that once there is a Republican majority on the EEOC, the commission will work to undermine employers’ ability to do this important work.”View image in fullscreenWith its commission in Republican hands, Samuels said the EEOC could roll back guidance that protects transgender workers from harassment, and rescind its interpretation of a federal law that female employees who seek abortions must be given accommodation by their employer. It may also actively take part in the Trump administration’s fight against DEI, by pursuing claims of discrimination against employers who embrace policies that favor workforce diversity, flipping the traditional mission of pursuing claims against employers who eschew diversity and discriminate against employees from underrepresented demographics.The firing of Samuels and Burrows has left just a single Republican and Democratic commissioner each on the EEOC, robbing it of a quorum and limiting its functionality. Trump appointed the remaining Republican, Andrea Lucas, as acting chair, who, portending what Samuels fears, named as among her priorities “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination” and “defending the biological and binary reality of sex”.“There are plenty of race-neutral ways that employers can advance their commitment to diversity, but I think that a commission that thinks that even committing to that proactive work means that you are taking race into account in a way that will hurt white people, can do a lot of damage,” Samuels said.And contrary to the White House’s accusation that she supports “extreme gender ideology” and failed to “defend women”, Samuels argues there is no conflict between women’s rights and transgender rights.“Cisgender women are not harmed by combating failures to hire trans people or egregious misgendering or harassment of trans people,” Samuels said. “An assault on the rights of one is an assault on the rights of all.”Samuels has considered suing over her dismissal, but is mindful of the greater legal peril that could bring. Such a case could wind up before the supreme court, where its conservative supermajority has recently shown a willingness to expand executive powers, including with last year’s ruling granting presidents immunity for their official acts. If the justices uphold Samuels’s dismissal, they could do so in a way that grants Trump and future presidents the explicit authority to fire members of independent bodies.Such a decision “would be regrettable and a disservice to the functions served by these bipartisan agencies”, Samuels said More

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    Trump says he will appoint himself chair of Kennedy Center

    Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is appointing himself as chairman of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, adding that he is immediately terminating multiple people from the board of trustees and the current chairman.“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.The Kennedy Center is the country’s national cultural center and is run through a public-private partnership. The idea for such a center began with Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s and was authorized by Congress in 1958 . It’s doors officially opened in 1971. The center is known for hosting music, theater, dance, artwork and performance art, and has hosted acts ranging from Tina Turner to Led Zeppelin.A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center said in a statement it was aware of Trump’s Truth Social post, but that it had “received no official communications from the White House regarding changes to our board of trustees”.Some members of the board have received termination notices from the administration, the spokesperson said.The Kennedy Center’s current chairman is David Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist and the co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group. Rubenstein has held the position since 2010 and was set to retire this year. After Trump was elected, the Kennedy Center said it had failed to find a new chair to replace Rubenstein and that he would stay on until September 2026.Rubenstein served as a policy adviser to Jimmy Carter and is reportedly close to Joe Biden. He was first appointed by George W Bush.Members of the board of trustees are typically appointed by the president. Currently, the attorney general Pam Bondi, lobbyist Brian Ballard and singer Lee Greenwood – all Trump supporters – are on the board, according to the Hill. Several Biden appointees are still on the board too, including press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. First ladies are honorary members and Congress can also designate ex-officio members.“We have had a collaborative relationship with every presidential administration,” the Kennedy Center spokesperson said, adding that it has long had “a bipartisan board of trustees that has supported the arts in a non-partisan fashion”.Rubenstein’s position, which Trump says he is now seizing, has always been appointed by the center’s board members, according to the act authorized by Congress in 1958.“There is nothing in the center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members,” the center’s spokesperson said. “However, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.”Trump said the reason for terminating Rubenstein and some members of the board of trustees is that they don’t “share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture”. In his Truth Social post, he also brought up the topic of queer people, something he has raised repeatedly since being sworn into office, saying that the Kennedy Center “featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth – THIS WILL STOP”.The Atlantic first reported Trump’s decision to appoint himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center. During his first term, he didn’t attend a single annual gala event at center – a tradition US presidents have long partaken in. Trump had a prickly relationship with the center after artists protested against his administration and threatened to boycott events at the White House.Now, it seems, Trump wants back in. Capping off his Truth Social post, he wrote: “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” More

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    Trump hints Musk ‘Doge’ team has free rein with Pentagon next in line for cuts

    Donald Trump has indicated that Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is operating without guardrails after it gained access to Americans’ private information “very easily” and as it prepares to assail the Pentagon.The US president was speaking at a White House press conference alongside Shigeru Ishiba, the prime minister of Japan, but most of the questions focused on Musk’s sweeping mission to root out waste in the federal government, which has caused disarray in Washington.Trump suggested that he has given the tech billionaire free rein and appeared blase about the details. Asked why Doge needs access to treasury payment systems including Americans’ social security numbers, home addresses and bank accounts, he replied: “Well, it doesn’t, but they get it very easily. We don’t have very good security in our country.”The president claimed that he was “very proud” of Musk’s team of young and “very smart” software engineers. He said: “They’re doing it at my insistence. It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption and we’ve found tremendous corruption.”Doge has so far produced no evidence of corruption at USAid, which it shuttered without seeking the required authority from Congress, or other agencies. Its fast and furious assault on the government has resulted in a flurry of lawsuits and street protests.Pressed on whether there was anything he has told Musk he cannot touch, Trump offered only a vague reply. “Well, we haven’t discussed that much,” he confessed. “I’ll tell them to go here, go there. He does it. He’s got a very capable group of people. Very, very, very, very capable.“They know what they’re doing. They’ll ask questions, and they’ll see immediately as somebody gets tongue-tied that they’re either crooked or don’t know what they’re doing. We have very smart people going.”Trump confirmed that he had asked Musk – the world’s richest man – to review spending in the sprawling defence department, which has a proposed budget for 2025 of $850bn. “I’ve instructed him to go check out education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military. And you know, sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad.”But he added pointedly: “Social security will not be touched. It will only be strengthened … we have illegal immigrants on social security and we’re going to find out who they are and take them off.”Democrats in Congress are seeking a treasury department investigation of the access that Musk’s team was given to the government’s payment system, citing “threats to the economy and national security, and the potential violation of laws protecting Americans’ privacy and tax data”.Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote in a letter to inspectors general: “Given the threats to the economy and national security, and the potential violation of laws protecting Americans’ privacy and tax data posed by Mr Musk and his team’s reported access to critical federal payment systems … we request that you use your authorities to investigate this matter further.”On Friday, Trump also said Doge should rehire a staff member who resigned after being linked by a newspaper report to an openly racist social media account.First JD Vance, the vice-president, said Marko Elez, 25, should be brought back and blamed “journalists who try to destroy people”. Asked whether he endorsed Vance’s view, Trump told reporters he was not aware of the specific case but “I’m with the vice-president”.Soon after Musk, who had polled his X followers on the question, posted: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”Send us a tipIf you have information you’d like to share securely with the Guardian about the impact of cuts to federal programs or the federal workforce, please use a non-work device to contact us via the Signal messaging app at (646) 886-8761. More

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    Trump delays key piece of China tariff plan amid threats to other countries

    Donald Trump halted a key part of his tariff attack on China on Friday, as he threatened to impose new US duties on goods from many more countries next week.Plans to ensure shipments from China to the US worth less than $800 still face tariffs – removing the longstanding duty-free status of low-cast packages – have been delayed to give more time to federal agencies to prepare for the change.At the White House on Friday, however, the president said he would announce new reciprocal tariffs on more countries next week. He did not give any details specifying what the tariffs will be and which countries would be affected.“I’ll be announcing that next week reciprocal trade, so that we’re treated evenly with other countries. We don’t want any more, any less,” Trump told reporters during a bilateral meeting with Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba.On Tuesday, the US Postal Service briefly halted all incoming packages from China and Hong Kong after Trump ended a de minimis provision that allowed low-value packages from China to enter the US duty-free.The provision allowed Chinese e-commerce companies such as Shein and Temu to ship items into the US without having to pay tariffs Trump had enacted on China in 2018. After a 12-hour period, the US Postal Service resumed taking all packages on Wednesday.An executive order, signed by Trump, said he would keep the provision until “adequate systems are in place to fully and expediently process and collect tariff revenue”.The president had removed the duty-free provision as his overall tariff strategy against China, what he says is in response to illegal drugs that are coming in from the country. Trump placed a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports, which went into effect this week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAny new tariffs will add to the confusion and chaos over global trade Trump has created since he entered office. Trump had originally planned to place 25% tariffs against Mexico and Canada on 1 February but ultimately halted both tariffs after negotiations with the country leaders. Those tariffs are now expected to go into effect 1 March.Reuters contributed reporting More

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    Trump’s Gaza plan suggests his pro-settler advisers are in the ascendant

    When Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington this week, his first stop was to meet evangelical Christian leaders, who have cheered on Israel in the war in Gaza in an alliance with the country’s pro-settler rightwing government. For both constituencies, Israel’s right to annex the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank is a matter of faith and, they hope, a matter of time.Both constituencies cheered this week as Donald Trump announced his half-baked plan to “take over” Gaza, an idea he had only tinkered with before Tuesday evening, when it tumbled out to the obvious surprise of his closest aides.While most observers were shocked that the US president was in effect advocating for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, the conservative alliance of Israel and the United States sees an opportunity to accelerate the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and its eventual annexation.“What has changed now is that Trump has said that it is US policy to support this as an end goal,” Matt Duss, the executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy, said of the Trump proposal. “And then of course it will just hop over to the West Bank, no question.”Israel’s pro-settler right wing immediately hailed Trump’s announcement. Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s ultranationalist finance minister, quoted a biblical passage about the return of Jewish pilgrims to Israel, writing: “Thank you President Trump. Together, we will make the world great again.”Itamar Ben-Gvir, who left Benjamin Netanyahu’s shaky coalition government because of the ceasefire with Hamas, said: “When I said this time and again during the war, that this was the solution to Gaza, they mocked me.”Under Joe Biden, saying that Gaza had been rendered unliveable would have been seen as a condemnation of Israel’s military campaign. But Trump, ignoring the Israeli assault that has been described as a “domicide” and led to the hollowing out of Gaza’s cities, simply went ahead and said it.The New York Times reported that the idea had been germinating among Trump and his close allies for weeks, and accelerated after his envoy Steve Witkoff travelled to the area and said: “There is almost nothing left of Gaza.” Yet Trump surprised his aides and even Netanyahu with the proposal, the paper reported, calling it “little beyond an idea inside the president’s head”.Trump’s plan may be a nonstarter and a distraction from more immediate questions of the second round of ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. But it marks a serious shift towards some of the pro-settler advisers that he has elevated, including his nominee for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who said on Fox News in January: “There was a Palestinian state. It was called Gaza. Look how that turned out.”Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, has a record of hardline pro-Israel rhetoric and previously said Israel has a rightful claim to the West Bank, which he refers to by its Hebrew and biblical name of Judea and Samaria. Huckabee has refused to call the settlements by that name, insisting they be called “communities” or neighbourhoods. He has denied that the West Bank, seized by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 six-day war, is under military occupation.In a sign of growing ties between the US Christian right, the Israeli right and the pro-settler movement, Huckabee was in the audience when Netanyahu met leaders from America’s evangelical community during his trip to Washington this week.Also at the meeting with Netanyahu was John Hagee, the televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel who has backed Israel’s expansion as a route toward Armageddon, after which “there will be 1,000 years of perfect peace, no presidential elections, no fake news, none of all of this nonsense”.In the US, Christian Zionists have tied their support for Israel’s claim to Palestinian lands to the book of Genesis, in which it says that God blesses those who bless Israel, and curses those who curse it.Hagee once claimed he had persuaded Trump to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by telling him at a White House dinner that Jesus was coming back to Jerusalem to “set up His throne on the Temple Mount where He will sit and rule for 1,000 years of perfect peace”.Trump has offered other tokens to pro-settler groups, including the repeal of Biden administration sanctions against individuals and groups accused of expansion and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.The situation may indicate that in the circles of those who surround him, pro-settler figures are ascendant. They include Huckabee and Elise Stefanik, the US ambassador-designate to the UN, who during a confirmation hearing said she supported statements by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich that Israel had a “biblical right to the entire West Bank”.Others, including Witkoff, represent a wing of Trump’s supporters who are less hawkish on Israel and more focused on cutting transactional deals across the world.Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel organisation, said before the summit that Trump had two choices: the “dealmaker route” or the “screw-it path”. For Saudi Arabia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, he said, Trump would have to at least seek to restrain Israel from expanding settlements in the West Bank.But, Ben-Ami said: “If he’s going down the screw-it path – ‘I don’t really care what anybody thinks, and I want Greenland and Panama and they can have the West Bank’ – then we’re in a different world.” More

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    Elon Musk’s journey from climate champion to backing EV-bashing Trump

    Donald Trump’s attempts to slash incentives for electric cars would cause sales of the vehicles to plummet, with this effort cheered on by a seemingly confounding supporter – Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and erstwhile champion for action on the climate crisis.Trump has said that he “will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers”.The US president, who previously suggested supporters of EVs “rot in hell” before somewhat tempering his rhetoric, has already ditched an aspirational goal for half of all car sales to be electric by the end of the decade, halted some funding for EV chargers and began reversing vehicle pollution standards that prod auto companies to shift away from gasoline models.A key tax credit for Americans buying an EV, worth up to $7,500, is also a major target for elimination, although to overturn this Trump will require Republicans in Congress. Should he succeed, though, the impact would be significant, with a recent study finding that electric car sales could fall by 27% without the incentive.“Turning off the credits would affect a meaningful share of the EV market,” said Joseph Shapiro, a University of California, Berkeley, economist and co-author of the study, who added that while a growing number of people would still go electric, the total number of cars sold would shrink by more than 300,000 a year than if the incentives stayed in place.“You could say that it would be a speed bump in the road but if the US goes all electric in 2090 rather than 2050, say, that matters a lot for the planet,” he said. “A lot of carbon would be emitted in that time.”Trump’s agenda has been enthusiastically backed by Musk, despite the world’s richest person heading Tesla, the market-leading EV company that also relies upon some parts made in China that may be targeted by tariffs imposed by Trump.Musk has said, though, that removal of EV subsidies will hurt rivals such as Ford and General Motors more than Tesla. “Take away the subsidies,” Musk wrote on X, another of his companies, in July. “It will only help Tesla.”There is some logic to this, Shapiro said. Tesla is comfortably the largest EV brand in the US, accounting for nearly half of all sales, and makes more profit per car than its rivals, meaning the removal of incentives would be disproportionately felt by other manufacturers.View image in fullscreen“If the tax credit is removed Tesla could survive and have less competition, they have more headroom to withstand a decrease in the market size,” Shapiro said. Stock in Tesla surged following Trump’s election win.However, Tesla will still be affected. Weakening federal pollution rules, for example, could see a reduction in the amount of carbon credits Tesla sells to other car companies – amounting to $2.7bn just last year – to offset their emissions and avoid fines. Tesla’s sales dipped slightly for the first time in 2024, amid concern among some of its traditionally liberal customer base about Musk’s rightward political turn.“Tesla isn’t immune to sales being impacted, they have some brand loyalty although we don’t know what the impact Elon Musk has had on polarizing consumers yet, that’s still a bit of an unknown,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, which estimates EVs will have a 10% share of US car sales this year, up from 8% in 2024.Regardless, Musk’s focus has now seemingly shifted away from EVs to other areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence and his SpaceX venture, Valdez Streaty said. He has also embraced rightwing fixations shared by Trump. In a speech after the president was inaugurated, Musk made no mention of cars but said that the “future of civilization is assured” with “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending, basic stuff”.He added: “We’re going to take Doge to Mars,” in reference to the “department of government efficiency” he heads in an effort to curb spending. “Can you imagine how awesome it will be to have American astronauts plant the flag on another planet for the first time? Bam. Bam. Yeah. How inspiring would that be?”Concern over the climate crisis is seemingly no longer one of Musk’s priorities, despite previously saying he is “super pro-climate” and in 2016 calling for a “popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry because the world was “unavoidably headed toward some level of harm and the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result”.When Trump removed the US from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, Musk said he was quitting a presidential advisory body in protest. “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”But Musk has had little to say after Trump, who memorably called climate change “a giant hoax”, once again pulled the US from the Paris deal and issued a flurry of orders to ramp up oil and gas drilling and stymie renewable energy production. In January, Musk said: “Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.”Critics say it is unlikely Musk will reflect the growing alarm voiced by scientists, and the American public, over the impacts of dangerous global heating within the Trump administration.“It just shows he’s an opportunist, really,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House. “He now downplays the dangers of climate change, but I think in the back of his mind he’s thinking about using government contracts for geoengineering as the costs of climate change become so undeniably expensive.”Those who know Musk say that he soured on Democrats in part after not being invited to a major summit on electric cars held by the White House in 2021, after Joe Biden became president.“That was an unforced error by Biden,” said Robert Zubrin, a leading advocate for human exploration of Mars who said he helped introduce Musk to the idea of Martian expansion. “And in the past two years, Elon Musk has redefined himself from the white knight of environmentalists to a Bond villain.”Zubrin said that Musk’s “central motivation is the desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds. He wants to save civilization because he wants to be famous for saving civilization.“This desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds has motivated his primary accomplishments, Tesla and SpaceX,” he added. “But it also has a dark side to it, and this has been exploited.”Tesla was contacted about its stance towards the EV tax credits but did not respond. More

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    If Trump really cared about his ‘favourite’ US president, he would leave Gaza and Greenland alone | Simon Jenkins

    Donald Trump’s favourite US president was William McKinley. Who he? In his inaugural address, Trump pledged to restore the name Mount McKinley to North America’s highest peak. It was an anti-woke dig at Barack Obama, who had given it the Alaskan native name of Denali. But why this idolatry?The answer has since become clear. McKinley was the president (1897-1901) who introduced super-tariffs in his first year in office to protect the US’s post-recessionary manufacturers. Some were as high as 57%, and were seen as an alternative fundraiser to income tax. McKinley was also appealing to Trump for presiding over the founding of a hesitant US empire beyond the North American continent, one from which it has since retreated. Apart from that, the man was unostentatious, intelligent and impeccably polite, faults that Trump is clearly ready to forgive. His only carelessness was to be assassinated six months into his second term.Trump has blatantly sought to mimic McKinley’s policies over the past fortnight. It is therefore worth studying what his hero actually did. Unlike Trump, McKinley made sure that his tariffs were approved by Congress. Indeed, the constitution then required it – and technically still does. He was emphatic that they should be based on treaties embracing reciprocity. They should be treaties.In the event, the tariffs were not seen as critical to economic recovery. They were also blamed for a 25% rise in the cost of living. McKinley lost enthusiasm for them and became instead a champion of global free trade. He formed a group of nations to pursue an open-door policy, aimed at strengthening trade with China. He never saw tariffs as tactical weapons of foreign policy, nor used Trump’s description of his trading partners as “atrocious”.As for seeking new colonies, historians regard McKinley as at best an accidental imperialist. A year after his 1897 tariffs were introduced, the US was faced with the effective collapse of the Spanish empire, with armed insurrections in Cuba and the Philippines. Like many Americans, McKinley welcomed the arrival of new and free states. But he was adamantly against aiding them in wars against Spain. His much-cited quote was that “war should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed”. He had seen the civil war, and never wanted to see another one.View image in fullscreenYet he was under pressure. This was a time when European nations were reaching their imperial limits. It was an opportunity for the US to spread its wings, and many of McKinley’s colleagues were eager for the challenge. Over the course of 1898, war fever against Spain became hysterical. The Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers daily demanded intervention in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Showered with petitions, Congress demanded, in effect, that McKinley declare war on Spain.He did so under protest. His belligerent assistant navy secretary, the young Teddy Roosevelt, had already mobilised the navy, aiming it at Cuba and the Philippines. Roosevelt then formally resigned his position and led a volunteer regiment to fight in Cuba amid a blaze of publicity. He had accused McKinley of having “no more backbone than a chocolate eclair”. He was nonetheless chosen as McKinley’s vice-president in 1900.These interventions did not result from any threat to US territory or sovereignty. They were naked acts of aggression. They were spectacularly egged on by Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden, directed at the Philippines and published in the New York Sun. It challenged America to take over from the British empire, to fight “the savage wars of peace” against “sloth and heathen folly”.McKinley throughout was on the side of negotiation and peace. The Spanish war ended in a treaty signed in Paris in December 1898, which ceded America varying measures of control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. McKinley agreed with an anti-imperial majority in Congress that, once pacified, the US should deny any “intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control”. The government of the islands must be left to their people. The only “imperial” acquisition that McKinley did undertake was that of Hawaii, to prevent it falling into the hands of Japan.View image in fullscreenOn McKinley’s assassination in 1901, it was Roosevelt who assumed control of these territories, did not leave and retained them into the 20th century. It was also Roosevelt who backed rebels in seizing Panama from Colombia and giving the US control of the canal’s building and fortification. This was highly controversial. Roosevelt was challenged in Congress and by the New York Times for “an act of sordid conquest”. If Trump is seeking to emulate an earlier president, it is surely Roosevelt – described as the “bucking bronco” of American imperialism – he should be worshipping.Almost every president comes to office asserting if not isolationism, then a refusal to commit money or resources to setting the world to rights. Yet all are seduced by the power of office and the language of the founding fathers. They come to see the US’s “manifest destiny” as being to champion freedom and democracy wherever it is threatened. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt, from JFK to Johnson and the Bushes father and son, all came to see themselves as global crusaders for that cause.In 2016, Trump refreshingly described the interventionism of his predecessors as a “total disaster”. He stuck to his guns and almost entirely avoided troop deployments during his first term of office. The world at least knew where it stood.His emphasis on putting America’s interests first was repeated in 2024. But this time the prospect is uncertain. In his inaugural speech, he described his task as one that “expands our territory … and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons”. He even used the fell phrase, manifest destiny, as being one he would “pursue … into the stars … to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”. Not content with Mars, he has set his sights on Panama, Greenland and Gaza.These territories might not match the ambitions of a Kipling or a Roosevelt, but Trump’s current intentions are hardly pacific. If he is to deify McKinley, he might first seek to find out a bit more about him.

    Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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