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      Trump hails achievements of first 100 days despite polls revealing American disapproval on economy – as it happened

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      Trump is speaking now at a rally in Warren, Michigan and he has fulsome praise for what he calls “the most successful 100 days of any administration in the history of our country”.A raft of opinion polls released this week shows that a majority of Americans disagree, strongly, expressing deep disapproval of his performance as president, and particularly his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his chaotic imposition of tariffs against nearly even nation, except Russia.A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released on Tuesday shows that 45% of those asked to grade Trump’s performance as president gave him an F, 7% a D, 8% a C, 17% a B, and 23% an A.Half of independents said Trump deserves an F, and only a slim majority of Republicans gave him an A.This brings our coverage of day 100 of Donald Trump’s second term to a close. We will be back in the morning, as the next of 1,000-plus days dawn, but in the meantime we leave you with this list of the day’s developments:

      At Donald Trump’s rally in Michigan, his supporters reacted to the screening of a long video, set to ominous music, showing the harsh treatment of men he had deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador without due process by chanting”: “USA! USA!”

      As Trump defended his broadly unpopular handling of the economy, he criticized Fed chair Jerome Powell, saying: “I have a Fed person who’s not really doing a good job, but I won’t say that.” The businessman president who used bankruptcy law to rescue his failed enterprises six times added: “I know much more about interest rates than he does”.

      Trump mistakenly attacked the Michigan representative John James, calling the Republican he had endorsed “a lunatic” for trying to impeach him. That was someone else.

      Trump supporters praised by the president at a rally included the former member of a violent cult who founded Blacks for Trump, and a retired autoworker who once told people to read David Duke’s “honest and fair” book about race.

      The US Department of Justice has begun the first criminal prosecutions of immigrants for entering a newly declared military buffer zone created along the border with Mexico, according to court filings.

      Trump called Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos on Tuesday morning to complain about a report that the company planned to display prices that show the impact of tariffs. Trump told reporters later that Bezos “was very nice, he was terrific” during their call, and “he solved the problem very quickly”.

      The Trump administration has reached one trade deal already but won’t tell us who with until that country’s prime minister and parliament approve the deal, the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said told CNBC.

      The United States proposed sending up to 500 Venezuelan immigrants with alleged ties to the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador as the two governments sought to reach an agreement on the use of the nation’s notorious mega-prison, according to emails seen by CNN.

      Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Tuesday that offers temporary relief to automakers from the 25% tariffs he imposed in March in a previous proclamation. The measure gives automakers a break for two years to give them time to move auto production back to the United States.

      Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, accused the Trump administration of turning “one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue”, after he and other Joe Biden appointees were removed from the board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

      Pete Hegseth has abruptly banished the Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security program as part of his crusade against diversity and equity, dismissing it as a “woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative” despite it being a signature Donald Trump achievement from his first term.

      Donald Trump surprised Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, by inviting her to speak during his address at Selfridge air national guard base on Tuesday afternoon.
      One notable feature of Tuesday’s Trump rally in Michigan is that it featured cameos from supporters of the president who have been fixtures of his campaign rallies for nearly a decade.Early in the speech, as he pointed to familiar faces, Trump recognized the Front Row Joes, a group of diehard supporters akin to groupies who have traveled the country to attend dozens of his rallies. He also shouted out Blake Marnell, a supporter who wears a “brick suit” in homage to Trump’s border wall and witnessed the assassination attempt last year in Butler, Pennsylvania.“There’s my friend, Blacks for Trump. I like that guy. He follows me”, the president said pointing into the crowd. “We love you, your whoile group has been so supportice over the years, I want to thank you”.“Everyone thinks I pay you a fortune”, Trump added. “I don’t even know who the hell he is, I just like him”.As I reported in 2020, the “Blacks for Trump” founder is Maurice Symonette, a.k.a. Michael the Black Man, a former member of a violent cult who posts anti-Semitic screeds and racist conspiracy theories online, and yet has been a featured member of the audience at Trump campaign events since 2016.Symonette was known as Maurice Woodside until 1992, when the black supremacist cult leader he followed, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed for leading a conspiracy to murder 14 white people in initiation rites. Woodside was among the Miami-based Nation of Yahweh cult members charged in two of the murders, but he was acquitted. After the trial, he changed his last name to Symonette, which was his father’s surname, before eventually reinventing himself as Michael the Black Man.On his website, Symonette makes a variety of bizarre claims, including that Omar and other prominent Black Democrats, artists and athletes — including former President Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, Colin Kaepernick, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. — are “DECEVING [sic] FAKE BLACK PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY INDIANS!” In a sermon now deleted from YouTube, he claimed that the Senate is controlled by a secret underground of “Cherokee Mormons.”Later in the speech, Trump called to the stage another supporter who has been a figure at rallies since 2016: Brian Pannebecker, a retired auto worker who told the crowd, “We have the greatest President, probably not just in our lifetimes, but in the history of this country!”Pannebecker’s brief cameo was clipped and shared on social media by an official White House account, despite the fact that it was first reported a decade ago that he had written a glowing review of David Duke’s book, “My Awakening”, in which he called the former Klansman’s work “honest and fair”. After reading the book, Pannebecker wrote in his online review, people “will be able to discuss the issue of race without the fear of being labeled a racist because you will have the facts and the truth on your side”.A federal judge in New Jersey ruled on Tuesday that Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate and Palestine solidarity activist who was detained on 8 March in his apartment building in New York and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Louisiana, can move forward with his lawsuit claiming the government is unlawfully detaining him for his political views.“This Court has habeas jurisdiction over this case” Judge Michael Farbiarz wrote. “And as set out in this Opinion, that jurisdiction is intact. It has not been removed.”“As I am now caring for our barely week-old son, it is even more urgent that we continue to speak out for Mahmoud’s freedom, and for the freedom of all people being unjustly targeted for advocating against Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife said in a statement. “I am relieved at the court’s finding that my husband can move forward with his case in federal court. This is an important step towards securing Mahmoud’s freedom. But there is still more work to be done. I will continue to strongly advocate for my husband, so he can come home to our family, and feel the pure joy all parents know of holding your first-born child in your arms.”“The court has affirmed that the federal government does not have the unreviewable authority to trample on our fundamental freedoms,” Noor Zafar of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project said in a statment emailed to reporters. “This is a huge step forward for Mahmoud and for the other students and scholars that the Trump administration has unlawfully detained in retaliation for their political speech, and a rebuke of attempts by the executive to use immigration laws to weaken First Amendment protections for political gain.”The US Department of Justice has begun the first criminal prosecutions of migrants for entering a newly declared military buffer zone created along the border with Mexico, according to court filings, Reuters reports.At least 28 migrants were charged were charged in federal court in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Monday for crossing into the 170-mile-long, 60-foot-wide militarized buffer zone patrolled by active-duty US troops.Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, visited the area last week and said it was the start of a plan to extend the buffer zone along the border.“The reason we are here today, at almost the 100-day mark of President Trump’s administration is because you’re standing on a National Defense Area, this may as well be a military base” Hegseth said in a defense department social media video posted online. “Any illegal attempting to enter that zone is entering a military base.”“As New Mexicans, we have deep concerns about the enhanced militarization of our borderlands communities” the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico in a statement last week. “The expansion of military detention powers in the ‘New Mexico National Defense Area’ – also known as the ‘border buffer zone’ – represents a dangerous erosion of the constitutional principle that the military should not be policing civilians.”The idea of militarizing the border has long been a dream of far-right politicians, like the failed Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters, who devoted a campaign ad to the idea in 2022.Trump has left the stage, and his supporters are filing out of the venue, which we are told by the pool reporter there has a capacity of 4,000, but was only about half or three-fifths full.One bizarre moment early in the speech that we would have heard a lot more about had the speaker been Joe Biden was when Trump tore into Representative John James, telling the crowd the Michigan Republican he had endorsed and campaigned with was “a lunatic”.“Some guy that I never heard of, John James. Is he a congressman? This guy? He said, he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to start the impeachment of Donald Trump”, Trump told the crowd. Many of his supporters in the room, and watching at home, were probably aware that the president, who celebrates his 79th birthday in six weeks, had confused James with Representative Shri Thanedar, the Michigan Democrat who did, in fact, introduce articles of impeachment against Trump on Monday.Trump has just finished speaking and departed to the strains of the Village People anthem YMCA. He spoke for about 90 minutes in what was a fairly typical rally speech and even told the crowd early on, “I miss you guys. I miss the campaign”.If there has been one constant theme throughout his time in office, it has been that he clearly loves the adulation of the crowd that comes from making campaign speeches far more than the work of governing.Trump just made the entirely false claim that, “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction”.“For the first time ever, in, I think, ever, that they’re saying the country is headed in the right direction”, Trump added. “Has never happened before”.It is not clear why the president thinks this is true, or indeed if he does, but it is very clearly not true.In the latest nationwide poll, conducted from April 17-21 for the Associated Press by National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the overwhelming majority of Americans said that the country is headed in the wrong direction (62% vs 37%).The latest Gallup poll, from earlier in April showed that just 34% were satisfied with the way things were going in the US, and 64% were dissatisfied. While those numbers were markedly better than last summer, when satisfaction was as low as 18% and dissatisfaction reached 80%, the majority still clearly says the country is headed in the wrong direction.It is also not true to say that American have never previously said the country was going in the right direction. Gallup found that 50% of the public said that things were going n the right direction at this point in George W. Bush’s first term in 2001. There was even more optimism in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, when the right direction number reached 70%.Defending his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his trade war and the prospect of rising inflation, Trump just told his supporters in Michigan: “Inflation is basically down, and interest rates came down despite the fact that I have a Fed person who’s not really doing a good job, but I won’t say that. I want to be very nice. I want to be very nice and respectful to the Fed. You’re not supposed to criticize the Fed; you’re supposed to let him do his own thing, but I know much more about interest rates than he does, believe me.”At his rally in Michigan, Donald Trump’s supporters reacted to the screening of a long video, set to ominous music, showing the harsh treatment of men he had deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador without due process by chanting “USA! USA”!”The video, first posted on Elon Musk’s social media platform X by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in March, shows 238 men accused of being members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, being taken from planes and confined in the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as Cecot.The images of the abusive treatment clearly delighted Trump, and his supporters. The fact that the men were not given an opportunity to contest the accusation that they are members of either Tren de Aragua or the Salvadoran gang MS-13, seemed not to trouble Trump.Instead, he accused Democrats of “racing to the defense of some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth”.“They’re racing to the courts to help them”, Trump claimed, ignoring the fact that his own administration has admitted in court that at least one of the man deported, Kilmar Ábrego García, was sent there by mistake, in violation of an order issued during hjis previous term in office. The families of other men seen in the video have pointed to multiple errors in the interpretation of their tattoos as proof that they are gang members.Trump is speaking now at a rally in Warren, Michigan and he has fulsome praise for what he calls “the most successful 100 days of any administration in the history of our country”.A raft of opinion polls released this week shows that a majority of Americans disagree, strongly, expressing deep disapproval of his performance as president, and particularly his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his chaotic imposition of tariffs against nearly even nation, except Russia.A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released on Tuesday shows that 45% of those asked to grade Trump’s performance as president gave him an F, 7% a D, 8% a C, 17% a B, and 23% an A.Half of independents said Trump deserves an F, and only a slim majority of Republicans gave him an A.“Today, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, spoke with the President of the United States, Donald J Trump”, a statement from the Canadian prime minister’s office said.“President Trump congratulated Prime Minister Carney on his recent election. The leaders agreed on the importance of Canada and the United States working together – as independent, sovereign nations – for their mutual betterment. To that end, the leaders agreed to meet in person in the near future.”Carney’s center-left Liberal party won Monday’s general election thanks to a wave of resentment about Trump’s threats to annex Canada and the imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports.“As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country”, Carney said in his victory speech late Monday. As the crowd jeered and shouted “Never!” Carney agreed. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, never, ever happen”.As Canadian went to the polls on Monday, Trump posted what seemed like an endorsement of Carney’s rival, the Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, suggesting that the pro-Trump politician would help bring about Canada’s absorption into the United States. When the votes were counted, however, Poilievre, who had a commanding lead in the polls before Trump started talking about annexing the country, had not only failed to lead the Conservatives to power, he had even lost his own seat.Despite Carney’s office claiming on Tuesday that he and Trump had agreed to work together “as independent, sovereign nations”, White House officials insisted that Trump is still serious about his stated desire to make Canada the 51st US state.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked during a briefing for rightwing influencers if Trump was “truthing or trolling” when he says that he wants to annex Canada, and Greenland. “Trump truthing, all the way”, she replied. “And the Canadians would benefit greatly, let me tell you that”.Donald Trump surprised Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, by inviting her to speak during his address at Selfridge air national guard base on Tuesday afternoon.Trump, who came to Macomb county, Michigan, for an evening rally to celebrate what he calls the historic accomplishments of the first 100 days of his second term, despite widespread disapproval of his actions by a majority of Americans in a series of polls, announced a new fighter jet mission for the base outside Detroit, easing fears that the installation would be closed.For decades, Trump said, the base has “stood as a crucial pillar of North American air defense”.“In recent years, many in Michigan have feared for the future of the base. They’ve been calling everybody, but the only one that mattered is Trump,” he said. “Today I have come in person to lay to rest any doubt about Selfridge’s future.”Whitmer’s political standing was damaged earlier this month when she was photographed hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office after Trump invited her to be present as he signed executive orders, two of which demanded investigations of critics who had served in his first administration.On Tuesday, she was careful to begin her impromptu remarks by saying that she had not expected to speak, and then praised the decision as a boon for the local economy, but did not praise Trump, as Republicans he invited to make remarks did.Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Tuesday that offers temporary relief to automakers from the 25% tariffs he imposed in March in a previous proclamation.The White House confirmed to Fox Business earlier that the new measure would give automakers a break for two years to give them time to move auto production back to the United States.The proclamation outlines a series of technical changes to the tariff regime, “to modify the system imposed in Proclamation 10908 by reducing duties assessed on automobile parts accounting for 15 percent of the value of an automobile assembled in the United States for 1 year and equivalent to 10 percent of that value for an additional year”.As we reported earlier, the changes will allow carmakers with US factories to reduce the amount they pay in import taxes on foreign parts, using a formula tied to how many cars they sell and the price.Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, accused the Trump administration of turning “one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue”, after he and other Joe Biden appointees were removed from the board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.Emhoff, who is Jewish and spoke passionately against the rising tide of antisemitism during his time as the second gentleman, said he was informed on Tuesday that he had been removed from the museum’s council.“Let me be clear: Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous – and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve,” he said.“No divisive political decision will ever shake my commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education or to combatting hate and antisemitism. I will continue to speak out, to educate, and to fight hate in all its forms – because silence is never an option.”The New York Times reported that the Trump administration also fired Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff; Susan Rice, national security adviser to Barack Obama, and Biden’s top domestic policy adviser; and Tom Perez, the former labor secretary who was a senior adviser to the former president.Trump defeated Harris, then the US vice-president, in November. Emhoff’s law firm recently struck a deal with the Trump administration to avert an executive order targeting its practice, a decision Emhoff is reported to have voiced his disagreement with.Pete Hegseth has abruptly banished the Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security program as part of his crusade against diversity and equity, dismissing it as a “woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative” despite it being a signature Donald Trump achievement from his first term.In a post on X, the US defense secretary wrote: “This morning, I proudly ENDED the ‘Women, Peace & Security’ (WPS) program inside the [Department of Defense]. WPS is yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops – distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.”Hegseth added that the program was “pushed by feminists and left-wing activists”, claiming: “Politicians fawn over it; troops HATE it.”But the decision is raising some eyebrows, as the initiative was established during Trump’s first administration when he signed the Women, Peace and Security Act in 2017, making the US the first country in the world to codify standalone legislation on the matter.The Trump campaign even courted female voters by citing the initiative as one of its top accomplishments for women on its website.Attempting to square this circle, Hegseth later claimed the Biden administration had “distorted & weaponized” the original program. “Biden ruined EVERYTHING, including ‘Women, Peace & Security,’” he insisted.The Senate has confirmed billionaire investment banker Warren Stephens to be ambassador to the UK, backing Donald Trump’s nominee by 59 to 39.Stephens is chair, president and CEO of Stephens Inc, a privately owned financial services firm headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is a longtime contributor to Republican candidates, including Trump, having donated millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaigns and 2025 inauguration fund.Asked about negotiations with Congress over tax legislation, Trump said: “The Republicans are with us. I think we’ve got the big beautiful deal that’s moving along, and I think we’re going to have it taken care of.” He added:
      A very important element that we’re working on now, more important than anything with the border in good shape, is the fact that we want to get, and very importantly, the big beautiful new deal. If we get that done, that’s the biggest thing … And I think we’re going to get it done. We have great Republican support. If the Democrats blocked it, you’d have a 60% tax increase. I don’t think that’s going to happen. We have great support from Republicans. …
      The next period of time, I think, my biggest focus will be on Congress, the deal that we’re working on. That would be the biggest bill in the history of our country in terms of tax cuts and regulation cuts, and other things. More

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      in US Politics

      Mehdi Hasan on Trump’s first 100 days – podcast

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      “So many things have shocked me about the past 100 days,” says the Guardian US columnist and author of Win Every Argument, Mehdi Hasan.“Even for me, even the person who was saying it’s going to be so bad, it’s much worse than even I thought.”What’s been shocking to Hasan about Donald Trump’s second term so far is not the policies – they were laid out on the campaign trail – but the lack of resistance.“I didn’t realise how quickly mainstream US media organisations would roll over,” he tells Michael Safi. “Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Google all lined up at the inauguration. No, I didn’t see that coming. I didn’t see universities and big law firms bending the knee so quickly.”Hasan discusses the impact of Trump’s first 100 days on people in the US and around the world, his plan to run for a third term, how the Democrats are performing and why public movements are the only way to resist the dismantling of democratic norms.“My greatest hope is that the American people – not all of them, I think 30 to 40% are unreachable – but the vast majority of them recognise the peril that American democracy is in, the peril that the American economy is in, and the peril that the globe is in, and actually do take to the streets, do take to town halls, and do take to the ballot box, eventually, when we get there in ’26, to say this was a huge mistake that we did twice.”Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More

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      in US Politics

      Trump warns ‘nothing will stop me’ at rally to celebrate 100 days in office

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      Donald Trump has celebrated his 100th day in office with a campaign-style rally in Michigan and an attack on “communist radical left judges” for trying to seize his power, warning: “Nothing will stop me.”The president also served up the chilling spectacle of a video of Venezuelan immigrants sent from the US to a notorious prison in El Salvador, accompanied by Hollywood-style music and roars of approval from the crowd.Trump’s choice of Michigan was a recognition not only of how the battleground state helped propel him to victory over Vice-President Kamala Harris in last November’s election, but its status as a potential beneficiary of a tariffs policy which, he claims, will revive US manufacturing.But the cavernous sports and expo centre in the city of Warren, near Detroit, was only half full for the rally, and a steady stream of people left before the end of his disjointed and meandering 89-minute address.“We’re here tonight in the heartland of our nation to celebrate the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country!” Trump declared. “In 100 days, we have delivered the most profound change in Washington in nearly 100 years.”The 45th and 47th president falsely accused the previous administration of engineering massive border invasion and allowing gangs, cartels and terrorists to infiltrate communities. “Democrats have vowed mass invasion and mass migration,” he said. “We are delivering mass deportation.”Trump defended his use of the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the citizens of an enemy nation, to expel foreign terrorist from the US as quickly as possible. Then he took aim at that courts that have blocked many of his moves during the first 100 days.“We cannot allow a handful of communist, radical-left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws and assume the duties that belong solely to the president of the United States,” Trump said, with evident frustration. “Judges are trying to take away the power given to the president to keep our country safe.“It’s not a good thing, but I hope for the sake of our country that the supreme court is going to save this, because we have to do something. These people are just looking to destroy our country. Nothing will stop me in the mission to keep America safe again.”In a darkly theatrical touch, Trump encouraged the crowd to watch big screens that showed mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members deported from the US arriving last month in El Salvador and having their heads shaved or being manhandled by guards.The video, originally shared by El Salvador’s authoritarian president Nayib Bukele, was accompanied by moody music reminiscent of a thriller. Once it was over the big screens offered the simple message, “100 days of greatness”, while the crowd cheered raucously and broke into chants of: “USA! USA! USA!”The arena was surrounded by banners that read, “Investing in America”, “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!”, “The Golden Age”, “Buy American, Hire American” and “The American Dream is Back”. Trump’s supporters held signs with slogans such as: “Make America Great Again” and “Golden Age of America”. Michigan’s unemployment rate has risen for three straight months.One person behind the president waved a “Trump 2028”, banner even though he is constitutionally barred from serving a third term. At one point Margo Martin, a White House aide, joined the president on stage and asked: “Trump 2028, anybody?” The crowd roared.Before the rally, warm-up tracks included It’s A Man’s World by James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti, Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinéad O’Connor and YMCA by Village People. There were video clips of Elton John and the Who singing Pinball Wizard in the movie Tommy, and factory worker turned country singer Oliver Anthony performing Rich Men North of Richmond.View image in fullscreenYet despite the ostensible celebration of his election win and hugely consequential first 100 days, Trump spent much of the rally in campaign mode, fixated on past grudges and grievances.He mocked Biden’s mental acuity and even how he appears in a bathing suit, repeated the lie that he won the 2020 election and sought to discredit polling and news coverage unflattering to him. “When you watch the fake news you see fake polls,” he said, without evidence. “In legitimate polls I think we’re in the 60s, the 70s.”Trump defended his administration’s steep tariffs on cars and auto parts, hours after the White House announced it was softening them. He boasted of ending diversity, equity and inclusion “bullshit” across the federal government and private sector, and of making it official government policy that there are only two genders.He reiterated support for the beleaguered defence secretary Pete Hegseth, telling the crowd: “I have so much confidence in him. The fake news is after him, but he’s a tough cookie. They don’t know how tough he is.”Trump also heaped praise on his billionaire ally Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, and condemned the backlash against the Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur: “It’s not fair what they’ve done to him. That is a disgrace.”The rally featured guest speeches by Brian Pannebecker, a retired car worker who pitched a book he is writing about his support of Trump, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who said earnestly: “Thank you, President Trump, for being the greatest president in American history.”Democrats take a different view. Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “Trump’s pathetic display tonight will do nothing to help the families he started screwing over 100 days ago.“Michiganders and the rest of the country see right through Trump, and as a result, he has the lowest 100-day approval rating in generations. If he’s not already terrified of what the ballot box will bring between now and the midterm elections, he should be.” More

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      Denied, detained, deported: the people targeted in Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting people requesting asylum and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution.Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far because of their extreme and legally dubious nature, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its swift and unlawful power grab.Students and academics hunted and ‘disappeared’In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) teams suddenly began arresting and detaining foreign-born students and academics on visas or green cards. In most cases the government has cited their roles in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attack. Claims that they “support Hamas” are invoked as justification for wanting to deport them, even though they have not been charged with any crimes. Those taken include:Mahmoud KhalilA recent graduate student of Columbia University in New York, Mahmoud Khalil, 30, is a Palestinian green-card holder who was a leader during protests last year. He was arrested without due process in front of his pregnant wife and has been in a detention center in Louisiana since mid-March, denied release to attend the birth. He told an immigration judge that he and hundreds of other detainees were being denied rights the court itself had claimed to prioritize: “Due process and fundamental fairness.”View image in fullscreenThe government is using obscure immigration law to make extraordinary claims in cases like Khalil’s that it can summarily detain and deport people for constitutionally protected free speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy. A far-right group has claimed credit for flagging his and others’ names for scrutiny by the authorities.Rümeysa ÖztürkView image in fullscreenUS immigration officials encircled and grabbed the Tufts University PhD student near Boston and bustled her into an unmarked car, shown in onlooker video. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national on a visa, had co-written an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts’ response to Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Palestinians. She was rushed into detention in Louisiana in apparent defiance of a court order. Öztürk, 30, says she has been neglected and abused there in “unsafe and inhumane conditions”.Mohsen MahdawiView image in fullscreenMahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University, was apprehended by Ice in Colchester, Vermont, on 14 April, as first reported by the Intercept.He was prominent in the protests at Columbia last year. During his apprehension he was put into an unmarked car outside a federal office where he was attending an interview to become a naturalized US citizen. The administration’s arcane justification is that his activism could “potentially undermine” the Middle East peace process, citing a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). He is detained in Vermont. Democratic lawmakers have visited Khalil, Öztürk and Mahdawi but failed to secure their release.Yunseo ChungView image in fullscreenAnother Columbia student, Chung, 21, sued the administration for trying to deport her, and has gone into hiding. She is a pro-Palestinian campaigner and was arrested by the New York police in March while protesting, as first reported by the New York Times. She said a government official told her lawyer they wanted to remove her from the country and her residency status was being revoked. Chung was born in South Korea and has been in the US since she was seven.Alireza DoroudiView image in fullscreenThe Democrats on campus group at the University of Alabama said of the arrest of Doroudi, 32, an Iranian studying mechanical engineering: “Donald Trump, Tom Homan [Trump’s “border czar”], and Ice have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community.”He was taken to the same Louisiana federal detention center as Khalil. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said he was a threat to national security, without providing details, and the state department had revoked his visa, while an immigration judge refused to release him.Badar Khan SuriView image in fullscreenMore than 370 alumni of Washington DC-based Georgetown University joined 65 current students there in signing on to a letter opposing immigration authorities’ detention of Dr Badar Khan Suri, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the institution’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).The authorities revoked his student visa, alleging the Indian citizen’s father-in-law was an adviser to Hamas officials more than a decade ago – and claiming he was “deportable” because of his posts on social media in support of Palestine. He was taken to Louisiana and then detention in Texas and was given court dates in May.View image in fullscreenKseniia PetrovaThe Harvard Medical School research scientist was stopped at Boston’s Logan airport by US authorities on her way back from France in February, over what appeared to be an irregularity in customs paperwork related to frog embryo samples. She was told her visa was being revoked and she was being deported to her native Russia.When Petrova, 30, said she feared political persecution there because she had criticized the invasion of Ukraine, she was taken away and also ended up in an overcrowded detention facility in Louisiana. Her colleagues say her expertise is “irreplaceable” and Petrova said foreign scientists like her “enrich” America.Student visas revoked, then restored amid chaosMore than 1,400 international students from at least 200 colleges across the US had their “legal status changed” by the state department, including the revoking of visas, in what the specialist publication Inside Higher Education called “an explosion of visa terminations”.Amid scant information and rising panic, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, lambasted protesters and campus activists as “lunatics”. Some were cited for pro-Palestinian views, others concluded they must have been targeted because of minor crimes or offenses, such as a speeding ticket. Some could find no explanation. Then in the face of multiple court challenges, the administration in late April reversed course and restored legal statuses that had been rescinded en masse, but said it was developing a new policy. Uncertainty prevails.The legal rollercoaster came too late for this high-profile case:Felipe Zapata VelásquezView image in fullscreenThe family of the University of Florida student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, 27, said he was “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his native Colombia after police arrested him in Gainesville in March for traffic offenses and turned him over to Ice. He agreed to be deported, to avoid lengthy detention and legal battles. The Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost accused authorities of “kidnapping” Velásquez.Removed by (admitted) mistakeKilmar Ábrego GarcíaView image in fullscreenThe Salvadorian man was removed to El Salvador by mistake, which the Trump administration admitted. But it is essentially defying a US supreme court order to “facilitate” his return to his home and family in Maryland. Ábrego García was undocumented but had protected status against being deported to El Salvador. He was flown there anyway, without a hearing, to a brutal mega-prison, then later transferred to another facility. The administration accuses him of being a violent gangster and has abandoned him, infuriating a federal judge repeatedly and prompting warnings of a constitutional crisis.He has not been charged with any crimes but was swept up with hundreds of Venezuelans deported there. He has begged to speak to his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who insists he is not a criminal. The sheet metalworkers union chief, Michael Coleman, described Ábrego García as an “apprentice working hard to pursue the American dream” and said he was not a gang member. Trump said he was eyeing Salvadorian prisons for US citizens.Deported to a third country, without due processThe US deported more than 230 Venezuelan men to the mega-prison in El Salvador without so much as a hearing in mid-March despite an infuriated federal judge trying to halt the flights, then blocking others. Donald Trump took extraordinary action to avoid due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a law meant only to be used in wartime, prompting court challenges led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). John Roberts, the US chief justice, rebuked the president when he threatened the judge. The justices, by a majority, did not stop Trump from using the AEA but the bench unanimously reaffirmed the right to due process and said individuals must be able to bring habeas corpus challenges.Most of the men are reportedly not violent criminals or members of violent gangs, as the Trump administration asserts, according to a New York Times investigation.Many appear to have been accused of being members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua partly on the basis of their tattoos, with their families speaking out, including:Andry José Hernández RomeroView image in fullscreenHernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist and hairdresser, entered California last year to attend an asylum appointment, telling the authorities he was under threat in Venezuela as a gay man. But he was detained and accused of being in Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos, then suddenly deported under Trump, deemed a “security threat”.Jerce Reyes Barriosskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former professional footballer, 36, has been accused of gang membership by the DHS, seemingly because of his tattoos, including one of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “dios”.“He chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favourite soccer team, Real Madrid,” his lawyer, Linette Tobin, said, adding that her client fled Venezuela after protesting against the government and being tortured.Francisco Javier García CasiqueView image in fullscreenRelatives were shocked when they spotted Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, in a propaganda video from El Salvador showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody there. He is a barber in his home town of Maracay and is completely innocent of gang involvement, the family said, adding that Francisco and his brother Sebastián have matching tattoos quoting the Bible.Migrants seeking asylum removed to PanamaA US military plane took off from California in February carrying more than 100 immigrants from countries as far flung as Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Pakistan, dumping them in Panama. They were shackled and deported to a third country without due process because their countries of origin refuse to accept them back from the US. Shocking scenes unfolded of the people locked in a hotel in Panama City, signaling and writing on the windows pleading for help.The people, including children, were then moved and held at a facility deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia. They were later reportedly freed and were seeking asylum from other countries, their futures uncertain. One of those deported from the US was:Artemis GhasemzadehView image in fullscreenGhasemzadeh, 27, a migrant from Iran, wrote “Help us” in lipstick on a window of the hotel in Panama City, as a desperate way of alerting New York Times reporters on the street to her and fellow detainees’ plight. She had thought that, especially as a convert from Islam to Christianity who faces danger in Iran as a result, that she would be offered freedom in the US, she told the newspaper while still in custody. She is possibly still in Panama trying to get a foothold.Americans questioned and threatenedAmir MakledView image in fullscreenMakled, a Detroit-born attorney, was questioned at the airport on returning from vacation. He was flagged to a terrorism response team, kept behind and pressured to hand over his phone, then give up some of its contents. The Lebanese American represents a pro-Palestinian student protester who was arrested at the University of Michigan. Experts said the incident was evidence of a weakening of fourth amendment constitutional protections at the border against “unreasonable search and seizure”.Nicole MicheroniView image in fullscreenThis Massachusetts immigration lawyer, a US-born American citizen, spoke out after receiving an email from the Trump administration telling her “it is time for you to leave the United States”. She said it was “probably, hopefully, sent to me in error. But it’s a little concerning these are going out to US citizens.” She told NBC she thought it was a scare tactic.Adam PeñaThis San Diego-based US citizen now carries his American passport and birth certificate everywhere with him and thinks he was sent one of the “time for you to leave” letters in error but because he represents clients in Ice detention locally. “I do believe this email was sent intentionally to immigration advocates around the country to instill fear and intimidation,” he told NBC news.Americans removedChildren who are seven, four and two and are US citizens were removed from the US in late April when their mothers were deported to Honduras. DHS said the two women chose to take their children with them but one of their lawyers told the Guardian that they were denied any opportunity to coordinate the care and custody of their children before being put on deportation flights from Louisiana. A federal judge said it was “illegal and unconstitutional” to thus remove a US citizen “with no meaningful process”.Visitors detainedJasmine Mooney, CanadaView image in fullscreenCanadian Jasmine Mooney was shackled and ended up in Ice detention in the US for two weeks over an alleged work visa irregularity while on one of her frequent visits to California. She spoke out about the harsh conditions and the information black hole and how outraged she was that so many other detainees she met, who helped her, are stranded without access to the kind of resources that ultimately got her out.Rebecca Burke, UKView image in fullscreenThe British graphic artist was stopped at the border when she headed from Seattle to Canada as a backpacker and, because of a visa mix-up, she became one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency. Almost three weeks of grueling detention conditions later, she smuggled out her poignant drawings of fellow detainees when she was released.Jessica Brösche, GermanyThe German tourist and tattoo artist, 29, from Berlin was detained by US immigration authorities and deported back to Germany after spending more than six weeks in US detention, including what she described as eight days in solitary confinement. Her family compared her ordeal to “a horror film”.Fabian Schmidt, GermanyView image in fullscreenThe 34-year-old German national and US green-card holder was apprehended and allegedly “violently interrogated” by US border officials as he was returning to New Hampshire from a trip to Luxembourg. His family said he was held for hours at Boston’s Logan airport, stripped naked and put in a cold shower, then later deprived of food and medicine, and collapsed. His case is being investigated and as of mid-April he was in Ice detention in Rhode Island.Sent back‘Jonathan’A man with a US work visa provided his anonymous account to the Guardian of being denied entry into the US after a trip to his native Australia to scatter his sister’s ashes. He was pulled aside on arrival in Houston, Texas, and accused, variously, of selling drugs and having improper paperwork. After being detained for over a day he was put on a flight back to Australia even though he has worked on the US east coast for five years, where he lived with his girlfriend.Denied entry – for criticizing Trump?Alvin Gibbs, Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein of band UK SubsView image in fullscreenMembers of the punk rock band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US on their way to play a gig in Los Angeles, after being questioned about visas. Bassist Alvin Gibbs said: “I can’t help but wonder whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president [Trump] and his administration played a role.” He and the two band mates were kept in harsh conditions for 24 hours then deported back to the UK.French scientistA French scientist, who has not been publicly named, was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, according to a French government minister. The researcher was on his way to a conference in Texas.“Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, told Le Monde. More

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      ‘They disappear them’: families of the detained see grim echo of Latin American dictatorships in Trump’s US

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      Neiyerver Rengel’s captors came one sunny spring morning, lurking outside the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and pouncing as soon as he emerged.The three government agents announced the young Venezuelan man had “charges to answer” and was being detained.“Everything’s going to be OK,” the man’s girlfriend, Richely Alejandra Uzcátegui Gutiérrez, remembers the handcuffed 27-year-old reassuring her as she gave him one last hug.Then Rengel was put in a vehicle and vanished into thin air: spirited into custody and, his family would later learn, dispatched to a detention centre notorious for torture and inhuman conditions hundreds of miles from home.“We have to take him,” Uzcátegui recalls one officer saying before they left. “But if this is a misunderstanding, he’ll be released and given a phone call to contact you.”That call never came.View image in fullscreenThe scenes above might have played out in any number of Latin American dictatorships during the 20th century, from Gen Augusto Pinochet’s Chile to Gen Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina. Thousands of regime opponents were seized at home or on the street – and slipped off the map, becoming “desaparecidos” (the disappeared ones).But Rengel’s disappearance took place on 13 March this year in Donald Trump’s US, where what campaigners call the “forced disappearance” of scores of Venezuelan migrants has fuelled fears of an authoritarian tack under a leader who vowed to be a dictator “on day one” of his presidency. Those fears intensified on Friday amid reports that a judge had been arrested by the FBI for supposedly helping “an illegal alien” evade arrest.Juanita Goebertus, Human Rights Watch’s Americas director, said she had no hesitation in calling the detentions of those Venezuelans enforced disappearances. “Under international law, when someone is detained and there’s no account of where the person is, it amounts to enforced disappearances – and this is exactly what has happened,” she said.View image in fullscreenFor five weeks after Rengel’s detention in Irving, Texas, relatives remained in the dark over his whereabouts. His brother, Nedizon León Rengel, said he spent hours calling immigration detention centres but failed to get clear answers. “They told us he’d been deported but wouldn’t say where,” recalled Nedizon, who migrated to the US with his brother in 2023.Finally, on 23 April, came the bombshell: a report on NBC News said Rengel was one of at least 252 Venezuelans who had been flown to authoritarian El Salvador and jailed for supposedly belonging to the Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang that Trump’s administration has designated a foreign terrorist organisation.“Finding out through the news was devastating. But the worst part was having to tell my mum,” said Nedizon. “Before I came here, the US represented a land of opportunity – a place to fulfil dreams and improve our quality of life … Now it feels like a nightmare. Human rights aren’t even being respected any more – not even the right to make a phone call, which is guaranteed to anyone who is detained.”Rengel was not the only Venezuelan to disappear after being ensnared in Trump’s crackdown on immigrants he has repeatedly smeared as rapists, murderers and terrorists who have supposedly launched an “invasion” of the US.Ricardo Prada Vásquez, 33, was apprehended in Detroit in mid-January, days after sending his brother a video showing the Chicago snow – a magical moment for a man raised on Margarita, a sun-kissed Caribbean island, who had never seen a northern winter.On 15 March, Prada told a friend he was being deported to Venezuela – but he never arrived. Nor was Prada’s name on a list published five days later by CBS News identifying 238 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s “terrorism confinement” prison. (Rengel was also not on the list. US and Salvadoran authorities have refused to publish a register of the prisoners’ names.)For the next five weeks, Prada’s relatives – who deny he is a criminal – also had no idea where he was.View image in fullscreen“It’s mentally exhausting to be constantly thinking about how he is and what he’s going through,” his brother, Hugo Prada, said from Venezuela. Only last Tuesday, after Prada’s story was featured in the New York Times, authorities did confirm where he had been sent.“This TDA gang member didn’t ‘disappear’. He is in El Salvador,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary, wrote on X, claiming Prada had been “designated a public safety threat”.Prada defended his brother, a former shoe salesman he described as a laid-back, hard-working quipster who migrated to the US last year hoping to provide a better future for his four-year-old son, Alexandro, who still lives on Margarita. “Dammit, he went [to the US] in search of a better life and what he got was this disaster,” said Prada, insisting his sibling was innocent.Before Prada’s detention, he held near-daily video calls with his child. In recent days, Alexandro has repeatedly asked relatives why he can no longer speak with his father. “They say he’s working,” said Hugo, voicing shock that people could vanish into custody in the US.“It’s unbelievable that they just grabbed them and sent them to a concentration camp for them to die, just like Hitler did with the Jews,” Prada added. “[The US is] a democratic country – and it’s as if we’ve gone 50 or 100 years back in time.”View image in fullscreenNelson Suárez, the brother of a third Venezuelan jailed in El Salvador, said the treatment of the detainees – some of whom have been paraded on television with shaved heads and in shackles – reminded him of how the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro dealt with his foes. “[They are doing] the same thing they do in Venezuela when they capture a political prisoner. They lock them up and disappear them – and nobody hears anything more from them until the government feels like it,” said Suárez, whose brother, Arturo Suárez, is a musician with no criminal background.The wave of detentions and disappearances has devastated the US’s Venezuelan community, which has swelled in recent years as a result of the South American country’s economic collapse.“The community lives in uncertainty and in terror,” said Adelys Ferro, who runs the Venezuelan American Caucus advocacy group. “People are petrified. They are thinking: ‘What if I am next? What if they stop me? What is going to happen?’“Even people with documents are terrified. Even people with green cards are terrified,” added Ferro, a Venezuelan-American who has lived in the US for 20 years. “This is something that shouldn’t be happening anywhere in the world, much less – for Christ’s sake – in America.”Six weeks after federal agents seized her hairdresser boyfriend outside their home in Irving, Texas, Uzcátegui said she was still not convinced she knew the full truth about his plight, despite the DHS admitting last Tuesday that he had also been sent to El Salvador.View image in fullscreenWithout offering evidence, McLaughlin told NBC News Rengel was “an associate of Tren de Aragua … a vicious gang that rapes, maims, and murders for sport” – a claim relatives reject. Rengel’s only run-in with the law appears to have been being last year fined $492 after he was stopped in a co-worker’s car in which police found a marijuana trimmer.“To me, he’s still missing. This doesn’t give me peace of mind,” Uzcátegui said of the government’s admission. “Because there’s no record, no photo, no phone call. I insist – he’s still missing.”Even families who now know their loved ones were sent to El Salvador do not know how they are, in which prison they are being held, what charges, if any, they face, or how long they may be held there.“On one hand I feel a little bit calmer knowing that he’s somewhere and he’s not dead. But what situation awaits us? What comes next?” wondered Hugo Prada, who had no idea what charges his brother was facing or how long a sentence he could face.Ferro vowed to continue denouncing the “nightmare” such families were facing. “It is exhausting, and so painful and disheartening. But that pain is not going to make us cease fighting for justice, that’s for sure,” she said.Speaking from her home in Venezuela, Rengel’s 50-year-old mother, Sandra Luz Rengel, recalled begging him “from the bottom of my heart” not to travel to the US. But he was unmoved – and now he was lost.“Not knowing anything about him is outrageous,” she said. “And there’s nothing I can do.” More

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      Trump 100 days: delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude

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      He has blinged it with gold cherubim, gold eagles, gold medallions, gold figurines and gilded rococo mirrors. He has crammed its walls with gold-framed paintings of great men from US history. In 100 days Donald Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded cage.The portraits of Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan and other past presidents gaze down from a past that the 47th seems determined to erase. Trump is seeking to remake the US in his image at frightening speed. The shock and awe of his second term has challenged many Americans’ understanding of who they are.In three months Trump has shoved the world’s oldest continuous democracy towards authoritarianism at a pace that tyrants overseas would envy. He has used executive power to take aim at Congress, the law, the media, culture and public health. Still aggrieved by his 2020 election defeat and 2024 criminal conviction, his regime of retribution has targeted perceived enemies and proved that no grudge is too small.Historically such strongmen have offered the populace a grand bargain: if they will surrender some liberties, he will make the trains run on time. But Trump’s delusions of monarchy have been coupled with a fundamental ineptitude.His trade war injected chaos into the economy, undermining a campaign promise to lower prices and raising the spectre of recession; his ally Elon Musk wreaked havoc on the federal government, threatening health and welfare benefits for millions; his foreign policy turned the world upside down, making friends of adversaries and turning allies into foes.Having promised so much winning, Trump is losing. Just 39% of respondents approve of how he is handling his job as president, according to an opinion poll by ABC News, the Washington Post newspaper and Ipsos, while 55% disapprove. For the first time Trump is even under water on his signature issue of immigration.“Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president have been 100 days from hell for the American people,” Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to Senate colleagues. “His first 100 days have been the worst for any president in modern history, and unsurprisingly, he has the lowest 100-day job approval any president has seen in 80 years.”The scale of the disaster is hard to comprehend for anyone who expected a repeat of Trump’s first term. His first 100 days in 2017 were consequential enough: a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, an order for construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border and the firing of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, over undisclosed contacts with Russia. But while America’s guardrails bent, they did not break.View image in fullscreenFrom the moment he was sworn in on 20 January 2025, with the tech oligarchs Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg looking on, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency would be of a different magnitude. Instead of the conservative stalwart Mike Pence as vice-president, there is the Maga isolationist JD Vance. Instead of the retired four-star general Jim Mattis as defence secretary, there is the former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth.And instead of experienced hands ready to curb Trump’s impulses, there is a cabinet of sycophants eager to indulge them, including in ostentatious displays for the TV cameras. Trump, 78, told the Atlantic magazine: “The first time, I had two things to do – run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and White House chief of staff, said: “In the first term there were some guardrails and individuals that were able to restrain him before he took action. In the second term he doesn’t have any guardrails and deliberately selected a cabinet in which loyalty was the primary quality that he was after.“The problem is that he goes ahead and takes actions that can cause tremendous disruption. The only check that I can see is when something he does could very well lead to an economic disaster of one kind or another. It’s only when that seems clear that he basically pulls back.”Trump and his allies had four years in political exile to plot and plan a disruptive agenda laid out in Project 2025, a set of proposals by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank in Washington. Yet its execution has been undermined by the president’s mercurial nature, cabinet infighting and leaks, especially at the Pentagon, reportedly now in disarray.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “I’m struck by this weird combination of a focused and very well-planned agenda on the one hand and reckless incompetence on the other. You have Russ Vought [director of the office of management and budget] and the Project 2025 folks who clearly had a blueprint for action ready to go and yet you also see this pattern of dysfunction running through agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense.”For Trump’s diehard supporters, his key strength is his success as a businessman and promise to run the economy accordingly. As president he has imposed tariffs on trading partners including Mexico, Canada and China, with Chinese goods facing a combined tax of 145%.The impact has been profound, with consumer confidence plummeting, stock markets convulsing and investors losing confidence in the credibility of Trump’s policies. In the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 72% said they thought it was very or somewhat likely that his economic policies would cause a recession in the short term.View image in fullscreenTrump, who promised be a dictator only on “day one”, has signed more than 135 executive orders, well ahead of any other president in their first 100 days, bypassing Congress. He tapped Musk to lead the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, aimed at reducing government waste with a Silicon Valley-inspired “move fast and break things” mentality.Doge has been slashing programmes, jobs and entire agencies, including the Department of Education, that by law receive funding under the purview of Congress. Musk and his team have combed through tax, social security and health records, putting private data at risk. While Musk initially aimed for $1tn in budget cuts, analysts predict that he will fall dramatically short.Doge has caused turmoil in medical research by firing doctors and scientists working to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. It has frozen funding for military veterans’ facilities and fired critical workers at hospitals serving disabled veterans. Musk has also described health and social welfare programmes as “the big ones to eliminate” and social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.Even long-term political observers are aghast at Trump’s acts of self-sabotage. Paul Begala, a former White House adviser and Democratic strategist, said: “I expected him to be stupid. I expected him to be chaotic. I expected his team to be a bunch of sycophants and nincompoops. I expected the tariffs and trade war.“Here’s what I didn’t expect. For me, the defining word of these 100 days has been betrayal. A good politician takes office and tries to expand beyond his base; an average politician tries to reward his base; Trump is the first politician who’s screwing his base, betraying his base. I honestly don’t understand it.”View image in fullscreenIn keeping with his campaign promise, Trump has implemented some of the hardest-line immigration policies in the nation’s history, driving a sharp decline in illegal border crossings.He invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants without due process, including sending alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order. The action was met with legal challenges and judicial rebuke. Trump also pledged to end birthright citizenship and proposed “gold cards” for millionaires to buy US citizenship.Another defining theme of the first 100 days is retribution. On his first day in office, Trump pardoned virtually everyone who took part in the 6 January 2021 insurrection. He has actively targeted prosecutors who investigated him, former officials who criticised him and universities whose policies he disliked. He ordered the justice department to investigate Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity director who refuted unfounded claims of election fraud in 2020.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “This will truly be known as the administration of revenge and retribution. No one’s ever done these things before. Even Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list and was full of anger and resentment, couldn’t hold a candle to Trump.“It’s frightening and has the effect of intimidating people. He loves to bully and he has done more than any other president, certainly in a short period of time. There’s just nothing like this in all of American history. I’ve had so many people my age say, can I survive this? Because it’s stressful.”Trump’s executive orders have faced more than 150 lawsuits and judges have blocked the administration numerous times. The president called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him, prompting a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week agents arrested Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities at her courtroom.Trump is also waging a culture war. Funding for arts and cultural institutions has been cut, and leaders ousted, with the president declaring them fronts for a “woke” agenda. The administration has gone after the media, fighting against news organisations in court and seeking to dismantle the Voice of America broadcaster. Access for some outlets has been restricted while “Maga media” have been platformed.PEN America, which defends writers worldwide against autocratic regimes, said the opening weeks of the Trump White House were unlike anything seen since the red scare McCarthy era of the 1950s. It warned of a “five-alarm fire” for free speech, education, the right to protest and a war against ideas and language themselves.The events – along with outlandish statements about annexing Greenland, retaking the Panama canal and making Canada the 51st state – have hurt America’s reputation around the globe.View image in fullscreenPatrick Gaspard, a former official in the Barack Obama administration, said: “Donald Trump has been radically successful in demonstrating that in 100 days you can destroy a brand that’s been built up over nearly 250 years. If that’s a success then congratulations.”He added: “We’re in DefCon 1 in a democracy where the president is radically consolidating power, politicising non-partisan agencies, attacking civil society and private firms, and literally disappearing people from our streets. Tragically, those with influence only seem to be moved by the volatility in the stock market because of tariffs, failing to see that the entire edifice that makes their success possible is being dismantled.”Trump’s political honeymoon appears to be over. Even among Republicans, polling shows that there is ambivalence about his priorities, with only about half saying he has focused on the right things. Street protests are growing across the country, judges continue to hand him defeats and Harvard University stood its ground against him. As the Democratic party tries to regroup, Trump could find his second 100 days heavier going than his first.In 2021 Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, told the Guardian that history would remember Trump as by far the worst president ever on the basis of his first term. “I was wrong,” he acknowledged last week. “This is the worst presidency in American history.“The ignorance was actually our ally in the first Trump term. He didn’t know what he was doing and now, unfortunately, while he still doesn’t know what he’s doing, he knows more than he did. Trump believes he is infallible. He’s going to burn out with the public long before the end of this term.” More

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      Trump 100 days: ‘unpredictable’ US alienates allies and disrupts global trade

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      For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.The tariffs Trump has unleashed will, if effected, disrupt global trade and lead to supply chain shocks in the United States, with China’s Xi Jinping seeking to recruit US trade allies in the region.The pace of the developments in the past 100 days makes them difficult to list. Operating mainly through executive action, the Trump administration has affected nearly all facets of US foreign policy: from military might to soft power, from trade to immigration, reimagining the US’s place in the world according to an isolationist America First program.“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Nato.The Trump presidency has ended the relative peace in the western hemisphere since the end of the second world war underwritten by US economic, military and diplomatic influence, Daalder said.“The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore,” he said. “And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”The US’s key foreign policy and national security making institutions are in crisis. The Pentagon is mid-meltdown under the leadership of Pete Hegseth, whose erratic and unsteady leadership has been reflected in score-settling among his senior staff, while a leaked Signal chat embroiled the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and others in scandal. The state department under Marco Rubio is undergoing a vast shake-up, and the US’s diplomats are being sidelined in favour of envoys such as Steve Witkoff with little background in foreign policy. Critics say the gutting of USAID will cut back on US soft power for generations.“There’s no better way to get us into a war, perhaps a catastrophic war, than essentially poking out your eyes and numbing your brain, and you’re left with Donald Trump and a few people sitting in the White House winging it, and they’re not competent to wing it,” said Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer for the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, and the executive director of the Steady State, an advocacy group of former national security professionals. “And so we’ve seen that with the tariffs. We’ve seen that with Nato. We’ve seen that with Ukraine, and we’re gonna see a lot more of it.”After assuming office in 2021, Joe Biden declared: “America is back.”“The world now knows America is not back,” Daalder said. “America is gone again.”In a recent interview with the Zeit newspaper, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, expressed similar sentiments, saying: “The west as we knew it no longer exists.”View image in fullscreenIn Munich, JD Vance delivered a landmark speech openly pandering to Europe’s far right, accusing European leaders of “running from their own voters” and saying: “America can do nothing to help you.”A backlash has begun. Last month the EU presented an €800bn ($913bn) plan on the future of European defense, a putative step in what would be a herculean task to overcome internal divisions and onshore European defense manufacturing. The UK and other US allies have considered other efforts, such as limiting intelligence-sharing with the US. “We still need America now, but there is a vision [of a time] when we won’t any more,” said one European diplomat.Meanwhile, the Trump effect is beginning to sway elections as well – though not as he might hope.In the western hemisphere, Trump has terrorised US neighbours and tacitly declared what some have compared to a new Monroe doctrine, saying the White House planned to “take back” the Panama canal and annex Greenland, while regularly calling Canada the future 51st state.In an extraordinary bit of election-day meddling, Trump wrote a social media post suggesting that he was on the ballot in Canada’s vote, repeating that Canada should become the 51st state in order to avoid tariffs and reap economic awards.Canadians responded by duly electing the liberal candidate Mark Carney, completing a 30% swing in polling that has largely been explained by opposition to Trump’s tariff war and territorial menaces.In Europe, populist parties seen as Trump’s ideological allies are also on the defensive. While Trump was popular in terms of his ideological and anti-woke agenda, the trade war has made him “quite toxic, just in the last month or two, with a lot of the populist voting bases”, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.Nowhere has the shift in US foreign policy been felt more acutely than in Ukraine, where the sudden cutoff in US military and intelligence sharing confirmed the Trump administration’s goals of pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal with the Kremlin, rather than the other way around. Those frustrations boiled over into an Oval Office meltdown fueled by Vice-President JD Vance that one former US official close to the talks called “disgraceful”.Trump has swung wildly on the war, on certain days targeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and then quickly pivoting to call out Putin for continuing to rain down missiles on Ukrainian cities. His theatrics have produced symbolic moments, including a sudden recognition that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war” after speaking with Zelenskyy this weekend in the baptistry of St Peter’s Basilica. But in terms of hard results, Trump has not fulfilled a promise to end the war within 24 hours or produced a clear path to peace many months later.View image in fullscreenThe Russians have said they largely tune out what he says in public.“We hear many things coming from President Trump,” said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a television appearance this weekend. “We concentrate, as I said, on the real negotiations which President Trump supports and instructed his people to continue to engage in these negotiations.”Key among those people is Witkoff, a neophyte diplomat who has spent hours in conversation with Putin, often with no other adviser present. One person close to the Kremlin said that Witkoff was viewed as a reliable negotiator in Moscow with “a chance to make an agreement”, but added: “There is a chance it will pass by.”Much of the burden of international diplomacy now rests on Witkoff, who is also running point on other key negotiations. Trump has tasked him with reaching a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in effect renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018. Both the US and Iran have played up the talks, although “differences still exist both on major issues and on the details”, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state television this week.And then there is the Middle East, where the Trump administration scored its greatest early success by negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza but then failed to prevent its collapse, with Israel cutting off new aid to Gaza as the fighting continues.“There now seems to be less focus on ending the devastating conflict,” wrote Stefanie Hausheer Ali, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. “Trump’s threat in February to Hamas to release the hostages or ‘all hell is going to break out’ has, in practice, meant Israel restarting the war and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Without an alternative to Hamas rule, the militant group may hang on and continue to fight as an insurgency, replenishing its ranks by recruiting desperate people.”Trump’s most extreme remarks have turned out to be bluster: he stunned the world when he claimed that he would turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront condos and said that the local Palestinian population would be forcibly removed. Months later, the initiative is largely forgotten.While attempting to close three landmark negotiations at once, the Trump administration has also launched a trade war with the entire world, establishing sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports before abruptly reversing course and cutting tariffs to 10% save for those against China.With so many major efforts ongoing, observers say that the government is largely paralysed to deal with smaller but still crucial issues in foreign policy and national security. As part of a blanket ban on refugees, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted US troops against the Taliban are left waiting for relocation to the United States, a promise that was extended by previous administrations.“The lack of clarity and the chaos are the things that are causing so much pain,” said Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a group that works with the state department to help resettle Afghans.He said he was critical of both the Biden and Trump administrations for failing to relocate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were far enough along in the vetting program to be relocated before Trump came into office.“The truth is, is that when America makes a promise, you should be able to trust our word,” he said. “If our flag waving over an embassy in Tunisia or Baghdad or Kabul, or Kyiv doesn’t mean this is the place where there’s truth, where there’s justice … well, then what are we even doing here?” More

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      Peace Corps to undergo ‘significant’ cuts after Doge review

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      The Peace Corps is offering staff a second “fork in the road” buyout, according to a source familiar with the matter. Allison Greene, the chief executive of Peace Corps, sent an email to staff on Monday with an update about the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) assessment of the agency.Greene said to expect “significant restructuring efforts” at Peace Corps headquarters, according to the email seen by the Guardian. Starting on 28 April and going through 6 May, direct hire and expert staff are being offered a second deferred resignation program, what Elon Musk’s Doge has referred to as a “fork in the road” buyout. Greene referred to this offer as “DRP 2.0”.Eligible staff will hear from human resources and “are strongly encouraged to consider this option”, Greene wrote. The offer applies to employees both domestically and overseas.Peace Corps will “continue to recruit, place, and train volunteers”, Greene said, indicating that the cuts are specifically for agency staff and will not affect volunteers.A Peace Corps spokesperson confirmed that Doge began the cuts on Monday.“The agency will remain operational and continue to recruit, place, and train volunteers, while continuing to support their health, safety and security, and effective service,” the spokesperson said.Since Donald Trump was inaugurated and tapped Musk to head the unofficial government agency Doge, the secretive group has steadily worked to slash budgets and lay off workers in federal agencies.With the mission to identify “waste, fraud and abuse”, it has targeted nearly two dozen agencies and fired hundreds of workers. Doge has especially focused on agencies involved in foreign aid and development, such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID).Doge started its work at Peace Corps headquarters in the beginning of April, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A Doge representative, Bridget Youngs, visited the agency headquarters at that time and asked for access to the agency’s financial records. Doge workers have continued to work in the building over the following weeks.Peace Corps staffers were told to cooperate with Doge and “if data from the system is requested, confirm what is required to meet their needs (data, format, etc)”. Staff were additionally told that “under all circumstances, ensure that clear records are kept on what is requested and provided”.It’s unclear how many Peace Corps jobs will be cut or if Doge will direct the agency to do more than this new round of buyouts. In a separate email sent by the Peace Corps office of human resources on Monday and seen by the Guardian, the agency wrote: “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance which positions will remain – or where they will be located – after an anticipated workforce restructuring.”The Peace Corps sends volunteers to countries around the world to work for two years on public health, economic development and education projects. It was created in 1961 by John F Kennedy and has sent more than 240,000 volunteers abroad. It currently has around 3,000 volunteers working in 60 different countries. More