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    Trump has ‘never evolved, which is dangerous’, his niece Mary Trump says

    Donald Trump has “never evolved” and “isn’t close with anybody”, according to Mary Trump, the US president’s niece and a vocal critic of his business and political career.The daughter of Donald’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr (nicknamed Freddie), Mary Trump told the Hay festival in Wales – where she was discussing her latest book about the Trump family, Who Could Ever Love You – that she no longer has relationships with anyone in her family apart from her daughter.She described herself as “the black sheep of the family”, calling her grandfather, Fred Trump, Donald’s father, “literally a sociopath”, and adding: “Cruelty is a theme in my family.”She explained that much of her understanding of her uncle comes from when she was in her 20s and Donald hired her to ghostwrite his second book.“I can’t say we got closer, because Donald isn’t close with anybody,” she said, but working with him for six months in his office, she got “a little bit more insight”.“He is the only person I’ve ever met who’s never evolved, which is dangerous by the way,” she said. “Never choose as your leader somebody who’s incapable of evolving – that should be one of the lessons we’ve learned, for sure.”She also described the president as “one of the most provincial people I know, and that does not serve us well, at all”.Reading from her book, she described the moment a friend of her father’s, Anna Maria, met Donald for the first time. “When she first encountered Donald, he was a cocky, rude teenager, who was intensely jealous of his older brother, Freddie.“Donald didn’t have any friends, so she felt sorry for him, but whenever they included him, they regretted it. Nobody in Freddie’s circle could bear to be around this arrogant, self-important, humorless kid.“Over the years, Anna Maria watched Donald devolve into an even more arrogant adult with a widening, cruel streak.”In the book she also recounts Donald throwing a baseball at his young nieces and nephews when he was in his 20s and she was eight years old. Her brother bought her a catcher’s mitt for Christmas one year, and she “realised it was probably to protect me from having every bone in my hand broken from Donald throwing a baseball at me as hard as he could”.Mary also told audiences that after Donald’s older sister, Elizabeth, was born, doctors told his mother “that it would be very dangerous for her to have more children” because of her health issues. “She did, and the next one was Donald. About which I will say nothing more,” Mary joked.His mother later became very ill, meaning Donald, “at a very crucial developmental period, did not have his primary caregiver, and the only person left was his dad, the sociopath. So you can imagine how that sort of changed the trajectory of Donald’s life.”Mary is a psychologist whose previous books, Too Much and Never Enough and The Reckoning, also involve her uncle. She distanced herself from him around the time he began his first presidential term in 2017.In 2021, the former president sued her for $100m for giving the New York Times information for its investigation into his finances. The lawsuit sends “a very clear message to me”, she said. “But what if everybody capitulates? Then what? Well, then we lose, and that’s unacceptable.”She added that she does not “understand people who are afraid of Donald, because he’s so pathetic. I would be embarrassed to be afraid of him.” More

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    She compared motherhood in four countries. The US isn’t looking good

    When Abigail Leonard saw the news that the Trump administration was considering handing out $5,000 “baby bonuses” to new mothers, she realized that she had already received one.A longtime international reporter, Leonard gave birth to three children while living in Japan, which offers a year of parental leave, publicly run daycare, and lump-sum grants to new parents that amount to thousands of US dollars. But it was not until moving back to the US in 2023 that Leonard grasped just how robust Japan’s social safety net for families is – and, in comparison, just how paltry the US net feels.Not only is the US the only rich country on the planet without any form of national paid leave, but an uncomplicated birth covered by private insurance tends to cost families about $3,000, which, Leonard discovered, is far more than in most other countries. The federal government also spends a fraction of what most other wealthy countries spend on early education and childcare, as federally subsidized childcare is primarily available only to the lowest earners. Middle-class families are iced out.View image in fullscreenLeonard traces the effects of policies and disparities like these in her new book, Four Mothers, which follows the pregnancy and early childrearing experiences of four urban, middle-class women living in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the US. Published earlier this month, Four Mothers provides a deeply personal window into how policy shapes parents’ lives. And it has emerged as an increasingly rightwing US seems poised to embrace the ideology of pronatalism and policies aimed at convincing people to have more kids.Pronatalism is deeply controversial, in no small part because its critics say pronatalists are more concerned with pushing women to have kids than with ensuring women have the support required to raise them.“Being ‘pronatal’ – designing policy to increase the birthrate – is not the same thing as being pro-woman,” Leonard notes in Four Mothers’ introduction. A $5,000 check would not have been enough to help any of the moms profiled in the book. Instead, the women relied on – or longed for, in the case of the US – extensive external support, such as affordable maternity care, parental leave and access to childcare.“The book is an implicit comparison of the rest of the world to the US, and parenthood is so much harder here in many ways,” Leonard said in a phone interview with the Guardian. “People are so accepting that things can be privatized and that government can be torn down and that there won’t be any repercussions to that. We don’t think about how integral government policy is to our lives, and for that reason can’t imagine how much more beneficial it could be.”View image in fullscreenIn the US, resistance to increasing government aid in childrearing has long gone hand in hand with a commitment to upholding a white, traditional view of the American family. At virtually every juncture, rightwing groups have been galvanized to stop sporadic efforts at expanding support. During the second world war, Congress allocated $20m to a universal childcare program that could help women work while men fought in the war effort. The program was so popular that people protested in the streets to keep it even after the war ended, according to Leonard. But the program was dismantled after political disputes over how to run the program, as southern states demanded that the daycares be segregated.In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national system of federally subsidized daycare centers. Inflamed by the idea that the bill would encourage women to work outside the home, church groups organized letter-writing campaigns against the bill. Rightwing pundits, meanwhile, claimed the bill was “a plan to Sovietize our youth”. Richard Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill, calling it “the most radical piece of legislation” to ever cross his desk.Today, Leonard writes, corporations have an entrenched interest in keeping childcare from becoming a public good in the US. Private equity is heavily invested in childcare companies. Wealthy corporations, especially big tech companies, can also use their generous paid leave policies to lure in the best talent.“I talked to a congressman who was telling me he was trying to get some of these companies on board to back a national paid leave policy, and they were saying: ‘We don’t want to do paid leave because then we give up our own competitive advantage.’ It’s so cynical,” Leonard said. “These are companies that have been able to create this image around themselves of being feminist and pro-family. Like: ‘They’re great places to work for women. They help fund fertility treatments!’”She continued: “They’ve feminist-washed themselves. They’re working against a national policy that would benefit everyone and that ultimately would benefit our democracy, because you wouldn’t have this huge inequality of benefits and lifestyles.”‘A grind’The US has become far more accepting of women’s careerist ambitions over the last 50 years – especially as it has become more difficult for US families to sustain themselves on a single income – but balancing work and family life is still often treated as a matter of personal responsibility (or, frequently, as a personal failing).View image in fullscreenTo improve mothers’ lives, Leonard found, a commitment to flexible gender norms – in the home and at work – must be coupled with a robust social safety net.Each of the women in Four Mothers struggled with male partners who, in various ways and for assorted reasons, failed to provide as much childcare as the mothers. Sarah, a teacher in Utah, was married to an Amazon delivery driver who got zero parental leave. Sarah was entitled to three months of leave, at partial pay, but only because her union advocated for it. Although Sarah and her husband chose to leave the Mormon church, she found herself longing for the community that the church provided because it offered some form of support and acknowledgment of motherhood.Finland perhaps fares the best in Leonard’s book. The country, which gives parents about a year of paid leave, invests heavily in its maternal care system and has some of the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world; it even offers mothers prenatal counseling where they can discuss their own childhoods and how to break cycles of intergenerational trauma. (The US, by contrast, has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country.) Finland is also the only industrialized nation on the planet where fathers spend more time with their children than mothers do. (The difference is about eight minutes, “about as even as it can be”, Leonard wrote in Four Mothers.) Parents are also happier than non-parents in Finland – which is routinely ranked as the happiest country in the world – while the inverse is true in the US.View image in fullscreenStill, the birth rate is on the decline in Finland, just as it is in Japan and the US. It is not clear what kinds of pronatalist policies, if any, induce people to have kids. Nearly 60% of Americans under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children say that’s because “they just don’t want to”.“The pronatal argument here – that’s really focused on people who make the choice not to have children. That is not only cruel and mean, but it’s also ineffective, because people who don’t want to have kids probably aren’t going to have kids and none of this stuff is going to make a difference,” Leonard said.That said, had she been building her family in the US rather than Japan, Leonard doesn’t know if she would have had three children. Given the cost of US childcare, “it would have been more of a grind”.“I just think it’s harder and more expensive here. So it was somewhat easier to have that third child there,” Leonard said. “It’s not because they gave me a $5,000 baby bonus.” More

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    Tourists from countries badly hit by Trump tariffs are staying away from US

    Holidaymakers in countries hit the hardest by Donald Trump’s trade tariffs are taking the US off their list for trips abroad, according to online travel booking data.Findings from the hotel search site Trivago also suggest that UK and US travellers are increasingly choosing domestic holidays amid concerns over an uncertain economy.The company has seen double-digit percentage declines in bookings to the US from travellers based in Japan, Canada and Mexico. The latter two countries were the first on Trump’s tariff hitlist when he announced tariffs of 25% on 1 February.Canadians in particular were incensed at Trump’s repeated suggestions that its northern neighbour would be better off annexed as the 51st state of the US.According to Trivago’s findings, which were shared with PA Media, demand among Germans was also “down heavily”, with hotel bookings in the US showing a single-digit percentage decline.Germany is the largest economy in the EU, which Trump has repeatedly threatened with increased tariffs, most recently saying on Sunday he had “paused” a 50% tax he intended to introduce next month.There has not been a significant change in the numbers of UK holidaymakers travelling to the US. The UK has so far faced some of the lightest tariffs globally and last month struck a “breakthrough” trade deal with the US.Businesses operating in its $2.6tn tourism industry are becoming increasingly concerned about a “Trump slump” due to the turmoil the president’s tariff war is causing on the global economy.Last month, the federal government’s National Travel and Tourism Office released preliminary figures showing visits to the US from overseas fell by 11.6% in March compared with the same month last year.Bookings made via Expedia-owned Trivago also show that Americans are spending less on their trips, while there is higher demand for cheaper hotels and lower star categories.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has levied tariffs on more than 180 countries, but has paused many of his tariffs for periods of up to 90 days while governments seek to negotiate deals.Recent booking data shows that in the UK there has been a 25% year-on-year leap in demand for domestic travel for the important months of July to September.“In times of uncertainty, people stay closer to home,” said Johannes Thomas, chief executive of Trivago.Trivago’s research has shown that London is the top destination for British tourists, followed by Edinburgh, where demand is up by nearly 30%, then York, Blackpool and Manchester. More

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    Trump’s foreign policy is not so unusual for the US – he just drops the facade of moral leadership

    JD Vance is an Iraq war veteran and the US vice-president. On Friday, he declared the doctrine that underpinned Washington’s approach to international relations for a generation is now dead.“We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defence and the maintenance of our alliances for nation building and meddling in foreign countries’ affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests,” Vance told Naval Academy graduates in Annapolis, Maryland.His boss Donald Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East signified an end to all that, Vance said: “What we’re seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in policy with profound implications for the job that each and every one of you will be asked to do.”US foreign policy has previously zigged and zagged from isolation to imperialism. Woodrow Wilson entered the first world war with the the goal of “making the world safe for democracy”. Washington retreated from the world again during the 1920s and 1930s only to fight the second world war and emerge as a military and economic superpower.Foreign policy during the cold war centered on countering the Soviet Union through alliances, military interventions and proxy wars. The 11 September 2001 attacks shifted focus to counterterrorism, leading to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under George W Bush with justifications that included spreading democracy.Barack Obama emphasized diplomacy and reducing troop commitments, though drone strikes and counterterrorism operations persisted. Trump’s first term pushed economic nationalism, pressuring allies to pay their way. Joe Biden restored multilateralism, focusing on climate, alliances and countering China’s influence.As in many other political arenas, Trump’s second term is bolder and louder on the world stage.Trump and Vance have sought to portray the “America first” policy as a clean break from the recent past. Human rights, democracy, foreign aid and military intervention are out. Economic deals, regional stability and pragmatic self-interest are in.But former government officials interviewed by the Guardian paint a more nuanced picture, suggesting that Trump’s quid pro quo approach has more in common with his predecessors than it first appears. Where he does differ, they argue, is in his shameless abandonment of moral leadership and use of the US presidency for personal gain.On a recent four-day swing through Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Trump was feted by autocratic rulers with a trio of lavish state visits where there was heavy emphasis on economic and security partnerships.Saudi Arabia pledged $600bn in investments in the US across industries such as energy, defence, technology and infrastructure, although how much of that will actually be new investment – or come to fruition – remains to be seen. A $142bn defence cooperation agreement was described by the White House as the biggest in US history.Qatar and the US inked agreements worth $1.2tn, including a $96bn purchase of Boeing jets. The UAE secured more than $200bn in commercial agreements and a deal to establish the biggest artificial intelligence campus outside the US.Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic magazine, said Trump had shown “the outlines of America’s newest foreign policy doctrine: extreme transactionalism”. He had prioritized quick deals over long-term stability, ideological principles or established alliances. But, Goldberg noted, the president had also advanced the cause of his family’s businesses.The president said he will accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One. Abu Dhabi is using a Trump family-aligned stablecoin for a $2bn investment in the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. And the Trump Organization, run by the president’s two oldest sons, is developing major property projects including a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai, and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar.Analysts say no US president has received overseas gifts on such a scale. Aaron David Miller, who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues for both Democratic and Republican administrations, said: “He gives transactionalism a bad name.“The level of self-dealing in this administration means the notion that the national interest is now seamlessly blended with Donald Trump’s personal interests and financial interests. The concept of an American national interest that transcends party politics and partisanship has gone the way of the dodo.”Ned Price, a former US state department spokesperson during the Biden administration, said: “I actually think calling this ‘transactional’ is far too charitable, because so much of this is predicated not on the national interest but on the president’s own personal interest, including his economic interests and the economic interests of his family and those around him.”Presidential trips to the Middle East usually feature at least some public calls for authoritarian governments to improve their human rights efforts. But not from Trump as he toured the marble and gilded palaces of Gulf rulers and deemed them “perfecto” and “very hard to buy” while barely mentioning the war in Gaza.In his remarks at a VIP business conference in Riyadh, the president went out of his way to distance himself from the actions of past administrations, the days when he said US officials would fly in “in beautiful planes, giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs”.Trump said: “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Price challenges the notion that Trump’s aversion to interventionism represents revolution rather than evolution. “It is fair to say that presidents have successively been moving in that direction,” he said.“The sort of military adventurism that characterised the George W Bush presidency is not something that President Obama had an appetite for. It’s not something that President Biden had an appetite for. President Obama’s version of ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ has echoes of what President Trump said. Of course, as he often does, President Trump took it one step further.”Price added: “Most people who worked under President Biden or President Obama would tell you it doesn’t have to be either/or: you don’t have to be a nation builder or an isolationist. You can engage on the basis of interest and values at the same time and it’s about calibrating the mix rather than declaring the age of nation building is entirely over and from now on we’re not going to lecture, we’re just going to come in and be feted with your goods.”In his address in Riyadh, Trump made no reference to the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul which, the CIA found, had been sanctioned by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The president’s willingness to turn a blind eye to human rights violations was condemned by Democrats.Ro Khanna, who serves on the House of Representatives’ armed services committee, said: “I was opposed to the Iraq war and I’m opposed to this idea that we can just go in and build nations. But I’m not opposed to the idea of human rights and international law.“To see an American president basically embrace cultural relativism was a rejection of any notion that American values about freedom and rule of law are not just our cultural constructs but are universal values.”Khanna added: “The past century of development in global governance structures has pointed us towards human rights and dignity. He wants to go back to a a world where we just have nation-states and that was the world that had wars and colonialism and conflict.”Trump is hardly the first president to court oil-rich nations in the Middle East and tread lightly on human rights issues. Nor is he the first to be accused of putting interests before values. The public was deceived to justify wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Democratically elected leaders have been ousted and brutal dictators propped up when it suited US policy goals.John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: “Different presidencies say they have different priorities but I would be willing to go down the list and all of their record is mixed and somewhat hypocritical in terms of exactly what they do on the values side of things. Just take Biden as the most recent example. He started off by calling Saudi Arabia a pariah but by the end of it he was going to visit the crown prince as well.”In that sense, Trump’s lack of pretension to an ethical foreign policy might strike some as refreshingly honest. His supporters have long praised him for “telling it like it is” and refusing to indulge the moral platitudes of career politicians.Miller, the former state department official who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank in Washington, said: “He’s made explicit what is implicit in Republican and Democratic administrations. I’m not saying presidents don’t care about values; Joe Biden cared a lot about American values. But the reality is, when it comes time to make choices, where or what do we choose?”Miller added: “No administration I ever worked for made human rights or the promotion of democracy the centerpiece of our foreign policy. There are any number of reasons for that. But Donald Trump, it seems to me, is not even pretending there are values. He’s emptied the ethical and moral frame of American foreign policy.”Trump’s lifelong aversion to war is seen by many as a positive, including by some on the left. But it comes with an apparent desire to achieve significant and flashy diplomatic breakthroughs that might win him the Nobel peace prize. The president also displays an obvious comfort and preference for dealing with strongmen who flatter him, often siding with Russia’s Vladimir Putin against Ukraine.Miller commented: “Trump has no clear conception of the national interest. It’s subordinated to his grievances, his pet projects – tariffs – his political interests, his vanity, his financial interests. I worked for half a dozen secretaries of state of both political parties. That he is so far out of the norm with respect to foreign policy frankly is less of a concern to me than what’s happening here at home.” More

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    Donald Trump announces he will pause threatened 50% tariffs on Europe after call with EU chief – US politics live

    Donald Trump has warned that if Vladimir Putin attempts to conquer all of Ukraine, it will lead to the “downfall” of Russia, while also criticising Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a Sunday night post on Truth Social.“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post, adding, “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!”Earlier on Sunday the US president told reporters that was he was “very surprised” that his Russian counterpart had intensified the bombardment of Ukrainian cities despite the US president’s efforts to broker a ceasefire.Pressed by a reporter to say if he was now seriously considering “putting more sanctions on Russia”, Trump replied: “Absolutely. He’s killing a lot of people. What the hell happened to him?”In his post on Sunday night, Trump also criticised Zelenskyy, saying the Ukrainian president was “doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does.”“Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.”Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you all the latest news lines throughout the day.Donald Trump has announced that he will pause his threatened 50% tariffs on the European Union until 9 July, after a “very nice call” with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen.The European Commission president announced in a social media post that she had spoken with Trump and secured the delay to give the two sides more time to negotiate.European assets rallied on Monday, Reuters reported. The euro hit its highest level against the dollar since 30 April, while European shares surged and were poised to recoup the previous session’s losses.“Europe is ready to advance talks swiftly and decisively,” von der Leyen wrote. “To reach a good deal, we would need the time until July 9.”Brussels and Washington have been locked in negotiations in a bid to avert an all-out transatlantic trade war, after Trump’s tariff threat on Friday dramatically raised the stakes.Trump warned he would impose 50% tariffs on all of the bloc’s imports into the US, saying “discussions with them are going nowhere”, adding that the tariffs would be applied from 1 June. Trump claimed he was “not looking for a deal”, repeating his longstanding view that European states had “banded together to take advantage of us”.For the full story, see here:In other news:

    President Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin had “gone absolutely CRAZY” by unleashing the largest aerial attack of the war on Ukraine and said he was weighing new sanctions on Moscow, though he also scolded Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump posted the remark on Truth Social as sleeping Ukrainians woke to a third consecutive night of Russian aerial attacks, listening for hours to drones buzzing near their homes and eruptions of Ukrainian anti-aircraft fire.

    The United States demanded that South Korea resolve the large trade imbalance between the countries during recent trade talks, South Korean media reported on Monday. The US repeatedly raised the issue of the trade imbalance in the commodity sector and both countries agreed it was necessary to address it, broadcaster YTN and the Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unnamed South Korean trade official who was part of the trade delegation.

    Trump said on Sunday his tariff policy was aimed at promoting the domestic manufacturing of tanks and technology products, not sneakers and T-shirts. Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One in New Jersey, Trump said he agreed with comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on 29 April that the US does not necessarily need a “booming textile industry” – comments that drew criticism from the National Council of Textile Organizations. “We’re not looking to make sneakers and T-shirts. We want to make military equipment. We want to make big things. We want to do the AI thing with computers,” Trump said.

    Malaysian prime minister Anwar Ibrahim said on Monday he has written to US president Donald Trump to organise a meeting between the United States and the Asean regional bloc. Malaysia is chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations grouping this year.

    Hong Kong’s education bureau has called on the city’s universities to “attract top talent” by opening their doors to those affected by the Trump administration’s attempt to ban Harvard from enrolling international students. Last week the Trump administration revoked Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, effectively banning the university from accepting foreign students.

    Federal judges are discussing a proposal that would shift the armed security personnel responsible for their safety away from the Department of Justice and under their own control, as fears mount that the Trump administration is failing to protect them from a rising tide of hostility. The idea of creating their own armed security detail emerged at a meeting of about 50 federal judges two months ago, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

    Trump has been warned by fiscal hawks within his own party in the US senate that he must “get serious” about cutting government spending and reducing the national debt, or else they will block the passage of his signature tax-cutting legislation known as the “big, beautiful bill”. More

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    We demanded justice after George Floyd’s death. Donald Trump made things worse, but we fight on | Al Sharpton

    Yesterday, I led a private memorial service at ​George Floyd’s graveside​, along with his family, in Houston, Texas. Once that was over, we visited the housing project where Floyd and his siblings grew up.Half a decade after Floyd was taken from them, they were keen, as are we, to ensure his life and legacy will not be forgotten – and to remind the world why the fight for police accountability continues.He died in front of the entire world. Everyone saw the phone footage of the incident where a white officer in Minneapolis kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as he repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”, and cried out for his mother. His desperate pleas for help were ignored by those sworn to serve and protect the public; but they were heard in every corner of the globe.The movement for police reform gained renewed fire, and people from all walks of life demanded systemic change and the protection of Black lives. Five years later, while the officer convicted of Floyd’s murder is behind bars, the current climate in the US and regressive actions from those in power have set us back and prevented substantive police accountability.Just a few days shy of this sombre fifth anniversary, Donald Trump’s department of justice announced that it would back away from cases to force reforms on police departments – including in Louisville, Kentucky, and in Minneapolis, the city where Floyd was killed. This outrageous decision is not a surprise; it is just the latest roadblock in the fight for police reform and justice. It is an insult to the mothers, fathers, children and loved ones of all those killed at the hands of law enforcement. The consent decrees and small incremental changes that were achieved after tireless advocacy, organising, protests and political courage have been dismantled by a department that should be protecting the civil rights of individuals, not eliminating them.This move isn’t just a policy reversal. It’s a moral retreat that sends a chilling message that accountability is optional when it comes to Black and Brown victims. Trump is shamelessly weaponising the justice department against marginalised communities. The decision to dismiss these lawsuits with prejudice solidifies a dangerous political precedent that police departments are above scrutiny. The timing is no coincidence; it is an insult to Floyd’s family and the loved ones of victims such as Sandra Bland, Tyre Nichols, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner and countless others whose names we may never even know.View image in fullscreenI remember delivering the eulogies for Floyd (one in Minneapolis and one in his native Houston) like it was yesterday. There was so much frustration, anger, disgust and exhaustion permeating throughout the US and, in turn, in many nations across the world. In fact, his death sparked global protests against racial injustice, particularly at the hands of law enforcement. Many young people mobilised and hit the streets for the first time, and more than 200,000 folks joined us in the nation’s capital for a march on Washington in August 2020 to call attention to ongoing police injustice. Despite a pandemic, hundreds of thousands from all races, ages and socioeconomic backgrounds protested alongside my organisation, National Action Network (NAN), as we led this march through the streets of Washington.Much has changed. In the wake of Floyd’s killing, and amid calls to respect Black lives, many corporations made commitments to continue diversifying and investing in our communities. Now we are watching many of those same companies turn their backs on their own diversity, equity and inclusion policies, capitulating to a rightwing government. The 2021 conviction of Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed Floyd, represented one of the first major cases in which someone in law enforcement was held accountable for their actions. But now some conservative groups and individuals are pushing for Chauvin to receive a pardon from the president. Such action would be the height of throwing salt into an already achingly deep wound. It should not be entertained for a moment.Some (particularly those in power at the moment) would like to distort reality and act as though police brutality and misconduct aren’t current problems. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Mapping Police Violence, police in the US have killed 456 people so far this year (as of 23 May). In fact, there has only been a single day when police haven’t killed a person in 2025. And as it highlights, Black people are 2.8 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than their white counterparts. This is why we still march, this is why we still put pressure on elected officials and corporations.For several months, NAN and I have been leading “buy-cotts” to support businesses such as Costco who remain firm in their DEI commitments. I have had meetings with PepsiCo’s chair and the CEO of PepsiCo North America, as well as Target’s CEO. Recently, I joined fellow leaders of national civil rights organisations for a meeting with top Google executives. And on 28 August, NAN will lead a march on Wall Street to defend DEI, remind corporations of their own promises in the wake of Floyd’s death, and reiterate that we will only spend our dollars where we are respected.When I stood in front of mourners five years ago at Floyd’s funeral, I said that his story has been the story of Black people, because the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is because society kept its knee on our neck. Well, just as we loudly proclaimed around the world then, we say it again, remembering George Floyd, remembering all the victims: get your knee off our necks. Do it now.

    Rev Al Sharpton is an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and radio talkshow host More

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    Indivisible: the mass movement leading the progressive fight against Trump

    After the biggest day of protest of the second Trump presidency, when millions of people rallied in more than 1,300 cities and towns across the country, Ezra Levin addressed thousands of faithful progressive activists.For the previous few months, as Trump reclaimed the White House and Democrats struggled to oppose him, the drumbeat of opposition had steadily grown. Protest was back in the air. Democrats were finding their way. And it was because of activists like them, Levin told the crew gathered on a weekly organizing call for Indivisible, the progressive movement that started during Trump’s first term.The day of the Hands Off protests, 5 April, was an “inflection point” in the movement against Trump, the Indivisible co-founder and co-executive director said.The pressure had mounted. Trump’s approval rating had tanked. Elon Musk, a frequent villain in protests and pushback, was in retreat, returning to his car company after its stock fell following sustained demonstrations and boycotts. A growing number of universities, law firms and private organizations had started pushing back on Trump’s agenda of retribution.“Who are they going to be when democracy reasserts itself? They now have to think about that. All of these institutions, all of these leaders, are sticking their finger into the wind, and they’re trying to see which way the wind is blowing. And on Saturday, we changed the weather. That’s what we did together,” he said.Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization with a national office and thousands of offshoots in cities and towns around the country, grew out of a Google Doc created by Levin and his wife, Leah Greenberg, when Trump won in 2016. At the time, the document suggested progressives use the Tea Party tactic of constituents pressuring their members of Congress to derail Trump’s agenda.View image in fullscreenNow, more than eight years later, the organization has matured and formed a critical flank of the opposition, using its millions of members across the country to quickly spin up town halls, rallies, educational events and protests. Since Trump won in November, progressive activists have launched or restarted more than 1,200 chapters, reigniting a level of activity the organization hasn’t seen since the early days of Trump’s first term.“If your theory of winning against the authoritarians is mass peaceful protest, what’s the first word? Mass. It’s got to be big,” Greenberg said during a recent Indivisible call. “It’s got to be overwhelming. And you don’t just snap your fingers and get there. You build. You build over time.”The tactics meet new obstaclesTrump’s first term began with the massive Women’s March protest. His second term started with a question mark for the resistance: how would the adrift Democrats oppose a man they revile who shocked them by winning the popular vote? And how could the opposition be effective without elected power?Those questions cleaved the party. Some suggested sitting back while the Republicans fought within their own ranks and Trump took it too far, like Democratic strategist James Carville, who wrote in the New York Times that Democrats should simply “roll over and play dead” for now.Indivisible capitalized on the leadership vacuum. When Democrats were voting for Trump nominees or priorities, it was time to call or show up at their offices. When Democratic leaders showed some spine by holding protests or breaking filibuster records, they deserved praise.This time, the organization had models for success – it helped block the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017, one of the first big wins for the left in the first Trump administration, by pressuring moderate Republicans at town halls to keep it.David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University who studies political advocacy and strategy, said Indivisible created a “vessel for localized outrage”.Trump was not an anomaly, the organization acknowledges, but an increasingly authoritarian threat, and his rise transformed the Republican party into a group of loyalists. It also acknowledged that “a lot of people are burned out on the idea of protesting and marching” after the first Trump term and the racial uprisings in 2020.“Too often in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests instead of using them as part of a strategy. Let’s be clear: protest is a strategic tool to achieve your goal. It is not a form of self-expression or therapy,” the 2024 guide says.They also had to reckon with Democrats’ serious losses in 2024. Some in Democratic circles were quick to blame groups like Indivisible for pushing Democrats too hard on issues like trans rights and the war in Gaza. This sense of indignation from the establishment toward the grassroots created a chasm in the party.Indivisible members first started whipping up Democrats in February to form the party into a more uniform anti-Trump bloc, though that wasn’t taken kindly by some. Some Democratic lawmakers told Axios that they were upset at Indivisible and other groups, who should be calling Republicans instead.“It’s been a constant theme of us saying: ‘Please call the Republicans,’” the representative Don Beyer said in February. In some places, local Indivisible groups are still turning up to pressure Democratic lawmakers, including the representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.Building a movement again required first aligning Democrats with a basic truth, at least in Indivisible’s eyes: the country is in a constitutional crisis that needs the opposition party to use every tool to block the Trump agenda.One of the first big tests came when Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer helped pave the way for a Republican bill to keep the government open. Indivisible chapters across the country resoundingly called for him to be replaced as leader.During weekly organizing calls since November led by Levin and Greenberg attended by thousands, questions hit on common themes: whether Trump would crack down on protests (he already has, but don’t give him more power by staying home), how to protest against the courts (many judges are lifetime appointments, so they’re not necessarily swayed by protests), impeachment (not a practical move right now) and the benefit of a proactive policy agenda right now (now is the time for defense, offense comes later).Levin and Greenberg often allude to the experts who study authoritarians. Timothy Snyder, a professor and author of On Tyranny, is frequently cited, as are historian Heather Cox Richardson and Erica Chenoweth, who studies mass movements.“These are the experts in how authoritarianism takes over. And what they tell us is, do not wait for somebody else to come and save you. If you wait for that, it will be too late,” Levin said. “When institutions fall, it is up to people to organize. That’s the tool we’ve got.”The married couple who grew a movementCo-directors Levin and Greenberg work from their Washington home, where they are also raising two young children, so their days include a constant stream of messages about work and household tasks.In weekly calls with thousands of people across the group’s nationwide chapters, they sit shoulder to shoulder in front of the camera, a guitar beside them on the wall.Both attended Carleton College in Minnesota, a private liberal arts school, but didn’t meet until they were working in Washington, in the early Obama years.Greenberg is from Maryland, where politics is in the water, she told a group of new Indivisible chapter leaders on a recent call. She started organizing before she knew the word for it, running anti-sweatshop campaigns in middle school. Much of her professional work was in anti-human trafficking policy and advocacy. She also worked as a staffer and then on the campaign for the former representative Tom Perriello.Levin was born and raised in rural Texas, where he described his family as low-income. He told the new leaders that he, like many people, was radicalized by the country’s healthcare system. He worked on anti-poverty policy and served as staff for the Texas representative Lloyd Doggett.When Trump won in 2016, they, along with other former congressional staffers, wrote a guide that detailed how progressives could fight back using the Tea Party model (minus the racism and on very different policy lines) to get members of Congress to listen. Written in about two weeks, the guide flew around political and activist circles, crashing the Google doc with its virality.They thought the most likely outcome of publishing the guide was losing their jobs; they didn’t intend to start an organization, much less one that’s grown this much. A footnote in the guide says: “PS: we’re doing this in our free time without coordination or support from our employers. We’re not starting an organization and we’re not selling anything.”People started forming local groups, gathering in living rooms and basements and calling themselves Indivisible, before a national organization officially existed. In early January 2017, Levin and Greenberg wrote an op-ed in the New York Times and Levin went on Rachel Maddow’s show to talk about it. At that time, whenever a new Indivisible group would join, he would get an email. While he did the show, his pocket in his pocket was buzzing nonstop. “I could literally feel it growing in real time,” he said.Levin is bombastic, prone to a full-throated characterization of what they’re up against. Trump and his allies are “malicious muppets”. When a Democratic elected official who voted against progressive principles comes up, he doesn’t hesitate to launch into a critique. Greenberg is more wonkish, laying out the steps it takes to achieve a broad opposition movement and peel off independents or moderate Republicans and responding to questions about immigration and deportation policies.“We successfully get to the right combination of risk and caution between the two of us,” Greenberg said. “It’s been eight years. When we first started, we had to learn each other’s work personalities.”They now also have to protect themselves and their family from the ire of the right, who have accused Levin and Greenberg of orchestrating criminal activity, paying protesters and astroturfing Trump opposition, in posts often laced with antisemitism.Levin and Greenberg didn’t want to comment to the Guardian about safety threats, but told an organizing call that they expected this kind of response when they wrote the 2024 version of the Indivisible guide. “We knew what we were getting into. We knew this was an authoritarian regime,” Levin said. The fact the right is fighting them shows Indivisible is effective and that the right is scared of these widespread protests, he said.“They think we’re the leaders of this. Look, we could be gone tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. There are thousands and thousands of people across the country who are leading this movement. They are up against much more than just little old me and Leah,” Levin said.But on the weekly calls, which are public, Levin also often jokes that he looks forward to seeing clips of him and Greenberg circulating in rightwing media.“Shoutout to the special people on the call who are Maga infiltrators,” he said on a call on 27 March. “Look, I know a lot of Trump supporters were looking for a lower price of eggs and bread, and they got this fascist nut in the White House. You’re probably looking for ways to organize, too. Welcome.”The local chaptersIndivisible has nearly 2,000 active groups registered across the country. In the past six months, the number of new or reinstated chapters has kept growing considerably: 101 in January, 319 in February, 395 in March, down a bit to 261 in April.“This is by far the biggest surge in new Indivisible groups forming since that initial wave in 2017 when the movement began,” Levin said.In November, after Trump’s win, about 135,000 people joined a call hosted by a coalition of progressive groups, which Greenberg helped lead. After Indivisible released its revamped guide, 31,000 people joined a zoom to discuss it. In the months since then, Levin and Greenberg have drawn about 7,000 people weekly to their organizing calls.The structure of local groups feeding into a national movement is common among social movements, including the movements for civil rights and migrant farmworkers, said Hahrie Han, a political science professor who studies organizing and collective action at Johns Hopkins University.“The key is to develop national purpose, but local action,” Han said. “You need all the ships sailing in the same direction, obviously, otherwise it doesn’t add up to anything bigger. But you need people to feel like they’re independently strategizing and developing their own locus of control over the work that they do.”Cyndi Greening, a Wisconsin retiree who fought for women’s rights and abortion access during her career and intended to spend her retirement gardening and flinting, spent the first couple months after Trump’s second victory in despair. But she started joining the weekly calls and learning what she could do with her chapter. Her first group meeting for Chippewa Valley Indivisible had 28 people; she now has more than 900 members.Many local Indivisible leaders, including Greening, have been called “fake protesters” or “paid actors” by the right. They’ve also been falsely accused of approving violence to achieve their goals.Levin described nonviolence as critical to the movement, saying: “There’s nothing that the administration would like to see more than some sort of violence in the streets that they can then use as an excuse to crack down on normal, everyday Americans organizing and protesting. So we embrace nonviolence as a hard-headed strategic matter.”Lots of Indivisible chapters are run by older white women, partly because they were the people who hadn’t already been organizing before Trump’s first term, Greenberg said, which often raises questions. “We think older women organizing is amazing, because they’re bringing their skills, they’re bringing their resources, they’re bringing their experiences from their previous lives,” she said.Mary Jane Meadows runs one of the longest-running Indivisible chapters, started after Trump’s 2016 win. The group, based in north-east Mississippi, provided a life raft in a deep-red part of the country, where people were initially scared to talk about their distaste for the president. She was not previously politically active.The chapter was initially mostly white women, but the group has worked to diversify by reaching out to other organizations and holding events together, building trust along the way.“We began on this journey never knowing where it would take us,” Meadows said. “And we found community and we found purpose and a voice. And now, our machine is ready to go into battle.”Each week on the Indivisible calls, someone will ask what comes next. How can they get more people involved? When can they start round-the-clock sit-ins and general strikes and mass boycotts?“Those require enormous amounts of planning, preparation, building of muscles, building of potential,” Greenberg told a recent group. “We should just be real about the fact that those are not things that people are capable of doing right now.”Some also ask whether progressives should be crafting a policy agenda for when Democrats have more political power. Thinking about a policy platform can happen alongside pushing back on Trump, but it can’t be the sole focus.For now, Levin and Greenberg say, the goal is to build a broad-based coalition that aligns behind a simple message of no to Trump. That group will not agree on everything – and that’s OK for now.You have to make it to the next round of free and fair elections first, Levin said. More

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    Trump envoy praises new Syrian president for ‘counter-ISIS measures’

    Donald Trump’s old friend Thomas Barrack, now serving as the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, praised Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, after a meeting in Istanbul on Saturday.“I stressed the cessation of sanctions against Syria will preserve the integrity of our primary objective – the enduring defeat of ISIS – and will give the people of Syria a chance for a better future,” Barrack said in a statement, referring to actions taken on Friday by the Trump administration to temporarily suspend sanctions imposed on the government of the former president, Bashar al-Assad, who was deposed by rebel forces led by Sharaa late last year.Syria had been under US sanctions since 1979, which intensified after 2011’s deadly crackdown on peaceful protesters by Assad.“I also commended President al-Sharaa on taking meaningful steps towards enacting President Trump’s points on foreign terrorist fighters, counter-ISIS measures, relations with Israel, and camps and detention centers,” Barrack added.Those conditions put Sharaa in the position of cracking down on his former allies. Sharaa, an Islamist rebel, initially came to Syria from Iraq to fight Assad with the support of the Islamic State, but later broke with the group and pledged allegiance to al-Qaida. He broke with al-Qaida as well, in 2016.His militant group, the al-Nusra Front, rebranded twice, becoming Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, in 2017. HTS was designated a terrorist organization by the United States.“President al-Sharaa praised America’s fast action on lifting sanctions,” Trump’s envoy reported after the talks on Saturday.“This meeting was historic, putting the issue of sanctions – as President Trump has indicated – far behind us, and resulting in joint commitment of both our countries to drive forward, quickly, with investment, development, and worldwide branding of a new, welcoming Syria without sanctions.”Among the projects now possible is a Trump Tower Damascus, proposed as part of an effort to entice the US president into removing sanctions. Trump himself appears to have been impressed by a recent meeting with al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia; the US president told reporters that the former commander of al-Qaida’s franchise in Syria was a “young, attractive guy, tough guy, you know. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”Barrack, who was indicted by the justice department in 2021 and charged with “unlawful efforts to advance the interests of the United Arab Emirates” during the first Trump administration, was acquitted of all charges after a federal trial in 2022. More