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5 days ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
John Palfrey will not be obeying in advance. At a moment when leaders of tech companies, law firms, media corporations and academic institutions have bent the knee to Donald Trump, the president of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation insists that charitable organisations choose resistance over capitulation. “We have an opportunity to unite and advance,” Palfrey said last week.
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
When the Rev Robert Schenck saw Donald Trump secure the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2016, he turned to a fellow evangelical and asked: “Are we really going to do this? We’re going to choose this man who’s inimical to everything we believe?” The Christian leader looked at Schenck and replied: “I don’t care how bad he is.
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Reged Ahmad |David SMith |David Smith |Miles Herbert |Karishma Luthria |Miles Martignoni | +1 more
In just over 80 days of Donald Trump’s second administration, the world already seems to have been remade. Even before the tariffs brought economic turmoil, the world watched as legal US residents were deported, and others arbitrarily detained at the border. And now some Australians are questioning whether they should risk travelling to the US at all.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
Republicans are quietly pushing a procedural rule that would curb the power of the US Congress to override Donald Trump’s chaotic tariff policy. The House of Representatives’ rules committee on Wednesday approved a measure that would forbid the House from voting on legislation to overturn the president’s recently imposed taxes on foreign imports.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
Donald Trump has insisted “I know what the hell I’m doing” by imposing sweeping tariffs and bragged that world leaders are “kissing my ass” as they try to negotiate trade deals. The US president was speaking to political donors at the National Republican congressional committee’s annual fundraising dinner in Washington on Tuesday night. His rambling 90-minute address came just hours before his latest tariffs – including a 104% levy on China – went into effect.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
Democrats have begun plotting the next phase of their electoral revival with a seven-figure spend in Virginia ahead of a vote they hope will turn into a referendum on Elon Musk. The party, which had been despondent since Donald Trump’s victory last year, got off the canvas last week with a convincing win in a Wisconsin supreme court race and two strong congressional performances in Florida. Now all eyes turn to Virginia as the next battleground.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
It is noon on 20 January 2029. In the biting cold of Washington, thousands of people are gathered on the National Mall to witness the swearing in of a new US president or, more accurately, an old US president: Donald Trump, aged 82, starting his third term in office. The scene is the realm of fantasy or, for millions of Americans, the stuff of nightmares. But in Trump’s own mind it is apparently not so far-fetched at all.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
It was Jeopardy!, or The Price is Right, come to Washington. On an unseasonably chilly day in the White House Rose Garden, Donald Trump stood with a giant chart listing what reciprocal tariffs he would impose on China, the European Union, the United Kingdom and other hapless contestants. The winner? Trump, of course, the maestro of fake populism, watched by a crowd that included men in hard hats and fluorescent construction worker vests. The losers? Everybody else.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
“Would the senator yield for a question?” asked Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. Senator Cory Booker, who on a long day’s journey into night had turned himself into the fighter that many Democrats were yearning for, replied with a wry smile: “Chuck Schumer, it’s the only time in my life I can tell you no.”But Schumer wasn’t taking no for an answer. “I just wanted to tell you, a question, do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you?
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
She had moved from India to live the American dream. Priyanka Shetty came to study acting at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, a liberal place of clipped lawns and classical architecture rated in one survey as the happiest city in America. But what she found was isolation and discomfort because of her race and, as the era of Donald Trump dawned, a nation on the cusp of hostility towards immigrants like her.
