9 h. ago We are witnessing slow constitutional collapse in the US | Moira Donegan

The vestiges of the US’s democracy are crumpling to the ground. We don’t yet know what will be erected in its placeIt’s possible that later, when we know more about how the Trump regime reshapes the US and about how it ultimately comes to an end, we will look back at this moment in 2025 and conclude that we were already living under an autocracy. Checks on executive power seem to have all but vanished; the Trump administration is not acting like either the courts, the judiciary or the people have any prerogatives that they must respect.Science is suffering: massive cuts to federal funding of research into medicine, climate change or anything that might include a word on a long list of banned ones – like “transition” – has decimated research, made the US a global laughingstock, and set the cause of human thriving back by years. The economy is in chaos, and the bribery is all but out in the open; it no longer seems to occur to many Americans that their politicians should not be on the...

Politics

52 h. ago The FBI’s arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan is a bid to silence dissent | Moira Donegan

The Trump administration is making an example of the Milwaukee judge to intimidate critics and opponentsOn Friday, the Trump administration dramatically escalated its assault on the courts when the FBI arrested Hannah Dugan, a county circuit court judge handling misdemeanors in Milwaukee – allegedly for helping an undocumented man avoid abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents outside her courtroom. The arrest, a highly publicized and dramatic move from the Trump administration, seemed designed to elicit fear among judges, government bureaucrats and ordinary Americans that any effort to slow, impede or merely not facilitate the administration’s mass kidnapping and deportation efforts will lead to swift, forceful and disproportionate punishment by Donald Trump allies. Her arrest may be the opening salvo of a broader Trump assault on judges.Even if you believe the FBI’s allegations, their account of Dugan’s alleged misconduct is trivial and flimsy, wholly undeserv...

Events

2 w. ago The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism | Moira Donegan

The trip leaned on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish sillinessThere are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-female flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.The flight, which was promoted for months in advance, was touted as a triumph of feminism, a win for science and an embrace of the kind of expansive, curious human spirit of striving and possibility that once animated both. Instead, the flight served as a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scie...

Politics

2 w. ago Trump’s already skirting due process. Now he’s musing about deporting citizens | Moira Donegan

Amid a series of sadistic expulsions, the White House says Trump has reflected kicking Americans out of the countryThey’re rounding people up, and you could be next. The Trump administration has largely dispensed with due process rights in deporting immigrants, who are now being targeted for their protected speech, having their visas or green cards summarily cancelled without process and sometimes without notice, and getting kidnapped off the streets and hustled into vans so that they can be shipped to “detention centers” too far away for their loved ones, or their lawyers, to visit them.Some immigrants are being targeted for disappearance because they oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, an opinion that it is now physically dangerous, instead of merely unpopular, to hold. But others the government seems to be seizing almost at random. More than 200 Venezuelan nationals have been seized and deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, rendered outside of US jurisdiction in...

Politics

3 w. ago Saturday’s Trump protests weren’t perfect. But they brought a glimmer of hope | Moira Donegan

The Hands Off event proved Americans with a slew of different priorities can still form a broad left-liberal coalitionWhat is the point of street protest? This is the question I asked myself as I rode the bus downtown to San Francisco city hall, where activists were hosting a rally and march for Hands Off, a national day of action meant to collect a broad range of resistance to the Trump regime under one banner.During the first Trump administration, I’d gone to these a lot. I’d attended the Women’s March in Washington in January of 2017, and felt myself crushed between the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of attenders; I’d held a sign at JFK airport, chanting “Immigrants are welcome here”, a few weeks later, when Trump instituted his travel ban. In 2020, I’d marched in Black Lives Matter protests, trying to avenge the horror I had felt when I’d seen videos of police officers killing Black men, often as they begged for their lives, played over and over again on the tiny screen of ...

Politics

4 w. ago First Trump joked he wanted a third term. Then he got serious | Moira Donegan

The US president made himself explicit this week by saying: ‘I’m not joking’ when asked about his ambitions to stay in officeJokes have a specific relation to Trumpian politics: they are the tip of the spear for introducing illegal or once-unacceptable ideas to the public, under a thick gloss of irony or plausible deniability, to advance a far-right agenda.In 2016, Donald Trump’s support from the young, online “alt-right” was underestimated in part because so much of the profession of love for Trump, and for his racist and authoritarian ambitions, came in the form of supposed jokes. Trump himself, meanwhile, uses humor to charm and titillate, making jokes to demean adversaries, get audiences on his side, and hint, with winking coyness, about his next move. This has been his strategy for years.Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Politics