6 h. ago The Nobel is just the start: 16 imagined victories for Donald Trump | Ariel Dorfman

The president has made clear he wants the prestigious prize. That’s just one of many honors to comeFrom the start of his first campaign for president 10 years ago, Donald Trump has incessantly presented himself as a winner, the only man in the world who had the temperament to make America great again. As he said in 2016:“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say: ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it any more, Mr President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say: ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’”Ariel Dorfman, a distinguished professor emeritus of literature at Duke University, is the Chilean American author of the play Death and the Maiden and the novel The Suicide Museum and, more recently, Allegro, narrated playfully by Mozart Continue reading...

Politics

23 h. ago Chris Riddell on Donald Trump, the Easter bunny who came to break all the eggs

Free trade is smashed to pieces, while just a couple of chicks he fancies are sparedYou can buy a copy of this cartoon Continue reading...

Politics

33 h. ago Trump has found in El Salvador a model for the repressive state he wants to build – and he’s just getting started | Jordana Timerman

Nayib Bukele has shown how brutal control can be sustained not just through force, but by raising the cost of speaking outThe Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) maximum security prison in El Salvador is the crown jewel of President Nayib Bukele’s efforts to quash not only criminal gangs, but also criticism and political opposition to his government. The “mega-prison” is also one of the more visible destinations in the emerging map of American deportations – a sprawling archipelago that includes conservative US districts, the Guantánamo military base and Central American waypoints connected by a tangle of military and charter flights.That the two states have connected their penal architecture is no coincidence. Donald Trump’s aggressive policies towards foreigners build on Bukele’s infamous iron fist crackdown against criminal gangs: it’s a political toolkit that leverages anti-establishment anger to justify an authoritarian slide. In deploying strongman tactics to address social c...

Politics

44 h. ago Mickey Rourke 'visited by Secret Service' after scathing Donald Trump comments

Celebrity Big Brother star Mickey Rourke made a surprising claim that he had been visited by secret service agents due to comments he made about President Donald Trump

Politics

48 h. ago Mickey Rourke 'had visit from undercover agents' over Donald Trump comments

While actor Mickey Rourke may have been removed from the Celebrity Big Brother house due to his behaviour, fans were stunned when he recounted a run-in with the US President

Politics

50 h. ago Why do Trump voters have no regrets? Because the people they hate are getting hurt more | Arwa Mahdawi

Even amid political chaos and rising prices, what matters most to his supporters is a macabre form of payback and vengeanceThe stock market is plunging, prices are rising, federal workers are getting laid off, students are being snatched off the street by immigration agents. The US is many things at the moment, but stable is not one of them. So, amid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in? Are they starting to wonder whether voting in a convicted felon as president – a man who has declared bankruptcy six times – might not have been the wisest move?Not according to the polls. Rather, the US appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien. I’m not saying that disillusioned Republicans don’t exist; do enough digging and you can certainly find a few. And journalists have been doing a lot of digging. During Trump’s first term, there was a steady stream of media pieces profiling the regretful Trump voter. The genre has remained po...

Politics

3 d. ago Can we stop pretending a trade deal with Trump will be a gamechanger for the UK. It won’t | Martin Kettle

I’m not saying Britain should refuse every sort of free trade agreement with the US, but there may be options that better suit Labour’s purposeIt’s a deal. The words sound good. Most human beings are primed to think of a deal as desirable in itself. It isn’t hard to see why. Agreement is generally better than disagreement. In most aspects of life, shaking hands under shared rules makes sense. So it takes a bit of effort to think more objectively. But it is important to do that now, especially in the case of the proposed UK trade deal with the United States.Even before Donald Trump became president again, and long before the US started its current tariff wars, there were already plenty of reasons for caution about what a free trade deal with the US might look like. In the wake of Brexit, these concerns centred on whether a deal could be struck – and sold at home – on bilateral trade issues such as pharmaceuticals, food products and digital regulation, on all of which very different s...

Politics

4 d. ago The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s industrial policy: inward turn by ultimatum | Editorial

The US is retreating behind chokepoints and tariffs. It remains determined to invent the future but is struggling to ensure its control Globalisation is out; reshoring is the new realism. Intel’s half-built Ohio campus and Nvidia’s US supercomputer plan demonstrate the very different routes taken by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the search for homegrown tech dominance. Mr Biden relied on institutions: grants, land and investment incentives. That approach has stalled after last year’s election, rendering Intel’s plant idle. Mr Trump prefers court politics: flattery, pressure and tariff threats. Nvidia’s move seems driven less by design than executive ultimatum. Industrial strategy lives on – but, and this is a concern, increasingly through presidential menace, not policy.There’s another important message in the Nvidia announcement. In an era where ideas spread freely, power lies not in invention but in chokepoints, such as artificial intelligence supercomputer fabrication, that deter...

Events

6 d. ago What does China really think of Trump? That he and vengeful chairman Mao would have got on well | Tania Branigan

Many see parallels with the architect of the Cultural Revolution. Both relished disruption and have exploited the power of the mobWhen rare protests flared in China in 2022, one slogan read: “We want reform, not a Cultural Revolution.” It alluded to complaints that the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, was behaving in an increasingly Mao-esque manner. His extraordinary dominance over his party, political repression, tight social controls and burgeoning personality cult all lent themselves to comparison with the man who ruled China for decades.Yet Xi is committed to order and discipline, exerting authority through the organs of the Communist party. Mao Zedong relished disruption and turned to the power of the masses. That’s why, increasingly, many in China are comparing Mao to another modern-day leader. Despite the ferocity of Donald Trump’s trade war, they are perhaps just as shocked by what he is doing to his own country. They see a proud nation felled not by an external threat, but by...

Politics

7 d. ago Chris Riddell on Donald ‘Captain America’ Trump wielding his tariff shield – cartoon

Is the president really ready to do battle with China after causing global chaos and undermining the US economy?You can buy a copy of this cartoon Continue reading...

Politics

8 d. ago In the face of Trump’s mayhem, Europe is the direction to which the UK must turn – and Keir Starmer knows it | Tom Baldwin

The PM will not antagonise the unpredictable president, but it is clear to No 10 that Trump is the problem and the solution lies elsewhereTom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer: The BiographyKeir Starmer was back at the Emirates Stadium on Tuesday to watch Arsenal’s 3-0 win over Real Madrid, a result that far exceeded expectations of his team’s chances in Europe. And, over the next few days, I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to snatch a short Easter break in the warmth and sunshine of that same continent.Football and family holidays offer him some much needed relief from the grim reality of a faltering economy, towering public debt and terrifying global insecurity, which are all being made worse on a daily – sometimes hourly – basis by Britain’s closest ally of the previous 80 years. Continue reading...

Politics

8 d. ago Martin Rowson on Donald Trump and the American bond market – cartoon

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Politics

9 d. ago What’s the true cost of Donald Trump? All the crises around the world that we’ve no time to fix | Jonathan Freedland

The US president adores the attention, but while leaders struggle to mitigate the damage he causes, other emergencies are getting worseWe’re all having to master a vocabulary that was once the preserve of specialists. Now everyone needs to know their tariffs from their treasuries, their levies from their yields. But there’s one more term from the realm of economics that urgently needs to enter our lexicon. Given what Donald Trump is doing to the world economy – and the world – we need to talk about opportunity cost.Put simply, opportunity cost is the value of opportunity lost. It’s the benefit you could have had if you had chosen a different path. For an economist, the opportunity cost of the Mars bar you bought is the Twix you didn’t.Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago There are opportunities for Keir Starmer in Trump's trade chaos. Here's how he can seize them | Martin Kettle

From fiscal rules to universities, doors have opened that were shut three months ago. Our future depends on which he choosesIt was Bismarck who expressed the art of political leadership most poetically. “A statesman cannot create anything himself,” Germany’s 19th-century iron chancellor once said. “He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment.”In other words, when it comes, seize the day. Leadership as Bismarck perfected it combined opportunity, readiness and drive. If circumstances allowed – something Bismarck was brilliant at ensuring – an opening might present itself, through which he could propel the state in the direction he wanted. At such moments, the gales of history seem to intensify, making it possible to achieve things that would otherwise be impossible, or more hazardous, in normal times. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Trump is pushing the world into recession. By learning the lessons of 2008, we can still prevent it | Gordon Brown

As I discovered then, global problems need international responses. By working together, we can protect jobs and living standardsThis is the first in a two part series on the global response to Donald Trump’s tariffsNo more than a narrow window of opportunity remains if we are to prevent an unnecessary global recession. As China and the US decouple, disruptive trade wars are intensifying and threaten to descend into currency wars; import, export, investment and technology bans; and financial fire sales that will destroy millions of jobs worldwide. It seems barely credible that the world is being brought to its knees by one economy, outside of which live 96% of the population, who produce 84% of the world’s manufactured goods. But even though US officials have previously talked of a tariff policy of “escalate to de-escalate”, Donald Trump’s aim is to force manufacturing back to the US, and his 90-day relaxation of some tariffs does not mean he intends to defuse the crisis.On Monday, ...

Politics

1 week ago Trump is pushing the world towards recession. By learning the lessons of 2008, we can still prevent it | Gordon Brown

As I discovered then, global problems need international responses. By working together, we can protect jobs and living standardsThis is the first in a two part series on the global response to Donald Trump’s tariffsNo more than a narrow window of opportunity remains if we are to prevent an unnecessary global recession. As China and the US decouple, disruptive trade wars are intensifying and threaten to descend into currency wars; import, export, investment and technology bans; and financial fire sales that will destroy millions of jobs worldwide. It seems barely credible that the world is being brought to its knees by one economy, outside of which live 96% of the population, who produce 84% of the world’s manufactured goods. But even though US officials have previously talked of a tariff policy of “escalate to de-escalate”, Donald Trump’s aim is to force manufacturing back to the US, and his 90-day relaxation of some tariffs does not mean he intends to defuse the crisis.On Monday, ...

Politics

1 week ago Ben Jennings on Donald Trump’s domination of the news headlines – cartoon

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Politics

1 week ago I’ve seen many phoney trade wars come and go. This is the real thing | Larry Elliott

This battle between the US and China goes far beyond market turmoil – it has killed off the liberal dream of a borderless world Donald Trump’s decision to impose a 104% tariff on Chinese imports into the US – and China blasting back with 84% – has spooked the financial markets. The response is entirely rational. Over the past few decades, phoney trade wars have been commonplace. Rival nations have squared off against each other, indulged in a bit of sabre-rattling, but eventually agreed on a deal. Headlines that screamed “trade war looms” were quickly replaced by those that read “trade war averted”. This time it’s different. The battle between the US and China prompted by Trump’s tariffs is no pretend trade war. It is the real deal – and it will have real consequences. Tariffs operate as a tax, adding to the costs of doing business and raising prices for consumers. Growth will slow and inflation rates will rise. The global economy was already growing only slowly. As things stand, it...

Events

1 week ago Germany to send ‘clear signal’ of ‘strong, effective government’ under new coalition, says Friedrich Merz – Europe live

Presumed future chancellor says coalition has ‘strong plan’ after negotiations as polling shows popularity of far-right AfDEarlier today I brought you Donald Trump’s comments overnight on “major” tariffs to be announced “very shortly” on pharmaceuticals (9:20).My colleague Lisa O’Carroll looked at the risks such measures could pose for Europe:Pharmaceutical companies in the EU have warned of a “risk of exodus” to the US as stocks in the sector slid around the world on the back of Donald Trump’s renewed threat to impose tariffs on US drugs imports.Drugmakers’ shares across Europe and India, another foreign drugs hub, slipped on Wednesday after Trump indicated further carnage was on the way in addition to the 20% “reciprocal tariffs” on imports that kicked in overnight. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Donald Trump has transformed the American story | Osita Nwanevu

A decade ago, it was easy to believe US identity was a settled question. Now, as our institutions acquiesce to barbarism, the US’s promise has been traded for chaosMaking America great again was never a promise Donald Trump could deliver on, nor one that he intended to. That said, he has undoubtedly thrust the US back into history – and not just through his assault, in recent days, on the global economic order.About 50 years ago, the tumults of the late 1960s and early 1970s began giving way to a quietude that would carry us through the end of the cold war. Tested as we may have been by conflict, scandals and crises economic and not, we entered this new century – and met the uncertainties of a new world we’d forced into being – surer of ourselves than ever before. The towers fell, yes, but the US’s sense of purpose was as much of a settled fact in the world as American power. The American people were divided, true, but for all but an impertinent and implacable few, the major questio...

Politics