PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S AGENDA IS quickly taking shape in the weeks since he returned to power vowing to end social liberalism and usher in a new era of American prosperity. Through a shock-and-awe flurry of executive orders and other actions, Trump started a massive crackdown on illegal immigration, withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and Paris climate accord, issued sweeping pardons to the rioters charged with participating in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and began the process of dismantling federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Welcome to Trump’s self-described “golden age of America.” The administration’s early moves have put Washington—and the rest of the world—on notice that Trump is determined to turn his campaign promises into reality. Anyone doubting his sense of mission would…

Little more than a week ago, Stewart Rhodes was serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy over his role in a deadly attack on the US Capitol. Last Wednesday, two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, Rhodes was inside the Capitol building, wearing a Trump 2020 hat and relaxing at a Dunkin’ Donuts. With mere strokes of a pen, Trump has launched a rightwing political revolution in America, deploying troops to the US-Mexico border, assailing a constitutional right to citizenship, reversing gender and diversity policies, all but abandoning the fight against the climate crisis and freeing violent criminals who backed him. The president, back in the White House for mere days, electrified his support base with a series of pardons and actions designed to reshape the nation. From…

What happened The U.S. detained thousands of undocumented migrants in cities nationwide this week, as President Trump ordered a dramatic ramp-up of raids and stepped up threats against countries that refuse to cooperate with deportation efforts. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have made more than 5,000 arrests since Trump returned to office. The administration is demanding at least 1,800 arrests a day, a number that Trump adviser Stephen Miller called “a floor, not a ceiling.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the ICE raids were needed to remove “dirtbags,” and the raids have netted some sex offenders and gang members. But many arrested migrants have no criminal record. “Our youngest, the 7-year-old, hasn’t stopped crying,” said Kenia Velásquez, 34, a Honduran asylum seeker whose husband, Wilson, was arrested outside their suburban…

IT’S MONDAY, JANUARY 20, the first night of Donald Trump’s second presidency, and just a couple blocks from the Capitol Building that his now-pardoned MAGA army swarmed four years and 14 days ago, there is, as there has been for the past several nights in restaurants, hotel ballrooms, and lobbying offices, a party for people who have never been happier about the direction in which this country is heading. They are drinking, smoking, flirting, networking, but mostly congratulating one another on their big win. This party is at Butterworth’s, a new dimly lit bistro that has become a hot spot for the right in part because one of its investors is Raheem Kassam, once the editor-in-chief of the U.K. edition of Breitbart. On the menu are themed cocktails with names…

As Donald Trump was sworn in as 47th president of the United States on Monday, only his family stood between him and the tech moguls, among them the three richest men in the world – Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Not since Dwight Eisenhower’s post-war military-industrial complex has there been “such unity of purpose between political and economic power”, says Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph. As Joe Biden warned in his farewell address last week, “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms”. In a show of intent, on the day of his inauguration, Trump revoked a 2023 executive order from Biden that sought to reduce the risks of…

Few items of clothing have come to exemplify American far-right nationalism in the 21st century as much as the red “Make America Great Again” hats worn and sold by Donald Trump. But last week, the beloved – and reviled – headwear appeared to have met its match. Before a high-stakes meeting with Canadian leaders in preparation for American tariffs, the Ontario premier, Doug Ford, strode into the summit wearing a hat emblazoned with a defiant message: “CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE”. Canadian leaders are still scrambling to come up with a response to the threat of a trade war with the country’s closest ally if Trump makes good on his promise to inflict punishing tariffs on all Canadian goods and services. And in the depths of a national crisis, the…

“After far too long and far too much death” there is, for now, peace in Gaza, said The Washington Post in an editorial. Under the terms of a cease-fire deal that took effect this week, Hamas released three Israeli women it has kept captive for 471 days, while Israel released 90 Palestinian prisoners. During the deal’s first six-week phase, 30 more hostages should be released—Hamas still holds about 90 Israelis, living and dead—in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. If the cease-fire holds, all living hostages will be freed in the second phase. The two sides will then negotiate a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, ending the nightmare that began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 251 more. President Trump—who threatened Hamas with…

Facebook used to have an internal corporate motto: “Move fast and break things.” “The idea,” founder Mark Zuckerberg explained in a 2012 letter to investors, “is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.” The company, now known as Meta, dropped the slogan in 2014. But it seems that Zuckerberg – who kicked off the year by announcing an end to fact-checking on Facebook, Threads and Instagram – still doesn’t care what he breaks. The sites will do away with moderation that identified and discouraged misinformation, the owner of the social tech giant Meta said last week, in favour of a community notes-style system like that used on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter. This, he said, is in the pursuit of free speech and a rejection…

A president’s legacy usually takes decades to come into focus, said Matt K. Lewis in The Hill. Not this time. When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, the “fundamental promise” of his campaign was to save U.S. democracy from the autocratic threat of a second Donald Trump term. Biden repeated the sentiment this week in a farewell letter to the nation, saying he “ran for president because I believed the soul of America was at stake.” By his own standard, in other words, the fact of Trump’s swearing-in on Jan. 20 makes “Biden’s historical legacy one of failure,” no matter what else he achieved as president. “It didn’t have to be this way,” said Anthony Zurcher in BBC News. Biden’s crises in office were largely self-inflicted, from the bungled…

AS PRESIDENT DONALD Trump’s picks for energy posts faced confirmation hearings, the oil industry’s top lobbying group detailed its recommendations for the incoming administration. The industry spent a record amount to help elect Trump and other Republicans, and their energy wish list would mark a dramatic reversal on many of the country’s climate and energy policies. The American Petroleum Institute rolled out its energy “road map” for the Trump administration and the new Republican-controlled Congress on January 14. Topping the list: expanded drilling areas and the reversal of rules by President Joe Biden’s administration on auto emissions and natural gas exports. “This past November, American energy was on the ballot, and American energy won,” API President and CEO Mike Sommers said in a press briefing as he attempted to turn…

The US and Colombia pulled back from the brink of a trade war last Sunday after the White House said the Colombians had agreed to accept military aircraft carrying deported migrants. Donald Trump had threatened tariffs and sanctions on Colombia to punish it for earlier refusing to accept military flights carrying deportees amid his sweeping immigration crackdown. But in a statement late on Sunday, the White House said Colombia had agreed to accept the migrants and Washington would not impose its threatened penalties. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, had earlier said he would only take back citizens “with dignity”, such as on civilian planes, and had turned back two US military aircraft with repatriated Colombians. The US president responded fiercely, posting that the flights had “a large number of illegal criminals”.…

Donald Trump has been back in office only a week, said The Minnesota Star Tribune in an editorial, but he’s already “wiped out” a half-century of “gains that had made America a more just place.” First, the president signed an executive order demanding the termination, within 60 days, of all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government. A day later, his Office of Personnel Management ordered agency heads to shutter DEI programs immediately, place all workers involved on indefinite leave, and, in an Orwellian flourish, to report anyone trying to escape the axe by removing the term “DEI” from their job title. Trump’s assault on federal DEI programs is “no great surprise” said Ed Kilgore in New York magazine. But his “anti-woke” ambitions go “far beyond” that.…

CALIFORNIA WAS ONE of President Donald Trump’s largest foes during his first term; the state sued his administration over 120 times. Lawsuits from the Golden State impeded several of Trump’s deregulatory moves, including attempts to curb regulations regarding methane emissions from landfills and fracking on federal lands. Then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra also led a coalition of 22 states in challenging the Trump administration’s final rule to modernize the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The first significant overhaul of the law in decades, the rule set hard page and time limits for completing an environmental review and was designed to streamline permitting in the United States. While the lawsuit did not reverse the rule, the NEPA modernization was ultimately rescinded when President Joe Biden took office. With Democratic Gov. Gavin…

TAKE-CHARGE Donald Trump is storming into the Oval Office with a blueprint for wiping out ISIS terror cells in America and neutralizing the rogue nations that sponsor the bloodthirsty killers, experts say. ISIS — also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — is hell-bent on making America pay for its ally Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Palestine’s Gaza Strip and have penetrated the U.S. border to wreak havoc and recruit maniacs like New Orleans attacker Shamsud-Din Jabbar, intelligence sources warn. “It’s quite obvious that ISIS is on the upswing, and its propaganda continues to be convincing and resonate with individuals in the West,” explains Colin Clarke, research director at The Soufan Center, a New York–based foreign policy think tank. Texas born and bred Jabbar, a 42-year-old U.S. Army vet, was taken…

A few days after the US election in November, I rewatched Oppenheimer. It’s a strange film, mostly because it’s two films. Going in, we think we’re getting a movie about the construction of the atomic bomb, but we also get a second story about a failed US Senate hearing in 1959, and this turns out to be the climax. A man called Lewis Strauss – a former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission – has been nominated to become the US Secretary of Commerce but (spoiler) is blocked. The movie is split into two timelines. The first, in colour, is called fission, set before and during the war and centred on J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the bomb. The second, in black and white, is fusion, depicting the post-war era,…

Tributes to President Jimmy Carter ▸ P.18 The u.s. is not prepared enough for a possible long-range missile strike from Russia, China or North Korea, a new report revealed, offering one potential road map for Donald Trump to piece together the American version of Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome system he has pledged to build around the U.S. The report, penned by Robert Soofer, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the previous Trump administration, said the threat of long-range strikes—including those using intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads—hitting U.S. territory is “real and growing.” Soofer, writing for the Atlantic Council, recommended the incoming Trump administration quickly build up U.S. stocks of specific types of interceptor missiles to knock out a possible incoming…

For Isabel Corro, Donald Trump’s suggestions that the US could use military force to take control of the Panama Canal evokes painful memories. The 79-year-old vividly recalls 20 December 1989, when US army helicopters and fighter jets screamed over Panama City, turning buildings to piles of rubble with rockets and gunfire. Corro’s stepfather, a police officer, was killed in the invasion; his body was not found until it was hauled from a mass grave the following year. “It was an extremely violent and tragic night,” she said. “One that unfortunately I will never forget.” Washington had once backed then president Manuel Noriega – an ally who had spied for the CIA – but George HW Bush sent in 10,000 troops to oust the dictator as his role as an international…

Elon Musk is now driving British government policy, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. With a flurry of furious X posts, the billionaire ally of Donald Trump “single-handedly succeeded in putting back on the global news agenda” one of Britain’s most horrific scandals—the grooming gangs. In Rotherham and other English towns from the late 1980s until 2013, men of mostly British Pakistani origin groomed and raped hundreds, maybe thousands of working-class white girls as young as 11. The scandal died down around 2016 after dozens of men were convicted. But now that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government has declined a request for a new national inquiry, Musk is howling that Starmer should be “jailed for complicity.” Starmer was chief public prosecutor between 2008 and 2013, and Musk says he…

What happened President Trump expanded his assault on the workings of the federal government this week with a blitz of actions that included firing independent watchdogs, attempting to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, and offering buyouts to more than 2 million federal workers. Many of his actions appeared to violate the law, and Sen. Jeff Merkley—the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee—said Trump had caused a “constitutional crisis” with a budget-office memo ordering a temporary halt to payments of billions of dollars in grants, loans, and other federal assistance. “Congress holds the power of the purse,” said Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.). “That is very clear in the Constitution.” The White House said the pause was needed to ensure spending met Trump’s “priorities” and did not “advance Marxist…

INSIDE: Confessions of a prominent internet addict / Will AI upend the Oscars race? DONALD TRUMP’S JANUARY 6 pardon spree is, without question, a captivating shiny object. Love what he’s done or hate it (and even some Republicans acknowledge the lunacy), it’s impossible not to gawk: clemency for, essentially, everyone—from seditious conspirators to 170-plus defendants who attacked cops with weapons to nonviolent insurrection-curious Capitol meanderers. Over 1,000 convictions were wiped off the books, all pending prosecutions were dismissed, and about 400 offenders were ordered to be released from prison. Despite prior insinuations from Trump and others about moderation, almost no lines were drawn. They all skated. But the pardon bonanza, for all its shock value and undeniable historical import, obscured a series of momentous policy changes initiated through an avalanche…

AMERICA’S shocking vulnerability to terrorism was laid bare in deadly fashion with two horrific attacks on innocent New Year’s revelers in New Orleans and Las Vegas, killing 14 innocent people and leaving 35 more injured. The bloodshed in our own backyard has led to intense criticism of the increasingly lax safety measures and border security of the past four years and renewed vows from President Donald Trump to hunt down and obliterate terrorists and their foreign sponsors both home and abroad. But as the holiday carnage revealed, the enemy is already among us — with killers lurking even among those sworn to our nation’s safety! In an exhaustive special report, The National ENQUIRER has talked to top international terror experts, military veterans, espionage insiders and more to pinpoint where and how the new…

What happened Donald Trump vowed to end “America’s decline” this week, as he was sworn in as the 47th U.S. president and issued a blizzard of executive orders aimed at radically overhauling the federal government, rewarding his most loyal supporters, and reversing the work of President Biden’s administration. In a 29-minute inaugural address, Trump declared a mandate from God, who he said saved his life during an assassination attempt last summer so he could “make America great again.” With Biden seated nearby, he said voters had given him a mandate to “reverse a horrible betrayal” by a “radical and corrupt establishment.” He vowed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, said the U.S. “is taking back” the Panama Canal, and declared the federal government would recognize “only two…

AS PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD Trump prepares to take office, Native communities are bracing for another pivot in federal policy and direction. Trump’s previous term, combined with the far-right political playbook Project 2025, offer a glimpse of what to expect: increasing oil and gas and mineral extraction on tribal and public lands and a reversal of the Biden administration’s work on climate change and protection of culturally significant places. Neither Trump nor the Republican Party has put forward any policy regarding tribes or Native communities. But Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, a blueprint for Trump’s coming presidency, increases the power of the executive branch and presents an extreme vision for the nation’s future and the return of Trump-era policies on extraction, climate and public land management. “At this point, our main obstacle…

Donald Trump can be unpredictable, but “we know what he thinks about tariffs”, says John Mauldin in his Thoughts from the Frontline newsletter. The incoming US president “promises more of them, and we should believe him”. Yet the scale of any coming disruption to world trade is difficult to judge. Fundamentally, tariffs are similar to a consumption tax, and “as with all taxes… much depends on the magnitude”. Uncertainty about tariffs is taking a toll on markets, say Jenny Leonard and Saleha Mohsin on Bloomberg. On Monday, the S&P 500 briefly touched its lowest level since the election amid continued speculation about the incoming administration’s trade plans. How bad will it get? Trump has described his ideal tariff as “so high, so horrible, so obnoxious” that manufacturers rush to relocate…