One in four Brits view Donald Trump as a greater threat to the UK’s national interests than terrorist groups.
The poll was commissioned by Good Growth Foundation, a new think tank set up Praful Nargund, who stood against Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s candidate in Islington North.
It found that 24% of respondents saw Trump as the biggest threat, ahead of terrorist groups (22%) and China (10%). Only Russia ranked higher, with 34% identifying it as the most dangerous actor.
In addition, almost half of Britons think Donald Trump will worsen the UK’s economy (47%) and safety and security (45%).
The findings come as Trump announced the framework of a UK-US trade deal this afternoon.
As part of the trade deal, the US has removed tariffs on UK steel and aluminium, and immediately cut the rates on car exports from 27.5% to 10%.
In addition, if forced to choose, 62% of all Brits, including 60% of Labour-Leave voters and 53% of Labour-Reform Switchers back joining forces with the EU over the US.
Moreover, 29% of the public and 25% of Labour voters who have switched to Reform UK say one of the worst things about Nigel Farage is his close relationship with Donald Trump.
Nargund, Good Growth Foundation Director, said: “A closer relationship with Europe must answer the crisis of insecurity, cutting bills and offering safety amidst tumultuous global politics. Faced with the threat that Trump and Putin pose to UK interests, the public is looking again to Europe as a vital partner in protecting Britain’s security, economy and future.”
However, he added: “But support remains fragile, easily lost if voters feel their core concerns are dismissed, especially on immigration. The issues that underpinned Brexit – control, sovereignty, fairness – haven’t gone away.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
Fast, furious and frightening: 100 days of Trump Mark II
Geroge Binette looks at the impact of the President’s first three months on US domestic politics.
The USA today: hundreds of Venezuelans shipped to a notorious El Salvadoran prison under the pretext of a 1798 law and kept there in defiance of a court order; ‘abductions’ by masked agents in civilian clothing on city streets in broad daylight of overseas students and thousands of barely reported, arbitrary arrests of migrants in homes, schools and workplaces, while the FBI takes a ‘liberal’ Wisconsin immigration court judge into custody and a two-year-old US citizen winds up deported to her mother’s native Honduras.
After 100 days of his second presidential term, Donald Trump regards much of the above as a cause for a celebratory rally. He addressed supporters in the swing state of Michigan, symbolic home of the US auto industry, on the eve of the administration’s 100th day, where he engaged in a 90-minute orgy of self-congratulation. Trump now boasts that he will not arrange the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man unlawfully deported to El Salvador according to a right-wing Supreme Court, stacked with Trump nominees. And to mark his 79th birthday he has announced a four-mile military procession through Washington on 14th June.
Trump’s one-time primary opponent and now his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, depicted just weeks ago as a potential moderating influence on the second Trump administration, boasts of having suspended hundreds, possibly several thousand, student visas, largely on grounds of participation in peaceful protests or otherwise voicing pro-Palestinian views. (On Friday 25th April there was at least a partial retreat with many of the visas reinstated).
Trump Mark II has licensed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, the frequently concealed faces of the Department of Homeland Security, to wage a reign of terror over migrant populations and political dissidents with permanent residence status in the United States.
Of course, large-scale immigration raids, mass detention and deportations are hardly unprecedented in US history, from the Palmer raids in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and Bolshevik revolution, through the internment of Japanese-Americans under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, through a vicious crackdown on Middle Eastern and South Asian migrants under George W Bush post-9/11.
Recent events also have antecedents in the domestic conduct of Bush the younger’s ‘global war on terror,’ but the ideological and literally physical assault on dissent and residents born outside the United States evokes memories of another dark period – the second ‘Red Scare,’ otherwise known as McCarthyism in the late 1940s to early 1950s. Not so coincidentally, the administration has seized on an obscure clause in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act to justify the arrest, detention and potential deportation of recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and final year undergraduate Mohsen Mahdawi (released from ICE custody on 29th April after 16 days by order of a judge in Vermont), and Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, among others.
Khalil, a Green Card holder of Palestinian heritage, was a significant figure in last year’s student protests at Columbia opposing Israel’s murderous offensive against and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Ozturk’s supposed crime was to co-author a comment piece for her university’s student paper, which was highly critical of Israel’s remorseless assault on Gaza. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of government agencies (usually at the behest of ICE or the Department of Homeland Security) arbitrarily revoking nearly 5,000 visas held by university students, research fellows and recent graduates by mid-April. Both Khalil and Ozturk remain in abysmal conditions in privately run immigration detention centres in Louisiana. Ironically, their detention and visits by some Democratic politicians have peeled away the veil of secrecy surrounding poor diets and absence of medical care in such facilities, which long predate the start of Trump’s second administration.
“Every US citizen should be concerned,” says Larry Diamond, a fellow at the relatively mainstream conservative Hoover Institution. He added: “The government has all kinds of ways to target people. You can’t separate what is happening to these students from the assault on law firms, the assault on universities, the assault on public broadcasting. We are seeing a willingness to weaponize government power to silence critical voices.”
Government by Fiat
On 2nd April, the US president declared a “national economic emergency” as a pretext for dramatically escalating his administration’s trade war. He had launched the battle with an executive order that imposed tariffs, briefly rescinded, on Canada and Mexico in the first fortnight of his second term. By 28th March, Donald Trump had already issued 107 Executive Orders, easily exceeding the total for the first 100 days of any previous presidency, and the decrees have continued to flow since. (Franklin D Roosevelt signed 99 in his first 100 days in office against the backdrop of the Great Depression and just over 100 at the start of his third full term in 1941).
While some Trump orders appear merely petty and idiosyncratic at first glance (“Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness” and “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias”), there are consistent themes relating to culture war topics, the militarisation of the US-Mexico border and an aggressive assertion of an unabashedly white European version of American nationalism, with one decree supposedly “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History”. The latter has provided a pretext for a purge of books by internationally renowned authors from public libraries and the deletion of references to significant figures in US history from assorted federal websites. Though now restored to the Pentagon’s website, the name of baseball star Jackie Robinson, who broke the sport’s colour bar in the late 1940s, had disappeared, supposedly by ‘accident’.
South Africa has been a particular target of presidential wrath with Trump even offering political asylum in the US to white Afrikaners even as his regime moves to make applying for asylum from other nations nigh impossible. Washington effectively expelled the South African ambassador for blunt criticism of the Trump administration. Secretary of State Rubio even branded Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool “a race-baiting politician who hated America” and its president.
Assault on Academia
The administration’s offensive on ‘woke’ and specifically so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes in both the public and private sectors has now gone beyond the merely ideological. Government agencies, which provide funding for research in a wide range of disciplines, have threatened to axe or have already withdrawn enormous sums invested in elite Ivy League universities. The most notable first-round target was Columbia University, which was on the brink of losing some $400 million (more than £310 million) in federal funds until its administration capitulated to the Trumpian demands. Even so, government officials are now threatening the Ivy League institution with direct federal supervision.
Meanwhile, after initially conceding to demands to restructure its Middle Eastern Studies department, Harvard University, the nation’s oldest and richest, has now taken a stand in defence of academic freedom in response to a further diktat from the Trump administration. The almost immediate retort from Washington was to make good on the administration’s threat to withhold $2.2bn in research funds, much of it previously earmarked for the university’s medical school. Trump appointees have threatened to halt the release of a further $6.8bn.
On the other hand, Harvard’s own senior management is hardly innocent. As Jonathan Feingold, an associate law professor at Boston University, has noted, “Harvard has spent much of the past 18 months normalizing the repression of pro-Palestinian speech and legitimizing the fraught claim that criticism of Israel is anti-Jewish. Beyond undermining the university’s stated commitments to free speech, inclusion, and pluralism, this conduct paved the way for Trump to weaponize Jewish identity as [a] naked pretext to smear political opponents and now wage war on the nation’s colleges and universities.”
On 21st April, Harvard launched a lawsuit against the administration. With an endowment worth a staggering $53bn, it can certainly afford the legal bills for some time. The language used in its submission may reflect the advice of conservative lawyers, but it offers extremely timid arguments in defence of academic freedom or the right of universities to determine their own hiring and admission policies. Instead, the court submission focuses largely on Harvard’s role in cutting-edge medical research and its usefulness to the nation state in terms of “innovation, economic success and global leadership.”
While the presidents of Princeton, another Ivy League institution, and Wesleyan College, a highly regarded centre for the liberal arts, have mustered rhetorical opposition to the Trumpian agenda, there’s little evidence so far of a ‘united front’ developing among academia’s leading managers.
An Overpowering Whiff of Musk
Having featured at Trump campaign rallies and invested north of $275 million in the presidential campaign, Elon Musk had secured his place at the Trumpian top table and a position charged with eliminating supposed “government waste”. The world’s richest man, principal owner of Tesla, X (formerly known as Twitter) and SpaceX, Trump’s new best bro’ was placed atop a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an acronym derived from a crypto meme coin rather than a reference to the elected dukes of pre-19th century Venice.
While Musk may be on his way out of DOGE before spring turns to summer – not least because of Tesla’s tumbling share prices – he and his gaggle of IT whizz kids have hacked away at numerous federal agencies. And he’s still attending Cabinet meetings as of 30th April. The Musk hit squad’s achievements may fall far short of the expectations encouraged by the multi-billionaire’s bizarre displays, including his onstage appearance with a large chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s February conference. Even so, according to the New York Times, as of 21st April more than 76,000 Government employees had accepted ‘voluntary’ severance packages, with more than 58,000 other posts axed (albeit with judicial rulings temporarily delaying implementation of some cuts) and a further 145,000 jobs targeted.
Some departments such as the Agency for International Development – admittedly, in large measure, an instrument of US foreign policy’s ‘soft power’ – have all but ceased to exist, while the Education Department has lost nearly half of its workforce and Health & Human Services nearly a quarter of all staff. None too surprisingly, given his rejection of climate change and general contempt for the natural environment, several hundred posts at the Environmental Protection Agency have vanished. The Internal Revenue Service’s workforce had shrunk by 13%. The tallies remain unofficial, but the analysis for the Times suggests that 12% of some 2.4 million civilians employed at federal level will have exited by summer with the article’s authors noting that the numbers cited “are most likely an undercount”.
Remarkably, the relationship between Musk’s own business interests and the federal government’s procurement policies has not come under official scrutiny. Musk’s SpaceX operation, for example, is the recent beneficiary of a $5.9bn (£4.25bn) contract from the Defense Department, which looks set to have a budget of $1 trillion in the coming year. Then again, shamelessly naked corruption is one of the current regime’s hallmarks. The nominee for the role of chief at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is Jacob Isaacman, who donated at least $2 million to the committee organising Trump’s second inauguration. NASA is the prime customer for SpaceX and Isaacman, alongside Musk, is a major SpaceX shareholder.
Among Trump’s executive orders from March was an effective revocation of collective bargaining rights for civil servants at some 30 agencies. Union density among federal employees is comparatively high, but there is a long-standing legal ban on the vast majority taking strike action. In addition, the legacy of the PATCO air traffic controllers’ dispute in 1981 continues to haunt the memories of union activists. The union suffered a humiliating, nigh fatal defeat after daring to defy the law in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which saw union stewards dragged into courtrooms in leg irons.
And What of the Resistance?
Most mainstream British media coverage tended to downplay displays of opposition during the first two to three months of Trump’s second presidency. Some suggested that mobilisations against Trump Mark II appeared substantially smaller and less lively than those witnessed in 2017. Certainly, the initial weeks of January and February didn’t feature anything comparable to the giant women’s march that marked the start of Trump’s first term, but since then there have been marches and rallies in hundreds of cities and small towns. Some have involved more than 100,000 people and plans were afoot for large-scale actions to coincide with May Day, an occasion barely marked in the United States despite its origins as a labour movement event in US workers’ struggles in the 1880s.
In addition, rallies organised under the banner “Fight the Oligarchy” at the behest of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have attracted record crowds with 34,000 in Denver and at least 36,000 pouring into a Los Angeles park. Even in Republican strongholds, thousands have turned out to hear the veteran ‘independent socialist’, who caucuses with Senate Democrats, and the 35-year-old New Yorker, first elected to Congress in 2018. While failing to provide a political home for the growing movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people – Sanders has been muted in his criticism of Israel while calling for a limited arms embargo and Ocasio-Cortez has failed to make a clear call for the release of Mahmoud Khalil – the enthusiastic receptions in sometimes unlikely locations highlight the potential for a mass movement of resistance.
Of course, these rallies are in stark contrast to the supine official Democratic leadership in Congress. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer backed a Republican spending bill, ostensibly to avoid a shutdown of the federal government. The Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, pleads that his party has no leverage. While New Jersey Senator Cory Booker garnered headlines internationally for his 25-hour-long speech, many of his Democratic colleagues have continued to rubber-stamp Trump nominations for ambassadorships. Michigan’s ‘moderate’ Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, even hugged Trump on his recent visit to the state, evidently in return for his greenlighting a fighter jet base for the Air National Guard in Michigan.
Still, with US GDP growth screeching to a halt in the last quarter, consumer confidence plummeting and Trump’s approval ratings sliding to an exceptionally low 41% in a CNN poll, some senior Democrats appear to be rousing themselves, at least rhetorically. Illinois’ governor, JB Pritzker, far from a Sanders’ supporter and himself a billionaire, used a speech on 28th April to decry the “simpering timidity” of his party’s national leadership. Pritzker declared: “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.”
Sustaining any effective coalition of resistance is fraught with challenges and there is, of course, the danger that such a coalition gets subordinated to the Democrats’ electoral fortunes. But the prospect of a bout of stagflation, induced in large measure by the Trumpian tariff obsession, along with a federal budget that threatens swingeing cuts to popular entitlement programmes like Medicare/Medicaid and potentially Social Security threatens to stoke far greater opposition to this authoritarian imperial presidency.
George Binette, a Massachusetts native, is a retired union activist, vice-chair of Camden Trades Council and former Trade Union Liaison Officer of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP.
Image: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/world/2024/02/10/trump-vows-to-undo-bidens-gun-restrictions-if-re-elected/ Creator: Matt Rourke | Credit: AP Copyright: Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0
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