Trump's hold over US Supreme Court is weakening

The US Supreme Court had a busy day yesterday, as it prepares to wind down for a long and leisurely summer break. Among its mixed bag of decisions was one particularly important one: a 6-3 decision to strike down Trump's attempts to end "birthright citizenship", the right of children physically born in the USA - even to undocumented immigrants, tourists, and people on short-term work or study visas - to have US citizenship.

This was a big deal for Trump. His executive order on this issue was one of the very first things he did on taking power. He even attended the Supreme Court's oral arguments in person, the first time a sitting president has ever done so, his intention presumably being to stare down the judges to make sure they voted with him. In the end, though, the court voted against him in one of the few checks to his many illegal attempts to re-write American law and way of life.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, though, considering how clear the wording of the American Constitution is on the matter, and the century-plus of corroborating case law and legal precedent, is that three of the Court's most conservative judges - let's name names: Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas - still managed to justify dissenting against the decision. A fourth, Brett Cavanaugh, decided to prevaricate and knit-pick, concluding that Trump's order was not unconstitutional but did still violate immigration law. The other two conservatives on the Court (John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett), who have in the past been guilty of voting ideologically, voted according to the clear legal principles this time, siding with the three Democrats on the Court.

Legal scholars are at something of a loss to understand how, and on what legal grounds, the three conservatives could vote to allow Trump to force through this clearly unconstitutional measure. But it just shows the hold Trump still has over them, even if his hold over some of the others appears to be weakening.

The Washington DC Reflecting Pool Saga

The Washington DC Reflecting Pool Saga in three minutes flat. In case you care...

Anti-immigrant sentiment does not extend to soccer

If the World Cup has done nothing else, it has drawn attention to immigration, and, for once, no-one seems keen on criticizing and protesting.

Nearly a quarter of the 1,248 players at this year's World Cup a representing a country other than the one they were born in, up from just 9% at the 2006 competition. You just have to look at the number of black faces on teams from Canada, USA, England, Netherlands, even notoriously immigration-unfriendly Switzerland, to get a very visual reminder that these countries are highly reliant on immigrant talent (although bear in mind that many of the white faces are also immigrants).

Tunisia, Algeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Qatar all have more than half of their squads born elsewhere. The Morocco team is 73% foreign-born, the Democratic Republic of the Congo's is 85%, and little Curaçao's squad is comprised of 97% immigrants. 

There are many compelling immigrant stories behind some of the competition's top players. Canada's star player Alphonso Davies was born in a refugee camp in Ghana to Liberian parents. Australia's Thomas Deng and Nestory Irankunda were both born in refugee camps, in Kenya and Tanzania respectively. Germany's Antonio Rudiger was born to immigrant parents fleeing Sierra Leone's civil war.

The US team in particular has received a lot of attention, given the Trump administration's outspoken views on immigration. Florian Balogun, who scored two of the US's four goals against Paraguay, was born to Nigerian parents temporarily living in New York, making him a 14th Amendment "birthright citizen", which Trump has actively tried to deny (although federal courts are currently blocking his executive order from taking effect). Tim Weah, Haji Wright, Ricardo Pepi, Sergiño Dest, even Christian Pulisic, are all immigrants or children of immigrants, and several others on the squad have immigration somewhere in their stories.

I just find it interesting how little push-back there is against this particular kind of immigration, even from countries like USA, Germany, Switzerland,.Sweden and England, where there is so often a strong and vocal anti-immigration sentiment.

Trump? Isolated? Say it ain't true!

Here's Mr. Trump at the G7 meeting. 

Everyone else seems vey animated and engaged. But does no-one want to speak to Trump? Say it ain't true!

This photo probably came soon after Trump, supposedly tongue-in-cheek, told the room, "I'm the boss". *sigh* 

What has America achieved in Iran?

It's taken four months, and not a "few days" as advertised, but Donald Trump finally has his Iran Deal (or, rather, a memorandum of understanding, not a full-blown peace agreement). Details are still scarce, but it should see the extension of the current shaky ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and the lifting of the US and Iran blockades. Much can still go wrong between now and Friday, when the agreement is due to be officially signed, but assuming it does actually happen, where does that leave things?

Well, essentially it leaves things pretty much where they were before the war, but with America, Iran and most of the rest of the world worse off. It's being called Trump's worst foreign policy blunder so far - and there have been a few! - an ill-advised, botched affair that should never have happened.

It has soured America's relations with the Gulf states, and severely damaged those states' reputations (albeit through no fault of their own) as islands of stability in a turbulent Middle East. 

It has weakened the US militarily, as it has burned through much more of its expensive and hard-to-replace weapons stocks than expected. At the same time, it has provided an important free lesson to equally heavily-armed and belligerent China as it continues to consider military action against Taiwan. Russia too will have been watching closely.

The global economy has taken a huge and unnecessary economic hit, for which the USA will be eternally (and rightly) blamed, with some countries in Asia and Africa in particular bearing the brunt of the suffering as oil prices surged and the supply of oil, petrochemicals, fertilizer and other important resources were strangled for months on end. The war has set in motion economic changes that will be hard, if not impossible, to reverse.

In terms of actual cost to the USA, best estimates put this in the area of $40 billion so far (because this may not be over!), although that only accounts for direct costs like munitions, destroyed equipment, damage to bases, etc.  The total price, of course, may be much higher, depending on what you choose to include.

The future of Iran's nuclear program and the level of sanctions levied against it remain to be negotiated, essentially the same position as things were at on 27th February, just before the US-Israeli attacks (except, then at least, negotiations on these matters were already well advanced). Iran did not have nuclear weapons before the war and it does not now. Its pledge not to develop them has been in place since 2003, and was renewed under President Obama in 2015. While Trump used to make a big hooh-hah about Iran's "nuclear dust" (what does he mean by that? nobody says "nuclear dust"!), he now claims that "it's not very valuable stuff", and he's not really bothered about it, except for perhaps "psychologically". What?

Trump is trying to sell the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz as a win. But the Strait of Hormuz was open before the war that Trump started. How is a return to the status quo a win for anyone? There is also a distinct possibility that the Strait may reopen with new "maritime service fees" - i.e. a toll - that was not there before. Transit tolls are prohibited under international law, but Iran says it reserves the right to charge fees in exchange for navigational services and environmental protection(!) as part of its deal with Trump. Still calling it a win?

Through the Memorandum of Understanding, Washington has promised to unfreeze billions in Iranian assets, remove sanctions, allow Iran to trade its oil on more favourable terms, and commit $300 billion to reconstructing what it has destroyed in Iran. Does that sound like the actions of a victor?

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other members of his administration and military are now dead, but they have been succeeded by younger and equally radical replacements. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) still wields total control over the beleaguered Iranian people. The repressive theocratic regime remains intact, arguably even more entrenched, embittered and emboldened, and the Iranian people are no better off than they were. Remember Trump's exhortations to the people of Iran to rise up and that "help is on the way"? Poof! Just in case you were in any doubt, Trump confirmed in a recent interview, "I never cared about regime change", and the Iranians now in charge are "nice to deal with"!

America's relationship with Israel - or at least with Prime Minster Netanyahu - has also suffered, once it became clear that Israel's goals were quite different from those of the USA. (Surprise!) Israel looks on the US-Iran agreement with dismay, as they are still looking to make further incursions into Lebanon, and would like to see Iran totally destroyed, which, despite Trump's bluster, it evidently is not. Some top Americans have been criticizing Israel's reaction in ways that would have been inconceivable at the start of this war. Vice-President Vance described Trump as "the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time", and even that may be a stretch. He warns that Israel "needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in".

The whole sorry affair, then, is petering out, more with a whimper than a bang. Any agreement that does come out of it is unlikely to be much different from what Barack Obama achieved all those years ago. And that will really rankle with Trump. Thousands of Iranians and other Middle Easterners have lost their lives, reputations across the board have been damaged, the world is poorer and more unstable, the global economy is screwed up, and tempers are further frayed.

Remember Trump's demands for Iran's "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER"? Well, in some respects, Iran may come out of this in better shape than before, even if the rest of the world doesn't. Good job, Donny!

Trump outdoes himself in the vulgarity stakes

It's hard to keep up with candidates for peak idiocy in Trump World, but yesterday's mixed martial arts (MMA) extravaganza on the White House South Lawn has to rank up there.

The very churlishness of using a National Historic Landmark for this kind of spectacle in the first place is unfathomable. But to feature a circus of violence in a monstrous 80 foot tall cage amid a welter of tasteless self-serving advertising (mainly for Trump products and companies) is surely beyond the pale. Just 16% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll thought that the event was appropriate. Even ex-Trump booster and influential blogger Joe Rogan seemed lost for words.

The UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) itself footed the reported $60 million dollar bill for the event, which was nominally in celebration of the USA's upcoming 250th anniversary, but was really for Trump's own 80th birthday. Trump is a big fan of the brutal UFC sport (famously branded by John McCain as "human cockfighting"), and UFC President Dana White is a big fan of Donald Trump. She gave an impassioned speech about how Trump had saved the UFC, notable for its falsification and mendacity (Trump's connection with the organization actually only began in 2016, when he saw it as just another plank of his election strategy).but 

The Event was invitation-only, but there are reports of sponsorship packages (including ring-side seats) selling for $1 million and up. And all this for a piece of vulgar narcissism by a fading president. Oh, yes, and a celebration of America's 250th anniversary.

Kash Patel is the archetypical chud

My new favourite word is "chud", although I confess I have never used it IRL (in real life).

The word "chud" supposedly originates from a cult 1980s sci-fi horror movie C.H.U.D., which in that context stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, a group of radioactive post-apocalyptic drop-outs. It gradually became used online to describe basement-dwelling internet trolls, gradually broadening its application to any online nerd, creep or jerk.

It's only recently that it had become even more broadly used to describe any unpleasant, boorish or socially inept (almost always male) person. It is particularly used by left wingers to describe those on the far right, particularly those of the MAGA persuasion. Embattled US FBI director Kash Patel recently sued a blogger for calling him a chud.

It should not be confused with the epithet "chad" (or "Chad"), which refers to an alpha male type, usually a strong, handsome and entitled man who effortlessly attracts women, and who is either admired or scorned for their brazen self-confidence.

Neither should it be confused with the Anglicism "chav", which is used for a binge-drinking, bling-wearing lout or boor, although that might work well for Kash Patel too.

Trump's attendance at Knicks game sheer selfishness

New York Knicks fans are saying that Donald Trump's presence at Game 3 of the NBA finals "killed the vibe", "messed up the flow" and generally "jinxed" the team, when he attended the last game against the San Antonio Spurs.

The Knicks were 2-0 up in the series and on a record-breaking 13-game play-off winning streak, when the Spurs beat them 115-111 in Game 3. Trump was heartily booed whenever his image appeared on the jumbotron, despite his own contention that "it was mostly cheers" (it was mostly cheers when he was NOT on the screen). This was New York, after all - not a big Trump town.

Fans were already up in arms after facing enhanced security screening at Madison square Gardens due to Trump's presence, causing waits of over two hours. Even getting to the venue was a nightmare, with many streets cordoned off and barred to vehicles while Trump arrived in his motorcade to boos and signs saying "Nobody wants you here", "Trump must go", and "Impeach. Convict. Remove." Local businesses, hoping to make a healthy profit from a home game, complained that the streets were deserted and takings were down.

And in the end, the Knicks lost, and a record-breaking run came to an end. Make of that what you will.

Trump may be a long-time Knicks fan, but he really didn't have to go to the game. It was sheer selfishness and narcissism. And it backfired, big-time, on any number of levels. 

UPDATE

A wild Game 4 went the Knicks' way too. Trump did not attend. Are you seeing a trend here?

America's latest World Cup affront

God, the current American administration really knows how to manufacture a public relations disaster out of thin air!

After multiple reports of incidents like the Iranian World Cup soccer team's support squad being denied entry, and even the players being forced to jump through all sorts of hoops just to play the games they have already earned and deserve - why are they even scheduled to play in the US? With games also being played in Mexico and Canada, surely that could have been avoided - now we have a lone Somali referee being denied entry at the last minute.

Omar Artan is an experienced FIFA -approved international referee, and has all his papers in order, including his travel visa. He was named referee of the year last year by the Confederation of African Football, and he would have been the first referee from his country to officiate at such a prestigious event, the honour of his lifetime.

Instead, he was pulled over at Miami airport, subjected to 11 hours of interrogation, and denied entry "due to vetting concerns" by US Customs and Border Protection. He was put back on  plane home. They later "clarified" that the Somalian was refused admission due to "association with suspected members of terror organizations", with no other details being offered.

There has been understandable outrage across most of the world. As a former England player put it: "Every few hours its another story - another story about fans denied, players denied, officials denied, journalists denied, now refs. Is this how the hosts behave really for the greatest game, the greatest tournament in the world?"

So much for Gianni Infantino promising "Everyone will be welcome in Canada, Mexico and the United States". There are those who argue that FIFA has lost complete control of this particular World Cup, and that the scandals from the last two tournaments, in Russia and Qatar, are starting to pale into insignificance at the side of what is happening in the United States.

Canadian politicians have also weighed in, saying that Mr. Artan would be welcome to officiate in Canada. But apparently even that would not be an acceptable solution because all the referees are required to attend a training hub in Florida before the games begin. Ridiculous!

Mr. Artan arrived back in Somalia to a hero's welcome, greeted by MPs, government and football federation officials, social media celebrities, and many of his fellow referees. He has quickly become an icon in his homeland. He took the moral high ground, praising FIFA and vowing to be back refereeing at the 2030 FIFA World Cup in Spain/Portugal/Morocco.

Donald Trump and the rest of his merry band of crooks and thugs have their dirty fingerprints all over this late decision. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the order for this latest indignity came right from the top. Trump has singled out Somalia several times for some of his most offensive insults, calling it "barely a country" and "garbage", and claiming that "they just run around killing each other".

How can it possibly be in America's interests to have the rest of the world hate them so?

America hijacks D-Day memorial to score what they see as political points

The arrogance! The disdain! The pompousness! The insensitivity! Yes, I could be talking about almost any member of the Trump administration on almost any day, but this time it's the turn of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth was giving a speech in Normandy, 82 years after the joint D-Day operation to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944. Under the codenames Operation Overlord and Operation Neptune, D-Day remains the largest amphibious invasion in military history, and marked a crucial turning point in World War II.

I guess the Europeans felt they had to invite an American to speak, as the USA did provide the largest contingent of troops in the operation and was directly responsible for two of the five beach landings. But they must have had some misgivings at handing Hegseth the mike. And they would have been so right.

Hegseth thought it was appropriate to turn a solemn memorial event into a tub-thumping political diatribe and a pointed critique of European immigration policy from a (totally inapposite) American perspective.

"Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

"The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe. That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war-fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary."

I don't know whether Hegseth thought up the (spurious) link between these "invasions" himself, or had a speech-writer do it. But I'm sure he felt himself very clever for it. 

And clearly it never even occurred to him that the callous politicization of a such a sombre and reflective event might not be, well, appropriate. European speakers could have drawn parallels between the "dangerous ideologies" of the Nazis and what is happening in the USA today, but they realized that that would have been inappropriate. Or they could have pointed out modern America's penchant for invading other countries, but that would have been cheap political point-scoring, wouldn't it?

Hegseth - and the whole Trump administration for that matter - has no such qualms, no such subtlety or delicacy. They feel emboldened to say whatever they want in whatever arena at whatever time. They are boors and churls (and much worse).

Trump tries some new tariffs - well, why not?

The Trump administration is at it again with tariffs, this time against almost all of America's major trading partners, with the pretext being that they are not pulling their weight on preventing the importation of goods manufactured using forced labour, which unfairly disadvantages the USA.

After the US Supreme Court struck down Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs (levied, illegally as it turned out, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act), he needed to find another way to impose tariffs, because that seems to be the sum total of his economic policy. What his highly-paid lawyers and policy wonks came up with this time was to use Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to impose tariffs of 10%-12.5% on 60 countries (including Canada) that they say are not doing enough to enforce the import ban on goods produced using forced/slave labour (from Xinjiang, China mainly). Canada, however, should be largely protected from these tariffs due to its participation in the USMCA/CUSMA agreement.

It's a bit of a stretch, and it's hard to see the current US regime taking the moral high ground on ANYTHING. But, to some extent, in this area, they may be right. 

Canada does have laws around forced labour imports, and there are specific provisions built into USMCA/CUSMA which prohibit the importation of goods produced wholly or partly by forced labour. But enforcement does seem to be lax. While Canada has intercepted 50 shipments on suspicion of forced labour contraventions since 2020, just 2 were ultimately turned away. The Coalition Against Forced Labour has called Canada out on this, and auditors from PwC agree that enforcement has been far from perfect. This will all no doubt also come up in some detail at the USMCA renegotiations later this year.

I confess, the first thing that occurred to me after I heard the news about the new tariffs was, "I bet America doesn't enforce their forced labour rules any better than we do!" Former Liberal MP John McKay, who was involved in the original implementation of the Canadian laws on forced labour, notes that the US still allows private American firms to make exports using prison labour, and it does not adequately enforce its own laws on forced labour imports, such as the Biden-era Uyghur Forced labour Prevention Act.

Actually, though, the US does seem to be enforcing that specific law quite well, as well as the terms of the Tariff Act of 1930 insofar as they relate to the products of forced labour. Some 6,300 shipments were denied entry into the US in 2024 alone (although that was pre-Trump; figures for 2025 do not seem to be available).

That said, most people seem pretty sure that the Trump regime is not doing this out of moral indignation. They are doing it as "an excuse to impose the tariffs that they wanted to do anyway", as one European diplomat put it, adding that it's completely implausible that all these US trading partners are equally guilty - all 60 major trading partners appear to have failed to meet the bar the US has arbitrarily set - and there seems to be little or no proof being offered. Human rights groups also caution that, while the problem of forced labour does exist, the US tariffs are not the way to deal with it. 

I have looked previously at the whole issue of forced labour in Xinjiang, China - because that is essentially what we are talking about here -  and it is not as black-and-white an issue as it might appear. But the bottom line is, Trump is effectively using any justification he can to impose tariffs (because he's a "tariff guy", don't you know?), and if he can also engineer a hit on China at the same time, then all well and good.

These new tariffs cannot be imposed immediately, but must go through a period of public comment and review, starting with hearings in July. Given how many legal set-backs Trump has experienced in recent months, the tariffs are not the slam dunk they may have been even a year ago.

UPDATE

A new law proposed by the Liberals to placate Trump and his buddies on the matter of blocking imports produced with forced labour was tabled this week (mid-June), designating a list of specific goods, producers, countries or regions where there are "reasonable grounds to suspect" forced labour involved. The government maintains this was not in direct response to the Trump tariff threat, and that it had been innthe works since 2024, but the timing sure is propitious.

It all sounds a bit woolly, especially as the bill puts the onus on shippers to prove that their goods are free of forced labour components. How is that going to work, I wonder? Proving the absence of something is always fraught.

Correlation between education and voting in the USA

Here's an interesting little rabbit hole to go down. Based on US census data, the best-educated American states are:

1. Massachusetts
2. Colorado
3. Vermont 
4. Marylamd
5. New Jersey 
6. Virginia
7. Connecticut
8. New Hampshire
9. New York
10. Washington

The least-educated states are;

1. West Virginia
2. Mississippi
3. Arkansas
4. Louisiana
5. Kentucky
6. Nevada
7. Oklahoma
8. Alabama
9. Indiana
10. New Mexico

Well, maybe you could have guessed most of those. But what's interesting is the correlation of these results with election results.

ALL of the top ten educated states vote Democrat. And ALL of the top ten least educated states voted Republican.

Of course, it could just be coincidence.

US crusade against Cuba makes no sense

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's usual function in the US government is to try to settle things down after yet another wild outburst from his boss, Donald Trump, who, as we know, has anger management and impulse control issues (among many other issues).

On one brief, though, Rubio is probably even more hawkish than Trump, and that issue is Cuba. After all, there is no good reason why Trump should care that much about Cuba: it has little in the way of economic or strategic importance, which is what usually exercises Trump's twisted mind. He appears to be guided by Rubio on this one.

Because Rubio DOES have skin in that game, or at least he seems to think he does. Rubio was actually born and raised in Florida, but his parents were Cuban, and he seems to share the acute sense of grievance that so many Cuban-Americans feel. Despite living the good life in the Sunshine State, many ex-Cubans and their descendants are desperate for retribution against the Castros for pushing them out, as they see it, from their island paradise. 

These are not working-class ex-Cubans (which the Castro revolution actually helped raise up from penury and almost medieval serfdom under the pre-revolution Washington-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista); these are the old wealthy landowners and middle-class professionals. Pre-revolutionary Cuba was not a pleasant place for the poor, but a near-utopia for the wealthy. Being displaced from that is what really rankles for many Florida Cubans (and their descendants), and they want revenge.

But here's the thing: very few Cuban-Americans living in Florida today have any first-hand experience of the Cuban Revolution 67 years ago, or of the supposed paradise that preceded it (actually a brutal dictatorship, defined by rampant corruption, censorship and ties to the American mafia). Most of their rancour and sense of grievance is based more on family lore and race memory, warped and overblown throughout the decades, a kind of foundational myth with little base in reality. This is also Mr. Rubio's background.

Actually, Marco Rubio's parents left Cuba in 1956, over two years BEFORE the revolution, so arguably they were not even displaced by the revolution (although maybe they saw the writing on the wall). That makes Rubio an American born of Cuban parents who voluntarily left before the revolution. So, how much skin can he really be said to have in it? He is, though, the designated representative of many other displaced Cubans in Miami (or, mainly these days, their descendants), hence his apparent ardour on the subject.

Either way, one gets the impression that it is Rubio that is driving this latest crackdown by America. Trump probably doesn't care that much, other than about the Cuban-American vote. Rubio often claims the Cuban government is a severe national security threat to the US, although pretty much everyone knows that is not true.

The United States has long maintained a debilitating embargo on Cuba, an embargo that Trump recently made much, much worse by denying the country its essential imports of oil, which used to come mainly from Venezuela (which is now effectively controlled by the US). This has led to devastating power cuts, food shortages, transportation standstill, and a general  disabling of its entire economy. Most recently, Trump's DoJ has announced the indictment of 94-year old Raúl Castro (Fidel's brother) on "Trumped-up" charges relating to events back in 1996. It's even possible that another Maduro-style kidnapping is in the pipeline. How is arresting and trying a doddering old man going to help anything?

So, all this vitriol is directed against a small island in the Caribbean which is hard-pressed to keep its own population alive and in order, let alone present a threat to the mighty USA. It's hard to credit. This crusade against Cuba makes no real sense, not even for Marco Rubio. But then, why are we still looking for sense with this administration?

Americans are fleeing Trump's USA in droves

Donald Trump may have succeeded in forcing out a lot of immigrants, something that might still come back to bite the country. But a lot of other non-immigrants are following the immigrants out of the USA.

Under Trump, the US is experiencing significant net emigration for the first time in over a century, with more citizens leaving the country than arriving. And Donald Trump himself is a big reason, although not the only one: along with disgust with Trump are the rising cost of living (arguably also Trump's fault), gun violence (which Trump has certainly done nothing to improve), and an inability to achieve economic prosperity (ditto). 

Thousands are deliberately giving up their citizenship, while many others are choosing to live abroad in pleasanter, cheaper, quieter places like Mexico, Portugal, Ireland, Bali, Colombia, Thailand or Canada, to study, work remotely, or retire. Comprehensive statistics are hard to come by, but net migration figures can be built up from a variety of sources. Estimates suggest that at least 400,000 Americans voluntarily left the USA in 2025.

And this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise: a Gallup poll shows that about one-in-five Americans would prefer to leave permanently, given a chance, and two-in-five women between the ages of 15 and 44. This poll was six months ago; the numbers can only be higher today.

As one woman put it: "If you can't achieve in the United States what was once called 'the American Dream', then why stay here? There is a disgraceful President, health insurance that costs more than a salary, and a Supreme Court that decided my body doesn't belong to me. My husband and I are now looking at options, and by the end of the year we will leave."

Yeah, she's got a point.

These are not low-earning, fly-by-night immigrants that are choosing to leave the USA; they are typically high-earning well-educated Americans. Of course, Trump would probably just say "good riddance, they are all Democrats", which is probably true. But, in true Trumpian style, that would be short-term blinkered reasoning.

How Trump's obsession with "deals" blinds him to the bigger picture

Out of the blue, the Trump administration, through some Pentagon "Under Secretary" or other, has announced that it is putting on hold, pending review, the US-Canada Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD).  

The US says it us "pausing" its participation in the PJBD because it says that Canada has "failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments" (i.e. military spending targets), even though Canada has, for the first time in decades, just increased its defence budget to meet or exceed NATO targets. It also wants to "reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense", it says, as though that is not obvious. The announcement was made on X, so it must be official and important, right?

Now, most Americans and Canadians have probably never even heard of the PJBD, but it is a reasonably important advisory body and part of the joint North American security apparatus. Made up of senior Canadian and US defence officials, it is perhaps best known for setting up and administering the North American Air Defense command (NORAD) early warning system, although it does have other functions too. It was established in 1940, during the Second World War, and is an important symbol of the bilateral relationship between the two countries. And yes, as the name suggests, it is permanent.

Of course, the US could just as well review the Board's value and efficacy without putting it on hold. That, and the conspicuous timing of the announcement, is how you know that this actually has nothing to do with regional security and military preparedness, but has everything to do with Donald Trump's peevishness at Prime Minster Mark Carney's very public comments (particularly his Davos speech) about Canada's realignment away from an unreliable and antagonistic United States in favour of more reliable partners in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. 

It's also a pressure tactic to get Canada to buy more American military equipment (e.g. F-35 fighter jets), given Canada's recent pivot away from the US and towards more dependable, decent and welcoming providers in Europe and South Korea.

And last but not least, it is also very much about strong-arming Canada and softening us up as we start to get into the nitty-gritty phase of the scheduled renegotiation of the Canada United States Mexico Agreement on free trade. 

This, then, is all part of "the art of the deal".

Now, I have never read Trump's book The Art of the Deal, nor am I ever likely to. But it seems pretty clear to me that this kind of intimidation and duress masquerading as negotiation tactics is never going to foster long-term relationships and goodwill. All it does is piss people (and whole nations) off. This combative and transactional approach to negotiations - reliant, as it is, on an existing economic and military dominance that Trump himself was not responsible for building up - may make some short-term gains for the US, but only at the expense of its other "partners", and to the detriment of the relationship as a whole.

Trump's frenzied quest for wins of any kind and at any cost (viz. his Iran war), and his psychologically unbalanced pursuit of "deals", will not win him any friends. I don't even know what "friends" means in Trumpian terms: this is a man who calls Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping "friends", apparently blissfully unaware of just how much they despise him. Maybe Canada can be friends with the USA again one day, but that's not going to happen while Donald Trump is in power. His willful destructiveness will take decades, maybe even generations, to repair.

Has America lost another war?

The United States is not used to losing. Whether we're talking sports, military conflicts, cultural exports, economic power, you name it, the US has been without doubt the most successful country in the world over the last couple of centuries.

That said, it has over-reached itself a few times, especially militarily. The War of 1812 with Canada, Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s, arguably even Iraq in the 2000s - these were all either American losses or at least stalemates that did not achieve their objectives.

Is Iran 2026 another such failure?

There are arguments to say so. While Donald Trump has claimed overwhelming victory almost since Day 1 and at least a dozen times since, no-one really believes that guy. Although Trump has repeatedly claimed that Iran's military capabilities have been "obliterated" (his favourite word after "tariffs"), other sources suggest that Iran has retained or restored operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, and that it retains about 70% of its mobile launchers and it's pre-war missile stockpiles. 

Trump seems to be dialling back his earlier insistence that he needs Iran's nuclear stockpiles, or that at the very least they should be destroyed. And while the US "took out" Ayatollah Ali Khomeini early on in the action, Iran has seamlessly replaced him with his son, and the regime has continued essentially unchanged. The Strait of Hormuz is still far from "open". Iran remains a key player in the Middle East.

Of course, part of the problem here is establishing what would constitute an American victory, as Trump and his whole administration seem a bit confused about what the actual goals of the engagement are or were. Success and failure are therefore pretty hard to pin down. Also, as has been argued by better men than me, military leaders rarely actually admit defeat: their whole credibility rests on success.

Either way, whether you believe the USA has won the Iran war or not, Iran certainly believes - and with some justification - that it has not lost it. Iran has, at the very least, made America look like what the Chinese like to call a "paper tiger". People are muttering, online and in the street, that the US will not soon recover from this set-back.

US position on Taiwan remains unchanged, but Trump can turn on a dime

For the most part, Donald Trump's visit to China was a bit of a nothingburger, despite his usual bombastic and delusional reporting. No big deals, and very few small deals.

Of course, the subject of Taiwan had to come up at some point in the visit, and, of course, President Xi urged Trump not to support Taiwan, which China claims as part of its own territory. Trump, for his part, blathered something about "not looking for somebody to go independent", which might or might not be a veiled and confusing warning to Taiwan not to declare its independence, which is has already done for decades. He did say that "if you kept it the way it is, I think China's going to be OK with that", which is also absolutely not true.

Trump added that "nothing's changed" with respect to the USA's policy on Taiwan, which amounts to not formally supporting Taiwanese independence, while stopping short of explicitly opposing independence, a kind of sensible on-the-fence position, given the circumstances. The average Taiwanese citizen just wants to maintain the current status quo, i.e. neither formally declaring independence, but not unifying with China either, what you might call de facto independence.

Of course, the first thing Taiwan did after Trump's visit was to publicly re-declare their independence: Taiwan "is a sovereign and independent democratic nation and is not subordinate to the People's Republic of China", read an unequivocal foreign ministry statement. Taiwan's Presidential Office reminded the world of "the multiple reaffirmations from the US side, including from President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that the consistent US policy toward Taiwan remain unchanged".

This, of course, puts the US in an awkward position, especially as President Xi was at pains to remind Trump that any misstep on the issue could cause "conflict". 

But Taiwan too needs to tread carefully. The United States is legally required to provide weapons to Taiwan for its defence (stipulated in the Taiwan Relations Act), and an $11.1 billion arms package was announced by Washington just this last December. But a second phase of arms sales, worth around $15 billion, has not yet been approved by the US, and Taiwan must know that Trump would be more than willing to use that as a bargaining chip in his relations with China (in fact, he admitted as much, in so many words). Taiwan might think that that deal is done, dusted and non-negotiable, but Trump almost certainly does not.

Trump is openly flirting with fascism, but Americans only care about gas prices

I'm kind of tired of writing about Trump. But I still keep doing it because, like it or not, he is the driving force of our times, the single individual generating most of the worldwide news (almost all of it bad) in these weird times we live in.

Trump's popularity in the USA, the metric by which he measures himself, is at an all-time low. (His popularity in the rest of the world has always been at an all-time low, but doesn't really care about that.) So, does this mean that America is finally waking up from an embarrassing - and extremely consequential - trance?

Er, probably not.

See, here's the thing. Despite the fact that Trump has spent the last year and change converting the US into a fully-functional fascist state, the thing that is finally causing Americans to snap out from under his spell is actually something as mundane as ... gas prices.

Think about that. It gives a good indication of just where American priorities lie. 

Trump has presided over the establishment of a vicious paramilitary force tasked with oppressing the American people and forcefully abducting specific segments of the population based on racist ideology. He has co-opted the highest legal court in the land by installing compliant judges willing to put ideological bias before sound legal judgement. He has wilfully demonized political opponents, and weakened institutional trust. He has pursued an aggressive policy of imperialistic expansionism, in words and sometimes in actions. He has deliberately taken actions to undermine democratic norms and protections, and has openly flirted with extreme authoritarianism, with all the trappings (think White House ballroom, mugshot pictures hanging from public buildings, etc). He has attempted to suppress free speech anywhere it implies criticism of his actions and policies. He, his family, and members of his administration have all enriched themselves on the back of his policies, at the expense of the working stiff. He no longer feels constrained by international norms or domestic institutions, but is happy to let power speak, whatever the ethical implications. Truth is now optional in official circles.

This, it has been widely argued, is fascism. But many Americans have stood idly by and watched all this happen, like a frog in a pot of heating water (I'm talking here about the republican/conservative half of this dismally divided country - Democrats have always opposed Trump, even if not as loudly as they might have.) Land of the free? Cradle of democracy? Pshaw. Over-rated.

What has actually - finally - started to galvanize opposition to Trump and his policies is the threat to Americans' profitability and financial ease. America has always been a country obsessed with money and wealth, to a degree unmatched by any other state. When Trump's disastrous trade policies and, particularly, his ill-advised invasion of Iran (and the oil price chaos that, predictably, followed) finally started to hit their proverbial pocketbooks, even Republicans have started to wake from their deplorable sleepwalk.

Does Donald Trump type out his own social media posts?

I was trying to figure out how Donald Trump found the time and the energy to make all those unhinged late night Truth Social posts. I mean he'd have to spend most of the day consuming the latest conspiracy theories and disinformation streams, wouldn't he, and then stay up half the night as well? Well, it turns out that he has a "personal aide" or "executive assistant" called Natalie Harp who does most of the leg (and finger) work for him.

Little-known and low-profile, Harp is one of his most influential aides, and has been instrumental in the nearly 8,800 posts Trump has made since the start of his second term. She has access to Trump's Truth Social account, but she also has an alarming amount of control over what Trump writes about, and she also controls much of what reaches his desk in the first place. Unusually, she appears to work directly for Trump and answers only to him, without any oversight by Trump's chief of staff, national security officials, or other communication aides, which has raised more than a few eyebrows.

How it works is that she arrives at Trump's residence each evening with a stack of printed-out draft posts, on subjects that she thinks Trump might want to publish under his name. She will have spent most of her day scouring the internet for suitable videos, images and text that would align with Trump's current grievances, whims and worldview. 

Then, once Trump approves the selections, she logs into his account, usually in the late-night early-morning hours, and posts large batches of messages in quick succession, occasionally up to 160 in a single night's activity. This gives the impression that Trump is up at all hours, working(!) for the American people.

So, who is this eminence grise? Well, not so grise, it turns out. Ms. Harp is 34 years old, and sports long blonde hair and lots of make-up - a typical Trump pick, you could say. She used to be an anchor with One America News Network, a far-right political commentary TV network, and joined Trump's campaign in 2022. She became known as the "human printer" because part of her brief was to follow Trump around, even onto golf courses, to print out pertinent information for him, as Trump is of an age where he prefers the printed word to screens.

Natalie Harp

Although she has somehow managed to remain quite private, she has attracted some scrutiny, particularly for some rather embarrassing adoring letters she has sent to Trump, which include comments like "You are all that matters to me", "I don't ever want to let you down", and "I want to bring you joy". Sycophantic, bordering on creepy. Others in Trump's staff find the "aggressiveness of her attention" discomfiting and unnerving, and possibly even a security concern.

Trump, however, is a big fan, and anyway is a sucker for the attentions of a young blonde woman. (Snopes' fact-check points out that reports from the New York Times and Washington Post of an affair between the two are actually just based on hearsay and speculation.) So, maybe don't feel too sorry for him tapping away on his phone into the wee hours - he's probably actually tucked up in bed with a can of Coke at the time his Truth Social posts are sent out.

Trump selects a Surgeon General nominee purely based on merit

And now, right back to... Donald Trump. 

Trump's new nominee for the vacant position for Surgeon General is someone called Nicole Saphier. You probably won't have heard of her unless you watch Fox News. She's a radioligist (so, almost a doctor) who does an occasional segment on the right-wing news show in which she mainly engages in culture war issues, and only incidentally in "medical" matters, where she espouses some rather iffy stances on vaccinations and transgender ideology, among other things.

But you only have to see a picture of Ms. Saphier to get a pretty clear idea of why Trump selected her. The man has a certain recognizable style. Are you seeing a trend here?

I kind of feel sorry for the poor woman in some ways. How is she supposed to head up a huge medical bureaucracy with zero experience and not much medical knowledge? What could possibly go wrong? There again, she could always say no...