The full story of what has happened at the BBC may take months (or years) to emerge. But it’s become evident that a combination of poor editorial judgement and political meddling by longstanding BBC critics contributed to Tim Davie and Deborah Turness’s departures.

That there were editorial mistakes is not in question. The BBC Panorama documentary on Trump spliced together two different parts of Trump’s notorious January 6 2021 speech on Capitol Hill, without making the edit clear.

The programme itself, which was broadcast a few days before the 2024 US presidential election, was arguably carefully balanced, containing an equal number of Trump supporters and detractors. Notably, it did not receive a single complaint at the time of transmission.

It was broadcast a week before the 2024 US presidential election – nearly four years after the speech itself. It wasn’t a programme that was likely to sway anyone’s views of the president, who was impeached for “incitement of insurrection” after January 6. He was later acquitted.

Nevertheless, it was wrong to edit the speech in this way. That error was one of many allegations of institutional bias included in a dossier by Michael Prescott. Until June, Prescott – a former political editor for Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and longtime PR professional – was an external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee.

The report was leaked to the Telegraph, which splashed with selected excerpts alleging that the programme had been “doctored”, and listing other editorial problems that he claimed the BBC had failed to put right.

Political influence

The Telegraph, like much of the British press, has for decades waged an editorial war against the BBC. As a publicly funded, free-to-air broadcaster, which is by some distance the most trusted news provider in the UK, the BBC is a serious challenge to news publishers’ commercial interests. It also offends the political sensibilities of those opposed to public funding interventions more generally.

It was therefore only a matter of time before the Telegraph “exclusive” on BBC bias and the Panorama programme escalated, especially once noticed by the White House. As the crisis gathered steam, one of the many burning questions was: why on earth is the BBC not responding?

It has now been reported – including by the BBC’s media editor Katie Razzall and BBC presenter Nick Robinson – that an apology was drafted by the BBC news team and was ready to be signed off a week ago.

Unfortunately, the BBC board reportedly prevented Turness from putting out the apology, instead opting for a letter to MPs on the media select committee. What followed was a damaging vacuum, with the BBC unable to defend itself or acknowledge its error. As internal arguments raged, it simply issued a bland statement that it would respond in writing to the select committee.

Key to this institutional paralysis and the fallout that followed were the political appointees to the BBC board. When the BBC charter was renewed in 2016, the then Conservative government introduced a new governance structure. The BBC would be governed by a unitary board of 14, including a chair, and four part-time members, each representing one of the UK’s nations. These five were all government appointees.

That boardroom dissent was, it now appears, led by those political appointees, in particular Sir Robbie Gibb. Following time as a BBC executive in charge of political programmes, Gibb was Conservative prime minister Theresa May’s director of communications. He was subsequently involved in the founding of GB News, an avowedly right-wing news channel.

In the words of Prospect magazine and former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Gibb “does not pretend to be impartial on issues related to British politics or Israel”.

Gibb was appointed to the BBC board by Boris Johnson, reappointed by Rishi Sunak, and his term runs until 2028. It is therefore unsurprising that Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has called for Gibb’s immediate removal from the board and for an end to the practice of political appointments.

The Conversation has reached out to Gibb for comment.

In his letter to the chair of the media select committee on Monday, BBC chairman Samir Shah acknowledged the Panorama mistake and apologised for the news team’s “error of judgement”. He made it clear, however, that Prescott’s report “does not present a full picture of the discussions, decisions and actions that were taken”.

Changes for the future

This peculiar arrangement of political appointments appears to have effectively given partisan appointees a veto over a crucial senior management decision, resulting in the forced departure of the BBC’s two most senior news executives.

While Davey is right that this anomaly needs to be rectified, the whole BBC governance structure is in need of an overhaul. At a time of increasing polarisation and social media misinformation, it is more important than ever that the BBC is protected from political interference.

The next BBC charter, starting from January 2028, offers a perfect opportunity to provide the kind of protective structure that the BBC requires. As part of a campaign to support public service broadcasting in the UK, the British Broadcasting Challenge – a group of academics and media professionals that includes myself and The Conversation’s CEO Chris Waiting – published a report last month calling for a “genuinely independent public appointments process for the chair and trustees, insulated from covert and overt government influence”.

This could be done through a dedicated body set up under the same terms as the wholly independent Press Recognition Panel, with no links to any political party or partisan campaigning group. Such a body could be responsible not just for non-executive BBC appointments (including its chair) but also for the chair of regulator Ofcom and the chair of Channel 4 – both currently in the gift of government.

The Labour government is about to kickstart a debate on the next BBC charter. Lisa Nandy, as the responsible secretary of state, has it in her hands to rectify some of the egregious damage inflicted on the BBC’s reputation by the political meddling of the last few days. Let’s hope that she rises to the challenge.

Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications, University of Westminster

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

These concern the effectiveness and integrity of the BBC’s internal editorial procedures for investigating complaints, and the pressure being brought to bear on the BBC by conservative political and media forces in the United Kingdom.

The Trump controversy originated from the editing of a BBC Panorama documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?” It went to air a week before the 2024 US presidential election, and contained replays of sections of the speech Trump had made to his supporters just before the insurrection in Washington on 6 January 2021.

In the speech, Trump said at one point: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer our brave senators and congressmen and women.” Fifty minutes later, in the same speech, he said: “I’ll be with you. And we fight. Fight like hell.”

According to the BBC’s own account, these two quotes were spliced together to read: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol […] and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

The effect was to give the impression Trump was egging on his supporters to violence.

At that time, a journalist called Michael Prescott was working as an independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee. According to The Guardian, Prescott’s appointment to this role had been pushed by a BBC board member, Robbie Gibb, who had been communications chief for the former Conservative prime minister Theresa May and had also helped set up the right-wing broadcaster GB News.

Prescott left the BBC in June 2025, but during his time there he wrote a letter to the BBC board drawing their attention to what he saw as problems of “serious and systemic” editorial bias within the broadcaster. The dishonest editing of the Trump speech was one example he gave to support his case.

He wrote that when these lapses had been brought to the attention of editorial managers, they “refused to accept there had been a breach of standards”.

That letter came into the possession of London’s Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper. On November 3 it published a story based on it, under the headline: “Exclusive: BBC doctored Trump speech, internal report reveals”. The sub-heading read: “Corporation edited footage in Panorama programme to make it seem president was encouraging Capitol riot, according to whistleblower dossier”.

It is not known who the whistleblower was.

The Trump White House was on to this immediately, a press secretary describing the BBC as “100% fake news” and a “propaganda machine”. Trump himself posted on his Truth Social platform that “very dishonest people” had “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election”, adding: “On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for democracy!”

News Corporation’s British streaming service TalkTV predicted Trump will sue the BBC. As yet there have been no developments of that kind.

The Prescott revelations come only three weeks after the BBC reported that the British broadcasting regulator Ofcom had found another BBC documentary, this time about the war in Gaza, had committed a “serious breach” of broadcasting rules by failing to tell its audience that the documentary’s narrator was the son of the Hamas minister for agriculture.

Ofcom concluded that the program, called “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone” was materially misleading by failing to disclose that family link.

These are egregious errors, and the journalists who made them should be called to account. But the resignation of the director-general and the CEO of news is so disproportional a response that it raises questions about what pressures were brought to bear on them and by whom.

The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail ran hard for a week on the Trump story, and this generated pressure from the House of Commons culture committee to extract explanations from the BBC.

Politically, the timing was certainly inconvenient. The BBC is about to begin negotiations with the government over its future funding, and perhaps a calculation was made that these might proceed more fruitfully with a new director-general and head of news after a procession of controversies over the past couple of years.

On top of that was the Trump factor. Were there diplomatic pressures on the British government from the White House to see that some trophy scalps were taken?

Davie and Turness have each said that mistakes had been made, that the buck stopped with them, and that they were resigning on principle. Perhaps so, but the sources of pressure – the White House, the House of Commons, the conservative media – are such as to invite a closer scrutiny of the reasons for their departure.

They also seemed unable to respond effectively to the week-long onslaught from The Telegraph and Mail, either by defending their journalists or admitting mistakes had been made and that they had taken remedial steps.

It is also a reminder to public broadcasters like Australia’s ABC, that in the current political climate they are high-priority targets for right-wing media and politicians. The ABC has had its crisis with the Antoinette Lattouf case, which cost it more than $2.5 million for its management’s failure to stand up for its journalists against external pressure.

Fortunately it coincided with the planned departures of the chair and managing director, giving it the opportunity of a fresh start. The BBC is about to get a similar opportunity. Clearly it needs to more effectively enforce its editorial standards but it also needs to stand up for its people when they are unfairly targeted.

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It was another example of how Trump’s shifting policy positions, racially inflammatory statements and threats frequently fuel a flurry of headlines, reflecting what some psychologists are calling “media saturation overload” or “Trump stress disorder.”

This barrage of information may seem like overcommunication from a hyperactive administration. But it is much more than that.

Scholars have found that the constant, often conflicting and at times false information coming out of the White House and shared via social media posts and the conventional news media causes members of the public to see truth and fact as relative and makes them more likely to dismiss those who disagree with them as untruthful. This leaves doubt about what’s real and what isn’t.

This citizen paralysis creates what philosopher Hannah Arendt described in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” as a general public “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exist.” When lies are truth and truth is derided as lies, Arendt wrote, ordinary people lose their bearings and can be manipulated for totalitarian objectives.

Meanwhile, many journalists have openly acknowledged fatigue with the pace and nature of the Trump administrations’ news cycles, amid frequent newsroom layoffs, mergers and closures.

I am a longtime journalist and now scholar of journalism and race, trained to see the methods and aims behind political leaders’ press operations. And as I show in my forthcoming book, the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies echo the playbooks of authoritarian and white supremacist organizations such as the Third Reich and some factions of the modern alt-right movement. They are intended to narrow the scope of who belongs as an American.

Headlines at ‘muzzle velocity’

The Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies include claiming victim status while often laying blame on immigrants or other scapegoats in ways that I believe betray racist intent. At the same time it has overwhelmed journalists and the public with breaking news.

This strategy was laid out by Steve Bannon, an influential Trump supporter and strategist in his first administration, during a 2019 PBS “Frontline” interview, when he described the media as “the opposition party.”

“They’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time,” he said. “All we have to do is flood the zone. … Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never – will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Bannon has long been associated with the alt-right, a movement known for rhetorical tactics that minimize and obfuscate its true aims.

A strategy forged in Trump’s first term

As I detail in my book, “American Otherness in Journalism: News Media Representations of Identity and Belonging,” Trump and his key advisers have been developing, refining and ramping up their news media manipulation for a long time.

An early example of this is the way the administration used these tactics through Trump’s public responses to the fatal violence at the August 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The two-day rally was organized by a white nationalist blogger and attended by members of neo-Nazi, white supremacist and far-right militias protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville park. They marched with tiki torches, flew Confederate and Nazi flags and chanted antisemitic and racist slogans.

Amid violent clashes with counterprotesters on the second day, a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove into a crowd, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring many others.

My study of television news coverage of Unite the Right found that the majority of news reports focused on the contradictory and inflammatory statements that Trump made about the antisemitic and racist protesters. Trump’s Aug. 15, 2017, press conference remark about blame on both sides after what happened garnered the most news media attention: “I think there is blame on both sides,” he said. “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

Exploiting chaos

The uncertainty surrounding what he meant created a cycle of news stories implying and denying that he sympathizes with white supremacists.

This is-he-or-isn’t-he intrigue spurred a surge of what fits the description of Bannon’s “muzzle-velocity” news headlines: “Trump declares ‘racism is evil’ amid pressure over Charlottesville” followed closely by “Trump defends White-nationalist protesters” and “Why Trump can’t get his story straight on Charlottesville.”

With the focus on Trump’s comments and what he might have really meant, the news media ultimately missed covering at the time the long-term threat posed by these white supremacist and other extremist groups.

Echoing a playbook from the past

Scholars have identified the fascist roots of these “post-truth” strategies: strongmen leaders uninterested in establishing leadership through honesty and transparency.

A recent scholarly analysis of Trump’s leadership concludes that the second-term president is overwhelming the public into “organized despair” by pitting races against each other while targeting minority groups as scapegoats, a tactic that hearkens back to 1930s Germany.

A 2019 analysis of Trump’s narrative style describes how he presents himself as a “strongman” fighting invisible forces of censorship and suppression. It also points out that this was part of the appeal of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler.

Researchers of Nazi propaganda identified key tactics in the German press such as name-calling and lumping together groups seen as opposition – communists, liberals and Jews – until public understanding of those groups blur into phrases like “enemies of Germany.” The messaging was constant and immersive, carried in local and national newspapers, radio, film and posters.

A key part of Trump’s rhetorical strategy is using race without directly referring to it. For example, Trump has described cities with large nonwhite populations such as Washington, D.C., and Chicago as “out of control” or “dirty,” contrary to actual crime statistics. He’s also questioned Kamala Harris’ racial identity, suggesting she “happened to turn Black.” And referring to Black football players who had been protesting systemic racism by kneeling during the national anthem, Trump said, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” which many observers interpreted as racist because he was insulting people of color for the act of protesting racism.

This racial coding has been used by white supremacist groups to mask their true intent. They also use less overt labels such as “alt-right” or “pro-white” as a “rhetorical bridge” to the mainstream public.

In the case of the NFL protesters, the plausible deniability became an actual denial. Trump perfected this move when, during a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he said, “Proud Boys – stand back and stand by,” referencing another group accused of thinly veiled racism.

Drowning in headlines

I believe that the endgame for this strategy is authoritarian power that greatly narrows the scope of who truly belongs and has rights in this country as an American.

This media saturation – drowning the public with a thousand Trump-generated headlines – allows his administration to keep dominating and controlling national attention.

But the media-consuming public can use the tools they have to encourage news outlets to better inform the public by identifying the media saturation strategy and reporting on why leaders are using it.

Otherwise, if news consumers let the headline overload do what it’s intended to do, and become overwhelmed and paralyzed, they become pawns in what I consider a ploy to make America less egalitarian and less democratic.

Angie Chuang, Associate Professor of Journalism, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The move by the Federal Aviation Administration is intended to ease pressure on air traffic controllers, many of whom have been working for weeks without pay after the government shut down on Oct. 1. While nonessential employees were furloughed, workers deemed essential, such as air traffic controllers, have continued to do their jobs.

But what does that mean for the many Americans who take to the skies every day? To find out, The Conversation U.S. spoke with Laurie A. Garrow, a civil aviation expert at Georgia Tech.

What do we know about the FAA’s plans so far?

The first thing to note is that things can change fast. But as of this morning, 4% of flights are being canceled across 40 “high-volume” airports. The list is publicly available, but it includes most of the big hubs across the United States, such as Atlanta, New York’s airports, Chicago O'Hare, Los Angeles International and Dallas/Fort Worth.

The plan is to ramp this up to 10% by Nov. 14 should the shutdown extend that long.

The FAA, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the airlines are working together on the details of which flights and routes are affected – and this will no doubt be monitored as the days go on.

But they are trying to make the cancellations in a way that cause the least disruption to customers.

So we are looking at cuts to domestic, not international, flights – flights across the Atlantic, Pacific and to Latin America are not, for now at least, subject to cuts.

The 4% of cancellations we are seeing are really targeting the high-frequency routes. This should help mitigate the impact. For example, typically American Airlines flies nine flights a day from Miami to Orlando, but they are planning to fly eight this weekend.

And carriers are looking at reducing regional flights. For example, my mom lives near Erie, Pennsylvania, where American Airlines flies three daily flights to their hub in Charlotte – I would expect that to go down to two, or one.

But the FAA was clear that it wasn’t going to cut flights to markets entirely, just reduce them.

What will this mean for existing flights?

For starters, you are going to see more passengers on them. It is fortunate that we are in the lull before Thanksgiving. This isn’t like the summer. There is more slack in the system – so there are extra seats available. If one flight gets canceled on a busy route, it will at this stage be fairly easy to accommodate on another flight.

And I expect customers will be asked to get to airports a little earlier than they would normally.

But people should expect more delays on existing flights. This is because of the way we maintain safety in the air transportation system. Air traffic control can only safely watch a certain number of flights. So when you have someone not at work, or a reduction in number of controllers, you will need to reduce the number of airplanes in the sky. You can’t ask a controller to watch, say, 20 flights when they usually watch 10. So what you do is put in more ground delay programs to limit the number of aircraft coming into or out of an airport. This causes delays but is necessary in peak periods.

What impact will this have on airlines?

At 4%, probably not too much of an impact. When you look at the list of airports affected, it is balanced from the point of view that many are large hubs and the pain is being shared across all U.S. carriers.

As for the impact on other types of businesses, at the moment it is mainly the industries that air transportation supports. According to the International Air Transport Association, the air transport sector in the U.S. – covering airlines, airports and tourism enabled by aviation –contributes about US$1.3 trillion, or about 4.7%, to GDP and supports about 7.6 million jobs. If these wider sectors are severely affected, it could create a longer-term impact on the economy.

And if this continues into the holiday season?

That is when it will get painful for the carriers. If we are looking at reduction of 10% going into the holiday season with additional delays, then that is when the real pain will be felt.

Will this affect how Americans choose to travel?

Air travel is what I call an emotional mode of transport – we use it for the events that are most significant in our life, such as big family meet-ups, holidays and major face-to-face business deals. So this may affect how people choose to travel going into the holiday season if it is more difficult to get people back to their families in time.

Robert Isom, CEO of American Airlines, said on Nov. 7 that they are seeing an impact on bookings, with people postponing and rescheduling travel.

I certainly think for people looking at a 500- to 600-mile trip, the option of traveling by car is looking more appealing right now.

Will passengers be compensated for canceled flights?

Typically, compensation depends on whether the delay or cancellation was within the airline’s control. The U.S. Department of Transportation has created a dashboard showing “what services U.S. airlines provide to mitigate passenger inconveniences when the cause of a cancellation or delay was due to circumstances within the airline’s control.”

However, delays and cancellations caused by ATC staffing shortages are not considered to be within the airline’s control, and it is up to each airline to decide if and how they will compensate passengers.

As of Nov. 7, many airlines had announced they were allowing customers to change their flights or request a refund without penalty, including nonrefundable fares such as basic economy.

After all, it is in their interest, too, that people continue to fly.

Typically, major carriers offer more services for delayed and canceled flights within their control than low-cost carriers.

Is there any precedent for this? What happened then?

There is no real precedent for what we are seeing: a 4% to 10% reduction across the board due to a government shutdown. But we have seen major disruptions, such as after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and during the pandemic, when COVID-19 ran through flight attendants and pilots before the holidays – that caused flight cancellations and delays.

Historically, when we have seen something like this, we have seen consumer behavior change for a short period. After 9/11, when U.S. travelers had the hassle of increased security, there was a shift to more automobile travel for those 500- to 600-mile journeys.

What advice would you give would-be flyers now?

First off, download the app for the airport and airline carrier so you get up-to-date, reliable information. And if you can book for a day earlier than you normally would for a major event, do so – it provides a buffer in case your flight is delayed or canceled.

And try to avoid connections at all costs. The fewer legs, the fewer things can go wrong.

Also, don’t check bags if you can. There is nothing worse than getting to an airport, finding your flight is canceled, and then having to wait for your luggage to get returned.

Laurie A. Garrow, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

His signature also happens to be of particular interest to me, given my decades-long fascination with, and occasional academic research on, the connection between signature size and personal attributes.

A long-time social psychologist who has studied America’s elite, I made an unintentional empirical discovery as an undergraduate more than 50 years ago. The link that I found then – and that numerous studies have since echoed – is that signature size is related to status and one’s sense of self.

Signature size and self-esteem

Back in 1967, during my senior year of college, I was a work-study student in Wesleyan University’s psychology library. My task, four nights a week, was to check out books and to reshelve books that had been returned.

When students or faculty took books out, they were asked to sign their names on an orange, unlined card found in each book.

At some point, I noticed a pattern: When faculty signed the books out, they used a lot of space to sign their names. When students checked them out, they used very little space, leaving a lot of space for future readers.

So I decided to study my observation systematically.

I gathered at least 10 signatures for each faculty member and comparison samples of student signatures with the same number of letters in their names. After measuring by multiplying the height versus the width of the amount of space used, I found that eight of the nine faculty members used significantly more space to sign their names.

In order to test for age as well as status, I did another study in which I compared the signatures of blue-collar workers such as custodians and groundskeepers who worked at the school with a sample of professors and a sample of students – again matched for the number of letters, this time on blank 3-by-5-inch cards. The blue-collar workers used more space than the students but less than the faculty. I concluded that age was at play, but so was status.

When I told psychologist Karl Scheibe, my favorite teacher, about my findings, he said I could measure the signatures in his books, which he had been signing for more than a decade since his freshman year in college.

As can be seen in the graph, his book signatures mostly got bigger. They took a major leap in size from his junior year to his senior year, dipped a bit when he entered graduate school and then increased in size as he completed his Ph.D. and joined the Wesleyan faculty.

I did a few more studies, and published a few articles, concluding that signature size was related to self-esteem and a measure of what I termed “status awareness.” I found that the pattern held in a number of different environments, including in Iran – where people write from right to left.

The narcissism connection

Although my subsequent research included a book about the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, it never crossed my mind to look at the signatures of these CEOs.

However, it did cross the minds of some researchers, 40 years later. In May 2013, I received a call from the editor of the Harvard Business Review because of the work I had done on signature size. They planned to run an interview with Nick Seybert, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Maryland, about the potential link between signature size and narcissism in CEOs.

While Seybert told me his research had not found direct evidence for a positive relationship between the two, the possibility of the connection he inferred nonetheless intrigued me.

So I decided to test this using a sample of my students. I asked them to sign a blank 3-by-5 card as if they were writing a check, and then I gave them a widely used 16-item narcissism scale.

Lo and behold, Seybert was right to deduce a link: There was a significant positive correlation between signature size and narcissism. Although my sample size was small, the link subsequently led Seybert to test two different samples of his students. And he found the same significant, positive correlation.

Others soon began to use signature size to assess narcissism in CEOs. By 2020, growing interest in the topic saw the Journal of Management publish an article that included signature size as one of five ways to measure narcissism in CEOs.

A growing field

Now, almost six years later, researchers have used signature size to explore narcissism in CEOs and other senior corporate positions such as chief financial officers. The link has been found not only in the U.S. but in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay, Iran, South Africa and China.

In addition, some researchers have studied the effect of larger versus smaller signatures on the viewers. For example, in a recent article in the Journal of Philanthropy, Canadian researchers reported on three studies that systematically varied the signature size of someone soliciting funds in order to see whether it affected the size of donations. It did. In one of their studies, they found that increasing the size of the sender’s signature generated more than twice as much revenue.

The surprising resurgence of research using signature size to assess narcissism leads me to a few conclusions.

For one, signature size as a measure of certain aspects of personality has turned out to be much more robust than I imagined as an observant undergraduate working in a college library back in 1967.

Indeed, signature size is not only an indicator of status and self-esteem, as I once concluded. It is also, as recent studies suggest, an indicator of narcissistic tendencies – the kind that many argue are exhibited by Trump’s big, bold signature.

Where this research is taken next is anyone’s guess, least of all for the person who noticed something intriguing about signature size so many years ago.

Richie Zweigenhaft, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Guilford College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

At stake is more than the scope of presidential power. The case highlights a deeper question of accountability: Who should decide what Americans pay for imported goods – the president acting alone, unelected judges reading emergency laws broadly, or the elected representatives who must face voters when prices rise?

When tariffs end up in court, it’s usually because Congress has failed to act. Over the past few decades, lawmakers have ceded much of their trade authority to presidents eager to move quickly – and the courts have been left to clean up the mess. Each new lawsuit makes it seem as though judges are running the economy when, in fact, they’re being pulled into policy questions they’re neither trained nor elected to answer.

As an economist, not a lawyer, I view this as more than a constitutional curiosity. It’s about how the world’s largest economy makes decisions that ripple through global markets, factory floors and family budgets. A duty on steel may help a mill in Ohio while raising bridge-construction and car-buying costs everywhere else. A tariff on electronics might nudge assembly onshore yet squeeze hospital and school budgets that depend on those devices.

These are choices about distribution – who gains, who pays, and for how long – that demand analysis, transparency and, above all, democratic ownership.

How did the US get here?

Congress didn’t exactly lose its tariff power; it gave it away.

The Constitution assigns “Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” to Congress, not the White House. Historically, Congress set tariff lines in law – consider the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The pivot began with the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act of 1934, which let presidents adjust rates within limits via executive agreements. In the 1960s and ’70s, Congress passed laws expanding the president’s authority over trade, granting new powers to restrict or adjust imports without a separate congressional vote if certain conditions are met.

In my view, two key incentives drove the drift: blame avoidance and gridlock. Tariffs are redistributive by design: They benefit some sectors and regions while imposing costs on others. Casting a vote that helps steelworkers in one state but raises prices for builders in another is politically risky. Delegating to the White House allowed lawmakers to sidestep the fallout when prices rise or when jobs shift.

And as polarization intensified, the bargaining that once produced workable compromises became increasingly complex. Broad emergency statutes and open-ended delegations became the path of least resistance – fast, unilateral and insulated from negotiation. Over time, exceptions became the norm, and courts were tasked with resolving the gray areas.

That’s a poor way to run economic policy.

Judges interpret statutes and precedent; they don’t run general equilibrium models, forecast inflation paths or map supply chain rerouting. Evidence in court is confined to a single case file. Remedies are blunt: They are either to uphold, strike down or send back. Tariff design, by contrast, is about calibration: how high, how long, which sectors, which exclusions, what off-ramps, what triggers for renewal or repeal.

When lawsuits substitute for legislation, countries drift into policy by injunction. Companies see rules whipsaw; projects are delayed or shelved; households experience price swings that feel arbitrary; trading partners retaliate against policies they see as improvisational.

A matter of accountability

Accountability sits at the center of the problem. Most judges aren’t elected; lawmakers are. Lifetime tenure protects judicial independence – good for rights, bad for setting taxes. No one can vote out a court when tariffs push up the price of a school Chromebook or a contractor’s rebar.

Members of Congress, by contrast, must explain themselves. They can hold hearings, commission impact analyses, hear from unions and small businesses, and then defend the trade-offs. If tariffs save jobs in one town but raise prices nationwide, voters know exactly whom to reward or punish. That democratic link is why the Constitution places “Duties and Imposts” in the hands of Congress.

None of this means paralysis when it comes to trade policy. The United States has done this before – via trade-promotion and fast-track authorities that set clear goals and required renewal votes – while the EU and Japan have paired swift action with built-in legislative oversight.

Congress can be nimble without being reckless. Best practices for tariffs include setting clear targets using accessible language, having independent analysts conduct reviews before and after a tariff is put in place, and having diplomacy baked into a broader trade-security strategy that reports retaliation risks.

The challenge facing the court

In my view, the Supreme Court’s role here is both modest and vital: to enforce the statute and the constitutional line.

If a general emergency law doesn’t clearly authorize sweeping, long-duration tariffs, it’s not activism to say so plainly. It’s boundary-keeping that returns the pen to Congress. What I think the court should avoid is appearing to write the tariff code from the bench. That swaps democratic ownership for judicial improvisation and guarantees more litigation as a strategy.

In theory, a more public, accountable system would also free everyone to focus on what they do best. That means economists measuring who gains and who pays, lawmakers weighing trade-offs and answering to voters, and courts enforcing the rules – not designing the policy.

Bedassa Tadesse, Professor of Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth

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Entitled, his unauthorized biography of Andrew and Sarah, appeared shortly before Andrew’s precipitous fall from grace and will undoubtedly be a bestseller. (There is more up-to-date information, and perhaps less speculation, than in Nigel Cawthorne’s 2020 book Prince Andrew: Epstein, Maxwell and the Palace.)

“I think there’s lots more still to come, lots more, and it will be even more damaging material,” Lownie said last week of the ongoing revelations about the former prince, now Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

A historian, journalist and literary agent, Lownie has specialized in writing about royal scandals. Entitled seems an obvious next step for an author whose last book was about the Duke of Windsor, whose 1936 abdication to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson was the biggest crisis for the monarchy in the past century.

Even for those not interested in royal gossip, Entitled is a fascinating read. As Lownie writes, “It is a tale of childhood trauma, infidelity, lust, betrayal, corruption, greed, extravagance, arrogance, entitlement, Establishment cover-up and hubris.”

Reckless and corrupt

We have known for most of the past 20 years that ex-Prince Andrew was both reckless and corrupt. We have also known Sarah Ferguson (Fergie), his former wife and apparently continuing housemate, at least until now (she has announced she will be moving into her own separate home), was equally so. There is no suggestion, however, that her contact with Jeffrey Epstein involved seeking sexual favours.

It was the couple’s closeness to convicted sex offender Epstein that brought them down. Lownie writes that “Randy Andy” was not only close to Epstein, but apparently shared young women with him. Epstein claimed “he likes to engage in stuff that’s even kinky to me — and I’m the king of kink”.

In 2019, Andrew famously resigned from royal duties (at his then 98-year-old father’s instigation, writes Lownie) after his disastrous hour-long interview with BBC Newsnight. In it, among other things, Andrew denied meeting Virginia Giuffre Roberts, the self-described Epstein “sex slave” who said she had sex with Andrew three times and was photographed with him and Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

The infamous BBC Newsnight interview that had Andrew removed from royal duties in 2019.

The tragic April suicide of Giuffre, and the publication last week of her memoir Nobody’s Girl, finally forced the palace to take significant action.

Though Andrew had denied Giuffre’s accounts of having sex with him, he paid her out a large sum, then lied about his continuing association with Epstein. Court documents released in January reveal a “member of the British royal family”, believed to be Andrew, emailed Epstein saying: “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”

A BBC producer told Lownes the team “found personal email discussions between Ghislaine and Andrew discussing Virginia” and “they worked together to build a dossier about Virginia to leak to the media”.

Dubious deals

Andrew equally deserved to lose his position because of years of dubious deal-making with an extraordinary series of crooks and tyrants.

After a long career in the British Navy, including time as a helicopter pilot in the 1982 Falklands War, he was found a position supporting British trade and investment abroad. At this point, any sense he might have had of the distinction between royal duty and personal advancement vanished.

Even before this, Andrew had shown a disregard for restraint and a willingness to use his royal privilege at enormous cost to the state, demanding helicopter flights to take him to private golf games. But with the imprimatur of the Foreign Office, he appears to have spent considerable time with a series of deeply unpleasant regimes – Libya, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan – in pursuit of his own financial interests.

I lost track of the many complex ways in which Andrew sought to use his position to make money, some of which, such as his dealings with a Chinese businessman with close ties to the Chinese government, caused considerable concern for the UK government.

It remains something of a mystery why the king is now apparently prepared to provide Andrew with an income, given the amount of money he has reputedly earned over the past decades.

Sarah’s spending ‘literally staggering’

As a commoner, one assumes Andrew will continue to enjoy expensive watches and cars, even if he is confined to racing them around the Sandringham estate. He might emulate his wife and appear on the US television and speech circuit. Back in 2007, Lownie writes, Sarah was paid half a million dollars to give five speeches, plus the cost of transporting her entourage across the Atlantic, a group of at least ten.

But Sarah’s involvement in murky deals is also problematic. She appears to be a woman of enormous energy, whether in spending money at a rate only the Kardashians could match or flying off to yet another all-expenses-paid holiday courtesy of rich friends.

Sarah’s father had been a polo manager for Prince Charles, and she had a friendship with Princess Diana that preceded their respective marriages. Once a member of “the firm”, as the royals refer to it, she took to heart Gore Vidal’s dictum that “in the world of stars, no-one is a stranger”, and moved into the world of celebrities and the ultra-rich.

The amount of money Sarah has earned and spent is literally staggering. Over her time as Duchess of York, she was paid millions for her childrens’ books, television appearances and her work with Weight Watchers. She engaged in considerable charity work and apparently showed a genuine capacity for empathy with disabled and orphaned children.

At the same time, many of her charitable ventures seem to have rewarded her and her friends more than the causes they were meant to support. She may well be big-hearted and generous; she is also imperious and wasteful. Like Andrew she treats servants, of whom they both appear to need large numbers, with a striking lack of courtesy.

Comparisons to Trump

Reading about the Mountbatten Windsor family, as they will now be known, I was struck by the comparison with the Trump family. (Trump himself has just commented on King Charles’ decision to strip Andrew of his titles: “I feel very badly,” Trump said. “It’s a terrible thing that’s happened to the family.”)

When they built and furnished their first home, Sunninghill, it sounded remarkably like something Trump might construct: “One entered by the thirty-five-foot high stone floor hall, which rose to a glass dome and minstrels gallery through a lobby adorned with a medieval soldier’s helmet from Windsor Castle and the head of a North American buffalo — a gift from a royal tour.”

Trumplike, too, is the way their children, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, have been gifted profitable access to some of the Middle East potentates who befriended Andrew, though Lownie tells us remarkably little about the princesses. (He does not even comment on the fact their royal titles are not shared by their cousins, the children of Princess Anne and Prince Edward.)

Lownie is an engaging author, and his book is a compulsive read. He is skilful in dropping in a casual comment that becomes relevant later. The best example is several accounts of Andrew seen dancing at nightclubs and sweating profusely; those of us who watched his fateful television interview will recall his protestation that the stress of his service in the Falklands War cost him the ability to sweat.

Among the many people whose reputations are soiled in this sorry tale, that of the late Queen Elizabeth is most striking. While others in the family – Prince Phillip, Prince William, even Princess Margaret – were appalled by the couple, the queen remained blind to Andrew’s dealings and consistently bailed him out. After the BBC interview, she was deliberately photographed riding with Andrew in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Lownie writes.

Lownie remains discreet in his discussion of the queen and is on record as a supporter of the monarchy. (Though he told an interviewer last week: “I think the queen has to take some responsibility for the monster she created.”)

If there is a gap in this book, it is his reluctance to question how far the sense of entitlement, carried to the extreme by Andrew and Sarah, is common to others in the family.

Can the monarchy survive?

Lownie ends his book warning of the harm this story has done to the British monarchy. He finished it before King Charles acted to decisively exorcise Andrew from “the firm” and banished him to what the royals call “a cottage” on Charles’ private Sandringham estate.

I suspect this has saved the monarchy in Britain, at least for now. Charles has proved to be a far more effective constitutional monarch than most expected, as he demonstrated when he very carefully hosted Trump’s state visit. That the Canadian prime minister invited Charles to open the nation’s parliament earlier this year suggests he is seen as a valuable political asset.

Whether exile to Sandringham will prevent further moves against Andrew is unclear. With royal status removed, he is vulnerable to other possible accusations emerging. I would not be surprised were he to end up in Dubai, where he could share reminiscences of royal splendour with the disgraced Spanish king, Juan Carlos. Or in Abu Dhabi, where he has reportedly been offered the use of a lavish royal palace by the country’s ruler.

Reading Entitled, it is hard to feel monarchy is justified. But I return to the dilemma that led me to write my book God Save the Queen: many of the countries we regard as most democratic – Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands – are constitutional monarchies.

In the end, Britain’s monarchy will survive because its political leaders are trusted even less than its hapless royals.

Dennis Altman, Vice Chancellor's Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University

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Congress is not on the ballot this November, but it will be in the 2026 midterms. A year from now, Americans in every state and district will get to vote for whom they want representing their interests in Washington.

But right now, Congress isn’t giving the American people much to go on.

As the shutdown of the federal government passes the one-month mark, the U.S. House of Representatives has been in recess for over 40 days. That’s the longest it’s ever stayed out of town outside of its typical summer recesses or the weeks leading up to their own elections.

Notably, the shutdown does not mean that Congress can’t meet. In fact, it must meet to end the shutdown legislatively. The Senate, for example, has taken votes recently on judicial nominations, a major defense authorization bill and a resolution on tariff policy.

Senators have also continued to hold bipartisan behind-the-scenes negotiations to end the shutdown impasse.

But with dwindling SNAP benefits, skyrocketing health care premiums and other major shutdown impacts beginning to set in, the House has all but abdicated its position as “The People’s Chamber.”

Long ‘path to irrelevance’

In addition to not meeting for any votes, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has refused to swear in Democratic U.S. Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona. Despite Johnson’s assurances, the shutdown does not prevent the House from meeting in a brief session to swear in Grijalva as a member for Arizona’s 7th District, which has been without representation since March.

Along with Casey Burgat and SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor, I am co-author of a textbook, “Congress Explained: Representation and Lawmaking in the First Branch.” In that book, it was important to us to highlight Congress’ clear role as the preeminent lawmaking body in the federal government.

But throughout the shutdown battle, Congress – particularly the House of Representatives – has been unwilling to assert itself as an equal branch of government. Beyond policymaking, Congress has been content to hand over many of its core constitutional powers to the executive branch. As a Congress expert who loves the institution and profoundly respects its constitutionally mandated role, I have found this renunciation of responsibility difficult to watch.

And yet, Congress’ path to irrelevance as a body of government did not begin during the shutdown, or even in January 2025.

It is the result of decades of erosion that created a political culture in which Congress, the first branch of government listed in the Constitution, is relegated to second-class status.

The Constitution puts Congress first

The 18th-century framers of the Constitution viewed Congress as the foundation of republican governance, deliberately placing it first in Article 1 to underscore its primacy. Congress was assigned the pivotal tasks of lawmaking and budgeting because controlling government finances was seen as essential to limiting executive power and preventing abuses that the framers associated with monarchy.

Alternatively, a weak legislature and an imperial executive were precisely what many of the founders feared. With legislative authority in the hands of Congress, power would at least be decentralized among a wide variety of elected leaders from different parts of the country, each of whom would jealously guard their own local interests.

But Trump’s first 100 days turned the founders’ original vision on its head, leaving the “first branch” to play second fiddle.

Like most recent presidents, Trump came in with his party in control of the presidency, the House and the Senate. Yet despite the lawmaking power that this governing trifecta can bring, the Republican majorities in Congress have mostly been irrelevant to Trump’s agenda.

Instead, Congress has relied on Trump and the executive branch to make changes to federal policy and in many cases to reshape the federal government completely.

Trump has signed more than 210 executive orders, a pace faster than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Republican Congress has shown little interest in pushing back on any of them. Trump has also aggressively reorganized, defunded or simply deleted entire agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

These actions have been carried out even though Congress has a clear constitutional authority over the executive branch’s budget. And during the shutdown, Congress has shown little to no interest in reasserting its “power of the purse,” content instead to let the president decide which individuals and agencies receive funding, regardless of what Congress has prescribed.

Many causes, no easy solutions

There’s no one culprit but instead a collection of factors that have provided the ineffectual Congress of today.

One overriding factor is a process that has unfolded over the past 50 or more years called political nationalization. American politics have become increasingly centered on national issues, parties and figures rather than more local concerns or individuals.

This shift has elevated the importance of the president as the symbolic and practical leader of a national party agenda. Simultaneously, it weakens the role of individual members of Congress, who are now more likely to toe the party line than represent local interests.

As a result, voters focus more on presidential elections and less on congressional ones, granting the president greater influence and diminishing Congress’ independent authority.

The more Congress polarizes among its members on a party-line basis, the less the public is likely to trust the legitimacy of its opposition to a president. Instead, congressional pushback − sometimes as extreme as impeachment − can thus be written off not as principled or substantive but as partisan or politically motivated to a greater extent than ever before.

Congress has also been complicit in giving away its own power. Especially when dealing with a polarized Congress, presidents increasingly steer the ship in budget negotiations, which can lead to more local priorities – the ones Congress is supposed to represent – being ignored.

But rather than Congress staking out positions for itself, as it often did through the turn of the 21st century, political science research has shown that presidential positions on domestic policy increasingly dictate – and polarize – Congress’ own positions on policy that hasn’t traditionally been divisive, such as funding support for NASA. Congress’ positions on procedural issues, such as raising the debt ceiling or eliminating the filibuster, also increasingly depend not on bedrock principles but on who occupies the White House.

In the realm of foreign policy, Congress has all but abandoned its constitutional power to declare war, settling instead for “authorizations” of military force that the president wants to assert. These give the commander in chief wide latitude over war powers, and both Democratic and Republican presidents have been happy to retain that power. They have used these congressional approvals to engage in extended conflicts such as the Gulf War in the early 1990s and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later.

What’s lost with a weak Congress

Americans lose a lot when Congress hands over such drastic power to the executive branch.

When individual members of Congress from across the country take a back seat, their districts’ distinctly local problems are less likely to be addressed with the power and resources that Congress can bring to an issue. Important local perspectives on national issues fail to be represented in Congress.

Even members of the same political party represent districts with vastly different economies, demographics and geography. Members are supposed to keep this in mind when legislating on these issues, but presidential control over the process makes that difficult or even impossible.

Maybe more importantly, a weak Congress paired with what historian Arthur Schlesinger called the “Imperial Presidency” is a recipe for an unaccountable president, running wild without the constitutionally provided oversight and checks on power that the founders provided to the people through their representation by the first branch of government.

This is an updated version of a story that first published on May 15, 2025.

Charlie Hunt, Associate Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

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Vampires have long represented our political and social attitudes to race, immigration and the threat of foreign invasion – reflecting the prejudices of their times.

My research explores how comic books and graphic novels interrogate political, social and cultural issues. Dracula became a 20th-century pop culture phenomenon, appearing in several films and TV programs. But American comic books were relatively slow to feature vampires.

In 1954, the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency investigated the comic book industry. Hearings were held to testify about the perceived harm caused by crime and horror comics. To allay threats to their business, publishers banded together to form the Comics Magazine Association of America and established The Comics Code of 1954, which banned crime and horror content, including stories featuring vampires. A revision and relaxation of the code in 1971 enabled vampires to be used when “handled in the classic tradition” of novels such as Dracula “and other high calibre literary works written by Edgar Allen Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world”.

This led to the creation of the character Morbius the Living Vampire, who debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #101 in July 1971. Morbius was a scientist with a blood disease whose experimental cure using vampire bats led to his transformation.

Soon after, Dracula himself joined the Marvel comic universe in Tomb of Dracula #1 (November 1971), a series that ran until 1979. Writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan had to work within the limitations of the code by ensuring that they adhered to a traditional depiction of Dracula in line with Stoker’s original version. This could have limited the style and content of their stories, which were set in the modern era, but the inclusion of a newly created supporting cast kept the narrative fresh and engaging.

Vampires in American comic books retained this outsider status – invariably they were European immigrants like Morbius, who was born in Nafplio, Greece. In this way, comic vampires continue the literary vampire tradition of tapping into the fear of foreigners.

Doctor Doom: anti-immigrant populist politician

Comic book writer Ryan North explored a variation of this theme with Doctor Doom, the Marvel Comics’ super-villain, in issues of Fantastic Four released this year. Doom will be played by Robert Downey Jr. in the new film Avengers: Doomsday, due in 2026.

Doom rules Latveria, a fictional European country. He has recently declared himself Emperor of the World, supported by leaders of nations across the globe. Doom also uses Trump-style populism by propagating prejudice and fear-mongering against vampires.

In Fantastic Four #29 (February, 2025) Susan Storm, Ben Grimm and Jennifer Walters (also known as the Invisible Woman, the Thing and She-Hulk respectively) meet for lunch in a New York diner. They discuss Doom’s recent activities, which their waitress agrees are wrong before asserting that “at least he’s doing something about those horrid vampires”.

Outside, sat on the sidewalk, is a dishevelled, slumped vampire holding a sign that reads: “Anything Helps.” Apart from slightly elongated nails and subtly pointed canine teeth, there is nothing to distinguish him from any other normal person begging on a street.

Sue, Ben and Jen then leave the diner and encounter a terrified family of four being chased by an angry crowd. The father exclaims “Please! Leave us alone!!” and “Please don’t kill us” as they try to outrun the mob. The family, dressed in normal casual clothes, are vampires.

Protected by the heroes, the parents explain that they are starving. Having been turned away from a blood bank, and not wanting to harm people, they had resorted to eating a pigeon, which prompted the chase. Members of the crowd scream “Vampires!”, “Kill them!” and call them “monsters”. The parents are killed by a member of the mob, but the vampire children are saved by the Fantastic Four. This leads to Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) creating a synthetic food substance that quenches vampires’ bloodlust, before ensuring the children are re-homed with their aunt.

Thinking that solving vampires’ hunger for blood will render Doom’s propaganda impotent, the story ends on a foreboding scene: a normal suburban house in America, with parents waving off their children to school. However, their house is bedecked with Maga-style pro-Doctor Doom flags and signs. It seems that Doctor Doom is still winning the hearts and minds of many Americans.

In One World Under Doom #3 (April, 2025) a group of superheroes and super-villains team up against their common enemy and find out how Doom has manipulated the world’s leaders. Using their own powers, they discover that he has not used magic, telepathy or mind control. He has merely negotiated with other leaders to become World Emperor. His populist policies have been embraced by the public.

This, along with the anti-vampire rhetoric and misinformation, creates a powerful allegory of the far-right ideologies that are currently being propagated by politicians across our own world. This current portrayal of Dr Doom as a proxy for public figures and politicians who use anti-immigrant rhetoric, harmful stereotypes and egregious misinformation, strongly suggests that they are the real monsters. Not the immigrants – or vampires for that matter.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Andrew Edwards, Student Learning Developer, The University of Law

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Trump has already voiced some unease about the election. In a recent interview with the One America News (OAN) network he stated: “The one thing that I worry about is that… I don’t have the numbers, but the person that wins the presidency always seems to lose the midterms”.

There’s a clue to the president’s apprehension about the numbers from the 2024 general election results. Despite winning the popular vote in 2024, the Republican vote in the House fell by 0.2 percentage points, as a result the GOP (the Republicans) lost two seats, leaving them with a majority of only five seats.

Trump knows from bitter experience what could happen if he loses control of the House. The Democrats made a net gain of 40 seats at the 2018 midterms after which the House impeached Trump twice.

So the president and his Maga coalition are well aware of how important it is to retain control of Congress.

The president is already taking steps that could tilt the midterms in his favor. Shortly after being sworn in as president in January 2025, he rescinded Joe Biden’s executive order that aimed to expand voting access and voter registration.

In April Trump ordered the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into the Democrats’ top fundraising platform ActBlue, after allegations it had allowed illegal campaign donations. The Democrats denounced the move as “Donald Trump’s latest front in his campaign to stamp out all political, electoral and ideological opposition”.

In August, Trump announced he wanted to ban mail-in-voting for the midterms. Three in every ten ballots cast in 2024 were mail-ins and are historically thought to favour the Democrats. But the US constitution mandates that the states control their elections. Congress has the power to pass legislation banning mail-ins for federal elections, but it is thought unlikely that such a measure would pass the Senate.

History has shown that the party occupying the White House usually performs poorly in the subsequent midterm elections. Three recent polls, Economist/YouGov, Morning Consult, and Emerson, show Democrats edging ahead in the generic congressional vote.

But precedent and political polling may count for little over the next year, as America’s democratic system is tested by extraordinary events and challenges.

Redistricting

There are already moves by mainly, though not exclusively, Republican controlled states to carve out additional congressional seats (referred to as redistricting) to bolster the party’s chances of retaining their majority in the House of Representatives. In three states – Texas, Missouri and North Carolina – Republican legislatures have redrawn constituency lines to the party’s electoral benefit, resulting in a notional seven new GOP-leaning congressional seats.

After the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature voted through a new congressional map that may provide the party an additional seat in next year’s midterms, Trump posted on Truth Social that this provided the potential for “A HUGE VICTORY for our America First Agenda.”

Democrats have responded to these events by launching their own redistricting plans, with Virginia becoming the latest blue state to announce proposals to redraw electoral boundaries that could give the party two or three additional seats.

It is, however, the largest state in the union – California – which serves as the base for Democrats counterbalancing moves. California Governor Gavin Newsom is asking his state’s voters to decide on proposition 50. If passed this would authorize state lawmakers to create new electoral wards that could favor Democrats. Academic analysis has estimated that the move could provide up to five additional Democratic seats in Congress.

This action has been endorsed by former US president Barack Obama, who stated the Democrats strategy in California gives the national party a “chance… to create a level playing field” in next year’s elections.

Partisan gerrymandering is nothing new in US politics. But what is new, according to Benjamin Schneer, a Harvard-based expert in political representation, is the scale on which this is being done. He believes:

Gerrymandering can be done more effectively now because we have fine-grained data on the population and on how people are likely to vote, and computing techniques to design maps in clever ways. Put all that together with intense polarization and that creates a perfect storm where gerrymandering can flourish.

Voting rights

The 2026 midterms would also be affected in a seismic way by an impending Supreme Court decision relating to a central pillar of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Section 2 of the act “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups”. The court is now weighing whether Section 2 is constitutional. to voting rights laws could affect the outcome in 2026.

The case relates to a lawsuit in Louisiana where it was required under the VRA to redraw its congressional map to ensure two majority black districts. This is now being challenged in the Supreme Court. If successful it could weaken the voting power of minorities and result in congressional districts being redrawn throughout the American south.

This would be a major blow for the Democrats. Analysis by the BBC projects that this could “flip more than a dozen seats from Democratic to Republican”. Findings from the Economist go further, suggesting “Republicans could eliminate as many as 19 Democrat-held districts in the House of Representatives, or 9% of the party’s current caucus.”

The 2026 midterms will be hugely consequential. They will decide what party controls the US Congress for Trump’s last two years in office and therefore the extent of his power until January 2029. They will also serve as the unofficial start of the 2028 presidential campaign and determine whether it is the Republicans or Democrats with the political momentum heading into this historic election.

Richard Hargy, Visiting Research Fellow in International Studies, Queen's University Belfast

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Over the past few weeks, activists taking part in protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the United States have donned inflatable animal costumes. The aim is to disrupt the Trump administration’s claim that the protests are violent “hate America” rallies.

The result is a sight to behold, with many encounters between police and protestors going viral.

Whether they know it or not, these costumed activists are contributing to a rich history of using humour and dress to mobilise against and challenge power.

The ICE crackdowns

Since its creation in 2003, ICE has enforced immigration laws on the ground, arresting, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of criminal activity.

During Donald Trump’s first term as president (2017–2021), the agency expanded its operations to target and deport many people with no criminal record.

This expansion sparked the June 2018 Occupy ICE protests, inspired by the broader global Occupy movement challenging corporate power and economic inequality.

The first major Occupy ICE action in 2018 occurred in Portland – a city known for its creativity and dissent. It grew from a rally organised by the Direct Action Alliance into what federal officials called a “very, very peaceful” encampment with kitchen tents, kids’ spaces and media hubs.

The protesters forced the temporary closure of the facility for about eight days, before federal officers cleared the site and erected a fence around its perimeter.

Following Trump’s re-election this year, ICE operations have intensified again, with the repealing of policies that prevented enforcement operations in sensitive areas such as schools and hospitals. Protests have followed.

In Portland, tensions escalated again this September, when Trump described the city as “burning to the ground” and “overrun with domestic terrorists,” announcing his plans to deploy the National Guard.

A federal judge has so far blocked Trump from doing so, saying the protests don’t meet the requirements for rebellion. He will likely keep trying.

Operation inflation

Protesters in Portland and across the US have long used humour and costume in their demonstrations. In October, a TikTok video showing an ICE agent spraying pepper spray into the air vent of an activist’s inflatable frog costume amassed more than two million views.

The clip exposes the absurd levels of police force against peaceful demonstrators. The protester, Seth Todd, said his intention was to contradict the “violent extremists” narrative, and “make the president and the feds look dumb”.

The Portland frog has quickly became emblematic of resistance, appearing on shirts, signs and street art, including parodies of artist Shepard Fairey’s iconic OBEY design – the authoritarian face replaced by a cartoon amphibian surrounded by the words DON’T OBEY.

And the frog costume has spawned imitators, with creatures multiplying in protests across the country, including at the recent No Kings rallies. One group of activists launched Operation Inflation, a website that crowdfunds inflatable suits for protesters, aiming to make resistance more visible, playful and safe.

Strategic silliness

One example that echoes Portland’s blow-up menagerie is London’s Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA). Members of CIRCA dressed as clowns during anti-war protests in the early 2000s. They played tag around police lines, hugged officers, and marched in absurd choreography.

As scholar Eve Kalyva notes, such actions employ “strategic frivolity”: silliness or absurdity in a way that disrupts the scripts between police and protester. By appearing playful rather than menacing, costumed activists directly counter narratives that paint them as violent threats.

The Portland frog and its friends work with the same strategies of silliness. Their dancing and cartoon-like actions make it impossible to frame them as thugs. Their soft forms bounce in contrast to the hard utility of riot gear.

From suffragette sashes to handmaids

Beyond frivolity, activists throughout history have also used dress and costume to more serious effect. In Britain in the early 20th century, suffragettes wore coordinated purple, white and green sashes to project unity in the fight for women’s voting rights.

In the US, dress and costume have played important roles in successive movements for African American liberation. During the 50s and 60s Civil Rights Movements, many marched in their best suits and dresses to assert their dignity against dehumanising racism.

The Black Panther Party had an unofficial uniform of sunglasses, berets and black leather jackets, embodying a more defiant style.

More recently, demonstrators in the US, Northern Ireland and Argentina have donned the red cloaks and white bonnets of The Handmaid’s Tale to protest abortion bans.

Similarly, The Extinction Rebellion–affiliated group Red Rebel Brigade stages actions in flowing red robes to mourn environmental loss.

And the wearing of the fishnet-patterned keffiyeh has now become a global symbol of Palestinian support.

Naked solidarity

On October 12, Portland’s anti-ICE demonstrators – many in their inflatable suits — were joined by thousands of naked cyclists in the Emergency World Naked Bike Ride. As costume designer and historian Camille Benda writes in Dressing The Resistance: The Visual Language of Protest (2021), nakedness in protest lays bare the body’s vulnerability to state violence.

In Portland, the mix of bare skin and soft blow-up animals heightens both the absurdity and tenderness of the scene. These protesters offer new avenues for direct action at a time when many people’s rights and freedoms are at stake.

At the time of writing, ICE was reported to have increased its weapons budget by 700% from last year.

Whether Trump will ultimately deploy the National Guard remains unclear. But across the US, the frogs (and their friends) keep multiplying. Their placards declaring “frogs together strong” remind us of the strength to be forged in unity and laughter.

Blake Lawrence, PhD Candidate (Design) and Performance Artist, University of Technology Sydney

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And finally – usually after some contact with the Russian president – he finds some imaginary silver lining that, in his considered view alone, justifies backing down and essentially dancing to the Russian dictator’s tune again.

The latest iteration of his by now very predictable sequence of events has unfolded as follows. Back in September, while he was still busy pushing his ultimately unsuccessful campaign to be awarded the Nobel peace prize, the US president began to envisage a Ukrainian victory against Russia. This, he said, would involve Kyiv reclaiming all territory lost to Russia’s aggression since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

To make this happen, there was suddenly talk of US deliveries of Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. Access to these missiles would enable strikes against Russian military assets and energy infrastructure far beyond the current reach of most of Ukraine’s weapons. Trump and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, spoke twice by telephone on October 11 and 12 to discuss the details. A deal was expected to be announced after they met in the White House on October 17.

Yet, the day before that meeting, Trump, apparently at the Kremlin’s request, took a phone call from Putin. Over the course of two hours of flattery and promises of reinvigorated trade relations, the Russian president managed to get Trump to back off his threat to supply Ukraine with Tomahawks.

This message was promptly delivered the following day to the Ukrainian delegation led by Zelensky. While clearly not as disastrous as their first encounter in the White House in February this year, Ukraine’s humiliation was clear.

Not only were Tomahawks taken off the table, but Kyiv and its European allies are essentially back to square one and the very real possibility of a deal between Putin and Trump. Or rather two deals to be hammered out by senior officials first and then sealed at another Trump-Putin summit in Budapest.

The first deal would likely be on the broader terms of a peace settlement. After the meeting, Trump posted on his social media channel that Russia and Ukraine should simply accept the current status quo and stop the fighting. With Trump thus appearing keen – again – to stop the fighting in Ukraine on the basis of a compromise between Russia and Ukraine means that Ukraine would lose as much as 20% of its internationally recognised territory. This is something that Kyiv and its European allies have repeatedly said is unacceptable.

The second deal would be on resetting relations between Washington and Moscow. This is something that Trump has been keen on for some time and suggests that more severe sanctions on Russia and its enablers, including India and China, are unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon.

Before Zelensky’s trip to Washington, there appeared to be some genuine hope that a ceasefire could be established as early as November. But Trump’s arrangements with Putin do not mention a ceasefire. Instead they make an end to the fighting conditional on a deal between the US and Russian presidents, which Zelensky is then simply expected to accept.

This will put further pressure on Ukraine, which suffers from daily attacks against critical infrastructure and is particularly harmful to the country’s economy and civilian population and foreshadows another difficult winter.

Russia continues its push for territory

So far, so bad for Ukraine. But this was not an accidental outcome that could have gone the other way, depending on the whims of Trump. Ever since the US president appeared to shift gear in his approach to the war in late September, the Kremlin carefully prepared the ground for a rapprochement between the two presidents – with a mixture of concern, threats and a good dose of flattery.

The goal of this rapprochement, however, is not a better peace deal for Russia. Putin surely knows this is unrealistic. Rather, it appears that the Kremlin’s main goal was buying itself more time to continue ground offensive in the Donbas.

This is best achieved by preventing the US from fully backing the position of Ukraine and its European allies. In this context, the choice of venue for a potentially deal-clinching summit between Trump and Putin is also interesting.

It will not be possible for Putin to travel to Budapest without flying through Nato airspace and through the airspace of countries that are at least candidate states for EU membership. This will put serious pressure on the EU and Nato to allow Putin passage or otherwise be seen as obstructing Trump’s peacemaking efforts – a narrative that the Kremlin has been peddling for some time, part of its strategy to disrupt the transatlantic relationship.

On the other hand, Trump’s latest turnaround – difficult as it may be for Kyiv to stomach – does not bring Ukraine closer to defeat. In Ukraine, mobilisation is in full swing and domestic arms production is increasing. Ukraine is further helped by the commitment of more than half of Nato’s member states to supply Kyiv with more US weapons.

There are three key takeaways from the diplomatic flurry over the past few weeks.

First, for all of Putin’s bluster, the threat of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles clearly had an effect. Putin made a move to reach out to Trump, thereby exposing an obvious vulnerability on Russia’s part. Second, and this barely needed confirmation, Trump is not a dependable ally of Ukraine or within the transatlantic alliance. He clearly has not given up on the possibility of a US-Russia deal, including one concluded behind the back and at the expense of Ukraine and European allies.

Finally, Zelensky may be down again after his latest fruitless encounter with Trump, but Ukraine is definitely not out. After all, Trump was right that Russia is a bit of a paper tiger and Ukraine can still win this war, or at least negotiate an acceptable settlement. Until Europe steps up, the key to this remains in the White House.

Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham and Tetyana Malyarenko, Professor of International Security, Jean Monnet Professor of European Security, National University Odesa Law Academy

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump has been claiming vast powers, at the expense of other branches of government, on the grounds of various “emergencies”. He has used these claims to justify sending troops to US cities and deporting non-citizens without due process under a law dating from 1798.

Trump imposed sweeping global tariffs under the auspices of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. Most legal experts agree, and so far three lower courts have ruled, that this act gives him no such power.

This case now presents an important test of the Supreme Court’s willingness to impose limits on Trump’s emergency powers.

The powers Trump is claiming

The US Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to set tariffs. Since the 1930s, Congress has passed a series of laws granting presidents the authority to adjust existing tariffs and deploy them to protect industries that are crucial to US national security.

The tariffs Trump has imposed this year go beyond the powers any previous president has had.

Some of Trump’s tariffs on goods in specific sectors such as steel and aluminium are authorised under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act because of their importance to military industries.

But to justify blanket tariff rates on entire countries, regardless of the goods involved, Trump has turned to the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA).

This allows the president to block economic transactions and freeze assets after declaring an emergency. These actions usually target hostile powers or individuals. An emergency is an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US, originating “in whole or substantial part outside the United States”.

Trump originally claimed tariffs against Canada, Mexico and China were necessary to force those countries stop the traffic in fentanyl, which causes more than 70,000 overdose deaths in the US every year. Yet less than 1% of the fentanyl that enters the US comes from Canada.

For the “liberation day” tariffs affecting every other country in the world, Trump declared the annual US trade deficit in goods constituted “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States”.

This trade deficit has been running since 1976, and it widened during Trump’s first administration.

The court case

The Trump administration is being sued by a group of small businesses that have been hurt by the 2025 tariffs, and which claim Trump had no right to impose them. They are supported by a bipartisan group of legal scholars.

Two federal courts and the US Court of International Trade have so far ruled IEEPA does not give the president the power to set tariffs.

The IEEPA was an amendment to the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, which the then president Richard Nixon used to impose 10% import tariffs during a trade crisis in 1971. The Trump administration has argued that because those tariffs were upheld by courts, Trump’s are also valid.

But the IEEPA, passed in 1977 following post-Watergate reforms of emergency powers, was intended to limit executive power, not expand it.

In the words of a report from the House Committee on International Relations that underpinned the reforms, “emergencies are by their nature rare and brief, and are not to be equated with normal ongoing problems”.

What will the Supreme Court do?

The weakness of the administration’s legal arguments is reflected in Trump’s public statements about why the Supreme Court must uphold his tariffs. These statements increasingly read like blackmail notes. He has said striking down the tariffs would “literally destroy the United States of America”.

As well as bringing in billions of dollars in revenue, Trump claims five of the eight wars he has supposedly ended were thanks to tariff leverage, and “if they took away tariffs, then they’ve taken away our national security”.

Striking down tariffs could be economically disruptive. It would weaken US leverage in trade negotiations, and raise the possibility of large tariff refunds.

These threats may persuade conservative Supreme Court justices who already take an expansive view of executive power, and who have so far enabled Trump’s accumulation of it.

However, the one area where Supreme Court conservatives might be willing to limit Trump’s powers is where they interfere with economic orthodoxy.

In a ruling allowing Trump to fire commissioners of some small, independent agencies, the court also appeared to protect members of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, because of its “distinct historical tradition”.

The Supreme Court has since temporarily blocked Trump’s attempt to fire one of the Federal Reserve governors, Lisa Cook. The judges may also decide that allowing a president to impose unlimited new taxes is a step too far.

Even if the Supreme Court does strike down the IEEPA tariffs, Trump is unlikely to abandon tariffs as a policy tool. They are a core part of his identity.

The administration has already vowed that if it loses in the Supreme Court, it will find other ways to impose tariffs under different laws that “have the same effect”.

The significance of the Supreme Court’s decision may not be about the tariffs themselves, but about whether it recognises any limit to presidential power.

David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The official communication from the White House appeared on Facebook in June 2025, after Trump sent in troops to quell protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles. Visually, it is melodramatic, almost campy, resembling a TV promotion.

The post is not an outlier.

In the Trump administration, White House social media posts often blur the lines between politics and entertainment, and between reality and illusion.

The White House has released AI images of Trump as the Pope, as Superman and as a Star Wars Jedi, ready to do battle with “Radical Left Lunatics” who would bring “Murderers, Drug Lords … & well-known MS-13 Gang Members” into the country.

Most recently, on the weekend of the No Kings protests, both Trump and the White House released a video of the president wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet, from which he dispenses feces onto a crowd of protesters below.

Underpinning it all is a calculated political strategy: an appeal to Trump’s political base – largely white, working-class, rural or small-town, evangelical and culturally conservative.

As scholars who study communication in politics and the media, we believe the White House’s rhetoric and style is part of a broader global change often found in countries experiencing increased polarization and democratic backsliding.

White House style

In the past, national leaders generally favored a professional tone, whether on social or traditional media. Their language was neutral and polished, laced with political jargon.

While populist political communication has become more common along with the proliferation of social media, the communication norms are further altered in Trump White House social media posts.

They are partisan, theatrical and exaggerated. Their tone is almost circuslike. The process of governing is portrayed as a reality TV show, in which political roles are performed with little regard for real-world consequences. Vivid color schemes and stylized imagery convert political messaging into visual spectacle. The language is colloquial, down-to-earth.

Just as other influencers in a variety of domains might create an emotional bond by tailoring social media messages, content, products and services to the needs and likes of individual customers, the White House tailors its content to the beliefs, language and worldview of Trump’s political base.

In doing so, the White House echoes a broad, growing trend in political communication, portraying Trump as “a champion of the people” and using direct and informal communication that appeals to fear and resentment.

Trump White House social media makes no effort to promote social unity or constructive dialogue, or reduce polarization – and often heightens it. Undocumented immigrants, for example, are often portrayed as inherently evil. White House social media amplifies dramatic, emotionally charged content.

In one video, Trump recites a poem about a kind woman who takes in a snake, a stand-in for an immigrant who in reality is a dangerous serpent. “Instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite,” Trump recites.

Talking to the base

While some scholars have called the White House social media style “amateurish,” that hasn’t resulted in change.

The lack of response to negative feedback is partially explained by the strategic goal of these communications: to appeal to the frustrations of Trump’s deeply disaffected political base, which seems to revel in the White House social media style.

Scholars identify a large number of these voters as “the precariat,” a group whose once-stable, union-protected jobs have been outsourced or replaced with low-wage, insecure service work. These workers, many former Democrats, can no longer count on a regular paycheck, benefits or work they can identify with.

As a result, they are more likely to support political candidates whom they believe will respond to their economic instability.

In addition, many of these voters blame a breakdown in what they perceive as the racial pecking order for a loss of social status, especially when compared with more highly educated workers. Many of these workers distrust the media and other elite institutions they feel have failed them. Research shows that they are highly receptive to messages that confirm their grievances and that many regard Trump as their champion.

Trump and the White House social media play to this audience.

On social media, the president is free to violate norms that anger his critics but have little effect on his supporters, who view the current political system as flawed. One example: A White House Valentine’s Day communication that said “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you.”

In addition, Trump and the White House social media use the president’s status as a celebrity, coupled with comedy and spectacle, to immunize the administration from fallout, even among some of its critics.

Trump’s exaggerated gestures, over-the-top language, his lampooning of opponents and his use of caricature to ridicule whole categories of people – including Democrats, the disabled, Muslims, Mexicans and women – is read by his political base as a playful and entertaining take down of political correctness. It may form a sturdy pillar of his support.

But prioritizing entertainment over facts has long-term significance.

Trump’s communication strategies are already setting a global precedent, encouraging other politicians to adopt similar theatrical and polarizing tactics that distort or deny facts.

These methods may energize some audiences but risk alienating others. Informed political engagement is reduced, and democratic backsliding is increasingly a reality.

Although the communication style of the White House is playful and irreverent, it has a serious goal: the diffusion of ideological messages whose intent is to create a sense of strength and righteousness among its supporters.

In simple terms, this is propaganda designed to persuade citizens that the government is strong, its enemies evil and that fellow citizens – “real Americans” – think the same way.

Scholars observe that the White House projection of the often comical images of authority echoes the visual style of authoritarian governments. Both seek to be seen as in control of the social and political order and thereby to discourage dissent.

The chief difference between the two is that in a deeply polarized democracy such as the U.S., citizens interpret these displays of authority in sharply different ways: They build opposition among Trump opponents but support among supporters.

The rising intolerance that results erodes social cohesion, undermines support for democratic norms and weakens trust in institutions. And that opens the door to democratic backsliding.

Andrew Rojecki, Professor of Communication, University of Illinois Chicago and Tanja Aitamurto, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Illinois Chicago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Homeland Security head Kristi Noem promised that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “would be all over the Super Bowl.” President Donald Trump called the selection “absolutely ridiculous.” Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson bemoaned the fact that the rapper has “no songs in English.” Bad Bunny, conservative pundit Tomi Lahren complained, is “Not an American artist.”

Bad Bunny – born Benito A. Martínez Ocasio – is a superstar, one of the top-streaming artists in the world. And because he is Puerto Rican, he’s a U.S. citizen, too.

To be sure, Bad Bunny checks many boxes that irk conservatives. He endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024. There’s his gender-bending wardrobe. He has slammed the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies. He has declined to tour on the U.S. mainland, fearing that some of his fans could be targeted and deported by ICE. And his explicit lyrics – most of which are in Spanish – would make even the most ardent free speech warrior cringe.

And yet, as experts on issues of national identity and U.S. immigration policies, we think Lahren’s and Johnson’s insults get at the heart of why the rapper has created such a firestorm on the right. The spectacle of a Spanish-speaking rapper performing during the most-watched sporting event on American TV is a direct rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to paper over the country’s diversity.

The Puerto Rican colony

Bad Bunny was born in 1994 in Puerto Rico, an unincorporated U.S. territory that the country acquired after the 1898 Spanish-American War.

It is home to 3.2 million U.S. citizens by birth. If it were a state, it would be the 30th largest by population, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.

But Puerto Rico is not a state; it is a colony from a bygone era of U.S. overseas imperial expansion. Puerto Ricans do not have voting representatives in Congress, and they do not get to help elect the president of the United States. They are also divided over the island’s future. Large pluralities seek either U.S. statehood or an enhanced form of the current commonwealth status, while a smaller minority vie for independence.

But one thing is clear to all Puerto Ricans: They’re from a nonsovereign land, with a clearly defined Latin American culture – one of the oldest in the Americas. Puerto Rico may belong to the U.S. – and many Puerto Ricans embrace that special relationship – but the island itself does not sound or feel like the U.S.

The over 5.8 million Puerto Ricans that reside in the 50 states further complicate that picture. While legally they are U.S. citizens, mainstream Americans often don’t see Puerto Ricans that way. In fact, a 2017 poll found that only 54% of Americans knew that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens.

The alien-citizen paradox

Puerto Ricans exist in what we describe as the “alien-citizen paradox”: They are U.S. citizens, but only those residing in the mainland enjoy all the rights of citizenship.

A recent congressional report stated that U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans “is not equal, permanent, irrevocable citizenship protected by the 14th Amendment … and Congress retains the right to determine the disposition of the territory.” Any U.S. citizen that moves to Puerto Rico no longer possesses the full rights of U.S. citizens of the mainland.

Bad Bunny’s selection for the Super Bowl halftime show illustrates this paradox. In addition to criticisms from public figures, there were widespread calls among MAGA influencers to deport the rapper

This is but one way Puerto Ricans, as well as other Latino citizens, are reminded of their status as “others.”

ICE apprehensions of people merely appearing to be an immigrant – a tactic that was recently given the blessing of the Supreme Court – is an example of their alienlike status.

And the bulk of the ICE raids have occurred in predominantly Latino communities in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. This has forced many Latino communities to cancel Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations.

Bad Bunny’s global reach

The xenophobic fervor against Bad Bunny has led political leaders like House Speaker Mike Johnson to call for a more suitable figure for the Super Bowl, such as country music artist Lee Greenwood. Referring to Bad Bunny, Johnson said “it sounds like he’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience.”

But the facts counter that claim. The Puerto Rican artist sits atop the global music charts. He has over 80 million monthly Spotify listeners. And he has sold nearly five times more albums than Greenwood.

That global appeal has impressed the NFL, which hopes to host as many as eight international games next season. Additionally, Latinos represent the league’s fastest-growing fan base, and Mexico is its largest international market, with a reported 39.5 million fans.

The Bad Bunny Super Bowl saga may actually become an important political moment. Conservatives, in their efforts to highlight Bad Bunny’s “otherness” – despite the United States being the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world – may have unwittingly educated America on the U.S. citizenship of Puerto Ricans.

In the meantime, Puerto Ricans and the rest of the U.S. Latino community continue to wonder when they’ll be accepted as social equals.

Ediberto Román, Professor of Law, Florida International University and Ernesto Sagás, Professor of Ethnic Studies, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods.

We are social psychologists who study political psychology and how people reason about reality. During the pandemic, we surveyed 5,535 people across eight countries to investigate why people believed COVID-19 misinformation, like false claims that 5G networks cause the virus.

The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to fend off or “give in” to untoward influence.

This factor outweighed how people felt about COVID-19 in general, their thinking style and even their political beliefs.

Our survey measured it on a scale of how much people agreed with sentences including “Following coronavirus prevention guidelines means you have backed down” and “Continuous coronavirus coverage in the media is a sign we are losing.” Our interpretation is that people who responded positively to these statements would feel they “win” by endorsing misinformation – doing so can show “the enemy” that it will not gain any ground over people’s views.

When meaning is symbolic, not factual

Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.

When people think symbolically this way, the literal issue – here, fighting COVID-19 – is secondary to a psychological war over people’s minds. In the minds of those who think they’re engaged in them, psychological wars are waged over opinions and attitudes, and are won via control of belief and messaging. The U.S. government at various times has used the concept of psychological war to try to limit the influence of foreign powers, pushing people to think that literal battles are less important than psychological independence.

By that same token, vaccination, masking or other COVID-19 prevention efforts could be seen as a symbolic risk that could “weaken” one psychologically even if they provide literal physical benefits. If this seems like an extreme stance, it is – the majority of participants in our studies did not hold this mindset. But those who did were especially likely to also believe in misinformation.

In an additional study we ran that focused on attitudes around cryptocurrency, we measured whether people saw crypto investment in terms of signaling independence from traditional finance. These participants, who, like those in our COVID-19 study, prioritized a symbolic show of strength, were more likely to believe in other kinds of misinformation and conspiracies, too, such as that the government is concealing evidence of alien contact.

In all of our studies, this mindset was also strongly associated with authoritarian attitudes, including beliefs that some groups should dominate others and support for autocratic government. These links help explain why strongman leaders often use misinformation symbolically to impress and control a population.

Why people endorse misinformation

Our findings highlight the limits of countering misinformation directly, because for some people, literal truth is not the point.

For example, President Donald Trump incorrectly claimed in August 2025 that crime in Washington D.C. was at an all-time high, generating countless fact-checks of his premise and think pieces about his dissociation from reality.

But we believe that to someone with a symbolic mindset, debunkers merely demonstrate that they’re the ones reacting, and are therefore weak. The correct information is easily available, but is irrelevant to someone who prioritizes a symbolic show of strength. What matters is signaling one isn’t listening and won’t be swayed.

In fact, for symbolic thinkers, nearly any statement should be justifiable. The more outlandish or easily disproved something is, the more powerful one might seem when standing by it. Being an edgelord – a contrarian online provocateur – or outright lying can, in their own odd way, appear “authentic.”

Some people may also view their favorite dissembler’s claims as provocative trolling, but, given the link between this mindset and authoritarianism, they want those far-fetched claims acted on anyway. The deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, for example, can be the desired end goal, even if the offered justification is a transparent farce.

Is this really 5-D chess?

It is possible that symbolic, but not exactly true, beliefs have some downstream benefit, such as serving as negotiation tactics, loyalty tests, or a fake-it-till-you-make-it long game that somehow, eventually, becomes a reality. Political theorist Murray Edelman, known for his work on political symbolism, noted that politicians often prefer scoring symbolic points over delivering results – it’s easier. Leaders can offer symbolism when they have little tangible to provide.

Randy Stein, Associate Professor of Marketing, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and Abraham Rutchick, Professor of Psychology, California State University, Northridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Typhoon Halong was an unusual storm, likely fueled by the Pacific’s near-record warm surface temperatures this fall. Its timing means recovery will be even more difficult than usual for these hard-hit communities, as Alaska meteorologist Rick Thoman of the University Alaska Fairbanks explains.

Disasters in remote Alaska are not like disasters anywhere in the lower 48 states, he explains. While East Coast homeowners recovering from a nor’easter that flooded parts of New Jersey and other states the same weekend can run to Home Depot for supplies or drive to a hotel if their home floods, none of that exists in remote Native villages.

What made this storm unusual?

Halong was an ex-typhoon, similar to Merbok in 2022, by the time it reached the delta. A week earlier, it had been a powerful typhoon east of Japan. The jet stream picked it up and carried it to the northeast, which is pretty common, and weather models did a pretty good job in forecasting its track into the Bering Sea.

But as the storm approached Alaska, everything went sideways.

The weather model forecasts changed, reflecting a faster-moving storm, and Halong shifted to a very unusual track, moving between Saint Lawrence Island and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta coast.

Unlike Merbok, which was very well forecast by the global models, this one’s final track and intensity weren’t clear until the storm was within 36 hours of crossing into Alaska waters. That’s too late for evacuations in many places.

Did the loss of weather balloon data canceled in 2025 affect the forecast?

That’s a question for future research, but here’s what we know for sure: There have not been any upper-air weather balloon observations at Saint Paul Island in the Bering Sea since late August or at Kotzebue since February. Bethel and Cold Bay are limited to one per day instead of two. At Nome, there were no weather balloons for two full days as the storm was moving toward the Bering Sea.

Did any of this cause the forecast to be off? We don’t know because we don’t have the data, but it seems likely that that had some effect on the model performance.

Why is the delta region so vulnerable in a storm like Halong?

The land in this part of western Alaska is very flat, so major storms can drive the ocean into the delta, and the water spreads out.

Most of the land there is very close to sea level, in some places less than 10 feet above the high tide line. Permafrost is also thawing, land is subsiding, and sea-level rise is adding to the risk. For many people, there is literally nowhere to go. Even Bethel, the region’s largest town, about 60 miles up the Kuskokwim River, saw flooding from Halong.

These are very remote communities with no roads to cities. The only way to access them is by boat or plane. Right now, they have a lot of people with nowhere to live, and winter is closing in.

These villages are also small. They don’t have extra housing or the resources to rapidly recover. The region was already recovering from major flooding in summer 2024. Kipnuk’s tribe was able to get federal disaster aid, but that aid was approved only in early January 2025.

What are these communities facing in terms of recovery?

People are going to have really difficult decisions to make. Do they leave the community for the winter and hope to rebuild next summer?

There likely isn’t much available housing in the region, with the flooding so widespread on top of a housing shortage. Do displaced people go to Anchorage? Cities are expensive.

There is no easy answer.

It’s logistically complicated to rebuild in places like Kipnuk. You can’t just get on the phone and call up your local building contractor.

Almost all of the supplies have to come in by barge – plywood to nails to windows – and that isn’t going to happen in winter. You can’t truck it in – there are no roads. Planes can only fly in small amounts – the runways are short and not built for cargo planes.

The National Guard might be able to help fly in supplies. But then you still need to have people who can do the construction and other repair work.

Everything is 100 times more complicated when it comes to building in remote communities. Even if national or state help is approved, it would be next summer before most homes could be rebuilt.

Is climate change playing a role in storms like these?

That will be another question for future research, but sea-surface temperature in most of the North Pacific that Typhoon Halong passed over before reaching the Aleutian Islands has been much warmer than normal. Warm water fuels storms.

Halong also brought lots of very warm air northward with it. East of the track on Oct. 11, Unalaska reached 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), an all-time high there for October.

Rick Thoman, Alaska Climate Specialist, University of Alaska Fairbanks

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

While many liberal female voters are critical about Donald Trump’s remarks about women as well as his policies related to women’s rights, it’s worth noting that between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, Trump increased his support among women voters, from 42% to 45%.

Making assumptions about female voters as a single voting block is tempting, but there are multiple layers and contradictions within this hugely diverse group. Polling shows that there are a few broad conclusions about their voting patterns.

For example, in the modern era, women have higher turnout rates at US elections than men and have consistently been more likely to vote Democrat.

So, who are those women voters that Trump appeals to? The short answer is white women, or at least, some of them. With a couple of election exceptions (1964, 1996) white women tend to prefer Republican candidates over Democrats. They maintained this trend with Donald Trump.

Trumpism and the Maga movement doesn’t tend to appeal to many college-educated white women. However, religion is a factor.

Born-again or Evangelical believers who tend to be committed to the idea of the traditional family where the man goes to work and the woman stays at home and looks after the children have proved essential to Trump’s support in 2024. Eight in ten (80%) of voters who identified as Christian cast their ballots for the Trump/Vance ticket, up from 71% in 2020.

Women in this group may be more likely to appreciate the Trump administration’s attempts to encourage and support women to have more children. Trump’s proposed “National Medal of Motherhood” would create financial incentives for women to have large families. Women with six or more children may be eligible.

The government has already launched what are known as money accounts for growth and advancement. These saving plans will put a US$1000 (£742) deposit from the government into an account for babies born between 2024 and 2028, with families able to add up to US$5,000 annually before the children can access the money at age 18.

Around 64% of all American women support a legal right to abortion. However, national access to abortion is only supported by 39% of Republican women over 50, according to one poll, and this is another group that may be supportive on the Trump administration agenda on families, which has included moves to restrict abortion.

The Maga-influenced GOP is not the conservative party of yesteryear, but some aspects of its appeal are not new. Voter priority has long been “the economy, stupid”. And around 24% of women (compared to 17% of men) rank inflation and prices as their most important policy issue.

Trump made slashing the price of eggs a major talking point in his recent election campaign, and this will have resonated with women voters worried about the cost of living. Indeed, Trump claimed he won the election on immigration and groceries.

Trump also plans to “fix” the economy and “tariff the hell” out of countries that have “taken advantage” of the US. These policies aim to rebuild US domestic manufacturing. For women in manufacturing communities who have seen the negative impact of globalisation – factory closures, job losses and an undermining of the social fabric – this holds appeal.

Those reliant on the local economy for their livelihoods are aware that the survival of this community ecosystem is crucial, not only for those working in industry but for those whose lives are intertwined. Such views are not necessarily Maga-centric, but the movement’s cultural concerns align with these challenges.

Trump’s promises to reject globalism and “embrace patriotism” may offer comfort to those whose socio-economic security has been undermined by the trade decisions of his predecessors.

Trump’s political opponents would be well advised to listen to the concerns of conventionally conservative America. Dismissing their anxieties will not dissipate them. Instead, it may encourage more socially traditional women to embrace the some of Trump’s policies.

But Trump will also need to worry about the state of the economy, and delivering on his price promises. If he doesn’t deliver, those women who put the cost of living at the top of the list may take their votes elsewhere.

Clodagh Harrington, Lecturer in American Politics, University College Cork

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Until recently, graduate students could take out two types of federal loans: Direct Unsubsidized Loans, which had a lifetime limit of US$138,500, and Grad PLUS loans, which allowed students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance, minus financial aid.

But Grad PLUS loans will be eliminated next summer, with a three-year transitional period for current borrowers. That will leave only the capped loans for new borrowers, and those loans have new lifetime borrowing limits: $200,000 for students pursuing certain professional degrees, and $100,000 for nonprofessional graduate programs.

If you add both undergraduate and graduate loans, there’s a new lifetime limit of $257,500 per person.

That seems modest to me. Consider that the annual average costs for an undergraduate degree range from $24,920 for in-state public universities to $58,000 for private universities. That means we’re looking at up to $224,000 for a bachelor’s degree. If we add three years of law school, we’re looking at an additional $132,000 to $168,000, respectively. Alternatively, completing four years of medical school will set you back another $268,000 to $363,000. It’s not easy to make those numbers add up to less than $257,500.

As I reflect on these numbers and my journey to becoming a college professor, specializing in race and ethnic studies, one thing becomes clear: I would never have been able to earn my bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, and Ph.D. under these new rules.

Adjusting for inflation, I took out nearly $300,000 in student loans, and I paid them all off within a decade of starting my college teaching career. For me, the system worked. I wonder how today’s aspiring professionals, especially those from less prosperous backgrounds, will manage.

The future of professionals

Professional students already graduate with a lot of debt – often far more than the new loan caps will allow. In 2020, more than a quarter of graduating medical students and nearly 60% of graduating dental students had borrowed more than the new limits would allow, author Mark Kantrowitz, who is an expert on student loans, has found. In 2024, nearly a quarter of medical school graduates left school with more than $300,000 in debt.

The new borrowing limits will likely hit minority students especially hard. While about 61% of all graduate students take out student loans, the share is much higher for Black students compared with white students, 48% to 17%.

While some might be able to supplement their federal loans with private ones – which tend to have much worse terms for borrowers – I fear that many others will be forced to end their educations prematurely.

That, in turn, would worsen the already severe shortage of doctors serving the Black community. As pointed out in a 2023 report of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the shortage of Black primary care physicians is directly related to overall lower population health and ultimately higher mortality rates within the Black community. As of 2023, fewer than 6% of U.S. doctors were Black, versus 14.4% of the population.

Research has suggested that student loan relief would help diversify the medical workforce. Adding new restrictions would likely have the opposite effect, making the profession more homogeneous and significantly undermining Black public health.

Or consider attorneys. Law school costs have risen more than 600% over the past two decades. The average 2020 law school graduate left with $165,000 in student debt.

Black law students face unique challenges, graduating with approximately 8% more debt on average than white students and facing significant wage disparities once they enter the legal workforce. Making it harder for Black students to afford law school could reduce the number of Black attorneys, which has held steady at about 5% of active lawyers over the past 10 years.

Reducing access to federal student loans risks disproportionately affecting women, since they hold roughly two-thirds of all student debt.

What comes next

Supporters of the change say that capping graduate student borrowing will encourage universities to rein in tuition hikes. They also say private student loan providers will step in to help students. I am skeptical, but the true test will come next year.

In the meantime, professional students might want to familiarize themselves with the many scholarship opportunities available. Many organizations offer a range of medical school scholarships, including those targeting women and minorities. The same is true for students interested in law school. A helpful starting point is this list of scholarships with approaching deadlines and these opportunities for women and people of color.

Rodney Coates, Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The release reflects the continuing vitality of Woody Guthrie in the United States. There is an ongoing process of updating and redefining his figure and artistic legacy – one that does not always take into account the singer’s radicalism but sometimes accentuates his patriotism.

The story of “This Land Is Your Land” is a case in point. There are versions of the song containing verses critical of private property, and others without them. The first version of “This Land” became almost an unofficial anthem of the US and, over the years, has been used in various political contexts, sometimes resulting in appropriations and reinterpretations. In 1960, it was played at the Republican national convention that nominated Richard Nixon for president, and in 1988, Republican candidate George H. W. Bush used it in his presidential campaign.

However, Guthrie made his contribution by supporting both the Communist Party and, at different times, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. He borrowed the idea that music could be an important tool of activism from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union. In the party, Guthrie saw the ideological cement; in the union, the instrument of mass organization. It was only through union – a term with a double meaning that Guthrie often played upon: union as both labour union and union of the oppressed – that a socialized and unionized world could be achieved.

‘Deportee’

The release of Woody at Home, Vol. 1 & 2 was preceded by the single “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” a song that had long been known, but whose original recording by Guthrie had never been released. The artist wrote it in reference to an event that occurred on January 28, 1948, when a plane carrying Mexican seasonal workers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California, killing everyone on board.

This choice was not accidental, as explained by Nora Guthrie – one of the folksinger’s daughters and long-time curator of her father’s political and artistic legacy – in an interview with The Guardian, where she emphasized how his message remains current, given the deportations carried out by the President Donald Trump’s administration.

Woody Guthrie read the account of the tragic plane crash in a newspaper, and was horrified to find that the workers were not referred to by name, but by the pejorative term “deportees”. In their story, he saw parallels with the experiences of the 1930s “Okies” from the state of Oklahoma, impoverished by dust storms and years of socioeconomic crisis, who moved to California in search of a better future. It was a “Goin’ Down The Road,” according to the title of another Guthrie song, in which the word “down” also conveyed the sadness of having to hit the road, with all the uncertainties and hardships that lay ahead, because there was no alternative – indeed, the full title ended with “Feeling Bad”.

The Okies and the Mexican migrant workers faced racism and poverty amid the abundance of the fruit fields. Mexicans found themselves picking fruit that was rotting on the trees – “the crops are all in and the peaches are rotting” – for wages that barely allowed them to survive – “to pay all their money to wade back again”. In “Deportee,” in which these two lyrics appear, Guthrie provocatively asked:

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”?

Visions of America and radicalism

“We come with the dust and we go with the wind,” sang Guthrie in “Pastures of Plenty” (1941, and also included in Woody at Home), the anthem he wrote for the migrants of the US southwest, denouncing the indifference and invisibility that enabled the exploitation of workers. In this way, Guthrie measured the gap separating the US’s reality from the fulfillment of its promises and aspirations. For him, tragedies were also a collective issue that allowed him to denounce the way in which a minority (the wealthy capitalists) deprived the majority (the workers) of their rights and well-being.

The artist’s political vision owed much to the fact that he grew up in Oklahoma in the 1920s and 1930s, where the influence of Jeffersonian agrarian populism – the vision of an agrarian republic inspired by president Thomas Jefferson, based on the equitable distribution of land among citizens – remained deeply rooted. It is within this framework that Guthrie’s radicalism, which took shape in the 1930s and 1940s, must be situated. These periods were marked by intense debate over the health of US democracy, when Roosevelt’s New Deal sought to address years of economic crisis and profound social change.

Against racial discrimination

Guthrie’s activism sought to overcome racial discrimination. This was no small feat for the son of a man said to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and a fervent anti-communist, who may have taken part in a lynching in 1911.

Moreover, Woody himself, upon arriving in California in the latter half of the 1930s, carried with him a racist legacy reflected in certain songs – such as his performance of the racist version of “Run, N----- Run”, a popular song in the South, which he sang on his own radio show in 1937. Afterward, the artist received a letter from a Black listener expressing her deep resentment over the singer’s use of the word “n-----”. Guthrie was so moved that he read the letter on the air and apologized.

He then began a process of questioning himself and what he believed the United States to be, going so far as to denounce segregation and the distortions of the judicial system that protected white people while readily imprisoning Black people. These themes appear in “Buoy Bells from Trenton”, also included in Woody at Home. The song refers to the case of the Trenton Six: in 1948, six Black men from Trenton, New Jersey were convicted of murdering a white man by an all-white jury, despite the testimony of several witnesses who had seen other individuals at the scene of the crime.

“Buoy Bells from Trenton” was probably included on the album because of the interpretation it invites concerning abuses of power and the “New Jim Crow”, an expression that echoes the Jim Crow laws (late 19th century to 1965) that imposed racial segregation in the Southern states. These laws were legitimized by the Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which established the principle of “separate but equal”, before being abolished by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). Popularized by Michelle Alexander in her book, The New Jim Crow (2010), the contemporary term refers to the US system of racial control through penal policies and mass incarceration: in 2022, African Americans made up 32% of convicted state and federal prisoners, even though they represent only 12% of the US population, a figure highlighted by several recent studies.

Guthrie’s song can thus be reread as a critique of persistent racism, both in its institutional forms and in its more diffuse manifestations. Once again, this is an example of the enduring vitality of Woody Guthrie and of how art does not end at the moment of its publication, but becomes a long-term historical phenomenon.

Daniele Curci, PhD Candidate in International and American History, Università di Siena

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Numerous legal commentators on both the left and right have argued that Comey’s indictment is little more than the Trump administration seeking vengeance on one of the president’s perceived enemies. They allege that the president has it out for Comey, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and was fired by Trump in 2017.

The president’s own words support the idea that the Trump administration is targeting Comey. In a social media post on Sept. 20, 2025, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to move forward with prosecutions against Comey, Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James: “They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. …JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

If the case against Comey is exceedingly weak – and little more than a political prosecution – then, in my view as a scholar of the U.S. legal system, it should result in the dismissal of charges by the judge or a not guilty verdict by the jury.

But even when an individual is not convicted, the process of defending against charges can itself be a form of punishment, as renowned legal scholar Malcolm Feeley pointed out almost 50 years ago.

Here’s how the criminal justice process punishes even innocent people.

The criminal justice process

The criminal justice process is complex.

After a grand jury returns an indictment at the request of a prosecutor, the accused appears in court for their arraignment. They are informed of the charges against them and typically enter a plea.

During what’s called “discovery,” the prosecution and defense investigate the evidence the other side plans to rely on. There are also pretrial motions in which the parties ask judges to dismiss charges and accept or exclude evidence.

The defense and prosecution may also meet to discuss a plea bargain, wherein the accused may plead guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence or reduced charges.

If there is no plea bargain, then the case moves to trial, which is itself a complicated process. If a defendant is found guilty, they can mount an appeal to higher courts in an attempt to have their conviction overturned.

To help navigate this process, criminal defendants typically hire a lawyer.

And good lawyers don’t come cheap.

Money and time

Indigent defendants, who do not have the financial resources to pay their own legal fees, can rely on public defenders paid for by the government.

But individuals who can afford to pay for their own lawyer face a substantial financial burden for attorney services and court fees. An experienced criminal defense lawyer can charge more than US$1,000 per hour, with fees quickly adding up. This means that mounting a legal defense can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.

On top of this, it takes a great deal of time to prepare for a criminal case. While lawyers and their staff do much of the legwork for trial preparation, a client works with their attorneys to help formulate a defense.

As a result, criminal defendants lose one of the most precious commodities in the world: their time.

And this time can come at a tangible cost in the form of lost wages, which harms their day-to-day lives. Put simply, every hour spent preparing for trial is an hour defendants could spend working or enjoying their lives.

Stress and embarrassment

It’s not pleasant being charged with a crime.

The criminal process, which typically lasts months, takes a toll on one’s mental health. This is largely driven by the uncertainty surrounding the outcome of a criminal trial and the possibility of losing one’s freedom if convicted.

In addition, there is a social stigma that comes with being accused of a crime. This can result in reputational damage, anxiety and embarrassment.

The Trump administration appears to recognize this reality.

Several media outlets have reported that FBI leadership had planned a public perp walk for Comey.

According to a CBS News report, this was to have included “‘large, beefy’ agents … ‘in full kit,’ including Kevlar vests and exterior wear emblazoned with the FBI logo.” Apparently, the plan was aborted after several FBI supervisors refused to cooperate, viewing it as inappropriate. One agent was disciplined for insubordination after refusing to go along with the plan to embarrass Comey in this way.

Not all criminal defendants suffer the same

The extent to which criminal defendants experience the criminal justice process as a form of punishment varies from person to person.

For high-status people like Comey, lost wages and attorneys’ and court fees may not be that big of a deal.

But these costs may be incredibly significant for other people who have been, or are likely to be, targeted by the Trump administration.

The high costs of lawyers’ fees are well known to the president. For instance, his political action committee spent millions of dollars on attorneys’ fees in an unsuccessful effort to defend Trump from criminal charges in New York.

In addition, people no doubt experience the psychological stress and stigma of a possible criminal conviction differently. But regardless of one’s wealth, the lost time spent preparing a criminal defense is something that cannot be replaced.

The recognition that the criminal process is itself a form of punishment is one of the reasons that the Department of Justice has maintained independence from the president. By violating the tradition of staying out of politics, the Justice Department in the Trump administration has opened the door for the president to seek retribution on his perceived political enemies.

The mere act of putting them through the criminal process ensures that they suffer, regardless of their guilt or innocence.

Paul M. Collins Jr., Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The proposed coin depicts Trump in profile on one side (the obverse). On the other side (the reverse) the president raises his fist in defiance accompanied by the words “fight, fight, fight”.

While only a draft proposal, the coin could be minted in 2026 to mark 250 years since the US declaration of independence. But an old law prohibits the “likeness of any living person” from being “placed upon any of the bonds, securities, notes, fractional or postal currency of the United States.”

More than 2,000 years ago, the depiction of living figures on Roman coins caused similar ructions.

It came at a time when the Roman republic was in trouble. The republic would crumble altogether soon after, ushering in the long period of Rome being led by emperor-kings who saw themselves as almost akin to gods.

Perhaps the American republic is at a similar stage.

Sulla’s image on a coin

Rome was said to be founded by the mythical king Romulus, who killed his own twin (Remus). The fledgling state was led by seven kings before it became a republic in about 509 BCE.

By the late second century BCE it was led by Roman general and politician Gaius Marius. Marius and his later rival, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, broke many of the republic’s long-held conventions. They also fought Rome’s first major civil war.

In 88 BCE, while consul, Sulla marched an army on Rome to defend the city from “tyrants” (by which he meant the faction of Marius, who had ousted him). After Sulla won the civil war that followed, he held the dictatorship from 82-79 BCE. Dictatorships were only to be held for six months in times of emergency. Sulla claimed the emergency was ongoing.

As part of this he ordered a list (known as proscriptions) of enemies drawn up. Hundreds or even thousands were killed and had property confiscated.

In the same year a silver coin (called a denarius) was minted in Sulla’s name. One side featured Sulla himself riding in a four-horse chariot.

This was the first time a living person was depicted on a Roman coin. Up to this point only gods and mythological figures had that honour.

It was highly unusual.

Caesar’s challenge to the old republic

Sulla was the first but he wouldn’t be the last leader of the Roman republic to have his image on a coin.

In 44 BCE Julius Caesar went a step further. Only months before his assassination, coins appeared with Caesar’s bust dominating their obverses. Some included the words dict perpetuo meaning “dictator for life”.

By this time, Caesar and many before him, including Marius and Sulla, had broken the mould of the old republic.

Early in 44 BCE, Caesar took the dictatorship for life.

From 46-44 BCE he held the consulship, which was only meant to be held for a one-year term at a time. (Sulla held the dictatorship three years running, which partly set the scene for Caesar’s later emergence and the final breakdown of the republic.)

For many at the time, it seemed Caesar was moving the republic in the direction of monarchy. In January 44 BCE, when a throng hailed him as “rex” (king) Caesar responded, “I am Caesar and no king”. His very name was by now more powerful.

The coins of 44 BCE containing a profile bust of Caesar were an important part of his public program, and part of his challenge to republican convention.

Sulla paved the way 40 years before.

The parallels with Trump are hard to miss

Some emphasise that Caesar did not directly order his image to be placed on coins. Those wanting to curry favour read the room and Caesar did not object.

A similar scenario appears to be playing out with the coin design bearing Trump’s image.

The parallels with Trump are hard to miss. Trump has signed more than 200 executive orders in less than nine months. His predecessor Joe Biden issued 162 in his entire presidency.

Trump’s deployment of federal troops to US cities under emergency decrees provokes cries of tyranny. Sulla’s march on Rome and the proscriptions that followed drew a similar response.

The possibility of a one dollar coin depicting Donald Trump on both sides echoes the coins of Sulla and Caesar.

They might not technically break the law but they would break convention. In the process they also symbolise a notable shift in the US from democracy to autocracy.

When the “no kings!” demonstrations took place in the US earlier this year, they reminded us of a key motivation for the declaration of independence.

A coin celebrating its 250-year anniversary may well symbolize its journey to demise.

Peter Edwell, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The release of the partially redacted album is part of a larger investigation of the federal government’s handling of Epstein and Maxwell and “possible mismanagement.”

The album is in the spotlight due to an entry allegedly penned by U.S. President Donald Trump, though the White House has denied he wrote it. Entitled The First Fifty Years, the book overflows with handwritten letters, campy sketches and images fixated on women’s bodies.

The book was bound by Weitz & Coleman, an esteemed bookbinder in New York City since 1909, as indicated by a note within the album itself.

Its “vegetable tanned” leather covers, table of contents and sections titled “Family,” “Friends” and “Business” signal an intent to elevate casual notes into a permanent record.

As book historian D.F. McKenzie contends, a book’s physical form shapes its social role. Here, the elaborate binding and careful organization transform private, ephemeral notes into a social gesture, something shared in a legacy format.

In this sense, Epstein’s album sits alongside a tradition of bound tribute books — scrapbooks pressed into leather for golden anniversaries, glossy volumes marking a CEO’s retirement or academic festschrifts that canonize a career. What unites them is the transformation of passing moments into artifacts meant to endure.

Charm, codes, clichés

Maxwell’s prologue describes the book as a retrospective to “jog your memory of places and people and different events.”

In the birthday book, one redacted former “assistant” recalls how working for Epstein transformed her life: she went from being “a 22-year-old divorcée working as a hotel hostess” to rubbing shoulders with royalty, presidents, financiers and celebrities.

One letter from a childhood friend who recently said Maxwell instructed him to write something “raunchy” spins a sexually explicit fantasy about Epstein’s conception before drifting into nostalgic tales of their four-boy Brooklyn clique.

In one vignette, Epstein is praised for flaunting a “beautiful British babe” at his family’s home, his indifference to her feelings reframed as charm. The anecdote turns callousness toward women into a badge of confidence and belonging. The letter concludes: “That shows a lot. It really does … Yes, your charisma and persuasive ways came very early on … you’re my kid’s role model.”

Epstein’s sex life and treatment of women are recurring themes.

A note apparently from private equity investor Leon Black, who was earlier found to have paid millions in fees to Epstein, cast Epstein as Ernest Hemingway’s hero in The Old Man and the Sea, swapping fish for “Blonde, Red or Brunette” women.

Philosophers and scholars of rhetoric have long noted that ready-made clichés can replace inner reflection, forming a “code of expression” that insulates people from moral reckoning.

Laughter as defense

If language conveys loyalty, humor compounds it. Composed in 2003, as Epstein’s notoriety grew, today — amid the knowledge of Epstein’s sex crimes — the birthday book’s laughter seems knowingly defensive.

There are bawdy jokes and mocking nicknames: Epstein is dubbed “Degenerate One” and teased or taunted with “so many girls, so little time.”

As French philosopher Henri Bergson argued, laughter functions as a social corrective: a “kind of social ragging” that polices behaviour by ridiculing deviation under the guise of amusement.

One birthday book contributor quips that Epstein had “avoided the penitentiary.” The comment implies knowledge of punishable behavior, yet also suggests Epstein is an affable rogue.

Figures of authority

The book’s inclusion of entries from public office and science figures could suggest Maxwell and Epstein sought to keep or commemorate connections with figures of authority as a form of perceived legitimacy.

The Wall Street Journal reported that former U.S. president Bill Clinton, whose name appears in the album’s “Friends” section, gave Epstein a handwritten note praising his “childlike curiosity” and drive to “make a difference.” In 2019, a spokesperson for Clinton said he severed ties with Epstein prior to his 2019 arrest and he was not aware of Epstein’s alleged crimes.

Peter Mandelson, recently forced out as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the U.S. after the Epstein birthday book’s release, penned a note saying Epstein was an “intelligent, sharp-witted man.” Mandelson has said he felt tremendous regret over his Epstein friendship and sympathy for Epstein’s victims.

The birthday book’s “Science” section, with letters from leading scientists, shows that Epstein’s reach extended beyond business and politics into elite academic networks.

Eroticized power and dominance

While some entries strike a mundane or playful tone, others veer into vulgarity.

The former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, Leslie Wexner, contributed a sketch resembling a woman’s breasts with the words “I wanted to get you what you want… so here it is” — framing it as a present. Wexner has said before he severed ties with Epstein in 2007 and declined to comment about the book.

The note allegedly written by Trump features a drawing of a naked woman alongside typewritten text imagining a conversation between them. It calls Epstein “a pal” and ends with the wish that “every day be another wonderful secret.”

Former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold contributed a series of African wildlife photographs, claiming they spoke more vividly than words. The images — of copulating lions and a zebra with an erect penis — foreground predatory and sexualized behavior, and may be interpreted as reflecting a fascination with dominance and raw biological impulse.

The Seattle Times reports that a spokesperson for Myhrvold said Myhrvold knew Epstein “from TED conferences and as a donor to basic scientific research” and “regrets that he ever met him.” The representative did not address the letter.

The legacy of small gestures

While journalists have long documented that Epstein’s networks stretched from political leaders and Wall Street financiers to influential figures in science and culture, it remains to be seen how the carefully curated and gifted birthday book fits into the larger investigation.

The book’s most insidious achievement is its ordinariness. It suggests the ways that power is fortified and legitimized not only with contracts and institutions but through gestures of social life, including commemorative books.

Jason Wang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

These have included Trump’s efforts to remove thousands of government workers and fire several prominent officials, such as members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the chair of the Commission on Civil Rights. He has also attempted to shut down entire agencies, such as the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

For some scholars, these actions appear rooted in the psychology of an unrestrained politician with an overdeveloped ego.

But it’s more than that.

As a political science scholar who studies presidential power, I believe Trump’s recent actions mark the culmination of the unitary executive theory, which is perhaps the most contentious and consequential constitutional theory of the past several decades.

A prescription for a potent presidency

In 2017, Trump complained that the scope of his power as president was limited: “You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI, I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”

The unitary executive theory suggests that such limits wrongly curtail the powers of the chief executive.

Formed by conservative legal theorists in the 1980s to help President Ronald Reagan roll back liberal policies, the unitary executive theory promises to radically expand presidential power.

There is no widely agreed upon definition of the theory. And even its proponents disagree about what it says and what it might justify. But in its most basic version, the unitary executive theory claims that whatever the federal government does that is executive in nature – from implementing and enforcing laws to managing most of what the federal government does – the president alone should personally control it.

This means the president should have total control over the entire executive branch, with its dozens of major governmental institutions and millions of employees. Put simply, the theory says the president should be able to issue orders to subordinates and to fire them at will.

The president could boss around the FBI or order the U.S. attorney general to investigate his political opponents, as Trump has done. The president could issue signing statements – a written pronouncement – that reinterpret or ignore parts of the laws, like George W. Bush did in 2006 to circumvent a ban on torture. The president could control independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The president might be able to force the Federal Reserve to change interest rates, as Trump has suggested. And the president might possess inherent power to wage war as he sees fit without a formal authorization from Congress, as officials argued during Bush’s presidency.

A constitutionally questionable doctrine

A theory is one thing. But if it gains the official endorsement of the Supreme Court, it can become governing orthodoxy. It appears to many observers and scholars that Trump’s actions have intentionally invited court cases by which he hopes the judiciary will embrace the theory and thus permit him to do even more. And the current Supreme Court appears ready to grant that wish.

Until recently, the judiciary tended to indirectly address the claims that now appear more formally as the unitary executive theory.

During the country’s first two centuries, courts touched on aspects of the theory in cases such as Kendall v. U.S. in 1838, which limited presidential control of the postmaster general, and Myers v. U.S. in 1926, which held that the president could remove a postmaster in Oregon.

In 1935, in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the high court unanimously held that Congress could limit the president’s ability to fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. And in Morrison v. Olson the court in 1988 upheld the ability of Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire an independent counsel.

Some of those decisions aligned with some unitary executive claims, but others directly repudiated them.

Warming up to a unitary executive

In a series of cases over the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has moved in an unambiguously unitarian, pro-presidential direction. In these cases, the court has struck down statutory limits on the president’s ability to remove federal officials, enabling much greater presidential control.

These decisions clearly suggest that long-standing, anti-unitarian landmark decisions such as Humphrey’s are on increasingly thin ice. In fact, in Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2019 concurring opinion in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, where the court ruled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership structure was unconstitutional, he articulated his desire to “repudiate” the “erroneous precedent” of Humphrey’s.

Several cases from the court’s emergency docket, or shadow docket, in recent months indicate that other justices share that desire. Such cases do not require full arguments but can indicate where the court is headed.

In Trump v. Wilcox, Trump v. Boyle and Trump v. Slaughter, all from 2025, the court upheld Trump’s firing of officials from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

Previously, these officials had appeared to be protected from political interference.

Total control

Remarks by conservative justices in those cases indicated that the court will soon reassess anti-unitary precedents.

In Trump v. Boyle, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “whether this Court will narrow or overrule a precedent … there is at least a fair prospect (not certainty, but at least a reasonable prospect) that we will do so.” And in her dissent in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Elena Kagan said the conservative majority was “raring” to overturn Humphrey’s and finally officially embrace the unitary executive.

In short, the writing is on the wall, and Humphrey’s may soon go the way of Roe v. Wade and other landmark decisions that had guided American life for decades.

As for what judicial endorsement of the unitary executive theory could mean in practice, Trump seems to hope it will mean total control and hence the ability to eradicate the so-called “deep state.” Other conservatives hope it will diminish the government’s regulatory role.

Kagan recently warned it could mean the end of administrative governance – the ways that the federal government provides services, oversees businesses and enforces the law – as we know it:

“Humphrey’s undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control. Congress created them … out of one basic vision. It thought that in certain spheres of government, a group of knowledgeable people from both parties – none of whom a President could remove without cause – would make decisions likely to advance the long-term public good.”

If the Supreme Court officially makes the chief executive a unitary executive, the advancement of the public good may depend on little more than the whims of the president, a state of affairs normally more characteristic of dictatorship than democracy.

Graham G. Dodds, Professor of Political Science, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And while the platforms have proliferated for years, experts are only now beginning to demonstrate their full impact on our attention, mental health, spending habits and politics.

Despite the benefits, social media is also creating new problems. A pressing concern is the dissemination of misinformation by political extremists, a trend amplified by the unprecedented reach of platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). When it comes to issues like immigration, many activists, experts and pundits point to social media as a vehicle for the spread of prejudice, conspiracy theories and false claims targeting immigrant and minority populations.

Even before launching his 2016 presidential bid, for example, Donald Trump used Twitter to share messages attacking immigrants and ethnic minorities with millions of people, giving him the power to dominate news cycles and shape public policy.

Does social media make people more xenophobic?

Polarizing platforms

For decades, scholars studying how people consume information about immigration have argued that print and TV news stories often portray the economic and social impact of immigration negatively.

Studies on major American newspapers and news stations show that traditional media coverage has encouraged prejudice toward Latin American immigrants and Muslims.

Does social media follow this trend? Social scientists are beginning to disagree.

Some scholars point to racist and anti-immigration messages on social media as evidence that platforms like Facebook, X and Reddit encourage users to speak freely without the constraints of social norms to a broad and diverse audience.

Other studies argue that social media creates uniquely polarizing environments where users organize themselves into political tribes that fight one another using aggressive dialogue. Even in Canada — a country often touted as pro-immigration — social media has allowed users to attack immigrants and minorities.

Users’ attitudes, however, may matter more than the specific platform.

Politically aggressive users

Recent studies from the United States and Western Europe show that social media attracts politically aggressive users who often do most of the talking in heated online conversations.

Based on my recent research on Canadian X users, I found similar results. I analyzed roughly 13,000 English-language posts discussing immigration and Canada’s housing crisis in 2023. Unsurprisingly, I discovered that many users blamed immigrants for a lack of affordable housing, including influencers with tens of thousands of followers.

In August 2023, discussions about housing on X peaked, with 3,638 posts mentioning both immigration and housing. This significant increase in online conversation coincided with federal government’s public comments linking international students to the housing crisis. The data supports the idea that Canadians were actively discussing the housing crisis in relation to immigration during this time.

Does this mean that Canadian X users are now seething with hatred for immigrants? While some are, a closer look reveals the partisan nature of these posts.

When I examined users’ identities and networks, it became clear that their anti-immigration messages were often a means of criticizing Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government. In other words, right-wing users (with large and small followings) were chiefly responsible for creating and sharing these posts, including People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier.

For instance, Fringe Albertan (about 2,500 followers in August 2023) posted in response to a post by Rebel News:

“@RebelNewsOnline Its a lie! Typical Liberal. Hes lying bc Canada is a UN member, and as a member, has signed onto an immigration pact to flood Canada with migrants, destroying our economy, social network, housing, and culture. #EndUNMembership @UCPCaucus @CPC_HQ @Buffalo_AB @BuffaloPartySK”_

Similarly, lloyd (about 50 followers at the time) posted in response to a post by CTV News:

“@CTVNews Thanks CTV News it’s no wonder why they are leaving as Canada is so poorly governed ! Housing shortage when Immigration brings millions of Migrants and never checked to see how many homes they had and shortage worst ever for Canada! Worst blunder in Canadian History! HELP.”

Right-wing social media users significantly contributed to public discourse blaming immigrants for Canada’s problems.

Some might argue polarizing content is simply a reflection of free speech.

This is true to some degree, but recent studies suggest online polarization can also threaten free societies. Algorithms designed to focus users’ attention on threats and conflict can reliably make users engage with content; this is what makes social media platforms potentially dangerous. Fortunately, users are far from powerless.

Reducing online polarization

While figures like Trump show that social media can be used to spread prejudice to mass audiences, it also matters that users often self-select into networks they like.

New studies make clear that users’ socio-political context, partisanship and behaviour seem to matter as much as the platform itself.

It turns out both platforms and users are responsible for online polarization.

What can we do about social media platforms?

Ultimately, we need socially responsible online platforms that focus less on producing outrage and division to attract users. This means including researchers, governments and civil society in designing social media interfaces and algorithms to establish reasonable community standards for sharing information and regulating users’ behaviour.

But we cannot wait for politicians to solve this problem. Even if we get platforms that focus less on outrage, trolls will still exist.

Social media’s rapid pace and the lack of consensus over online behaviour create ethical dilemmas for users everywhere. For example, many people passively scroll and react to content they skimmed, but if conflict arises later in the thread, many users are unsure how to respond or whether they should respond at all.

To see less polarizing social media content, we need to both consciously choose what platforms we wish to join (and why), and we need to cultivate better ways to handle online conflict.

Nicholas A. R. Fraser, Senior Research Associate , Toronto Metropolitan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How would that scenario play out? Looking at the sheer size of the American military, many people might believe that Trump would enjoy an easy victory.

That analysis is wrong. If Trump ever decides to use military force to annex Canada, the result would not be determined by a conventional military confrontation between the Canadian and American armies. Rather, a military invasion of Canada would trigger a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States.

But in this nightmare scenario, could Canadians successfully resist an American invasion? Absolutely. I know this because I have studied insurgencies around the world for more than two decades, and I have spent time with ordinary people who have fought against powerful invading armies.

How insurgencies begin

The research on guerrilla wars clearly shows that weaker parties can use unconventional methods to cripple a more powerful enemy over many years. This approach treats waging war as a secret, part-time job that an ordinary person can do.

Guerrillas use ambushes, raids and surprise attacks to slowly bleed an invading army, and local communities support these fighters by giving them safe havens and material support. These supporting citizens can also engage in forms of “everyday resistance,” using millions of passive-aggressive episodes of sabotage to frustrate and drain the enemy.

Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest without resistance. There is no political party or leader willing to relinquish Canadian sovereignty over “economic coercion,” and so if the U.S. wanted to annex Canada, it would have to invade.

That decision would set in motion an unstoppable cycle of violence. Even if we imagine a scenario in which the Canadian government unconditionally surrenders, a fight would ensue on the streets. A teenager might throw a rock at invading soldiers. That kid would get shot, and then there would be more rocks, and more gunfire. An insurgency would be inevitable.

The myth of Canadian ‘niceness’

This idea may shock Canadians today because they see themselves as friendly and affable people. However, Canada’s current self-image of “niceness” only exists because they’re at peace. War changes people very quickly, and Canadians are no more innately peaceful than any other human beings.

When your child is dying in your arms, you become capable of violence. Once you lose what you love, resistance becomes as natural as breathing.

Except for a few collaborators and kapos, my research suggests many Canadians would likely engage in various forms of everyday resistance against invading forces that could involve stealing, lying, cutting wires and diverting funds.

Meanwhile, the insurgents would unleash physical devastation on American targets. Even if one per cent of all resisting Canadians engaged in armed insurrection, that would constitute a 400,000-person insurgency, nearly 10 times the size of the Taliban at the start of the Afghan war. If a fraction of that number engaged in violent attacks, it would set fire to the entire continent.

Canada’s geography would make this insurgency difficult to defeat. With deep forests and rugged mountains, Canada’s northern terrain could not be conquered or controlled. That means loyalists from the Canadian Armed Forces could mobilize civilian recruits into decentralized fighting units that could strike, retreat into the wilderness and blend back into the local communities that support them.

The Canada-U.S. border is also easy to cross, which would give insurgents access to American critical infrastructure. It costs tens of billions of dollars to build an energy pipeline, and only a few thousand to blow one up.

What about American air strikes?

But wouldn’t the Americans crush the rebellion with missiles and drone strikes? They would try, but that approach to counterinsurgency won’t work.

In fact, it is a well-known booby trap of insurgent warfare. The harder more powerful nations strike, the larger and more fragmented the insurgency becomes, making it impossible to achieve either a military victory or negotiated agreement. Canada’s rugged terrain would protect insurgents from those types of attacks, while global outrage at the bombings would only boost support for the rebellion.

Americans have already been defeated by insurgents in many parts of the world because they could not escape this trap. If they dare to invade Canada, they would create this unsolvable security problem on their own soil.

Russia and China rise to power

How could Canadians pay for this decades-long insurgency? The answer lies in every single historical example of the old adage: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

The prospect of Americans becoming trapped by an insurgency on their own continent would delight Moscow and Beijing, which could easily establish covert northern passages to send weapons to the insurgency. Financing an insurgency is an effective way to ensnare and bankrupt a rival power, as counter-insurgency operations are exponentially more expensive than the price of a few arms shipments.

A chronic violent insurrection in North America could financially and militarily pin down the U.S. for decades, ultimately triggering economic and political collapse. Russia and China, meantime, would enjoy an uncontested rise to power.

Forewarned

This scenario would guarantee the destruction of both Canada and the United States. No one in their right mind would choose this gruesome future over a peaceful and mutually beneficial alliance with a friendly neighbour.

Nevertheless, if Trump is reckless enough to think the violent annexation of Canada is an achievable goal, then let it be known that all these horrifying outcomes were predictable well in advance, and that he was forewarned.

Aisha Ahmad, Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In response, Congress enacted reforms designed to ensure that legal actions by the Department of Justice and the FBI, the department’s main investigative arm, would be insulated from politics. These included stronger congressional oversight, a 10-year term limit for FBI directors and investigative guidelines issued by the attorney general.

Some of these measures, however, were tenuous. For example, Justice Department leaders could alter FBI investigative guidelines at any time.

Donald Trump’s first presidential term seriously tested DOJ and FBI independence – notably, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. Trump claimed Comey mishandled a 2016 probe into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but Comey also refused to pledge loyalty to the president.

Now, in Trump’s second term, prior guardrails have vanished. The president has installed loyalists at the DOJ and FBI who are dedicated to implementing his political interests.

A lawsuit filed by three former FBI officials fired by the Trump administration asserts that the bureau is being politicized and is supporting Trump’s agenda.

As a historian of the FBI, I recognize the FBI has had only one other overtly political director in the past 50 years: L. Patrick Gray, who served for a year under President Richard Nixon. Gray was held accountable after he tried to help Nixon end the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Whether Trump’s current director, Kash Patel, has more staying power is unclear.

After Hoover

Ever since Hoover’s death in 1972, presidents have typically nominated independent candidates with bipartisan support and law enforcement roots to run the FBI. Most nominees have been judges, senior prosecutors or former FBI or Justice Department officials.

While Hoover publicly proclaimed his FBI independent of politics, he sometimes did the bidding of presidents, including Nixon. Still, Nixon felt that Hoover had not been compliant enough, so in 1972 he selected Gray, a longtime friend and assistant attorney general, to be Hoover’s successor.

Gray took steps to move the bureau out of Hoover’s shadow. He relaxed strict dress codes for agents, recruited female agents and pointedly hired people from outside the agency – who were not indoctrinated in the Hoover culture – for administrative posts.

Gray asserted his authority with blunt force. FBI agents at field offices and at headquarters who resisted Gray’s power were censured, fired or transferred. Other senior officials opted to leave, including the bureau’s top fraud expert, cryptanalyst and skyjacking expert, and the head of its Crime Information Center.

Agents regarded these moves as a purge, and press reports claimed that bureau morale was at an all-time low, charges that Gray denied. According to FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, who became Gray’s second in command, 10 of 16 top FBI officials chose to retire, most of them notable Hoover men.

Gray surrounded himself with what journalist Jack Anderson called “sharp, but inexperienced, modish, young aides.” FBI insiders called these new hires the “Mod Squad,” a reference to the counterculture TV police series.

Gray helps Nixon

In contrast to Hoover, who had rarely left FBI headquarters and publicly avoided politics, Gray openly stumped for Nixon in the 1972 campaign. He was so rarely spotted at FBI headquarters that bureau insiders dubbed him “Two-Day Gray.” At the request of Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, Gray told field offices to help Nixon campaign surrogates by providing local crime information.

Gray cooperated with Nixon to stymie the FBI’s investigation of the 1972 Watergate break-in and the ensuing cover-up. He provided raw FBI investigative documents to the White House and burned documents from Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe.

When Nixon had CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters ask Gray, in the name of national security, to halt the FBI’s investigation, Felt and other agency insiders demanded that Gray get this order in writing. The White House backed down, but Nixon’s directive had been recorded. That tape became the so-called “smoking gun” evidence of a Watergate cover-up.

Felt, in classic Hoover fashion, then leaked information to discredit Gray, hoping to replace him. Gray resigned in disgrace.

While Felt never got the top job, he is now remembered as the prized anonymous source “Deep Throat,” who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate investigation. But it was internal FBI resistance, from Felt and agents at lower levels, that led to Gray’s departure.

Political from the start

Campaigning in 2024, Donald Trump vowed to “root out” his political opponents from government. Realizing he was a target because of his investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, FBI director Christopher Wray, whom Trump had nominated in 2017, resigned in December 2024 before Trump could fire him.

In Wray’s place Trump nominated loyalist Kash Patel, a lawyer who worked as a low-level federal prosecutor from 2013 to 2016 and then as a deputy national security appointee during Trump’s first term.

Patel publicly supported Trump’s vow to purge enemies and claimed the FBI was part of a “deep state” that was resistant to Trump. Patel promised to help dismantle this disloyal core and to “rebuild public trust” in the FBI.

Even before Patel was confirmed on Feb. 20, 2025, in an historically close 51-49 vote, the Justice Department began transferring thousands of agents away from national security matters to immigration duty, which was not a traditional FBI focus.

Hours after taking office, Patel shifted 1,500 agents and staff from FBI headquarters to field offices, claiming that he was streamlining operations.

Patel installed outsider Dan Bongino as deputy director. Bongino, another Trump loyalist, was a former New York City policeman and Secret Service agent who had become a full-time political commentator. He embraced a conspiracy theory positing the FBI was “irredeemably corrupt” and advocated “an absolute housecleaning.”

In February, New York City Special Agent in Charge James Dennehy told FBI staff “to dig in” and oppose expected and unprecedented political intrusions. He was forced out by March.

Patel then used lie-detector tests and carried out a string of high-profile firings of agents who had investigated either Trump or the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Some agents who were fired had been photographed kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington, D.C. – an action they said they took to defuse tensions with protesters.

In response, three fired agents are suing Patel for what they call a political retribution campaign. Ex-NFL football player Charles Tillman, who became an FBI agent in 2017, resigned in September 2025 in protest of Trump policies. Once again, there are assertions of a purge.

Will Patel be held accountable?

Patel’s actions as director so far illustrate that he is willing to use his position to implement the president’s political designs. When Gray tried to do this in the 1970s, accountability still held force, and Gray left office in disgrace. Gray participated in a cover-up of illegal behavior that became the subject of an impeachment proceeding. What Patel has done to date, at least what we know about, is not the equivalent – so far.

Today, Patel’s tenure rests solely upon pleasing the president. If formal accountability – a key element of a democracy – is to survive, it will have to come from Congress, whose Republican majority has so far not exercised its power to hold Trump or his administration accountable. Short of that, perhaps internal resistance within the administration or pressure from the public and the media might serve the oversight function that Congress, over the past eight months, has abrogated.

Douglas M. Charles, Professor of History, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many people commenting on the press conference reacted to this confusing reference to Valhalla with a mixture of amusement and disdain, with some pointing out the contradiction of eulogizing a Christian nationalist with reference to the pagan afterlife.

For scholars of the Vikings, Patel’s reference to Valhalla looked like something far more sinister. To understand why, we need to know both what Valhalla meant to the Vikings, and what it means in political discourse today.

The Norse peoples had a developed concept of the afterlife. The desirable destination for Norse warriors was Valhalla, the hall of the slain, where Odin watched over his band of chosen warriors as they prepared for Ragnarök, the world-destroying battle against the giants. Only those who died a heroic death in combat were brought to Valhalla by the Valkyries.

Those who died by sickness, old age or accident – or who had committed murder and other dishonourable crimes – seem to have been excluded from this martial afterlife. Some believed that you could cheat the Norse gods by arranging to be buried with deliberately worn and damaged weapons as if you had seen heavy combat. There’s a lot we don’t know.

What we do know is that in the 1930s the concept of Valhalla, along with the image of the heroic Viking and many of the symbols of Norse mythology, had a profound appeal to Nazi thought leaders. They looked to Norse mythology as a survival of a wider “Germanic” culture that had been erased by Judeo-Christian dominance.

The Nordic “race” was held up as the Aryan ideal. Norse cultural remnants were used to add legitimacy to the idea of a glorious German past. Heinrich Himmler in particular repurposed Norse symbols for use by the SS.

Today, many white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups continue to brand themselves using a widening range of symbols taken from Norse mythology. One aspect of Norse culture that has gained increasing prominence in the past few decades is the specific co-opting of Valhalla by those who are prepared to kill, and die, in the cause of “protecting” an endangered white supremacy.

Valhalla in terrorist manifestos

The most chilling example of the co-option of the phrase “see you in Valhalla” is found in the manifestos published by far-right terrorists in the wake of their atrocities.

In 2019, Brenton Tarrant carried out mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed. He published a rambling manifesto in which he attempted to justify his actions, and touted the “great replacement” conspiracy theory which holds that Jewish elites are deliberately engineering the replacement of white populations through immigration.

This has since become a far-right talking point and was pushed by Charlie Kirk on his show. Tarrant signed off his diatribe against multiculturalism and “white genocide” by saying “Goodbye, god bless you all and I will see you in Valhalla.”

Tarrant in turn influenced other far-right terrorists. One such terrorist, Peyton Gendron, was convicted of the Buffalo mass shooting in 2022 in which ten black Americans were murdered. Gendron plagiarised much of his 180-page manifesto, and similarly ends his screed with the statement: “I hope to see you in Valhalla.”

By invoking Valhalla, these terrorists are attempting to cast themselves as warriors in the Viking tradition. There is, of course, nothing remotely heroic about gunning down unarmed civilians.

But the point is that this reference doesn’t require any understanding of the Norse tradition. In this context it comes directly from the Nazi’s fetishisation of violent death to secure the racial purity of Germany.

From terrorists to the FBI

Rather than borrowing from extremist discourse, Patel may have been influenced by the use of “til Valhalla” by the US marines to honour fallen comrades – including those who died by suicide. This is a use which has been traced back to the influence of Norwegian Nato forces in Afghanistan, who may have used “til Valhalla” as a kind of battle cry. Of course, the optics of using a military honorific to commemorate the assassination of a civilian is problematic in itself.

Patel’s “see you in Valhalla” was much closer in its wording to the sign off used by far-right terrorists – but even this phrasing was unlikely to have been lifted directly from extremists. It is more likely an example of a phenomenon often observed in the study of the far-right online ecosystem, which is the seepage of extreme right discourse into more mainstream spaces.

Neo-Nazi groups use memes, s--posting and humour as a deliberate strategy to seed increasingly extreme ideas into groups amenable to their message.

It isn’t hard to find references to Valhalla commercialized, repackaged as inspirational Viking quotes for MAGA consumption, referencing cancel culture, or even using Norse video games as a gateway to white supremacy. In this way, the more mainstream right often ends up sharing and amplifying extremist messaging.

Patel’s reference to Valhalla was at the very least a huge misstep by a government official trying to appeal to the MAGA base and elevate Kirk’s tragic killing into a heroic warrior’s death.

While he may not have made his reference to Valhalla in knowledge of its association with far-right terrorism, it nevertheless served as a signal to white supremacists. As reported elsewhere, there was a lot of engagement from the extreme right on social media, but their posts tended to ridicule Patel.

His words prompted memes on social media playing on the apparent absurdity of someone of Patel’s ethnicity cosplaying as a Viking. And among this racially tinged mockery, there was also some revelling in the fact that a stock phrase of violent white supremacy had found its way into the mouth of the director of the FBI.

Tom Birkett, Professor of Old English and Old Norse, University College Cork

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Both sides appear to be dug in. Do you see a path to a quick compromise?

Not at this point. The Democrats have made clear at least what their stated sticking point is: these health care subsidies that are set to expire at the end of this year that were part of the Obamacare legislation. Politically speaking, this is part of a larger tactic of pushing back broadly and finally having some point of leverage against the Trump administration. The Democrats are going to use this moment to draw attention to what they see as abuses in the administration.

There have been a number of incidents like the spectacle at the Department of Defense (on Sept. 30), the use of the military in cities, and a lot of the other uses or abuses of the Justice Department or the Trump administration. Even though those all are technically separate from the shutdown issue, it’s impossible to talk about the Democrats’ strategy without making reference to those as things that a lot of folks of the left are really upset about. And this is a vehicle by which the Democrats can push back politically and actually use some of their power to stop momentum and draw attention to what the administration is doing.

But on the Republican side of things, they have a pretty simple argument, which is they want to continue funding the government at current levels and the Democrats do not. Until those dynamics change, or until enough Democratic senators get nervous about the optics of what is going on, no, I don’t see a pathway out.

How does the White House’s power over government spending, in the form of impoundment, affect negotiations?

The process of impoundment is basically the executive branch declining to spend money that Congress has appropriated. Technically speaking, that is not legal under the Impoundment Act that was passed following Richard Nixon practicing this method in the 1970s. If you’re the Democrats and you’re trying to negotiate for some kind of spending, for instance on these health care subsidies, and say you win a concession from the Republicans, then the Democrats might rightfully say, “Why would we even agree to this when we think there’s a chance that you’re either going to impound these funds that we’re appropriating for these subsidies, or you’re just going to have another rescissions package and the Republican-led Congress, with a simple majority, is just going to take these funds back? And then we haven’t won any concessions.”

Who are key players and groups of senators and representative who might decide how long this shutdown lasts?

You have people like GOP Sen. Rand Paul who are sort of the Tea Party or Freedom Caucus wing of the party, who want to see less government spending overall, and on principal tend to oppose these continuing resolutions. He was the only Republican who voted against the GOP bill last night. I have the feeling that if Republicans like the Senate Majority Leader John Thune manage to peel off a few more Democrats, and Rand Paul ends up being the deciding vote, they might be able to get him on board to pass this package.

In terms of the Senate, the real sticking points are the Democrats. You’ve got a shrinking number of moderate Democrats who could end up joining the Republicans on future votes to pass their spending bill. (You have) John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who has been a bit of a wild card for the Democrats ever since he took office in 2023. Then you’ve got other more moderate Democrats from middle-of-the-road states. People like Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada and others from states like Arizona or Pennsylvania, or maybe Wisconsin. But, for the most part, the Democrats have held the line.

To me, at the end of the day it’s a question of how much leadership in these two parties can hold together their caucus. I think both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leaders in the Senate and House, respectively, have faced a ton of blowback from Democratic voters, who have made it really clear that their strategy last time was not something the left supported. So I think there’s a lot more political pressure on them this time. And (Schumer and Jeffries) are going to sort of use that pressure a lot more with their caucus members than they did last time.

Which party stands to lose more from the political backlash of the shutdown?

It’s perfectly possible that we end up having this fight and there are no winners. A lot of times in these negotiations it ends up being who can save the most face. Who can get away from the fight without having lost the respect of their own supporters.

I have the feeling that most Democratic senators understand that Republicans are not going to suddenly give in on these health care subsidies, or that Donald Trump is going to suddenly say, “You know what, you’re right. We shouldn’t use the military in American cities.” Or that (Director of the Office of Management and Budget) Russell Vought is suddenly going to say, “You’re right. The executive branch should really stop impounding funds and we’re just going to give you what you want.” The Democrats understand that, but they are trying to demonstrate to their voters that they are going to do some kind of fighting and use whatever small leverage they do have.

I think there is more on a policy basis for the Democrats to lose just based on their ideological principles. There are plenty of Republicans that, frankly, are happy to see the government shut down, to demonstrate to the American people that “hey, look, you don’t need this much government, you can get away with less, this is a good opportunity maybe to cut a bunch of government programs, do mass firings of federal workers, as the OMB director has suggested.” Whereas the Democrats favor more robust social safety net programs and more government spending to achieve their goals.

So the longer the government stays shut down, the less funding those programs are going to get. In that sense, the Democrats have more to lose. On the other hand, the Republicans can lose a lot in terms of public relations because of who is leading their party.

I think Donald Trump demonstrated in the last shutdown, back in 2018-2019, that he has a great deal of difficulty not making these fights all about him, at least from a public perspective. That doesn’t tend to go well for him because he’s a pretty unpopular president, because he tends to bite off more than he can chew in fights like these. And that’s something the Democrats can use to their advantage from a public relations or communications perspective, in terms of talking to their voters.

But the question is going to be: How much of that is worth the losses that are going to be incurred if we’re talking about a government that is shut down for weeks or even months? That’s going to be a lot of pain for Americans. Then it just turns to who ends up getting the blame. And I don’t think we know enough yet.

Charlie Hunt, Associate Professor of Political Science, Boise State University

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