Communism is back, the US president argued – a resurgent menace and mortal threat to American liberty.

He linked the fight against communism to the upcoming midterm elections in November. Trump’s Republican party is presently on course to lose at least one and possibly both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, the president’s personal job approval ratings continue to plummet.

This attack on communism might seem so ludicrous as to be easy to dismiss. It is partly a response to the success of Zohran Mamdani, who was elected last year as the mayor of New York on a Democratic Socialists of America ticket.

Neither Mamdani nor any of his Democratic Socialists colleagues are remotely close to being communists. But Trump has clearly decided that the best strategy for the midterm elections is to whip up a new Red Scare.

He may well be right. Anti-communism has huge appeal within American political culture – particularly for the generation of voters who, like Trump, grew up on a diet of cold war propaganda.

Ironically, given the connections Trump has regularly made between communism and immigration, it also appeals to some voters from immigrant communities. For much of the Latin American diaspora in the US, particularly from places such as Cuba and Venezuela, anti-communism is even more politically powerful than it is for the rest of the country.

When we think about the history of anti-communism, we probably think first about McCarthyism and America’s last major Red Scare in the 1950s. But anti-communism was not limited to the US or the cold war. It was one of the most powerful global political projects of the 20th century.

Anti-communism drove Britain and its allies to invade Russia 1919, and provoked a rightwing backlash against the rise of the Labour party in the 1920s. It fuelled Christian politics and parties in the interwar period, particularly in the Vatican.

Anti-communism also underpinned the rise and popular appeal of fascism throughout Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. It drove Britain’s murderous fight against Malaysian independence in the 1950s, caused up to 1 million deaths in the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s, and was used to justify mass torture and disappearances during the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s.

It also underpinned many features of 20th-century politics that are widely regarded as progressive. The UK’s welfare state, for example, was built to encourage the working classes to resist the siren call of communism. Social democratic parties existed to offer a reformist alternative to revolutionary parties to their left. Many trade unions, in Britain and elsewhere, pursued the fight against communist rivals with even greater urgency than the fight against their bosses.

Anti-communism, in short, was a far more persistent and powerful force in 20th-century history than anti-fascism.

Manufacturing an ‘enemy within’

There are three reasons why anti-communism was, and remains, such a powerful project. The first is the ease with which hatred or fear of communism can be yoked to hatred or fear of other outsider groups.

For Trump, the link is between communists and illegal immigrants. For the Nazis, it was between communists and Jews. Hitler’s deranged obsession with “Judeo-Bolshevism” culminated in the Holocaust.

The second reason is the ability of anti-communism to unite people across the political spectrum, from traditional conservatives to the wildest fringes of fascism.

In the Spanish civil war, fear of communism proved a more powerful ideological glue for Franco’s supporters than fear of fascism did for the fractured Republican side. And throughout history, there have been plenty of examples of liberals and social democrats who, when push came to shove, chose to line up on the side of the fascists when the threat of communism loomed.

The third reason is that anti-communism doesn’t require the existence of actual communists to retain its power.

Many of those being tarred with the brush of communism, like Mamdani, are no more than moderate social democrats by historical standards. Similarly, most of those killed in the anti-communist massacres in Indonesia and Latin America weren’t card-carrying party members. And while there were plenty of Jewish communists and socialists in early 20th-century Europe, the idea that all Jews were communists was nothing more than an antisemitic fever dream.

We can see all of this at play in the rise of the global far right over recent decades. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declared at his first inauguration that Brazil’s flag would never be red. Colombia’s president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, denounced his reformist opponent as a “radical left Marxist”.

Even mainstream UK conservatives such as Suella Braverman are prone to sharing “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theories.

For all these reasons, it’s important not to be blinded by the seeming absurdity of Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric. Anti-communism is back – indeed, it never went away.

It survived the end of the cold war, embedded itself within some of the most extreme ideological currents of the far right, and is now reemerging as a central plank of global politics. It is powerful, persuasive and dangerous, and we need to take it seriously.

David Brydan, Senior Lecturer in the Modern History of International Relations, King's College London

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

As part of this, the administration is making pains to link Cuba with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is growing politically in the US, thanks to Zohran Mamdani’s win as New York City mayor and other victories.

And it comes against the backdrop of fear-mongering by US President Donald Trump about the prospect of communism threatening the US again. He has specifically linked Democrats to communism, as well.

So, why is the Trump administration making this spurious argument, and why now?

What the administration is alleging

Last week, the US State Department published a nearly 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism”.

The report’s core claim is that Cuba has spent over half a century influencing and aiding the domestic left in the US. Among its more extraordinary allegations:

• the far-left Weather Underground had direct contact with Cuban officials and Cuban spies in the 1970s, who helped facilitate the group’s bombings in the US
• delegations of other “American radicals” travelled to Cuba during that decade to learn urban terrorism and guerrilla tactics
• Cuban intelligence today treats infiltrating US universities as a top priority
• leftist activists in the US and elsewhere routinely make “revolutionary tourism” excursions to the island, and
• the DSA specifically maintains a “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime”.

That framing collapses under scrutiny. The report anchors its argument in a handful of genuine espionage and terrorism cases. But it then tries to connect these with more innocuous activities: attending a Cuban-organised trip, expressing solidarity with Havana, or opposing the US embargo on the island.

This echoes a long US tradition of using national security as a premise to target leftist movements. This includes everything from the targeting of civil rights and labour organisers during the McCarthy era to the Cold War surveillance of anti-war activists.

Equally telling is what the report leaves out: six decades of documented US covert action against Cuba, including assassination plots and support for armed exile groups.

The report also came just days after Rubio convened delegations from dozens of countries in Washington for a conference on “resurgent far-left political terrorism”. At the event, he said the threat of far-left violence “can no longer be denied” and that it was “time to crush this evil forever”.

And in May, the White House released a new counterterrorism strategy that called “violent left-wing extremists” one of three terror threats facing the US (alongside narcoterrorists and Islamist terror groups). There was no mention of neo-Nazi or other far-right groups.

Why now?

Viewed against this wider context, the State Department report dramatically amplifies the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on Cuba.

In the past few months, Washington has imposed an oil blockade on Cuba, expanded economic sanctions against the island, directly sanctioned President Miguel Díaz-Canel and members of former leader Raúl Castro’s family, and secured a criminal indictment against Castro himself.

This economic warfare has pushed the island towards humanitarian collapse. UN experts have condemned it as a serious violation of international law.

Trump has repeatedly floated a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, and his officials have not ruled out direct military action if Havana does not yield. Rubio’s report and recent statements now provide the ideological framework to justify such an action.

What is driving the timing of this coordinated campaign is harder to explain. However, two factors appear to be converging.

First, the administration is seeking a foreign policy “victory” after the costly and inconclusive war with Iran.

The other is the midterm elections in November. A hardline stance on Cuba could help the Republican Party shore up support with its base. It also allows the party to frame the US left as being aligned with foreign forces and supporters of “communism”.

The more consequential question is what could come next. The administration has created a premise for action on several fronts:

• further measures against Havana, including a possible military operation
• expanded moves against US left-wing organisations, such as targeting their tax-exempt status or funding
• designating left-wing groups as terror organisations, and
• increased pressure on European governments to act against their own leftist organisations.

The brunt of the Trump administration’s actions, however, will be felt by the Cuban people themselves, who have long been scapegoats and collateral damage of their powerful neighbour to the north.

Juan Zahir Naranjo Cáceres, PhD Candidate, Political Science, International Relations and Constitutional Law, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

Should the U.S. follow these other countries and broadly eliminate the ability to write checks?

Years ago, experts predicted that checks would have disappeared by now. However, they are still around, and billions are written each year in the United States.

Why? The quick answer is that businesses love them. And plenty of Americans still use checks for good reasons. But there is more to the story.

I am a business school professor and one of the few academics who advocates for the use of cash. While I have long told everyone about the benefits of paper money, I didn’t give paper checks much thought or use them until my mother’s recent death. Then I found myself writing checks to the cemetery, funeral home, gravestone engraver and a host of other places. Plus, I started getting refund checks back from her landlord and insurance companies.

These experiences made me look more deeply into this form of payment to understand what was happening.

Fewer checks for bigger bucks

Every three years the U.S. government runs the Federal Reserve Payments Study by asking banks and credit unions for internal information. This survey tracks everything from how often credit cards are used to the number of checks written.

While check usage has sharply declined in the U.S., a significant number – about 9.2 billion in 2024 – are still written, the data shows. The face value of those checks is probably bigger than you’d expect: more than US$24 trillion, not adjusted for inflation. That is almost as large as U.S. gross domestic product of $29 trillion that year.

Not everyone can imagine numbers in billions or trillions, so let’s put those figures in more manageable terms.

A little over 150 checks were written per person in 2000. By 2024, the average had plummeted to 27 checks – slightly more than two per month. However, over that time, the amounts typically scribbled or printed on the face of those checks rose.

In 2000, the typical check was worth less than $1,000. By 2024, the average amount had more than doubled to $2,600.

Trends elsewhere are similar. The Bank for International Settlements, which serves as a bank for central banks like the Federal Reserve, has tracked check usage in 25 countries since 2012. Its data shows that in only two other countries is payment by check still commonplace.

And in both of those countries, check usage has fallen more sharply than in the United States.

Who uses checks today?

While check payments have declined, there are still two big groups of check writers in the United States.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta runs the Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice. This survey asks people, rather than banks, for information on their payment habits. Roughly one-third of all respondents stated they used a paper check in the past 30 days.

Not surprisingly, the answers vary by age. About 60% of people 65 and over say they wrote a check. Among those 18 to 24, under 6% said they did.

It also turns out that a lot of people who think they never write checks actually unknowingly do it all the time. If you pay your bills online, your bank tries to pay them electronically. If it cannot electronically make the payment, the bank cuts a paper check on your behalf. Any online bill payment taking more than a couple of business days to post is being sent by check.

Another important factor is that small businesses love checks. Over 80% of businesses with sales between $1 and $10 million make payments using checks. Why? Small businesses often require two signatures on a check. The need for signatures means owners have to sign their name before any money goes out the door. This gives them control over money and a clear idea who is getting paid and how much.

Small businesses also like receiving checks. I wrote a lot of checks after my mother’s death because many of those small businesses I dealt with wanted an extra 3% and sometimes more to cover the cost to them of a credit card payment. Writing paper checks saved me and the businesses a lot of money.

The future

While many Americans still write checks, their declining usage clearly underscores that they are not ideal for making payments in all situations.

One of the biggest problems with checks is that you never know if the check writer has sufficient funds to cover the amount. When an account doesn’t have enough money, the check bounces. The Federal Reserve, which clears about one-third of all U.S. checks, returned about 22 million checks, with a total face value of around $80 billion. While these numbers are large, over 99% of all checks written don’t bounce.

Another problem with checks is forgery. Thieves steal checks from mailboxes, alter information and then cash them. The most recent figures show about 500,000 annual cases of check fraud in the U.S. Again, while a half-million is large, it is a tiny fraction of the 9.2 billion checks written annually.

Because of these problems, the Federal Reserve is contemplating leaving the check processing business. In early 2026, it accepted public comments on whether it should wind down, improve or leave alone its check processing unit.

The unit, which costs about $100 million a year to run, turned a $6.6 million profit in 2024. But its machines need replacing, and the Federal Reserve is wavering on spending the money.

Should checks be killed off like the penny, which the federal government stopped minting in 2025, and the haypenny, which was worth half a cent and hasn’t been produced since 1857?

For me, the answer is a clear no. While checks are clearly less important today than in the past, the numbers show that the American people and businesses still use and need checks.

Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor of Business, Boston University

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

The US president is famously hyperbolic, but this time he did not exaggerate. His reading of US constitutional law was entirely correct. The court overruled its own precedent set in 1935 and held that the president had the power to fire federal trade commissioner Rebecca Slaughter “at will”.

Slaughter was one of two Democratic members of the commission sacked by Trump. The president invoked his powers under Article II of the constitution and said that their continued service was “inconsistent” with the “administration’s priorities”.

She sued Trump and other administration officials on the grounds that Congress, by statute, had said that a commissioner of the independent agency could only be fired “for cause”, meaning there had to be a proven reason to terminate her.

In 1935, in Humphrey’s Executor v United States, the court held 9-0 that then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt did not have the power to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner William Humphrey. Roosevelt had asked Humphrey to resign because he believed that his administration’s agenda for the FTC would be “most effectively carried out with personnel of my own selection”.

But when Congress established the FTC, it insulated the agency’s political independence by design. Commissioners could only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”.

Overruling the precedent set by Humphrey’s Executor gives the president individual authority over great swaths of the administrative state. Since the FTC was established, Congress has created dozens of “independent agencies” operating under the same “for cause” rule to protect their independence.

The decision is a triumph for the US Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority of six justices. Their aim is to restructure the US government according to the “unitary executive” theory of the constitution. This theory holds that when the framers of the constitution “vested” the power of the executive in a president, they intended that the power and responsibility for executing the laws of the United States would ultimately be held by one man.

Under this theory, the president must be able to control the entire executive branch, including its independent agencies. Ironically, given the No Kings protests against Trump, the version of history promoted by this Supreme Court under the leadership of the chief justice John Roberts, maintains that the framers did this because only a single, all-powerful president could resist a return to a monarchy.

Trump posted: “The Republican Party was treated very fairly by the United States Supreme Court. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Overruling Humphrey’s Executor was included in Project 2025, the blueprint drawn up by ultra-conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term.

The conservative legal movement could be confident that this aim would be well received by the court. Roberts had championed the unitary executive agenda since his days in Ronald Reagan’s justice department in the 1980s.

Unprecedented power

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented from the Slaughter decision. She wrote in her dissenting opinion the court “gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted”. In the dissenters’ view, for at least the past 140 years Congress and the president, together, had set up independent agencies that did not rely “on who is disfavored or owed a favor by those in office”.

The US Supreme Court had approved “for cause” requirements in statutes as constitutional in 1935. But only now did the court decide that the president, congress and the court had all been “acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time”.

Under the guise of upholding the principle of “separation of powers”, the court reinterpreted the constitution and shifted power away from Congress to the president.

Already in Trump’s second term, the court has given the president unprecedented power at the expense of Congress. Following on from its decisions on abortion and voting rights, the court has continued to overrule its own precedent and reinterpret the US constitution in line with the public policy objectives of the conservative legal movement.

In two years, Trump will be out of office and a Democrat might even replace him. But the court’s decisions will remain, and the only check on presidential power will be the president’s own morality and self-restraint.

Andrea Loux Jarman, Senior Lecturer in Law, Bournemouth University

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

Up front the two authors announce that they conducted “more than a thousand interviews with a wide range of people close to President Trump”. These interviews were carried out “on the journalistic ground rule of deep background”. This is an arrangement whereby a source gives out information on the basis that it will not be attributed to them.

And it is this sourcing of interviewees, in particular from the intimate group of Trump’s most trusted and loyal buddies, that will fascinate journalists and the political cognoscenti. How on earth did the authors get such stunning access to the inner circles of his government, friends and associates?

The book is stuffed to the gills with Trump’s denigrating and indiscreet one-liners about world leaders and political opponents. It also contains what it calls “detailed scenes in sensitive locations” and some of the dialogue is in direct quotes, so one can only conclude that it was the very people inside the room who were leaking.

For example, in the meeting that planned “Operation Epic Fury”, the ongoing US military operation against Iran which began on February 28, the book recounts that the group “had been kept so tight that two key officials who would need to manage the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market – Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright – were still not in the loop, one day before the launch of the war. Nor was the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard”.

So who was there? Vice-president J.D. Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles, CIA director John Ratcliffe, White House counsel David Warrington, communications director Steven Cheung, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Dan Caine, secretary of war Pete Hegseth and secretary of state Marco Rubio. So if there were, as Haberman and Swan note, “no presentations” and “no paperwork”, presumably one of these top officials must have blabbed.

The only two people quoted directly in this instance were Trump and Ratcliffe, the CIA director. According to the authors’ notes on sources at the start of the book, direct quotes come “either from the person speaking them, someone who heard them directly, or from contemporaneous notes, recordings or transcripts”. This question will excite the political sleuths out there – not to mention White House staff. As the celebrated Anglo-American journalist Tina Brown notes in her “Fresh Hell” Substack review, at the very least, “it’s an interesting parlour game”.

The 464-page book is a comprehensive look at Trump’s first year, but it’s not a rollicking page turner. The details in certain chapters will only interest readers engrossed by that particular topic’s minutiae. Broadly it is broken up into four parts, and the titles tell the tale: Whirlwind; Retribution; The Enemy Within and Plunder.

Thin skin

Trump’s narcissism jumps off the page. In a chat with the authors published in the epilogue, he happily quotes “a historian” as saying: “Donald Trump is, without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known – by a long way”. And that: “If President Trump is the American Eagle, then William the Conqueror was merely a sparrow.” On checking the source, the authors discover that the “historian” was South African golfer Gary Player’s former caddie.

The book finds plenty of evidence of the president’s thin skin suggesting he will go to any lengths to wreak revenge on those he sees as having wronged him, particularly over what he still insists on calling the “stolen election” of 2020. The authors note that “retribution – against critics, prosecutors, investigators, journalists, and even late-night talk hosts – was always at the top of Trump’s second-term agenda.”

There are few public figures prepared to stand up to him. One quiet hero of the book is the chairman of the federal reserve Jerome Powell. Trump was frustrated that he couldn’t seize control of interest rates, but Powell did not buckle even though Trump tried myriad ways to have him prosecuted. In desperation Trump settled on the renovation of the organisation’s HQ in Washington.

His language concerning Powell, according to the book, is shockingly intemperate: “I want to bust his fucking balls, honestly,” Trump said of Powell. “What about that fucking building? Can we stop it? Can we stop construction? I just want to bust his fucking balls. Fuck him”. One is left asking again – who squealed on this particular story?

On the record

The book represents the best of factual political reporting and will be read in the future as an invaluable historical record of the Trump government. Sprinkled throughout its pages are behind the scenes campaigns to try to snap shut the Epstein Files, and round up illegal migrants (and ordinary Americans) via Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

There are tasteless anecdotes such as when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave Trump a gold-plated pager, to commemorate an Israeli operation to blow up Hezbollah members. The pagers and walkie-talkies killed 37 people including children and injured many more.

But there’s one area that the authors didn’t succeed in penetrating, as underlined by Martin Pengelly in The Guardian, and that concerns Trump’s health. Here it seems nobody is prepared to spill the beans from either the regime or the health services. His tendency to fall asleep and slur his words is beginning to mirror the behaviour of Joe Biden in his final year in office.

It is surprising that as journalists the pair has not investigated more of Trump’s attacks on the press. They do summarise his lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch, and his fights with CBS and the New York Times, but there is only passing reference to his appalling treatment of journalists – in particular women reporters.

The breakup of the Elon Musk bromance is also covered only scantily, when one would have expected more in-depth reporting.

Inevitably one is left to ponder if Musk could have been one of the early whistleblowers, or perhaps even conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, another former insider with whom the US president appears to have had an epic falling out. I don’t suppose Trump will want to pop this tome on the shelves of his presidential library. But when he finishes investigating the leaks, whose heads will roll?

Colleen Murrell, Full Professor in Journalism, Dublin City University

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

A common misconception is that declassification works like a curtain being pulled back: A “Top Secret” marking comes off, and the public sees the truth. In reality, a released record may be raw reporting, a fragment of a communication, a source’s claim or a draft assessment. Each carries a different relationship to reliability and analytic judgment.

I’m an international affairs professor with nearly 30 years of experience in the U.S. intelligence community, including executive roles in the Central Intelligence Agency, National Counterterrorism Center and National Security Agency. I would advise anyone reviewing this release – or any declassified intelligence – to keep one distinction in mind before drawing conclusions: Declassification changes who may see information, but it does not determine whether the information is true, important, current, corroborated or representative of the broader intelligence record.

The archive is not the assessment

The 17th-century French statesman Cardinal Richelieu is commonly credited as saying, “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” It’s an apt warning here – not because intelligence collection is indifferent to truth, but because of what it deliberately preserves.

Intelligence agencies collect widely and retain material across a full spectrum of reliability, including reporting that was later contradicted, downgraded or explicitly discounted, because judging what matters is supposed to happen through analysis over time, not by declining to collect something in the first place.

In my experience, that means the government’s holdings almost certainly contain a report that appears to support nearly any serious allegation someone could make about a public official, a foreign government or a disputed national event – sitting alongside the later reporting and analytic judgment that determined how much weight, if any, it deserved.

Mistaking a document’s existence for proof of its content – without the context of what came after it – is, in my assessment, the most common way declassified material can get misread.

‘Intelligence report’ is misleading

The phrase “intelligence report” adds to the confusion. It is often used as though it describes one kind of document. It does not. A report might be an unevaluated database entry, a clandestine source account, an intercepted communication or a finished assessment such as the President’s Daily Brief. These documents sit at different points in the intelligence cycle: planning, collection, processing, analysis, dissemination and evaluation. Evaluation, though it’s listed as a step in the cycle, is continuous.

A human-source report includes both what a source said and how the intelligence officer handling that source assessed the source’s access, reliability and possible motives. Those judgments help analysts weigh the reporting. They do not make it definitive. A well-placed source can misunderstand what he heard. A generally reliable source can still be wrong.

Signals intelligence can create a different kind of false confidence. Intercepted communications can appear definitive, but a single intercept shows only that something was said. It does not establish that the speaker knew the truth, that the communication was complete or that later reporting supported it.

Finished intelligence exists to weigh those questions. Analysts compare reporting streams, test assumptions, identify gaps, assign confidence levels and state what remains uncertain. Finished products can still be wrong.

This is why intelligence work runs on a cycle, with evaluation happening at every stage, not only at the end. That discipline is what keeps flawed or incomplete information from being mistaken for settled fact.

What a declassification review exists to catch

That distinction matters in any declassification, but it becomes especially important when the process is rushed.

Removing a classification marking is only one part of the process. Review also asks what release might expose beyond the text: a human source, collection method, foreign liaison relationship, ongoing operation or analytic context needed to keep the public from being misled.

One document can also involve several agencies. A report about a foreign leader might draw on information from a CIA source, quote communications collected by the National Security Agency and discuss a diplomatic relationship managed by the State Department. Large-scale declassification is therefore normally interagency work, not simply the decision of one office.

The Biden administration’s decision to declassify intelligence on Russian preparations leading up to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine moved unusually fast by intelligence standards. I was involved in that process while serving at the CIA. But the speed served a specific purpose: warning allies and shaping Russian calculations before an invasion occurred. The review process was compressed, not abandoned.

What to look for once something is released

Readers should ask practical questions when declassified material appears: Is this document raw reporting, an intercept, a source account, a draft or a finished assessment? Was it released with the caveats, later reporting and interagency review needed to judge its weight? If it is being used to challenge an intelligence assessment, does the release show how analysts evaluated that material, what other reporting they weighed and why they accepted or discounted it?

None of these questions requires assuming bad faith. They are the same questions intelligence professionals ask before turning information into judgment. A raw report in a classified system is evidence that something was reported. It is not, by itself, proof that the report was true.

Brian O'Neill, Professor of Practice, International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology

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

The movement is led by figures such as self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate (named by the New Yorker as a “singularly influential proponent of masculinism”), who has just been arrested in the US, with his brother Tristan. UK authorities have just announced new charges against the brothers related to allegations of rape and sex trafficking – adding to previous charges in the United Kingdom, and a criminal investigation underway in Romania.

Other masculinists include male supremacist podcaster Myron Gaines, white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and preacher Doug Wilson, leader of a network of 170 churches whose followers include US war secretary Pete Hegseth.

The term “masculinist” was originally coined in the late 1800s or early 1900s to refer to defenders of male domination. It was then adopted by some in the men’s rights movement in the 1980s as part of a reaction against second-wave feminism. Now, it is being widely used by manosphere and far-right figures and groups.

Masculinism is an extreme form of a men’s rights movement, which believes men should have more rights, power and opportunities than women.

Extreme ideas becoming more common

Andrew Tate has lived out these ideals in life – building an “empire of abuse” based on systemically exploiting women (whom he called “assets” he could “monetize”) for his webcam business.

Wilson was a guest pastor at the Pentagon’s monthly Christian prayer service in February, with Hegseth praying alongside him. He would like to remove women’s right to vote, and has said: “Men are created to exercise dominion over the earth; they are fitted to be husbandman.” And:

the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.

These extreme ideas are becoming more common among leading figures within the US right.

“Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys,” argued feminist journalist Helen Lewis in a popular Atlantic article.

While right-wing leaders may disagree on Israel, or the role of big tech, they are united in their belief that feminism has destroyed the world, she says.

Though these ideas are also evident in Australia, they are so far confined to the fringes. Far-right commentary website XYZ, for example, whose editor-in-chief David Hiscox once said his goal was “redpilling white men about race” to advocate for the establishment of a “white” ethno-state, includes articles titled “Women’s and girl’s sports need to be banned”, “The woman problem” and “The decay of man”, all promoting masculinist sentiments.

At the same time, a recent study showed 25–30% of Australian boys aged 13–17 agreed with misogynistic attitudes, with 28% supporting “violence to resist feminism”. This mirrors a growing global sentiment that “feminism has gone too far” or that men are now discriminated against.

Extreme men’s rights

A core tenet of feminism has been to argue against simplistic gender roles, stating women can be leaders and men can be carers. Modern masculinist movements are a backlash against these arguments. They argue feminism has undermined the inherent differences between men and women, creating an imbalance that has destroyed modern society.

Masculinists focus in particular on the role of women in the public sphere, arguing women are too irrational and emotional to be involved in politics.

Initial versions argued feminism had gone “too far” and that men’s issues were being ignored. While men’s rights movements had an underlying current of belief in male dominance, they often – at least officially – claimed they were only about achieving equality.

Today’s masculinist movements officially remove the mask. They argue not just that men’s issues have been ignored, but that we need to return to a world of full male dominance.

They argue we should strip women’s right to vote, that women should return to a “traditional” life as homemakers, and that husbands should be able to control their wives’ lives – including their weight, spending habits, television viewing, and when they have sex.

These ideas stem from a belief in fundamental differences between men and women. Dominant values in the West (and some other parts of the world) promote traits characterised as “masculine” (logic, reason, conflict, individualism) and disparage traits considered to be “feminine” (emotion, collectivity, cooperation, being other-oriented).

Valuing one set of traits over another promotes the idea that men are more suited to being leaders in politics and business, while women are more suited to life in the home. Much of this is driven by the needs of capitalism, which has privatised domestic care.

As families have increasingly become less able to survive on one salary alone, this model has become untenable for many, with women increasingly entering the workforce over the past 50 years. Even so, these gendered roles have largely stayed the same.

Masculinists trace what they perceive as a collapse in good governance to women’s involvement. They argue not only that women shouldn’t be political leaders, but that they shouldn’t have the right to vote. Some, such as Wilson, advocate returning to a “family vote”, where male heads of households get to decide on the vote for the entire house.

Masculinists want men to have control in the family too. They promote the return to men being the heads of households and women being subservient homemakers and child-rearers. This aligns with white supremacist views.

Some masculinists believe that in pursuing careers, white women stopped having enough babies, resulting in a “replacement” of white people with people of colour.

Uniting the far right

Masculinism is an idea – and a movement – we need to take seriously. There are no serious moves to abolish suffrage, ban women from politics, or legally force them back into the home – yet. But these ideas are becoming increasingly mainstream in the US, as Wilson’s association with the upper echelons of the US government shows.

“Bit by bit we start to break down these walls … and then one day, we become the mainstream,” said Fuentes in a 2019 livestream, outlining his own strategy.

Despite the serious allegations he has faced, Andrew Tate and his ideas have received widespread political support, including allegations the Trump White House intervened in his case in Romania to have a travel ban lifted. (The White House denies backing the Tates in this way.) It is unclear what impact the Tate brothers’ weekend arrest will have on the support they receive.

Australia has yet to go as far as the US, with no mainstream leaders espousing views as extreme as the Tates or Wilson in the US. However, One Nation has increasingly adopted men’s rights and anti-feminist views, evidenced by Pauline Hanson’s recent attack on paid parental leave. Anti-feminist sentiment is also growing in the country, and Andrew Tate himself has become a very popular (albeit contested) figure here.

Feminists and anti far-right groups continue to resist this ideology – through the #metoo movement, for example, and in ongoing fights for abortion rights, increased pay for women, rights for trans people, and so much more.

However, the role of misogyny and masculinist thinking is still often ignored by those studying and fighting against far-right organisations – particularly security agencies, but also many mainstream researchers. Misogyny is often seen as a “lesser” extremism, ignoring the real violence this ideology creates.

Masculinism as a movement, however, is gaining steam. We must tackle it, both to stop the epidemic of violence against women and to ensure we don’t lose the gains feminism has made.

Simon Copland, Honorary Fellow in Sociology, Australian National University

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

It’s ironic, then, that officials from the powerful European nations are pushing for FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s resignation despite him pulling off one of the globe’s great spectacles.

This 39-day celebration of soccer took place despite myriad geopolitical fears, border disputes, and visa crises blighting the tournament’s buildup.

There were a few major scandals

There were controversies, as you’d expect.

Three months before the event began, the United States – staging 78 of the 104 matches – started a war with one of the competing nations: Iran. One can only imagine the frantic negotiations behind closed doors that enabled Iran to play all three of its group games on US soil.

The president of Iran’s football federation, Mehdi Taj, requested FIFA relocate the team’s home base from Arizona to Tijuana, Mexico, just across the border. This allowed Taj and other officials – banned from entering the US because of their allegiance to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (listed as a terrorist organisation in countries such as the US, Canada and Australia) – to stay with the team as it prepared for matches.

Many were later shocked when FIFA-selected Somali referee Omar Artan was banned from entering the US.

However, there were eight other referees from nations on the US’s list of banned and semi-banned countries. All were admitted.

Teams that were allowed to compete in the US despite a full ban were Iran and Haiti, while partial ban countries Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire were also able to compete in the US.

The biggest and most damaging controversy though was the Donald Trump-Gianni Infantino red card affair, when FIFA’s disciplinary committee suspended a one-match ban for the US’s Folarin Balogun following the US president’s call to the FIFA boss.

Both presidents admitted to the call, but a statement from Infantino trying to limit the damage and another from the disciplinary committee justifying the suspension seemed only to fan the flames of discontent.

It prompted London-based sport and human rights organisation FairSquare to lodge an ethics complaint with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) against Infantino. It stated:

the complaint alleges Infantino has repeatedly breached IOC rules on political neutrality by offering his political support for US President, Donald Trump.

A core group of European nations and Western media see the red card affair as another example of the FIFA president cosying up to autocratic leaders, including those democratically elected. But reports alleging “the world” is calling for Infantino’s head are grossly exaggerated. It is a media and politics story – most fans are talking about the the on-field action.

That didn’t stop many fans at the final booing Trump and Infantino before and after the decider between Spain and Argentina in New Jersey.

The politics and governance of FIFA will play out in the months ahead – Infantino’s ambition is to seek a fourth term, with an election in 2027. The next eight months will be an intense period of lobbying, with many of European soccer’s 55 members hoping to elicit support from other confederations to vote Infantino out.

FIFA, though, is made up of 211 member nations, many of whom are very happy with the increase in FIFA profits distributed to national federations, in turn allowing them to further invest in the game.

Cabo Verde, one of the highlights of the expanded World Cup format, is a case in point. FIFA money helped construct new pitches in 2022, as well as a refurbishment of its elite academy.

There were also forecasts of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents patrolling venues, scaring away other fans; that too did not materialise.

Perhaps the biggest concern of all was the risk to security and yet, publicly at least, there were no major incidents.

The good news stories

The media’s predictions of empty stadiums and “real fans” being priced out of the market proved to be way off the mark.

Even before the semi-finals, FIFA reported more than six and a half million fans had packed venues, surpassing the past two editions of the World Cup combined, for an average occupancy of 99.7%.

It is the numbers that speak of success – the numbers attract sponsors, pushing up broadcast rights for future editions, growing the pie from which every member federation eats.

Record television audiences in several markets will contribute to what is expected to be a new overall record for global audiences once the final numbers are compiled.

It has silenced many critics, mostly from Europe, who believed the talent across the globe did not warrant a tournament expansion from 32 to 48 nations.

But several “minnow nations” acquitted themselves well, and teams from Africa shone, with nine of its ten qualified nations moving beyond the group stage and into the knockouts.

The on-field legacy

Western media coverage may continue to portray the Trump-Infantino red card affair as the dominant memory of the World Cup.

The ordinary person, who tuned in at all hours of the day or night to see their team play, will disagree.

For them, it will be the extraordinary moments of athletic skill on show as their team provided moments of national joy and despair on a global stage which came and went all too quickly.

Politics often overshadows sport – until the ball is kicked. This World Cup proved to be no different.

Tracey Holmes, Industry Professor in Sport and the Media, Office of 2032 Games Engagement, University of Queensland, The University of Queensland

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

Researched and written in the years preceding September 11, and published in April 2001, Them – which Ronson described in a preface to its second edition as “a snapshot of life in the Western world on 10 September 2001” – is turning 25.

Ronson’s original plan was to spend time with people who’d been described as “the extremist monsters of the Western world” as they went about their everyday lives. They included neo-Nazis, militias and Omar Bakri, a UK Islamic fundamentalist who called himself “Osama Bin Laden’s man in London”, and whom Ronson shadowed for a year in 1996 for a documentary.

Among other things, Ronson recorded the “clownish” Bakri watching the Lion King with a baby on his knee, and asking him to guard the money he’d been collecting for Hamas in giant Coca Cola bottles, while he retrieved a coat – which he agonised over as a Jewish person, but did (seemingly to avoid awkwardness).

Bakri, who told the Daily Mail the September 11 attacks were “exciting”, was barred from the United Kingdom after leaving in 2005. In 2010, he was arrested in Lebanon and sentenced to life in prison after a terrorism trial. Released pending retrial, he was sentenced again in 2015 to six years hard labour.

“I thought that perhaps an interesting way to look at our world would be to move into theirs and stand alongside them while they glared back at ours,” Ronson writes. But what started as a series of profiles of extremist leaders “quickly became something stranger”, when he realised the very different people he was following all shared a belief in the New World Order: a conspiracy theory that imagines “a tiny elite rules the world from inside a secret room”.

This tyrannical, shadowy elite, Ronson soon discovered, was said to launch wars and wield almost unimaginable power. It has the ability to, among other things, “select and cast out the heads of state, control Hollywood and the markets and the flow of capital, operate a harem of under-age kidnapped sex slaves”.

If there was any truth to the theory, Ronson reasoned, there must be an actual secret room, and it had to be located somewhere. So he resolved to find it.

At various points, he found himself chased by men in dark glasses and surveilled from behind trees. He also managed to witness robed international chief executives participate in a bizarre effigy-burning ritual in the forests of northern California – an experience he shared with Jones, then a harmless-seeming regional radio crank, based in Texas.

Now, 25 years on, that worldview has arguably become easier to sustain than Ronson could have imagined. Revelations surrounding figures such as Jeffrey Epstein – who did operate a network of underage girls he coerced into sexually servicing powerful men – have shown the wealthy and powerful can and do conceal serious and shocking crimes through networks of influence and privilege.

But rather than confirming the existence of a secret cabal directing world events, such scandals have often been absorbed into far broader conspiracy narratives – from QAnon to claims about bloodthirsty global elites harvesting adrenochrome from children – further blurring sometimes porous lines between fact and fiction.

Genuine curiosity and refusing caricature

The book helped to establish Ronson’s distinctive investigative approach: an interest in the fringe and the unusual, approached with a genuine sense of curiosity and a refusal of easy caricature.

This sensibility has run through his work since, from The Men Who Stared at Goats (looking at bizarre, fringe tactics adopted by the US army) and You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (an early critique of social media shaming) to his culture war conspiracy theories podcast series, Things Fell Apart.

But Them also propelled Jones into the mainstream – which Ronson has publicly regretted. When Ronson got to know him, “Alex was hollering his powerful apocalyptic vision down an ISDN line from a child’s bedroom in his house, with choo-choo train wallpaper and an Empire Strikes Back poster pinned on the wall”.

Since then, Jones has been “successfully sued” and has filed for bankruptcy after being found liable for defamation for his claims that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged and “no one died”.

Sadly, what once seemed extreme and marginal – the circulation of conspiracy theories and the associated peddling of prejudice and hate – now feels depressingly routine.

Just as it inadvertently captured the historical moment about to erupt with the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, Them anticipated the mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking, which would become a defining feature of our misinformation-ridden historical moment.

Paranoia as the new common sense

“Paranoia was the new common sense,” writes columnist John Ganz in When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. “The country seemed to be seeking something new, a break with the exhausted possibilities of the past but also a restoration, a way to recover what had been lost.”

At the end of the 1980s, the Berlin Wall had been reduced to rubble and the communist bloc was crumbling. Excitable liberals were wittering on about the end of history. America stood triumphant, seemingly without rival. And yet something felt off.

Ganz argues appearances were deceptive. “America felt itself to be losing out: losing its dominant place in the world, losing the basis of its security and wealth, and losing its sense of itself.”

There had to be an explanation. And there had to be someone to blame.

This bled through in the culture of the early 1990s. “Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you,” sang Kurt Cobain, capturing the zeitgeist on Nevermind (1991). It was the time of Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) and The X-Files (1993). The truth, we were told, was out there. Trust no one – especially anyone in a position of authority.

Ruby Ridge: ground zero?

This atmosphere permeates Them’s second chapter, on the bloody Ruby Ridge standoff in regional Idaho in August 1992. Also permeating the chapter – and the book – are Ronson’s stated aims of painting people “as complicated grey areas, rather than magnificent heroes or sickening villains” and sticking “to the nuanced truth, rather than flattening it to make ideological points”.

Randy and Vicki Weaver were among the first Americans to articulate fears about the New World Order. In the 1980s, they moved from Iowa to a plywood cabin without electricity, high in the Idaho ranges. There, they home-schooled their children, living among bears and mountain lions.

Randy felt the need, Ronson tells us, to socialise from time to time. He made friends within the nearby Aryan Nations community and attended their summer camps with his children four times – though he told Ronson he wasn’t personally a white supremacist, but a “separatist”.

One such friend was an undercover agent, who asked Randy to sell him two illegal sawn-off shotguns. Once arrested, Randy was offered a choice: spy on Aryan Nations for the government or face time behind bars for illicit gun running. He went with the second option. Warned they could lose their house and convinced the New World Order was monitoring them (which was not untrue now), the Weavers stopped showing up to court.

In August 1992, US marshals hiding in the bushes shot the Weavers’ barking family dog as it came too close. Ronson reports that Weaver’s teenage son Sammy fired random shots in response, and was shot and killed. A marshal was killed too. Hundreds of federal agents descended, martial law was declared, and residents emerged from their homes bearing placards denouncing the New World Order. Vicki was shot and killed while holding her infant daughter.

Media coverage recast the human tragedy as a national psychodrama about extremism, government overreach and the collapse of public trust.

In the following months, militia movements expanded rapidly across the US. The infamous siege in Waco, Texas, where David Koresh’s Branch Davidians clashed with federal agents, ending with 75 members dead, unfolded in Texas less than a year later.

For many in the American far right, the ruined Weaver cabin became a symbol of resistance and martyrdom, assuming a quasi-mythic status. One pilgrim who visited was Timothy McVeigh, later responsible for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured close to 700.

Bilderberg: a secret society running the world?

Ronson soon realised the same name was on the lips of the various militia members and anti-government activists he spoke to: the Bilderberg Group. These are the people who actually run the world, they believed. Bilderberg was described as “the Roman Senate” or “a pyramid”.

Jones explained: “They’re way up there. Below them you’ve the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, then you’ve got us down here, the cattle, the human resources.” At the time, he was funding efforts to rebuild the Branch Davidian church.

Ronson first encountered Jones while interviewing Randy Weaver, who considered the then regional radio host “a true and tirelesss warrior”. Jones explained the Bilderbergers were orchestrating world decline from the behind the scenes. As with many conspiracy theories, the line between fantasy and reality was not always easy to discern.

The Bilderberg Group is real. It even has its own website. Established in the wake of World War II, it consists of annual private meetings attended by political and industrial leaders, financiers, media executives and royalty. It is, without doubt, a highly secretive organisation – which has intensified the suspicion around it.

Interestingly, UK politician Peter Mandelson, former US ambassador and friend of Epstein even after his conviction, is named in the book as a Bilderberg attendee.

This explains how Ronson eventually found himself sneaking into Bohemian Grove, the annual retreat (since 1878) of a secretive, elite club whose attendees “read much like a Bilderberg roll-call”, alongside Jones.

There, hidden among the redwoods of northern California, wealthy and politically connected men, many of them drunk, gathered for an elaborate ceremony centred on burning an effigy before a giant owl statue. Harmless elite play-acting, or dastardly occult ritual conducted by the secret rulers of the world? Ronson saw the former, Jones the latter.

In his short book on Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, The Elephant in the Room (2026), Ronson describes watching the alt-right move steadily closer to political power, propelled in part by “leading voice” Jones – who reportedly received a swift call from a newly elected Trump, thanking him for his support.

Despite a lingering “personal” fondness for his fellow Bohemian Grove crasher, Ronson calls him “basically the most irresponsible man I have ever met”, who “uses his powers to inflame paranoia” and “boldly makes stuff up to suit his weird agenda”.

Lizard people

I first became aware of David Icke, former semi-professional footballer and respected sports journalist, now a believer in giant lizards, in April 1991. I was at home, watching TV, not yet ten years old.

Icke was being interviewed live on a prime-time UK talk show, wearing an eye-wateringly lurid turquoise tracksuit. He had recently started to refer to himself as the “Son of the Godhead”. On air, he made a series of predictions about imminent and devastating natural catastrophes. The audience, not knowing what to make of it all, laughed.

Ronson describes the moment:

He said this with such ferocity, such conviction, that the audience stopped laughing for a moment […] You could feel it sweep across the television studio, sweep across the land, a stirring of some primordial paranoia. Could David Icke actually be a soothsayer?

But in fact, ridicule and opprobrium followed the segment. In the period after his very public shaming, Ronson records, Icke came to believe his mockery had been orchestrated by shadowy elites. He immersed himself in conspiracy literature, including on the Bilderberg Group.

Icke became convinced the global elite were not merely corrupt politicians or financiers, but something much stranger: shape-shifting reptilian beings manipulating humans across millennia. Ancient civilisations, occult rituals and modern political institutions were all folded into a single explanatory system.

The reptilian invaders, he concluded, were the secret rulers of the world.

Critics have long argued his talk of secret reptilian elites functions as a coded form of antisemitism, echoing older conspiratorial myths – including ideas traceable to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Yet Ronson suggests Icke genuinely believes the world is controlled by interdimensional lizard people.

The promise of hidden forces

This creates a puzzle. If someone claims giant lizards secretly control the planet, are we dealing with metaphor, coded prejudice, mental instability, opportunity or sincere belief? Increasingly, it seems the answer may be some unstable combination of them all.

Part of what makes Them feel so relevant now is that Ronson rejects the reassuring assumption that extremist or conspiratorial thinking falls outside the bounds of ordinary life.

Long before social media turned paranoia into a viable business model, he grasped that bizarre ideas do not emerge from nowhere. Rather, they are shaped by spectacle, distrust, insecurity and the seductive promise that hidden forces can explain an increasingly bewildering world – often with disastrous consequences.

Given Ronson’s record of books on topics just hitting (or about to explode into) the mainstream, the topic of his forthcoming one, to be published in August, is unsurprising: the masculinity crisis.

Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

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

However, the declassified documents the White House released alongside the speech do not support those claims.

As such, Trump’s speech may matter less for what it says about the 2020 election than what it portends for November’s Congressional midterm elections, which could result in huge losses for his Republican Party.

Critics say Trump is clearly setting the stage to delegitimise the vote, so he can contest the result if it doesn’t go his way.

Old claims, new packaging

Trump claimed his explosive allegations were backed up by a set of intelligence documents, which were newly declassified and posted on the White House website.

Trump said these documents revealed foreign interference in the 2020 election, Chinese access to voter data, and a cover-up by “rogue bureaucrats”. He also claimed illegal ballots were manufactured for his opponent, Joe Biden, and that more than 278,000 non-citizens were enrolled to vote.

Most of this is not new. Trump has made versions of these claims since his election defeat in 2020. More than 60 courts have rejected Trump’s claims of fraud in the election. Audits and recounts in contested states, including some run by Republicans, also confirmed the results.

Trump’s own former attorney-general, Bill Barr, found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the outcome, and his own cybersecurity agency called the election the “most secure” in US history.

In addition, the documents produced by the White House either do not support his claims or sit at odds with the speech.

What investigations have found

The official record is consistent. A joint report by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security found no evidence that any foreign government changed votes or blocked voting in the US in 2020 and 2022.

A declassified intelligence assessment in 2021 similarly found no sign that foreign actors touched any technical part of the voting process, including registration, ballots, counting or reporting.

This assessment also concluded Beijing did not actively interfere in the election. Even the one dissenting analyst in the report, whose “minority view” Trump’s speech presents as suppressed truth, agreed there was no evidence China interfered with US election systems. And, contrary to Trump’s view, that dissent was not “covered up”: it was published in the declassified assessment, alongside the majority analysis.

What the newly declassified documents do show is that China spied on campaigns and collected voter data. But collecting data is not changing votes or interfering in the process, and much of that data is commercially available. Trump’s speech blurs the distinction.

The claim about non-citizen voters follows a similar pattern: creating a false reality of widespread non-citizen voting fraud, when the real numbers are small and insignificant.

A Homeland Security program, for example, has checked about 60 million voter registrations and flagged roughly 24,000 possible non-citizens. This comes to about 0.04% of registered voters, a figure that shrinks further once false positives are removed.

State reviews have also flagged insignificant numbers of naturalised and native-born citizens on voter rolls. Utah audited its entire roll of more than two million voters over more than a year. After it found 27 confirmed non-citizens (about 0.001%), the Republican official who ran the audit said it showed no widespread problem.

The SAVE America Act would reshape who can vote

To address this issue, Trump urged Congress in his speech to pass the SAVE America Act.

The bill, which is currently stalled in the Senate, would require every American to show proof of citizenship (usually a passport or birth certificate) in person to register to vote, plus photo ID to cast a ballot.

While the bill is framed as an anti-fraud measure, electoral research suggests its primary impact would be widespread disenfranchisement.

There is direct evidence of this – a similar program has already been run at state level. When Kansas required documentary proof of citizenship for voter enrolment, it blocked about 31,000 eligible citizens (12% of all applicants) from registering. Federal courts struck it down.

Research also shows the costly administrative hurdles – the cost of applying for a passport, for instance – proposed in the SAVE America Act would considerably impact who can vote.

This burden would be toughest on young, rural and low-income voters, who make up a substantial proportion of US voters.

What’s at stake in November

Research on elections and electoral integrity shows that what leaders say about fraud is more damaging than actual electoral fraud itself.

Democracies depend on what political scientists call “losers’ consent”: the willingness of the losing side to accept the results of free and fair elections. Studies consistently find that when a candidate alleges fraud, trust falls sharply among their supporters. Some research also points to demobilisation and decreased turnout among those who adhere to these claims.

The claims keep working even after they are debunked. The supposed absence of evidence of voter fraud is treated as proof of a cover-up, not evidence of a system working as it should.

US intelligence agencies warned of exactly this in 2020, cautioning that fabricated, hard-to-disprove claims about election processes could damage public confidence more than any real attack.

The context surrounding Trump’s speech raises further concerns.

A week ago, Trump removed the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, the federal body that certifies voting machines and helps administer elections, leaving it unable to act.

He has now directed his intelligence chief to investigate and charge the “rogue bureaucrats” behind the alleged cover-up of a rigged 2020 election.

Asked whether Trump would accept November’s midterm results, his press secretary declined to answer.

For many, the combination of these moves – questioning the machines and voting processes, sidelining the agency that certifies them, threatening the officials who check the claims, and leaving open whether results will be accepted – point to a clear aim of delegitimising the upcoming elections.

The clearest test will come in November. Will Trump’s claims of fraud follow the evidence, or follow the results?

Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau, Research Fellow, Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, Flinders University

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

The US president has also begun to recycle threats he made earlier in the war. These include striking civilian targets and seizing Iran’s Kharg Island, which is host to most of its oil refining capacity.

Hope within the White House of achieving a deal to address Iran’s nuclear capabilities is fading. But Trump is hoping that his latest moves will force Iran to relinquish its control of the Strait of Hormuz, allowing global energy markets to return to normal.

There’s just one problem: none of these things have worked before, and there is no reason to think they will work now. In fact, Trump’s return to the same playbook that has previously failed to end the war on terms acceptable to the US shows just how limited his options have become.

The war began with an attempt by Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to damage Iran’s nuclear capabilities and perhaps topple its regime. However, the conflict’s centre of gravity has since shifted.

Nuclear matters have taken a back seat to the issue of whether shipping through the strait will in the future operate only under what Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has called “Iranian arrangements”. This means ships will only be allowed to transit on Tehran’s terms.

The US rejects the idea of Iranian control of the strait and wants a return to the situation of free transit that existed before the war. Yet, after all of these months, it has still not figured out a way to achieve this goal at an acceptable cost. To understand why, it is helpful to break down US options into three groups: military, diplomatic and economic.

Trump’s limited options

Militarily, nobody fully controls the Strait of Hormuz. It is a contested zone into which various countries can project military power. However, Iran does not need to control the strait entirely to achieve its aim. It only needs to continue to pose enough of a credible threat to vessels that they are too worried to transit.

Iran’s ability to menace shipping in the strait stems from its stockpile of missiles, drones and fast boats. These are relatively easy to conceal and launch, and the CIA assesses that Iran still has healthy supplies of them. To stop these capabilities, the US would have to seize a vast swathe of Iranian territory, risking great casualties. And even then, success would not be guaranteed.

Seizing Iran’s Kharg Island would likewise be highly risky. Occupying it may be easy initially, but any US forces stationed there would be exposed to Iranian attacks. A lengthy occupation would probably cost lives, making it hard to hold on to the island long enough to use as leverage in negotiations.

As cynical – and probably illegal – as military strikes on civilian targets would be, Trump perhaps thinks they might force Tehran to the table. But they also might not and risk kicking off a round of Iranian retaliation, which could do much greater damage to energy and civilian targets across the Gulf.

The risks and probable futility of these military options are what have pushed Trump to instead explore a diplomatic solution to the conflict over the past few months. But success here has also proven elusive, and it is likely to continue to do so.

The results of diplomacy usually reflect the state of the battlefield. With the US lacking any credible military option to neutralise Iranian influence in the Strait of Hormuz, there is little reason for Tehran to relinquish it.

Mohsen Rezaee, an adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, recently referred to Iran’s influence in the strait as “more important than dozens of nuclear bombs”. His statement reflects the importance the waterway has taken on in the country’s strategic calculations.

Being able to control shipping through the strait gives Iran leverage against the US. It will not give this up without a very good reason.

Economic tools

A lengthy economic blockade of Iranian ports is perhaps the most effective way Trump has to inflict pain on the Iranian government, whose domestic support may fray in a prolonged economic crisis. Economic grievances, including high inflation, contributed to a wave of unrest in Iran in early 2026 that was met with brutal repression.

However, the economic pain cuts both ways. While the blockade is in place, Iran is unlikely to allow oil and gas to transit the strait. That raises global energy prices, which is a perilous political proposition for Trump, too.

Imposing the blockade is costly in another way for the US – it requires a permanent military deployment to enforce. Given the competing demands made on the US military from other missions, such as deployments in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, this blockade cannot be kept in place forever.

Yet when the blockade is lifted and US forces leave the region, Iran will still be physically next to the Strait of Hormuz, able to menace shipping anew.

Ultimately, Trump has backed himself into a corner from which there is no apparent escape. For all the immense military power available to the US, there are limits to what it can achieve. In this war of his own making, Trump is running hard and fast into them.

Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University

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

The Sunshine Protection Act, which the House approved by a bipartisan vote of 308–117, would implement year-round daylight saving time nationwide. This would effectively extend the current eight-month period of daylight saving to cover the four winter months, in which standard time is observed.

Having now passed the House, it will head to the Senate, where it is likely to encounter stiff opposition even from some Republicans.

President Donald Trump promised before his second inauguration to “eliminate” the “inconvenient, and very costly” twice-yearly clock changes.

But it may not be so easy. Debate has raged for decades between sleep scientists and industry groups as to whether the time change should be abolished in favour of year-round standard time (with brighter mornings and darker evenings), or year-round daylight saving time (with darker mornings and brighter evenings).

While it may appear to be an academic choice between the two, they would have radically different impacts on the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Daylight saving’s moment in the sun

The debate over whether or not daylight saving is worth the trouble has progressed little in the past century. Senators as far back as 1919 argued over whether or not the benefits of daylight saving time for urban workers outweighed drawbacks for farmers.

The cost of shifting between the two time zones each year has been estimated to cost the economy over half a billion dollars annually. The time changes cause a rise in heart attacks, car accidents and hospital admissions, though an extra hour of evening daylight can also bring increased leisure time, consumer spending and potential energy savings.

Modern polls consistently show that Americans abhor the inconvenience of the biannual clock change but also that they can’t agree on a permanent solution. According to a YouGov poll in February 2026, while 64% of Americans want to abolish clock changes, 43% want to see year-round daylight saving time and 28% want to see year-round standard time. Almost a third are undecided. In March 2025, Trump himself called it a “50–50 issue”.

During his time in the Senate, Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly introduced the Sunshine Protection Act to make daylight saving time permanent. The Senate surprised many when it passed the act in 2022, though it failed to reach a House vote at the time.

In the past seven years, 19 states have approved similar proposals that would authorise permanent, year-round daylight saving time if permitted by Congress. Proponents of such a system point to possible economic benefits and suggest it could lead to energy savings, lower crime and fewer road accidents.

However, leading sleep research associations such as the American Academy of Sleep Medicine instead support year-round standard time and oppose year-round daylight saving time on the grounds that the increased disconnect between the sun and people’s body clocks in winter would be particularly unhealthy.

Our analysis at the United States Studies Centre in 2024 showed that if clock changes were abolished in favour of year-round daylight saving time, 87% of the contiguous urban US population (around 70% of the total population) would experience sunrise after 8am in winter.

Residents of New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Denver and Tampa, among many others, would all see winter sunrises that occur after 8.15am. Indeed, close to half of the over 2,500 urban areas in the contiguous United States would see sunrise after 8.30am on the winter solstice.

Such late sunrise times are currently almost unheard of in the United States. Just 3% of the contiguous urban US population currently experiences sunrises after 8am.

Sunset times would still be no later than 6.30pm in the vast majority of the country at the solstice under year-round daylight saving time, limiting its winter evening benefits.

The misalignment between clocks and circadian rhythms as a result of artificially dark mornings is associated with a host of negative health outcomes, particularly for adolescents.

Given close to 60% of US workers depart for work prior to 8am, the impacts of such late sunrises on a population level would likely be significant. The average school start time of 8am would also mean most children wake, go to school and start class in the dark in winter.

By contrast, year-round standard time would produce brighter mornings and earlier sunsets than under year-round daylight saving time. However, it would sacrifice the popular extra hour of daylight in summer evenings that is produced by switching to daylight saving in summer.

The current daylight saving regime attempts to strike a balance between the two extremes, with standard time used during the darker winter months and daylight saving time used during summer to capitalise on the longer days.

The lack of consensus over whether this flexibility is worth the cost of resetting clocks twice yearly has meant the system has endured, though 16 US states have considered time zone legislation this year alone.

A recurring nightmare

Perhaps most surprising about the concept of year-round daylight saving time is that the United States has already tried it. In 1973, Congress authorised a two-year trial of year-round daylight saving in an attempt to save energy during the global oil crisis.

Yet initial public support for the trial of close to 80% almost halved by the end of the 1973–74 winter amid safety concerns for children and criticisms from the construction and agricultural industries. The trial was abandoned prematurely, and American clocks have changed twice a year ever since.

Lawmakers now find themselves once again navigating a fierce debate between whether to adhere to year-round standard or daylight time. But with Americans so divided on the issue and historical precedent for how quickly support for year-round daylight saving time can collapse, the Senate would do well to take its time deciding whether to make nine in 10 urban Americans experience winter sunrises after 8am – or whether permanent standard time would instead help the country to sleep better at night.

Samuel Garrett, Senior Research Associate, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

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

Thiel, a German-American entrepreneur and activist, was a co-founder of PayPal and software firm Palantir. Revelations about the society – known as “Dialog” – have attracted widespread attention. And Thiel himself gave a confidential lecture series in San Francisco this year, in which he framed issues of politics and technology in biblical terms.

Thiel has said he believes that humankind faces existential threats from nuclear war or runaway artificial intelligence (AI) that could lead to “Armageddon”. In such an end-times era, so the thinking goes, only the most ingenious – like those in the secret society – would survive.

Thiel is an extreme, but by no means isolated, case. Other powerful people in politics and technology are viewing today’s world through a lens of civilisational crisis and impending catastrophe.

Politics of the end times

Over the centuries, political leaders have often invoked fears of decline and collapse. In ancient times, Augustus, the first Roman emperor, championed the narrative that Rome faced moral collapse to justify concentrating power in his own hands. Yet the current moment of “end-times politics” is different on several fronts. Threats, both real and imagined, spread faster than ever, diffused through social media algorithms that favour hysteria and conspiracy.

In Silicon Valley, influential figures routinely discuss AI as either humanity’s salvation or an extinction event. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has described the AI race as “our Oppenheimer moment”, when the world’s rich nations must decide whether to halt the development of a dangerous technology or tip the balance of power in its favour.

Yet the phenomenon extends beyond eccentric tech circles. End-times narratives have made their way into the halls of power, as political figures seize the opportunity to propagate radical politics.

US military personnel have filed a large number of complaints, stating that their commanders have been using biblical end-times rhetoric to justify the US attacks on Iran. Their leadership reportedly made reference to the Armageddon, viewing the war in Iran as a necessary step in bringing about the return of Christ.

This occurs in a context where the Trump administration has been catering to the Christian right, particularly evangelicals, as a major constituency for its “spiritual warfare”. The US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, in particular has been portraying himself as an instrument of god in an existential civilisational battle for Christianity.

Hegseth and other central figures have reportedly been stacking their departments with evangelicals and Christian Zionists. These instances can be viewed as elements of a larger shift, where political and corporate leaders mix their interpretation of Christianity with beliefs about US supremacy.

Radical minds, radical politics

Trump’s threats towards Iran, including his decree in April that “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”, indicate the consequences of this myth-making. It paves the way for radical politics in the US, and also beyond.

The Trump administration has claimed that Europe is facing continental decline and “civilizational erasure” due to immigration and European integration. In the same vein, Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, has sounded the alarm about the UK facing “societal collapse”.

Research has shown that people are more willing to support extraordinary measures when they believe they face an existential threat. It has also been shown that political leaders’ psychological dispositions matter more in times of uncertainty. The unforeseeable effects of technological and environmental transformation create risks and anxiety – and the danger is that leaders treat opponents, social movements or minority groups as mythical foes.

End-times politics then becomes a struggle over the definition of the ultimate threat to humankind. We are in a time when humans face multiple risks. These worldviews eventually determine how national politics and geopolitics evolve.

There is another reason to pay attention. For much of the modern era, the most influential people were elected leaders and state officials. Today, a novel type of leader has emerged: technology executives with wealth and media influence. Their influence can extend deep into the state – symbolised by Elon Musk’s role in the US Department of Government Efficiency and the critical role of SpaceX in US global strategy.

For a long time, scholars explained global politics in terms of institutions and structural relations, and globalisation through business interests. Now, the future of both increasingly depends on the psychology of a small political and corporate elite.

End-times leaders will exaggerate certain threats while downplaying others. Often, technology executives will establish links between a prosperous future and the necessity of disruptive innovation. US venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has been a proponent of “technological accelerationism” – the idea that unregulated technological development is the only way to overcome the world’s existential problems.

The challenge is distinguishing between genuine threats and narratives that amplify fear while obscuring more pressing problems. At a time when the debate is saturated with predictions of collapse, it may be more important than ever to focus on the risks that are supported by evidence – the climate crisis and an erosion of democratic systems, for example.

On the question of whether technology can overcome climate change and bring world peace, it might be wise not to take the word of tech billionaires. After all, Thiel has recently been hedging his bets between a bunker in New Zealand and a refuge in Javier Milei’s Argentina.

Joscha Abels, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Institute of Political Science, University of Tübingen and Juliana Tappe Ortiz, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Institute of Political Science, University of Tübingen

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

Rather than simply suggesting Talarico is weak on border security or inflation economics, Paxton’s campaign has taken a different rhetorical approach. To quote Fox News host Jesse Watters, “The major factor in this race … is whether Tala-freak-o is a vegan.”

Though Talarico maintains he is not vegan, Paxton has referred to his opponent as “Tofu Talarico.”

Paxton and Watters aren’t the only ones making these dietary accusations.

Earlier this year, after Talarico ordered a potato, egg and cheese taco from a restaurant in Austin, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott posted to his campaign social platform X account: “Homie is not beating the vegetarian allegations.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz joked that if a soy latte could speak, “that would be Democrat James Talarico.” Even President Donald Trump has chimed in: “He’s a vegan in Texas, and you can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas.”

Again, Talarico denies being a secret vegetarian or vegan. “I’m an eighth-generation Texan,” he has said. “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”

The accusations likely stem from a 2022 appearance with the Texas Humane Legislation Network when Talarico suggested Americans reduce their meat consumption for climate reasons. His girlfriend follows a plant-based diet. Nonetheless, Talarico says that his campaign “runs on barbecue.”

As communication scholars who study the symbolic roles of meat and meat-eating in political communication, we see the construction of “Tofu Talarico” not as a one-off political jab but as part of a more sophisticated rhetorical strategy by which politicians appeal to voters.

Attacks on Talarico show how, across American politics, what people eat is a metaphoric marker of who they are, from political affiliation to regional belonging and cultural values. Eating meat – or not – plays a huge role in the political process, and accusations of meat avoidance, regardless of whether they’re true, can be a potent rhetorical weapon.

Meat, metaphor and political communication

Communication scholarship shows that metaphors, when a word or phrase denoting one object or idea is used in place of another, are more than literary decoration; they shape the way we perceive reality, acting as part of a “conceptual system” that enables snap judgments and decision-making.

As mental shortcuts, or heuristic devices, metaphors are common in political communication. They’re a means to “see something in terms of something else.”

For example, in the case of Paxton and Talarico, allegations of vegetarianism and veganism are not about Talarico’s nutritional profile or even his environmental ethics. Here, “vegan” and its analogues metaphorically stand in for weakness and nonconformity, whereas “meat” and its affiliates stand in for strength, traditionalism and the stereotypical Texan way.

This usage is consistent with what food politics researchers call the “sexual politics” of meat, wherein meat imagery is often used in displays of traditional masculinity. This is evident in other jabs levied at Talarico. For example, Watters linked Talarico’s diet to his sexual orientation, joking on Fox News that Talarico was a “gay vegan” with a fake girlfriend.

Dietary demographics and election modeling

Dietary preference also links to key political demographics. For example, political scientists have explored whether the concept of a Republican vegan is an oxymoron due to the deep entrenchment of meat-eating and meat production in primarily conservative regions.

Overwhelmingly, vegans tend to be women, young and liberal. Across all political identifications, being male and white correlates with higher meat consumption.

Even the choice of where to purchase meat can be an electoral measure. Political journalist Dave Wasserman has suggested that the 2012 election was a contest between “well-educated, Democratic-trending Whole Foods markets and down-home, Republican-trending Cracker Barrel outposts.”

Meatless political appeals

The “meatless” have long been framed as social and political threats, levied in discussions of whether they should be politically elevated or subordinated. Historically, Western norms during the 19th and 20th centuries held that to not eat meat is odd at best, and suspicious at worst.

In the late 1800s, colonialism in Asia was partially justified on the grounds that Asian men were but “effeminate rice eaters” who, according to 19th-century neurologist James Leonard Corning, lacked “the intellectual vigor of flesh-eating men.”

Negative appeals to veganism again flourished in 2019 after Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” a resolution proposing to combat climate change. Conservative senators like Joni Ernst and Marsha Blackburn attacked the environmentally progressive initiative as a “war on meat,” posing an existential threat to meat eaters and cattle farmers. Notably, the Green New Deal did not contain meat mandates. In the Green New Deal discussion, though, this hypothetical meat ban effectively functioned as metaphorical shortcut for progressive political overreach.

This demarcation is not confined to one political party. In a Democratic primary debate in 2019, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker – a vegan since 2014 – was asked by a debate moderator if, as president, he would demand Americans follow his diet. Booker, surprised by the personal question, said no. He did not win the nomination.

More meat, less elite

Meat, or lack thereof, has gathered more significance in the second Trump presidency via Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again initiative. Kennedy, who touts his “carnivore diet,” says he “only (eats) meat or fermented foods.” He has even modified the food pyramid – the Department of Agriculture’s visual nutrition guide – shifting red meat from a food to be consumed sparingly to a high dietary priority.

Meanwhile, multiple Republican-leaning states have banned cell-cultured meat, or meat produced in a lab, for not being “real” and, so, being dangerous. After signing a ban on cultured meat, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared that the bill represented a battle against the global elite and its “authoritarian goals.”

2026 and beyond

While the beef between Paxton and Talarico will likely resolve after the 2026 midterms, appeals to meat, meat eaters and meat-eating in U.S. political communication will not.

As available meat substitutes increase, economic burdens on ranchers rise and debates over the meat industry’s impact on climate change intensify, we expect meat’s culture war cachet to surge too.

“Tofu Talarico” is just one of what will be numerous examples of meat symbolizing what the future of the country, its leaders and its citizens should be.

S. Marek Muller, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Texas State University and David Rooney, Associate Professor of Practice, University of Wyoming

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

In a meeting of the pair that lacked the acrimony of earlier encounters, Trump added that Ukraine has “such great people,” too. He has expressed different views privately in the past.

But what do everyday Ukrainians think of Trump?

For more than a decade, we have organized and conducted public opinion polls in Ukraine. While polling has become more difficult since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, our surveys have provided a window into Ukrainian public opinion in the territories not occupied by Russia.

In our latest survey, we drilled down on how Ukrainians felt toward Trump and his administration’s diplomatic efforts, and toward Americans more generally.

Fielded by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, we arranged for a computer-aided telephone survey of 1,801 Ukrainians across government-controlled Ukraine from June 9-26, 2026.

Here’s what we learned:

Trump is seen as more enemy than friend

Trump has openly expressed his admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin on many occasions. When he returned to office, Trump initiated a sharp break from the policies of his predecessor Joe Biden. The U.S. now sends less military aid to Ukraine, although U.S.-made arms continue to flow to the country thanks to European funding. A promised US$400 million military aid package has not yet been released.

Trump famously chastised Zelenskyy in a 2025 Oval Office meeting and has pressured the Ukrainian president to give up land to satisfy Putin’s territorial desire for all of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Yet Washington continues to provide Ukraine with intelligence, which is used by Kyiv for targeting its middle- and long-range drone strikes inside Russia. Washington also still enforces significant sanctions against Russia, including Moscow’s oil exports, although it has granted specific waivers of late.

To understand what Ukrainians make of all this, we asked them a direct question about Trump: Is he a friend or an enemy of their country, or a bit of both?

The results showed that only 17% of Ukrainians surveyed consider Trump a friend. More than double that consider him an enemy of Ukraine. Almost a quarter say he’s a bit of both, with a similar percentage responding “don’t know.”

Few have confidence in US negotiators

In April 2026, Zelenskyy invited Trump’s envoys – his son-in-law Jared Kushner and a real estate friend Steve Witkoff – to come to Ukraine “to see, to understand and to explain to President Trump” what the country needs.

It was, Zelenskyy added, “disrespectful” to confine their visits to Moscow but not Kyiv. So far, however, Kushner and Witkoff have declined to visit Kyiv. A U.S. administration official recently told The New York Times that Kushner and Witkoff were prepared to travel to Russia and Ukraine if there was something new to discuss, but that they would not travel “for a photo op.”

When asked about their “confidence in the U.S. team that negotiates with Putin to end the war,” just a third of Ukrainians expressed some confidence. A clear majority (57%) said they had no confidence in Kushner and Witkoff, and a paltry 2% had high confidence in U.S.-led negotiations.

Mixed feelings about US global role

The conflict in Ukraine has been overshadowed of late by the Iran war. Many of the U.S. Patriot missiles that Ukraine says it needs to protect itself from Russian attacks were abruptly diverted to the Middle East after the U.S.-Israeli attacks of Feb. 28, 2026. As a consequence, Ukrainian stocks have run out and more Russian missiles are getting through and killing Ukrainians; June saw the highest number of civilian deaths in three years.

Ukraine and its allies had hoped the U.S.-Iran ceasefire would see the European war return to the top of Washington’s foreign policy agenda. But the ceasefire remains fragile, with the U.S. stuck in a condition between war and peace. Zelenskyy recently complained: “Unfortunately, we are in the queue of wars.”

We wanted to know how the U.S. administration’s actions in the Middle East – as well as other interventions elsewhere – had influenced Ukrainians. Asked how they feel about the U.S. role in world affairs today, just 7% of respondents to our survey said they felt positively toward Washington. A quarter (26%) felt negatively, with the clear majority (62%) saying they had mixed feelings.

Warmer views of Americans, generally

Many foreign policy experts in the U.S. and Europe have decried the long-term damage the Trump administration is doing to the image of Americans in world affairs. To test the latter proposition, we also asked Ukrainians if they now viewed Americans as friends or enemies of their country.

The results decisively show that Ukrainians still consider Americans in general to be a friend, with a solid majority of 73% judging them as such. Only 4% consider them as enemy, with 11% indicating it is a bit of both.

We believe this is a stark display of confidence in the American people that contrasts with Ukrainians’ negative view of Trump. It also suggests that ordinary Ukrainians are capable of distinguishing between the policies of the current U.S. president and his advisers, and the country’s people as a whole.

Russia’s invasion in Ukraine has developed into a protracted war of endurance with no clear end in sight. Amid continued fighting and mounting deaths, Ukrainians appear pessimistic about current U.S. efforts to mediate between the two warring countries.

Washington needs the trust of Ukrainians if it is to succeed in mediating peace in Europe. That an overwhelming majority of people there view Americans as friends presents an opportunity for U.S. leaders to regain their confidence – even if Ukrainian’s opinion of current U.S. leadership is low.

Gerard Toal, Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech; John O’Loughlin, Professor of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder, and Sarah Wilson Sokhey, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Colorado Boulder

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

These are the most severe violations yet of the Memorandum of Understanding that came into effect on June 17, and may signal an end to the truce.

For the first time since the initial ceasefire on April 8, US President Donald Trump has definitively stated the ceasefire is over.

These escalating tensions suggest the ceasefire will not turn into a permanent peace. The US is being drawn into a long war with Iran, against its will.

Fighting for control

The key sticking point that has driven the latest round of strikes is Iran’s determination to impose control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The Memorandum of Understanding stated Iran would use its “best efforts” to ensure safe passage of commercial vessels through the strait with no charge for 60 days.

However, tensions immediately spiked over ships using the “Omani route” through the strait. This is a US-endorsed maritime corridor that hugs the coast of Oman and involves international coordination.

Iran wants vessels to use a second route that passes along the Iranian coast and is closely monitored and controlled by Iran.

The strait is too wide for Iran to maintain control over both routes without the use, or threatened use, of force.

Iran has shown it is willing to use live fire to deter vessels from sailing the Omani route.

A battle of different strengths

One reason it has been so hard for the ceasefire to hold is that US and Iran have different strengths. Neither sees themselves as having surrendered.

The US is militarily strong, with overwhelming military capability.

But it has weak political resolve. It does not want to stay in this war or put boots on the ground in Iran. The US does not want to expend its military arsenal in a long war, or focus its global military efforts on the Iranian regime.

So, while the US has the military capability, it is highly unlikely to force regime change in Iran or forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian regime’s greatest strength is its political resolve. It is determined to survive.

Since key political leaders were killed at the start of this war, the regime has become even more hardline and militaristic. The current regime is ideological, savvy and ruthless.

Iran is determined to show the US and the region that it is in control and will not back down. It is willing to bear staggering economic and security costs to achieve this aim.

Iran’s resolve is shown in its willingness to threaten civilian vessels in the strait with light, cost-effective drones and attack boats.

The Iranian regime’s main weakness is economic. Iran has suffered massive economic and military damage as a result of this war. It could not weather another long US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and sustained US air strikes on infrastructure and military targets.

The power of domestic politics

The very different domestic landscapes in the US and Iran are driving both parties closer to a breakdown of the ceasefire.

In Iran, as noted, the war has led to a hardened regime with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) more firmly in control of political power. Iranian leaders who even talk to US counterparts, let alone make concessions, may risk being branded political traitors by some IRGC elements.

As history has shown with the assassinations of President Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981 and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Israel in 1995, leaders can put their own life on the line if they make agreements with counterparts considered sworn enemies by hardliners in their own country.

This drives Iran to focus on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and appearing uncompromising, rather than capitulating to enjoy the economic benefits of sanctions relief and the promised US$300 billion reconstruction fund.

Trump, on the other hand, does not want to return to full-scale war due to a lack of domestic support.

However, Trump is also influenced by those in the US who do not want to see the US walk away from the war with Iran with no agreement on the nuclear issues, and Iran in full control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump expects Iran to cooperate with the Memorandum of Understanding due to its promised economic benefits. But he has vastly underestimated Iran’s determination to assert dominance over the strait and control in the region.

What will happen from here?

Trump’s reticence for full-scale escalation means we are unlikely to return to the war of February 28.

Iran’s determination to show control means we are also not likely to see the ceasefire hold or a substantial peace agreement forthcoming.

The most likely scenario is we will return to the status quo from the first ceasefire of April 8 until June 17. This was a precarious truce, below the threshold of all-out war, but also not a substantive peace.

Tit-for-tat strikes will continue over coming months. The Strait of Hormuz will remain partially closed with security uncertain.

As I have previously noted, this is more akin to a frozen conflict than a full ceasefire or a return to full-scale war.

Jessica Genauer, Academic Director, School of Public Policy and Government, UNSW Sydney

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

On July 7, everyone in France was waiting expectantly for a Paris appeal court to decide on whether Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), would be allowed to run in the 2027 presidential election after her conviction for embezzlement of European funds.

But just as the European media machine was gearing up for the verdict, across the Channel, Nigel Farage – the leader of Reform UK – announced on X that he would be making a “statement about his future”. This came after multiple allegations of undeclared gifts and an ongoing investigation into possible money laundering. Farage maintains that he has done nothing wrong.

The parallels were impossible to ignore. Here were two prominent European populist rightwing politicians whose political careers were being threatened by extensive and well-documented corruption claims. How would they respond?

We did not have to wait long to find out. Only hours after the verdict, Le Pen announced that she was now officially a candidate for the 2027 presidential election. Despite the fact that her initial conviction was upheld on appeal, she intends to contest the appeal court’s decision. This means she retains her presumption of innocence and is able to proceed with her election campaign as if nothing happened.

It is a remarkable sleight-of-hand; Le Pen has found the narrowest of legal loopholes through which to pass. In her announcement, she presented her decision as a democratic one: the French people should judge her, not the courts.

In the meantime, Farage told his supporters that he is stepping down from his parliamentary seat of Clacton after being made the subject of a parliamentary inquiry into his alleged improprieties. This will trigger a byelection – but, in an equally remarkable gambling act, he plans to run himself in the hope of winning back his seat. Again, he is suggesting that this means letting the voters decide whether he is guilty or not.

Le Pen and Farage are both reading from a well-thumbed playbook. The people v the courts; voters v judges; the “transparent” legitimacy of the ballot box v the “opacity” of lengthy legal and regulatory proceedings. All of these tropes will be familiar to observers of populist politics in the United States, Hungary or Turkey.

The bigger question is: do voters care whether populist politicians break the rules? Le Pen and Farage are hoping that, like Donald Trump, they can simply swat aside legal and regulatory processes on the road to their ultimate electoral triumph.

Question of standards

There are many reasons to take Le Pen and Farage’s arguments with a pinch of salt. A closer analysis of the relationship between the populist right and corruption reveals a more complicated picture, perhaps especially in France, which is gearing up for its most important electoral cycle in 2027.

At face value, Le Pen has little to worry about since French politics is famously corrupt. Every French president of the Fifth Republic, except Charles de Gaulle and Emmanuel Macron, has a major corruption scandal to their name. Both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy have been found guilty of corruption by French courts. They have been joined by countless MPs and mayors over the years who have been convicted of similar crimes.

Until recently, this level of corruption was widely tolerated. French voters largely accepted that politicians would embezzle money, employ their family members on the public purse, or swing large public contracts for their benefit. They were more concerned with ideological faultlines than political integrity – and they displayed little of the hand-wringing that accompanied equivalent scandals like Watergate in the US in the 1970s or the “cash-for-questions” affair in the UK in the 1990s.

Yet this tolerance has begun to dissipate in recent years. Public anger towards politicians has reached unprecedented levels, most notably in recent protest movements such as the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests), and the deep personal hostility many French voters feel towards Macron.

Le Pen and the RN have provided a highly effective electoral outlet for this anger, and they have made much of their commitment to probity in public office. Le Pen even said herself that she would not run for election while wearing an electronic tag, and for many years the party campaigned for politicians found guilty of corruption to be banned from public office for life.

Rocky road to the Elysée Palace

But Le Pen and the RN’s role as standard-bearers of the “ordinary” French person’s rage against a “rigged” and “corrupt” political system is now under threat. By effectively stamping her dynastic authority on the party that was previously run by her father, and by blocking the rise of her young protege Jordan Bardella, Le Pen has boxed herself into a corner.

Her only way out is by the ballot box. Yet the chances of her winning the presidential election remain slim. She – and her party – lack the necessary support to win in the second round of the elections where vote transfers from eliminated parties and candidates determine the overall result, and she still suffers from a credibility deficit in comparison to more mainstream politicians.

She may well have made matters worse by giving her opponents a powerful stick with which to beat her. Even in France, accusations of corruption can be hard to shake off. And, as Le Pen and Farage know from long experience, it is just as possible to lose at the ballot box as it is to win.

Emile Chabal, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Edinburgh

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

That’s after FIFA made the decision to suspend a one-game ban that had been triggered by a red card against Balogun in the US team’s last match against Bosnia and Herzegovina.

According to multiple media reports – including in The New York Times, The Guardian and Associated Press – this decision came after US President Donald Trump personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino to lobby for the reversal.

The US team, perhaps unsurprisingly, welcomed the ruling, which could significantly improve their chances against Belgium. As did Trump himself, who posted on Truth Social:

Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!

But in a statement, the Royal Belgian Football Association said it was “astonished” by FIFA’s decision. It argued the decision ran counter to the rules of the tournament, where a red card automatically results in a player being suspended for a team’s next match.

The association said it was investigating “all potential options”, which presumably includes legal action.

Sport has always been deeply political, but this normally occurs off the field of play. If true, reports Trump has used political power to change on-field decisions signal a dangerous precedent and the risk of changing the entire system from a fair game into an exercise of raw influence.

A controversial red card

Before he was sent off with a red card, Balogun had scored the US team’s first goal of the match, ultimately helping them secure a 2–0 victory over Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Round of 32.

In the 64th minute, Balogun stepped on the ankle of Bosnia and Herzegovina defender Tarik Muharemović during what has been described as a normal, 50–50 challenge.

The on-field referee, Raphael Claus from Brazil, initially let the play continue unpenalised. However, an experienced video assistant referee (VAR), Juan Ernesto Soto Arévalo from Venezuela, recommended an on-field review for “serious foul play” based on the still images of the ankle bend.

Balogun was given a red card, despite many critics claiming it was both a VAR overreach, and too harsh a penalty for the tackle.

A red card triggers an automatic suspension from the next game, and there is no right to appeal unless there are exceptional circumstances (such as the referee issuing the card to the wrong player).

What’s Article 27?

In its decision to allow Balogun to play against Belgium, FIFA has invoked Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code. This allows FIFA to fully or partially suspend a disciplinary measure.

Article 27 has been used before. But importantly, this was done outside of the tournament, to allow one of the most famous names in football to play in the 2026 World Cup: Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo.

Ronaldo received a red card in a World Cup qualifier match in 2025, resulting in a three-match ban. However, the FIFA Disciplinary Committee allowed him to sit out the first of his three match bans last year, and suspended the other two under a one-year probation period.

While Ronaldo’s treatment is not unique, what is lacking is a transparent process for the teams to challenge the ban, to preserve both the independence of referees and the integrity of the competition.

Regardless of whether the referee’s call was “right” in Balogun’s case, political interference in on-field decisions should be robustly resisted to protect the integrity of sport.

Bending the rules

International sport is not immune from changing its own rules – even mid-tournament – to create a “fair” outcome (that is, to benefit the star athlete who can draw fans). Think of the “wild cards” in tennis and athletics that override selection requirements.

There is even precedent in football, before red cards led to an automatic one-game ban. In 1962, Brazilian star Garrincha was given a red card in the men’s World Cup semi-final against Chile.

Brazil’s prime minister sent an official telegram directly to the FIFA President, arguing Garrincha shouldn’t be penalised. The Chilean president co-signed a petition pleading with FIFA to let Garrincha play. Garrincha’s ban for the final was lifted, and he played a pivotal role in their victory.

An American by ‘accident’

The context around Balogun even being eligible to play for the US – as a child of two Nigerian parents, raised in the United Kingdom – makes Trump’s reported intervention even more startling.

In 2001, airline employees prevented Balogun’s mother, seven-months pregnant with him at the time, from flying home to London from New York, where she had been visiting.

Shortly afterward, Balogun was born in New York – and automatically granted US citizenship under the constitutionally protected “birthright” provisions.

In a stroke of irony, President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship was struck down by the US Supreme Court only days before Balogun’s goal helped the US defeat Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The spirit of the game

Sport is fundamentally about the rules of the game. The “spirit of sport” demands these rules are fairly and impartially applied.

While FIFA is technically acting within its own rules to change the referee’s decision, political interference destroys the integrity of sport. How can we expect that integrity issues – from fraud, to racism, to match manipulation or sexual assault – will be addressed, to support those with the least power?

Catherine Ordway, Visiting Scholar, School of Business, CBR, UNSW Sydney and James Connor, Associate Professor in Sociology, UNSW Sydney

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

This news has raised the ire of Trump’s critics. Juliana Stratton, the Illinois lieutenant governor and a Democratic Senate candidate, accused Trump of using his public office “to make billions while American families struggle to afford their basic needs. His infinite greed is disgusting.”

The White House denied Trump or his family has engaged in conflicts of interest. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people”.

But how exactly has Trump earned so much money from cryptocurrency?

How does cryptocurrency work?

A cryptocurrency is simply digital money. It differs from traditional money in two ways.

First, traditional currencies are issued by central banks of each country, while cryptocurrencies are issued according to rules written in computer code.

The computer code behind crypto may be controlled by a company. Or the code may be predefined ahead of time (for example, in a “white paper” that sets up the algorithm behind crypto) and controlled by no one at all.

Second, transactions in traditional money happen via the banking system, while transactions in cryptocurrency happen on blockchains, which are databases that store information on who owns what.

Bitcoin is the oldest and best-known cryptocurrency, with a decentralised structure and no single entity controlling its issuance or making profits off it.

Aside from Bitcoin, there are tens of thousands of privately issued coins, which run on public blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana. But private coins, unlike Bitcoin, are issued by private companies to make money.

Transactions on a blockchain can involve transferring many different versions of private crypto assets – anything that can be written into a piece of code, regardless of whether that digital asset has any value at all.

What are the Trump’s crypto businesses?

Trump and his family are involved in three kinds of digital assets: the $TRUMP memecoin, a governance token called WLFI, and a stablecoin called USD1.

Memecoins are coins with no real business behind them. They derive their value from investor attention – a digital equivalent of buying a kid’s scribble because it’s your kid, not because the scribble has value in the outside world.

Stablecoins, by contrast, are a digital equivalent of a fiat currency like USD. For example, each unit of USD1 is designed to be worth exactly US$1. To maintain this value, stablecoins are typically backed by short-term government bonds and cash.

Governance tokens are yet another type of coin, which give holders voting rights over a crypto project, but no ownership over the project itself, and no claim on its profits.

The $TRUMP memecoin launched three days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. About 80% of its supply is held by Trump-affiliated companies, which also collect a fee every time the coin changes hands.

WLFI and USD1 are issued by World Liberty Financial, cofounded in 2024 by the Trump family and business partners. A Trump business entity owns about 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of net proceeds from token sales.

Trump’s annual financial disclosure shows World Liberty brought him more than $500 million last year, while the memecoin business brought in more than $600 million. Forbes now estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.

How do you make a billion dollars from tokens?

Let’s start with the stablecoin, USD1.

As a stablecoin issuer, you take in dollars, hand out coins, and use the dollars to buy US Treasury bonds. Then, you earn interest on Treasury bonds. The more coins you issue, the greater the amount of money you earn interest on. So the main trick is to convince someone to use your stablecoin and hand in the dollars to you, preferably in large amounts.

For USD1, that someone handing in the dollars was Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, which had pleaded guilty to US money-laundering violations in 2023. Binance reportedly wrote the computer code underpinning USD1 and promoted it on its platform.

Then, in May 2025, MGX – an Abu Dhabi state fund chaired by the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan – invested $2 billion in Binance and paid in USD1. This instantly created $2 billion of interest-earning reserves for the Trump venture, worth an estimated $80 million a year.

Binance today holds 87% of all USD1.

The Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its lawsuit against Binance days after the exchange listed USD1, and in October 2025 Trump pardoned Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao. A Wall Street Journal investigation later revealed Sheikh Tahnoon had also secretly bought a 49% stake in World Liberty itself for about $500 million, four days before Trump’s inauguration.

The $TRUMP memecoin required even less effort.

With memecoin, you simply let speculators buy a digital asset that is effectively pure hype packaged as a currency. You make money on every trade. And because anyone, anywhere can buy the coin anonymously, legal experts warn that it operates as a channel for untraceable gifts to Trump and his family.

Some buyers openly spent $148 million in memecoin for seats at a dinner with Trump.

Like most memecoins, $TRUMP collapsed after the initial hype: it now trades at about 98% below its peak.

A Reuters investigation of Trump and his family’s four main crypto ventures – World Liberty, the memecoin business, American Bitcoin and AI Financial Corp – found the family has gained about $2.3 billion since Trump retook office, almost exactly matching the amount lost by more than a million investors.

Without precedent

Some of the crypto regulations issued under Trump are good policy.

For example, the GENIUS Act clarifies the rules of the game for all – something the crypto industry had sought for years.

But all the useful crypto regulation is at risk of being undermined by stories of special favours and institutionalised corruption in Trump’s crypto ventures.

It’s also likely to undermine the US reputation for the rule of law, as Trump’s crypto dealings are without precedent in US history: anyone seeking presidential favour can simply buy the president’s coin.

Marta Khomyn, Senior Lecturer, Finance and Data Analytics, Adelaide University

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

In Trump v. Cook, the justices took up the case involving Trump’s decision to terminate Lisa Cook, a member of the powerful policymaking Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. On June 29, 2026, Cook and the Fed prevailed. In a 5-4 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court upheld a lower court’s decision to keep Cook in her role while her case proceeds on whether she was terminated “for cause.”

The high court also held that Trump didn’t meet the due process requirements for dismissing a board governor when he “fired” her via a social media post. Trump claimed Cook had committed mortgage fraud, even though she had not been found guilty of any wrongdoing.

As a scholar of employment law, I had expected the court to side with Cook to some degree. But other recent Supreme Court cases have gone the other way, protecting the president’s authority to fire other high-level government officials at will.

Same court, different opinions

The court’s Cook decision and its constraints on presidential power stand in contrast to its rulings regarding other federal agencies. On the same day, the conservative majority sided with Trump when it ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that a “for cause” provision limiting his right to fire the head of the Federal Trade Commission was unconstitutional.

In earlier rulings, the court similarly affirmed a president’s right to fire leadership at the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

As I’ve previously written, it’s important to remember that a vast majority of U.S. workers are employed at will, which means they can be fired for any reason and terminated from their jobs with no advance notice. By contrast, Cook’s position is covered by the Federal Reserve Act, which states that board members are appointed by the president to 14-year terms. They can be terminated by the president, but only for cause.

The same was true, however, at the Federal Trade Commission, where agency heads can be terminated only for cause. But in the Slaughter case, the conservative majority deemed the cause provision unconstitutional.

In Cook’s case, the government didn’t try to argue that the “cause” provision was unconstitutional. It waived that argument early on in the case. However, in upholding the lower court ruling in Cook, the court more or less assumed that the cause provision in the Federal Reserve Act is valid.

How to make sense of this contradiction?

As Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted in a dissenting opinion, the majority opinion in Cook was “in serious tension” with Slaughter. She also criticized the majority opinion for addressing “a constitutional issue” that was “outside the scope of this case.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a similar point in her dissent in Trump v. Slaughter, characterizing the majority’s treatment of the Fed as an “ad hoc … exception” to the court’s “totalizing” and “half-baked” interpretation of presidential power. Sotomayor noted that Slaughter creates “line-drawing” problems that were previously absent under long-standing precedent protecting FTC agency heads from dismissal.

When facts matter as much as the law

It’s difficult to reconcile the two cases based on legal reasoning alone. That doesn’t necessarily make the outcome wrong. But it does suggest it’s important to consider other factors at play – namely, what’s happening out in the real world, beyond the courthouse. This interpretation of the law is known as “legal realism.”

Legal realism dates back to the 1930s, based on the commonsense critique that predictions about the law require some incorporation of the facts rather than purely abstract notions of legal rights.

Legal realism extends beyond the idea that a judge’s political ideology might influence outcomes, which is today a common basis for pundits to explain court decisions. Instead, legal realism acknowledges that facts on the ground sometimes matter more than the law.

Legal realism is useful here because there’s one overriding fact that makes Cook’s case distinct from the others involving presidential power over federal agencies. Simply put, the Fed is special. It preserves price stability and safeguards the economy as a whole over the long term by rescuing it in bad times and preventing it from overheating in good times. Former Fed Chair Jerome Powell described it as a “first responder in times of financial crisis.”

But to do its job well, the Fed needs to be insulated from outside political forces. That’s why Wall Street and global markets more broadly were watching the decision closely.

The Fed’s unique role

In Cook, both the majority and concurring opinions frequently referred to the Fed’s vital role in the modern economy.

The majority opinion invoked “the Federal Reserve’s unique historical status and role” and warned of the economic “calamaties” that would come with “political manipulation of monetary policy.” And Roberts seemed to suggest that the Cook opinion is all the more important in light of the Slaughter ruling, noting the importance of leaving no public “doubt” as to the independence of “one of our Nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions.”

Of the dissenters, only Justice Clarence Thomas took the position that the president should have had the power to fire Cook at will. The rest objected on various technical and procedural grounds.

That is, at least by today’s standards, something like a consensus.

Elizabeth C. Tippett, Professor of Law, University of Oregon

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