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WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation will hear a new president sing a far different tune in his prime-time address before Congress on Tuesday night. Some Americans will lustily sing along. Others will plug their ears.

The old tune is out – the one where a president declares “we strongly support NATO,” “I believe strongly in free trade” and Washington must do more to promote clean air, clean water, women’s health and civil rights.

That was Donald Trump in 2017.

That was back when gestures of bipartisanship and appeals to national unity were still in the mix on the night the president comes before Congress to hold forth on the state of the union. Trump, then new at the job, was just getting his footing in the halls of power and not ready to stomp on everything.

It would be three more years before Americans would see Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, then the House speaker and his State of the Union host in the chamber, performatively rip up a copy of Trump’s speech in disgust over its contents.

On Tuesday, Americans who tune into Trump’s address will see whether he speaks to the whole country, as he mostly did in his first such speech in the chamber as president, or only to the roughly half who voted for him.

They will see also whether he hews to ceremony and common courtesies, as he did in 2017, or goes full bore on showmanship and incitement.

He comes into it days after assailing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to his face and before the cameras in the Oval Office for not expressing sufficient gratitude for U.S. support in Ukraine’s war with Russia. It was a display of public humiliation by an American president to an allied foreign leader with no parallel in anyone’s memory.

Jarrett Borden, walking to lunch on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, Florida, this past week, expressed ambivalence about Trump, having heard a lot of “hogwash” from him even while liking some of what he has done. Borden anticipates a good show Tuesday and will watch.

“I want to see if he’s going to leave the mic open for Elon Musk, like it’s an open mic at a club or something,” he said, citing the billionaire architect of Trump’s civil service purge. “This is what he’s been doing recently, which is comical.”

In Philadelphia, visual artist Nova Villanueva will spend Tuesday evening doing something — anything — else. She is into avoiding politics and social media altogether these fraught days.

“Yeah, it’s kind of sad,” she said. “It’s almost like I have to be ignorant to be at peace with myself and my life right now.”

A new president’s first speech to Congress is not designated a State of the Union address, coming so close to the Jan. 20 inauguration. But it serves the same purpose, offering an annual accounting of what has been done, what is ahead and what condition the country is in, as the president sees it.

It is customary in modern times for the president to say the state of the union is strong, no matter what a mess it may be in. Trump won the election saying the state of the union was in shambles and he was going to make it right.

The Trump who addressed Congress on Feb. 28, 2017, is recognizable now, despite the measured tone and content of that speech. After all, he had already shocked the political class by assailing “American carnage” from the inaugural stage.

He told Congress that night he wanted NATO members to spend more on their armed forces, wanted trade to be “fair” as well as free, and wanted foreign countries in crises to be made stable enough so that people who fled to the U.S. could go back home. But he did not open his first term with the wrenching turns in foreign policy, civil service firings, stirrings of mass deportation or cries of “drill, baby, drill” of today.

In a line that could have come from any president of either party, Trump noted in his 2017 speech that, “with the help of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, we have formed a council with our neighbors in Canada to help ensure that women entrepreneurs have access to the networks, markets and capital they need to start a business and live out their financial dreams.”

Now he belittles Trudeau as “governor” of a land he wants to make the 51st state and is about to slam with tariffs, along with Mexico. Canadians, not known for displays of patriotism, are seething about their neighbor and rushing to buy and fly their flag.

In Philadelphia, small-time entrepreneur Michael Mangraviti cannot help but take some satisfaction in Trump’s scouring of the bureaucracy as the firings pile up with scant regard for how well people did their jobs or how those jobs helped keep services to the public running.

“He said for years and years, ‘Drain the swamp, drain the swamp,’” Mangraviti said. “But, you know, now is the time to actually drain the swamp.”

“We’ve seen time and time and time again that the government is horribly, horribly ineffective at everything it wants to do,” he went on. “The fact that they’re actually taking action on something that they say they’re going to do, the fact that they’re ready to take the ax and take it to our government, is something I appreciate.”

To Cassandra Piper, a Philadelphia instrumentalist, Trump’s move to stop making pennies was a “fine decision” — unlike everything else he has said and done.

“I comprehensively disapprove of the changes that are being made,” Piper said, stopping to speak while walking by the Liberty Bell Center. “Not that I was all too happy with the status quo beforehand in the first place, but there’s absolutely no good that can come from the inhumanity of mass deportation, something that this country has already been scarred by.”

So, too, with Trump’s selection of vaccination skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary and his choice of Musk to lead the effort to “effectively plunder the government of its resources,” in Piper’s view.

In Hollywood, Florida, Borden, who is Black, said that to the extent Trump can take money that Washington spends overseas and pump it into the U.S. economy, “then you are making America great again. But do that without the racial overtones. Do that without the negative energy, and we’re going to be OK.”

“I think the world is just the world, and we should all just love each other,” he said.

Abraham Lincoln might have agreed, as he summoned the “better angels of our nature” in an inaugural speech, a month before the Civil War, that pleaded with Americans not to “break our bonds of affection.”

Trump had something to say on that subject, too, in 2017: “We all bleed the same blood.”

___

Associated Press video journalists Tassanee Vejpongsa in Philadelphia and Daniel Kozin in Hollywood, Florida, contributed to this report.

Michael Wolff has earned the ire of Donald Trump – again. The new Trump book by the author of three other bestsellers “is a total FAKE JOB, just like the other JUNK he wrote”, the 47th president posted after the first revelations from Wolff’s work broke. “I assume … he was able to speak to a small number of people, but not meaningfully.”

Once again, Wolff has poured a samovar of scalding tea on Trump’s lap.

Fire and Fury was released in January 2018 and sold millions, despite Trump’s attempt to block its publication. Siege and Landslide followed. Wolff’s interview with Trump in 2021, for Landslide, remains memorable for its descriptions of place and people as much as for Trump’s usual invective. From Mar-a-Lago, Wolff wrote of “blond mothers and blond daughters, infinitely buxom”, traipsing through the lobby of a palace built to cater to its creator’s sensibilities.

Four years later, All or Nothing is the first major work about Trump’s re-election to drop since the inauguration. Wolff rains on Trump’s parade, offering a breezy but disturbing read about how Trump willed his way back to power and captured a plurality of the electorate.

Like many of us, Wolff stands simultaneously mesmerized and disdainful.

Trump’s rage toward Wolff is at least understandable. In the run-up to the last election, Wolff released tapes in which the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appeared to detail close social ties with Trump, a relationship the president has long denied. Now, on the page, Wolff paints a dismal picture of Trump’s third marriage. “She fucking hates him,” a “Mar-a-Lago patio confidant” tells Wolff of Melania Trump. “She had not enjoyed a single day in the White House. To the extent that they had had a marriage (even on a negotiated footing), it was further disrupted by her husband’s mood swings and constant sense of offense and injury.”

Donald’s 34 criminal convictions for paying the porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her claimed affair can’t have helped.

Between Trump and his daughter Ivanka, and Jared Kushner, her husband, Wolff depicts a dance of ambitions and expectations.

“Kushner’s own clear and immediate post-White House plan was to put distance between himself and his father-in-law,” Wolff writes, of Jared and Ivanka’s flight from Trump’s side after 6 January 2021 and the attack on Congress. The couple decamped to Miami, not Palm Beach, rather than be part of Trump’s daily orbit. “Asked about his father-in-law’s future by a friend, Kushner replied early on, ‘What was Nixon’s future?’”

Richard Nixon never enjoyed a second act. It seemed Trump would not either.

According to Wolff, in the aftermath of 7 October 2023, and Hamas’s attack on Israel, Kushner was asked to help swat down a Washington Post investigation on Trump and allegations of antisemitism. “No, Ivanka and I aren’t going to do that,” Jared reportedly said. “We’re not going to go and put our names on something and get in the middle of things. That’s just not what we’re going to do this time.” A spokesperson for Kushner and the White House characterized Wolff’s reporting as false.

In his first term, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, Jared’s father. This year, Trump nominated Kushner Sr to be ambassador to France and Monaco. Gratitude means many things.

All or Nothing also scrutinizes Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal lawyer and pick for deputy attorney general. “In private, Trump liked Blanche’s certainty and forcefulness,” Wolff writes. “But now, in open court [in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case], with sudden humility, unaccountably weak and deferential, Blanche seems to stumble and suck his words and fill his hesitations with ‘ums.’ (‘POTUS really hates ums,’ says a reproving aide.)”

Blanche whiffed, Trump was convicted. For now, Blanche remains at Trump’s side.

The White House has pushed back against Wolff – forcefully.

“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of shit and has been proven to be a fraud,” said Steven Cheung, the White House communications director. Irony abounds. Trump entered office as a twice-adjudicated fraudster as well as the first convicted felon to hold the presidency.

Wolff reports misogyny and racism too. He captures Trump musing that Michelle Obama would replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket in 2024. “People call her ‘Mike,’ you know. You know that, don’t you?” he purportedly said, in a series of telephone monologues. “They think she looks pretty manly. Those very big shoulders. What’s that about? That’s what people will call her if she runs, ‘Mike.’ That’s the name she’ll have: ‘Mike.’”

Michelle Obama refused to attend Trump’s second inauguration.

Nor, according to Wolff, could Trump countenance the possibility that Kamala Harris would replace Biden. He saw her as an intellectual lightweight, beneath his contempt. “It won’t be Harris. It’ll never be Harris,” Trump reportedly told the denizens of the Mar-a-Lago patio. In debate prep, Wolff writes, he branded her a “fucking bitch” more than 100 times. Harris won the debate but lost the election. Unlike Hillary Clinton, she also lost the popular vote.

On the other hand, Wolff says, Trump feared Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. The two had clashed over Covid-19. If it was her, Trump reportedly thought, he was “fucked”.

Now, back in the White House, Trump sits at the center of all news cycles, describing himself as a “king”, watching titans of industry prostrate themselves before him. “But,” Wolff adds, “there is, too, the inescapable fact of his age, term limits, second-term malaise, and his lame-duck status – power ebbs.

“At some point, as hard as it might seem to imagine, events will have a life of their own without Donald Trump at the center of them. And then the story will end.”

Don’t be so sure. Trump openly speaks of a third term.

• All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America is published in the US by Penguin Random House

Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate in the November presidential election won by Donald Trump, says he deplores how much time he spent addressing the opposing campaign’s decision to spread false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in Springfield, Ohio.

“They sucked me in on” that, Walz said in a recent episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. Echoing similar remarks that he made on a recent episode of the Fast Politics With Molly Jong-Fast podcast, he added: “I was just horrified and angry when they were demonizing folks in Springfield, Ohio. [And] there I was talking for almost a week about immigration, right where they wanted us to be.”

But, Walz said, Trump “was right, for whatever reason … that more people were OK with saying that than they were against”.

The Democratic Minnesota governor’s commentary on the podcasts is some of his most extensive yet on one of the defining moments of his and Harris’s defeat to Trump – who clinched a return to the White House – and his vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance.

Vance went on CNN in mid-September, a little less than two months before the electoral polls closed, and essentially acknowledged that the rumors in question were rooted in “accounts from … constituents” but otherwise essentially a creation of his and Trump’s campaign meant to draw viral attention to Springfield’s relatively large Haitian population.

Roughly 15,000 mostly Haitian immigrants had started legally trickling into Springfield – a city of about 60,000 – in 2017 to work in local produce packaging and machining factories, availing themselves of a temporary protected status (TPS). The status requires renewal after 18 months, and it was allocated to them because of political violence as well as unrest in their home country.

Vance at the time said he felt it was OK “to create stories” about those people to get voters to focus on the White House’s immigration policies while Harris was vice-president to Joe Biden, who had ended Trump’s first presidency by defeating him four years earlier.

Nonetheless, at their lone debate more than a month later on 22 October, Walz invoked the widely debunked rumor that members of Springfield’s Haitian community were stealing and eating local pets to accuse Vance of seeking to “demonize” immigrants.

“When it becomes a talking point like this, we dehumanize and villainize other human beings,” Walz said.

The lies boosted by Vance upended daily life in Springfield for some who grappled with bomb threats aimed at local hospitals and government offices.

Walz told the New Yorker: “That bothered me on a real human basis. On that one, I was pretty fired up, pushing back, it wasn’t fair, we need[ed] to do this.”

Yet none of it mattered. The Harris-Walz ticket ended up losing the electoral college to its Republican counterpart by a 312-226 margin. Trump and Vance, the former US senator from Ohio, also took the popular vote by a margin of about 49.8% to 48.3%.

“We were talking about immigration at a critical part of the campaign, and it was hurtful, and it pissed me off, and I was standing there to defend people,” Walz said on Fast Politics. “And it didn’t do a damn bit of good electorally.”

At the time Walz spoke to the two podcasts, one of the hallmarks of Trump’s second presidency had been widespread workforce cuts affecting federal government agencies providing a wide array of services, including healthcare, military defense, weather forecasts and humanitarian aid.

Trump’s cabinet had generally done little more than defend the cuts as substantial cost-reduction measures, despite a lack of evidence that they would save as much money as the president and his billionaire businessman adviser Elon Musk boasted – and amid widespread concerns that the axed services could sooner or later bear a cost in the form of people’s lives.

“Those people in all those positions are loyal to Donald Trump first and the American people fall right down the line,” said Walz, who recently announced his interest in pursuing a third term as governor of Minnesota – which has no term limits – in 2026. “I appoint people who challenge me daily. That’s how you’re supposed to do leadership.

“I think it’s clear that he’s building an authoritarian government that is [loyal] to Donald Trump first.”

Central America has long been a source of immigrants, and in recent years, it’s also become a major transit route for those from around the world heading to the United States.

That shift led to record numbers of immigrants arriving at the US border, and contributed to the supposed crisis that helped Donald Trump win the election this past November.

Now, little more than a month since his inauguration day, Trump is strong-arming Central American leaders into collaborating with his hardline immigration agenda, forcing their countries to act as a dumping ground for immigrants that the United States can’t simply deport back to their home countries.

“In Trump’s first term, it was said that it was a transactional logic,” said Ana María Méndez-Dardón, Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America. “In this case, I would say that it’s one of imposition, a logic of threats.”

The threats, such as to take back the Panama canal or impose tariffs, have forced a flurry of deals between Washington and Central American countries that have little to gain from cooperation, but potentially much to lose.

“It’s clear that there’s a new order of relations in this matter where things are demanded of countries that are not in a position to refuse,” said Marcela Martino, deputy director of Central America and Mexico for the Center for Justice and International Law.

Caught in the middle are hundreds of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East who have been deported to Panama and Costa Rica as part of an experiment of sorts that observers say lacks transparency and could violate their rights.

“There is talk of shelters and humanitarian assistance, but the truth is that these people are detained with no option of leaving and with no certainty that they are guaranteed at least the right to request asylum,” said Martino.

Lawyers and independent human rights organizations have been denied access to the shelters and the migrants have reportedly had their cellphones and passports confiscated by officials.

During Trump’s first term, his administration attempted to outsource the asylum process through so-called safe third country agreements with Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, but only the agreement with the last country was briefly implemented before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This time around, the Trump administration has shut down the asylum system entirely and is attempting to turn Central American countries into a staging ground or for migrants whose countries of origin lack diplomatic relations with Washington or refuse to accept deportation flights.

On 13 February, Panama – under immense pressure due to a dispute manufactured by Trump over its famous canal – became the first country to receive immigrants from the US under this new strategy when it received a military plane carrying 119 people.

Since then, hundreds more immigrants from countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, China, Pakistan and others have been deported to Panama and Costa Rica. While some have agreed to be transported onward to their home countries, others have refused, including 128 of the 299 immigrants that arrived in Panama.

These immigrants have fallen into a legal limbo with an uncertain future, epitomized by a viral photo of a young Iranian migrant who scrawled “help” on the window of a Panama City hotel where she and family members were temporarily held before being transported to a remote shelter in the Darién Gap – far from the cameras.

Versions of these bridge agreements, which often include increased border security, have also been agreed upon with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – with the third country facilitating the transfer of 177 Venezuelan migrants who had been held at Guantánamo military base and were immediately boarded on a plane back home upon arriving at a joint Honduras-US air force base outside Tegucigalpa.

The United States has agreed to cover the cost of sheltering the immigrants abroad, but it is unclear for how long – and if this is only the beginning of a much larger movement yet to come.

“We don’t know what the plans are, whether it’s to see what happens with this, whether it’s to be able to receive others, whether this is an example to replicate in other countries,” said Martino.

The presidents of Panama and Costa Rica have portrayed the arrival of the deportees as only temporary. But if the numbers grow and the stays become prolonged, they and other leaders who implement the bridge agreements could be forced to make a difficult calculation between staying in the good graces of Trump while avoiding domestic backlash.

“It’s difficult to understand to what extent governments are willing to accept these types of conditions and how this will impact domestic narratives,” said Martino.

Mary McCool

BBC Scotland News

The prime minister has dismissed calls from the SNP to scrap an unprecedented second state visit for Donald Trump following a showdown with Ukraine’s President Zelensky.

Trump accused Zelensky of “gambling with World War Three” at the White House on Friday, in a fiery exchange described as “deeply troubling” by Scotland’s first minister.

John Swinney told the BBC he did not see how a state visit for the US president – offered by the King on Thursday – could go ahead unless he was “absolutely full-square with us” in protecting Ukraine.

However Starmer, who is hosting a summit of European leaders including Zelensky later, accused the SNP of using rhetoric and said he would not be distracted.

It followed a number of SNP MPs criticising the prime minister’s relationship with Trump on social media, including the party’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn who said Starmer “better get back up off his knees and revoke that offer of a state visit”.

Prior to Zelensky’s warm welcome at Downing Street on Saturday, the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesperson Stephen Gethins accused the prime minister of being silent on the matter which he said was “disappointing”.

After the White House exchange Starmer called both Trump and Zelensky and later reiterated the UK’s support for Ukraine, saying “we stand with Ukraine for as long as it may take”.

Speaking to on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Starmer said: “I’ve seen people ramping up the rhetoric and taking to Twitter and saying what they would do – good for them, I’m not that interested in that.

“I’m interested in what are the practical steps, what are the bridge building that I can do, what are the relationships that I can mend and take forward to take us to lasting peace in Europe.

“I’m not going to be diverted by the SNP or others trying to ramp up the rhetoric without really appreciating what is the single most important thing at stake here – we’re talking about peace in Europe.”

Starmer used his US visit to present Trump with a letter from the King, offering an initial meeting in Scotland – where Trump owns two golf courses – to discuss the logistics of a second state visit.

Second-term US presidents are traditionally not offered state visits and have instead been invited for tea or lunch with the monarch, usually at Windsor Castle.

Taking a different tone from SNP MPs, John Swinney said he welcomed the role the prime minister was taking and that he supported him trying to find a way through a difficult situation.

Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday Show, he said: “I think the prime minister is absolutely right to try and find a way forward with the United States because the position that unfolded on Friday evening was… deeply troubling to watch.

“To see a courageous leader of a courageous country being berated in the fashion that President Zelensky was is completely unacceptable.”

But he added that he could not see how a state visit could go ahead if Trump was “not a steadfast ally of ours in protecting the future of Ukraine”.

He said: “That seems to me an absolutely fundamental requirement of any offer of a state visit to the president of the United States – that he is absolutely full-square with us in protecting Ukraine and insuring its independence.

“If we don’t do that then I think we are undermining the future of western democracy.”

John Swinney has previously said he would use Trump’s affinity for Scotland in a bid to avoid tariffs being applied on imports to the US, particularly on Scotch whisky.

He had publicly backed Harris, the Democratic nominee, in the run up to the 2024 presidential election.

Zelensky had hoped for positive talks with Trump during his visit, including the signing of a minerals deal which would give the US a real stake in his country’s future, if not an outright security guarantee.

Instead he faced an extraordinary dressing down in front of the world’s media, with Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance demanding that he show more gratitude for years of US support.

The Ukrainian president pushed back at suggestions from his more powerful partners that he should work harder to agree a ceasefire with Vladimir Putin. They responded that he was being “disrespectful”.

After his departure, Zelensky said Ukraine is “ready to sign the minerals agreement” but continued his call for US security guarantees.

The exchange prompted a series of responses from European leaders with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz among those reiterating their support for Ukraine.

Sir Keir Starmer and John Swinney differ on the question of a state visit for Donald Trump.

But that’s about the only point of contention between them on this global issue.

It was striking that the first minister went out of his way to repeatedly welcome the approach of Sir Keir to the war in Ukraine, and to say he was “absolutely right” to keep seeking a deal with the US.

If Sir Keir and Mr Trump are very different characters, then the prime minister has far more in common with Mr Swinney.

They are both serious men, more interested at this point in outcomes than optics.

Mr Swinney stopped short of slapping down Stephen Flynn’s sharply-worded social media post, but he was explicit in his backing for Sir Keir’s efforts to build bridges between Western allies.

While the SNP leader is always keen to capitalise on any domestic differences with his electoral rivals in Labour, he has made it clear that they are on the same team on the international stage.

The smelly thoughts of Donald Trump bubble up like brown burps in the sort of bombsite pond Chopper bike-riding children were advised to avoid in 1970s public information films. Do they indicate concrete plans, are they designed to provoke, or do they have no meaning, like the gurgles and gasps that can inadvertently escape from a decomposing corpse? My job here is to try to anticipate if anything Trump says or does is likely to be of any lasting significance and to satirise it accordingly, in the small window of time allowed, for money. And it isn’t getting any easier. Yes, Ukraine is suffering, but I am the real victim here.

For example, last Saturday Trump opined: “We were the richest… think of this, from 1870 to 1913… because we collected tariffs… We had so much wealth. Wouldn’t it be nice today? Of course, now, we give it away to transgender this, to transgender that. Everybody gets a transgender operation. It’s wonderful. We give it away to crazy things. But in those days, it was different. It was a different world. It was a different country.”

Would Trump’s notion of the damage caused to long-term American prosperity by transgender this surgery, and also to a lesser extent by transgender that surgery, gain any traction, and thus be deserving of the barbs of my quill, or would it be politely ignored as another crazy corpse bleat?

I’m not a historian, though I do follow Prof Janina Ramirez on social media, but surely part of US prosperity in the period Trump describes was built on the proceeding two and a half centuries’ use of free labour in the form of enslaved people stolen in their millions from Africa, their descendants finally getting the vote in 1965, when the Beatles’ Help! was top of the UK charts; and also on the natural wealth appropriated from the country’s Indigenous people, who were systematically ethnically cleansed and robbed of land and resources for which, conveniently, they hadn’t really developed a notion of ownership as Europeans understood it. Have these beads, this whiskey and these smallpox-infected blankets. Thanks for all the pelts. Enjoy your dancing.

To be fair to Trump, studies of Irish history, for instance, show that though three significant famines between 1740 and 1879 did affect the country economically, the main dent in the nation’s finances was caused by the Roman Catholic church’s liberal attitude to notions of gender, and by its demand that the Irish state fund transgender this surgery, and moreover transgender that surgery, for any Irish citizen requiring it, or for anyone who had even been just a little bit curious. I’m joking of course. Trump’s idiotic Trump Theory of Transgender Economics ™ ® didn’t stick and I wisely elected to ignore it in last week’s column. But Trump continues to be a tough call.

For 13 years, I filed these columns on Thursday mornings, hoping that I’d have anticipated any news developments that might destabilise my so-called “jokes” between the deadline and Sunday’s publication. But last year I asked if I could start filing on Tuesdays, as various special-interest, right-leaning groups kept nibbling at the grey area between actionable exaggeration and exaggeration for comic effect, and I wanted to give the Observer’s legal team time to protect me from imprisonment, having already experienced the spleen-dissolving stress of being co-targeted by Britain’s final, and failed, attempt at a blasphemy prosecution in 2005.

But now I’m back to filing at the last possible moment, 10am on Thursday. It’s 9.15 now and I’m cross-checking the paragraphs that follow this sentence with live news updates to see if, perhaps, last week’s Trump Theory of Transgender Economics ™ ® has suddenly resurfaced in a more vociferous form. Trump has turbocharged the news cycle and I’m a tortoise trying to spray-paint the side of speeding trains with clever satirical caricatures, James Gillray on a folding scooter. Those long wavy lines all along the carriages were supposed to be a drawing of Trump hanging a tea towel marked Ukraine out to dry. Or something.

It’s impossible. On Wednesday afternoon, the world briefly combusted when it appeared Trump’s Truth Social feed had shared an impossibly offensive AI-generated film of his vision for Gaza’s future. An image of a soldier pointing a gun at a Palestinian kid’s head dissolves into liberated children running towards a Dubai-style resort, where Elon Musk eats hummus on a beach, bellydancers bellydance, a toddler tugs at a giant golden balloon of Trump’s head, Trump apparently dances with a semi-naked woman, Musk and some infants dance in falling money, a gaudy Trump casino full of small golden effigies of Trump emerges from the ruins, Musk eats some more hummus but indoors this time, a giant golden statue of Trump bestrides a street scene and, finally, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu drink cocktails by a pool in just their pants as a rapper raps: “Trump Gaza number one!”

Theories erupted. Was Trump trying to bait the world? Or had Israel made the film to goad Hamas into breaking the ceasefire? Had Hamas made it to goad the outraged into attacking the US? But looking closely, it seems Trump is uncomfortably overfamiliar with the woman he is dancing with and the beach bellydancers are in fact men with beards in translucent dresses, in a country where transgender this and transgender that is yet to do the economic damage it has in the US.

Had someone made an all too plausible satire of Trump’s ethics and aesthetics that Trump himself had taken as an endorsement and shared online? Or did Trump know it was a parody and have so little regard for the human suffering in the region, he shared it anyway? It’s impossible to know. All that is certain is that, as Steve Bannon advised, the zone is flooded with shit. And every week, it gets harder to wade through.

• Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

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This Christian Convert Fled Iran, and Ran Into Trump’s Deportation Policy

Artemis Ghasemzadeh fled Iran, where she could face a death sentence for converting to Christianity.Credit…

• Published Feb. 23, 2025Updated Feb. 24, 2025

She first entered a church on a visit to Turkey. She remembers feeling a sense of calm so overpowering that she purchased a small Bible. She wrapped it in her clothes and smuggled it back to her hometown, Isfahan, in central Iran.

Artemis Ghasemzadeh’s conversion from Islam to Christianity evolved over a few years starting in 2019, through an Iranian network of underground churches and secret online classes. Three years ago, she was baptized and, in her words, “reborn.”

Converting was colossally risky. While Christians born into the faith are free to practice, Iran’s Shariah laws state that abandoning Islam for another religion is considered blasphemy, punishable by death. Some members of her Bible-study group were arrested.

So in December, Ms. Ghasemzadeh set out for the United States.

“I wanted to live freely, to live without fear, to live without someone wanting to kill me,” Ms. Ghasemzadeh, 27, said in a series of phone interviews.

Image

Her journey has landed her in a migrant detention camp on the outskirts of the Darién jungle in Panama. She and nine other Iranian Christian converts, three of them children, are among dozens detained at the Saint Vincente camp. Their fate remains uncertain.

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