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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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It was a delicate balancing act for the man once considered Europe’s “Trump whisperer”.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was seated in the Oval Office gently trying to factcheck Donald Trump in real time as the US president pushed a narrative that Ukraine had taken advantage of US support during its defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion. Now, said Trump, it is time to get paid back.

“This war cost all of us a lot of money,” said Macron as a scowling Trump looked on. “And this is the responsibility of Russia because the aggressor is Russia.”

Trump broke in. “Just so you understand, Europe is loaning the money to Ukraine,” he said. “They get their money back.”

“No,” Macron placed his hand gently on Trump’s wrist. “To be frank, we paid 60% of the total effort… we provided real money to be clear.”

For much of today’s summit with Trump, Macron sought to provide a master class in how to manage a belligerent friend. He praised Trump for his leadership. He clapped him on the back and smiled as the two acted like old friends outside of the White House. In an interview with Fox News, Trump’s beloved television station, Macron called his election a “game-changer” and said that his initiative was a “positive one.”

But he also held firm, resisting Trump’s efforts to physically dominate him, and he maintained that Russia was responsible for the war. That is a simple truth that has suddenly disappeared from the mouths of Trump’s advisers as the US president abruptly began negotiations with Russia and delivered Ukraine an ultimatum in the form of a punishing “rare earth metals deal”. Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that signing it would force his people to pay the US back for “ten generations.”

It is not clear that any relationship, even one with such evident bonhomie as that between Macron and Trump, can bridge the chasm growing between the United States and Europe.

Macron and Keir Starmer, who is set to come to Washington later this week, are trying to salvage a trans-Atlantic alliance under its greatest strain in generations. They argue that US support for European defence is a sound investment, and that Trump must not achieve peace by simply throwing Ukraine under the bus.

But Trump has also held them responsible for failing to negotiate a peace between Ukraine and Russia.

“They didn’t do anything either” to end the war, he said during an interview with Fox Business earlier this week. “The war’s going on, no meetings with Russia, no nothing… They haven’t done anything. Macron is a friend of mine, and I’ve met with the Prime Minister and he’s a very nice guy… [but] nobody’s done anything.”

The US president’s turn towards a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin has created a strain that was evident on Monday at the United Nations as the US tried to scuttle a joint resolution from the European Union and Ukraine that condemned Russia three years after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It passed with the US and Russia both voting against the resolution.

Others in Europe are running out of patience. In Germany, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and likely Germany’s next chancellor, said in an interview over the the weekend that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”

“I would never have believed that I would have to say something like that on television,” he said. “But at the very least, after Donald Trump’s statements last week, it is clear that the Americans – at least this part of the Americans in this administration – are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

Macron leaves Washington without a firm promise of US support or a clear change in Trump’s stance on the war in Ukraine.

Starmer will also have his work cut out for him when he meets with Trump on Thursday. He too will try to coax the US president away from the brink of a split with Europe.

“We don’t want to rile Trump, that would be totally counterproductive both to our interests and those of Ukrainian and European security,” one aide told the Guardian. “We’re much more interested in what he actually does, rather than what he says. So far, we think there’s a difference.”