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Edward LuceFinancial Times |
One thing is for sure: the opening act of the US president’s second term is over

The anti-Jewish threat in America today comes largely from the right

Those who are bearish on US democracy should not extend their pessimism to the economy

Russia bets it can gain in US negotiations what it cannot win on the battlefield

Trump’s latest piece of brinkmanship is likely to result in another climbdown

Despite the president’s claims, the South American country is nowhere close to being the US’s biggest drug supplier

The philanthropist is as close as the world’s strongmen get to a cross-border demon

After the Kirk murder, Trump is pulverising the country’s founding principles with astonishing ease

Keir Starmer might be tempted to hymn ‘shared values’ but such talk rings increasingly hollow

The president’s genius is to keep pushing the Democrats into a reactive defence of the status quo

Ahead of Friday’s meeting, Putin knows that Trump is desperate for a deal on Ukraine

The US president is upending a quarter of a century of American policy in the Indo-Pacific

Lack of conviction and intolerance are character defects that augur badly for centrist and centre-left parties

The US president’s sympathy for disgraced strongman Bolsonaro is part of an alarming pattern

For years he insisted on a deep-state plot that only he could expose. Now he says there is nothing to show

The nation of immigrants’ shift to mass deportation is among the most shocking turns in US history

Many Republicans could lose their seats in Congress as a result of the president’s reverse Robin Hood budget

The US president hopes that his display of power in Iran will stop the war — but that is not his decision to make

A bitter fight is on between restrainers and neoconservatives

The right has no monopoly on violent fantasy, but liberals are far less likely to own guns

Sending the National Guard into LA is the administration’s clearest step yet towards authoritarianism

No one knows what the US president’s desired endgame with Beijing really is

Trump’s mercurial war on economic orthodoxy is making markets jittery

Some Republicans warn that a tax-cutting budget will destroy the party’s standing with working-class voters

Federal ethics rules now seem little more than decoration

The Tesla founder’s much-heralded war on government waste has had uncertain results

America’s 47th president plays unwitting ally to non-populists everywhere except at home

The many contradictions of the vice-president should not distract from his ambition

The president’s refusal to accept a Supreme Court ruling on illegal deportation is a turning point

There is no school of foreign policy realism or trade mercantilism that could explain the US president’s actions

On many fronts, and with deliberate haste, America is vaporising its soft power

Fear and muddled thinking are stopping Trump’s opponents from acting in defence of a democracy in peril

The cost for Donald Trump of keeping the world’s richest man by his side is growing

Having previously declared bitcoin to be a ‘scam’, the US president now wants to add it to the Fed’s balance sheet

With ruthless purges of the US government, the president is tipping the scales towards autocracy

The world’s richest man is taking a torch to the American state on behalf of Donald Trump

The US judiciary poses the ultimate test of whether the president will break the system

Washington is ill-prepared for the speed with which the president has been ‘flooding the zone’

As Donald Trump tears up America’s rule book, the minority party can’t work out how to respond

The president revels in his unpredictability but over time he risks sowing distrust in America’s good faith

Very little stands in the way of the president’s goal of remaking America

Vibes speak volumes as new president lays out a radical agenda

Hubris kept him too long in the presidential race and he will be remembered chiefly for easing Trump’s return

The question of whether he is speaking for Trump is urgent for Europe

Elon Musk and other super-wealthy entrepreneurs stand to benefit from deregulation

The end of the US-led order is giving way to a kind of chaos that chimes with the president-elect’s preferences

In pardoning his son, the president has ensured that the distance between himself and Trump is now shrouded in fog

The danger posed by the president-elect lies most obviously at home not abroad

One irony of the president-elect’s campaign of destruction is that the government is in dire need of reform

The president-elect has promised vengeance against perceived enemies
