Politics

Normally one is inclined to avoid cliches like the plague. But sometimes you just need to latch onto one. And the golden oldie "a week is a long time in politics" just seems so right for this moment. And it's certainly been one of those weeks in DC. Not that it's over yet. Indeed, I had barely written that line when my phone pinged with the news that US President Donald Trump had commuted the seven-year prison sentence imposed on disgraced former congressman George Santos. The Republican had flipped a Democrat seat in New York in the 2022 midterms but was soon exposed as a fraud and a fraudster. He pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges last year and has been in prison since July. His behaviour was outrageous, but he was a Trump loyalist. This story will be a one-day w...

Each year, 5,000 to 6,000 Americans renounce U.S. citizenship mostly for tax-related and logistical reasons but politics is now playing a more central role, lawyers say. On the morning after the U.S. election last November, an American living in London woke up, read that Donald Trump would be returning to the White House and sent an email to the U.S. Embassy. It said, in essence, I want a divorce. A year later, the country of his birth is about to grant his request not to be an American any more. The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears retribution by the Trump administration, is in the final phase of expatriation, the process of formally renouncing his U.S. citizenship. On a coming morning, he will walk into the embassy as an American, swear face-...

The US government shutdown has entered its third week, with Republican and Democratic politicians no closer to an agreement on how to resolve an ongoing budget dispute. It means that some, but not all, US government services aretemporarily suspended, and around 1.4 million federal employees are on unpaid leave or working without pay. Although budget confrontations are common in US politics, this spending fight is especially tense because President Donald Trump has drastically reduced the size of the national government since taking office, and has suggested he may use the current impasse to make further cuts. The Trump administration has already moved to lay off about 4,000 workers as the shutdown continues, though that was temporarily blocked by a federal judge on Wednesday....

Republicans, who hold a governing trifecta, have adopted a mostly passive stance while Democrats dig in for a fight, with both feeling they have the political upper hand. At the White House, President Trump is posting A.I.-generated memes about the government shutdown, depicting his wonky budget director dressed as the Grim Reaper and ready to visit death on the federal bureaucracy. In the Senate, Democrats show no sign of backing down from their demands in the shutdown fight, while Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, has given verbal shrugs to reporters who ask about the status of his nonexistent negotiations with the other party about how to bring the crisis to an end. “I don’t know that there’s a lot to sort out,” Mr. Thune said on MSNBC

Despite promising not to lecture other countries on “how to live,” the Trump administration is intervening with increasing frequency and force in the political affairs of other countries. Immediately upon taking power, President Donald Trump and his team set about pulling the United States away from its longtime stance as a supporter of democracy globally. They dismantled U.S. pro-democracy assistance programs, dissolved most of the State Department’s institutional capacity on democracy issues, and disabled most of U.S. global broadcasting, a traditional linchpin of democracy support. Trump put a ribbon on this course change in Riyadh in May when he criticized his predecessors as “interventionists” and declared that the United States would no longer give other countries “

In an exclusive interview, Tom Barrack says Hezbollah’s legitimacy within Lebanon’s political system makes solving conflict with Israel difficult. Convincing Hezbollah to give up its weapons is the job of the Lebanese government, and the United States is not interested in pressuring anybody, the US special envoy for Syrian affairs, Tom Barrack, has told Al Jazeera. Barrack’s comments come a day after Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, once again rejected the Lebanese government’s attempts for the group to disarm, which was one of the key parts of the November ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. “We will never abandon our weapons, nor will we relinquish them,” Naim said on Saturday, adding that Hezbollah would continue to “confront any project that serves Israel”. Hezbollah ma