While hopes are rising for a peaceful resolution to war in the Middle East, Donald Trump has reached his racist AI grandpa era. Here’s everything you need to know
The big news out of the Trump White House this morning, hopefully, is not actually unhinged. Mostly.
It seems Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has given some level of agreement to a plan to end the war in Gaza.
Curiously, the only difference we can see between this new plan, and a plan that’s been on the board already, and which Netanyahu turned down, is the creation of an “international transitional body” called the “Board of Peace”…which will be chaired by Donald Trump, and will also include Tony Blair.
There’s also a bit in there about a “Trump economic development plan”, to open up “investment proposals” and “development ideas” crafted by “well-meaning international groups.”
Which all sounds rather unfortunately like that mad AI video Trump posted a few months ago of his vision for a Las Vegas-like resort on the Gaza Strip.
But unlike Trump’s previous rantings, it’s clear in the framework that “no-one will be forced to leave Gaza” – which is, we suppose, progress.
Whether this works out is all going to depend on whether everyone – especially Netanyahu – actually sticks by it, and that’s a matter of time.
Meanwhile in Trump World:
- Trump has reached his racist AI grandpa era
- His latest tariff brainwave could have a huge impact on the UK
- YouTube put $22m in Trump’s ballroom fund
- All the President’s Generals are in Quantaco for a weird meeting
- JD Vance changes his tune on government shutdowns
All this and more below. Here’s everything you need to know.
1. Trump is posting increasingly bad tweets. Even for him.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Donald Trump has reached the racist AI grandpa era of his political career.
For example, overnight, he posted a fake video of Senior Democrat congressmen Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. In the clip, Schumer appears to admit that support for democrats is dramatically waning because of their “trans bulls**t”, and saying he wants to give “illegal aliens free healthcare” so it might “get them on our side so they can vote for us.”
To illustrate the point, Jeffries is depicted wearing a comedy moustache and a sombrero, and the video is backed with some mariachi music. Subtle.
It comes after he posted a fake news report over the weekend announcing the rollout of “MedBeds” across the country. MedBeds are a wild far-right conspiracy theory, which claims most ailments can be cured with magical beds, but that this technology is being held back from the public by shadowy elites.
The weird thing about that one is that there was footage of him in it, making the announcement. Which either means he’s so deranged he couldn’t remember whether he announced it or not, or that he genuinely doesn’t care. The video was later deleted from his Truth Social account.
2. Hakeem Jeffries responded
The reason Trump is on the attack against these two in particular is that they’re pushing the US government towards a shutdown in order to block Trump’s bid to slash huge amounts of funding from healthcare services for poorer Americans. They’re playing a little b bit of political chicken, trying to get the Republicans to “own” the Shutdown for refusing to compromise.
Anyway, this is how he responded to Trump’s fake video:
3. Trump revives a tariff idea that could cause big problems for the UK
Trump posted on Truth Social last night that he plans to introduce a 100% tariffs on movies made outside America.
The president has little love for foreign cinema, saying the movie business “has been stolen” from Hollywood and the U.S.
“Therefore, in order to solve this long time, never ending problem, I will be imposing a 100% Tariff on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States,” Trump wrote.
It’s unclear how this would work, because movies and TV shows don’t tend to go through ports or customs barriers these days.
Neither is it clear whether this would apply to US films produced and shot in other countries. The UK has a booming movie business, with British studios and workers playing a huge role in blockbusters for decades.
Nor was it clear what the legal basis would be for these import taxes. Trump has previously relied on national security grounds and an economic emergency in the form of trade deficits to justify his tariffs.
4. YouTube puts $22 million in the pot to build Trump’s White House ballroom
Remember back in 2021, when Boris Johnson cooked up a plan to get donors to chip in – or at least lend him the cash – to pay for his lavish refurb of the Downing Street flat?
There was, rightly, uproar. Even Dominic Cummings said it was “unethical, foolish, possibly illegal”. Had the scheme gone ahead as originally planned, cash would have been funnelled into a “Downing Street Trust” to fund the renovation. In the end, it was paid for with a loan to the Conservative Party from Lord Brownlow, which was not properly declared. The issue was that if you fund high-profile work like that, that in effect personally benefits the PM, through donations, the public might well believe that there’s an expectation that the donor will get special treatment in return.
Well hold all that in your mind when I tell you that YouTube has paid more than $24 million to settle a lawsuit from Donald Trump, who claimed it was unfair of them to ban him from the platform after he whipped up an attempted coup. (A coup he still denies took place).
And of that $24m, $22m is being paid to the “Trust for the National Mall” – the fund set up to raise money to build a massive, Mar A Lago-style ballroom on the side of the White House.
Trump has settled similar lawsuits with Meta (Facebook) and X (Twitter), with the cash going to a fund earmarked for Trump’s future Presidential Library.
The CEOs of YouTube parent company Alphabet, Meta and X all sat in the front row for Trump’s inauguration.
5. Who’s in charge of bombing Venezuelan boats? The answer might surprise you
Stephen Miller, the White House’s Deputy Prince of Darkness, has reportedly taken a “leading role” in directing military strikes against suspected Venezuelan drug boats.
The White House claims the boats were carrying drugs bound for the US, which pretty much amounts to the US carrying out extrajudicial executions in international waters. Which is only slightly less bad than the US being secretly in an undeclared war against Venezuela, bypassing Congress, which is the other interpretation.
Anyway, Miller is not the Secretary of State – that’s Marco Rubio, or the Secretary of War – that’s Pete Hegseth. Neither is he the National Security Advisor – that’s also Rubio. It’s entirely unclear under what authority Stephen “Renfield” Miller would have to direct US military assets to the bathroom, let alone a shakily justified international conflict.
And yet, according to the Guardian, the Homeland Security Council, a weird new body which Miller for some reason leads, has been placed in charge of the strikes.
6. Generals baffled by short-notice order to meeting with Trump and Hegseth
Trump and Hegseth are set to speak in front of hundreds of the US military’s top commanders today, and many of them are baffled as to why.
The gathering at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, near Washington, has fueled intense speculation about the purpose and value of summoning such a large number of generals and admirals to one place, with many stationed in more than a dozen countries that include conflict zones in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Meetings between top military brass and civilian leaders are nothing new. But experts say the scale of the gathering, the haste with which it was called and the mystery surrounding it are particularly unusual.
“The notion that the secretary is going to talk to the generals and give them his vision for running the department – and maybe also for strategy and organization – that’s perfectly reasonable,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine colonel.
“What’s mystifying is why it’s on such short notice, why it’s in person and what else might be involved,” he said.
Italian Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee, described the meeting as unusual and told reporters Saturday after a NATO meeting in Riga, Latvia, that “as far as my 49 years of service, I’ve never seen that before.”
The lack of detailed information has prompted many observers in Washington to speculate about the meeting’s focus. Whatever it is, Michael O’Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution, said he suspects there will be a dramatic element that may be “as important as any substantive element.”
7. JD Vance changes his tune on shutdowns…
JD Vance, as he appeared with Republican congressional leaders at the White House on Monday, said it was “not reasonable” for Democrats to use their proposals “as leverage and to shut down the government unless we give you everything you want.”
He called that “preposterous” and “totally unacceptable.”
But last year, when Vance was a senator and Congress was similarly staring down a potential government shutdown, albeit over different sticking points, he embraced the idea of some Republicans using the threat of a shutdown to negotiate.
“Why shouldn’t we be trying to force this government shutdown fight to get something out of it that’s good for the American people?” Vance said in a September 2024 podcast interview. “Why have a government if it’s not a functioning government?”
8. Trump threatens to pull federal funding for New York City if it elects the wrong mayor
Trump warned New York City, his former home, “won’t be getting any” federal cash if frontrunner Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor.
“Remember, he needs the money from me, as President, in order to fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises,” Trump wrote on social media. “He won’t be getting any of it, so what’s the point of voting for him?”
Still, the president sees a political upside in having a democratic socialist be one of the prominent figures in the Democratic Party.
Mamdani “will prove to be one of the best things to ever happen to our great Republican Party,” Trump wrote.