Trump Has Revolutionized Executive Power

As we move toward the end of the Trump era, we need to reckon with the changes his administration has wrought in the American system of government. The most significant is the enormous concentration of power, not just in the executive branch as a whole, but in the office of the president. Any successor administration, Republican or Democratic, will inherit these powers, and will have to decide how it wants to define the limits of executive authority in the future.

The U.S. Constitution limits presidential power in a number of ways. Article I says that laws and budgets are made by Congress, and Article II says the president’s chief duty is to see that the laws are “faithfully executed.” He can choose his own cabinet officers, but they must be confirmed by the Senate. The president has more discretionary authority with regard to foreign policy and national security, where he is designated commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Yet even in this sphere, the right to declare war and ratify treaties is given to Congress.

Donald Trump has tried to expand executive authority in any number of ways. From Day One of his second administration, he has issued a blizzard of executive orders that have in effect usurped Congress’s legislative powers. In some cases he has acted under obscure legal powers, many of which were later found by the courts to be inappropriate. In other cases he has simply acted illegally or unconstitutionally. Among the many examples are:

1. Ending birthright citizenship;
2. His failure to spend money appropriated by Congress;
3. The closing of entire departments, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, that had been established by Congress;
4. Attempting to assert federal authority over election administration;
5. Using emergency powers to impose tariffs in an arbitrary and discretionary manner;
6. Firing federal employees protected by statute;
7. Launching a major war without seeking authorization from Congress.

The lower courts have blocked many of these initiatives, and the Supreme Court has reversed both the birthright citizenship order and the tariffs imposed last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

However, the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on many of the other cases, and in one case clearly ruled in favor of the administration. That was Trump v. Slaughter, decided last month, which overturned an earlier Supreme Court decision called Humphrey’s Executor. That precedent, set in 1935, upheld the right of Congress to impose limits on the president’s power to change the composition of the boards of supposedly “independent” multi-member regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

The Slaughter decision may seem technical, and has received relatively little public attention. The one multi-member federal agency that the public (and more importantly the markets) care about is the Federal Reserve Board, where Trump had already tried to fire one member, Lisa Cook. The Supreme Court exempted the Fed from its general evisceration of Humphrey’s Executor, arguing somewhat speciously that the Fed has a different historical status from other agencies and therefore its board could remain protected from political interference.

The Slaughter decision, however, has huge implications for the way America will be governed in the future, and it is only the first shoe to drop in a long-term conservative effort to remake the federal executive. Humphrey’s Executor had been the long-term target of conservatives under a doctrine of the “unitary executive.” They argued on originalist grounds that the Constitution gave executive authority to the president alone, who, as a democratically legitimated official, could not be restricted by Congress in his control over the executive branch.

There is a certain logic to this position, one that has been supported not just by conservatives but by certain progressives as well. Most prominent in the latter camp was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in the 1930s sought to remove William Humphrey (who was accused of blocking FDR’s legislative agenda) as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Humphrey’s removal was overturned by a conservative Supreme Court.

To this one could add the following argument. No one questions the right of the president to appoint, with the Senate’s approval, Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials, or to unilaterally remove them. The president’s right to appoint or remove the heads of agencies led by a single individual, like the CDC or NASA, is not contested. So why should those with multi-member boards be treated differently?

The argument I would make against the theory of the unitary executive is not based on any originalist reading of the Constitution. It is rather based on a pragmatic observation. Today’s executive branch is so large, sprawling, and powerful that there needs to be a separation of powers within the executive, and not simply between the executive and the other two branches of government. The chief argument in favor of such a separation has to do with the preservation of the expertise that is necessary to run a modern state.

We see this most clearly in the case of the Federal Reserve, which in the Slaughter decision was somehow exempted from political control. Painful experience with inflation has taught the United States and other countries around the world that central banks must be made independent. The incentives of politicians are almost always short-term and aimed at their political self-interest. The independent structure of the Fed and its multi-member board protects it from politicization and enhances its ability to operate according to the judgment of the experienced professionals who run it-i.e. PhD economists and practitioners with deep experience with financial markets.

Quite apart from the illegality and unconstitutionality of many of the Trump administration’s actions, there is also its incompetence.

That incompetence has been on display since the beginning of the second term, when Trump appointed a series of individuals with no expertise in the agencies they were to run: Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, TV commentator Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and podcaster Kash Patel as head of the FBI.

The consequences are clear: by sidelining regional experts throughout State, Defense, and the intelligence community, for example, there was no one to warn the president that launching a massive air assault on Iran might lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Justice Department likewise has been diverted from its role as impartial enforcer of the law to being an instrument for Donald Trump’s personal revenge campaign. By forcing out career prosecutors, the department found its cases susceptible to being overturned by the courts and indictments rejected by grand juries across the country.

Underlying the theory of the unitary executive is a flawed concept of hierarchical organization that is as incorrect as it is widespread. “Principal-agent theory” is commonly used by economists and other social scientists to understand the dysfunctions of hierarchies. All authority lies with the principal; agents are simply expected to carry out the wishes of the principal and problems arise only when the agents follow their own agenda.

As Nobel laureate Herbert Simon pointed out many years ago, this is not how real-world organizations work. Agents, including front-line workers at the bottom of hierarchies, often have more expertise and local knowledge than the principals who give them orders. As a result, authority in many organizations flows from the agents to the principal. This is a truth understood in well-functioning militaries, which give their junior officers substantial authority and advise senior commanders not to micro-manage.

So too in the U.S. government. The knowledge of how to deal with an airline accident, or a sudden disease outbreak, or indeed a financial crisis, will not lie with the democratically-elected politician at the top of the hierarchy, but rather with the experts who have the training and experience to act. A well-designed government needs to have mechanisms for protecting that expertise.

Multi-member commissions are a very imperfect means of doing this, but they do at least make it more difficult for an incompetent president to do his destructive work. There are other important protections for expertise as well, such as requirements for “for cause” removals, which protect officials from arbitrary firing. Such constraints have been a clear target of the Trump administration.

Another critical protection for expertise lies in Senate confirmation: in most administrations, the Senate will simply not confirm blatantly unqualified people for senior positions. One of the greatest failures of the current Congress is its unwillingness to exert this authority in so many prominent cases.

The Trump administration’s war on expertise has only just begun. Greater political control over senior officials in multi-member commissions will have limited day-to-day impact on most citizens. But believers in the unitary executive want to extend that control to the whole of the federal government, such that every government worker, down to your local postmaster, will be subject to removal by a political boss.

This assertion of executive authority was attempted at the end of the first Trump administration with an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” employment designation into which the whole of the civil service could be moved, and then fired or replaced at will. Schedule F was rescinded by the Biden administration, but has re-emerged in the second Trump term as “Schedule P/C.”

This is not a casual innovation off the top of Donald Trump’s head. The authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 spent their four years out of office designing a policy that would allow them to radically reshape the entire federal bureaucracy, and to eliminate the checks and balances that Congress had inserted over the years to limit the president’s power. The overturning of Humphrey’s Executor is only part one of this plan; the administration’s war against the “deep state” also seeks to invalidate the 1883 Pendleton Act, which first created a merit-based civil service. This will return the United States to the 19th-century spoils (or patronage) system, whereby not just top policy-makers but all government officials were put in place by a politician in return for political loyalty.

The spoils system was known for its corruption at all levels of government, from Credit Mobilier to Tammany Hall. Today we have massive corruption at the top levels of government, beginning with Donald Trump and his friends and family. But the elimination of a professional civil service will open up vast new areas for corrupt behavior in every city and county in the United States. Project 2025 is unapologetic about this, arguing that the patronage system was unfairly criticized.

The next president - and there will be a next president- will have to confront the question of how much of the authority claimed by Donald Trump he or she will want to retain. This is a complicated question, because the status quo ante was very problematic. As I’ve argued in previous articles, the government really has become over-constrained in its ability to take action. A new president will face many obstacles to implementing their desired agenda, and will be strongly tempted to use the kind of executive power claimed by Donald Trump. The next president needs to come into office not just with new policies, but with clear plans for how to use the mechanisms of government to get them done.

The time to start thinking about these questions is now: we cannot put this off until January 20, 2029, when a new president will be facing immediate political pressures to act. The Republicans spent their four years out of power coming up with clever strategies to get their way, which they have been implementing in the second term. Those backing a post-Trump administration need to do the same.

I hope to be able to outline some of the ways that authority can be structured in future articles.

Regarding the 250th anniversary of US Independence

We, the generation of the 60s, 70s, 80s have memories. So we must say and show the right path to our young generation. No propagandists, no to hate speech, no to neofascists, whether from the left or from the right. Having witnessed the turbulent shifts of history, we carry a unique responsibility to pass down the truth about where fanaticism and authoritarianism inevitably lead. When icons like Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger sang, they did not answer to partisan machines or blind dogmas; they stood firmly for human dignity, truth, and the freedom of ordinary people against any form of oppression.

Extremism operates the exact same way no matter what flag it waves, relying on propaganda to distort reality, dehumanize opponents, and silence dissent. Guiding the youth today means teaching them to question easy promises and political scapegoats, encouraging them to look closely at the lessons of the past, and reminding them that standing up for the working class and the vulnerable is an act of universal empathy rather than a tool for political manipulation. By keeping our collective memory alive with honesty and conviction, we can ensure the next generation recognizes these historical traps and uses the power of authentic voice and art to keep building a freer, more compassionate world.

Also recall the episode of a tweet by George Bush's brother in 2016. The tweet was published by Jeb Bush on February 16, 2016, during his campaign for the Republican Party presidential primaries. The post is extremely minimalist and consists of just one image: a photograph of a .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol (an FNX-45) with the inscription "Gov. Jeb Bush" engraved on the barrel. The caption simply read "America." The tweet immediately went viral and generated a massive wave of criticism, memes, and parodies on a global scale. Users from all over the world began responding with photos of typical objects from their own countries using the same monotonic caption. In 2020, Anja Thaler made a homonymous music video "America is a Gun", based on this story.

The Theory of the Vulgar Class

On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday with a cage match on the White House lawn. The match and the events that surrounded it — especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — were a desecration of America’s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues. The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar.

That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms. As I argued yesterday, these norms historically played a key role in mitigating abuses of power and privilege during the Gilded Age, the last time America suffered from extreme income and wealth inequality (though not nearly as extreme as what we have now).

Norms matter. In his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class — published in 1899, at the apogee of the Gilded Age — Thorstein Veblen famously argued that much of the behavior of his era’s elite was driven not by the desire to enjoy life but by the desire to impress others. Partly they did this through conspicuous consumption. Thus they built lavish mansions staffed by legions of servants.

However, members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society:

John D. Rockefeller and family

The contrast with the public behavior of Trump’s band of uber-wealthy is startling:

In addition to modeling upstanding behavior, the extremely rich of the Gilded Age were expected to have, or pretend to have, some virtues that were part of the aristocratic ideal, including a sense of noblesse oblige displayed by good works. Veblen was quite cynical about philanthropy, yet even he didn’t dismiss it completely, stating that:

The fact itself that distinction or a decent good fame is sought by this method [such as the endowment of a university, public library or museum] is evidence of a prevalent sense of the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a consistent factor in the habits of thought of modern communities.

(Veblen’s lasting intellectual influence did not come from his sparkling prose style.)

Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

So in a real sense we are living in the midst of a reenactment of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, not a second American Gilded Age. No, I’m not one of those men who thinks about ancient Rome all the time. But there are some obvious parallels.

While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex, there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?

The death throes of the Republic went on for many years. Politicians declared their rivals enemies of the state, deployed violent gangs to disrupt the rule of law, established temporary dictatorships, and more. The installation of Augustus as emperor in 27 BC was just the final act.

And during this long twilight of constitutional government, one of the ways the extremely wealthy and powerful sought both to demonstrate their wealth and to curry favor with the mob was by sponsoring gladiatorial games.

The vulgarity of the Trumpian elite isn’t in itself that important. But it’s a symptom of a collapse in values and norms that, unless confronted and reversed, may herald the end of the American experiment. We should heed the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”

‘Indefensible’: Meta unleashes on Anthony Albanese’s journalism levy

Tech behemoth Meta has lashed the Albanese government’s plans to impose a new tax on its Australian revenue to fund journalism, describing it as an “indefensible” regime that will make media companies dependent on government handouts.

In a blog post published overnight, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Quest virtual reality products, unleashed its response to the News Bargaining Incentive, a new law attempting to strongarm three of the world’s biggest tech companies – Meta, Google and TikTok – into striking deals funding media outlets.

‘Foreign extortion’

The plan has triggered an angry response from US business lobby groups, which have warned that it falls foul of Australia’s free-trade obligations with the US. The White House described it as “foreign extortion” but, so far, has not stepped in to impose any retaliatory trade measures.

The major Australian media companies, meanwhile, took the rare step of sharing a joint statement in April, warning that without compensation, “journalism becomes unsustainable”. On Wednesday, News Corp Australia chief Michael Miller rejected the notion that the incentive was a tax.

“The government only built this path because Meta refused to sit down at the negotiating table, and again they are flipping the script rather than adhering to Australia’s proposed laws,” he said.

Nine Entertainment chief executive Matt Stanton said it was disingenuous to suggest that following Australian law was blocking investment.

“This initiative would be completely unnecessary if these companies simply adhered to existing Australian law, came to the bargaining table and reached deals for the fair use of our commercial property,” he said.

On Tuesday evening, Albanese backed the importance of the news incentive during a speech at a Parliament House function celebrating 195 years of The Sydney Morning Herald, according to several people who attended the event.

Meta has been a fierce critic of the policy since the beginning, but its rhetoric has escalated as the law comes closer to being introduced. The government wants to legislate the incentive this winter. Meta wrote in its Australian blog that the incentive is a “discriminatory tax built on a false premise”, and said it could remove news from its platforms entirely – as it did in Canada in response to a similar law – and people would use its platforms more.

Its harshest criticism is reserved for the levy being imposed on “consolidated revenue attributed to Australia” – a broad definition that captures its sales of Quest devices and, potentially, Google’s smartphones and other tech products.

“It is broader than digital services taxes, as it is applied on the widest possible revenue base and with no credible connection to news,” Meta wrote.

“The case for extracting revenue from social media services – where publishers voluntarily share news – is not supported by the evidence. Extending that logic to VR headsets and smart glasses is indefensible.”

Meta said it rewarded legacy business models instead of innovation and insulated news publishers from competition. “This is not a plan to save journalism. It is a tax on innovation dressed up as media policy,” it concluded.

“We are vehemently opposed to this legislation. It is discriminatory, economically incoherent, and will not deliver the sustainable news sector that Australian journalists and audiences deserve.”

Google has continued to honour and re-sign its pre-existing commercial deals with Australian media companies, but there are grave fears it would decimate journalist roles if it followed Meta in pulling out.

The policy is playing an active role in the minds of investors. On Tuesday, Macquarie reduced its valuation for Nine from $1.15 to $1.05 a share, ahead of its current price of 92¢, noting the incentive policy could add “an incremental $20 million in annual revenues on high margin”.

Nine owns the Nine Network, streaming platform Stan, out-of-home firm QMS Media and publications including The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Free TV, the group representing Nine, Southern Cross Media (which owns Network Seven) and Network Ten, has argued in its own submission to Treasury that the scheme is too narrow and should be expanded to include Microsoft and Apple.

It has also called for “robust powers” to be granted to the Tax Commissioner to demand that each tech platform report its Australian revenue. Google and Facebook do not report the full revenue they derive from Australians due to complex resale agreements or because they act as “agents” for low-tax jurisdictions like Singapore or Ireland. The two companies transferred more than $11 billion abroad in 2025.

“Free TV is concerned that there is insufficient power granted to the Taxation Commissioner to investigate whether a platform may exclude Australian-generated gross revenues from its calculations of this amount,” the group wrote.

Cenário climático RCP 8.5 - é assim que funciona a publicidade aos combustíveis fósseis hoje em dia

Fonte: Stefan Rahmstorf  (clique na imagem para ampliar)

Leu em algum lugar esta semana que a crise climática está a ser cancelada? Infelizmente, isso é mentira. A forma como esta mensagem chegou ao público alemão é um exemplo clássico de propaganda do século XXI.

Imagine que sofre de uma doença grave e progressiva que lhe causará dores e limitações cada vez maiores ao longo dos próximos anos e décadas. Os médicos prescreveram medicamentos. Agora, parecem estar a surtir efeito: a dor já não está a aumentar tão rapidamente como antes. Qual seria a sua reação? Deixaria de tomar a medicação o mais rapidamente possível?

Foi basicamente isso que a ex-ministra da Família, Kristina Schröder (CDU), exigiu esta semana. Num artigo para o jornal "Die Welt", pertencente ao grupo Springer, Schröder escreveu: "A Alemanha está a mergulhar cada vez mais na desindustrialização. O culpado é um cenário catastrófico climático que os cientistas já desmascararam como falso."

Isto está duplamente errado: um "cenário de horror climático" não é o culpado pela ampla absorção da indústria alemã pela China – o que precisamos é finalmente de uma política energética e climática coerente, afirmam tanto o Conselho de Peritos Económicos como o conselho independente de peritos em questões climáticas . Nem um "cenário de horror climático" foi "desmascarado como falso".

Infelizmente, isto não é absolutamente motivo para tranquilização.

Para se perceber como é que este absurdo artigo de opinião foi parar a um jornal alemão supostamente respeitável, é preciso recuar algumas semanas. No início de abril, um artigo assinado por dezenas de investigadores climáticos foi publicado numa revista científica , contendo uma notícia relativamente boa e uma notícia muito má. A notícia muito má é que a meta acordada em Paris por 195 países e pela União Europeia — limitar o aquecimento global a menos de 1,5 graus Celsius em comparação com os níveis pré-industriais — está, para já, fora de alcance. Os detalhes científicos são explicados, por exemplo, por Stefan Schmitt no jornal "Die Zeit " .

A notícia algo animadora é que é altamente improvável que a humanidade continue a utilizar o carvão para a geração de eletricidade a uma escala cada vez maior, principalmente porque as energias renováveis ​​estão a crescer muito rapidamente e a tornar-se cada vez mais baratas. O chamado cenário RCP8.5 , que pressupõe a escalada máxima da crise climática, tem sido considerado inverosímil pelos especialistas há anos . Um cenário de "baixa probabilidade e alto risco" já está descrito no relatório de avaliação de 2021 do Painel Intergovernamental sobre Alterações Climáticas (IPCC) .

Vai aquecer ainda mais rápido

Infelizmente, isto não é nada tranquilizador, e os especialistas concordam : ainda estamos a caminhar para um mundo que pode ser mais de três graus mais quente do que era há 200 anos. E já está mais quente do que em qualquer outro momento da história da humanidade. O Acordo de Paris sobre o Clima, como é sabido, estabelece uma meta flexível de 1,5 graus e uma meta rígida de 2 graus. E por uma boa razão: mesmo com um aumento de dois graus na temperatura, por exemplo, os corais de água quente do planeta provavelmente morrerão em todo o mundo. O que isto significa para os ecossistemas marinhos e, consequentemente, para o abastecimento alimentar de parcelas significativas da humanidade é sistematicamente ignorado por aqueles que dizem "não é assim tão mau". Para citar apenas um exemplo.

A publicação de Detlef Van Vuuren e dos seus colegas em "Geoscientific Model Development" está, por isso, longe de ser motivo de complacência; muito pelo contrário. Apenas confirma o que já era óbvio: os combustíveis fósseis são, sobretudo por razões económicas, um modelo de negócio (lentamente) em declínio . Isto significa que as emissões aumentarão a um ritmo mais lento. Mas a temperatura continuará a subir. De acordo com as descobertas atuais, até mais rápido do que antes .

Um grupo de reflexão financiado por combustíveis fósseis está a moldar a narrativa.

O que aconteceu após a publicação é um exemplo clássico de desinformação climática. Poucas semanas depois do artigo científico de Van Vuuren et al., Roger Pielke Jr., um notório negacionista das alterações climáticas (de segunda geração ) há anos, publicou um artigo no blog do American Enterprise Institute (AEI) intitulado "RCP8.5 is officially dead". O texto contém muitas afirmações aparentemente enganadoras e uma peculiaridade reveladora: Pielke Jr. escreve repetidamente que agora é provável que fique "mais frio" do que o previsto nos piores cenários (o adjetivo "mais frio" aparece cinco vezes no texto ). No entanto, definitivamente não ficará "mais frio", mas sim continuará a aquecer.

O que precisa de saber: O AEI é um daqueles think tanks neoliberais que há anos fomenta agressivamente o sentimento contra qualquer forma de proteção climática. De acordo com o site de investigação "Desmog", o AEI recebeu milhões de dólares em donativos ao longo dos anos dos suspeitos do costume na disseminação organizada de desinformação climática: de várias fundações do bilionário do petróleo americano Charles Koch, incluindo a Fundação de Caridade Charles G. Koch e o "Instituto Charles Koch", e, em grande medida, das instituições de caridade associadas aos Koch, "Donors Trust" e "Donors Capital Foundation". O AEI recebeu também donativos da ExxonMobil, da Shell, da organização de lobby "American Petroleum Institute" e assim por diante. Em síntese: o AEI é um pilar fundamental na rede de propaganda da indústria do petróleo e do gás.

Não houve absolutamente nada de "repentino" nisto.

A 11 de maio, um antigo colega, que também poderia ser descrito como um antigo jornalista científico, repercutiu a distorção da AEI no jornal "Die Welt". Este autor chamou recentemente a atenção sobretudo por uma decisão judicial e uma reprimenda do Conselho de Imprensa por reportagens agressivas, mas imprecisas, sobre "ONGs ambientalistas". O título do artigo afirmava que os cientistas climáticos estavam a "abandonar subitamente o seu cenário mais dramático". Como disse: não há absolutamente nada de "repentino" nisto. Nem aconteceu "secretamente", como alegaram vários órgãos de comunicação social de direita dos EUA , inspirados pelo presidente norte-americano. Mentiu no "TruthSocial", afirmando que o IPCC tinha "admitido" que "as suas próprias projecções" eram "FALSAS! FALSAS! FALSAS!"

A advertência subtil, mas marcante, do rei Carlos III à América

Monarca britânico discursou perante o Congresso norte-americano, numa abordagem direta e contundente, suavizada pelo profundo respeito pelos anfitriões e pelas relações históricas entre os dois países

Numa nova era de revolta, foi preciso um rei para lembrar à América os seus valores republicanos: o Estado de direito, a democracia e o poder do seu exemplo internacional.

O rei Carlos III escolhe as suas palavras com precisão - tal como fazia a sua falecida mãe, a rainha Isabel II. O significado real tem frequentemente de ser inferido.

Mas, para os padrões reais, o seu discurso numa sessão conjunta do Congresso na terça-feira foi surpreendentemente direto.

Carlos não repreendeu nem criticou a administração Trump. Mas o monarca desaprovou implicitamente a atual direção política dos Estados Unidos e defendeu os pilares da democracia ocidental: freios e contrapesos internos, alianças e tolerância inter-religiosa.

Carlos apelou ainda à defesa firme da Ucrânia. E a “natureza”, disse ele, deve ser protegida, num apelo velado para combater as alterações climáticas, que o presidente Donald Trump chamou de “burla”.

E o rei salientou que os amigos podem discordar sem romper laços eternos, uma referência velada à “relação especial”, que tem sido abalada pela recusa do Reino Unido em aderir à guerra contra o Irão.

“As palavras da América têm peso e significado, tal como têm desde a independência”, disse Carlos, no hemiciclo da Câmara dos Representantes. “As ações desta grande nação importam ainda mais”.

A versão do rei sobre os valores dos Estados Unidos provavelmente agradou mais aos democratas “No Kings” do que ao vice-presidente JD Vance, que tem opiniões sobre o declínio civilizacional do Reino Unido e da Europa e que se sentou atrás dele na Câmara dos Representantes.

Mas Carlos amenizou a sua crítica demonstrando profundo respeito pelos anfitriões. Citou Trump, afirmando que o “laço de parentesco” entre os EUA e o Reino Unido é “inestimável e eterno”. E o seu discurso esteve repleto de elogios às conquistas históricas americanas.

E os pontos mais contundentes foram suavizados pela pompa coreografada de uma visita de Estado que retribui uma viagem de Trump no ano passado. Parafraseando o presidente Theodore Roosevelt, o rei falava suavemente enquanto empunhava um grande cetro.

O presidente não mostrou sinais de se sentir ofendido pelas observações de Carlos III. Donald Trump orgulha-se das suas relações pessoais com os líderes mais famosos do mundo. O rei também condenou por duas vezes a alegada tentativa frustrada de assassinato contra o presidente numa gala para a imprensa no sábado.

“The Firm”, como a família real é frequentemente conhecida, já passou por tudo isto antes. O rei Carlos III mencionou, num raro jantar de Estado de gala na Casa Branca na terça-feira à noite, que a sua mãe tinha vindo a Washington em 1957 para reparar as divisões entre os EUA e o Reino Unido provocadas pela crise de Suez.

“É difícil imaginar algo assim a acontecer hoje, mas não é difícil ver como a relação continua a ser importante, em assuntos visíveis e invisíveis”, disse o rei.

E Carlos III ofereceu ao presidente um presente único - o sino original da torre de comando do HMS Trump, um submarino da Marinha Real que esteve em serviço no Pacífico durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

“Se alguma vez precisar de nos contactar, basta dar-nos um toque!”, afirmou Carlos.

Esta forma cerimonial de abordar as divisões ideológicas de uma forma não ideológica destacou um paradoxo: os monarcas britânicos estão vinculados por convenção constitucional a serem apolíticos, mas a sua contenção confere-lhes um enorme poder simbólico quando optam, com moderação, pelo contrário.

Shell CEO sees energy crisis lasting until 2027

The shortage of oil and natural gas caused by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is likely to drag on for months and possibly into next year, the CEO of Shell, Wael Sawan, tells Bloomberg TV.

“We’re talking about roughly 900 million barrels that haven’t been produced in the last few months and have instead been replaced by inventory,” he says, adding:

“We’re now reaching some relatively low levels. We’re talking about constraints on demand in certain areas. And we’re talking about fuel switching.”

Sawan’s comments underscore the severity of the energy shock that has hit the global energy sector in the wake of President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, which began in late February.

About 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas cannot pass through the Persian Gulf, forcing countries like Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar to shut down production and pushing customers—especially in Asia—to compete for supplies elsewhere by driving up prices.

“It’s leaving a deep mark—and not just on oil,” says Wael Sawan, noting that liquefied natural gas (LNG) is also at stake.

Earlier this week, Shell agreed to buy Canadian shale producer ARC Resources for USD 13.6bn in the energy giant’s largest deal in more than a decade.

The acquisition will support production growth through 2030 and help supply their LNG Canada facility, which exports natural gas to Asia.

The Worst Neo Robber Baron of Them All

I’m tempted to give Elon Musk that title. But when it comes to greedy and irresponsible corporate behavior, one CEO is outdoing even Musk.

When the history of this sordid second Gilded Age is written, the list of neo robber barons will obviously include Musk as well as Meta’s (Facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and board chair Peter Thiel, Oracle’s Larry Ellison (and his son, David), Google’s Sundar Pichai, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and the Trump Organization’s monumentally corrupt Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump.

But one greedy, public-be-damned CEO stands out even above Musk, Trump, and the rest. His name: Jeff Bezos. His corporation: Amazon.

It is difficult for the human mind to comprehend all the ways Bezos is shafting Americans.

Start with prices. According to a newly unsealed filing released Monday in an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.

The New York Times’s David McCabe reports on unsealed evidence that Amazon punishes sellers on its marketplace for offering lower prices on other websites, like those of Walmart or Target. When it spots a competitor’s lower price, Amazon tells the brands to demand that rival sites raise their prices for the products.

The filing includes an email to Hanes from Amazon, with links to Target’s and Walmart’s lower prices, along with Hanes’s apologetic response that it “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.” And an email to Levi’s from Amazon, with links to lower-priced khakis on Walmart’s website, along with Levi’s response that Walmart had agreed to raise its price.

According to the lawsuit, Amazon has been able to exert pressure on different brands to raise their prices because of Amazon’s power and reach.

At a time when most Americans are having trouble making ends meet, Amazon’s push to raise prices — to enlarge its profits (and put more money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets) — is beyond unconscionable.

This is hardly Bezos’s and Amazon’s first brush with antitrust law. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states accused Amazon of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail by squeezing merchants who sell on its site and prioritizing its own products, resulting in “artificially higher prices.”

In September, the FTC agreed to settle another lawsuit against Amazon that accused it of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers — but didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson reports that Virginia is subsidizing Amazon’s “second headquarters” in Crystal City, Virginia — just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. — with $750 million in taxpayer funds, yet the corporation is wildly behind its job-creation pledge. Having promised to create 25,000 new jobs by 2038, it created a mere 1,600 jobs last year and is up to just 29 percent of the number of jobs it promised by now.

Speaking of Amazon jobs: Until earlier this month, attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board were prosecuting Amazon for firing employees that make Amazon deliveries because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a clear violation of labor laws.

But then, a few weeks ago, the NLRB attorneys — now firmly under control of Trump’s NLRB general counsel — announced they’d reached a “settlement” with Amazon in which Amazon agreed to pay the workers who’d been laid off for more than two years, two weeks’ worth of wages. Two weeks.

Amazon’s workers are among the worst-treated in America.

Ryan Haas of The Western Edge reports that on April 6, an Amazon warehouse worker collapsed and died on the floor of Amazon’s warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon. A co-worker trained in CPR tried to help but was told by a manager to turn around. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue picking items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look” and get back to work.

Jeff Bezos couldn’t care less. As of April 2026, his net worth is estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world.

Like the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, Bezos’s consumption is of the conspicuous kind.

He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day star-studded event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian, and including a ceremony on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and a pajama-themed afterparty at the Arsenal.

His “homes” include three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Florida, costing over $230 million; the former Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, which features a 13,600-square-foot mansion and a golf course, which he purchased for $165 million; a 14-acre compound on Maui with a 4,500-square-foot main house and 700-square-foot pool; a $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.; and a massive multi-lot compound with waterfront frontage in Medina, Washington.

But what puts Bezos at the head of all the other robber barons in this second Gilded Age is his slavish sycophancy toward the worst president in American history.

Bezos bought the legendary Washington Post for $250 million in October 2013 and has turned it into a Trump cheerleader — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump.

(That’s not all Bezos has done to ruin the Post. In February, he fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of its staff.)

Then he shamelessly paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back a tiny percentage. It was a blatant bribe of Trump.

And he does whatever Trump asks. After Trump complained to Bezos about a report that Amazon planned to display for consumers the costs of Trump’s tariffs, Bezos immediately canceled the plan.

Bezos has sucked up to Trump presumably to secure Pentagon contracts for his Blue Origin rocket company, which landed a $2.3 billion NASA contract early in Trump's second term. And to avoid further antitrust lawsuits or labor law scrutiny.

That he has zero scruples does not necessarily distinguish Bezos from the other robber barons of this despicable era.

But his public-be-damned business practices, his especially conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Jeff Bezos the worst CEO of them all.

What can you do? You might share this post and boycott Amazon.

Vergonhoso. Itália visa Trump e recusa substituir Irão no Mundial

O Governo de Itália colocou, esta quinta-feira, totalmente de parte a possibilidade de a seleção nacional vir a substituir o Irão no Campeonato do Mundo, em resposta à proposta que Paolo Zampolli, enviado especial dos Estados Unidos da América e 'braço direito' de Donald Trump, fez chegar ao presidente da FIFA, Gianni Infantino.

"Em primeiro lugar, não é possível. Em segundo lugar, não é oportuno. Não sei o que é que vem primeiro, mas a qualificação decide-se em campo", atirou o ministro do Desporto, Andrea Abodi, em declarações reproduzidas pelo jornal transalpino Il Giornale. Uma posição que mereceu o apoio por parte do responsável pela pasta da Economia, Giancarlo Giorgetti.

"Considero isso uma coisa vergonhosa. Eu ficaria envergonhado", atirou o responsável político, à margem de um evento que teve lugar no Palácio do Quirinal, em Roma. Isto, depois de a squadra azzurra ter falhado (surpreendentemente) o apuramento para um Campeonato do Mundo pela terceira vez consecutiva.

A hipótese foi veiculada pelo próprio Paolo Zampolli, em conversa com o jornal Financial Times, horas antes: "Eu confirmo que sugeri a Trump e Infantino que a Itália substitua o Irão, no Mundial. Eu sou nativo de Itália, e seria um sonho ver os azzurri num torneio organizado pelos EUA. Com quatro títulos, eles têm o 'pedigree' para justificar a inclusão".

Seguiu-se, entretanto, uma notícia avançada pela estação televisiva britânica BBC Sport, dando conta de que o organismo que rege o futebol internacional não teria qualquer intenção de retirar o Irão do Mundial2026, apesar da guerra com os Estados Unidos da América, que se prolonga já há mais de dois meses.

Fatemeh Mohajerani, porta-voz do governo do Irão, garantiu, de resto, que o país está "totalmente preparado" para disputar o torneio, no qual se encontra integrado no Grupo G, juntamente com Nova Zelândia, Egito e Bélgica.

EUA queriam 'redimir-se' após troca de galhardetes com o Papa Leão XIV

A publicação original citava fontes próximas do processo, que garantem que esta proposta não passou de uma tentativa de Donald Trump de remendar as relações com a primeira-ministra italiana, Giorgia Meloni, na sequência do 'bate-boca' público entre ambos, por conta da posição do Papa Leão XIV sobre a guerra no Médio Oriente.

"Acho que ele não está a fazer um bom trabalho. Acho que ele gosta de criminalidade. Não gostamos de um Papa que diga que não há problema em ter armas nucleares", afirmou o líder máximo norte-americano, em abril, a propósito das intervenções públicas levadas a cabo pelo compatriota sobre este tema.

"Continuarei a manifestar-me abertamente contra a guerra, procurando promover a paz, o diálogo e as relações multilaterais entre os Estados, para encontrar soluções justas para os problemas. Há demasiadas pessoas a sofrer no mundo de hoje. Há demasiadas pessoas inocentes a ser mortas", respondeu este.

"Considero inaceitáveis as declarações do Presidente Trump a propósito do Santo Padre. O Papa é o chefe da Igreja Católica, e é correto e natural que peça a paz e condene todas as formas de guerra, interveio a transalpina, deixando Donald Trump "chocado": "Pensei que ela tinha coragem, enganei-me".

Leia Também: 

FIFA 'bate o pé' a Trump e rejeita substituir Irão por Itália no Mundial

Transportes a 100 dólares geram revolta entre adeptos no Mundial

Hegseth Says Climate Change Is ‘Crap.’ The Military Is Still Bracing for It

When Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm, tore through Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base in 2018, it battered F-22 stealth fighter jets, destroyed hundreds of buildings and churned up 700,000 cubic yards of debris. The total cost of the damage approached $5 billion.

Now, Tyndall is being rebuilt as a super-resilient “installation of the future.” New buildings sit more than a foot above the ground, to remain dry through 75 years of sea-level rise. Their roofs are designed to withstand winds of up to 165 miles per hour. Manmade oyster reefs will protect coasts by breaking up waves.

The massive project will be 70% complete next year, said the officer leading it, Col. Robert Bartlow, chief of the US Air Force Civil Engineer Center Natural Disaster Recovery Division. “This is a first for the Air Force,” he said, with large-scale, cutting-edge construction taking place “on top of an existing base, while there was a continued flying mission.”

Storms like Michael are becoming more powerful and damaging as the world warms, and many military installations are exposed to them and other climate hazards. Still, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed last year that the Pentagon wouldn’t do any “climate change crap” on his watch. Biden-era climate action plans were scrapped, and the 2025 National Security Strategy invoked climate change only to label it a “disastrous” ideology. Hegseth canceled nearly 100 research studies related to global warming and security, which experts say will compound the loss of climate knowledge across the federal government under President Donald Trump.

“Because ‘climate’ is a dirty word, we’re not investing in that predictive capability,” said Sherri Goodman, secretary general of the non-governmental International Military Council on Climate and Security and, from 1993 to 2001, the US deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security.

But as Tyndall shows, the Defense Department is still engaged on one front of the climate fight: steeling its bases against the effects of a warming atmosphere, such as higher seas, fiercer storms and deadlier fires. A new flood wall is rising at the US Naval Academy in Maryland; a low-lying Air Force runway is being elevated in Virginia; and projects are underway to reduce wildfire risk around various military sites in Hawaii.

Work that was previously described as confronting the climate threat is now touted for ensuring “resilience” and “readiness.” The semantics are a nod to necessity: At stake are hundreds of billions of dollars of assets and the ability to launch missions quickly and smoothly.

“Ultimately, the military is a very pragmatic institution,” said John Conger, a past director of the nonprofit Center for Climate and Security and a senior Defense Department official during the Obama administration. “It wants to maintain mission capability. Whether we’re going to call it ‘climate,’ not ‘climate,’ whatever — if I can’t get to the base because the road is flooded, that’s a problem.”

Representatives of the Defense Department declined to comment.

Global warming impinges on American security and military operations in numerous ways. More climate-driven disasters means more deployments to respond to them. Extreme heat makes it harder for jets to lift off and sickens soldiers during training exercises. Climate change also acts as a “threat multiplier” – a term that Goodman coined – around the world. It can exacerbate drought conditions, which may limit water or food in regions already primed for conflict.

Much of the military’s resilience work began years ago; construction timelines are long. The $900 billion 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump signed into law in December, includes measures that could be said to come under the umbrella of climate adaptation. The law bolsters the military’s ability to respond to wildfires; raises the cost limit for replacing structures destroyed by disasters; and requires military leaders to identify the biggest risks to water security on bases.

Congress has given the military “decades-long, bipartisan direction” to prepare for climate change, even at times when the term itself was out of political favor, noted Will Rogers, a principal of Converge Strategies and the senior climate advisor to the secretary of the Army from 2022 to January 2025.

If climate preparedness is another term for environmental assessment, “the Army’s been doing this regularly now since World War II,” said Frank Galgano, a geographer at Villanova University who retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2007.

The approach may not have shifted, but the atmosphere has. Extreme weather and disasters have caused $15 billion of damage to defense facilities over the past decade. In 2023 alone, Typhoon Marwar ravaged two bases on Guam, heavy rains swamped the campus of West Point in New York and a landslide blocked the main road at Camp Pendleton in California.

Close to $400 billion of federal government assets, most of them belonging to the Defense Department, are at high risk of being hit by a major coastal flood or storm in coming years, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.

The Pentagon explicitly recognized the warming climate as a danger for many years. The 2008 National Defense Strategy flagged climate change as an emerging risk, and two years later it was named a national security threat in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review. After that, the Defense Department and the individual armed forces put out a stream of climate and sustainability plans. (Some have now been removed from government websites.)

James Mattis, who served as defense secretary during President Donald Trump’s first term, described climate change as a destabilizing force in 2017. His Biden-era successor Lloyd Austin said in 2021, “We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”

Trump and Hegseth have made a sharp pivot. In a March 2025 memo to military leaders, Hegseth called climate change a “distraction” from fighting wars, ordered that references to it be removed from mission statements and barred any environmental initiatives from being included in the Future Years Defense Program, a strategic plan.

Hegseth also included a caveat big enough to steer an aircraft carrier through. “Nothing in this memorandum,” he wrote, “shall be construed to prevent the department from assessing weather-related impacts on operations, mitigating weather-related risks, conducting environmental assessments, as appropriate, and improving the resilience of military installations.”

Days after Hegseth issued his memo, the Pentagon’s guidance on master planning for bases was updated. (By law, every major military installation must have a master plan.) In the older version from 2022, the word “climate” was used 54 times. It doesn’t appear once in the new version, which still directs planners to identify and mitigate risks from extreme weather.

Bartlow, at Tyndall, sees no contradiction between that project and Hegseth’s guidance.

The overarching goal at Tyndall, he said, is “preserving lethality in a high-end combat capability. When we talk about resilience, it’s focused on preserving that combat capability.” If another Category 5 hurricane hits, “there’ll be some interruptions, but the idea is you’ll be able to recover this installation quickly,” Bartlow said. “You can make that direct link back to readiness.”

Hardening efforts continue elsewhere but are falling short. A February Government Accountability Office report found that the military has failed to track all the costs from disaster damage and hasn’t fully incorporated climate-change projections into facility designs, and that many of its master plans still haven’t been updated to promote greater resilience.

One constraint is funding. “Our installations are funded at about 80% of what they need on a day-to-day basis,” said Rogers, the former Army climate adviser.

The Iran war could apply more pressure. Defense officials “could use their reprogramming authority to pay for contingency operations in Iran” with money meant for fortifying bases, said Rogers. “I would be worried about that, depending on how long this goes.”

Although the Pentagon has maintained a focus on resilience, under Hegseth it has backed off efforts to lower its emissions — the US military is the single biggest climate polluter in the country — and develop green ships and tanks. The armed forces have in recent years explored using hybrid and electric tanks for tactical, not just environmental reasons: They reduce reliance on diesel supply lines, are quieter and are less detectable to heat radar. While the Army is moving ahead with its hybrid M1E3 tank, funding for such initiatives has declined, said Rogers.

Of the studies that Hegseth canceled, some focused on the Indo-Pacific, where China has ambitions, noted Goodman. She said the lost knowledge and reduced funding for climate and weather research – not just in the military but in agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – could set back defense planning.

She offered a hypothetical example: With AI pushing the envelope in forecasting, an adversary could anticipate and take advantage of a weather event to launch a cyberattack on the US. “And if we’re not understanding that,” she said, “then we have become more vulnerable.”

Fonte

Pete Hegseth quis orar por soldado mas acabou a citar monólogo de "Pulp Fiction"

Um dos momentos mais recentes protagonizado pelo secretário da Defesa dos Estados Unidos está a gerar polémica. Durante uma oração por um soldado norte-americano resgatado depois de a sua aeronave ter sido abatida pelo Irão, Pete Hegseth acabou por recitar um discurso muito semelhante a um monólogo do filme "Pulp Fiction", de Quentin Tarantino, em vez de um versículo bíblico.

O mais recente discurso do secretário da Defesa dos Estados Unidos está a dar que falar pelas razões mais insólitas. Num momento em que fazia uma oração por um soldado norte-americano resgatado após a sua aeronave ter sido abatida pelo Irão, Pete Hegseth tentou recitar um versículo bíblico, mas acabou por proferir um dos monólogos mais icónicos da obra cinematográfica de Quentin Tarantino.

O momento que está a dar que falar na imprensa internacional aconteceu na quarta-feira, no Pentágono, perante militares e familiares. Antes de proferir o “falso” trecho bíblico, Pete Hegseth explicou que a oração era recitada pela missão de Busca e Salvamento em Combate “Sandy One”, no Irão: “Chamam-lhe CSAR 25:17, o que penso ser uma referência a Ezequiel 25:17”, afirmou.

“O caminho do aviador abatido está cercado por todos os lados pelas iniquidades dos egoístas e pela tirania dos homens maus. Bendito aquele que, em nome da camaradagem e do dever, guia os perdidos pelo vale da escuridão, pois é verdadeiramente o guardião do seu irmão e o protetor dos que se perderam. E abaterei sobre ti grande vingança e ira furiosa aqueles que tentarem capturar e destruir o meu irmão, e saberás que o meu indicativo é Sandy 1 quando exercer a minha vingança sobre ti. Ámen", proferiu.

No entanto, Pete Hegseth acabou por denunciar-se, devido às evidentes semelhanças com o monólogo de “Jules Winnfield”, o assassino contratado interpretado por Samuel L. Jackson em “Pulp Fiction” (1994), proferido antes de executar as suas vítimas, apesar de ter adaptado o versículo ao contexto militar e à operação de resgate.

Na altura, Quentin Tarantino adaptou-o a partir de um filme japonês de artes marciais, intitulado "Karate Kiba" (1973), protagonizado por Sonny Chiba.

“O caminho do homem justo está cercado por todos os lados pelas iniquidades dos egoístas e pela tirania dos homens maus. Bendito aquele que, em nome da caridade e da boa vontade, guia os mais fracos pelo vale da escuridão, pois é verdadeiramente o guardião do seu irmão e o protetor dos que se perderam. E abaterei sobre ti grande vingança e ira furiosa aqueles que tentarem envenenar e destruir os meus irmãos. E saberás que o meu nome é o Senhor quando exercer a minha vingança sobre ti", cita.

Já o verdadeiro versículo de Ezequiel 25:17, que consiste numa declaração de vingança divina contra os filisteus (povo marítimo da Idade do Bronze), diz apenas: “E executarei grande vingança contra eles com severas repreensões; e saberão que eu sou o Senhor, quando eu exercer a minha vingança sobre eles.”

Segundo os relatos, este foi o segundo culto consecutivo em que Hegseth usou versículos e mensagens violentas ao discutir a guerra no Irão: "Concedam a esta força-tarefa alvos claros e justos para a violência", orou no mês passado.