US President Donald Trump listens to a question from a reporter during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, January 20, 2026
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A recent You Gov poll showed that 55 per cent of the British people are ready to kick US bases out of Britain if Greenland was attacked. The poll showed that large majorities of Labour and Green voters and even most Tories supported the position, with just 22 per cent opposed.
Stop the War Coalition vice-chairman Chris Nineham told the Morning Star: “This poll shows that ordinary people in Britain are appalled by what Trump is doing and it is the basis for a mass campaign to expel the US military from Britain, which Stop the War will be launching shortly.
“The fact is that people are opposed to the appeasement of Trump by Starmer and the European leaders but also to their mimicking of him by ramping up arms spending.”
Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn said: “US bases should have been removed the moment they invaded Venezuela — a flagrant violation of international law.
“We need an independent foreign policy based on diplomacy and peace, which looks to collaborate with partners everywhere, including the global South, on the biggest challenges facing us all, such as the climate crisis and sickening global inequality.”
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“The swamp has never been so fetid,” wrote New York Times columnist Nick Kristof.
As millions of Americans face down devastating cuts to their healthcare and food assistance, President Donald Trump and his family personally enriched themselves to the tune of at least $1.4 billion during his first year back in office, according to an analysis published by the New York Timeseditorial board on Tuesday, the one-year anniversary of his second inauguration.
This unprecedented profiteering, which already amounts to 16,822 times the median US household income according to the Times, is almost certainly an undercount, as many sources of the president and his family’s wealth remain hidden from public view.
“President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him,” the board wrote. “He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency—into finding out just how much money people, corporations, and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes of bending the power of the government to the service of their interests.”
Relying on a series of previous analyses from other news organizations, the Times notes several of Trump’s key streams of income.
As has been widely documented, most comprehensively byReuters in October, by far Trump’s largest source of income has been his family’s investment in cryptocurrencies, which has generated at least $867 million in new wealth for the family. Other investigations suggest the true number could be several billion when accounting for unreported assets and gains that have not yet been realized.
“People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family’s coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret,” the Timesboard wrote.
The swamp has never been so fetid. President Trump has greedily raked in $1.4 billion (an underestimate) in the last year, often from those seeking favor. E.g. He accepts a Qatari jet and promises US forces will protect Qatar. The corruption is staggering: www.nytimes.com/interactive/…
It noted one particularly brazen transaction earlier this year, when an investment company owned by a member of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) ruling family dumped $2 billion into the Trump family’s crypto startup World Liberty Financial, just two weeks before the White House announced that the UAE would be given access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced computer chips.
Inking real-estate deals has been another tool nations have used to buy influence with Trump. The Times cites a report from the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), showing that the Trump Organization and its partners were planning at least 22 “Trump-branded projects around the globe” over the course of his presidency, including through hotels and golf courses in India, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Indonesia, and other nations eager to be in the US government’s good graces.
In all, since his reelection, the Times calculated that Trump has reaped at least $23 million from licensing his name overseas, at times culminating in the appearance of blatant pay-for-play. In one instance, “the administration agreed to lower its threatened tariffs on Vietnam about a month after a Trump Organization project broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf complex outside of Hanoi. Vietnamese officials ignored their own laws to fast-track the project.”
Another CREW analysis from July found that Trump visits his own properties roughly “every other day”—much more frequently than in his previous term—and that many foreign government officials have traveled to these sites to curry favor with the president.
CREW is tracking Trump’s conflicts of interest tied to his real estate empire, including:-Visits to Trump properties-Events held at Trump properties-Promotion of Trump business interests The pattern is clear: it’s all happening more this time around.
Trump also infamously accepted a $400 million jet, described as a “flying palace,” from the Qatari government. He plans to use the plane as Air Force One during his presidency and transfer it to his presidential library after leaving office. Shortly after receiving the jet, he pledged to “protect” Qatar and announced lucrative new military and economic partnerships with the country.
Elsewhere, Amazon spent $40 million on a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, $28 million of which will be given directly to the first lady, which the Times said is far more than has been paid for similar projects. The company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has critically lobbied the administration for favorable treatment regarding antitrust and defense contracts, and has seen his own wealth soar by nearly $9 billion over the past year.
But Trump’s income from media and tech companies has more commonly arrived in the form of shakedowns. He has made an estimated $90.5 million from settlements from X (formerly Twitter), ABC News, Meta, YouTube, and Paramount since his reelection, none of which, the Times argues, “were justified on the merits.”
“Mr. Trump’s hunger for wealth is brazen,” the editorial board wrote. “Throughout the nation’s history, presidents of both parties have taken care to avoid even the appearance of profiting from public service. This president gleefully squeezes American corporations, flaunts gifts from foreign governments, and celebrates the rapid growth of his own fortune.”
The report of Trump’s looting of the presidency comes as roughly 1.3 million Americans are expected to lose health insurance coverage in 2026 due to Republican cuts to Medicaid and other assistance programs, while more than 20 million are expected to pay higher insurance premiums after the GOP allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire last year. Roughly 1.5 million have already dropped their health coverage this year, according to a report last week from CNBC.
Meanwhile, about 4 million low-income people—including 1 million children—are expected to see their access to food assistance either substantially reduced or totally lost in the coming years due to Republican cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
While “Drain the Swamp” has remained one of Trump’s signature phrases, portraying the president as a crusader against endemic corruption in Washington, Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote, in the wake of his paper’s new report, that under Trump’s watch, “the swamp has never been so fetid.”
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Federal law enforcement agents confront anti-ICE protesters during a demonstration outside the Bishop Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 15, 2026. (Photo by Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images)
“We are all witness to a dangerous trajectory under President Trump that has already led to a human rights emergency,” said the leader of Amnesty International USA.
Exactly a year into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, a leading human rights group on Tuesday released a report cataloging the administration’s rapid escalation of authoritarian practices—and outlining the steps that can and must be taken in the US to halt Trump’s attacks on immigrants and refugees, the press, protesters, and his political opponents.
The group has documented human rights abuses and the patterns followed by authoritarian regimes around the world and has found that while the rise of autocratic leaders can happen within numerous contexts, the similarities shared by authoritarian escalations include the consolidation of government power, the control of information, the discrediting of critics, the punishment of dissent, the closure of civic space, and the weakening of mechanisms that ensure accountability.
Those patterns have all been documented in the US since January 20, 2025, when Trump took office for a second time.
🚨USA: One year into Trump's second term and the world faces 'a human rights emergency' – New Report
“We are all witness to a dangerous trajectory under President Trump that has already led to a human rights emergency,” said Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “By shredding norms and concentrating power, the administration is trying to make it impossible for anyone to hold them accountable.”
The 12 areas in which Trump is eroding human rights and accelerating toward authoritarianism, according to Amnesty, include:
Scapegoating populations and rolling back non-discrimination policies;
Using the military for domestic purposes;
Dismantling checks on corporate accountability and anti-corruption measures;
Increasing state surveillance; and
Undermining international systems that protect human rights.
Amnesty emphasized that the authoritarian tactics are “mutually reinforcing,” with Trump cracking down on protesters early in his term—targeting foreign-born students who had organized protests against Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza and revoking thousands of student visas, hundreds of which were revoked after the administration began monitoring foreign students’ social media and accused visa holders of “support for terrorism” under a broad federal statute.
In recent months, Trump’s attacks on refugees and immigrants have gone hand in hand with his militarization of law enforcement and targeting of First Amendment rights.
The president has deployed the National Guard and sent thousands of armed, masked federal agents into communities including Chicago; Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis; in the latter city, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a woman who had come out to help protect immigrants in her neighborhood earlier this month.
Masked agents have “seized migrants, asylum seekers, and US citizens” as they have searched for people to arrest to fulfill Trump’s campaign pledge to ramp up deportations.
Those who have been detained are being held in facilities like Camp Montana East in El Paso, Texas, which recently recorded its third detainee death in less than two months, and “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, where Amnesty last month documented treatment that amounts to torture.
The report also details Trump’s attacks on the press, with the president hand-picking outlets that are permitted to cover the White House and barring the Associated Press from “restricted spaces” in the government building because of its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s preferred name, the “Gulf of America.” The Pentagon also demanded that journalists sign agreements waiving their First Amendment rights, resulting in reporters walking out and turning in their press badges, pledging to continue covering the Department of Defense without the administration’s approval.
A White House official also aggressively attacked a journalist last week for asking about an ICE agent’s killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, accusing him of being a “left-wing activist” who was posing as a reporter when he did not accept the administration’s claims that the agent had shot Good in self defense.
The report also details the Department of Justice’s efforts to investigate groups it deems “domestic terrorist” organizations“ while moving toward classifying the filming of immigration arrests—a constitutional right—as domestic terrorism; Trump’s weaponization of the DOJ against his political opponents including New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey; his executive actions targeting law firms that represent individuals and groups that challenge the government, which resulted in some firms acquiescing; and his abandonment of due process, including through his ”extraordinary“ use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers to an El Salvador prison known for torture.
“Trump’s attacks on civic space and the rule of law and the erosion of human rights in the United States mirrors the global pattern Amnesty has seen and warned about for decades,” said O’Brien. “Importantly, our experience shows that by the time authoritarian practices are fully entrenched, the institutions meant to restrain abuses of power are already severely compromised.”
The report warns that “the Trump administration has moved swiftly—oftentimes outside the bounds of the law—to trample on rights and dangerously consolidate power,” and calls on institutions to take decisive action to respond to the “alarm bells” detailed in the report.
“We know where this path leads, and we know the human cost when alarm bells go unanswered,” reads the report.
Strengthening guardrails against the domestic use of the military for law enforcement and prohibiting finding for “militarized protest suppression that violates human rights standards”;
Conduct oversight of discriminatory press restrictions;
Pass legislation to develop national guidelines on respecting and facilitating the right to peaceful protest and for all law enforcement agencies to review their policies and the equipment used in the policing of demonstrations;
Conduct oversight of immigration agencies including through “unannounced inspections of detention facilities and immigration enforcement”; and
Decriminalize migration and establish a pathway to citizenship for people within the US.
The group also called on international leaders to continue scrutiny of human rights developments in the US, oppose US reprisals and sanctions against international courts and investigators, and mitigate humanitarian harms where US assistance is abruptly withdrawn by coordinating support for affected communities and frontline organizations.
Kerry Moscugiuri, interim chief executive of Amnesty International UK, called on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to “use every tool at his disposal to confront Donald Trump’s seemingly out of control anti-rights agenda.”
“A year into Trump’s second term and it’s never been clearer: this is a pivotal point in world history,” said Moscugiuri. “Starmer must also speak out on the US government’s support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Failure to oppose and stop the genocide has led us all to where we are now. Silence and inaction as the global human rights architecture is dismantled is not an option. Leaders across the globe must wake up to the world they seem to be sleepwalking into—before it is too late.”
O’Brien added that “authoritarian practices only take root when they are allowed to become normalized. We cannot let that happen in the United States.”
“Together,” he said, “we all have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to rise to this challenging time in our history and to protect human rights.”
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US President Donald Trump speaks during a reception for business leaders at the World Economic Forum annual meeting on January 21, 2026, in Davos, Switzerland. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Trump previously said he wished he could cancel elections, but feared being called a “dictator” by his detractors. Now he’s calling himself one in front of the whole world.
After weeks of authoritarian threats to crush protests with the military, cancel elections, conquer foreign countries, and send masked agents door-to-door to round up anyone who can’t prove their citizenship, Trump on Wednesday told an already uneasy room full of world leaders that “sometimes you need a dictator.”
The offhanded comment came in the middle of a rambling speech at the reception dinner for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, in which Trump congratulated himself on a different rambling speech he’d given earlier that day at the summit.
“We had a good speech, we got great reviews. I can’t believe it, we got good reviews on that speech,” Trump said of the widely mocked address in which he continued to demand the US take over Greenland (which he repeatedly referred to as “Iceland”) and made new tariff threats against Canada and Europe if they resist the annexation.
“Usually they say ‘he’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator,” Trump continued. “But sometimes you need a dictator! But they didn’t say that in this case… It’s all based on common sense, it’s not conservative or liberal, or anything else.”
At least twice over the past month, Trump has suggested that the 2026 midterm elections should be canceled, since his party is likely to lose.
The first time he brought up the idea, on the five-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, he seemed to back off the idea for fear of being called a dictator by his detractors: “I won’t say cancel the election; they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say: ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
But if being called a dictator was the only thing holding him back from attempting to suspend democracy, he no longer appears to care.
As political commentator Charlotte Clymer wrote on social media, “Trump is now openly referring to himself as a dictator” in front of the whole world.
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Original article by republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
A demonstrator expresses concerns over the sharing of private personal data by the Department of Government Efficiency at a “Hands Off!” protest against the Trump administration on April 5, 2025 in Riverside, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
The DOJ filing also appeared to corroborate claims that DOGE employees improperly tried to make “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information” on a third-party cloud platform.
In a court filing dated January 16, the DOJ revealed that the unidentified organization last March reached out to two DOGE employees, who were working at the Social Security Administration (SSA), and requested that they “analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired.”
“The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states,” the DOJ wrote. “In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a ‘Voter Data Agreement,’ in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group.”
The filing said that SSA has “not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group,” but that it had reviewed emails indicating that “DOGE team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”
The DOJ also revealed that the SSA in December 2025 made referrals of the two DOGE employees to the US Office of Special Counsel for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal government employees from using their positions for political purposes.
Politico, which first reported on the DOJ filing, noted that the disclosure “came as part of a list of ‘corrections’ to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data,” and also included revelations that “DOGE team members shared data on unapproved ‘third-party’ servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.”
The admission that DOGE employees shared data on a third-party server bolsters an explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August from former SSA chief data officer Charles Borges, who alleged that DOGE officials have been responsible for “serious data security lapses” that “risk the security of over 300 million Americans’ Social Security data.”
At the heart of Borges’ complaint was an effort by DOGE employees to make “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment” that “apparently lacks any security oversight from SSA or tracking to determine who is accessing or has accessed the copy of this data.”
Should hackers gain access to this copy of Social Security data, the Borges complaint warned, it could result in identity theft on an unprecedented scale and lead to the loss of crucial food and healthcare benefits for millions of Americans. In a worst-case scenario, the complaint said, the government may also have to give every American a new Social Security number “at great cost.”
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US President Donald Trump listens to a question from a reporter during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, January 20, 2026
