I often write the first paragraph of a story in a notebook, add to it every so often or leave it there to see if something might emerge from it. In 2008, in San Francisco, I went with three friends on a hike near Muir Woods overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At the summit, there was a kind of lodge where you could get a bed for the night and use the kitchen to make your own dinner. The view was spectacular.

As we climbed, I began to imagine a character, an Irish guy who had made up his mind to go home. This was his last big outing in the landscape. He had been working as a plumber. Dotted in the Bay Area were houses where he had repaired pipes and installed new sinks and toilets and washing machines. This was his legacy in America. He was someone who could be depended on in an emergency. But he was illegal and he was going home.

Over the next few years, the story became more solid. If my character left America, he knew that he would never be allowed back. He had a daughter from a marriage that had ended. He was crazy about her. If he left, he would lose the connection with her. I imagined him having one last day out with his daughter in that beautiful place. I wrote some more of the story and then I left it aside.

Sixteen years later, the story came back into my mind. It occurred to me that the election of Donald Trump for the second term and the prospect of him taking it out on illegal immigrants would be the actual spur to make my character really decide that he had to go home. He would leave on Monday 20 January 2025, the precise date of Trump’s inauguration. The hike with his daughter, almost a teenager, would take place on Saturday 18 January.

I worked it so that I would write the story of the hike on the very day it took place. I was in the same time zone. The inauguration was looming. ICE was coming towards us. Trump was getting louder and more ominous. As my protagonist and his daughter set out from the city, I was writing what they might say and do at the same time of the morning in question. They didn’t know (as I didn’t know) how they would find a parking space. But then it became easier than they (or I) had imagined. The aim was to finish this section that day. I could make changes, but they would be small. I would try to make it stick, so that I would not have to rewrite it on another day, a day when Trump had already taken over. I wanted the story done by then. And I wanted to publish it soon afterwards. It was superstitious; it felt serious at the time.

Sometimes, a glimpse is enough to start with, or a small detail from a much larger story. In his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James talks about this idea of a “germ”, what he called “a mere floating particle in the stream of talk”, something that “has the virus of suggestion”. Life, as James would have it, is “all inclusion and confusion”, just as art is “all discrimination and selection”. If you are seeking the inspiration for a story, then very little is more than enough. Something hinted – a clue, a suggestion – can do more in the imagination than something spelled out.

About 20 years ago, I interviewed a historian in the area of the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pallars. Because the Pallars is sparsely populated and remote, the historian had been able to account for every single death there in the Spanish civil war. And he was also able to collect many small details about injuries, bombardments and movements of troops.

What was strange, he said, was that in the summer of 1938 the town of Pobla de Segur in the Pallars was almost quiet. The real action was elsewhere. Thus, the fascist soldiers could hold parties at night down by the river, play guitar and drink plenty.

The historian invited a general who had been a young officer in Franco’s army in 1938 to return to the Pallars more than half a century later and show him where certain things had happened. As the general, now in his 70s, was walking through the town, he met a local woman who was out shopping, and, with surprise and a kind of delight, the two recognised one another immediately. They had known each other in that summer, the summer of 1938. She was from a world that was vehemently anti-Franco; no one wanted to remember those parties by the river.

That was all I needed. I almost asked the historian to tell me nothing more beyond that single encounter on the street. From that, I could start imagining those nights by the river in that summer of the civil war. And then conjure up the woman years later being told that the young soldier she had fallen in love with, whom she hadn’t seen for more than 50 years, was coming on a visit – he was a retired general now – and he remembered her name and he would like to see her.

It is important to be ready not to write the drama. At first, I tried to see what that meeting would be like. And then it struck me that it would be more powerful if the woman and the soldier didn’t meet all those years later. He had invited her to lunch but she didn’t go. The story would centre on how she spent those hours, knowing he was so close by, not meeting him.

The confrontation that does not occur is often more dramatic than the one that does. At the very end of another story, A Sum of Money, the young man who has been sent home from boarding school for stealing money has to face his parents. I sat gazing at a blank page for a long time as I worked out how this fraught encounter might be written until I realised that it didn’t have to be written at all. In the finished story, no one says anything. They almost do and then think better of it.

But something happens that makes a difference. The lack of open drama is a way to allow a shift to take place in someone’s sensibility. My job is to give it as much nuance and ambiguity as I can and also make it matter, make the arrow hit its mark.

James wrote about a fellow novelist who had published a much praised work of fiction about French Protestant youth. When someone asked her how she knew so much about French Protestant youth, she replied that once she was walking down a stairway in Paris and looked in through a doorway and saw a group of French Protestant youth. That is where her knowledge came from, just that. What James appreciated was the ability “to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern”.

In spring 1988 I decided to find a small apartment in Barcelona. One day, as I waited to be shown around a possible rental, three women in their 60s joined the queue. We spoke for just two or three minutes, but enough for me to discover they were sisters, they were Catalans, they had come back from living in Argentina for many years, they found prices in Barcelona very high. They finished one another’s sentences.

I waited 30 years to write The Catalan Girls. It is, at 30,000 words, the longest story in my latest collection. I imagined the lives of those three women I had fleetingly encountered. I dreamed up how and why they went to Argentina, how each of them lived there, and then how they came back to Catalonia. I made the middle one lesbian, the youngest dreamy and the eldest bossy. I gave them lovers and husbands. I imagined that the bossy one bossed her two younger sisters into getting the same hairdo as she had before they travelled back to Spain.

I moved closer also to what I knew. I imagined the three sisters attending the same festival in the village of Tírvia in the Pallars as I attended in July 2017. I could easily have seen them if I had looked over. I knew what music the band was playing.

Other elements in the story came from memory. The house where the middle sister lives in the outskirts of Buenos Aires is precisely where I lodged in the spring and early summer of 1985. Her room is my room. The apartment where the youngest sister lives, paid for by her lover, is where I also lived in the spring of 2013.

In writing stories, I get energy from rooms I knew but no longer live in, from things that have gone, from spaces that seem oddly haunted and have lodged in the memory or could come back in dreams. In A Sum of Money, much of the action takes place in the dormitory known as The Attic at St Peter’s College, Wexford. I have not been in that dormitory since 1971.

In the early years of this century, I worked for a semester at various American universities in cities where I will not live again. Thus, in a story called Barton Springs, I could conjure up Austin in Texas, and in Five Bridges, the city of San Francisco. In Sleep, I could venture into an apartment I sublet near Columbia University in 2012 and 2013. I could put my hero in my bed. I could have him watch from the same window as I watched from, with a view of the George Washington Bridge. When I take him back to Dublin, I have him spend time in the long living room in Ranelagh that belonged to the feminist writer June Levine and her husband the psychiatrist Ivor Browne. The bar in Barcelona in A Free Man is a place I once knew well. The story The News from Dublin opens in the back room of the house where I was raised, a house that has long been sold. I won’t go back there.

By the time I wrote those stories, those spaces could only be visited in my memory or in my imagination. Other spaces, such as the room where I am now in New York, have not been written about. Not yet. They have not been lost yet. I do not regret them or miss them. They are not part of a world that I can imagine, a world that has somehow been completed and is ready to be framed or entered stealthily, as a ghost might come and haunt a story.

In the future, if I live long enough, I will be able to see this room as though framed, as though completed. It will be part of memory, part of history. I will be able to write about it. This is the room where I learned first‑hand not only what evil is like but how evil is tolerated. What is strange about being in America in the time of Trump is how ordinary it is, how what was unimaginable just over a year ago is suddenly, shockingly no longer a surprise.

For Five Bridges, I imagined an Irishman, illegal in San Francisco, realising the danger if he stayed. A year after it was published, elements of the story came true. On 9 February, the Guardian reported on the case of Seamus Culleton, from County Kilkenny in Ireland, who came to the United States on precisely the same visa as my character in Five Bridges, and who also built a life over decades.

Culleton was arrested by ICE in September while buying supplies at the hardware store in Massachusetts. After being held in ICE facilities near Boston and in Buffalo, he was flown to El Paso, where he was in a cell with more than 70 men. Culleton told the Irish Times that the detention centre was cold, damp and squalid, and there were fights over insufficient food – “like a concentration camp, absolute hell”.

This is a fate my character in Five Bridges managed to avoid. In the stories of the future, such characters will not be so lucky.

The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is widely regarded as one of the Democratic party’s leading contenders for the 2028 presidential election. He has also published a new book, Young Man in a Hurry, reflecting on his childhood and his path to the governor’s mansion.

This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Newsom about why he believes the Democrats suffered such heavy losses in 2024, why the party needs to be less judgmental, and whether he intends to run for president in 2028

No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.

If you think this idea sounds intriguing and refreshing, you might love Politics Without Politicians, Hélène Landemore’s argument for radically extending citizen power. If you think it sounds like maddening whimsy, ill-suited to the seriousness of the times we are living through – well, we’ll come to that later. But first, to the argument that politics is so broken as to be beyond repair, and that scrapping electoral representation is the best way of fixing it.

Landemore now lectures at Yale but was born and raised in France, and has worked closely with two citizens’ assemblies set up by Emmanuel Macron following the gilets jaunes street protests of 2018, ostensibly triggered by rising fuel tax. (The first was challenged to produce better solutions for tackling the climate crisis if they didn’t like Macron’s, while the second considered assisted dying, an issue on which British politics is not currently covering itself in glory.) But she also examines examples from Iceland after the banking crash, Belgian local government and the widely praised Irish assembly convened to lead the country through the process of legalising abortion, which gave voters ownership of a sensitive decision in a way that bound everyone to it.

The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular. These range from the forging of lasting friendships and deeper civic bonds to the breakthroughs that can happen when strangers meet face to face and genuinely try to understand each other’s points of view, instead of merely yelling at each other on social media.

The continued rise of the French far right during this period suggests bringing the public into decisions once made by elites isn’t in itself a magic antidote to the lure of populism. But it’s easy to see a workable model here for taking the partisan heat out of issues British politicians have become visibly afraid of tackling, from social care reform to trans rights or even immigration, and for teaching the art of disagreeing civilly. There’s something deeply appealing, too, about the idea of giving people time to explore complex, nuanced issues properly, rather than herding them into snap judgments under the pressure of an election campaign littered with half truths. Where I stopped being convinced is when Landemore leaps from demonstrating that citizen juries have been an effective means of considering specific issues to arguing that they’re capable of running countries, and so elected parliaments can just be abolished.

The author favours – at least at what she calls “a theoretical level”, though there is no point in political theories that cannot work on the ground – a form of lottocracy, where groups of ordinary people are selected at random to form a parliament. They would serve for two years before being sent back to – well, what exactly? Are their employers meant to keep their jobs open? What if, having discovered they’re unexpectedly good at running the country, they don’t want to go back to working at Tesco? Perhaps all this is beneath the theoretical level, though there is some musing about how any born leaders that emerge from this process could be “organically” elevated, perhaps to an overseeing executive board exercising similar powers to a head of state.

What if they screw up so badly that a furious nation wants them out? Democracy’s greatest safeguard is the right to remove rotten rulers at the ballot box, but instead Landemore proposes a constant rolling programme of referendums on major issues to ensure the lottocrats are doing what the people want. (Try selling that to anyone who lived through the Scottish independence referendum, followed by the Brexit one.) It remains unclear, meanwhile, to what extent reluctant winners of golden tickets would be forcibly conscripted into power or allowed to opt out.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in the thesis is the mismatch between the knotty ethical problems she describes citizens’ assemblies resolving and the threats Britain faces now: autocracy abroad, rising extremism at home, economic stagnation fuelling both. Issues of social change – abortion or same-sex marriage in Ireland, say, or climate action in France – absolutely do lend themselves to the wisdom of crowds given years to properly unpick an issue. Waking up to discover that Donald Trump has annexed Greenland, your budget has caused a run on the pound or that a killer pandemic has broken out do not. In a crisis, this country rarely finds that it has had enough of experts or experience.

Landemore is right that politics can be frustrating, disappointing, downright unedifying: that it’s prone to corruption, elite groupthink, privileging what a handful of very rich people want over what the masses want, and attracting overconfident alpha types who talk over more thoughtful people.

But these aren’t things you can abolish just by abolishing professionals and hoping their amateur replacements don’t develop all the same vices under the same pressures and temptations. (Why wouldn’t vested interests lobby a people’s parliament, just as they lobby the professional kind? What stops power going to the heads of citizen MPs plucked from obscurity to run the country, and turning the revolution sour? Did George Orwell write Animal Farm for nothing?)

The biggest flaw in any political system is ultimately people – those in power but also sometimes the ones who voted for them – and unfortunately they’re the one non-negotiable. Of course it’s tempting, given the state of the world today, to think anyone could do better than this lot. But this book doesn’t make me want to risk finding out the hard way.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, was the driving force behind a purge of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents who had investigated Donald Trump, a new book reveals.

Miller trampled the independence of the FBI by demanding firings that would satisfy the US president’s desire for retribution, journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis write in Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department.

“Stephen Miller is breathing down my neck,” Emil Bove, then Trump’s chief enforcer at the justice department, confided in FBI leaders, according to the book, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian.

After his first White House term, Trump faced federal criminal investigations into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. His election victory last year effectively ended both prosecutions and left him spoiling for revenge.

In the second week of his second presidency he had already directed the removal of top leaders of the Department of Justice (DoJ), the authors write, and “his lieutenants at the White House and DoJ dramatically turned up the heat at the FBI”.

Bove, a lawyer who defended Trump in the two federal criminal cases and was on his legal team during his New York hush-money trial, was now acting deputy attorney general (he has subsequently been appointed as a federal appeals court judge).

Bove told the acting director of the FBI, Brian Driscoll, and his deputy, Robert Kissane, that he wanted a list of agents from the Washington field office who took part in the investigations into the 6 January 2021, insurrection and the classified documents case.

“‘We need to do a DoJ review,’ Bove told them, and said it was possible some agents would need to be fired,” the authors report.

Driscoll resisted, saying he did not want to provide such a list and did not understand why the justice department needed to review them, pointing out that the FBI had its own internal mechanisms to deal with potential misconduct.

But Miller, who has been described as the most powerful unelected person in America, had other ideas. Leonnig and Davis write: “On the evening of Tuesday, January 28, Bove took several calls from Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who had assumed the role of exacting the president’s revenge and delivering the fearsome new headlines to please both Trump and his supporters.

“Miller said he had talked with [FBI director nominee Kash] Patel, who was anxious to see more ‘targeted’ officials at the FBI removed from their jobs, to match how swiftly DoJ was firing prosecutors. Patel essentially wanted the FBI firings to happen faster. Miller had pressed Bove to get it done, saying he agreed, according to later reports of Bove’s account.”

The following morning, Bove informed Driscoll and Kissane about Patel’s wish and Miller’s order that key FBI personnel who authorized the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago documents investigations be dismissed. Driscoll and Kissane then told the executive assistant directors that mass firings were on the way.

“For most, it felt like the world was spinning,” the authors write. “They were career agents, not political followers of one administration or another … They would never mention their political views at work, but this was a Republican-leaning group. One director thought to himself: ‘Hell, several of us voted for Trump.’”

On 30 January, after Patel had told his Senate confirmation hearing that he was unaware of any discussions about politically motivated firings at the FBI, Bove again pushed Driscoll and Kissane to provide a list of names of agents involved in the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago cases.

Again Driscoll refused, the book continues, citing the bureau’s longstanding practice of protecting agents’ anonymity. “‘I can’t believe you’re fighting me,’ Bove said, sounding insulted.

“‘This is people’s careers, and they didn’t do anything wrong,’ Driscoll said.

“Bove at one point asked for a far more limited set: how about they start with the names of every FBI agent who had been part of the search of Trump’s bedroom in Mar-a-Lago?

“‘I just need a list to cut,’ Bove said, frustration rising in his voice. ‘I just need five or six names because Stephen Miller is breathing down my neck.’”

Leonnig, a former Washington Post reporter who is now a senior investigative correspondent at MSNBC, and Davis, an investigative reporter at the Post, observe: “Bove was acting and talking like a man under significant pressure to deliver some scalps to the White House. But Driscoll wasn’t budging. And an increasingly angry Bove wasn’t giving up either.”

On 31 January Bove sent Driscoll a memo entitled “Terminations” demanding that he fire seven specific senior leaders and, by Tuesday, 4 February, turn over a list of all agents and supervisors involved in the January 6 investigation.

The executive assistant directors left at the end of the week, taking a combined 150 years of FBI experience with them. “When Bove’s deadline arrived at noon on Tuesday, Driscoll had arranged to send him a list of agents – but instead of names, he provided employee ID numbers. Bove was furious. The same day, the FBI Agents Association filed its suit to stop the release of agents’ names.

“‘This feels like a resistance,’ Bove said.

“‘Because it is,’ Driscoll answered.”

The Trump administration has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical of Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka revealed on Tuesday.

“I want to assure the consulate … that I’m very content with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a news conference.

Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he destroyed his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.

Soyinka speculated that his recent comments comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.

Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had called him in for an interview to reassess his visa, which he said he would not attend.

According to a letter from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, seen by Agence France-Presse, officials have cancelled his visa, citing US state department regulations that allow “a consular officer, the secretary, or a department official to whom the secretary has delegated this authority … to revoke a nonimmigrant visa at any time, in his or her discretion”.

Reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre, he jokingly called it a “rather curious love letter from an embassy”, while telling any organisations hoping to invite him to the United States “not to waste their time”.

“I have no visa. I am banned,” Soyinka said.

The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, said it could not comment on individual cases, citing confidentiality rules.

The Trump administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider crackdown on immigration, notably targeting university students who were outspoken about Palestinian rights.

Soyinka said he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he said Trump “should be proud of”.

“Idi Amin was a man of international stature, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was paying him a compliment,” Soyinka said. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”

The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at and been awarded honours from top US universities including Harvard and Cornell.

His latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka described the book as his “gift to Nigeria” in an interiview with the Guardian.

In February, the Crucible theatre in Sheffield staged Death and the King’s Horseman.

Soyinka left the door open to accepting an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but added: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”

He went on to criticise the ramped-up arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being hauled up and they disappear for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”

Trump’s crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of aggressive raids, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry.

Donald Trump picked Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary as a personal favour to his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski despite objections that she was “obviously unqualified”, according to a new book.

The factional infighting behind Trump’s cabinet selection, where inexperience was no barrier to success, is detailed by journalist Jonathan Karl in Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Soon after his election victory last November, the book recounts, Trump picked Noem to run the Department of Homeland Security, central to fulfilling his campaign promise of the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Like Pete Hegseth, who landed the job of defense secretary, Noem, then the governor of South Dakota – who faced an outcry over her admission in a book that she once shot a pet dog – had not been on the transition team’s list of possible candidates and had not gone through vetting for the job, Karl writes in Retribution.

“When a surprised Trump advisor asked the president-elect why he had decided to nominate Noem to be secretary of Homeland Security, he had a simple answer. ‘I did it for Corey,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing Corey asked me for.’”

Lewandowski was Trump’s campaign manager until he was fired in June 2016 after a string of controversies that included being accused of forcibly yanking the arm of a female reporter. Rumours of an affair between Lewandowski and Noem have swirled in Washington for years, though both deny the relationship.

Karl notes that even some of Trump’s closest allies were uncomfortable with putting Noem in charge of a sprawling department that includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

Steve Bannon, an influential podcaster and former White House chief strategist, told the author two days after Trump made the announcement: “We still got the global war on terror. She runs the whole thing? She runs the fucking Secret Service? It’s all of it. It’s the global war on terror. It’s all that. What are you talking about? She’s never been in law enforcement!”

But Bannon did not blame Trump for making what he considered a terrible choice, Karl adds. “He blamed Lewandowski for convincing the president-elect to do it. ‘This motherfucker asked for somebody who’s obviously unqualified – and it’s dangerous. This is dangerous. What are you doing?’”

Noem was confirmed by the Senate in January. She has since been criticised for controversial spending, immigration policy overreach and bureaucratic delays in disaster aid. Her series of photo ops and glossy videos at locations including the southern border and a mega-prison in El Salvador have been described as “authoritarian cosplay”.

Noem was not the only cabinet pick who proved divisive, according to the book. Sean Duffy, a former Republican member of Congress and Fox Business anchor, wanted the job of US ambassador to the United Nations despite having no background in foreign policy. But Trump had already decided to offer the job to the House representative Elise Stefanik.

Duffy was considered for transportation secretary instead but again lacked relevant experience. Karl writes: “When Trump asked a friend of Duffy’s if he knew anything about transportation, the friend answered, ‘Of course he does, he has nine kids!’ Moving a family that large around, the friend joked, requires at least some transportation expertise.”

Howard Lutnick, who would become Trump’s commerce secretary, recommended Emil Michael, a former senior executive at Uber, for the transportation role, an idea endorsed by the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. “Trump, however, had never heard of the guy – and that made him a nonstarter.”

Lutnick, meanwhile, tried to block the nomination of Duffy by digging up dirt on him. He asked his team to search through hundreds of Duffy’s TV appearances to find an example of him saying something critical of Trump that might turn the president-elect against him.

Karl writes: “Lutnick’s team had to go back nearly a decade – to the early days of the 2016 Republican presidential primary – to find anything Duffy had said that was remotely negative about Donald Trump. He finally found a September 2015 interview in which the then congressman had said he didn’t believe Trump was a real conservative and didn’t think he would win the party’s nomination.”

The sabotage nearly worked: one stray comment from a decade ago nearly cost Duffy the job. But not quite. “Trump, reconsidering the pick, called Duffy and his wife, Rachel, and they were able to convince the president-elect that Sean had long since changed his views on Trump’s conservative bona fides.”

On 18 November Trump announced that Duffy would be transportation secretary. In July this year the president said Duffy would serve as acting Nasa administrator too. On Wednesday Musk posted on X: “Having a NASA Administrator who knows literally ZERO about rockets & spacecraft undermines the American space program and endangers our astronauts.”

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Artists and artistic organisations around the US are set to take part in a series of protests and events to speak out against Donald Trump and his administration.

According to the New York Times, the acts of “creative resistance” will be known as the Fall of Freedom and will take place on 21 and 22 November.

“Our democracy is under attack,” organisers state. “Threats to free expression are rising. Dissent is being criminalized. Institutions and media have been recast as mouthpieces of propaganda.” The events will amount to “an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation”.

The long list of names set to take part include some from the world of film including Michael Moore, Ava DuVernay and Laura Poitras as well as musicians Amanda Palmer and John Legend, artist Marilyn Minter and author Jennifer Egan.

Egan, who won the Pulitzer prize in 2011, also served as the president of PEN America between 2018 and 2020. “I welcome this spur to act alongside other artists and insist on our right to think and speak freely,” she said.

Organisations set to take part include New York and Brooklyn public libraries, the University of Southern California and the Maysles Documentary Center.

The initiative came from a group that includes the visual artist Dread Scott and Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage.

“The action is artistic expression,” Nottage said. “Expression is one of the essential ingredients in the American narrative, and it can’t be stymied or silenced.”

According to the New York Times, Nottage recently decided not to stage one of her musicals at the Kennedy Center after Trump changed the leadership and took more control of the artistic agenda. “Unless you adhere to a certain kind of narrative”, she said, “you are not going to receive support.”

Trump also demanded that Washington DC’s Smithsonian museum be purged of “improper ideology” while arts funding has been limited to projects that align with the administration’s particular political vision.

Fall of Freedom is being described as an open invite and guidelines for getting involved recommend examples such as a curated show around freedom of expression, a staged reading of a banned play or a screening of a censored or politically charged film.

Confirmed events include New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art creating a library of books focused on queer artists pushing back against censorship.

The announcement of Fall of Freedom comes as a second round of No Kings protest is set to take place on 18 October across the US. The demonstrations aim to hit back at the president’s king-like overreach and follow on from June’s first round which took place in 2,100 cities and towns with an estimated turnout of more than 5 million people.

Trump sues Penguin Random House, ‘New York Times’ for $15 billion

Sep 16 2025

President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit in Florida accusing the New York Times and its reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker, and Michael S. Schmidt, of disparagement. Penguin Random House, which published Buettner and Craig’s book based on their reporting, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success (Penguin Press), is also named as a defendant. Trump had previously threatened to sue PRH last year over the book.

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Donald Trump has “never evolved” and “isn’t close with anybody”, according to Mary Trump, the US president’s niece and a vocal critic of his business and political career.

The daughter of Donald’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr (nicknamed Freddie), Mary Trump told the Hay festival in Wales – where she was discussing her latest book about the Trump family, Who Could Ever Love You – that she no longer has relationships with anyone in her family apart from her daughter.

She described herself as “the black sheep of the family”, calling her grandfather, Fred Trump, Donald’s father, “literally a sociopath”, and adding: “Cruelty is a theme in my family.”

She explained that much of her understanding of her uncle comes from when she was in her 20s and Donald hired her to ghostwrite his second book.

“I can’t say we got closer, because Donald isn’t close with anybody,” she said, but working with him for six months in his office, she got “a little bit more insight”.

“He is the only person I’ve ever met who’s never evolved, which is dangerous by the way,” she said. “Never choose as your leader somebody who’s incapable of evolving – that should be one of the lessons we’ve learned, for sure.”

She also described the president as “one of the most provincial people I know, and that does not serve us well, at all”.

Reading from her book, she described the moment a friend of her father’s, Anna Maria, met Donald for the first time. “When she first encountered Donald, he was a cocky, rude teenager, who was intensely jealous of his older brother, Freddie.

“Donald didn’t have any friends, so she felt sorry for him, but whenever they included him, they regretted it. Nobody in Freddie’s circle could bear to be around this arrogant, self-important, humorless kid.

“Over the years, Anna Maria watched Donald devolve into an even more arrogant adult with a widening, cruel streak.”

In the book she also recounts Donald throwing a baseball at his young nieces and nephews when he was in his 20s and she was eight years old. Her brother bought her a catcher’s mitt for Christmas one year, and she “realised it was probably to protect me from having every bone in my hand broken from Donald throwing a baseball at me as hard as he could”.

Mary also told audiences that after Donald’s older sister, Elizabeth, was born, doctors told his mother “that it would be very dangerous for her to have more children” because of her health issues. “She did, and the next one was Donald. About which I will say nothing more,” Mary joked.

His mother later became very ill, meaning Donald, “at a very crucial developmental period, did not have his primary caregiver, and the only person left was his dad, the sociopath. So you can imagine how that sort of changed the trajectory of Donald’s life.”

Mary is a psychologist whose previous books, Too Much and Never Enough and The Reckoning, also involve her uncle. She distanced herself from him around the time he began his first presidential term in 2017.

In 2021, the former president sued her for $100m for giving the New York Times information for its investigation into his finances. The lawsuit sends “a very clear message to me”, she said. “But what if everybody capitulates? Then what? Well, then we lose, and that’s unacceptable.”

She added that she does not “understand people who are afraid of Donald, because he’s so pathetic. I would be embarrassed to be afraid of him.”