Catch up on what you may have missed coming from the United States this week.
Mon 29 Sep 2025 09.00
Photo: Official White House Photo/Juliana Luz
It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. ‘This Week in America’ is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
Understanding who Trump is isn’t that hard. He tells us all the time. But understanding the Trump phenomenon is hard. Processing and analysing something that is at once so ridiculous and embarrassing and so dangerous and extreme is tricky. Zooming out can really help – so this week, along with the more newsy stuff, I’ve included some pieces on the broader context and history that always help to ground my thinking.
This week:
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about Italian philosopher Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism. I know that sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. I think it’s one of the best, clearest explanations of the kind of fascist revival we’re dealing with. It’s 30 years old this year, but it could have been written yesterday.
One of Eco’s “features” of fascism is “the rejection of modernism”: “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
Which brings us, of course, to the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s not worth giving any more oxygen to the cruel and dangerous claims about paracetamol he and the President made this week. Kennedy himself poses a particular kind of danger to global health. He draws a great deal of support from Silicon Valley “wellness” types and “crunchy moms”. This Guardian essay outlines the origins of MAHA – Make America Healthy Again – and helps explain how on earth the worst Kennedy ended up with so much power.
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The President, meanwhile, has been busy making good on his promise to go after the “radical left”. The Presidential Memorandum he issued this week is pretty wild reading. As always, context matters.
This crackdown is happening at the same time as the Supreme Court is on the brink of gutting the Voting Rights Act – a key achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.
And finally, last week we noted that Australia has recognised Palestinian statehood at the UNGA – and America has not been friendly to the decision. My colleague at the Center for International Policy, Matt Duss, has an important piece in Foreign Policy on recognition. As Matt argues, recognition is “a long overdue move in the right direction. But it is nowhere near enough.”
Until next week.
This Week in America, link roundup:
Experts say the insertion of US special forces into Caracas and the abduction of President Maduro was a precision tactical operation.
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A new Australia Institute podcast shows why an amnesty is needed to address the estimated 7000 cases of people who have “disengaged” from the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme.
The abduction and subsequent arrest of the President of Venezuela is a dramatic re-statement of America’s dominance of the western hemisphere and its willingness to do whatever it takes – including defiance of international legal norms – to protect and promote its interests.