The Republican party is far from moving beyond Trump – but signals of his waning influence are everywhere

The sharks can smell blood in the water. After a decade in eerie command of the Republican party, with primary voters in his cult-like thrall and down-ballot elected officials feeling they have no choice – and often no inclination – to diverge from him, Donald Trump suddenly seems not quite in control of his own political machine.

Fractures have emerged in the Maga coalition; Trump’s approval is sinking; the Democrats, long anemic and risk-averse in the opposition, showed signs of life in elections last month; and the cumulative effect of a series of long-running scandals, most particularly the Epstein affair, seem to have alienated core components of the Trump faithful. Trump has faced some rebukes from a once largely compliant federal judiciary: his personal attorney, Alina Habba, was recently declared ineligible to serve in the US attorney role Trump had appointed her to, and his signature tariffs seem likely to be struck down by a conservative supreme court majority.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Amid concerns over greenhouse gas emissions, the Trump administration has abolished climate-friendly farming incentives

This article was produced in partnership with Floodlight

For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90m acres – about the size of Montana – and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline.

Sales spike at the Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons and Cipriani as luxury buyers weigh moves from Manhattan

There is a short stretch of prime waterfront real estate in Miami that has come to be known as Billionaire’s Beach. It contains a mix of famous old art deco hotels such as the Delano and Raleigh, both undergoing extensive upmarket refurbishments, and the construction of exclusive new residential tower blocks with high-end apartments running into the tens of millions.

It is here on the sun-filled shores of South Beach, more than a thousand miles from the chills of a Manhattan winter, where realtors and developers are beginning to see the first shoots of what they call the “Mamdani effect”: the predicted exodus of wealthy New Yorkers in the wake of socialist democrat Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor.

The administration is heightening its anti-immigrant crackdown – and punishing people from a country the US helped destroy

After two national guard members were ambushed in Washington DC last week, killing one and leaving the other in critical condition, Donald Trump went on a hate-filled social media rant and vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World countries”.

Trump’s late night Thanksgiving posts devolved into a fury, evidently because the suspected gunman is an Afghan national. He had worked with the US government, including the CIA, and was evacuated to the US in 2021 after the American military withdrew from Afghanistan.

Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University

A viral essay has caused outrage in the US with its argument that the poverty line for a family of four is now $136,500. But is this so wrong?

Have you heard that a family of four in the US is now considered poor if their household income is under $136,500 (£103,300) a year? Don’t @ me about the maths – I’m just the messenger. The person behind this calculation is Michael Green, who is chief strategist and portfolio manager for Simplify Asset Management. I think this means that he makes large sums of money by fiddling with even larger sums of money. When not doing that, Green writes a newsletter and recently published a viral piece on Substack arguing that the poverty line, calculated as $31,200 by the Department of Health and Human Services, is a “broken benchmark”. These days a family with a low six-figure income is officially “the new poor”, he reasoned.

Green’s essay has sparked numerous rebuttals, with people arguing that he had turned the poverty measure into a middle-class measure. “It’s completely disconnected from reality,” the economist Kevin Corinth said, for example, noting that the $136,500 figure was higher than the US median household income of $83,730. “It’s laughable to put a poverty line far above the median income in the United States.”

Officials hew closely to secret memo which gives legal cover to firing on boats even if it would kill people on board

Trump administration officials have defended carrying out a follow-up strike on a drug boat that killed survivors on 2 September by arguing that its objective was to ensure the complete destruction of the boat, an action the Pentagon had internal legal approval to conduct.

The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a briefing on Monday that Adm Frank Bradley, who oversaw the operation and gave the order for the second strike, directed it to sink the boat.

It contains enough steel to go round the world twice – and even has a fake breeze to flutter the stars-and-stripes flag in its lobby. If this colossus is just the first of a new breed of bulky supertalls, is Britain next?

Among the slender needles and elegant spires of the Manhattan skyline, a mountainous lump has reared into view. It galumphs its way up above the others, climbing in bulky steps with the look of several towers strapped together, forming a dark, looming mass. From some angles it forms the silhouette of a hulking bar chart. From others, it glowers like a coffin, ready to swallow the dainty Chrysler building that trembles in its shadow. It is New York’s final boss, a brawny, bronzed behemoth that now lords it over the city with a brutish swagger.

Fittingly, this is the new global headquarters of JP Morgan, the world’s biggest bank. The firm enjoys a market capitalisation of $855bn (£645bn), more than Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup’s combined, and it looks as if it might have swallowed all three inside its tinted glass envelope. Last year, for the first time, it made more than $1bn a week in profits. Chairman and chief executive Jamie Dimon likes to boast of its “fortress balance sheet”, and he now has an actual fortress to go with it – built at a cost, he revealed at the opening, of around $4bn. He has certainly made his mark. It would be hard to design a more menacing building if you tried.

When his book Notes on Being a Man was released last month, it raced to the top of the bestseller lists. The US author, tech entrepreneur and podcaster explains his theories on dating, crying – and the rise of Donald Trump

It takes balls to title your book Notes on Being a Man. And, superficially, Scott Galloway could easily be lumped in with a dozen other manosphere-friendly alpha-bros promising to teach young men how to find their inner wolf. He is, after all, a wealthy, healthy, white, heterosexual, shaven-headed, 61-year-old Californian who made his name and fortune as a successful investor and podcaster.

But in reality, he is almost the opposite: liberal, left-leaning and surprisingly sensitive. The guy who advises his readers on “how to address the masculinity crisis, build mental strength and raise good sons” has been described as a “progressive Jordan Peterson”, or “Gordon Gekko with a social conscience”.