Rightwing parties want to follow in US’s footsteps of minimal government intervention, but at what cost?

Next month, Donald Trump will welcome a poverty-stricken family to peruse his plans for a $300m glitzy state ballroom in the White House. The event will be staged as part of National Poverty in America Awareness Month, the time every year when charities document the number of US residents surviving on low incomes.

Of course, the president will do no such thing, preferring to summon the press to watch him rub shoulders with the billionaire class as he did at last month’s black tie dinner for the Saudi ruler and his entourage.

Drummer Chuck Redd decided to cancel his yearly Jazz Jam after Donald Trump added his name to the venue

The president of the Kennedy Center has demanded $1m in damages and fiercely criticized a musician’s sudden decision to cancel a Christmas Eve performance at the venue days after the White House announced that Donald Trump’s name would be added to the facility.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment – explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure – is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” the venue’s president, Richard Grenell, wrote in a letter to musician Chuck Redd that was shared with the Associated Press.

The year 2025 saw a Swift engagement, a rapid rollback of rights and a slow release of the heavily redacted Epstein files

The year 2025 would have been far better if we could have sent a few billionaires and world leaders into intergalactic exile. Instead, we had to make do with Katy Perry spending 11 minutes on the edge of space as part of Blue Origin’s all-female crewed mission. Perry promised us all that, in service of women’s empowerment, the crew would “put the ‘ass’ in astronaut” and “make space and science glam”. Truly, one giant leap for womankind!

Space may have got glam, but it was another glum year for many on Earth. The war in Ukraine continued, with increasing numbers of women volunteering to fight. The civil war in Sudan raged on, with the UN urging the world not to ignore harrowing details of targeted sexual violence, torture, and abductions from the region. The slaughter in Sudan is so extreme that the blood can even be seen from space. Although I’m not sure the billionaires and celebs doing celestial joyrides in their expensive rockets are particularly bothered by that view.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead