Susie Wiles has spoken to Vanity Fair magazine in a series of 11 interviews that she has since dismissed as a ‘hit piece’

The president’s chief of staff Susie Wiles has given her own, unvarnished thoughts about Donald Trump’s administration, in a series of interviews published by Vanity Fair magazine, revealing details and opinions that presidential aides usually save for memoirs long after they have left power.

From calling out attorney general Pam Bondi over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, to criticising Elon Musk over the dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Wiles has offered an unusually candid look inside the White House, after maintaining a low profile for much of Trump’s term.

The Russian strategy of exporting chaos to provoke extremism only works if liberals succumb to cynicism and despair

I once spent an exasperating week showing a Russian friend around London. He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops – all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so I asked my friend if there was anything at all about Britain that impressed him. “The stability,” he said without hesitation. “You can feel the stability.”

That was a different world; the late 1990s. I don’t remember the year, but I remember knowing what my friend was talking about because I had felt the same culture shock in reverse when first visiting Russia.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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Growth in the US economy – and the president’s political survival – rest on AI. The EU must use its leverage and stand up to him

The unthinkable has happened. The US is Europe’s adversary. The stark, profound betrayal contained in the Trump administration’s national security strategy should stop any further denial and dithering in Europe’s capitals. Cultivating “resistance Europe’s current trajectory in European nations” is now Washington’s stated policy.

But contained within this calamity is the gift of clarity. Europe will fight or it will perish. The good news is that Europe holds strong cards.

Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

Move comes amid escalating campaign against Maduro as Venezuelan government condemns ‘grotesque threat’

Donald Trump has ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro.

The move comes amid an escalating campaign by the Trump administration against Maduro that has included a ramped-up military presence in the region and more than two dozen military strikes on vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea near Venezuela, which have killed dozens of people.