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Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Last month, when I was discussing with Debra Sweet, the national director of the campaigning group the World Can’t Wait, how long to stay in the US on my annual trip to call for the closure of Guantánamo on and around the anniversary of its opening on January 11, we decided that it was worth staying for the Women’s March on January 20. Debra has been coordinating my January visits to the US since 2011, and I had stayed until January 21 last year, and took part in the colossal 500,000-strong march in New York, and we both felt that there was no good reason to miss it this year, as it promised yet again to be an opportunity for millions of women — and men — to tell Donald Trump what they think of him.

Last year, there was a huge outpouring of anger at the arrival in the White House of Trump, who had somehow become president despite his extraordinary unsuitability for the role: his complete lack of political experience, and his very public deficiencies — his rudeness, his vindictiveness, his inability to complete even a simple coherent sentence, his sordid history as a sexual predator, and the groundless illusion of his success as a businessman. This thoroughly unpleasant figure had particularly appalled women because of his “grab ‘em by the p*ssy” comment that had been revealed during the election campaign, but that had somehow failed to derail him.

A year on, the anger against Trump is surely more palpable, and more based on experience, than a year ago. This president is a bitter joke, the dysfunctional head of a dangerously right-wing version of the Republican Party, who governs by tweet, and constantly threatens,and tries to deliver on policies that reveal a profound and troubling racism: his attempted Muslim travel ban, for example, and the marked increase in his assault on the most vulnerable members of US society — the immigrants on whom the US economy depends, but whose presence, as with Brexit and immigrants in the UK, is perceived by self-pitying white people as being the source of their economic woes, rather than the truth: that it is the fault of the neoliberal machinery of political and big business, a world which, fundamentally, Donald Trump is as much a part of as the “elites” for which his supporters have nothing but contempt. Read the rest of this entry »

See my photos on Flickr here!

Please also consider supporting my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues – including the threats posed by Donald Trump and his administration – over the next two months.

After the shock of Donald Trump’s inauguration day, when millions of Americans (and visiting foreigners like me) felt understandably distraught, bereft, dismayed, as the grotesque, narcissistic, predatory, corrupt fraud that is Donald Trump delivered a bleak and graceless inauguration speech, it was nothing short of a delight on Saturday, Jan. 21, Day 2 of the aberrant Trump presidency, when, across the country and around the world, millions of women (plus large numbers of supportive men) marched in protest against Trump and all he and his administration stand for— his disdain for women, his racism, his xenophobia, his adherence to intolerant white Christian fundamentalism, and, last but not least, his opaque, but very obviously corrupt business practices. Two US academics have estimated that between 3.3m and 4.6m people marched in total across the US, with New York’s turnout estimated at between 400,000 and 500,000 people.

Stepping out of Grand Central Station into a river of protest, with more clever, witty and insightful handmade posters than you could imagine, and with chants and cheers punctuating the general hubbub at regular intervals was to feel that perhaps this dystopian vision of America can indeed be overthrown before it wreaks untold havoc at home and abroad. And with no beginning or end of the protest in sight, it was easy to believe that the number marching was much larger than even the academics’ estimate.

It will take more than one day, of course, as the people of America need to unite like never before — everyone who didn’t vote for Trump, everyone threatened by Trump, everyone appalled by Trump, including, of course, those who voted for him but might already be having second thoughts. This could be a disastrous presidency, or it could be even worse than that, but people need to put aside any notions of complacency, and work out how to resist. This was a great start, and a historic moment that everyone there will remember, but now there needs to be much more action and organizing. Read the rest of this entry »