Officials lack data on miscarriages after October 2025. Detained women aren’t getting the prenatal healthcare they need

Maga men have babies on the brain. They may not all be interested in changing diapers or hands-on parenting, but they’re very keen on population growth. “[W]e want more babies, to put it very nicely,” Donald Trump said last year.

Trump, who has called himself the “father of IVF” and joked that he will be known as the “fertilization president”, surrounds himself with people who profess a similar fondness for children. Only a few days after being sworn in as vice-president, JD Vance declared he wanted “more babies in the United States of America” and went on to make pronatalist policies a theme of his time in office.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

For years some have claimed a key part of the thriller was excised after the director’s sudden death – and that it provided clues to the real-life behaviour of rich predators. Now, his daughter has spoken out

Name: The Eyes Wide Shut conspiracy

Age: The erotic psychological thriller Eyes Wide Shut starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (married at the time, though that isn’t so important now) was released in 1999.

His poll numbers with the demographic are plummeting. But Democrats don’t seem to have learned anything from all this

Donald Trump has been facing a lot of allegations that he’s snoozing on the job. But we should give the poor man a break: he must be exhausted by his unceasing efforts to make life better for us all. At this very moment, for example, The Trump administration is spending $5m to cover four bronze horses near the Lincoln Memorial in thick gold leaf. No longer will passersby be subjected to subpar equine aesthetics. Finally, the American people will have the glimmering horse statues they deserve.

Meanwhile, the US has been fighting a war with Iran that, by one expert’s estimate, is costing $2bn dollars a day and will probably end up with a price tag of at least a trillion dollars. This may seem like a colossal waste of money to some, but real patriots understand that this is simply the cost of making America great again.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Unlike Trump’s cronies in the White House, outside voices are not so easily disciplined. There’s a lesson here for all future political movements

If you spend enough time swiping online, you may have seen skits by the American comedian and influencer Druski (real name Drew Desbordes), in which he parodies everything from Republican patriots to flashy mega churches. Once again, he has exploded on social media channels with a skit satirising “conservative women in America”, a nakedly targeted roast of Erika Kirk, now the CEO of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) after her husband, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated last year.

Predictably, it has drawn conservative backlash, with Ted Cruz calling the video “beneath contempt”. But Desbordes is far from the only one mocking Erika Kirk. Her entrances to the Charlie Kirk memorial and TPUSA’s AmericaFest have been widely memed online for their surreal, WrestleMania-like production and pyrotechnics. In fact, much of the opprobrium comes from her own side. Far-right live streamer Nick Fuentes has disparaged Kirk’s public appearances after her husband’s death (“she looks like she’s over the moon”), and commentator and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, a former darling of TPUSA, repeatedly takes aim at her (Owens describes Druski’s skit as “hilarious”).

Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian

The world’s most popular podcaster seemingly disapproving of ICE does not mean he has soured from the administration

Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster, is struggling to sleep. In an interview last week, he complained that the “madness” of the news cycle – from the release of the Epstein library, to US military strikes on Iran – has him “overwhelmed”. For some, this admission is just the latest sign that the world’s most popular podcaster might be regretting his role in cheerleading Donald Trump back into office.

It follows seemingly scathing criticism of ICE after the killing of Renee Nicole Good. Rogan compared ICE to the Gestapo in a short clip that quickly went viral. It led this newspaper to reasonably ask “Has Joe Rogan fully soured on Trump’s presidency?”, with ABC, Bloomberg and CNN all recently reporting on Rogan’s apparent disapproval of ICE.

With a huge audience and serving as an avatar for millions of centrist Americans, Rogan compares ICE raids to Gestapo

Joe Rogan’s comparison of US immigration raids to Gestapo operations, made during a podcast episode earlier this week, has sparked speculation about whether the wildly popular podcaster, who endorsed Donald Trump in 2024, has fully soured on Trump’s presidency – and what that might say of the millions of mainly young men who listen to Rogan’s show.

Rogan’s views, as expressed in the podcast discussion, were more complicated than the Gestapo remark taken alone might make them seem. Yet even his more measured skepticism about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids feels somewhat significant, given Rogan’s cultural status and the evidence that Americans in general are turning against Trump’s hardline anti-immigration efforts.

From merrily dismissing climate science, to promoting irresponsible health claims, the podcast was an unintentional warning for our times

Looking back on this crazy year, one event, right at the start, seems to me to encapsulate the whole. In January, recording his podcast in a studio in Austin, Texas, the host, Joe Rogan, and the actor Mel Gibson merrily dissed climate science. At the same time, about 1,200 miles away in California, Gibson’s $14m home was being incinerated in the Palisades wildfire. In this and other respects, their discussion could be seen as prefiguring the entire 12 months.

The loss of his house hadn’t been confirmed at the time of the interview, but Gibson said his son had just sent him “a video of my neighbourhood, and it’s in flames. It looks like an inferno.” According to World Weather Attribution, January’s fires in California were made significantly more likely by climate breakdown. Factors such as the extreme lack of rainfall and stronger winds made such fires both more likely to happen and more intense than they would have been without human-caused global heating.

The VP wouldn’t be where he is today without the patronage of the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. But with voters becoming more and more concerned about the firm’s surveillance tech, could that relationship affect his chances?

The US is the land of the free and the home of the world’s most expensive, and most excruciatingly drawn-out, elections. In most democracies, the election cycle lasts just a few weeks or months. In most democracies there are strict laws regulating how long politicians can campaign, and how much money political parties can accept. But the US is not most democracies.

In this week’s newsletter: When the video-sharing site launched in 2005, there were fears it would replace terrestrial television. It didn’t just replace it – it invented entirely new forms of content. ASMR, anyone?

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Barely a month goes by without more news of streaming sites overtaking traditional, terrestrial TV. Predominant among those sits YouTube, with more than 2.5 billion monthly viewers. For people my age – a sprightly 28 – and younger, YouTube is less of an app or website than our answer to radio: the ever-present background hum of modern life. While my mum might leave Radio 4 wittering or BBC News flickering in the corner as she potters about the house, I’ve got a video essay about Japan’s unique approach to urban planning playing on my phone. That’s not to say I never watch more traditional TV (although 99% of the time I’m accessing it through some other kind of subscription streaming app), but when I get home after a long day and the thought of ploughing through another hour of grim prestige fare feels too demanding, I’m probably watching YouTube. Which means it’s very unlikely that I’m watching the same thing as you.

When Google paid $1.65bn for the platform in 2006, (just 18 months after it launched) the price seemed astronomical. Critics questioned whether that valuation could be justified for any video platform. The logic was simple – unless YouTube could replace television, it would never be worth it. Nearly two decades on, that framing undersells what actually happened. YouTube didn’t just replace television – it invented entirely new forms of content: vodcasts, vlogs, video essays, reaction videos, ASMR and its heinous cousin mukbang. The platform absorbed new trends and formats at lightning speed, building what became an alternative “online mainstream”. Before podcasters, TikTokers, Substackers and even influencers, there were YouTubers.