By claiming that any regulation is censorship, the White House is bullying Britain to abandon online safety laws and digital taxes

Compared with many countries around the world, the US is still a great democracy, but a much lesser one than it was four months ago. The constitution has not been rewritten. Checks and balances have not been dissolved. The difference is a president who ignores those constraints, and the impotence of the institutions that should enforce them.

Which is the true US, the one enshrined in law or the one that smirks in contempt of law? If the latter, should Britain welcome its embrace as a kindred nation? That is an existential question lurking in the technical folds of a potential transatlantic trade agreement.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

The trip leaned on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness

There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-female flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.

The flight, which was promoted for months in advance, was touted as a triumph of feminism, a win for science and an embrace of the kind of expansive, curious human spirit of striving and possibility that once animated both. Instead, the flight served as a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scientific advancement and feminist progress – a spectacle that mocked these aspirations by appropriating them for such an indulgent and morally hollow purpose.

The United States is in the middle of a measles outbreak, and three children are already dead this year. The reason? A catastrophic drop in vaccination rates driven by disinformation, institutional sabotage, and a coordinated propaganda war against public health. Leading that war and now overseeing the health of the nation is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man whose entire brand is built on sowing fear about vaccines. And yes, this includes the MMR vaccine—the one that prevents measles.

Kennedy didn't create the outbreak in Texas. The virus doesn't need him to replicate. But the ecosystem that enabled it—the swamp of conspiracy, pseudoscience, and libertarian moralism—that's his kingdom. He nurtured, monetized, and rode it all the way to a Cabinet position. Now, he watches from the front pews of a child's funeral and offers thoughts and prayers instead of medical mobilization.

These deaths are the price of an ideology. An ideology that pretends to be about freedom and personal choice but is, in fact, a deeply cynical form of soft eugenics. Not the explicit, sterilize-the-"unfit" eugenics of the early 20th century—though let's be honest, that poison still flows through the veins of American policy—a modern, Instagrammable version. And it says: If you were healthy, you wouldn't have died. If your kid was strong enough, they would've made it. If you get sick, it's your fault.

As David Gorski puts it - this is social Darwinism. It's wrapped in turmeric and sold in amber-tinted bottles. But it's no less insidious. The grift is everywhere. From Del Bigtree's YouTube channel to the aisles of Erewhon, you see the same message: the strong survive, and the weak should have bio hacked harder. Don't trust the CDC; trust this influencer selling ozone therapy and vitamin A megadoses.

Now that Worldview is running HHS.

When RFK Jr. says the MMR vaccine is "the most effective way" to prevent measles, he doesn't mean it. They're just words. He doesn't follow it with a call for mass immunization campaigns. He doesn't fund clinics. He doesn't rally states to increase uptake. Because that would mean owning the reality that vaccines work, that public health is real, and that individual choices can kill people other than you.

But MAHA—"Make America Healthy Again"—as RFK Jr. brands his ideology, doesn't believe in collective responsibility. It doesn't believe in community immunity. It believes in the moral virtue of individual health, achieved through "natural" means. It believes that if your kid dies of measles, they must not have been pure enough. That your lungs were weak. That your aura was off.

This ideology is selective cruelty with a spa playlist. It rejects the notion that structural inequalities shape health outcomes. It sneers at the idea that maybe a poor kid in a rural county doesn't have access to the same Whole30 diet and private naturopath. It ignores the history of systemic racism in medicine and blames marginalized people for not juicing enough.

They call it freedom. It's a slow, choking abandonment.

When a child dies from measles in 2025, it's a flashing neon indictment of a system that allowed ideology to override evidence and charisma to override competence. The virus doesn't care what supplements you take. It doesn't care how many Instagram followers your favorite wellness influencer has. It only cares that herd immunity has collapsed.

And it has.

Gaines County, Texas, is now the epicenter. A Mennonite community that chose not to vaccinate has been devastated. And what does RFK Jr. do? He shows up. Not to lead. Not to mobilize. But to attend a funeral. It's theater. A photo op designed to show "compassion" while doing nothing to change course. It's as if the arsonist returned to the burning building to pose for pictures with the ashes.

The cruelest part? The parents still don't regret their choice not to vaccinate. Because that's what soft eugenics does. It convinces people that suffering is noble, that loss is natural, medicine is unclean, and morality is immune-boosting. It tells you that if your other children survived measles, the one who didn't must have simply "fulfilled her time."

It's hard to overstate how dangerous this is. We're not just talking about measles. This logic scales. It's being applied to long COVID, to heart disease, to mental illness. Every time someone blames poor health on lack of willpower or discipline, you hear MAHA echoes. Every time a politician cuts healthcare funding under the guise of "personal responsibility," you're seeing the logic of soft eugenics in action.

What comes next won't be an explosion. It will be a long, slow decay. The erosion of trust. The return of diseases we had once vanquished. The normalization of preventable death. And the worst part is, there will be no clear villain, just a thousand soft smiles telling you this was your choice.

But it wasn't. Not really. Not when your health secretary has spent two decades convincing your neighbors to fear vaccines more than viruses. Not when the most powerful voices in public health are more committed to libertarian aesthetics than to actual public health.

So here we are. Three children dead. Hundreds infected. This isn't an unfortunate coincidence. It's policy by neglect, ideology by omission. If we don't name it for what it is—if we don't call out the wellness grift industrial complex and the public officials who now cater to it—we will see more coffins, grief, and excuses.

Because soft eugenics kills. Even if it kills with a shrug.

In a second term of fiat, flubbing and flip–flopping, Trump pursued his desire to wield a club over everyone and everything

By imposing punitively high tariffs, Donald Trump was playing a high-stakes game of chicken with America’s trading partners – but it was Trump who chickened out and suspended his tariffs just hours after they took effect. The president couldn’t ignore the worldwide economic havoc that he had caused singled-handedly – stock markets were plunging, business executives were panicking and consumers were seething.

Eager to persuade manufacturers to build new plants in the US, Trump said on Monday that many of his tariffs would be permanent. But for Trump, permanent evidently meant two days.

Ministers are insisting that Trump’s regime can still be a friend. It’s a delusion and a lie

Whatever Britain’s relationship with the US under Donald Trump might be, it should not be called an alliance. That word implies common goals, shared burdens and trust – a cooperative model that is not available from the White House.

Trump’s warped concept of reciprocity is encapsulated in his belief that foreigners are guilty of “pillage” when they sell more goods to the US than they buy in return. The punitive levy, applied in proportion to the offending nation’s excess exports, is a “reciprocal” tariff in the president’s lexicon.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist