Why is there a Maga-branded Instant Pot? Because capitalism never sleeps
If you want to demonstrate your fealty to Donald Trump through the medium of branded merchandise (and who doesn't?) there are ample ways to do so. You can pick up a Trump bible and some of Melania's lovely 'Vote Freedom' jewellery. You can stay in one of his hotels, golf in his resorts, and get yourself a Trump watch. You can buy some of the Trump-branded cryptocurrency that has made the family extremely rich. You can also, as announced on Monday, buy a gold Trump smartphone for just $499 and use Trump mobile as your service provider for $47.45.
I know what you're thinking. All this is wonderful, but where are the Trump-branded home goods? How can I demonstrate my loyalty to the president while cooking stew in my kitchen? Well, I have great news. Because capitalism is relentless, the Instant Pot brand is coming out with a Trump-inspired design. (Instant Pot, if you're not familiar, is a pressure cooker that gained a cult-like following several years ago, then went on a downward spiral when it was bought by a private equity firm.) The company is apparently planning various products emblazoned with 'Make America Great Again'.
According to Semafor, a portion of the profits of the Instant Pot collaboration will be donated to the 'Trump Presidential Library'. At least two other home goods companies are also reportedly planning Trump-related releases, with profits being donated to Trump's library. These include a tableware and collectible items company that has proposed plates with Trump's face on them. Another company is thinking about a 'Mar-a-Lago' and 'White House' sheets collection. So you can really get into bed with the government.
It doesn't end here, does it? I imagine product development teams across the US are in brainstorming mode right now and we can look forward to more Trump-adjacent products with profits donated to Maga causes. Perhaps some enterprising confectionery company will come out with ICE cream: with every purchase going towards deporting an immigrant. Supplement companies could start selling red pills. If Elon Musk gets back in Trump's good books, perhaps we'll get Musk-branded contraception: guaranteed to never work, to help his pro-natalist plans. And, considering Trump's purported nickname ('Trump Always Chickens Out' or Taco), Taco Bell surely has scope to get in on the action.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist.
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The Independent
14 minutes ago
- The Independent
US-Iran latest: Trump says Iranian nuclear facilities were ‘completely and totally obliterated' in bombing as he speaks after strikes
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Israel launched attacks on Iran on June 13, saying it was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Iran says its atomic program is only for peaceful purposes. Since then, at least 430 people have been killed and 3,500 injured in Iran, Iranian state-run Nour News said, citing the health ministry. In Israel, 24 civilians have been killed by Iranian missile attacks, in the worst conflict in history between the two nations. Iran says it has right to resist US with full force Iran's foreign ministry has said it has the 'right to resist with all its might' against the US. 'Silence in the face of this blatant aggression exposes the world to an unprecedented and pervasive danger,' the ministry said. It added that the world 'must not forget US started war against Iran in the midst of diplomatic process,' referring to talks regarding Iran's nuclear programme. Last week, Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi met with his British counterpart David Lammy, along with European foreign ministers from France, Germany, and the EU in Geneva. Shahana Yasmin22 June 2025 07:22 11 injured after Iranian missile strikes in Israel Eleven people in Israel have been injured following a series of missile attacks launched by Iran, according to emergency services. One victim suffered shrapnel wounds, while the other 10 were 'lightly hurt,' Al Jazeera reported, citing the Magen David Adom national emergency service. The strikes caused severe damage in Tel Aviv, with several two-story residential buildings heavily damaged or collapsing, emergency responders said. 'This is a large-scale destruction site. Several two-story residential buildings were severely damaged, and some collapsed,' Magen David Adom is quoted as having said by CNN. Emergency crews, police, and bomb disposal units are actively responding to multiple impact sites across the country, including in the northern city of Haifa. The Israel Defense Forces confirmed that search and rescue operations are ongoing at various locations after at least 10 missile impacts were reported. Shahana Yasmin22 June 2025 07:00 Airlines reroute flights as Middle East airspace remains restricted Airlines continued to reroute flights on Sunday to avoid large parts of Middle Eastern airspace following US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. According to flight tracking service FlightRadar24, commercial traffic is operating under restrictions implemented last week, with no flights over Iran, Iraq, Syria, or Israel. Airlines are instead choosing longer routes via the Caspian Sea or through Egypt and Saudi Arabia, despite higher costs and extended travel times. Israel's airspace remains closed, and its two main carriers, El Al and Arkia, suspended rescue and scheduled flights on Sunday. Shahana Yasmin22 June 2025 06:50 At least 39 missiles fired at Israel in two waves Israeli teams were on the site of at least one strike in Tel Aviv. It is not clear whether it was caused by debris from a downed missile or from a missile strike itself. At least 39 missiles were fired at Israel, understood to have come in two waves. Sam Kiley22 June 2025 06:40 IAEA reports no radiation spike after US strikes The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Sunday that there was 'no increase in off-site radiation levels' following US airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities. Shahana Yasmin22 June 2025 06:30 Israeli media report multiple hits from Iranian missile barrage Israeli media are reporting several impacts across the country following the latest missile barrage launched from Iran. According to Israel's state broadcaster Kan, at least 10 missiles struck locations inside Israel. Shahana Yasmin22 June 2025 06:21 Iran calls for emergency UN Security Council meeting Iran's ambassador to the United Nations has requested an emergency Security Council meeting on Sunday in response to what he described as 'heinous attacks and illegal use of force' by the US. Amir Saeid Iravani said the Council must 'take all necessary measures' to hold the US accountable under international law and the UN Charter, in a letter obtained by the Associated Press. 'The Islamic Republic of Iran condemns and denounces in the strongest possible terms these unprovoked and premeditated acts of aggression, which have followed the large-scale military attack conducted by the Israeli regime on 13 June against Iran's peaceful nuclear sites and facilities,' he wrote. Shahana Yasmin22 June 2025 06:10 Sirens and blasts heard in Tel Aviv There are sirens in Tel Aviv and at least five audible blasts as Iran retaliated for the US bombardment of its nuclear facilities over night. The US attacks came as a relief for many Israelis who feared 'we are in danger of getting stuck in a war without end,' as one senior officer in the IDF put it. But a wider retaliation against US forces around the Middle East is also anticipated. Military experts in the IDF have assessed that Iran has the capacity to fire at least 29 ballistic missiles a day indefinitely, which could trap Israel and America in a ' forever war'. Sam Kiley22 June 2025 05:55 Trump bombs Iranian nuclear facilities in major escalation. What happens next? President Donald Trump has claimed to have 'completely, totally obliterated' Iran's nuclear program in a series of missile strikes and bombings, marking explicit US intervention into Israel's war that risks a wider international crisis. The world braces for retaliatory strikes while the US risks the prospect of serious blowback, writes Alex Woodward. What happens now that Trump has bombed Iran? Shahana Yasmin22 June 2025 05:50 Iran warns of consequences after US strike on nuclear sites Iran's foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi condemned the US attack on Iran's nuclear facilities as 'outrageous ' and warned of 'everlasting consequences'. In a post on X, he wrote: 'The United States, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, has committed a grave violation of the UN Charter, international law and the NPT by attacking Iran's peaceful nuclear installations. 'The events this morning are outrageous and will have everlasting consequences. Each and every member of the UN must be alarmed over this extremely dangerous, lawless and criminal behavior.' Citing the UN Charter's provisions on self-defence, he added that Iran 'reserves all options to defend its sovereignty, interest, and people'. Shahana Yasmin22 June 2025 05:40
Spectator
32 minutes ago
- Spectator
Prepare for Iran to retaliate
On Thursday, President Trump gave Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the regime he has led for more than 35 years an ultimatum: start negotiating over your nuclear programme, or face the full consequences. He would allow another two weeks, at most, for Tehran to prove its willingness to negotiate sincerely. The armchair warriors on cable TV news are gloating about how great the operation turned and how resolute Trump proved to be, but none appear particularly interested in the first, second and third order effects of the decision The two weeks, however, was only two days. Trump's decision to drop 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Fordow, Iran's deeply-buried underground uranium enrichment facility, as well as on facilities at Natanz and Isfahan, was the culmination of eight days of deliberations within the Trump administration. It was a long eight days for Trump, no doubt, with Senator Lindsey Graham on one side urging him to take care of Iran's nuclear programme militarily; former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was on the other, counselling the president to stick with his 'America First' principles of non-interventionism. Ultimately, Trump split the baby – or at least tried to. The way the White House describes it, Trump is taking decisive military action on Iran without getting bogged down in another long, drawn-out, convoluted mess in the Middle East. There will be no regime change as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants, nor will there be US boots on Iranian soil. Trump shared these details with Fox host Sean Hannity, and added that all of the Iranian nuclear sites targeted were completely destroyed. But let's face it: America's capabilities were never in dispute. The question wasn't whether the United States could bomb buildings both above and below ground, but whether bombing was the right way to address the Iranian nuclear issue. The armchair warriors on cable TV news are gloating about how great the operation turned and how resolute Trump proved to be, but none appear particularly interested in the first, second and third order effects of the decision. And there are plenty to mention. The most immediate consequence will be Iranian retaliation. Khamenei has virtually assured that some kind of military retaliation against US bases in the region will occur. There are plenty of those bases around, and Tehran has quite a few options at its disposal. By entering a war Israel started, Trump has now opened up the possibility of US troops having targets on their backs. While the Iranians have used perhaps as many as half of their ballistic missile inventory against Israel over the past eight days, there are still hundreds upon hundreds of them available to sail across the Persian Gulf into an American military installation. Some pundits will dismiss the Iranians as a fairly weak conventional power – not worthy of our concern. Yet even a weak power has some arrows in its quiver. If one of those quivers kills an American, Trump will feel an even greater amount of pressure to plunge further into the muck. Zooming out, another potential consequence: will Khamenei react to this US strike by throwing up his hands and begging for forgiveness – or by rebuilding what was destroyed? You won't find many analysts who know Iranian history and how the Islamic Republic operates betting on the former scenario. The only thing more dangerous to Khamenei than US military force is submitting to American demands. Indeed, it's one of the reasons why the Iranians refused to meet the Trump administration's nuclear demands when Washington imposed maximum pressure sanctions on the regime. Doing so would have been viewed as an embarrassment on the international stage – and from the regime's perspective, it would have served as a stepping-stone for America issuing even stronger demands in the future. In sum, don't expect the Iranians to wave the white flag. Instead, the regime is more likely to use the US strikes as a rationale to boot all international inspectors out of the country, suspend or withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and redouble their efforts to reconstruct the nuclear infrastructure the Americans and Israelis just wiped out. Those within the regime who were arguing that a nuclear weapon was absolutely essential to keep foreign powers at bay will be further empowered. And the Supreme Leader, who the US intelligence community assessed had yet to give the order to actually build a bomb, will have more reason to change his strategic calculations. Trump claims he's a master negotiator. On Iran, he claimed diplomacy was his preferred choice and authorised his old pal Steve Witkoff to get a deal done. But in the end, he opted for bombing and tweeting over negotiating.
Times
35 minutes ago
- Times
Trump is taking fire over ‘forever wars', but Maga's real battle awaits
'I'm the one that decides,' declared President Trump last week when asked by a reporter who gets to say what 'America First' really means. Faced with a backlash from parts of his base over the prospect of the US supporting Israel in military action in Iran, the president said his word is final — 'after all, I'm the one that developed America First' — adding that 'the term wasn't used until I came along'. In fact, the phrase dates back to the First World War when Woodrow Wilson used the slogan to appeal to voters who wanted America to stay out of the conflict. (They didn't get their wish.) The America First Committee was founded in 1940 to protest against US involvement in the Second World War, but gained notoriety after high-profile members such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh and the automotive tycoon Henry Ford led to a perception that it had antisemitic and pro-fascist sympathies. However, since Trump launched his first bid for president ten years ago, it has taken on a new meaning. 'He has driven the term back into usage,' says Julian Zelizer, the Princeton University historian and author of The Presidency of Donald J Trump: A First Historical Assessment. 'He has the most power to shape what it actually includes.' • US bombs Iran: follow live reaction Now it represents a whole movement, extending from foreign policy to trade to immigration. No more forever wars. No more favours for other countries out of the goodness of Uncle Sam's heart. But after Trump authorised US forces to bomb three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday, bringing America into Israel's war, the question being asked in Washington: is Trump still America First? Is the president in control of the agenda — or is it the base that now owns it? There are certainly plenty of figures in Washington who have distinct views on what America First ought to mean in practice. The row over Iran has brought a US version of blue on blue: Maga on Maga. As the alt-right influencer Jack Posobiec put it: 'I'm just thankful the neocons are here to tell us who is REAL MAGA.' Cabinet unease Trump has distanced himself from certain members of his cabinet, saying that his head of intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is 'wrong' on her intelligence assessment of Iran. She in turn changed tack, saying Iran could produce nuclear weapons 'within weeks' and blaming the 'dishonest media' for the confusion. But in his second term, Trump has had ultimate authority over his cabinet. Learning from the first term, he picked them for loyalty and deference. As a figure with close ties to the administration says: 'It's a football team. He's the manager, they're the players, they listen to the manager and that's all there is to it.' It is why the voices he needs to worry more about may be the ones on the outside. Enter the Maga-verse — the network of former advisers, informal advisers and influencers free to speak, exerting varying degrees of influence on the president. One figure close to the White House says: 'There are a bunch of people that we look to to see how things are landing.' Indeed, the administration last week reached out to key figures as they tried to control the narrative. Now such efforts are required to contain the fallout. There are different spheres of influence. Steve Bannon, Trump's former adviser, is widely regarded as the godfather of Maga. While he no longer has a place in the White House, he is seen as a temperature check on the movement by keeping the government in touch with the grassroots through his media and bringing up the next generation of Maga — several of whom have gone on to take jobs in the administration. 'Everybody just folds to whatever big corporate interest there is and this administration is only slightly different to that,' explains an insider. 'Steve keeps a check on it.' Bannon's War Room podcast regularly ranks among the top ten in the US, and has more than 200,000 followers on X. The former executive chairman of the alt-right news website Breitbart had lunch with the president last week — just before Trump's spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt announced a two-week window to make a decision on his next steps in Iran. In response to Trump's decision to strike Iran, Bannon has already sounded the alarm, saying he can get Maga on board but Trump needs to explain to the base why he is doing this. In a War Room broadcast on Saturday night, he said: 'There's a lot of Maga who are not happy about this. I'll just be blunt … We can tell this in the chats right now. A lot of the chats are saying, 'I hear you but you promised that you wouldn't do this'.' Next, consider Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who last week accused Trump of taking America on the wrong path. This led to Trump saying: 'I don't know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.' 'He's definitely relevant,' says one Maga figure. 'But it's a much younger, less-likely-to-vote demographic that he now appeals to. It's a much lower propensity voter. I don't think he would take that as an insult. He lives in a cabin in the woods in Maine.' After the barrage of words, Trump later said he shared a phone call with Carlson who apologised for going too far. Then there's Laura Loomer — the right-wing conspiracy theorist — who regularly leads the news in DC with her social media and investigations. Loomer has become one of Trump's biggest backers on intervention in Iran. After Trump announced the US action, she told her followers: 'Rule number 1: Never bet against Donald Trump' — before turning her fire on those in the movement who are not being sufficiently supportive. A Republican insider says: 'She's probably the best opposition researcher in Republican politics nationwide and she's devastatingly destructive to people. Some people might walk around with their chest puffed out and go, 'Oh, I'm not scared of Laura Loomer.' They're all scared of Laura Loomer.' The changing media landscape is giving these figures greater prominence. Matt Boyle, the Washington bureau chief at Breitbart, says: 'We live in impassioned times, especially in the podcast era and new media.' It's not gone unnoticed in Maga world that last week streaming overtook cable and broadcast as the most-watched form of TV in the US. Yet the base is insistent there is no civil war. 'We're not a monolith, we're not the left, they don't tolerate dissent, right?' says one Maga figure. 'One part of the coalition is holding the other part of the coalition accountable.' Speaking ahead of the strikes, Boyle, who was recently spotted dining with both Bannon and the Democrat senator John Fetterman, said the movement would adjust to whatever the president decided: 'I do think that when the president makes his decision that the movement is gonna fall in line very quickly. He is the leader of the America First movement. He built this movement.' Yet Trump has never been a perfect fit for some of the views within it. In 2016, he said of America First that he wanted to make decision-making more 'unpredictable'. 'We won't be isolationists — I don't want to go there because I don't believe in that,' Trump said. 'But we're not going to be ripped off any more by all of these countries.' The historian Victor Davis Hanson, of the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University, says: 'Trump is neither an isolationist nor an interventionist, but rather transactional. The media fails to grasp that, so it is confused why tough-guy Trump is hesitant to jump into Iran, or contrarily why a noninterventionist Trump would even consider using bunker busters against Iran. 'The common thread again is his perception of what benefits the US middle class — economically, militarily, politically and culturally.' But internal debates go beyond foreign affairs. The other main Maga priorities are bringing jobs back to the US — through tariffs — and cracking down on immigration. Tensions have bubbled on all of these: last week Trump exempted the farm and hospitality industries from the immigration raids, only for Maga activists to raise alarm. The president then changed it back. Raheem Kassam, who is a close ally of Bannon, a co-owner of the Butterworths restaurant in Washington — a Maga hotspot — and a former adviser to Nigel Farage, says: 'It's definitely become more complex and thoughtful and flexible. 'There's now a depth where you can't necessarily fit all of Maga policy on a banner held up at a rally. You used to be able to say it was 'build the wall', 'drain the swamp'. It's developed more, it's deeper, it's denser and that's kind of what the establishment is really upset about this time. It's like, 'Oh, these guys have actually developed an element of political sophistication.'' For now, most agree — at least publicly — that Trump is king. Yet privately what is making the base so jumpy is this idea that Trump is being forced by the deep state into the default establishment policy position. If it happens to Trump, what chance does his successor have? Hanson says: 'Trump decides — in the sense of le Maga état, c'est moi. Almost everyone who tried to redefine Maga or take on Trump has mostly lost rather than gained influence. 'The key question is whether Maga continues after 2029, given Trump's unique willingness to take on the left rhetorically and concretely in a way that far exceeds the Reagan revolution, and in truth, any prior Republican. Trump's bellicosity, volatility, and resilience — his willingness to win ugly rather than lose nobly — ensure him credibility and goodwill among the base that in turn allows him greater latitude and patience.' Or as a recent visitor to the White House puts it: 'A lot of them want a Maga ideology whereas Trump is happy with it just being about him.' Kassam adds: 'Trump does largely get to decide what America First means. But the point is, there's a whole movement behind it that will want to keep the America First agenda even after Trump.' If the president now finds himself dragged into a longer conflict in the Middle East, his authority will be tested. Yet the the real fight to define America First is likely to come when Trump exits the stage.
