Ministers are preparing to axe five times more civil service jobs than previously planned. Rachel Reeves announced yesterday that she would slash up to £2bn from the government’s running costs by 2030, meaning the loss of around 50,000 civil service jobs, says The Times. More than 1,000 protesters in Turkey have been detained after the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was arrested on corruption charges the day he received his party’s nomination to run for president. İmamoğlu – the leading opposition candidate to President Erdoğan – says the charges are politically motivated. Blue Peter is ending live broadcasts after 66 years on air. The world’s longest-running children’s programme, which will now pre-record episodes, has had many memorable live TV mishaps, including an out-of-control Girl Guides campfire, a Star Wars robot running over the show’s dog, and a rampaging baby elephant (below).

Trump’s “insatiable” appetite for vengeance

Donald Trump explicitly vowed during his presidential campaign to bring “retribution” against his enemies, says Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. He wasn’t joking. Since returning to office, the president has stripped security details from the likes of former military chief Mark Milley and infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci. He has sued networks and newspapers for millions of dollars, and targeted the law firms which helped oppose his first-term policies. In an impromptu speech at the Justice Department earlier this month, he described his adversaries as “thugs”, “savages” and “scum”. His message couldn’t have been clearer: the Justice Department is his “weapon for revenge”, and his appetite for vengeance is “insatiable”.

The threat all this poses to American democracy is obvious, not least because – unlike in his first term – none of Trump’s aides is willing to check his worst tendencies. “A president and an administration with a Mafia mentality can create a Mafia state.” Another danger, often overlooked, is the “corrosive effect” this approach is having on the public’s civic and moral sensibilities. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, when citizens see that unethical and corrupt behaviour lead to “riches and power”, it doesn’t just normalise that behaviour – it validates and even valorises it. Trump’s supporters argue that all this unpleasantness is legitimate because they are, to quote his former adviser Steve Bannon, “fighting for a republic”. In wartime, Bannon would say, traits like compassion and respect are irrelevant. The “great civic danger” is that Trump’s vengeful mentality sticks. “That the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts; that his code of conduct becomes ours.”

📚😢 Trump’s vengeance can be a little chaotic even by his standards. He fired the country’s official archivist because the National Archives alerted the Justice Department of his alleged mishandling of classified documents after his first term. “The archivist he fired hadn’t even been working for the agency at the time.”