Donald Trump will announce his latest round of tariffs at the White House on Wednesday, threatening to unleash a global trade war on what he has dubbed “liberation day”.

Trump has rattled global stock markets, alarmed corporate executives and economists, and triggered heated rows with the US’s largest trading partners by announcing and delaying plans to impose tariffs on foreign imports several times since taking office.

No details of Wednesday’s plans have been made available ahead of the announcement. The president is set to speak at 4pm ET. White House officials said that the implementation of the most sweeping rewrite of US trade policy would be immediate.

Trump has made clear a few goals he wants to accomplish through his tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US, respond to unfair trade policies from other countries, increase tax revenue and incentivize crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking.

The implementation of his tariffs has so far been haphazard, with multiple rollbacks and delays and vague promises that have yet to come to fruition. The threats have soured US relations with its largest trading partners. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has called them “unjustified” and pledged to retaliate. The European Union has said it has a “strong plan” to retaliate.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, said that Trump was spending Tuesday “perfecting” the trade plan. “He is with his trade and tariff team right now, perfecting it to make sure this is a perfect deal for the American people and the American worker,” Leavitt said.

Ahead of the announcement, Trump repeated the idea of imposing so-called reciprocal tariffs, where the US would tax imports at the same rates that a country uses for US exports. Trump has specifically mentioned countries like South Korea, Brazil and India, along with the EU, as being possible targets for reciprocal tariffs.

“The world has been ripping off the United States for the last 40 years and more,” Trump told NBC over the weekend. “All we’re doing is being fair.”

Also still on the table are 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada, two of the US’s biggest trading partners, which Trump wants to utilize to force the countries to quell migration and drug trafficking into the US. In early March, Trump delayed the start of the tariffs for the second time after negotiating with leaders of the two countries.

Reports have also said that Trump’s advisers are also pitching him a 20% across-the-board tariff on all imports, something closer to what Trump promised on the campaign trail.

Any tariffs announced would be on top of the tariffs that Trump has already implemented: an additional 20% tariff on all Chinese imports and a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminium imports. There is also a 10% tariff on energy imports from Canada.

Trump also announced in March a 25% tariff on all imported vehicles and, eventually, imported auto parts, which will start going into effect on Thursday.

The tariff plans have led to stock market sell-offs and are proving unpopular with Americans, according to polls. Multiple reports suggest internal conflict within the White House over how far and wide the tariffs should go have exacerbated the uncertainty over what the tariffs will be.

Recent reporting from Politico suggests that some within the White House see the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, as the most aggressive about tariffs, pushing across-the-board measures. Meanwhile, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and trade adviser Peter Navarro are both more averse to dramatic tariffs.

But all conflict within the White House has been largely internal, while Trump and his cabinet have spent the last few weeks trying to pitch the tariffs as good for the US economy, even as the US stock market has been sliding downward and consumer and business sentiments have plummeted.

On Monday, the end of the first quarter of 2025, two of the three major stock exchanges saw their worst quarter in over two years as Wall Street has been reeling from the chaos of Trump’s trade wars. In March, consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level in over four years.

Economists at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and other banks lowered their forecasts for growth in the US economy in recent days and have noted an increased chance of a recession.

Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, told Bloomberg News that it is “the most dramatic shift in confidence that I can recall, except for when Covid hit,” he said. “It’s conceivable that the hit to confidence could have a bigger effect than the tariffs themselves.”

The Trump administration has tried to argue that the drop in confidence has to do with the uncertainty over trade policy, not the impacts of the tariffs themselves. Yet economists say the impacts of tariffs will be another uncertainty in itself, likely leading to higher prices as American businesses, which will have to pay the tariffs on imports, ultimately shift the cost down to consumers.

“CEOs are consistently saying they want to hike prices,” Alex Jacquez, CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive thinktank and advocacy group, told reporters on Tuesday. “What the major retailers and companies who may be affected by tariffs are already planning to do … is pass these costs along to consumers as much as they possibly can.”

The European Union has a “strong plan” to retaliate against tariffs imposed by Donald Trump but would prefer to negotiate, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has said.

Trump, who has upended eight decades of certainties about the transatlantic relationship since taking office, has threatened tariffs on goods from around the world from Wednesday. His administration in March put tariffs on imported steel and aluminium and said higher duties on cars would come into effect on Thursday.

Von der Leyen, speaking to the European parliament on Tuesday, said the next sectors facing tariffs would be semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and timber.

She said many Europeans felt “utterly disheartened” by the US announcements. “Europe has not started this confrontation. We do not necessarily want to retaliate, but if it is necessary we have a strong plan to retaliate and we will use it,” she said.

After the announcement of the steel and aluminium tariffs in March, the commission said it would impose countermeasures on up to €26bn of US goods. These include the reimposition of tariffs on $4.5bn of US goods, such as jeans and Harley-Davidson motorbikes, which were suspended during the presidency of Joe Biden. The measures are due to be implemented in mid April, after the EU executive chose to delay the initial 1 April date in order to align them with other steps and fine-tune the EU position among the 27 member states.

The EU executive is consulting member states over a second tranche of tariffs, worth around €18bn, covering steel, aluminium, poultry, beef, seafood and nuts.

However, it is facing pressure from European capitals to protect national interests. France, for example, is concerned about the impact on French wines and spirits if the commission targets American bourbon. Its prime minister, François Bayrou, described proposed EU tariffs on Kentucky bourbon as a misstep, after meetings with the French cognac industry.

Under the EU-US trade relationship, worth €1.6tn in 2023, the European bloc exports more goods across the Atlantic than the US does, led by cars, medicines and pharmaceutical products, which could give it leverage.

EU officials have not ruled out retaliatory measures on US services, such as suspending intellectual property rights. In theory, retaliation could target US tech companies, banks and financial service providers.

Without giving away details, von der Leyen said “all instruments” – all countermeasures – were on the table. “Europe holds a lot of cards. From trade to technology to the size of our market,” she said. “But this strength is also built on our readiness to take firm countermeasures if necessary.”

Israel’s defence minister has said the country intends to “seize large areas” of the Gaza Strip amid a major expansion of aerial and ground operations in the besieged Palestinian territory.

Israel Katz said in a statement on Wednesday that “troops will move to clear areas of terrorists and infrastructure, and seize extensive territory that will be added to the state of Israel’s security areas”.

He also said he was calling on Palestinian civilians to flee areas where fighting had returned following the collapse of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas last month and to “act now to overthrow Hamas and return all the hostages”.

The announcement followed a night of intensive airstrikes on Khan Younis and Rafah in southern Gaza, which hospital officials said had killed at least 21 people. The bodies of five women, one of them pregnant, and two children were brought to Nasser hospital on Wednesday morning, medics said, as well as three men from the same family.

There were also reports early on Wednesday of at least two airstrikes on Gaza City and Israeli troop movement in the Rafah area. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had deployed an extra division to southern Gaza earlier in the day.

The Israeli military issued sweeping evacuation orders last week for people in Rafah and a swath of land stretching northwards towards Khan Younis to move to al-Mawasi, an area on the shore that Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone but repeatedly bombed.

Katz did not elaborate on how much land Israel intends to capture, but according to the Israeli human rights group Gisha, the IDF has seized buffer zones around Gaza’s edges totalling 62 sq km, or 17% of the strip, since the war began in October 2023.

Israel renewed intensive bombing across Gaza on 18 March, followed by the redeployment of ground troops, bringing to an abrupt end an almost two-month-old ceasefire and exchanges of Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militant groups and Palestinians in Israeli jails.

According to the terms of the truce, the sides were supposed to negotiate implementing further phases of the deal during the first 42-day-long stage, but the Israeli government repeatedly postponed the talks.

The latest UN estimate, from 23 March, suggested more than 140,000 people had been displaced since the end of the ceasefire. More than 90% of the strip’s population of 2.3 million have been forced to flee their homes during the conflict, many of them multiple times.

Hundreds of people have been killed in IDF airstrikes and Israel has also cut off humanitarian aid, food and fuel to the strip in an effort to pressure Hamas.

Efforts led by Qatari and Egyptian mediators to get talks aimed at ending the war back on track have not yet led to a breakthrough. The resumption of fighting in Gaza has fuelled protests in Israel against the government from supporters of the remaining hostages and their families.

The 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel, in which Israel says 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, were killed and a further 250 taken captive, was the trigger for the conflict in the Gaza Strip, the worst war between Israel and the Palestinians in more than 70 years of fighting.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 50,357 people, the majority of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Susan Crawford won the race for a seat on the Wisconsin supreme court on Tuesday, scoring a major victory for Democrats who had framed the race as a referendum on Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s popularity.

Crawford, a liberal judge from Dane county, defeated Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general and conservative judge from Waukesha county, after Musk and groups associated with the tech billionaire spent millions to boost his candidacy in what became the most expensive judicial contest in American history.

“Today Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy,” Crawford said in a speech at her victory night event in Madison. “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”

With more than 84% of the vote tallied, Crawford led Schimel by nearly 10 percentage points.

In remarks on Tuesday night, Schimel said he and his team “didn’t leave anything on the field” and announced that he had conceded the race in a call to his opponent before taking the stage. When his supporters began to boo, Schimel stopped them. “No, you gotta accept the results,” he said, adding: “The numbers aren’t gonna turn around. They’re too bad, and we’re not gonna pull this off.”

Musk said hours after the result that “the long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary” and that the most important thing was that a vote on the addition of voter ID requirements passed.

Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate for the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election, was succinct on Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

“Wisconsin beat the billionaire,” he posted.

The result means that liberals will keep a 4-3 ideological majority on the state supreme court. That majority is hugely significant because the court will hear major cases on abortion and collective bargaining rights. The court could also potentially consider cases that could cause the state to redraw its eight congressional districts, which are currently drawn to advantage Republicans.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, reported “historic turnout” for a spring election, with election officials saying in a statement on Tuesday evening that due to the “unprecedented high turnout”, seven polling places ran out of ballots. The city’s elections commission said it was working to replenish resources to voters during the evening rush.

Combined, more than $80m was spent on the race, topping the previous record of about $51m that was spent in the 2023 Wisconsin state supreme court race. Elon Musk and affiliated groups spent more than $20m alone. Musk reprised some of the tactics that he used last fall to help Trump win, including offering $100 to people who signed a petition opposing “activist judges” and offering $1 million checks to voters.

Pointing to the potential to redraw House districts, Musk had said the race “might decide the future of America and western civilization”.

Democrats seized on Musk’s involvement in the race to energize voters who were upset about the wrecking ball he and his unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, have taken to federal agencies. They raised the stakes of an already high-stakes contest by holding out Wisconsin as a test case for Musk, saying that if he succeeded, he would take his model across the country.

“Growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, I never thought I would be taking on the richest man in the world for justice,” Crawford said on Tuesday night. “And we won.”

After Musk’s involvement became public, Democrats saw an explosion in grassroots donations and people “coming out of the woodwork” to get involved in the race, Ben Wikler, the state’s Democratic party chair, said last month. When the party tested its messaging, Wikler said, messages that highlighted Musk’s involvement in the race motivated voters who were otherwise disengaged from politics.

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator for Massachusetts and a former presidential candidate, posted on X: “Wisconsin cannot be bought. Our democracy is not for sale. And when we fight, we win.”

The Democratic party’s official X feed was unabashed in its snarkiness. It posted simply: “loser”.

The post accompanied a large picture of Musk at a rally in Green Bay last weekend wearing the kind of humorous “cheese head” hats that Wisconsinites, celebrating the state’s dairy industry, like to wear to sporting events.

On Tuesday night Crawford won Brown county, where Green Bay is and where Trump won by eight points in last November’s election, Politico said.

Jeannine Ramsey, 65, voted in Madison on Tuesday for Crawford because she said the “Elon Musk-supported Brad Schimel” wouldn’t rule fairly on the issues most important to her.

“I think it’s shameful that Elon Musk can come here and spend millions of dollars and try to bribe the citizens,” Ramsey said. “I don’t think it should be allowed. He doesn’t live in our state, and I don’t think he should be able to buy this election. It makes me angry.”

Trump won Wisconsin in the presidential election in November by less than one percentage point – the closest margin of any battleground state.

Because turnout in a state supreme court election is lower than that of a typical election and those who vote tend to be highly engaged, experts have cautioned against trying to read too much into the election results for national political sentiment. Still, there were encouraging signs for Democrats.

“The hard work of reaching the voters who pay the least attention to politics is going to take years for Democrats to build that kind of communications strength that can puncture the Republican propaganda bubble,” Wikler said in March. “But for laying the groundwork for flipping the House and the Senate in 2026 and winning governorships and state legislative majorities, the supreme court race can really point the way.”

Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, also celebrated the result.

“Tonight, the people of Wisconsin squarely rejected the influence of Elon Musk, Donald Trump and billionaire special interests. And their message? Stay out of our elections and stay away from our courts,” he said in a statement.

In Madison, Crawford said she was ready to turn from the campaign trail, which she described as a “life-altering experience”, to the bench, where she promised to “deliver fair and impartial decisions”. Concluding her remarks, Crawford wished her mother, watching from home, a happy birthday and quipped: “I know how glad you are to see the TV ads end.”

Jenny Peek contributed reporting from Madison, Wisconsin and Joanna Walters contributed reporting from New York

Republicans on Tuesday won special elections for two US House of Representatives seats in Florida vacated by Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, dashing Democratic hopes for an upset victory in the first federal special elections held since the president began his second term.

But Democratic candidates Josh Weil and Gay Valimont are on track to lose the solidly red districts by much smaller margins than the more than 30 points that Democrats lost them by in November.

Weil put up a stiff challenge in the eastern coastal district formerly represented by Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, rattling Republicans in a state they have dominated over the past decade and leaving Democrats with a glimmer of hope. Weil, a Democratic public school teacher, had outraised Fine, a state senator, and a poll had shown them running practically neck-and-neck days before the election.

The Associated Press also called a second special election in Florida for Republican Jimmy Patronis, in the seat vacated by Republican Matt Gaetz, who resigned after Trump nominated him for attorney general only to drop out amid reports of sexual misconduct and drug use or possession.

In an all-caps social media post on Tuesday evening, the president celebrated the pair of “BIG” Republican victories in the conservative districts that overwhelmingly backed him in November. “THE TRUMP ENDORSEMENT, AS ALWAYS, PROVED FAR GREATER THAN THE DEMOCRATS FORCES OF EVIL. CONGRATULATIONS TO AMERICA!!!” he posted on Truth Social.

Democrats were not expected to be competitive in the heavily Republican area, but the final tally appeared much closer on Tuesday than it was in November.

In a statement, the Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, hailed the results as the latest evidence of the party’s “massive overperformance” in parts of the country where they struggled last year.

“From a Pennsylvania Democrat winning in a deep-red district last week to Donald Trump being terrified of losing Elise Stefanik’s seat, Republicans everywhere know a reckoning is coming – Democrats are taking the majority in 2026,” Martin said.

Last week, a Democrat won an upset victory in a state senate race in Pennsylvania, and the Trump administration a day later withdrew their nomination of congresswoman Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador, a decision widely seen as fueled by concern over creating another vacant House seat.

Michael Whatley, chair of the Republican National Committee, said the pair of “decisive victories” in Florida were an endorsement of the president’s second-term agenda.

“The American people sent a clear message tonight: they want elected officials who will advance President Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda, and their votes can’t be bought by national Democrats,” he said.

Earlier on Tuesday, voter Andrew Julius cast his ballot for Weil in Daytona Beach, Waltz’s former district, because he said Weil seemed like a level-headed, educated person. Julius was also concerned about how Trump’s team was handling foreign policy, including the latest privacy concern when Waltz shared war plans on a Signal chat that included a journalist.

“I had a top-secret security clearance with my job in the navy because I was a sonar tech,” he said. “If I would have done just a fraction of a mistake or what was done with this whole Signal-gate fiasco, I would have been court-martialed.”

But the majority of voters continued to support the Republican ticket.

At the Church of Christ in Daytona Beach, Fine campaign volunteer “Spock” Hinson wore a shirt with Trump’s mugshot that said “Never Surrender”. The former Democrat said he supported Trump and his key ally Elon Musk.

“I want him to do what he’s trying to do,” Hinson said of Musk. “Anybody who’s not happy with him is either brainwashed or a crook.”

On social media, Trump, who had endorsed Fine, congratulated him for “a great WIN against a massive CASH AVALANCHE”.

For congressional Republicans, the election wins help preserve their razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives, which is in the middle of a complex negotiation with the Senate aimed at enacting legislation authorizing Trump’s campaign promises, including the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, an extension of tax cuts passed during his first term and an increase in the US government’s debt ceiling.

Before Tuesday’s special elections, the GOP held 218 seats in Congress’s lower chamber and the Democrats 213. But despite their disappointing performance in last November’s presidential election, Democrats appear to be continuing their streak of strong performances in off-year elections nationwide.

Temperamental on-set behaviour by successful actors is common, but rarely made public. So it takes a particular type of performer, or one with poor PR defences, to become notorious for tantrums or capriciousness. The actor Val Kilmer, who has died aged 65 after suffering from pneumonia, was one such case.

He starred in several box-office hits, including Top Gun (1986), and played roles as distinctive as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and the ghost of Elvis Presley in True Romance (1993). He also got a fleeting taste of superstardom when he took the lead in Batman Forever (1995).

Yet still he was better known in Hollywood for being difficult to work with than for any of his performances. Michael Douglas berated him for unprofessionalism on the set of The Ghost and the Darkness (1997), while John Frankenheimer, who worked with him on the ill-fated 1996 remake of The Island of Dr Moreau, said: “Even if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer, I wouldn’t have that prick in it.”

On the other hand, Michael Mann, who directed him in Heat (1995), and Oliver Stone, who wrote and directed The Doors, spoke admiringly of him as a collaborator. At its best, Kilmer’s acting combined playfulness and intensity. He also had a flair for comedy that was under-used except in a few instances. One of these was his film debut, Top Secret! (1984), a scattershot spoof of second world war movies in which he demonstrated straight-faced comic aplomb amid a myriad wacky sight gags from the team behind Airplane! Even here, though, his approach was one of the utmost seriousness.

The film-makers Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams advised him to loosen up and enjoy himself. “The boys always wanted me to have more fun,” recalled Kilmer, “but I wanted to be good and I took it all way too seriously.” It was ever thus. As an adolescent, he had reportedly walked off the set of a hamburger commercial when he found himself unable to manufacture sufficient enthusiasm for the product in hand.

Kilmer, whose ancestry was Cherokee-German-Irish-Swedish, was born in Los Angeles, to Gladys (nee Ekstadt) and Eugene. His father was said to have amassed a $100m fortune from supplying parts to the aircraft and aerospace industries (though his real-estate business filed for bankruptcy in 1991). Kilmer’s parents, who raised him as a Christian Scientist, divorced when he was nine. The second of three sons, he was distraught at the death of his younger brother, Wesley, who drowned at the age of 15 after suffering an epileptic fit while swimming.

He was educated at Chatsworth high school and the Hollywood Professional school before studying drama at the Juilliard School, New York, where at 17 he was its youngest ever student. It was there that he co-wrote and played the lead in How It All Began, a play about the German terrorist Michael Baumann.

The producer Joseph Papp staged it at the Public theatre in New York. Kilmer won acclaim at the Playhouse theatre in 1983 for playing Alan, the rich kid in John Byrne’s The Slab Boys, opposite Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon as his working-class tormentors. Frank Rich of the New York Times commended him on the “fine, firm shading” of his performance.

That led directly to him being cast in Top Secret! He starred next in the comedy Real Genius (1985) and played Tom Cruise’s rival, Iceman, in Top Gun. Kilmer later called Top Gun “silly” and “a horrible celebration of redneckness”. He reprised his role briefly in the 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, which became his final screen appearance. Though he turned down prestigious directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman) and high-profile films (Blue Velvet, Dirty Dancing), Kilmer stayed in work, though his choices sometimes betrayed an uncertainty about the sort of actor he wanted to be. He starred in the whimsical fantasy adventure Willow (1988), produced by the Star Wars creator George Lucas, and won plaudits for the TV movie Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid (1989). He appeared in the noir thriller Kill Me Again (also 1989) opposite Joanne Whalley, whom he had met on the set of Willow. (“Top British actress elopes to Arizona with Cher’s former lover,” reported the Daily Mail, making reference to one of Kilmer’s old flames.) Whalley added Kilmer’s surname to hers after the couple were married in 1988. They divorced eight years later.

In 1991, The Doors gave him the nearest thing he had to a signature part, though he was excellent also as a foppish Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993). Subsequent years comprised a mixture of missed opportunities and misguided choices, with the occasional high-point such as Heat.

Kilmer was but one contributing factor to the disaster that was The Island of Dr Moreau, which went through two directors, the first of whom, Richard Stanley, was said to have later sneaked back on set in disguise. On that movie, Marlon Brando, himself no goody-two-shoes when it came to on-set etiquette, was heard to accuse Kilmer of having confused his talents with the size of his pay cheque.

The lead role in a feeble film version of the British television series The Saint (1997) did not improve Kilmer’s prospects. After providing the voices of Moses and God in the DreamWorks animation The Prince of Egypt (1998) and starring in the science-fiction thriller Red Planet (2002), he seemed to relinquish his conflicted mainstream ambitions and to prioritise quality instead.

He won praise playing the porn star John Holmes in Wonderland (2003) and had a small but significant part in the western The Missing (2003) after he wrote to its director, Ron Howard, apologising for his bad behaviour on the set of their previous film together, Willow. Kilmer was wryly charismatic as the taciturn agent hired to rescue the president’s daughter in David Mamet’s minimalist thriller Spartan. He was reunited with Stone for the historical epic Alexander (also 2004).

Kilmer did the warmest work of his career in the comic thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), in which he played “Gay” Perry, a private investigator who teams up with a thief-turned-actor (Robert Downey Jr). The character’s sexuality had been Kilmer’s idea. “I said, ‘We gotta get a little colour in here. We gotta juice it up a little. I think I should be gay. I think I should kiss Robert Downey in the middle of the film. Maybe even earlier. Several times.’” He also observed that, “Maybe this wasn’t my first gay role. Maybe that was Top Gun.”

The parts that followed were divided between straight-to-DVD movies and television miniseries, though there were some interesting exceptions: Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009); the action spoof MacGruber (2010), which marked a welcome return to comedy for Kilmer; Coppola’s horror film Twixt (2011); and Palo Alto (2013), based on stories by James Franco and also starring Kilmer’s son, Jack. A 2021 documentary, Val, found him reflecting on his life and career, as he had done in the previous year’s memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry.

Theatrical endeavours included a return in 2004 to the role of Moses in The Ten Commandments: The Spectacle Musical, the lead in a West End production of The Postman Always Rings Twice in 2005, and the 2012 one-man show Citizen Twain, which Kilmer wrote and directed, and in which he also played Mark Twain.

Late in the day, Kilmer acknowledged that he had been a difficult collaborator. “I understand how hard it is for directors to direct,” he said in 2005. “I try to participate more in [the director’s] experience than I have in the past. I hope I’ve done my penance.” He appeared also to have grasped the value of self-deprecation.

He played two exaggerated versions of himself – first as a washed-up actor-turned-life coach in The Lotus Community Workshop, Harmony Korine’s contribution to the portmanteau film The Fourth Dimension (2012), and then in 2013 on the Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant sitcom Life’s Too Short, in which he was shown begging for funding for a sequel to Willow and harassing restaurant diners by challenging them to guess his identity while wearing a Batman mask (“Think! Don’t you people go to the movies?”).

This humorous side spilled over into his exchanges with the press. Asked in 2003 if there was a biblical figure with whom he identified, he replied: “Other than God?”

He is survived by Mercedes and Jack, his two children with Whalley.

A man was pulled alive from the rubble of a hotel in Myanmar on Wednesday, five days after the country’s worst earthquake in a century flattened entire neighbourhoods and tore through temples, bridges and highways.

The 26-year-old was found alive in the ruins of the building in the capital, Naypyidaw, by a joint team of rescuers from Myanmar and Turkey after midnight, the fire service and the country’s ruling junta said.

The disaster has killed more than 2,700 people, and the death toll is expected to surpass 3,000 on Wednesday, said Myanmar’s military ruler, Min Aung Hlaing. Humanitarian agencies urged other countries to ramp up aid ahead of the monsoon rains.

Close to the epicentre, in the decimated cities of Mandalay and Sagaing, traumatised survivors slept in the street, with the stench of corpses trapped under the rubble permeating the disaster zone. Water, food and medicine are in short supply, and the monsoon could hit in May.

“The devastating impact of Friday’s earthquake is becoming clearer by the hour – this is a crisis on top of a crisis for Myanmar, where the humanitarian situation is already dire,” said Arif Noor, the Myanmar country director for the humanitarian agency Care.

“Rescue teams are still recovering those trapped under the rubble, and hospitals are overwhelmed. The physical and mental scars of this catastrophe will last for decades.”

Friday’s powerful quake is the latest in a succession of blows for the impoverished country of 53 million, which has been plagued by a civil war since the military seized power in a 2021 coup that has devastated the economy after a decade of development and tentative democracy.

The UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said: “We must act swiftly to provide relief before the upcoming monsoon season, which, of course, will even worsen this horrendous crisis.”

In addition to those killed, more than 4,500 people were injured and 441 remained missing, according to Min Aung Hlaing.

“Among the missing, most are assumed to be dead. There is a narrow chance for them to remain alive,” he said in a speech.

Some agencies say the unofficial toll could be as high as 10,000.

UN agencies said hospitals were overwhelmed and rescue efforts hindered by infrastructure damage and the civil war.

Julie Bishop, the UN special envoy for Myanmar, urged all sides to immediately cease fire, permit humanitarian access and ensure aid workers are safe. “Continuing military operations in disaster-affected areas risks further loss of life,” she said in a statement.

Residents and representatives of Myanmar’s exiled opposition National Unity Government (NUG) have accused the junta of continuing to drop bombs in the wake of the disaster, and of blocking emergency aid to areas that are beyond the military government’s control.

“[On Monday], five bombs were dropped around Nwe Khwe village. Although there were no casualties from that, the public is already traumatised by the earthquake,” said Ye Lay, 21, from Chaung-U, a town in the earthquake-affected region of Sagaing.

“Because of the earthquake damage people are staying outside their homes, and when bombs are dropped, they have to take shelter in trenches,” she said. “If an earthquake strikes, we can’t run away, so people are experiencing a profound sense of insecurity.”

Amnesty International said it had received testimony corroborating reports of airstrikes near areas where quake recovery efforts were focused. “You cannot ask for aid with one hand and bomb with the other,” said Amnesty’s Myanmar researcher Joe Freeman.

The Three Brotherhood Alliance of three major rebel groups at war with the junta on Tuesday declared a unilateral one-month ceasefire, to allow urgent humanitarian efforts to “be carried out as swiftly and effectively as possible”.

In its nightly news bulletin on Tuesday, the state-controlled MRTV quoted Min Aung Hlaing as saying the military had halted its offensives but that unspecified ethnic minority armies were planning to exploit the disaster.

“The military is aware they are gathering, training, and preparing to attack,” it said, quoting the general as saying at an event to raise funds for quake victims: “We consider it as attacking us and will respond accordingly.”

The junta has declared a week of national mourning, with flags to fly at half-mast on official buildings until 6 April “in sympathy for the loss of life and damages”.

A man was pulled alive from the rubble of a hotel in Myanmar on Wednesday, five days after the country’s worst earthquake in a century flattened entire neighbourhoods and tore through temples, bridges and highways.

The 26-year-old was found alive in the ruins of the building in the capital, Naypyidaw, by a joint team of rescuers from Myanmar and Turkey after midnight, the fire service and the country’s ruling junta said.

The disaster has killed more than 2,700 people, and the death toll is expected to surpass 3,000 on Wednesday, said Myanmar’s military ruler, Min Aung Hlaing. Humanitarian agencies urged other countries to ramp up aid ahead of the monsoon rains.

Close to the epicentre, in the decimated cities of Mandalay and Sagaing, traumatised survivors slept in the street, with the stench of corpses trapped under the rubble permeating the disaster zone. Water, food and medicine are in short supply, and the monsoon could hit in May.

“The devastating impact of Friday’s earthquake is becoming clearer by the hour – this is a crisis on top of a crisis for Myanmar, where the humanitarian situation is already dire,” said Arif Noor, the Myanmar country director for the humanitarian agency Care.

“Rescue teams are still recovering those trapped under the rubble, and hospitals are overwhelmed. The physical and mental scars of this catastrophe will last for decades.”

Friday’s powerful quake is the latest in a succession of blows for the impoverished country of 53 million, which has been plagued by a civil war since the military seized power in a 2021 coup that has devastated the economy after a decade of development and tentative democracy.

The UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said: “We must act swiftly to provide relief before the upcoming monsoon season, which, of course, will even worsen this horrendous crisis.”

In addition to those killed, more than 4,500 people were injured and 441 remained missing, according to Min Aung Hlaing.

“Among the missing, most are assumed to be dead. There is a narrow chance for them to remain alive,” he said in a speech.

Some agencies say the unofficial toll could be as high as 10,000.

UN agencies said hospitals were overwhelmed and rescue efforts hindered by infrastructure damage and the civil war.

Julie Bishop, the UN special envoy for Myanmar, urged all sides to immediately cease fire, permit humanitarian access and ensure aid workers are safe. “Continuing military operations in disaster-affected areas risks further loss of life,” she said in a statement.

Residents and representatives of Myanmar’s exiled opposition National Unity Government (NUG) have accused the junta of continuing to drop bombs in the wake of the disaster, and of blocking emergency aid to areas that are beyond the military government’s control.

“[On Monday], five bombs were dropped around Nwe Khwe village. Although there were no casualties from that, the public is already traumatised by the earthquake,” said Ye Lay, 21, from Chaung-U, a town in the earthquake-affected region of Sagaing.

“Because of the earthquake damage people are staying outside their homes, and when bombs are dropped, they have to take shelter in trenches,” she said. “If an earthquake strikes, we can’t run away, so people are experiencing a profound sense of insecurity.”

Amnesty International said it had received testimony corroborating reports of airstrikes near areas where quake recovery efforts were focused. “You cannot ask for aid with one hand and bomb with the other,” said Amnesty’s Myanmar researcher Joe Freeman.

The Three Brotherhood Alliance of three major rebel groups at war with the junta on Tuesday declared a unilateral one-month ceasefire, to allow urgent humanitarian efforts to “be carried out as swiftly and effectively as possible”.

In its nightly news bulletin on Tuesday, the state-controlled MRTV quoted Min Aung Hlaing as saying the military had halted its offensives but that unspecified ethnic minority armies were planning to exploit the disaster.

“The military is aware they are gathering, training, and preparing to attack,” it said, quoting the general as saying at an event to raise funds for quake victims: “We consider it as attacking us and will respond accordingly.”

The junta has declared a week of national mourning, with flags to fly at half-mast on official buildings until 6 April “in sympathy for the loss of life and damages”.

More than 20 women have contacted police to say they fear they may have been attacked by the serial rapist Zhenhao Zou, with detectives fearing there may be even more victims to come.

Zou, 28, was convicted last month of raping three women in London and seven in China between 2019 and 2024.

He was a PhD student in London, and a senior police officer said that a second criminal trial was now likely.

Zou filmed many of his rapes, and the videos provided key evidence leading to his convictions.

He drugged most of his victims, who had little or no memory of his attacks.

Detectives recovered 58 videos, which they believe show Zou attacking women. When he was convicted, most of the victims were still to be identified by police.

On Zou’s conviction, the Met appealed for women to contact them and said 23 had come forward in little more than four weeks describing the same method of attack by Zou.

One is believed to be a woman Zou has already been convicted of attacking, with 22 of the women believed to be previously unknown to police.

Some of the attacks outlined to police in initial accounts were not caught on video and were unknown to the force. This is increasing police fears that Zou, who outwardly appeared to be a charming man and who was from a wealthy Chinese family, could have attacked more than 60 women.

Just over half of the women who have come forward in the past month allege attacks in London; Zou was a master’s and then PhD student in engineering at University College London.

A Met commander, Kevin Southworth, said police fears about the scale of Zou’s offending are being borne out by the number of women who contacted them in the month since he was found guilty.

Detectives fear he may be one of the worst attackers of women in British criminal history.

Southworth said: “This particular one seems to be stacking up in exactly the way we were concerned that it would. It tells you something that 23 victims have come forward in a month since we did the appeal. That’s quite a strike rate.”

Further charges and a long jail term when Zou is sentenced on 19 June may further encourage other victims to contact the Met, Southworth said.

He said police were in the “middle” of establishing the extent of the engineering student’s offending, with months, perhaps years of work to come. He said the case was being transferred to the Met’s complex case work unit: “The potential for a second or even third trial is there. We’re still now working to build a case.”

The most recent female complainants are believed, like Zou’s other victims, to be of Chinese heritage and allege attacks in London or China. They live all over the world, with some in North and South America and Europe.

Most of Zou’s victims in the videos played at his trial were unconscious or stupefied because of the drugs he had given them. He ignored their pleas to stop his attacks as they lost consciousness after being drugged, with videos played in court leaving some jurors in tears.

In court Zou claimed to be sleeping with five women a month.

He came to Britain to study in 2017 at Queen’s University Belfast. He began his studies at UCL two years later, which continued until his arrest in January 2024.

He stayed in London in the vicinity of Woburn Place and later had a flat in the Elephant and Castle area.

He would invite women for drinks at his home, which he would spike.

Reports by victims or witnesses about Zou can be made online. Police can also be contacted via survivors@met.police.uk or by phoning 101 within the UK and quoting reference 2904/04FEB25.

Cory Booker, the Democratic US senator from New Jersey, has broken the record for longest speech ever by a lone senator – beating the record first established by Strom Thurmond, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Booker’s speech eventually ran to 25 hours and five minutes. Having begun at 7pm on Monday night, was not a filibuster but instead an effort to warn of what he called the “grave and urgent” danger that Donald Trump’s presidential administration poses to democracy and the American people.

“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said near the start of his speech. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our nation is in crisis.”

Booker said that he has heard endless stories of “pain and fear” from constituents who are both Democrats and Republicans due to the Trump administration’s policies.

“Institutions that are special in America, that are unique in our country, are being recklessly – and I would say unconstitutionally – affected, attacked and even shattered,” Booker said.

“In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety, financial stability, the core foundations of our democracy and even our aspirations as a people for, from our highest offices, a sense of common decency.

“These are not normal times in America and they should not be treated as such. I can’t allow this body to continue without doing something. The threats to America’s democracy are grave and urgent.”

Emphasizing the role Congress should play to hold the executive branch accountable, Booker decried his fellow congressmembers for failing to vote against the president’s cabinet nominees and other policies.

“The most powerful man in the world and the richest man in the world have taken a battle axe to the Veterans’ Association, a battle axe to the Department of Education, a battle axe to the only agency solely focused on protecting consumers against big banks and other factors that might abuse them,” he said. “What will we do in this body? What will we do in the House of Representatives? Right now the answer is nothing.”

As he approached a full day of speaking, Booker began to stumble slightly in his speech, but was still on his feet, making sweeping gestures as he spoke.

Booker evoked the Founding Fathers, Civil Rights leaders and lawmakers who stood up against McCarthyism in his calls for congressmembers to more assertively hold the Trump administration accountable.

Yielding to a question from Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, while retaining the floor, Booker rested a moment while Murphy recounted the longest speech in Senate history, given in 1957 by Republican senator Strom Thurmond to filibuster the Civil Rights Act.

“What you have done here today Senator Booker couldn’t be more different than what occurred on this floor in 1957,” he said. “Strom Thurmond was standing in the way of inevitable progress.” He added: “Today, you are standing in the way not of progress but of retreat.”

Booker’s speech is not technically a filibuster as he is not trying to run down the Senate’s time to prevent a piece of legislation from passing.

Instead, he has used his speaking slot to decry the Trump administration’s spending cuts, its attempt to abolish the Department of Education, the president’s attempts to bypass the judicial system and the removal of people from the US who speak out against the administration.

Booker’s speech has been supported with reams of quotes from speeches by the late American politicians John McCain and John Lewis, as well as excerpts from newspaper articles.

Some of the senator’s fellow Democrats have helped support him during his monologues, with several asking questions that have allowed Booker to have a break without yielding the floor.

The Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, was the first to pose a question to his New Jersey colleague, and he praised Booker for his “strength and conviction”.

“You’re taking the floor tonight to bring up all these inequities that will hurt people, that will so hurt the middle class, that will so hurt poor people, that will hurt America, hurt our fiscal conditions, as you document,” Schumer said in his own question to Booker.

“Just give us a little inkling of the strength – give us a little feeling for the strength and conviction that drive you to do this unusual taking of the floor for a long time to let the people know how bad these things are going to be.”

At one point, Booker spoke about the need for bipartisanship and mentioned a recent dinner he had with Ted Cruz, the arch-conservative Republican senator from Texas. Cruz is no stranger to marathon speeches, having spoken for more than 21 hours in 2013 in an attempt to filibuster an expansion of Medicaid eligibility. At one point, Cruz read from Green Eggs and Ham, the Dr Seuss children’s book.

Around his 20th hour of speaking, Booker offered an apology to his fellow Democrats for the current political climate, saying: “I confess that I’ve been inadequate. That the Democrats have been responsible for allowing the rise of this demagogue.”

Some of the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, killed by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave nine days ago in Gaza, were found with their hands or legs tied and had gunshot wounds to the head and chest, according to two witnesses.

The witness accounts add to an accumulating body of evidence pointing to a potentially serious war crime on 23 March, when Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews and civil defence rescue workers were sent to the scene of an airstrike in the early hours of the morning in the al-Hashashin district of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.

International humanitarian teams were only allowed access to the site this weekend. One body was recovered on Saturday. Fourteen more were found in a sandy grave at the site on Sunday and were brought back for autopsies in the nearby city of Khan Younis.

Dr Ahmed al-Farra, a senior doctor at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, witnessed the arrival of some of the remains.

“I was able to see three bodies when they were transferred to the Nasser hospital. They had bullets in their chest and head. They were executed. They had their hands tied,’’ Farra said. “They tied them so they were unable to move and then they killed them.”

He provided photographs he said he had taken of one of the dead on arrival at the hospital. The pictures show a hand at the end of a long-sleeved black shirt with a black cord knotted around the wrist.

Another person, an eyewitness who took part in the recovery of remains from Rafah on Sunday, also said they saw evidence of one of the dead having been shot after being detained.

“I saw the bodies with my own eyes when we found them in the mass grave,” the witness, who did not want his name used for his own safety, told the Guardian in a telephone interview. “They had signs of multiple shots in the chest. One of them had legs tied. One was shot in the head. They were executed.”

The accounts add to allegations made by a senior Palestinian Red Crescent official, the Palestinian Civil Defence and the Gaza health ministry that some of the victims had been shot after they were detained and put in restraints by Israeli troops.

The incident came after the Israeli government ended a two-month-old ceasefire and resumed its military campaign against Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza on 17 March, with heavy aerial bombing and ground operations. The people of Rafah were ordered to leave the town on Monday, before Israeli ground operations there.

The international criminal court issued arrest warrants for war crimes in November against the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, and the ICC prosecutor has said he is still investigating Israeli forces and Hamas for suspected atrocities.

The victims are believed to have been killed on 23 March, two of them in the early hours when their ambulance came under Israeli fire while on the way to collect injured people from an earlier airstrike. The remaining 13 of the dead were in a convoy of ambulances and civil defence vehicles dispatched to retrieve the bodies of their two colleagues. One of the dead was a UN employee. A Red Crescent paramedic, named as Assad al-Nassasra, is still missing.

The UN said the ambulances and other vehicles were buried in sand by bulldozers alongside the bodies of the dead, in what appears to have been an attempt to cover up the killings. UN video footage taken by the recovery team showed a crushed UN vehicle, ambulances and a fire truck that had been flattened and buried in the sand by the Israeli military.

“This is a huge blow to us … These people were shot,” Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN aid coordination office, said on Tuesday. “Normally we are not at a loss for words and we are spokespeople, but sometimes we have difficulty finding them. This is one of those cases.”

Israel’s military has said its “initial assessment” of the incident had found that its troops had opened fire on several vehicles “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals”, and has claimed, so far without evidence, that Hamas fighters and other militants had been using the ambulances for cover.

The Israel Defense Forces have so far not responded to questions, first posed on Monday, about the reports that the bodies and their vehicles had been buried or to the allegations that some had been shot after being detained.

Dr Bashar Murad, the Red Crescent’s director of health programmes in Gaza, said at least one of the recovered bodies of the paramedics had had his hands tied, and that one of the paramedics had been on a call to the ambulance dispatcher when the attack took place.

On that call, Murad said, gunshots fired at close range could be heard as well as the voices of Israeli soldiers on the scene speaking in Hebrew, ordering the detention of at least some of the paramedics.

“The gunshots were fired from a close distance. They could be heard on the call between signal officer and of the medical crews that survived and phoned the ambulance centre for help. The soldiers’ voices were clearly audible in Hebrew and very close, as well as the sound of the gunfire.”

“Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them,” was one of the lines that Murad said could be heard by the dispatcher. He said the call had not been recorded.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza, said the bodies had been found with at least about 20 gunshots in each of them and confirmed that “at least one of them had their legs bound”.

In a statement released on Monday, Gaza’s health ministry said: “They were executed, some of them handcuffed and had sustained head and chest injuries. They were buried in a deep hole to prevent their identities from being identified.”

On Monday the IDF issued evacuation orders covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation, eight days after the paramedics and rescue workers were killed.

According to the Red Crescent, an ambulance was dispatched to pick up the casualties from the airstrike in the early hours of 23 March and called for a support ambulance. The first ambulance arrived at hospital safely but contact was lost with the support ambulance at 3.30am. An initial report from the scene said it had been shot at and the two paramedics inside killed.

The Palestinian Red Crescent president, Dr Younis al-Khatib, said the IDF had impeded the collection of the bodies for several days. The IDF said it had facilitated the evacuation of bodies as soon as “operational circumstances” allowed.

“The bodies were recovered with difficulty as they were buried in the sand, with some showing signs of decomposition,” the Red Crescent said.

Their burial had been put off pending autopsies at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. The autopsies have now been carried out, according to hospital sources, and a full report is due to be delivered to the Gaza health ministry within 10 days.

Locals in Sydney’s east woke on Wednesday to discover some of the city’s most famous beaches and coastal walkways battered and damaged by huge overnight swells.

Bondi, Bronte, Clovelly and Cronulla beaches were among the areas smashed by 5.5 metre swells.

Bondi’s world-famous Icebergs pool was hit hard by the wild surf. Some glass fences above the pool were broken and railings mangled. The wreckage of a large water tank washed up on the beach nearby.

Sam Bebb, the operations manager at Wylie’s baths in Coogee, a few suburbs south of Bondi, said they got “lucky” compared with Icebergs due to their amenities being more elevated.

“The worst … is some broken seating on the pool deck and damage that we haven’t quite been able to assess to the fence line surrounding the premises,” Bebb said.

Wylie’s has been closed for swimming since Sunday. It was also closed on Wednesday, as were many eastern beaches.

A Waverley council spokesperson said infrastructure at three beaches was damaged overnight and they would remain closed on Wednesday as staff cleaned up.

A spokesperson for Randwick city council said beaches in their area would also remain closed on Wednesday as workers assessed damage at Coogee beach and along the coastal walk.

Waves smashed through the doors of Coogee Surf Club, tore through handrails at South Coogee and deposited large amounts of sand over the steps and rainbow walkway.

“These conditions are risky even for experienced surfers. After days of flooding in Queensland, there’s an additional risk of large debris in the water,” veteran Randwick city council lifeguard and well-known surfer, Paul Moffatt, said.

Moffatt urged the community to stay out of the water on Wednesday evening, when more large swells were expected to hit.

A section of the Cronulla esplanade has been cordoned off, with parts of the concrete walkway cratering from 4-metre waves as civil crews inspected the damage wrought overnight.

Brick walls also buckled under the pressure of powerful waves at Bronte.

Bayside council in Sydney’s south shared photos of extensive damage on Wednesday of broken footpaths, fallen debris and crushed bike lanes at Dolls Point as workers furiously tried to make sure the traffic flow was safe. Approximately 20 properties in the suburb were flooded.

Several beaches in the city’s north that are popular with tourists, such as Dee Why, were also affected and remain closed.

Some adventurous swimmers still braved the conditions on Wednesday morning, dipping into an ocean pool overlooking Cronulla beach.

The Bureau of Meteorology said the immediate threat of coastal hazards had passed and damaging surf conditions had eased, but a hazardous surf warning remained for the entire New South Wales coast.

The bureau warned against swimming, rock fishing and boating in affected areas.

NSW police advised people to stay out of the water and avoid walking near surf-exposed areas.

NSW State Emergency Services (SES) warned there was a risk of high tides on Wednesday night and asked people to avoid areas exposed to coastal erosion.

The SES received 17 reports of properties with coastal erosion on the NSW Central Coast.

The forecast on Wednesday was for heavy swells to continue for most of this week along the NSW and southern Queensland coasts.

Waves up to 6.3 metres were recorded at the Eden wave buoy on Tuesday morning and 5.1 metres at Batemans Bay in the afternoon. A 5.9 metre wave was registered at the Port Kembla buoy early on Wednesday morning.

– with Australian Associated Press

In a new book, Joe Biden’s former White House chief of staff paints a devastating picture of the then US president’s mental and physical state before the debate with Donald Trump that sent his 2024 campaign into a tailspin, resulting in his relinquishing the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris.

Ron Klain served Biden from 2021 to 2023, then returned to his side last June, to run debate preparation as he had for numerous Democratic presidents before.

According to Klain, it turned out Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was”; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation” and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job”.

As described by Klain to the reporter Chris Whipple, at one point Biden had an idea.

“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.”

Whipple’s book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Biden is reportedly planning his own book but Whipple’s blockbuster is not even the first such volume to hit the shelves. This week saw publication of Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, which also contains extensive reporting on Biden’s decline and Harris’s struggle to win over party elites.

Like Parnes and Allen, Whipple reports both sides of a campaign Trump won despite a criminal conviction, civil penalties including one related to an allegation of rape and indictments over election subversion and retention of classified information.

But Whipple focuses another harsh spotlight on Biden, an octogenarian president long beset by questions about his fitness.

Last week, Whipple told Politico: “I have fresh reporting on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis of Biden’s final days, and obviously his decline is a major part of the story.

“I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.”

In early 2024, as the campaign warmed up, Klain was among those who said he believed Biden was the right candidate to beat Trump a second time, telling the New York Times: “If I thought he wasn’t the right candidate to beat Donald Trump, I wouldn’t be for him running. But I think he is the right candidate.”

Even after the disastrous debate, by his own telling to Whipple, Klain believed Biden should have stayed in the race – a statement that jars with Klain’s account of debate prep at Camp David.

“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin,” Whipple writes, Klain “was startled. He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.

“That evening Biden met again with Klain and his team, [Biden aides] Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Bruce Reed. ‘We sat around the table,’ said Klain. ‘[Biden] had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted. And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with Nato leaders.’”

Klain, Whipple writes, “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of Nato instead of the US. ‘He just became very enraptured with being the head of Nato,’ he said, That wouldn’t help him on Capitol Hill because, as Klain noted, ‘domestic political leaders don’t really care what [Emmanuel] Macron and [Olaf] Scholz think.’”

Klain, fellow aides and visitors including the film mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg tried to get Biden into shape. Two mock debates were organized, focusing on domestic policy.

“The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45. The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the subject. All he really could talk about was his infrastructure plan and how he was rebuilding America and 16 million jobs. He had nothing to say about his agenda for a second term.”

Klain says Biden grew irritable, saying he would not make promises as he would be criticized for failing to deliver. Klain says he tried to persuade Biden to run on unfinished business, including his attempt to “subsidize state and local efforts to do childcare and bring down the cost to $20 a day. And you ought to try to fight for it again.”

“Biden seemed befuddled,” Whipple writes. “‘Well, that just seems like a big spending program,’ he said.

Klain said: “No, sir. It brings down costs for people. It’s responsive to inflation. It will bring more people into the workforce. It’s good economics. And you know this is something you’re for.”

But “Biden didn’t want to talk about it” and “25 minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day. ‘I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,’ he said. ‘I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ He went off to bed.”

“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” Whipple writes. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”

It was. On 27 June, Biden arrived at the Atlanta venue with minutes to spare – because, Klain said, “He was the president of the United States. They weren’t going to start without him.” Onstage, for two hours and six minutes, Biden stumbled, stared and mumbled.

As described by Whipple, Jill Biden praised her husband’s performance but all others around the president could see “something was terribly wrong”. Whipple quotes an unnamed close friend of Biden who took a call from Valerie Biden Owens. The president’s sister and longtime adviser was “so angry, she was practically incoherent”. The same friend reports a later call from Biden, laughing at his predicament and sounding like the senator and vice-president of old.

“Where did that voice go?” the friend wondered … “Where did that guy with that voice go? What the fuck happened to this guy?”

To Whipple, that was a question “on which the political fate of the nation would turn”.

Eventually, Biden bowed to reality. On 21 July, Klain took a call from Jeff Zients, his successor as chief of staff. Biden was out. Despite the debate disaster, the news was a “gut punch” to Klain.

“Jeff, that’s too bad,” he said. “I think that’s a mistake. I think this was an avoidable tragedy.”

Harris faced opposition from Democratic grandees including Obama and Nancy Pelosi, but wrapped up the nomination by August. In early September, Klain gave Whipple his interview. With the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate, Harris mounted an energetic campaign. In November, she lost to Trump.