Cory Doctorow is a journalist, author and internet activist.<\/p>\n
Piers Morgan Photograph: James Manning\/PA<\/p>\n
Happy 80th, Donald! I think I can be that familiar, Mr President, given we\u2019ve been friends for 20 years.<\/p>\n
The world will doubtless mark your big day in myriad good, bad and ugly ways.<\/p>\n
But birthdays are celebratory occasions, so I will focus on the one aspect to your character that surely everyone can agree on: your extraordinary resilience.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve been shot, prosecuted, impeached (twice), endured two scandalous divorces, survived a financial crisis that took down many of your friends, bounced back from ignominious political oblivion to dramatically win back the White House and been the subject of more mockery, abuse and vilification than any public figure in modern history.<\/p>\n
Yet here you are, alive, surprisingly well (that\u2019s what never touching alcohol, drugs or cigarettes can do for a man), and still bursting with astounding energy for someone entering their ninth decade.<\/p>\n
When we spoke a week after you were nearly assassinated, you\u2019d just come off another big rally stage.<\/p>\n
\u201cWere you not apprehensive?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t let myself think about that,\u201d you replied. \u201cI had to get straight back out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
There aren\u2019t many people who would do that a few days after a bullet bloodied their ear.<\/p>\n
You may be the most polarising, divisive, controversial and inflammatory president in US history.<\/p>\n
But nobody can deny you have the resilient skin of a thousand rhinos.<\/p>\n
Piers Morgan is a journalist and broadcaster who grew close to Trump after winning the US celebrity version of The Apprentice in 2008 (Trump called him \u201cruthless, arrogant, evil and obnoxious\u201d). Morgan was granted Trump\u2019s first international broadcast interview after becoming president, and has interviewed him on three subsequent occasions.<\/p>\n
Jennifer Egan![\"Headshot](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/619.png\")
Photograph: Ali Smith\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Happy birthday, President Trump! By any measure, you have racked up a staggering number of accomplishments in your 80 years. You\u2019ve managed to nullify the bulwark against fascism that our three<\/a> branches<\/a> of government<\/a> were meant to provide. You\u2019ve transformed the presidency into an orgy of corruption and self-dealing that would make last century\u2019s robber barons blush. You\u2019ve erased whatever goodwill and respect America commanded internationally, and ceded our relevance in the realms of science, medicine and climate technology for the foreseeable future. You\u2019ve elevated<\/a> racism and xenophobia into law, hobbled higher education and gutted women\u2019s rights. The sheer quantity and variety of your assaults has rendered your detractors punch-drunk, faced with a daily choice between trying to confront your lawless Hydra and maintaining some semblance of normal life so that our kids will believe they still have a future.<\/p>\n I like to think that your rampage has exposed areas of weakness in our government that needed exposing \u2013 that, when you and your minions are gone, we\u2019ll know what steps to take to ensure that your like will never again be able to hijack and ransack our country. But then, I\u2019m an optimist.<\/p>\n One thing is certain: having been effective beyond anyone\u2019s wildest imaginings, you\u2019ve more than earned an early retirement. Take it! Enjoy your remaining golden years on the golf course, buoyed up by the knowledge that you\u2019ve exceeded the expectations of virtually every person in the world.<\/p>\n Jennifer Egan is a Pulitzer prize-winning author.<\/p>\n Greta ThunbergPhotograph: Alamy<\/p>\n My initial thought was to give you a one-way ticket to The Hague as a birthday gift, but that comment would probably go above your head. I will instead give you a can of alphabet soup; the sentences you poop out will be more coherent than anything you have ever said. Now you can finally take part in meaningful public discourse.<\/p>\n Greta Thunberg is a climate activist, about whom Trump tweeted, after she was named Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year for 2019: \u201cGreta must work on her Anger Management problem \u2026 Chill Greta, Chill!\u201d<\/p>\n Ai Weiwei Photograph: Linda Nylind\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Life in the universe is the most precious common value we share. Anyone who regards it as a tradable commodity is harming the advancement of human civilisation and will be remembered only to be despised.<\/p>\n Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, documentarian and activist, and an open critic of the Trump administration. <\/p>\n Jon Sopel Photograph: Sarah Lee\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Happy birthday, big man! I wanted to get you something really big \u2013 and hugely extravagant \u2013 for your special day. I thought about a gold bar, but the Swiss have already<\/a> given you one. Or a jumbo jet, but the Qataris beat me to it<\/a>. Then I thought about a gold peace medal, but your mate Gianni from Fifa has done that<\/a>.<\/p>\n How incredibly thoughtful of your acting attorney general, Todd Blanche (remind me, didn\u2019t he used to be your personal lawyer?), to announce that the tax authorities are \u201cforever barred\u201d and \u201cprecluded\u201d from ever looking again at your tax returns. I mean, that\u2019s amazing isn\u2019t it? And it not only applies to you, but the boys as well.<\/p>\n How lucky, given the way the family has gotten so much richer off the back of your return to the presidency. Hope it was lucrative to have Eric accompany you on the state visit to China.<\/p>\n Can you imagine how much every American would love to fill in whatever they wanted on their IRS return in the knowledge that the tax authorities could never so much as arch an eyebrow? You could write: \u201cIncome, none. Gifts, none. Tax due, none.\u201d And there\u2019s nothing the auditors could do about it.<\/p>\n I have to say I did think it was kind of unusual when you announced you were suing your own government for $10bn over the leak of your tax returns all those years ago. But you\u2019ve been proved right again<\/a>.<\/p>\n That said, there\u2019s nothing I can think of to buy you now as you seem to have everything any man could legitimately want. I mean, it is legitimate, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n Jon Sopel is a presenter on The News Agents podcast and was formerly North America editor of BBC News.<\/p>\n Siri Hustvedt Photograph: David Levenson\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Dear Number 47. You\u2019re ageing fast, Mr President, plagued by bruising, memory holes, verbal incoherence and unwelcome fits of sleep. Although plain to many of us who did not vote for you, your age and inevitable death have been invisible in the Magaverse.<\/p>\n Maga magic transformed your real, fat, old man\u2019s body into the spectacular body of fascism, American style: bulletproof, muscle-bound, eternal. The many superhero costumes worn by your 6 January terrorists were testament to that pathetic fantasy of invulnerability, no doubt helped along by the very real carnage of a global pandemic.<\/p>\n \u201cWhite Americans do not believe in death,\u201d James Baldwin wrote. He understood the belligerent blindness to history, the screeching howls of innocence, the mad belief in \u201cracial\u201d hierarchy as projections of self-hatred on to others. Ignoring the universal reality of death turns human beings into amoral monsters.<\/p>\n And yet, birth is also a problem in the Magaverse. The fact that you were born out of the body of your mother, a bloody, wet, helpless infant still attached to her by a gelatinous umbilical cord, must feel a bit awkward. The realities of gestation and birth are the realities of dependence and interconnectivity, whereas the Maga man is self-made, supposedly dependent on no one, and violently rejects all things coded as feminine \u2013 compassion, empathy, negotiation, ecology and democracy itself.<\/p>\n Not such a happy birthday, then. ICE murders, immigrant concentration camps<\/a>, pregnant women bleeding out in parking lots<\/a> for want of an abortion, measles outbreaks, huge numbers dead after USAID vanished<\/a>, broken alliances and a war no one wanted are the veritable consequences of delusion. But time is inexorable, the citizens are restless, and your fantasy body is beginning to crack, just as your real body is showing the infirmities that come with 80 years of age.<\/p>\n Siri Hustvedt is an American novelist and essayist.<\/p>\n Jonathan Freedland Photograph: Linda Nylind\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The temptation is strong to discard all convention and do what you would do on the birthday of someone you don\u2019t like \u2013 to curse and mock you. Curse you for the poison you\u2019ve injected into the bloodstream of the US and the wider world, for your corruption<\/a>, for the damage you\u2019ve done to the world\u2019s most powerful democracy<\/a>, for the tens of thousands of documented lies<\/a> you\u2019ve told, for the lives you\u2019ve destroyed through your abolition of USAID<\/a> and your failed fiasco of a war on Iran. And mock you for your absurd vanity, for your statues, ballrooms and arches, so obviously designed to fill a hole in your soul that cannot be filled, to compensate for the gnawing fact that, as Gavin Newsom, a would-be successor of yours, put it to me<\/a>, \u201cTrump\u2019s not enough. And he knows he\u2019s not enough.\u201d That temptation is strong, not least because we know you care nothing for social convention. I\u2019m thinking of the insults you directed<\/a> at the beloved film director Rob Reiner, hours after his death, just because he was not a fan of yours. Or your reaction to the passing of the former FBI director Robert Mueller<\/a>: \u201cI\u2019m glad he\u2019s dead.\u201d And yet, for that very reason, to stand against your erosion of social standards that have value, we should not give in to temptation. So here it is: happy birthday, Mr President.<\/p>\n Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and host of the Politics Weekly America podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bill McKibben Photograph: Samantha Hawker<\/p>\n On the occasion of your birthday: It was unnecessary to launch a cruel, ridiculous war to convince the world of the benefits of wind energy, solar energy and so on. But you do deserve one small gold trophy as electric vehicle salesman of the quarter. Enjoy.<\/p>\n Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist.<\/p>\n Anthony Scaramucci Photograph: Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n I found this birthday message for you outside Trump Tower: \u201cYou sold me your soul. You got what you wanted. The tower. The power. The money. The name in gold. But you left a trail behind you, and it leads to the ninth circle. Goethe said any soul, while still living, can be saved. Will yours? Happy Birthday \u2013 Mephistopheles.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthony Scaramucci was director of communications at the White House, 21-31 July 2017. He will be on tour in the UK with Intelligence Squared, 14-19 September.<\/p>\n Illustration: Carl Godfrey\/The GuardianDom Joly Photograph: Comic Relief\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Hey Donald, You locked me out for insulting you on Twitter back in 2014 when it was still Twitter. I was right then and I\u2019m right now: you\u2019re a narcissistic, lying fraud who has somehow convinced a large number of people that you give a flying fuck about them when the only thing you actually care about is yourself. Enjoy your birthday while the world burns.<\/p>\n Dom Joly is a British comedian who was denied entry to the US because of his social media posts.<\/p>\n Afua Hirsch Photograph: Dave Benett\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Dear Donald Trump<\/a>, You have reached 80, an age at which, in my culture, you should be celebrated as an elder. As an octogenarian, you should sit under the shade of the tree you planted and watch all the children given a chance by your kindness and wisdom flourish into adults who in turn will plant more trees.<\/p>\n But you are a man who has spent your life chopping down trees, figuratively and literally<\/a>. The milestone you have reached is that of the ultimate anti-elder, a cautionary tale of age without wisdom, of cultivating hate instead of love. Instead of building up the village, you have tried to set it on fire.<\/p>\n This does not mean we don\u2019t value your life. Every age needs its cautionary tale. For our generation, you have helpfully modelled what destruction looks like. You have taken us to rock bottom \u2013 rolling back gender equality, racial justice and judicial independence, promoting economic chaos, greed, corruption and even genocide. You have exposed the fragility of your country, a nation whose supposed democracy people once looked up to and admired, waking millions up from their slumber. The crudeness of your project has united once bitter adversaries. It is clear that your legacy must never be repeated. On your birthday, let\u2019s take a moment to recognise that really is quite an achievement.<\/p>\n Afua Hirsch is a writer and broadcaster.<\/p>\n Edel Rodriguez Photograph: Deborah Feingold<\/p>\n Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban artist behind satirical anti-Trump covers for Time and Der Spiegel.<\/p>\n Sidney Blumenthal Photograph: The Guardian<\/p>\n Donald: After writing nice little thank-you notes to your three wise men \u2013 Kash Patel for the bottle inscribed \u201cPresident Donald J Trump Bourbon<\/a>\u201d, Pete Hegseth for the framed copy of the \u201cPresident Donald J Trump Ten Commandments<\/a>\u201d and Bobby Jr for the \u201cPresident Donald J Trump Cocaine Golden Toilet Seat<\/a>\u201d \u2013 please consider the practical and forward-looking art of Swedish death cleaning<\/a>. Decluttering can save your family a world of trouble. In the coming year, the Democrats who assume control in the Congress will subpoena the records of your far and wide business dealings. And don\u2019t forget the suppressed 3m documents in the Epstein files \u2013 especially any that have your name redacted. Avoid the chaos, the legal expenses, the accusations from the fake news that you are engaged in a cover-up. Organise your files now to prepare to cooperate. Don\u2019t be a hoarder. Don\u2019t pile boxes of documents in the Mar-a-Lago bathroom again. You can prove your simon-pure innocence, achieve retribution at last and prevent the crown jewel of your new East Wing from being renamed \u201cThe 8647 Joseph Robinette Biden Ballroom\u201d through Swedish death cleaning. We know you appreciate neatness. Be best! Four more years!<\/p>\n Sidney Blumenthal is a former senior adviser to president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n Oliver Bullough Photograph: Jeff Gilbert\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n Mr President, Your 80th year has been huge, not least because you\u2019ve made hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a> from cryptocurrencies. But, since it\u2019s your birthday, I want to give you a little bit of history.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no accident the US currency became central to how the world does business: your predecessors laboured hard to establish a dollar standard and thus to gain an effective veto over who does what. Anyone who wanted to move money had to do so via New York, and thus with the permission of the US authorities. Britain found out in the Suez Crisis, just like Russia is finding out now, that you can\u2019t do much in global finance if the United States doesn\u2019t want you to.<\/p>\n Crypto, however, marks the end of that. Privatised money means a future when the United States has no more power over financial flows than any other country. Washington will be a supplicant for the first time in generations, reduced to begging others for powers it once kept for itself. That\u2019s what the crypto bros are buying with that mo ney they\u2019re giving you. And once they\u2019ve got those capabilities for themselves, they\u2019re never going to give them back. Is selling a key source of national influence for personal profit really going to Make America Great Again?<\/p>\n Oliver Bullough is an investigative journalist who has written about cryptocurrencies.<\/p>\n Peter Frankopan Photograph: Charles Moriarty<\/p>\n On your 80th birthday, your thoughts might well turn to how history will remember your time as president.<\/p>\n Like many people around the world, I have much to be grateful to you for. Perhaps most important is your commitment to renewable energy. Your decision to attack Iran helped accelerate a shift away<\/a> from hydrocarbons. It turned out that fears of a warming world were not enough to concentrate minds; but the shock that came from the closure of the strait of Hormuz convinced many governments to think a lot harder about energy security and independence.<\/p>\n I\u2019m grateful, too, for the legacy you\u2019ve given to historians. You have been very generous to offer us many gems over the years \u2013 from telling the prime minister of Norway you no longer felt compelled to think \u201cpurely of peace<\/a>\u201d after not winning the Nobel peace prize, to posting images of yourself as a Jedi, as Jesus Christ and walking hand in hand with a penguin in what was supposed to be Greenland (where the native penguin population is precisely zero).<\/p>\n My favourite among all is the line I\u2019d use at the start of my book if and when I write about this period in history, in a few decades\u2019 time when the dust has settled. \u201cPope Leo is WEAK on crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy\u201d you posted on Truth Social in April. That\u2019s as good as anything I\u2019ve read for any region, in any period. It is primary source material made of solid gold. Thank you, Mr President.<\/p>\n Peter Frankopan is a professor of global history at the University of Oxford.<\/p>\n Arwa Mahdawi Photograph: courtesy of Arwa Mahdawi<\/p>\n Judging by the popularity of Mar-a-Lago face<\/a>, everyone in your orbit is terrified by the ravages of time. But you should remind us that growing old is a privilege. There can\u2019t be too many 80-year-olds trying to eke out an existence in the ruins of Gaza, where life expectancy has been cut in half since October 2023. For men it\u2019s dropped from 73.6 to 35.6 years. Your government\u2019s enablement of Israel\u2019s genocide is to thank for that. Meanwhile, the Trump administration\u2019s gutting of USAID, once the world\u2019s largest provider of humanitarian aid, has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people; an Oxfam analysis<\/a> further shows that, globally, a child under five could die every 40 seconds by 2030 due to USAID cuts. On your 80th birthday, it looks like your legacy will be mass immiseration and death.<\/p>\n Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist.<\/p>\n Jason Stanley Photograph: Edwin Tse<\/p>\n President Trump, congratulations on your birthday. You are one of the most consequential presidents in American history. Thanks to the supreme court you have appointed, which will rule for decades to come, you have shut the door on multiracial democracy<\/a> and given the country\u2019s fortunes over to America\u2019s billionaires (including yourself and your family), ensconcing their power in perpetuity. In true American tradition, you have used racism and xenophobia<\/a> to draw working-class Americans behind your billionaire agenda. You have taken the most damning propaganda of the Soviet Union<\/a> about the United States and made it into a proud statement of this America\u2019s values and ideals.<\/p>\n