Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 113 Shares159 Views

    in Elections

    Trump’s Tariff Pause Is Less Than Meets the Eye

    Presidents who make big changes in government policy usually lay their plans with care. They game out what might happen next. They sweat the little things. Richard Nixon did not just decide one morning to fly to China. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were the better part of a decade in the making. The details of Barack Obama’s expansion of health insurance emerged from countless public debates.President Trump prefers to shoot before aiming. Declaring that he intends to reboot America’s relations with the rest of the world, he has imposed tariffs on imports with abandon, demonstrating a disregard for the details or the collateral damage. His careless conduct of the public’s business has roiled stock and bond markets, threatened to cause a recession and damaged America’s global standing. The president’s decision-making has been so erratic that at one point this week, the administration’s top trade official was interrupted in the middle of testimony before Congress because the president had just changed the policy the official was defending.The original version of Mr. Trump’s plan, which he paused on Wednesday, imposed tariffs on foreign nations at rates that bore no apparent connection to America’s national interests. The highest tariff rate, 50 percent, applied to Lesotho, a tiny and impoverished nation in southern Africa.The latest version isn’t much better. Mr. Trump is imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports from most nations, along with higher rates on imports from America’s three largest trading partners: Canada, Mexico and China. The average tax on imports will rise to the highest level in more than a century, raising the prices on many consumer goods. The 145 percent maximum rate on Chinese imports is intended to isolate that nation economically, but the simultaneous tariffs on everyone else will undermine that goal. And while the stated purpose of all the tariffs is to expand American manufacturing, putting them in place immediately doesn’t give companies time to build factories. It will cause pain without any benefit.We want to emphasize that Mr. Trump has a point about the pain caused by free trade. The decades in which the United States threw open its doors to imports from other countries left many Americans without jobs and decimated the nation’s industrial heartland. Washington’s naïveté about China’s rise, accomplished partly through its own trade barriers and theft of intellectual property, is particularly regrettable.A revival of American manufacturing is a worthy goal. It would not heal past wounds, but it could provide a basis for future generations of Americans to build lives and to rebuild communities that are more prosperous and more secure.The price of cheap goods from ChinaDecrease in manufacturing employment caused by increased trade with China, 2000-19. More

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    I’ve Listened to ‘The Great Gatsby’ 200 Times. Here’s What I Learned.

    “The Great Gatsby” turned 100 this week. Probably, like me, you first read it in high school. My true engagement with the novel, though, began five years ago, when I was in my 50s and a writer and college teacher, and I started listening to a portion of the “Gatsby” audiobook every night.I started on March 17, 2020, which was the day the province of Ontario, where I live, declared a state of emergency because of Covid. My wife and I had listened to Jake Gyllenhaal’s rendition of “Gatsby” during a 2015 road trip, liked it and thought it would be a diverting bedtime story to get us through the lockdown, which we expected to last about three or four weeks. We set a sleep timer, pressed “play” and listened for 45 minutes, and the lockdown wound up lasting nearly two years.“Gatsby” for me has grown from a novel bedtime story to a nightly ritual to a kind of compulsion. It’s hard for us to imagine going to bed now without the compelling timbre of Mr. Gyllenhaal in our ears. In 2023 alone, I listened to “Gatsby,” which runs in its entirety for 289 minutes, just over 48 times. I broke that record in 2024 when I stopped setting the sleep timer and began listening to the entire book overnight, letting it unspool into my ears while I slept. “Gatsby” has now laid down roots in my brain — even into my dreams. In a way, that’s not just true of me but of the entire culture.The literary critic Maureen Corrigan once wrote that “Gatsby” contains some of “the most beautiful sentences ever written about America,” and it persists as a book that is nearly “perfect despite the fact that it goes against every expectation of what a Great American Novel should be.”Not only has it inspired at least five movies, an opera and a Broadway musical, “Gatsby” also has a habit of popping up in the strangest places: When the comedian Andy Kaufman wanted to subvert his stand-up by reading from a novel onstage, including on an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” he chose to read from “The Great Gatsby.” His prank inspired the New York-based experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service to create “Gatz” in 2004, a six-and-a-half-hour performance that involves actors reciting the entire book, word for word. And, yes, I’ve seen “Gatz.” Twice.There is a certain look I get when I tell people about my “Gatsby” ritual — call it “curious concern.” If I explain that during Covid I started listening to “Gatsby” as a comfort before bed — and have been listening to it almost every night since — I can hear how strange these words sound even as they trip out of my mouth. Who chooses as a ritual bedtime story a bittersweet novel that ends with a murder-suicide (preceded by a fatal car crash) in which no one finds love and the only character who ends up close to happy is a violent racist and a serial cheat? Maybe “Pride and Prejudice” would be a more acceptable obsession. It’s also a masterpiece and it has a happy ending. But only “Gatsby” can hold my attention. By now, I’m steeped in it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Elections

    Appeals Court Scales Back Freeze on Firing Consumer Bureau Employees

    A federal appeals panel on Friday halted parts of a district court judge’s injunction blocking the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, allowing officials to move ahead with firing some agency employees.Russell T. Vought, the White House budget office director, was named the consumer bureau’s acting director in February and immediately began gutting the agency. He closed its headquarters and sought to terminate its lease, canceled contracts essential to the bureau’s operations, terminated hundreds of employees and sought to lay off nearly all of the rest.In a lawsuit brought by the bureau’s staff union and other parties, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington froze those actions last month with an injunction to stop what she described as the administration’s “hurried effort to dismantle and disable the agency entirely.” The Justice Department appealed her ruling.A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously rejected the government’s request to strike down Judge Jackson’s injunction, but it stayed parts of her ruling while the government’s appeal progresses. Specifically, the appeals court said the agency’s leaders can send a “reduction in force” notice — the process through which the government conducts layoffs — to employees they have determined are not necessary to carry out the agency’s “statutory duties.”When Congress created the consumer bureau in 2011, it assigned the watchdog agency dozens of tasks and ordered it to staff certain positions, including offices to aid student loan borrowers, military service members and older Americans. Those mandated obligations have been at the heart of the legal fight over the agency, because the bureau is required to fulfill those duties unless Congress acts.Mr. Vought’s team fired more than 200 probationary and fixed-term employees, only to reinstate most of them, with back pay, on Judge Jackson’s orders. The appeals court cleared the way for some to be fired again. Agency leaders may terminate employees after “an individualized assessment” of their necessity for carrying out the agency’s statutory tasks, the ruling said.But the court left much of Judge Jackson’s order intact, including her mandates that agency leaders shall not delete or destroy most of the bureau’s records and data, and that employees must be given access to either physical office space or the tools needed to work remotely. The consumer bureau’s Washington headquarters has remained shuttered and off limits to workers since Mr. Vought’s arrival.The appeals court expedited the government’s appeal and scheduled oral arguments for May 16. More

  • 163 Shares129 Views

    in Elections

    After L.A. Fires, Edison Wants to Bury Power Lines in Altadena and Malibu

    Southern California Edison is echoing calls from homeowners to move spark-prone electrical equipment underground. Company officials estimated the cost at more than $650 million.Southern California Edison, the electric utility whose equipment has been the focus of investigations into the deadly Eaton fire in Los Angeles County in January, said on Friday that it planned to bury more than 150 miles of power lines in fire-prone areas near Altadena and Malibu, Calif.The project would require approval from state regulators, would take years to complete and would cover only a fraction of the utility’s vast service area. Still, underground lines have been among the top requests from fire-ravaged communities as Los Angeles looks to rebuild.In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, company officials estimated the cost of the project at more than $650 million. That amounts to about two-thirds of the nearly $1 billion that the utility estimated it would cost to rebuild the infrastructure that was damaged or destroyed in the wildfires that began on Jan. 7. Much of that cost is expected to be passed on to customers.But, officials said, the project will address a significant risk in two of Southern California’s most fire-prone areas. Officials said at least 90 miles of power lines would be buried in Malibu, and more than 60 miles in and around high-risk fire zones in Altadena, where the Eaton fire burned.“SCE will build back a resilient, reliable grid for our customers,” Steven Powell, the president and chief executive of the utility, said in a statement.Officials said on Friday that any distribution circuits not buried underground would be “hardened with covered conductor.” Company officials said in the letter that the investigation into the cause of the fire was still in progress, but they “acknowledged the possibility of SCE’s equipment being involved in the cause of the Eaton fire.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 50 Shares149 Views

    in Elections

    Corrections: April 12, 2025

    Corrections that appeared in print on Saturday, April 12, 2025.NATIONALAn article on Tuesday about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plans for the Indian Health Service misattributed a quote about Native Americans as political minorities. It was said by a Native leader who requested anonymity, not David Simmons, the government affairs and advocacy director for the National Indian Child Welfare Association.ARTSA review on Friday about the action film “G20” misstated the title of a movie, in one instance. It is “The Woman King,” not “The Woman Queen.”MAGAZINEAn article on Page 50 this weekend about rebuilding in the Palisades misstates the given name of a former Los Angeles fire chief. She is Kristin Crowley, not Lauren.OBITUARIESBecause of an editing error, an obituary on Tuesday about Jay North, who played the title role on the television show “Dennis the Menace,” misidentified the character Gale Gordon played on that show. He played Dennis’s neighbor John Wilson, the brother of Dennis’s former neighbor George Wilson; he did not play George. (Mr. Gordon joined the cast after Joseph Kearns, the actor who had played George Wilson, died in 1962.)Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, please email nytnews@nytimes.com. To share feedback, please visit nytimes.com/readerfeedback.Comments on opinion articles may be emailed to letters@nytimes.com.For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@nytimes.com. More

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    White House Swaps Obama Portrait With One of Trump From Assassination Attempt

    The Trump administration said on Friday that it had moved a portrait of former President Barack Obama in a White House hallway and replaced it with a pop-art painting of President Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt last year on the campaign trail in Butler, Pa.The shuffling of décor is not uncommon at the White House, where portraits are rotated often. But the new, striking artwork depicting Mr. Trump drew criticism from some presidential historians, who could not recall another president hanging a painting of himself during his term in the White House.Typically, paintings of presidents and first ladies are hung in the White House after they have left office, historians said.A spokesman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.The portrait of Mr. Obama, which was unveiled in the East Room during the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., shows the former president in a dark suit and silver tie, standing with his hands in his pockets. The background is white; the portrait was based on photographs taken by the artist Robert McCurdy.The new painting shows Mr. Trump embraced by a team of Secret Service agents as an American flag billows in a cloudless blue sky behind him. Streaks of red run across his face.In a post on social media, the White House announced the new portrait of President Trump.The White House, via XWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Elections

    Trump Directive Calls to Turn Border Land Into ‘Military Installation’

    President Trump announced a plan on Friday to turn a narrow strip along the Mexican border in California, Arizona and New Mexico into a military installation as part of his effort to curtail illegal crossings.The plan, set out in a White House memorandum, calls for transferring authority over the 60-foot-wide strip of federal border land known as the Roosevelt Reservation from other cabinet agencies to the Defense Department. Military forces patrolling that area could then temporarily detain migrants passing through for trespassing on a military reservation, said a U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.The directive expands a military presence that has increased steadily along the southern border, even as crossings have already dropped precipitously during the Trump administration. The ordering of troops to the border has already put the military in politically charged territory, and, depending on the details of the effort, the plan could run afoul of laws that limit the use of regular federal troops for domestic law enforcement.The directive says that the border strip will become a “military installation under the jurisdiction of” the Pentagon. Military members would be able to stop anyone crossing into the “military installation” but would not have the power to make immigration arrests, according to the military official. Border Patrol agents could then be summoned to arrest the migrants.The memorandum formalizes a plan that the administration had been considering for weeks. The Washington Post had reported on the plan earlier.A White House spokesman did not respond to questions seeking clarity as to what U.S. forces operating in the strip of border land would be able to do. A Defense Department spokesman also did not respond to questions seeking clarity.Military officials are still working out how to execute the plan, including how long troops could detain migrants before turning them over to Border Patrol agents, and what type of “no trespassing” signs needed to be installed along the border, warning migrants they were about to enter a U.S. military reservation.Then there are other logistics that would have to be hammered out, such as the languages the signs are written in, and how far apart they are posted. There is also the question of where to position military patrols along hundreds of miles of rugged land along the border, and what additional training those troops might need.Adam Isacson, who focuses on border security and human rights at the Washington Office on Latin America, said the memorandum appeared to create a path for using quasi-military personnel to detain migrants.A section of the memorandum calls for the authorization of state National Guard members to work on the military-controlled strip. If those working at the installation hold migrants until Customs and Border Protection officials pick them up, their use “comes very close to military personnel detaining migrants,” Mr. Isacson said.Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    Pennsylvania Man Threatened to Kill Trump and Musk, U.S. Says

    Shawn Monper, of Butler, Pa., also threatened immigration agents in comments on YouTube, federal prosecutors said.A Pennsylvania man was arrested this week after the authorities said he threatened to assassinate President Trump, Elon Musk and other government officials in comments that he posted on YouTube.Google, which owns YouTube, alerted the F.B.I. on Tuesday to the threatening comments, which were posted by someone using the username “Mr Satan,” whom the authorities later identified as Shawn Monper, of Butler, Pa., according to a criminal complaint.Mr. Monper, 32, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with four counts of influencing, impeding or retaliating against a federal official and a federal law enforcement officer.According to the court documents, Mr. Monper wrote, “im going to assassinate him myself” in the comments under a livestream of Mr. Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 4.In a comment on another YouTube video on Feb. 17, according to the complaint, Mr. Monper wrote, “Nah, we just need to start killing people, Trump, Elon, all the heads of agencies Trump appointed, and anyone who stands in the way.”On Feb. 26, according to the complaint, Mr. Monper wrote that he had “bought several guns” and had been stocking up on ammunition since Mr. Trump took office for a second time, promising “to do a mass shooting.”Butler, Pa., where Mr. Monper lives, was the site of a campaign rally where Mr. Trump was injured in an assassination attempt on July 13. The complaint did not mention that episode.Mr. Monper’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.In addition to Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were also a target of Mr. Monper’s threats, federal prosecutors said.As the Trump administration has ramped up its deportation efforts, ICE and Department of Homeland Security agents have come under scrutiny for detaining students and legal immigrants.On Friday, an immigration judge in Louisiana found that the Trump administration could deport a Columbia University graduate and legal permanent resident, Mahmoud Khalil, for his role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus last year.In a statement on Friday, Attorney General Pam Bondi thanked the F.B.I. and the Butler Township police for their work on the investigation.“Rest assured that whenever and wherever threats of assassination or mass violence occur, this Department of Justice will find, arrest, and prosecute the suspect to the fullest extent of the law and seek the maximum appropriate punishment,” she said. More