Evelyn Reynolds

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    ‘Disenfranchised and demobilized’: Native Americans face ballot box barriers in Arizona

    The calls started coming in to the Arizona Native vote election protection hotline around 6am on election day.Voters in Apache county, where a sizable chunk of the population is Diné, also known as Navajo, were seeing problems at the polls. One location was locked and several others were having trouble printing ballots, according to an affidavit filed in state court. As the day went on, voters reported hours-long waits and observers reported that people were leaving. A local judge would eventually agree to extend voting in nine precincts in the county by two hours.“It was just a mess from what we could tell and from our folks,” said Jaynie Parrish, the executive director of Arizona Native Vote, a nonprofit civic engagement organization focused on Native communities.While delays in opening polling sites and glitches that lead to long lines are not uncommon, they can be particularly acute in Native communities, where voters can travel hours to get to the polls and face other unique barriers, like non-traditional addresses and language access issues. Taken together, those barriers result in a significant gap between turnout among those living on tribal lands and those who live off of them, according to a new study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit that studies voting rights and elections.“There are systemic issues that prevent Natives from getting to the ballot box – some intentional,” said Samantha Blencke, a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, which had poll watchers in six states this election. For a voter who travels a far distance to cast a ballot, a polling place not opening on time could make a big difference, she said. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s their one shot to vote.”Native American voters are an influential voting bloc in Arizona, where they comprise 5% of the population. Both Republicans and Democrats courted Native voters this year. Election results analyzed by the New York Times showed that Donald Trump gained in many counties where Native Americans comprise a majority of the population.In addition to long travel times, Native voters also face a litany of unique hurdles. Many lack traditional addresses, making it more difficult to vote by mail. Tribal identification cards can get rejected at the polls. And there can be significant issues in translating ballots into Native languages.Turnout among those living on tribal lands was on average 11 points lower than turnout among people living off them between 2012 and 2022, according to the Brennan Center’s study. In presidential elections, the gap was 15 points.Tribal lands that had the highest share of Native voters also had the lowest turnout rates, the study found. And those who live on tribal lands were also less likely to use mail-in voting than those who lived off them.“These findings demonstrate that Native Americans living on tribal lands are uniquely disenfranchised and demobilized from participating in federal elections,” the report says.This year, after election day, Navajo voters sued Apache county again. Arizona gives voters five days after election day to address any issues with mail-in ballots. But county officials had delayed making public the number of voters who had problems with their ballots until two days before the deadline, the lawsuit said. With just two days left, they notified that there were 182 people who needed to cure their ballots, setting off a scramble to contact them.A judge rejected the request after elections employees said they had made a reasonable effort to contact anyone who was at risk of having their ballot rejected.For years, Leonard Gorman, the executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission has been concerned about the way ballots have been translated into Navajo. Translation is required under the Voting Rights Act, and accurately describing things like ballot measures on abortion and fentanyl can be immensely challenging, Votebeat reported earlier this year. Navajo is a historically oral language, and translators come up with audio that those who are not proficient in English can listen to at the polls, according to Votebeat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOver the years, Gorman said he’s heard glitches and poorly worded audio. And when he showed up at a polling location in Apache county in late October, the machine that offered the audio translation wasn’t working, he said.“It only said in literal translation or interpretation: ‘If you want to listen to the ballot, press any button,’” he said. When he pressed a button, the instruction would simply repeat. “That was the worst experience I’ve ever had.”Apache county election officials did not respond to an interview request.Chelsea Jones, a researcher at the Brennan Center who co-authored the nonprofit’s study, said its findings showed that people who live on tribal lands face unique barriers that haven’t thus far been addressed by federal laws. A piece of legislation, the Native American Voting Rights Act, that would address many of the systemic challenges Native voters face, has stalled in Congress.“Any of these common ways that we participate in elections have really layers of barriers for people who live on tribal lands,” Jones said. “Each of those numbers represent hundreds of thousands of people who are not able to or have a harder time participating. And so that’s what’s the hardest for us to grasp is that this many people are being left out of what is a fundamental right for all Americans.” More

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    The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win

    In the days since the sweeping Republican victory in the US election, which gave the party control of the presidency, the Senate and the House, commentators have analysed and dissected the relative merits of the main protagonists – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – in minute detail. Much has been said about their personalities and the words they have spoken; little about the impersonal social forces that push complex human societies to the brink of collapse – and sometimes beyond. That’s a mistake: in order to understand the roots of our current crisis, and possible ways out of it, it’s precisely these tectonic forces we need to focus on.The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies, organised as states, can experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting, roughly, a century or so. Inevitably, though, they then enter periods of social unrest and political breakdown. Think of the end of the Roman empire, the English civil war or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have amassed data on hundreds of historical states as they slid into crisis, and then emerged from it.So we’re in a good position to identify just those impersonal social forces that foment unrest and fragmentation, and we’ve found three common factors: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.To get a better understanding of these concepts and how they are influencing American politics in 2024, we need to travel back in time to the 1930s, when an unwritten social contract came into being in the form of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. This contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses and the state in a way similar to the more formal agreements we see in Nordic countries. For two generations, this implicit pact delivered an unprecedented growth in wellbeing across a broad swath of the country. At the same time, a “Great Compression” of incomes and wealth dramatically reduced economic inequality. For roughly 50 years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably low.View image in fullscreenThat social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. The power of unions was undermined, and taxes on the wealthy cut back. Typical workers’ wages, which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started to lag behind. Inflation-adjusted wages stagnated and at times decreased. The result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for the majority of Americans. One shocking way this became evident was in changes to the average life expectancy, which stalled and even went into reverse (and this started well before the Covid pandemic). That’s what we term “popular immiseration”.With the incomes of workers effectively stuck, the fruits of economic growth were reaped by the elites instead. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being, siphoning money from the poor and channelling it to the rich. The Great Compression reversed itself. In many ways, the last four decades call to mind what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900 – the time of railroad fortunes and robber barons. If the postwar period was a golden age of broad-based prosperity, after 1980 we could be said to have entered a Second Gilded Age.Welcome as the extra wealth might seem for its recipients, it ends up causing problems for them as a class. The uber-wealthy (those with fortunes greater than $10m) increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020, adjusted for inflation. A certain proportion of these people have political ambitions: some run for political office themselves (like Trump), others fund political candidates (like Peter Thiel). The more members of this elite class there are, the more aspirants for political power a society contains.By the 2010s the social pyramid in the US had grown exceptionally top-heavy: there were too many wannabe leaders and moguls competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, this state of affairs has a name: elite overproduction.Elite overproduction can be likened to a game of musical chairs – except the number of chairs stays constant, while the number of players is allowed to increase. As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers. Some of those turn into “counter-elites”: those willing to challenge the established order; rebels and revolutionaries such as Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in the English civil war, or Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In the contemporary US we might think of media disruptors such as Tucker Carlson, or maverick entrepreneurs seeking political influence such as Elon Musk alongside countless less-prominent examples at lower levels in the system. As battles between the ruling elites and counter-elites heat up, the norms governing public discourse unravel and trust in institutions declines. The result is a loss of civic cohesiveness and sense of national cooperation – without which states quickly rot from within. View image in fullscreenOne result of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that accelerates the breakdown of state capacity. It’s notable that a collapse in state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.How does this landscape translate to party politics? The American ruling class, as it has evolved since the end of the civil war in 1865, is basically a coalition of the top wealth holders (the proverbial 1%) and a highly educated or “credentialed” class of professionals and graduates (whom we might call the 10%). A decade ago, the Republicans were the party of the 1%, while the Democrats were the party of the 10%. Since then, they have both changed out of all recognition.The recasting of the Republican party began with the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in 2016. He was typical of political entrepreneurs in history who have channelled popular discontent to propel themselves to power (one example is Tiberius Gracchus, who founded the populist party in late Republican Rome). Not all of his initiatives went against the interests of the ruling class – for example, he succeeded in making the tax code more regressive. But many did, including his policies on immigration (economic elites tend to favour open immigration as it suppresses wages); a rejection of traditional Republican free-market orthodoxy in favour of industrial policy; a scepticism of Nato and a professed unwillingness to start new conflicts abroad.It seemed to some as though the revolution had been squashed when a quintessentially establishment figure, Joe Biden, defeated Trump in 2020. By 2024 the Democrats had essentially become the party of the ruling class – of the 10% and of the 1%, having tamed its own populist wing (led by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders). This realignment was signalled by Kamala Harris massively outspending Trump this election cycle, as well as mainstream Republicans, such as Liz and Dick Cheney, or neocons such as Bill Kristol, supporting the Harris ticket.The GOP, in the meantime, has transformed itself into a truly revolutionary party: one that represents working people (according to its leaders) or a radical rightwing agenda (according to its detractors). In the process, it has largely purged itself of traditional Republicans.Trump was clearly the chief agent of this change. But while the mainstream media and politicians obsess over him, it is important to recognise that he is now merely the tip of the iceberg: a diverse group of counter-elites has coalesced around the Trump ticket. Some of them, such as JD Vance, had meteoric rises through the Republican ranks. Some, such as Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, defected from the Democrats. Others include tycoons such as Musk, or media figures, such as Joe Rogan, perhaps the most influential American podcaster. The latter was once a supporter of the populist wing of the Democratic party (and Bernie Sanders in particular).The main point here is that in 2024, the Democrats, having morphed into the party of the ruling class, had to contend not only with the tide of popular discontent but also a revolt of the counter-elites. As such, it finds itself in a predicament that has recurred thousands of times in human history, and there are two ways things play out from here.One is with the overthrow of established elites, as happened in the French and Russian Revolutions. The other is with the ruling elites backing a rebalancing of the social system – most importantly, shutting down the wealth pump and reversing popular immiseration and elite overproduction. It happened about a century ago with the New Deal. There’s also a parallel in the Chartist period (1838–1857), when Great Britain was the only European great power to avoid the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, via major reform. But the US has so far failed to learn the historical lessons.What comes next? The electoral defeat on 5 November represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war. The triumphant counter-elites want to replace their counterparts – what they sometimes call the “deep state” – entirely. But history shows that success in achieving such goals is far from assured. Their opponents are pretty well entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively resist change. Ideological and personal tensions in the winning coalition may result in it breaking apart (as they say, revolutions devour their children). Most importantly, the challenges facing the new Trump administration are of the particularly intractable kind. What is their plan for tackling the exploding federal budget deficit? How are they going to shut down the wealth pump? And what will the Democrats’ response be? Will their platform for 2028 include a new New Deal, a commitment to major social reform?One thing is clear: whatever the choices and actions of the contending parties, they will not lead to an immediate resolution. Popular discontent in the US has been building up for more than four decades. Many years of real prosperity would be needed to persuade the public that the country is back on the right track. So, for now, we can expect a lasting age of discord. Let’s hope that it won’t spill over into a hot civil war. More

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    Trump cabinet criticized as hodgepodge team unified only by ‘absolute fealty’ to him

    During Donald Trump’s first administration, his vice-president became the target of an angry mob amid calls for him to be hanged. His top diplomat was fired via Twitter and branded “dumb as a rock”. His first attorney general was given his marching orders and called “very weak” and “disgraceful”.Despite it all, Trump has had no trouble recruiting a team eager to serve when he returns to the White House in January, even if his initial pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was forced to back out amid allegations of sexual misconduct.Trump’s cabinet for his second term is nearly complete just three weeks after his stunning election victory over Kamala Harris. To his Maga (Make America great again) followers it is a team of all the talents, poised to enforce an agenda of mass deportations, gutting the federal bureaucracy and “America first” isolationism.To critics with memories of Trump’s first cabinet, however, it is an ideological hodgepodge glued together only by unquestioning fealty to the incoming 78-year-old commander-in-chief. Some have compared it to the gathering of exotic aliens in the Star Wars cantina. Others predict they will soon be fighting like rats in a sack as different factions compete for Trump’s attention.“The same thing that happened last time will happen this time,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. “He cannot resist chaos. It is his drug. He will eventually start doing what he always does and turn on different people and start sandbagging his own choices for these various jobs.“It’s that pattern he has. He comes out one day and says, ‘I love so and so,’ and then the next he’s talking to his friends saying, ‘Hey, you think Tillerson’s doing a good job or is he screwing me over?’ Those things are patterns we’ve seen in Trump’s personal life, his business life and his prior administration. An 80-year-old man is not going to be a changed person.”Eight years ago, Trump arrived in Washington as a political neophyte in need of a helping hand. He appointed a cabinet that included traditional conservatives of whom he knew little. This time, he returns as a former president who has transformed the Republican party and prioritises unwavering loyalty and adherence to his agenda over qualifications and experience.This was most obvious sign of this was the selection of Gaetz for attorney general, a position key to Trump’s plans to deport undocumented immigrants, pardon January 6 rioters and seek retribution against those who prosecuted him over the past four years. Gaetz’s replacement, Pam Bondi, is a longtime ally who declared after Trump was criminally charged that the “investigators will be investigated”.View image in fullscreenThere was a similar motivation behind the choice of Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, for defence secretary despite him having no track record in government. Hegseth fits with a drive to purge perceived “woke” policies from the military. He has denied allegations made in a police report that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017 at a conference in California.Trump’s selections are sending mixed economic signals. The nomination of the Wall Street billionaire Scott Bessent to head the treasury implies an attempt to reassure markets (it is also notable because Bessent used to work for George Soros, the target of countless rightwing conspiracy theories). But Howard Lutnick, nominated for commerce secretary, has praised the president-elect’s proposed use of tariffs. Vice-president-elect JD Vance is also among those pushing a more protectionist agenda on trade.And Trump’s pick of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a congresswoman from Oregon, as labor secretary could be one of the rare selections that draws bipartisan support. She is considered one of the most union-friendly Republicans in Congress, and her selection was viewed as a way for Trump to reward union members who voted for him.On foreign policy, Trump made a relatively conventional choice in Marco Rubio for secretary of state. The Florida senator has advocated in the past for a muscular foreign policy with respect to foes including China, Iran and Cuba. But the president-elect also intends to put Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who has previously made statements sympathetic to Russia, as director of national intelligence.Other picks include Brooke Rollins, president of the America First Policy Institute thinktank, as agriculture secretary; Doug Burgum, a wealthy former software company executive, as interior secretary; and Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, as education secretary – overseeing an agency that Trump pledged to eliminate.Then there is Robert Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist and sceptic of established science. Kennedy’s career as an environmental lawyer could put him at odds with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” philosophy and figures such as Lee Zeldin, set to lead the Environmental Protection Agency with a mandate to slash environmental regulation. Kennedy has also been condemned by Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and other social conservatives for supporting abortion rights.Outside the cabinet, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, while lacking official authority, signals a strong push for drastic budget cuts and deregulation. And despite campaign trail denials, Trump has embraced Project 2025, a controversial plan from the Heritage Foundation thinktank, by appointing figures such as Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe person who will have to make sense of it all is Susie Wiles, a longtime Florida political operative who will become the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff. She will hope to avoid the fate of chiefs of staff who failed to last the course of Trump’s first term as, like a sports coach, she seeks to make disparate players gel into a cohesive whole.In an analysis for the New York Times, David Sanger, who has covered five US presidents, identified “a revenge team”, “a calm-the-markets team” and “a government shrinkage team”, commenting: “How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.”But others argue that the cabinet’s range of experiences and worldviews will pale into insignificance when set against their devotion to the Trump cult. Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “Regardless of whatever individual ideological leanings these people have had at varying points in their adult lives, it’s largely irrelevant because the only litmus test we have seen put forward is absolute fealty to Donald Trump.“As we have seen in the Republican party overall, absolute fealty to Donald Trump overshadows any ideological belief. We could take almost every issue that used to be a part of the Republican party and show how the party has moved to a diametrically opposite position. This is not a party governed by ideology any more. It is governed by personality. It is governed by loyalty to Donald Trump.”Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide, added: “They’re all going to get in a room and they’re just going to go: ‘Here’s what we think. What do you think, boss? Oh, OK, well, that’s what we’re all going to do.’ The idea that there’s going to be ideologically rooted debate, vigorous debate happening in the Trump administration is absurd. It’s laughable.”Notably, Trump’s cabinet is more diverse than in his first term, although it again has only three people of colour in secretary positions. Rubio would be the first Latino to serve as America’s top diplomat; Bessent could become the first openly gay Republican cabinet member confirmed by the Senate; Gabbard would be the first director of national intelligence from the Pacific Islander community.But seasoned Trump watchers detect no method in the madness and suspect that the former reality TV star will once again act on impulse and thrive on conflict. Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers, a book about White House chiefs of staff, said: “I don’t think there’s any evidence that Trump has learned anything about governing since his first term.“There’s a lot of wishful thinking among a lot of commentators that OK, he’s had four years in office, he learned a lot, he’s had all this time to plan with Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute and he’s got his act together. I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t see any evidence that there’s any sort of plan here other than ‘this guy looks good for that job, and Robert F Kennedy Jr has got a cool last name’.” More

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    Abandoning Ukraine means ‘infinitely higher’ long-term security costs, MI6 chief says

    Abandoning Ukraine would jeopardise British, European and American security and lead to “infinitely higher” costs in the long term, the head of MI6 has warned in a speech that amounted to a plea to Donald Trump to continue supporting Kyiv.Richard Moore, giving a rare speech, said he believed Vladimir Putin “would not stop” at Ukraine if he was allowed to subjugate it in any peace talks involving the incoming US Republican administration.“If Putin is allowed to succeed in reducing Ukraine to a vassal state, he will not stop there. Our security – British, French, European and transatlantic – will be jeopardised,” Moore said during an address given in Paris alongside his French counterpart.The spy chief was touted earlier this week as a possible surprise appointment as the UK’s ambassador to the US, though he is not thought to be pressing for the job. The former Labour minister Peter Mandelson is considered the frontrunner for a critical role at a delicate time in transatlantic relations.Moore has served as the head of MI6 for four years in what is normally considered a five-year job. At the start of his tenure he overlapped with the Trump adviser Richard Grenell, who was the acting director of national intelligence.Trump has complained about the expense of supporting Kyiv and said repeatedly that he wants to end the war, claiming he could do so “within 24 hours”. JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, has suggested freezing the conflict on the current frontlines, and denying Ukraine Nato membership for an extended period.“The cost of supporting Ukraine is well known,” said Moore. “But the cost of not doing so would be infinitely higher. If Putin succeeds, China would weigh the implications, North Korea would be emboldened and Iran would become still more dangerous.”A key British argument to the incoming Trump administration is to try to link the war in Ukraine with US concerns about the rising military might of China, emphasising that the arrival of North Korean troops is bringing authoritarianism from Asia into what was previously a European conflict.Moore emphasised the UK’s history of intelligence cooperation with France in a speech to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, but he was also careful to emphasise that he expected UK-US intelligence cooperation to be unchanged regardless of any political tensions.“For decades the US-UK intelligence alliance has made our societies safer; I worked successfully with the first Trump administration to advance our shared security and look forward to doing so again,” Moore told his audience at the UK embassy, a short walk from the Élysée Palace, the official home of the French president.The spy chief’s public presence in the French capital reflects a wider political rapprochement between the British prime minister and the French president. After Trump’s victory, Keir Starmer met Emmanuel Macron in France where the two discussed Ukraine amid reports that the Republicans would like European soldiers to act as peacekeepers if a ceasefire was agreed.Moore said Putin’s goal was to “challenge western resolve” and that western spy agencies had “recently uncovered a staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage in Europe” – a reference to a mixture of arson, assassination and kidnap plots, which included a fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham caused by an incendiary device hidden in a package sent at the behest of Russia.Moscow has said its demands regarding Ukraine remain unchanged. Earlier this month, the Kremlin said its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the “direct result” of a Nato policy that aimed at “creating a staging ground against Russia on Ukrainian soil”.Russia continues to demand “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, and in previous peace negotiations said Kyiv’s military should be reduced to 50,000. It also claims the territory of four eastern and southern Ukrainian provinces, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk, of which only the fourth is fully occupied. More

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    Trump cabinet picks shaped by new power centers in his orbit

    Donald Trump’s picks for the incoming administration are being shaped by a combination of different power centers including one-man influences like top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and combined groups led by chief of staff Susie Wiles and vice-president-elect JD Vance.The president-elect appears to have settled on a number of cabinet nominees himself without being aggressively pushed by advisers, including Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.But for other cabinet roles or major White House positions for which Trump did not have a clear preference or a frontrunner in mind, a handful of individuals with outsized influence have come to dominate the decision-making in meetings and interviews being held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.There are still factions, according to half a dozen people involved in transition planning, though they have been nowhere near as concrete as they were in 2017, when there were clear demarcations between Trump’s family, the Republican National Committee, establishment Republicans and people allied with Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon.And in recent months, the previously distinct camp informally led by Wiles, who has had influence over West Wing picks and some cabinet roles, and the other camp led by Vance have combined and engulfed the wider Trump orbit, the people said.“It’s ever-shifting sands of allegiance. The people who you think are your friends may not be the case in 24 hours. We’re all friends but none of us are friends,” said one person adjacent to the Trump team.Although there are people in Trump’s orbit who disagree with Epshteyn, there is universal acknowledgment that he has had significant influence in the first weeks of the presidential transition, a reflection of Trump’s appreciation for his help in coordinating the defeat of the criminal cases against him.When Trump floated the idea of having the congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Epshteyn was supportive of him during a round-trip flight from Palm Beach, Florida, to Washington when the president-elect announced he was nominating Gaetz.View image in fullscreenAfter the Gaetz nomination sank in the face of holdout Senate Republicans refusing to confirm him over sexual misconduct allegations, Trump nominated as a replacement former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi – who has been friendly over the years with Epshteyn.Epshteyn has also played key roles in finalizing the leadership at the justice department, recommending that Trump keep his personal lawyers in key jobs: Todd Blanche for deputy attorney general, Emil Bove for the principal deputy position and John Sauer for solicitor general.One through-line about those lawyers was that they were successful in delaying until after the election the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were dismissed on Monday. But the other was that they were all recruited by Epshteyn.Epshteyn, whose physically imposing presence is regularly fitted into a navy three-piece suit, has flexed his power away from the department as well, recommending Bill McGinley to be the next White House counsel.Epshteyn has told associates that the choices are for Trump to make. Some of the picks he has suggested have been names endorsed by other allies or people who have appeared on his longtime friends Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.From the outside, Bannon pushed for McGinley to be White House counsel and may yet get another victory if Trump picks Kash Patel, a regular guest on War Room, for the FBI director or the deputy FBI director roles for which he remains in the running, the Guardian has reported.Bannon lobbied for Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget and, in a particularly audacious play, managed to get Sebastian Gorka, the deeply polarizing national security aide from the first Trump administration, into the incoming team as the senior counter-terrorism director.He also played an instrumental role in bringing Scott Bessent to the fore, according to a person directly familiar with the matter. Bannon made the first introduction to Trump years ago, while his allies have advocated for him at Mar-a-Lago and pushed his agenda.View image in fullscreenBut a main power center for cabinet picks is widely seen to rest with JD Vance’s crew, which pushed for Bessent to be named as treasury secretary and Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, among others.The Vance crew is informally said to involve Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr – who pushed for Vance to be his father’s running mate – and Don Jr’s close advisers including Arthur Schwartz and Andrew Surabian, as well as former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.In addition to being seen as getting Bessent the nod when Trump still had his doubts, the Vance crew have earned additional juice with Trump in probably securing enough Republican votes for Hegseth to be confirmed as defense secretary, despite another set of sexual misconduct allegations.For West Wing picks, the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has extended her personal influence with Trump. Wiles has mostly been able to get the staff of her choosing without having to fight against competing interests.Wiles’s top aides have landed in deputy chief of staff roles, including James Blair for legislative policy, Taylor Budowich for presidential personnel and Steven Cheung as communications director – although the factions are amorphous and Budowich and Cheung are also close to the Vance crew.Then there are individuals – relative newcomers to the Trump orbit – who have been in transition meetings at Mar-a-Lago as a result of their unique situations: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is also the co-chair of the Trump transition team.By weighing in on major cabinet picks, Musk has gotten on the nerves of some Trump loyalists, including Epshteyn, who have complained that the billionaire knows little of the Trump agenda they are trying to bring about and has little idea about who would be best placed to enact it.Lutnick has retained his authority through his transition co-chair role, although he recently engaged in some accidental self-sabotage by pushing too hard to be treasury secretary and appeared to have been caught in a leak investigation over the nominee for secretary of agriculture.Trump was irritated by Musk’s post on X pushing Lutnick for treasury secretary, which gave an opening for his main rival Bessent to secure the job instead. Still, Lutnick has continued to be close to Trump and last week was named commerce secretary.Musk, who is staying off-site in Palm Beach, has become more judicious with his interactions with Trump since that episode and after he secured himself his own role to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”. More

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    Sanctuary cities respond to Trump deportation plans: ‘We’re preparing to defend our communities’

    Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver, joined a drumbeat of local leaders in left-leaning cities across the country earlier this month to say he’s willing to protest the incoming Trump administration’s expected mass deportation efforts.He told local outlet Denverite that Denver police would be “stationed at the county line” to keep federal authorities out. “It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right?” he said. He then walked back the comments about using local police, but still said he would protest deportations – even being willing to go to jail for it.“I’m not afraid of that and I’m also not seeking that,” he told 9News.Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, said that’s one area where he and Johnston agree. “He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail,” Homan told Fox on Tuesday.The back and forth is indicative of what’s to come, as liberal cities and states plan to push back against Trump’s mass deportation plans. The resistance will likely come with a backlash from Trump, who could withhold federal funds or, as Homan threatened, arrest local leaders who stand in his way. Trump’s team is reportedly figuring out ways the president could unilaterally remove federal resources from Democratic cities that don’t go along with deportation plans.The stature is not new for some cities. Some have had so-called “sanctuary city” policies in place since before Trump’s first term, promising not to aid federal immigration and customs enforcement agents as they seek to detain and deport immigrants. Some additionally have programs to provide support to migrants and to manage what data they collect on undocumented populations.Other cities and states choose to cooperate with agents by providing them information and resources to identify and detain migrants – and some state laws bar cities from adopting sanctuary policies. Texas, for instance, has offered up state land to use for deportation facilities.Sanctuary policies can slow deportations and, local officials hope, deter immigration agents from targeting their communities because operations there would encounter organized resistance and cost more money to carry out.“They work – that’s why the Trump administration hates them,” said Naureen Shah, the deputy director of government affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The Biden administration doesn’t like those policies either.”For his second term, Trump and his appointees have threatened a more forceful and broad deportation plan, though they have not offered details on what it will look like. Trump has said he will activate the military to carry out deportations, and there are likely to be flashy raids in Democratic cities that defy him.ICE has limited resources and has historically preferred to conduct raids in localities where it has local cooperation, though in his first term, Trump still sought to deport people from cities that opposed deportations. Immigration advocates expect a blend of these two strategies – with some showdowns in “sanctuary” places as a show of force.“Some of the raids will be in the red states where they have a lot of support from state and local law enforcement, because that’s just going to help them reach the numbers that they want to reach,” Shah said. “They’re also going to want to make people feel very afraid and very unsafe in the blue states. They’re going to want to create that sense that there is no safe sanctuary. That’s part of their game. So I don’t think that we should be comfortable in any part of the country.”What cities are doingAround the country, mayors and city councils are discussing how they can protect local immigrants from a mass deportation campaign. Cities cannot stop federal authorities from deporting people, but depending on state laws, they can refuse to use local resources or voluntarily provide information to assist in these operations. In Los Angeles, the city council approved a sanctuary policy earlier this month, with one council member saying the city would be “hardening our defenses” against Trump.Homan spoke out against the city on Newsmax. “If you don’t wanna help, get the hell outta the way,” he told the rightwing outlet. “If I gotta send twice as many officers to LA because we’re not getting any assistance, then that’s what we’re going to do. We got a mandate. President Trump is serious about this. I’m serious about this. This is gonna happen with or without you.”Chicago’s Democratic leaders have reignited trainings similar to those communities there went through during Trump’s first term. The trainings are designed to teach people how to spot and respond to immigration enforcement actions.Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, an alderman on Chicago’s city council, said a local training in mid-November drew nearly 600 people – six times as many as the first training in 2017. The group is also getting started earlier.“Trump is promising massive deportations on day one, and we’re preparing to defend our communities on day one,” he said.During Trump’s first term, hundreds of people in Ramirez-Rosa’s ward were ready to stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) using tactics such as bicycle brigades, which ultimately were not needed at that time. Still, being organized can serve as a deterrent to immigration agents, who want the lowest cost and easiest operations possible, he said. “Ultimately, the organized community is the safest community,” Ramirez-Rosa said.Slowing down deportations means fewer people are deported, though he acknowledges the policies can only go so far. “At the end of the day, nothing can preclude federal immigration agents from coming into your community, pulling people over, knocking on people’s doors. No local law can prohibit the federal government from enforcing immigration law in your community or in your neighborhood.”He said local officials should make sure policies are ready when Trump takes office, but also preparing the community to organize against deportations and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. They should also be figuring out what local resources they can use to help migrants through legal clinics or cash assistance, while being mindful about the data they collect and how it could be accessed by federal authorities to find and deport migrants, he said.“We, as residents, as US citizens, really do need to be thinking about how do we leverage our collective power to defend our immigrant neighbors?” Ramirez-Rosa said. “Do we surround Ice vehicles when they come into our neighborhood? Those are all risks that US citizens in particular should be thinking about taking at this time. But of course, doing that in a way that is strategic and organized, peaceful and really mitigates the harm, particularly towards undocumented people.”What Trump could do in responseTrump has said he will call a national emergency and then use the military to help carry out a mass deportation campaign. The use of the military, in particular, would bring up a host of legal questions.“The use of the military on domestic soil should worry all of us, but there’s plenty of harm that the Trump administration could seek to do just by using state and local law enforcement as the force multiplier to mass deportation,” Shah said. “And so sealing off access to the extent possible is going to be significant. It slows them down. It stymies their ability to act at the scale and speed that they want to.”The Trump administration is likely to try to deny federal funds to cities and states to get them to play ball. One idea floated in Project 2025, the conservative manifesto, called for withholding federal emergency assistance grants as a way to compel cities to detain undocumented immigrants and share sensitive data with the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes.The second Trump administration is coming into office emboldened by a strong electoral college win and a US supreme court ruling that granted a president immunity from criminal charges for actions taken in his official capacity.But the Trump administration will still need Congress’s help to expand their authority. A key test will be whether Congress agrees to take away funding from cities that don’t want to participate in deportation efforts, Shah said.“We’re going to be firing on all cylinders, and we’ll answer their blitz of policies with our own blitz.” More

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    Bomb threats target Democratic Congress members from Connecticut

    Several Democratic members of Congress from Connecticut have been targeted by bomb threats on their homes, the lawmakers or their offices said on Thursday.Jim Himes, Joe Courtney and John Larson all reported that their homes were the subject of bomb threats. Police who responded said they found no evidence of a bomb on the lawmakers’ properties.This happened a day after a number of Donald Trump’s most prominent cabinet picks and appointees reported that they had received bomb threats and “swatting attacks”, in which perpetrators initiate an emergency law enforcement response against a victim under false pretences.Courtney’s Vernon home received a bomb threat while his wife and children were there, his office said.Himes said on Thursday morning he was notified of the threat against his home during a Thanksgiving celebration with his family. The US Capitol police and Greenwich and Stamford police departments responded.Himes extended his family’s “utmost gratitude to our local law enforcement officers for their immediate action to ensure our safety”. He added: “There is no place for political violence in this country, and I hope that we may all continue through the holiday season with peace and civility.”Larson also said on Thursday that East Hartford police responded to a bomb threat against his home.The threats follow an election season marked by violence. In July, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing him in the ear and killing one of his supporters. The Secret Service later thwarted a subsequent assassination attempt at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course in Florida, when an agent spotted the barrel of a gun poking through a perimeter fence while Trump was golfing.Among those who received threats on Wednesday were New York representative Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick to serve as the next ambassador to the UN; Matt Gaetz, Trump’s initial pick to serve as attorney general; Oregon representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who Trump chose to lead the Department of Labor, and former New York congressman Lee Zeldin, who has been tapped to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. More