Evelyn Reynolds

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    Pall of ICE spoils weekend celebrations in Chicago: ‘I think people are just scared’

    For 40-year-old Cecilia Romero, the days before and after Halloween are not just any other holiday. It’s the time of year when she can take her kids trick-or-treating in the neighborhood she’s from – and a connection to her own past when she would go celebrate as a little girl.She remembers years of streets brimming with families and children, with street vendors selling food and cempasúchil, the marigolds that loved ones place on altars for Day of the Dead – or Día de los Muertos – from 1 to 2 November.But this year, things are much, much different – because of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids that have been happening in and around Chicago since early September.“Clearly, it’s because of ICE,” Romero said. Referring to how JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, had unsuccessfully requested that the Trump administration pause immigration enforcement operations for the Halloween weekend which began Friday, she added: “I think people are just scared. It’s just kind of sad that kids are not allowed to have fun on a day where they should be [kids].”In the Chicago neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village, Halloween, All Saints Day on 1 November, and Día de los Muertos collectively play an important part in bringing the community together to celebrate, mourn and pray as a whole. This year, amid ICE enforcement and raids, the celebrations were a lot more muted. At any point throughout years past, the corridors of 18th Street in Pilsen and 26th Street in Little Village would be packed with people. Those same corridors were much more empty for hours at a time when the Halloween weekend began Friday on this occasion.Prior to Pritzker’s plea to let families celebrate Halloween, federal agents released pepper spray on 25 October in Old Irving Park in an incident that led to the cancellation of a Halloween parade. On Friday, ICE operations in Evanston got out of control, according to neighbors, close to Chute middle school. Federal agents used pepper spray and arrested three US citizens, according to NBC 5 Chicago, on allegations of “violence against law enforcement”.Marco DeSantiago, 49, grew up on Chicago’s South Side, but has been taking his kids to Pilsen for the Halloween festivities for the last 12 years. And he said the changed tone for the revelry this time was striking.“I guess the big difference this year is you could just feel [the] sadness,” DeSantiago said. “It’s a somberness, we feel personally, I could just see [it] in people’s faces. It’s not a joyous occasion.“You’re kind of doing it to keep it going for the kids but everybody, I think, is feeling pretty sad and upset.”He said that in years past more businesses and people had their doors open to trick-or-treaters – more street vendors were on the street, and the vibe was happier and more celebratory.Instead, it felt more like a solemn occasion, he said, adding: “It’s definitely a different feeling.”View image in fullscreenAt nearby soccer fields owned by the Catholic church and school St Procopius, an annual Día de los Muertos celebration featured the usual elaborately decorated altars with photos of deceased loved ones. The tributes had their favorite snacks and items they owned – rosaries or bags, or even Pond’s face cream, and the iconic orange marigolds, in some cases substituted for a plastic alternative, along with votive candles, decorated skulls, as well as many depictions of the Virgin Mary.Yet a lower attendance than usual was obvious to those who went.“It would be packed from the afternoon till the end, like there will be people coming in and out and so you can definitely see a change or a shift – but I don’t think that has to do with the [lack of] motivation or the love for the holiday,” said Isabel Hernández, 27, who was sitting next to an intricate altar for her grandmother, Lorenza Hernández. “I think it’s more so part of the fear right now of … what’s going on in the city, in the country.”Hernández feels particularly sad for people who might be mourning a recent loss – but, due to the ICE raids, might not feel comfortable or safe enough to be able to celebrate with others or partake in the traditions.“I don’t think the grieving is going to ever just go away, but I think you just have to heal with time … or be able to control it some more,” she said. “I can’t even imagine, for those that just recently lost someone … what they’re experiencing seeing people celebrating and then not being able to celebrate with others. I think that’s really hard.”Hernández’s mom, Cecilia, said that it was important for her and her loved ones to keep going with their traditional celebrations despite the pervading sadness.“One of the questions was like, ‘Should we have this event take place?’” Cecilia, 52, said. “For me personally, I was like, ‘Yes, let’s have it,’ because we don’t want what’s happening out there with ICE [to] take that away from us.”For Romero, she just wants to continue celebrating like she used to. “Hopefully, ICE will leave,” she said. “We don’t want them here. We don’t need them here. You know, our city – and I think our country – has been doing fairly well without them coming in.” More

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    John F Kennedy grandson says Julia Fox’s bloody Jackie Halloween costume ‘disgusting’

    Political writer and commentator Jack Schlossberg has said it was “disgusting, desperate and dangerous” for actor Julia Fox to wear a Halloween costume evoking the assassination of president John F Kennedy, his grandfather.Fox, however, has defended her controversial decision to wear a replica of the blood-stained, pink suit that former first lady Jackie Kennedy was seen wearing when her husband was shot dead by a sniper while the couple rode in a motorcade in Dallas in 1963. The Uncut Gems star has said she dressed as Jackie Kennedy as “a statement” about the poise and “extraordinary bravery” she showed when subjected to unimaginable “brutality”.Fox wore the ensemble in question to a 30 October Halloween party in New York City. Many online met an image of Fox in the outfit with negative reactions, with TikTok users dismissing the look as “a terrible idea” and “disrespectful”.One particularly notable reaction came from Schlossberg, the son of the Kennedys’ daughter Caroline, who wrote in part on X: “Julia Fox glorifying political violence is disgusting, desperate and dangerous.”View image in fullscreenFox was unbowed by the commentary from Schlossberg and others, with the 35-year-old actor and model saying in an Instagram post that she dressed as Jackie Kennedy “not as a costume but as a statement”.“When her husband was assassinated, she refused to change out of her blood-stained clothes, saying, ‘I want them to see what they’ve done,’” the post read. “The image of the delicate pink suit splattered with blood is one of the most haunting juxtapositions in modern history.“Beauty and horror. Poise and devastation. Her decision not to change clothes, even after being encouraged to, was an act of extraordinary bravery. It was a performance, protest, and mourning all at once. A woman weaponizing image and grace to expose brutality. It’s about trauma, power, and how femininity itself is a form of resistance. Long live Jackie O ♥️”.After JFK’s assassination, Jackie Kennedy indeed refused to take the suit off at Dallas’ Parkland hospital where her husband was pronounced dead and as she flew with his body on Air Force One to Washington DC.“Let them see what they have done,” she is reported to have said before exiting the plane in the US capital.The pink suit then became fashion history’s most iconic piece of first lady clothing despite its dark past. The day of the assassination, the former first lady also wore blue shoes, a pair of bloodied stockings and a blue blouse that were folded and stored without cleaning.The suit is often claimed to be made by Chanel. But it was actually an authorized copy of a Chanel design. It is said that this was a strategy employed by Jackie Kennedy, who died in 1994, to circumvent public disapproval of her taste for European style.All of these items are preserved in a climate-controlled vault at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, as materials of historical importance. Documents have shown that the Kennedy family wanted to keep the suit from public viewing until 2103.The controversy surrounding Fox’s Halloween garb surfaced as political violence has become one of the most prominent topics of public discussion in the US.It attained that status in part after Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts while successfully running for a second presidency in 2024. Other such cases were the firebombing in April of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home, the murders in June of Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the killing in September of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. More

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    California set to approve Prop 50 as voters signal displeasure with Trump

    California’s Proposition 50 began as a warning from the nation’s largest blue state to its largest red one: don’t poke the bear. But when Texas moved ahead with a rare, mid-decade gerrymander, pushed by Donald Trump as Republicans seek to shore up their fragile House majority in the midterm elections, California made good on its threat.Now, California voters appear poised to approve a redistricting measure placed on the ballot in August by Democrats and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who have cast it as a chance to check Trump’s power.“California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes,” Newsom said at a rally, formally announcing the initiative, known as the Election Rigging Response Act.Proposition 50 asks voters to temporarily scrap the state’s independently-drawn congressional district lines in favor of new maps carved up to help Democrats win five additional safe seats – a tit-for-tat response to Texas, where Republicans secured five new, friendlier districts earlier this year.Voting has been underway for weeks in the Golden State. As of Saturday, nearly 6m ballots had been returned, about one in four of the total mailed out, according to Political Data Inc, a firm that tracks voter data. Voting ends on Tuesday, 4 November.Early returns and polling suggest the ballot measure is on track for a comfortable victory. Though it can be difficult to predict turnout in an off-year special election, several recent surveys showed it passing by more than 20 points.The focus on Trump has galavanized Democrats in the deep-blue state, averting what some initially feared: an esoteric debate about the political minutiae of redistricting, a process that until just a few months ago typically took place at the start of each decade.National Democrats lined up behind California’s retaliatory plan. Their closing ad features Barack Obama, Newsom, and prominent congressional Democrats – including New York House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – telling voters they have the power to “stand up to Donald Trump”.“Democrats have won the messaging war in California because they’ve successfully framed it as an anti-Trump campaign,” said Dave Wasserman, the senior elections analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Republicans just did not cobble together the resources or the momentum to stop it.”Opponents of the effort initially promised a formidable fight, but their campaigns were vastly outraised and support from national Republicans never materialized. In the final weeks, Republicans had largely retreated from the airwaves.California Republicans focused part of their attack on Newsom, denouncing the plan as a “Gavinmander” designed to help the term-limited governor build a national profile and donor base ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. Millions of conservative voters in the state will be disenfranchised, they’ve warned, appealing to the fairness of the independent redistricting commission’s current work.California representative Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose district would be redrawn under the new maps, has called for a nationwide ban on mid-decade redistricting. The proposal has not gained traction.“What Newsom is trying to do here is to entrench even more power in the hands of a corrupt political class that has caused California to go from being the most beautiful state in the country to being the most popular state to leave,” Kiley said in an interview this week on Fox Business Network.Republicans hold just nine of the state’s 52 House seats. If successful, the gerrymander could slash the number of Republicans California sends to Washington by more than half.Former California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Trump critic who championed the commission’s creation, harshly criticized Proposition 50. And Charles Munger, the wealthy Republican donor and longtime supporter of independent redistricting, poured more than $30m into the effort to stop California from “returning to the evils of partisan gerrymandering”.Amid the immigration raids and the federal takeover of US cities, California voters were more concerned with the stopping the Trump administration than saving their fair maps, said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist advising Munger’s opposition group, the Protect Voters First committee. Madrid suspected that most people who voted for Proposition 50 hadn’t even bothered to study the new districts.“It has nothing to do with redistricting,” he said. “This is about sending a message to Donald Trump.”National good governance groups such as Common Cause, which has historically fought partisan redistricting, opted to stay neutral on California’s gerrymander.“The question was, are we going to unilaterally disarm one side?” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the CEO and president of Common Cause. Instead, the group developed a six-point “fairness” criteria, an effort to put “guardrails” on the process, which she said were reflected in the California measure.The view that politicians should not draw their own districts remains popular in California. Trump, however, is not. Nearly two in three voters agree that the president treats California “worse” than other states, according to a CBS News/YouGov survey. Among those voting for the measure, 75% said opposition to Trump was a factor in their decision.“It brings me no joy to see the maps that the commission drew being pushed aside,” said Sara Sadhwani, a professor of politics at Pomona College who served as one of the mapmaking panel’s Democratic members in 2020. “However, I do believe that in this moment, there is a greater fight that we have to wage in order to ensure a level playing field across the nation for the 2026 election.”Sadhwani appeared in one of the yes campaign’s first ads, in which she warned: “Donald Trump’s scheme to rig the next election is an emergency for our democracy”.View image in fullscreenThough Trump is at the center of the yes campaign, he was unusually muted on the ballot measure itself. Last month, he weighed in on Truth Social to preemptively discredit, without evidence, the “totally dishonest” results of Tuesday’s election.The Trump administration announced that it was deploying federal election monitors to New Jersey and California to watch the vote. In response, Newsom accused Trump of attempting to “suppress the vote” while the Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, said the state would dispatch its own observers to watch the federal monitors.Heading into election day, Democrats’ confidence has given the campaign an air of inevitability – so much so that Newsom, to the surprise and delight of supporters, took the unconventional step of telling them last week: “You can stop donating now.”But the yes campaign say it is taking nothing for granted. Newsom spent the final weekend before Tuesday’s special election traveling “up and down” the state, his team said, as tens of thousands of volunteers knocked doors and sent text messages reminding voters to return their ballots. “This election is not over,” the governor cautioned.Meanwhile, in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Newsom made it a point to say he was “deeply confident” that California voters would approve Proposition 50 – and said Trump was “changing the rules” and Democrats had to adapt.“We want to go back to some semblance of normalcy, but you have to deal with the crisis at hand,” he said.In the national redistricting arms race, California remains the farthest along of any Democrat-led state to retaliate. Wasserman estimates that passage of the California ballot initiative would probably improve Democrats’ chances of winning the House majority next year by between 10% and 15%. But, with Trump having pushed Republican-led states such as Missouri and North Carolina to approve new maps and others poised to follow suit, he noted: “The problem for Democrats nationally is that they don’t have enough Californias.”As the gerrymander war escalates, supporters outside the Golden State are pleading with Californians to, in the words of their governor, “fight fire with fire”.“We’re depending on California to help a friend out, to help us out as a country,” said Texas state representative Nicole Collier, who fled the state with roughly two dozen of her Democratic colleagues to prevent a vote on the Republican gerrymander there. “The future direction of this country hangs in the balance.” More

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    Abigail Spanberger presents herself as bulwark against chaos and cruelty

    She spoke of political turmoil coming out of Washington. Recklessness and heartlessness coming out of Washington. A careless, chaotic, reckless economic policy coming out of Washington. She did not mention Donald Trump.The Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, pitched her closing argument on Saturday to more than 7,000 supporters at a campaign rally in Norfolk, home to the world’s biggest naval base.To the joy of the crowd she was joined on stage by former president Barack Obama, who eviscerated the Trump presidency with barbs, sarcasm and biting critiques. Spanberger, by contrast, is betting that the antidote to Trumpism is unflashy competence and a focus on the cost of living.The former CIA officer and three-term congresswoman has not attended any of the “No Kings” protests that featured millions of anti-Trump voters and seldom mentions him by name. “I feel like if I say it too much, it’s like Beetlejuice,” the 46-year-old joked recently to the Associated Press. “He’s gonna show up.”It is a different approach a year after Kamala Harris hammered a warning about stopping Trump to save democracy only for him to sweep back into power. On Tuesday Democrats hope to start hauling themselves up off the canvas by winning gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia.History will be made in Virginia where Spanberger and the Republican lieutenant-governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, are vying to become the state’s first female governor. The commonwealth, as it is known, is also seeking to reassert its claim to be the most progressive state in the south after four years under Republican Glenn Youngkin.Virginia is second only to California in the size of its federal workforce. Spanberger has vowed in stump speeches to stand up for the thousands of employees laid off by Trump’s department of government efficiency, or Doge.View image in fullscreen“We need a governor who will support the thousands upon thousands of Virginia families whose livelihoods have been disrupted or destroyed because of Doge and now this government shutdown,” she said in Norfolk, against a backdrop of a giant Stars and Stripes and supporters waving mini-US flags and campaign signs.“We do not need someone who has said that losing a job isn’t a ‘real issue’ when we have Virginians who have dedicated themselves to service to our country who have lost their jobs because of bad policies and a reckless administration.”The “someone” in question was Earle-Sears, 61, who has been criticised for not taking the government shutdown seriously. The Marine veteran has vowed to cut taxes, root out wasteful government spending and be tough on crime. A Jamaican-born immigrant, she has accused Democrats of playing “the race card”.Her campaign was boosted by an endorsement from Trump and a down-ticket scandal involving Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones, who reportedly sent violent text messages about a political rival in 2022.But polls show Earle-Sears trailing by about seven percentage points in a state that Obama won in 2008 – the first Democrat in 44 years to do so – and that Trump has lost three times. Indeed, Virginia had been moving left for years on issues such as reproductive rights, gun safety and the death penalty until Youngkin’s 2021 victory put a Republican back in the governor’s mansion.Earle-Sears has sought to emulate the Youngkin playbook with a focus on culture war issues such as abortion, parents’ rights and transgender athletes. She ran an ad that attacks Spanberger for voting “to let boys share locker rooms with little girls” and “let children change genders without telling their parents”.Echoing a spot from Trump’s campaign last year, a narrator says: “Spanberger is for they/them, not us.” But this time the messages appear to be falling flat.Brian Jones, a partner at Black Rock Group, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington that Republicans “jumped right to where they thought they could replicate some of the success of President Trump on the trans issue. It’s my sense that it hasn’t broken through. I don’t know if people are tired of the message or it’s just not as effective.“My sense is that Winsome Sears has not been effective in driving a credible message on Spanberger, [who has] done a nice job on the bio front presenting herself as somebody who is this committed centrist.”Spanberger’s brand was reinforced on Saturday when Obama extolled her ability to reach across the aisle despite Washington’s deepening polarisation. He told the crowd: “Abigail is ranked as the most bipartisan member of Congress from the Commonwealth. She has had bills signed into law by both President Trump and President Biden. That is not easy to do.”View image in fullscreenAs Democrats continue to debate how to fight back, Spanberger has not been drawing the huge crowds that follow progressive Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. But those who did the rally in Norfolk took a pragmatic view of her candidacy in a purple state such as Virginia.Kacie Schappert, 46, a doctor’s assistant attending with her 14-year-old daughter, said: “Some things I agree with, some things I don’t but at this point regardless Democrats need to come together and fight the craziness that’s going on. We have to vote for the people that are most going to do that for us. She’s a woman; she’s in a state that can go either way; she has to be moderate.”The party that lost the White House is often the more energised in off-year elections and 2025 promises to be no different. A vendor outside the rally was selling merchandise with slogans such as “Anti Trump Grandmas Club”, “Are we great yet?”, “Cats against Trump”, “Elect a clown, expect a circus”, “Gulf of Mexico: est 1550”, “No Kings in America”, “No kings since 1776” and a silhouette of dog defecating on the word “Trump”.Standing in a queue outside the sports arena, June Ameika, 61, a pilates and yoga teacher whose husband served in the navy for 30 years, said: “What’s going on in our country at the moment is absolutely frightening and so it takes all of us to come out and show support and be visible.“Every election is about sending a message. We have to let Trump know that his behaviour is despicable, breaking the law is despicable, and we’re not going to stand for it. Donald Trump has basically no regard for the democracy of this country and that’s fundamental going forward.”Spanberger is currently embarked on her second statewide bus tour of the campaign. On Thursday, she spoke at a “Latinos for Spanberger” event at a Mexican restaurant in Alexandria, delivering her stump speech in both English and Spanish – a language she used to conduct arrests during her days as a federal agent working narcotics cases.She accused the Trump administration of terrorising communities with its hardline approach to immigration. “I am a law and order Democrat – I’m a former intel officer and a former federal agent – but it is not law and in order to have your citizens, your community members, live in fear,” she said.Some attendees were government workers who have been furloughed since the shutdown began a month ago. Anna, 45, a Latino single mother who did not wish to give her last name, said: “I try to save, but it’s not going to last long. Instead of going out and contributing to the global economy, now it’s more restricted. I cannot spend a lot of money on certain things. It’s hard.”Anna said she would vote for Spanberger because of immigration, abortion and LGBTQ rights and urged Latino voters, who swung towards the Republicans last year, to return to the Democratic fold. “I hope people are opening their eyes. Latinos have to unify. I hope those who were in the middle and went towards Trump will now switch.”Spanberger presented herself as a bulwark against the chaos and cruelty emanating from Washington. She promised to work tirelessly to lower costs in housing, energy and healthcare and to improve public schools. She did not dwell on Trump and his attacks on institutions.Lauren Spears, 55, who works part-time at a school, said: “I love her background: CIA, law enforcement, congresswoman. I love that she is reasonable, moderate, very smart. She is a wonky policy kind of person and is good at compromise, which is what our government desperately needs.”Republicans have poured late money into the race but Trump has given only tepid support for Earle-Sears and has not campaigned with her in person – a clue that he suspects she cannot win. She has struggled to pull off the Trump-lite approach that Youngkin mastered four years ago by nodding to Maga without fully embracing it.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “The Republican candidate is a pleasant enough person but she’s far right. She is extreme. What worries me about Spanberger is she’s going to try and be bipartisan the way she’s advertising. She’s going to find the Democrats won’t put up with that either. This is not the time to be bipartisan.” More

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    The ghost of Ronald Reagan has spooked Trump over tariffs | Sidney Blumenthal

    Halloween came early for Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan spooked him. Trump had a startled reaction to the TV ad that appeared during the first game of the World Series, placed by the provincial government of Ontario, featuring excerpts from President Reagan’s radio talk in April 1987 in which he explained the danger of trade wars. “Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump posted. It was, he falsely claimed, a “serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act”. In retaliation, he slapped an additional 10% tariff on Canada.Trump was apparently horrified at the sudden presence of the ghost of conservatism past, who had kept the outlandish bounder at arm’s length and whom Trump regarded warily if not nervously. Reagan was the original, bigger and more successful performer, whose appeal was as the harbinger of morning in America, not the grim reaper of a zombie nightfall. Canada is being punished for Trump’s fright.Trump seemingly fears Reagan’s image might be taken as a warning to the supreme court to rule against him in the impending case of Trump v VOS, in which the basis of his tariff regime is at stake. “Canada is trying to illegally influence the United States Supreme Court in one of the most important rulings in the history of our Country,” Trump claimed.Two courts have already ruled against Trump for his invocation of national security under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on whomever he wishes without the approval of the Congress. In late May, the US court of international trade held that most of Trump’s tariffs were “contrary to law”. He appealed to the US court of appeals for the federal circuit, which on 29 August affirmed the CIT ruling. The appeals court observed that “tariffs are a core Congressional power”. The IEEPA does not explicitly grant the president the authority to impose tariffs. Even if the IEEPA were interpreted to allow tariffs, it would represent an unconstitutional delegation of Congress’s power to the president.Twice rebuffed, Trump has appealed to the supreme court. The argument is scheduled for 5 November. Trump’s hair-trigger response to the sudden appearance of Reagan’s shade revealed his deep unease with how the court might rule. Even though the court has permitted many of his policies to proceed temporarily without legal justification through the “shadow docket”, he seems to know he might be on shaky ground here. In the tariff case, the amicus briefs against Trump were filed by some of the leading lights of the conservative legal world. Trump accused the appeals court judges of “hatred” and called Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, which provided Trump with the lists of nominees for judgeships, a “sleazebag”. Trump is clearly afraid.On 15 October Trump announced that he might attend the oral arguments in person, to become the first sitting president ever to witness a supreme court case. Trump apparently has no concern about tainting the perception of the court’s objectivity or legitimacy. Either the court works for him or it does not; the justices fall in line or they are among the enemies within. To Trump, the Republican court should be no different from the Department of Justice under his thumb. He evidently views the separation of powers as a personal affront, unfairly stealing from him. Everything is a zero-sum game, not just international trade. “I’m the speaker and the president,” Trump has joked, according to the New York Times.Trump’s appearance in the sanctum of the court would let them know who’s the real chief. Just as the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and her deputy, Todd Blanche, sat behind Emil Bove, Trump’s henchman and nominee for the federal appeals bench, as Bove faced the senators at his confirmation hearing, Trump could sit behind his solicitor general, D John Sauer, to glower at the black-robed justices. His presence would threaten to strip away the veneer of the court’s independence as well as show his distrust for his own lawyer’s ability to prevail on the merits. Whether he wins or loses the case, he has personalized it. Winning would be interpreted as a victory for intimidation; losing would be flouting him rather than ruling on the merits. Either way, he would be poison and the decision would be, as it is said in the law, the fruit of the poisonous tree.Trump has been losing his case so far because of his transparently weak and sham argument, part economic illiteracy and part glaring cynicism, though there is a blurred line with Trump. Granting Trump his boneheaded economics, assuming he’s just a crude real estate operator who does not know the most basic things about international trade, may lend his primitivism a patina of dumb clumsy earnestness. Contrary to Trump’s stubborn ignorance, however, trade deficits are not a mercantilist zero-sum game and tariffs are not a tax on foreign countries. His complementary point that he must be able to impose universal tariffs by fiat whenever he likes without congressional authority, the only president ever to grab power for himself unilaterally under the statute in its 50-year history, because of the non sequitur of fentanyl trafficking, is so ridiculously phoney that it colors his whole case as typically dishonest.Trump’s snap imposition of 50% tariffs on Brazil for its supreme court’s judgment convicting his ally the former president Jair Bolsonaro of an attempted coup and Trump’s additional 10% tariff on Canada in his fit of pique at the Reagan TV ad may only serve to undermine his already tenuous argument that he is compelled to usurp sole power based on the IEEPA in the interest of national security. His tantrums are gifts to the opposing attorney, who may well hold them up as obvious refutations of his claims.In advance of Trump’s date with the court, he has raced around Asia tossing concessions which he hails as victories. Dropping the tariff rates for Japan, South Korea and China, while Beijing lifted its retaliatory threats to withhold rare earth minerals and stop purchasing American soybeans, he has to that extent reduced the harm he alone has been responsible for inflicting.The previously perfectly submissive Republican Congress has begun to crack up in reaction to the stress that Trump’s policies have placed on the rural Republican base. In symbolic votes, five GOP senators joined Democrats to oppose Trump’s tariffs on Brazil and four voted against his tariffs on Canada. The Republicans are in an uproar, following American ranchers, over his approval of importation of more Argentinian beef, apparently as a favor to his rightwing ally Javier Milei, to whom he has also authorized the payment of $20bn in support of the waning Argentinian currency. While Trump has grudgingly acknowledged that he cannot run for a third term, the Republican members of the Congress still have to face the music.The illegality of his tariffs aside, Trump’s retreat reveals the lasting damage he has already done to the US economy, his enhancement of Chinese power and his alienation of our allies, and it exposes his performance as a pantomime strongman on the world stage. Though some of his tariffs will be reduced, even those that remain stand at an unprecedented level in living memory.“Consumers face an overall average effective tariff rate of 17.9%, the highest since 1934,” the Yale Budget Lab reports. For small businesses, which account for one-third of US trade, 78% expect higher costs, and, unable to absorb them, 71% anticipate needing to pass them on as price increases. The Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development projects that as a result of Trump’s tariffs the US Gross Domestic Product growth rate will fall from 2.8% in 2024 to 1.5% in 2026 – a decline of nearly half.Trump’s atavistic return to the Republican protectionism of the 1930s, which deepened the Great Depression, rejects the lessons that Ronald Reagan sought to teach. “The memory of all this occurring back in the 30s made me determined when I came to Washington to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity,” Reagan, the former New Dealer, said in the speech that enraged Trump enough to punish Canada for reviving it.Reagan’s talk was a prophetic warning of the peril of Trump’s tariffs: “You see, at first, when someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works – but only for a short time … High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars … Then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s relationship with Reagan was always uneasy. Throughout the 1980s, he sought Reagan’s imprimatur. In 1983, Reagan was asked to send a congratulatory telegram on the opening of Trump Tower. A few years later, Trump invited the president to attend a LaToya Jackson concert at his Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino at Atlantic City. Several attempts to edge close to Reagan were rejected, according to the Washington Post. The White House counsel’s office wrote “NO” on the telegram request. Offering advice on calling Trump, Reagan’s political director advised, “He has a large ego” – “large” was underlined.Nancy and Ronald Reagan lavished attention on the wealthy, but Trump was apparently too vulgar. It seems not even Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, who was close to Nancy Reagan, could gain him access. Finally, Trump got himself invited to a social event at the White House, stood in the photo line and took a standard picture shaking hands with the president, and received the signed picture. Unfortunately, it was signed from “Reagan Reagan”. A corrected photo was sent, but Trump featured the original image as a token of his significance in The Art of the Deal.In that book, published in 1987, Trump suggested that Reagan was a hollow construct, “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile”. That year Trump briefly considered his first run for the presidency. He made a foray into New Hampshire and bought full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe scathingly attacking Reagan for weakness. His “Open Letter” stated, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” He blamed the federal deficit on our alliances. “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend to allies,” he wrote. “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.” It was the complaint he would retail for decades regardless of the circumstances. At the bottom, the ads reproduced his squiggly signature, nearly identical to the one on the lewd birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein that he denies he ever wrote. Now, “Reagan Reagan” has returned to haunt him.There’s a twist characteristic of the Trump era. If Trump loses his tariff case, the duties collected from companies will have to be refunded. The Wall Street financial firm of Cantor Fitzgerald reportedly anticipates a market on the rights to the tariff refunds. Its former head Howard Lutnick is the secretary of commerce, and his sons now run the firm. A Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiary is offering 20% to 30% in cash upfront rather than wait for litigation to resolve the claims, according to Wired magazine. In exchange, the company would eventually get the full refund. But if Trump prevails, the claims would be worthless. A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald calls the report “absolutely false”, saying in a statement that it is “not in the business of positioning any risk, taking views or facilitating business in litigation claims involving the legality of US tariffs”.In August, however, the senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter on 13 August to Brandon Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald’s CEO, seeking information. “Given that one of the purported architects of President Trump’s tariff policy is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, your father and the former Chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, LP, the firm’s actions raise obvious conflict-of-interest and insider dealing concerns.”The senators inquired: “Has anyone at Cantor or Cantor Fitzgerald, LP communicated with any individual representing the Administration’s interest or working on the court cases on these matters? If so, please provide a list of all such conversations, including the date, the individuals involved, and the nature of the conversation.”A spokesperson for the commerce department stated in an email to Wired, “Secretary Lutnick knows nothing about this decision because he has no insight or strategic control over Cantor Fitzgerald.” He remains busy working on Trump’s tariffs. This article was amended on 4 November 2025 to add a response from Cantor Fitzgerald to the Wired report.

    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Trump policies spur economic anxiety in US Republican heartland: ‘Tariffs are affecting everything’

    For decades, a line of storefronts in Jeffersonville, Ohio, a town of 1,200 people 40 minutes south-west of Columbus, lay empty.But now locals are hard at work renovating the downtown and paving streets in anticipation of a potential economic boom fueled by a huge new electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant.Two miles south of Jeffersonville, Korean and Japanese companies LG Energy Solution and Honda are in the midst of sinking $3.5bn into a facility that is expected to begin production in the coming months.Hundreds of people have been employed in the construction of the plant, and more than 525 people have been hired to work in engineering and other manufacturing roles at the facility. In total, about 2,200 people are expected to be employed on a site that, until several years ago, was open farmland.But some locals are concerned.A host of Trump administration policies – tariff measures and the end of clean vehicle tax credits worth thousands of dollars to car buyers – are causing multinational manufacturing companies to consider pausing hundreds of millions of dollars in future investments, a move that would hit small, majority-Republican towns such as Jeffersonville especially hard.Moreover, a raid by ICE immigration officers on a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Ellabell, a small town in south-east Georgia in September that saw more than 300 South Korean workers detained and sent home has sent shock waves through places like Jeffersonville and the C-suites of international companies alike.View image in fullscreen“The construction process has been slowing down. My fear is that the whole thing is going to stop, and we’re left with just unfinished concrete out there,” says Amy Wright, a Fayette county resident, of the under-construction battery plant.“What’s more, a lot of the people hired to do the construction of the plant are not locals. They are from out-of-state; I’ve met them at the gym.”While in last year’s presidential election, 77% of voters in Fayette county backed Trump, recent polls suggest his popularity in rural America has taken a nosedive.One poll suggests that his approval rating among rural Americans has slipped from 59% in August to 47% in October. Others chart his net approval rating in states he won in last year’s presidential election – Ohio, Michigan and Indiana – in negative territory by as much as 18.9 points.Wright says her son, who works for a local company that supplies Honda with parts, recently received notice that a prior promise of overtime work was being rescinded. She says she believes Honda is reeling in spending due to US government policies.“Tariffs are affecting everything,” says Wright.What’s happening in Jeffersonville is being mirrored across the midwest.In Kentucky, Michigan and elsewhere, global giants Toyota and Stellantis have spent billions of dollars in small communities, much of which came in the form of clean energy tax breaks from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.Toyota’s biggest production facility on the planet is in a small Kentucky town called Georgetown, where the company employs more than 10,000 people and has invested $11bn in the local economy since the late 1980s. These workers churn out nearly half a million vehicles and hundreds of thousands of engines every year.However, in August Toyota warned that it faced a $9.5bn financial hit to it and its suppliers due to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, the largest estimate of any automotive manufacturer. In July, Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, said Trump’s tariffs were undermining investments in the state such as Toyota’s, calling them “chaos”.View image in fullscreenSixty-three per cent of voters in Georgetown’s Scott county backed Trump in last year’s presidential election.Last April, Stellantis laid off 900 workers at locations across the midwest due to Trump’s tariffs.In Indiana, one of the largest employers in the state, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche is reportedly considering pulling out of $50bn worth of investment in the coming years if Trump follows through on his executive order to target companies that don’t reduce drug prices.“No [manufacturer] wanted to alienate customers, but those days are past. So, the bulk of tariff price increases will hit in the coming months. This matters, because factory employment is a major share of rural counties in the midwest – about 30% in Indiana, and similar in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin,” says Michael Hicks, an economist and professor at Ball State University in Indiana.“These things will clearly have a political effect, but my hunch is not fully for several months. Overlaying all this is the risk of a significant [economic] downturn, where tariffs combine with a financial bubble that would surely hit rural – red – communities very hard.”Still, others believe that the tariffs will benefit small American towns in the long run.“Toyota is doing fine and I don’t see [tariffs] as being a big hurt for us here in Georgetown,” says Robert Linder, co-owner of the Porch restaurant that’s situated a mile north of the huge facility, and who worked at the plant for 29 years.In April, Toyota suggested it might move more vehicle production to Georgetown to beat the tariffs, though that move could be years in the making. Sales of Toyota brands in the US have been growing this year, with the company thus far eating the cost of tariffs rather than passing it on to consumers.“They just announced a $10bn investment in the United States for more Toyota plants. If Toyota was worried about [tariffs] they wouldn’t be expanding,” says Linder. Recent reports, however, suggest the $10bn figure referred to previously announced investments.However, large multinationals have a track record of announcing major projects only for reality to play out in a very different way.In Wisconsin, the Taiwanese tech company Foxconn claimed it would spend $10bn on a facility outside the town of Mount Pleasant. Instead, local taxpayers today find themselves on the hook for $1.2bn spent on highways, attorneys and other infrastructure for a facility that has never transpired.In Arizona, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), backed directly by Trump, has been plagued with lawsuits related to safety and other issues, and missed project deadlines following promises to become a major employer of local talent.Despite Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, recently claiming there was no need to worry about the future of the LG-Honda battery plant, on 28 October, Honda announced it was reducing production at plants across Ohio due to a semiconductor chip shortage.While more than two dozen jobs are available at the Jeffersonville site, according to the LG-Honda plant’s hiring website, it’s a far cry from the more than 2,000 positions cited by officials previously.For Amy Wright, policies coming out of the White House are having a clear effect on residents of rural Ohio. As an organizer of four local No Kings protests against Trump’s policies she’s noticed a change in the people who are coming to the rallies.“We’ve had more and more people who have voted for [Trump] show up and say: ‘This is not good, this is not what we voted for,’” she says. More

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    The luxury gap: Trump builds his palace as Americans face going hungry

    It was a feast fit for a king – and any billionaire willing to be his subject. From gold-rimmed plates on gold-patterned tablecloths decorated with gold candlestick holders, they gorged on heirloom tomato panzanella salad, beef wellington and a dessert of roasted Anjou pears, cinnamon crumble and butterscotch ice-cream.On 15 October, Donald Trump welcomed nearly 130 deep-pocketed donors, allies and representatives of major companies for a dinner at the White House to reward them for their pledged contributions to a vast new ballroom now expected to cost $300m. That the federal government had shut down two weeks earlier scarcely seemed to matter.But two weeks later, the shutdown is starting to bite – and throw Trump’s architectural folly into sharp relief. On Saturday, with Congress still locked in a legislative stalemate, a potential benefit freeze could leave tens of millions of low-income Americans without food aid. Democrats accuse Trump’s Republican party of “weaponising hunger” to pursue an extreme rightwing agenda.Images of wealthy monarchs or autocrats revelling in excess even as the masses struggle for bread are more commonly associated with the likes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of France, who spent lavishly at the court of Versailles, or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, who siphoned off billions while citizens endured deepening poverty.But now America has a jarring split-screen of its own, between an oligarch president bringing a Midas touch to the White House and families going hungry, workers losing pay and government services on the brink of collapse.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen“Are you fucking kidding me?” exclaimed Kamala Harris, the former vice-president, during an interview on Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central podcast The Weekly Show. “This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that babies are going to starve when the Snap benefits end in just hours from now.”For years Trump has cultivated the image of a “blue-collar billionaire” and, in last year’s presidential election, he beat Harris by 14 percentage points among non-college-educated voters – double his margin in 2016.Yet he grew up in an affluent neighbourhood of Queens, New York, and joined the family business as a property developer, receiving a $1m loan from his father for projects in Manhattan. He attached his name to luxury hotels and golf clubs and achieved celebrity through the New York tabloids and as host of the reality TV show The Apprentice.View image in fullscreenAs a politician, however, Trump has successfully branded himself as the voice of the left-behinds in towns hollowed out by industrialisation. His formula includes tapping into grievance, particularly white grievance, and into “Make America Great Again” nostalgia . His speeches are peppered with aspirational promises that his policies will guarantee his supporters a share of the nation’s wealth.This has apparently given him leeway with Trump voters who, despite their own struggles, turned a blind eye to the largesse of his first term and how it might benefit his family. But it was clear from his inauguration in January – when he was surrounded by the tech titans Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg – that part two would be different.Trump has made a personal profit of more than $1.8bn over the past year, according to a new financial tracker run by the Center for American Progress thinktank, which says the lion’s share came from launching his own crypto ventures while aggressively deregulating the industry. Other sources of income include gifts, legal settlements and income from a $40m Amazon documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump.There have been brazen “let them eat cake” moments. In May, Trump said he would accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One despite concerns that it could violate the US constitution’s emoluments clause. In October, it was reported he was demanding the justice department pay him about $230m in compensation over federal investigations he faced that he claims were politically motivated.View image in fullscreenLarry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There is a glaring gap between the life of Donald Trump, which is gold-plated and luxurious, and the life of so many Americans who are now being hit by the government shutdown.“You have to go back in history to examples in the 1920s or the Gilded Age in the late 19th century to find this kind of opulence that’s not just going on but being advertised. That goes along with all the other efforts to enrich Donald Trump and his family and his friends. It’s a shocking display of the use of public power for private gain.”It is hard to imagine a more resonant symbol than the ballroom. Last month, Trump left presidential historians and former White House staff aghast by demolishing the East Wing without seeking approval from the National Capital Planning Commission, which vets the construction of federal buildings. He also fired all six members of the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent agency that had expected to review the project.He claimed the destruction was a necessary step towards building a long-needed ballroom which, at 90,000 sq ft, would be big enough to hold an inauguration and dwarf the executive mansion itself. It will be funded not by the taxpayer but the new masters of the universe.Among the companies represented at the 15 October dinner were Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton, Coinbase, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms and T-Mobile. The Adelson Family Foundation, founded by the Republican mega-donors Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, also had a presence.The oil billionaire Harold Hamm, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler and her husband, Jeff Sprecher, and crypto entrepreneur twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss – who were portrayed by the actor Armie Hammer in the film The Social Network – were all on the guest list.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEthics watchdogs condemned the dinner as a blatant case of selling access to the president with the potential for influence peddling and other forms of corruption. Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist, said: “It’s par for the course for Donald Trump. Millionaires and billionaires wine with him and dine with him and everything is fine with him. There’s a cost and there’s consequences.“They’re not donating this money because it’s a nice thing to do. Certainly there’s some sort of benefit to them and it could be the largest wealth transfer in American history with the big ugly bill [the Working Families Tax Cut Act] just a few months ago.”View image in fullscreenThat legislation delivers tax cuts for the rich while reducing food assistance and making health insurance more expensive for working families. The mood is only likely to darken as the second-longest government shutdown in history threatens to rip the social safety net away from millions of people. John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, warned on Wednesday: “It’s going to get ugly fast.”A number of essential public services are approaching the end of their available funds, a situation likely to be felt directly in households, schools and airports from this weekend.The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), also known as food stamps, is set to lapse for 42 million people, raising the spectre of long queues at food banks. On Friday, two federal judges ruled that the Trump administration must continue to fund the programme with contingency funds. But the decisions are likely to face appeals. It was also unclear how soon the debit cards that beneficiaries use to buy groceries could be reloaded.Schemes that provide early years’ education for low-income families and subsidised air travel to remote communities are also set to run aground. At the same time, thousands of federal employees will soon miss their first full paychecks since the shutdown began, raising the prospect of staffing shortages in areas such as airport security and air traffic control.The timing is awkward because Saturday also marks the start of open enrolment for health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. Premiums are expected to soar, reflecting insurers’ doubts that Congress will renew enhanced tax credits before they lapse at year’s end – one of the key points of contention in the current standoff.Trump can often appear immune to political crises. But in a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos opinion poll released on Thursday, only 28% of Americans say they support the ballroom project, compared with 56% who oppose it. The same survey found that 45% blame Trump and Republicans for the government shutdown while 33% hold Democrats responsible. Notably, independents blame Trump and Republicans by a 2-1 margin – handing Democrats an opportunity.View image in fullscreenJohn Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “For the first time in a while, they have an opening with rural voters. Medicaid and Snap are infrastructural necessities in the poorest counties. Without programmes like this being funded, you’re not just talking about hurting poor people or rural people who are invisible; you’re talking about shutting down hospitals and clinics, and that matters to people. Democrats should be fanning out in rural areas and people should be telling their stories.”It is safe to assume that, had Barack Obama or Joe Biden built a ballroom during the crippling austerity of a government shutdown, Republicans and rightwing media would have gone scorched-earth against them. Trump’s ostentatious display of wealth and cronyism comes against a backdrop of widening social and economic inequality. Democrats, however, are often accused of lacking a killer instinct.Joe Walsh, a former Republican representative aligned with the conservative Tea Party who four months ago became a Democrat, said: “Democrats don’t know how to fight and I can see they’re already squirming on this ballroom issue. We’ve got a guy in the White House who every day is taking a blowtorch to this country and most Democrats don’t understand the moment. He ploughs ahead and tears down the East Wing because he knows he can get away with it.”Walsh believes that the next Democratic president should commit to demolishing Trump’s ballroom. “This is somebody who’s a tyrant who believes he can ignore all laws, rules, norms and processes,” he added. “You have to draw the line on that. No, he cannot unilaterally demolish the East Wing and build a big old ballroom. This guy has no clue what America is. We don’t have palaces in America.” More

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    Marjorie Taylor Greene tells Bill Maher she believes extraterrestrials are demons

    Republican US House member Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she believes in demons, surmising that they might be aliens who fell from heaven, and claims to have been unaware that key figures in the antisemitic space lasers conspiracy she floated were Jewish.She made those bizarre remarks as a guest on Friday on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher after winning some fans among Democrats who once loathed her – yet had come to appreciate how the far-right Georgia representative had recently broken with Republicans on various issues. Those include healthcare, Gaza, the federal government shutdown that began on 1 October and the handling of documents pertaining to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was friends with Donald Trump before the latter man won two presidencies.Greene’s appearance on Maher’s show perhaps made evident the ideological distance between the congresswoman – who has conspicuously avoided directly criticizing Trump himself – and some of her newer, cross-aisle admirers.Maher on Friday asked another of his on-air guests, film-maker Dan Farah, to discuss his new documentary, The Age of Disclosure, and how it explores the way some senior US military officials apparently theorize earnestly that “demons” may be responsible for what some colloquially refer to as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.The Real Time host, who is generally considered to be left-leaning, subsequently asked those on the show: “Do you think demons and the devil are real?”Greene, who was first elected to Congress in 2020, confidently answered: “Absolutely. I’m a Bible-believing Christian. And I believe those could be fallen angels.”As Maher replied: “Fallen angels? The aliens are fallen angels?” Greene continued: “That’s possible – I think that’s what they could be. That’s what makes sense in my worldview.”The Fifth Column podcast host Michael Moynihan was also participating in the discussion, and Maher called on him to say whether he agreed with Greene. “No,” Moynihan said. “I’m sorry.”At another point in the show, Maher invited Greene to revisit her infamous 2018 social media screed positing that wildfires that had devastated California were ignited by a laser beam from space under the control of the Rothschild banking dynasty.The progressive watchdog Media Matters uncovered that post weeks into Greene’s first congressional term. And her colleagues at the time voted to remove her from her House committee assignments, with the Rothschild family having repeatedly been subjected to antisemitic conspiracy theories.Greene on Friday declared to Maher that she initially “didn’t even know the Rothschilds were Jewish”.“Before politics … I [did] not know much of any of this stuff,” Greene said. “I never even said the word ‘Jewish’ in the … post.”Maher pointed out that “‘Rothschild’, to a lot of people, is almost synonymous with the word ‘Jewish’”.Greene replied: “I had no idea … Now I know it’s Jewish.”Amid laughter and applause, Maher retorted: “Right. Well, now we know … That’s what I’m here for – to make sure that people in Congress know what the fuck you’re talking about.” More