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    Trump news at a glance: president faces intensifying criticism over Qatar plane gift

    Donald Trump is coming under increasing pressure for accepting a $400m luxury plane from Qatar as several senior Republicans join the chorus of criticism.Leading Democratic Chris Murphy on Sunday called it the “definition of corruption”, while even some of Trump’s close allies have been enraged, with some saying it was the opposite of Trump’s promise to drain the swamp and was “a stain on the administration”.Trump lashed out at the critics on Saturday, claiming the gift was to the US and not for him personally. Murphy later told NBC that was not true.Meanwhile, some lawyers are starting their own law firms and challenging the Trump administration’s effort to cut funding and punish civil servants as the president wages a broad attack on the justice department and major law firms.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump’s acceptance of Qatar jet is ‘definition of corruption’, senator saysDonald Trump’s acceptance of a $400m Boeing jet from Qatar is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat said on Sunday, as several senior Republicans joined in a bipartisan fusillade of criticism and concern over the luxury gift.Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, condemned the “flying grift” on NBC as he assailed the president’s trip to several Gulf states this week that included a stop in Qatar.Rand Paul, a Republican US senator for Kentucky and chair of his chamber’s homeland security committee, told the ABC that the gift of the jet “at least gives the appearance of a conflict of interest”.Read the full storyUS lawyers set up own firms to fight Trump onslaughtAs Trump wages a blunt attack on major law firms and the justice department, some lawyers are starting their own law firms and challenging the administration’s effort to cut funding and punish civil servants.The decision to start the firms come as the judiciary has emerged as a major bulwark against the Trump administration. More than 200 lawsuits have been filed challenging various Trump administration policies and there have been more than 70 rulings blocking the administration from executing various policies.Read the full storyBessent says Walmart will ‘eat’ some tariffs after Trump demandThe US retail company Walmart will “eat some of the tariffs” in line with Trump’s demands, the president’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has insisted, claiming he received the assurance in a personal phone call with the company’s chief executive, Doug McMillon.Walmart said last week it had no alternative to raising prices for consumers beginning later this month because it could not absorb the cost of the president’s tariffs on international trade. The statement provoked an angry response from Trump, who said on Saturday the company should “eat the tariffs and not charge valued customers anything”.According to Bessent, speaking on Sunday to NBC’s Meet the Press, Walmart is now promising exactly that.Read the full storyFears Trump could target statisticians if data disappointsA proposed rule change making it easier to fire civil servants deemed to be “intentionally subverting presidential directives” could pave the way for the White House to fire statisticians employed to produce objective data on the economy but whose figures prove politically inconvenient, experts warn.With Trump under pressure to explain shrinking gross domestic product (GDP) figures amid economists’ warnings that tariffs could trigger a recession, the administration could use new employment rules to pressure workers into “cooking the books”.Read the full storyTrump losing patience with Putin, says Finnish leaderDonald Trump is becoming impatient with Vladimir Putin, Finland’s president has said after a lengthy conversation with his US counterpart.Alexander Stubb said Trump and Putin, who are scheduled to speak by phone on Monday, must not decide the fate of Ukraine over the head of its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Stubb said: “If we were to pull it together, we could say that Zelenskyy is patient and President Trump is starting to be impatient, but in the right direction, that is, towards Russia.”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    Former US president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office announced on Sunday, and he and his family are considering options for treatment. Donald Trump expressed concern on behalf of himself and first lady Melania Trump.

    US government debt may come under more pressure this week after the credit rating agency Moody’s stripped the US of its top-notch triple-A rating.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened 17 May 2025. More

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    Joe Biden diagnosed with ‘aggressive form’ of prostate cancer, his office says

    Joe Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which has spread to the bone, and the former president and his family are reviewing treatment options, his office said in a statement on Sunday.“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” his office said. “The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”Prostate cancers are given a score called a Gleason score that measures, on a scale of one to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Biden’s office said his score was nine, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive.When prostate cancer spreads to other parts of the body, it often spreads to the bones. Metastasized cancer is much harder to treat than localized cancer because it can be hard for drugs to reach all the tumors and completely root out the disease.However, when prostate cancers need hormones to grow, as in Biden’s case, they can be susceptible to treatment that deprives the tumors of hormones.Biden, 82, beat an incumbent Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election and initially sought a rematch with him last year. But, amid questions about his age and mental acuity, he dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to succeed him.Trump, who is just three years younger than Biden, subsequently defeated Harris in November’s election and returned to the White House in January.Biden has dealt with cancer before. Prior to starting his presidency, he had several non-melanoma skin cancers surgically removed, and he had a cancerous lesion removed from his chest in February 2023.In the US, prostate cancer is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death among men, according to the American Cancer Society.In 2022, Biden made a “cancer moonshot” one of his administration’s priorities, with the goal of halving the cancer death rate over the next 25 years. The initiative was a continuation of his work as vice-president to address a disease that had killed his older son, Beau.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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    Trump’s acceptance of Qatar jet gift is ‘definition of corruption’, senator says

    Donald Trump’s acceptance of a $400m Boeing jet from Qatar is the “definition of corruption”, a leading Democrat said on Sunday, as several senior Republicans joined in a bipartisan fusillade of criticism and concern over the luxury gift.Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, condemned the “flying grift” on NBC’s Meet the Press as he assailed the president’s trip to several Gulf states this week that included a stop in Qatar.“Why did he choose these three countries for his first major foreign trip? It’s not because these are our most important allies or the most important countries in the world,” he said of Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.“It’s because these are the three countries willing to pay him off. Every single one of these countries is giving Trump money, the plane from Qatar, an investment in his cryptocurrency scam from the UAE, and they are asking for national security concessions in return.“This is the definition of corruption. Foreign governments putting money in the president’s pocket and then the US giving them national security concessions that hurt our own security.”Rand Paul, a Republican US senator for Kentucky, and chair of his chamber’s homeland security committee, told ABC’s This Week that the gift of the jet “at least gives the appearance of a conflict of interest”.And Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president during his first Oval Office term, said it was “inconsistent with our security” during an appearance on Meet the Press in which he pointed out Qatar had been previously accused of financing international terrorism.Trump has insisted he would be “stupid” to refuse Qatar’s offer of the jet, which would serve as the new Air Force One before being donated to his presidential library upon his retirement.But the proposal enraged even close allies of the president, some calling it the opposite of Trump’s promise to drain the swamp – and “a stain on the administration”.Trump lashed out at critics on his Truth Social network on Saturday, claiming the gift was to the US and not personally for him.Murphy told NBC that was not true. “The plane is not a gift to the American people,” he said. “It is going directly to Donald Trump.“That library will take a decade to build, and so once he leaves the White House, until the library is built, he gets to use that plane to fly around all of his billionaire friends while his policies result in millions of Americans losing their healthcare and having to pay higher costs.”Pence said Trump should turn down the offer.“Qatar has a long history of playing both sides. They support Hamas,” he said. “They supported Al-Qaida. Qatar has actually financed pro-Hamas protests on American campuses across the US, so the very idea that we would accept an Air Force One from Qatar I think is inconsistent with our security, with our intelligence needs.“There are profound issues, the potential for intelligence gathering, the need to ensure the president is safe and secure as he travels around the world, and of course there are very real constitutional issues. The constitution prohibits public officials from accepting a present from a foreign state.“It’s just a bad idea and my hope is the president will think better of it.”Paul said he could see a way in which the gift would be acceptable – but that Trump had handled the offer poorly.“My fear is that it detracts from a largely successful trip where the president is talking about opening up and doing more trade with the Middle East,” he said.“I’ve been part of vetoing or trying to veto arms [sales] to Qatar, as well as to Saudi Arabia, over human rights abuses. So could it color the perception of the administration if they have a $400m plane to be more in favor of these things. It at least gives the appearance of a conflict of interest. I don’t think it’s worth the headache.” More

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    US treasury secretary says Walmart will ‘eat some of the tariffs’ after Trump demand

    The US retail giant Walmart will “eat some of the tariffs” in line with Donald Trump’s demands, the president’s treasury secretary Scott Bessent insisted on Sunday, claiming he received the assurance in a personal phone call with the company’s chief executive, Doug McMillon.A spokesperson for Walmart said the company would not comment on conversations between its executives and administration officials. However, a source familiar with the conversation said the phone call between Bessent and McMillon was arranged many days prior to Trump’s post – and that the company’s position had not changed.Walmart said this week it had no alternative to raising prices for consumers beginning later this month because it could not absorb the cost of the president’s tariffs on international trade, which have caused turmoil in international markets.The statement provoked an angry response from Trump, who posted a rant to his Truth Social network on Saturday saying the company should “eat the tariffs and not charge valued customers anything”.According to Bessent, speaking on Sunday to NBC’s Meet the Press, Walmart is now promising exactly that.“I was on the phone with Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, yesterday. And Walmart is, in fact, going to, as you describe it, eat some of the tariffs, just as they did in ‘18, ‘19, and ‘20,” Bessent said after host Kristen Welker asked if the president was asking American companies to be less profitable.“What you’re describing was Walmart’s earnings call. The other thing the companies have to do – they have to give the worst case scenario so that they’re not sued.”On Thursday, McMillon said in the earnings call that his company, a bellwether of US consumer health, was moving to protect itself against the impacts of Trump’s tariffs, despite the president’s administration announcing a pause in its trade war with China that analysts called “capitulation day”.“We will do our best to keep our prices as low as possible but given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins,” he said.Walmart’s chief financial officer, John Rainey, told CNBC that the company, which has thousands of stores across the US, was “wired for everyday low prices”. But he said the tariffs were “more than any retailer can absorb” – and that consumers would begin to see higher prices towards the end of May and “certainly much more in June”.Trump announced plans for an unprecedented barrage of tariffs against numerous countries on 2 April, a date he called “liberation day”.For too long, he said, the US had been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far”, and he presented a list of countries and territories that would receive tariffs, ranging from numerous US allies and longtime trade partners to barren, remote islands near Antarctica occupied only by penguins.The president’s strategy, which he insisted would lead to negotiations and trade deals with at least 150 countries, was variously ridiculed and condemned as flawed and unworkable. And it created an ongoing six weeks of chaos with higher prices, crashing stock markets and slowing economic growth.He has since attempted to walk back many of the excesses of the policy, including this week’s announcement that, for an initial 90-day period, tariffs on China – a dominant supplier to Walmart and myriad other US companies – would be cut from 145% to 30%.The White House called it a “total reset” in trade relations and followed up on Friday by announcing that it would not, after all, negotiate with many of the countries, but instead unilaterally impose new tariff rates.“[It is] not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” Trump told a meeting of business leaders in the United Arab Emirates during his tour of Gulf states.“We have 150 countries that want to make a deal, but you’re not able to see that many countries.”Bessent told CNN’s State of the Union in a later appearance on Sunday that the US was focused on its “18 most important trading relationships” – and that he expected trade talks to continue with a number of countries leading to a series of regional deals. More

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    The Guardian view on Britain’s new aid vision: less cash, more spin. The cost will be counted in lives | Editorial

    Last week, the government justified cutting the UK’s development budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income – the lowest level in more than 25 years – by claiming Britain’s role is now to “share expertise”, not hand out cash. With a straight face, the minister responsible, Jenny Chapman, told MPs on the international development committee that the age of the UK as “a global charity” was over. But this isn’t reinvention – it’s abdication, wrapped in spin. No wonder Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who is chair of the committee, called Lady Chapman’s remarks “naive” and “disrespectful”. Behind the slogans lies a brutal truth: lives will be lost, and Britain no longer cares. Dressing that up as the “new normal” doesn’t make it less callous.Kevin Watkins of the London School of Economics analysed the cuts and found no soft-landing options. He suggests charting a sensible course through this wreckage, noting that harm from the cuts is inevitable but not beyond mitigation. Dr Watkins’ proposals – prioritising multilateralism, funding the global vaccine alliance (Gavi) and replenishing international lending facilities – would prevent some needless deaths. Ministers should adopt such an approach. The decision to raid the aid budget to fund increased defence spending was a shameful attempt to cosy up to Washington. The cuts were announced just before Sir Keir Starmer’s White House meeting with Donald Trump, with no long-term strategy behind them. It’s a deplorable trend: globally, aid levels could fall by $40bn this year.The gutting of USAID, the world’s biggest spender on international development, by Elon Musk, was less fiscal policy than culture-war theatre. Foreign beneficiaries don’t vote, and liberal-leaning aid contractors lack clout, so dismantling USAID shrinks “globalism” while “owning the establishment”. But the real casualties lie elsewhere. Memorably, Bill Gates said the idea of Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, “killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one”. Countries that built health systems around USAID now face a reckoning. It wasn’t just cash – it sustained disease surveillance, logistics and delivery. Ironically, much of it never left American hands, absorbed by US private interests.In the UK, University of Portsmouth researchers say aid increasingly serves foreign policy, not development. It’s not just ineffective – it’s cynical. Aid should change lives, not wave flags. All this as poor nations’ debt crisis deepens. Without global reform, the Institute for Economic Justice warns, African nations face a cycle of distress blocking investment in basic needs. The UK recasts withdrawal as progress – holding up Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as model partners. But Georgetown University’s Ken Opalo makes a cutting point: in diplomacy, when the music stops, those who outsourced ambition get exposed. Aid dependency, he argues, has hollowed out local ownership. With little planning, many governments now face a choice: take over essential services or cling to a vanishing donor model.Politicians should choose their words carefully. The former Tory development secretary Andrew Mitchell rightly criticised Boris Johnson’s “giant cashpoint in the sky” remark for damaging public support for aid. Labour ministers are guilty, too. Britain has replaced moral leadership with metrics, and compassion with calculation. The policy’s defenders call it realism. But without vision, it’s just surrender – leaving the world’s poor to fend for themselves, forced to try to survive without the means to do so. More

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    Could a British Fox News personality fix Republicans’ losing streak in California?

    California is usually regarded as a political graveyard for ambitious Republicans, but Steve Hilton, the smiling, bald-headed former British political consultant turned Fox News personality, has a few theories of how to turn that around.Theory number one is that the Democrats, who have not lost a statewide election in almost 20 years and enjoy a supermajority in the California legislature, make the argument for change more or less by themselves, because the state has become too expensive for many of its residents and is mired in a steep budgetary crisis.Even the current governor, Gavin Newsom, argues that his party’s brand has become toxic, that Democrats across the country have lost their way, and “people don’t think we make any damn sense”. The leading Democratic candidates to succeed him have been similarly blunt.“Everything costs too much!” the former congresswoman Katie Porter says on her campaign website. “Homes and rent are too expensive,” the former state attorney general Xavier Becerra concurs on his. “Folks can barely cover their grocery bills. Healthcare costs are incredibly high.”To which Hilton responds gleefully: “We know! You did it to us!”Given the depth of the malaise – “Califailure”, the title of his campaign book calls it – Hilton believes that next year’s governor’s race offers Republicans a unique opportunity. If even Democrats think it’s time for change, he argues, wouldn’t it make sense for voters to look elsewhere for a solution?And that leads him to theory number two: that an engaging, energetic, unorthodox-sounding candidate like himself might just be the man for a job.In the four weeks since he announced his run for governor, Hilton and a skeleton staff have crisscrossed the state in a distinctive white pickup truck emblazoned with the Trump-like slogan “Make California Golden Again”. He has spoken at universities and presidential libraries, made common cause with hardcore Trump Republicans, and struck up conversations with voters in some of the most liberal corners of the state.His style has been casual – he dresses most commonly in a T-shirt and sneakers as he sits down in coffee shops or addresses so-called “policy forums” for supporters – and he keeps a video crew close to post updates on social media and underline how little he looks or talks like a regular Republican candidate.Back in Britain, where he was an adviser to the Conservative prime minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012 and, later, a champion of Brexit, Hilton worked largely behind the scenes. He has been much more visible since as a Fox News host and contributor, and has honed a public persona that remains unabashedly rightwing but is also adept at presenting complex political viewpoints in easily relatable terms.So far, at least, Hilton’s British origins have proven more of an asset than a liability. (“He just sounds smarter because of his accent,” the moderator at a Republican gathering in Santa Barbara said. “It’s almost not fair.”) Even his bare scalp has contrasted favorably in some quarters with Newsom’s famously coiffed full head of hair.Hilton’s core message is simple: that Californians want good jobs, good homes and good schools for their kids. And the reason too many feel these goals are eluding them, he says, is because of “one-party rule and really bad ideas” from the Democrats.That diagnosis certainly has the potential to resonate widely, particularly among working-class voters who, according to Hilton, are ‘being completely screwed” by high living costs, high taxes and a public school system whose test scores in English and math consistently lag behind the national average.“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Hilton told the Santa Barbara crowd. “We don’t have to put up with this.”The question, though, is whether Hilton is the alternative voters are craving– and that’s where observers believe he may be on shakier ground, particularly since his strongest political connections are with the Trump end of the Republican party.View image in fullscreenEven Hilton’s more moderate ideas reflect a standard Republican playbook of cuts to taxes, public spending and business regulations – a platform Californians have rejected time and again. Dan Schnur, a former Republican campaign consultant who teaches political communications at Berkeley and the University of Southern California, thinks that behind the moderate facade Hilton is in fact “running pretty hard as a Maga candidate” on a range of issues from immigration to homelessness.Hilton has a slightly different theory of the case. He sees parallels between California in 2025 and Britain in the late 1970s, when it was known as the “sick man of Europe”, and envisions himself as a version of Margaret Thatcher providing a much-needed rightward course correction. He drew laughter and applause in Santa Barbara when he complained about California’s “nanny state bossy bureaucracy” – a Thatcher-inspired turn of phrase – and when he borrowed from a celebrated 1979 Conservative campaign slogan to say “California isn’t working”.Whether that message can work with independents and Democrats – constituencies he has to sway in large numbers to win – is far from clear. However much Hilton talks about “commonsense” solutions, his early champions include Charlie Kirk, who runs the Trump-supporting youth group Turning Point, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur turned politician who is old friends with Vice-President JD Vance and is now running for governor of Ohio – both of whom would suggest he has hitched his wagon to a more radical agenda.Even when forging connections in working-class, heavily Latino East Los Angeles, Hilton has relied on a local Trump activist, now in charge of the White House faith office, who in turn introduced him to Maga-friendly grassroots groups with names like the Conservative Comadres and Lexit (for Latinos Exiting the Democratic Party).The problem is not that Hilton’s new friends in East LA – many of them small business owners – do not reflect broader frustrations when they talk about working hard and having far too little to show for it. They almost certainly do.The problem is that Trump’s brand of working-class populism is toxic in California – vastly more so than the Democrats – and growing only more so as Trump’s chaotic second term in the White House unfolds.An LA Times opinion poll earlier this month showed 68% of Californians disapproved of the president’s job performance and thought the country was on the wrong track – numbers that many political analysts expect to worsen as the effects of Trump’s trade war kick in.Hilton himself makes light of this problem, arguing that if he runs an energetic, attractive enough campaign it will cut across the political spectrum and create its own momentum. “We’ve just learned that California is the fourth biggest economy in the world, and that’s great,” he said in an interview, “but it isn’t an economy that works for the people who live here … We are building a movement and a coalition for change.”Soon, though, he is likely to be pulled in different directions, because the logic of California’s primary system requires him to beat every other Republican before he can even think about the Democrats. And, in the age of Trump, there’s no competition between Republicans that does not require showing obeisance to the president. “The association’s going to be there, whether it results in a formal endorsement or not,” Schnur said. “Trump’s coat-tails are much longer in a primary than in a general election, which is good news for Hilton in the spring but a bigger obstacle in the fall.”Hilton’s stiffest Republican competitor so far, the Riverside county sheriff, Todd Bianco, has already run into trouble with the Trump faithful because he took a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters in the wake of the George Floyd killing in 2020. (Bianco, who generally talks and acts like a Trump-aligned Republican, insists he was tricked into kneeling when he thought he was being asked to pray – a version at variance with video footage from the time.)At the Santa Barbara event, Hilton looked almost bashful when asked what Trump thought of his decision to run and gave only the vaguest of answers. It is unlikely to be the last time he will field such a question, though, or risk alienating some part of his target electorate with his response.Hilton describes the task ahead as “possible, but difficult”. His chances most likely rest on another theory of his – that the rightward swing the country experienced last November was not a one-off, but a trend still gathering momentum. Hilton points to all the ways California was part of that national trend in 2024 – the 10 counties that flipped from blue to red, the rejection of liberal district attorneys and mayors up and down the state, the call for a stiffer approach to law and order in a key statewide ballot initiative – and concludes that “Californians voted Republican without realising it.”The last time Trump was president, though, the midterm elections produced a major swing in the other direction, in California and across the country, and most political analysts expect the same thing next year. If office-holders can justifiably point the finger at Washington – for shortages on the shelves, or higher prices incurred by tariffs, or immigrant laborers vanishing from key industries – voters are likely to be more forgiving of their leaders’ own shortcomings.“It would be much easier to make the case against the Democratic establishment if there weren’t a Republican president,” Schnur said. “An entire generation of Californians has come of voting age automatically dismissing the possibility of supporting a Republican candidate … That doesn’t mean a Republican can’t get elected governor, but it’s a very steep uphill fight.” More

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    This land is their land: Trump is selling out the US’s beloved wilderness

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    View image in fullscreenIn 1913, on a remote, windswept stretch of buffalo-grass prairie in western North Dakota, Roald Peterson was born – the ninth of 11 children to hardy Norwegian homesteaders.The child fell in love with the ecosystem he was born into. It was a landscape as awe-inspiring and expansive as the ocean, with hawks riding sage-scented winds by day and the Milky Way glowing at night.As a young adult, he decided to study the emerging field of range science in college, which led him to Louisiana – where he was so appalled by the harsh conditions faced by sharecroppers that he volunteered with a farmers’ union. After serving stateside in the army air forces during the second world war, he took a job in Montana with the US Forest Service, monitoring cattle and sheep grazing on public lands. He took to his work with high morale.Unfortunately for Peterson, his career took off at the height of anti-communist hysteria, at which time the second red scare, also known as the McCarthy era, was well under way.In the midst of this culture war, Peterson’s environmental advocacy and concern for exploited workers made him a glaring target, a man with a bullseye on his back. In 1949, two anonymous informants falsely accused Peterson of having been a communist, setting off an invasive loyalty investigation.View image in fullscreenMontanans from across the political spectrum rallied to his defense. So did the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and conservationist Bernard DeVoto, who was so moved by the case that he penned the most controversial column of his 20-year run at Harper’s Magazine: Due Notice to the FBI.In it, DeVoto delivered a bold defense of civil liberties in the face of growing authoritarianism – one of the earliest national articles to openly criticize both FBI director J Edgar Hoover and senator Joseph McCarthy.As the red scare escalated, Peterson’s loyalty was investigated a second time, and then a third when another informant told the FBI he was “behaving like a homosexual”.Peterson was fired from the Forest Service in early 1953. He lost his family’s ranch in Montana’s Bitterroot valley (not far from where the show Yellowstone is filmed). Peterson’s wife left him and was committed by her family to an asylum. A judge awarded custody of his three children to the state, placing them in foster care.A granddaughter, whom I located and interviewed, told me the children were repeatedly sexually abused; the two youngest later died by suicide.Peterson’s 2004 obituary, penned by his surviving daughter, states that he was “blacklisted by the infamous Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and J Edgar Hoover group of legal thugs”.That the one in the middle was Donald Trump’s mentor underscores the connection between then and now.Peterson was targeted during a low chapter in American history – one that feels eerily familiar today.It was a time when reactionaries in Congress plotted to sell off public lands – just as they do now. When the US Forest Service was under intense pressure to clear-cut more trees – just as it is now. When public lands faced destruction in the name of energy production – just as they do now. More than 14,000 people were forced out of government jobs during the red scare – a mass purge that mirrors the targeted layoffs we’re witnessing now.Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made no secret of its ambitions: a ramp-up of logging and drilling across public lands, and a sweeping plan to shrink up to six national monuments in the south-west.View image in fullscreenTaken together, a larger strategy comes into focus: Republicans are laying the groundwork to sell off some of the nation’s most treasured public assets. And it begins with gutting the numbers and the morale of the very people who protect them.Bill Wade boasts nine decades of perspective on the US’s public lands. The son of a ranger, the 84-year-old was raised inside Mesa Verde national park in Colorado and went on to have a long career in the agency, eventually serving as supervisor at Shenandoah national park in Virginia.Now retired, Wade serves as the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, which makes him an excellent ear to have on the ground. He has a bracing take on conservation workers and our public lands.Morale, he says, is probably the lowest he’s seen in his 58-year career.That’s a reasonable take, given that the message from the Trump administration is, to paraphrase the novelty slogan: “Purging will continue until morale improves.”February 2025 brought the “Valentine’s Day massacre”, when the misnamed “department of government efficiency” fired 1,000 National Park Service employees and 3,400 from the US Forest Service. In March, courts ruled the firings lawless. More buyouts followed. In May, the administration signaled it would slash the agency’s budget by 40% – the biggest cut in its 109-year history.With parks having boasted record visitation in 2024, this year they are already reporting shortages in visitor center hours; campground accessibility; sanitation; interpretation, such as ranger-led hikes; and environmental stewardship, such as trail maintenance and wildfire prevention programs with youth conservation volunteers.View image in fullscreenNone of the personnel cuts make good business sense. The National Park Service oversees resources that cost $3.5bn annually to manage, yet generate more than $55bn in revenue. Protecting such a profitable national asset should be a no-brainer. Despite that, conservation workers have been in effect barred from buying new supplies costing more than $1.Already, the National Park Service has about one employee for every 17,000 visitors, said Timothy Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “They’re breaking the system,” he said. “They’re traumatizing the workforce.” Many worry about the brain drain that will follow.That younger generation’s malaise was touched on in a poignant letter by the US Forest Service chief, Randy Moore, who announced his resignation in March. “If you are feeling uncertainty, frustration or loss, you are not alone,” Moore wrote. “These are real and valid emotions that I am feeling, too. Please take care of yourselves and each other.”Read between the lines: I understand the damage this all does to morale.His leaving was conspicuous, coming at the start of Trump’s anti-diversity zealotry. Moore is the first Black person to lead the forest service. Was his replacement, Tom Schultz, chosen because he is the same race as every other chief in the service’s 116-year history? Or because the former timber industry executive is the first chief never to have served in the forest service? (Or both?)Whitehouse explained that it wasn’t just that the conservation workers were fired, it was how they were fired: the dismissed employees had received a form letter which stated that they “failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment”.Conservation workers deal in hard, natural truths: the forest is on fire, the river is in flood, the bear is there. The “failed to demonstrate fitness” letters are false by any degree of objective measurement.Wade, the experienced ranger, described it with a phrase used for totalitarian propaganda.“All of this amounted to,” he said, “a big lie.”We have been here before.The question goes, why are there public lands? Why protect them?The start of the answer is put nowhere better than the Bible. Genesis, 2:10:And a river went out of Eden to water the garden …When Europeans reached the eastern shores of North America, they found a climate with rain amounts similar to the lands they had left. Land ownership in Europe was feudal, with kings and lords controlling vast expanses. In democratic opposition, Americans distributed small farms and plantations to a far wider array of its citizenry.As the nation expanded westward from the original 13 colonies, Thomas Jefferson maneuvered the public domain into the control of the federal government, so states would not war with each other over land.View image in fullscreenSo far as the rainfall remained similar to Europe, this American settlement system was tenable. But when settlers crossed the Mississippi River in the 1800s, they confronted a new climate: desert.Across vast expanses of the US west, the majority of the precipitation collects as wintertime snow on the tops of high mountains. As was figured out by the ancestral Puebloans, who irrigated farmland and built towns and cities in the American south-west for centuries before Columbus sailed, the key to survival is getting the summertime meltwater from mountain snowpack safely and cleanly down into the valleys where lie the farms, ranches, towns and cities.For this to happen – for our national garden to be watered – there must be healthy mountain forests and grasslands. These mountains and prairies, the vast majority of which were never claimed by homesteaders and never belonged to any state, would become the bedrock of public lands conservation.It is a wonderful fact of nature that some of the most magnificent scenery is where rivers begin: at the tops of mountain ranges. This is why our awe-inspiring national parks – Yosemite, Yellowstone – became the modern world’s first protected public lands. It’s always worth remembering the words of writer Wallace Stegner: national parks are America’s best idea.But national parks proved far too small to protect all the water the dry west needs. At the turn of the 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt made the US the first modern nation to enshrine public lands conservation as a national priority. He created 150 national forests in the west to ensure a consistent supply of water and timber. Soon followed the first national wildlife refuges and the first national monuments.Protecting only parks and forests proved tragically insufficient. Come the 1930s, farmers over-plowing dry prairies and deserts caused the Dust Bowl – the worst single-event environmental disaster yet in the nation’s history. To protect the soil-saving, deep-rooted native grasses, in the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt created the Grazing Service. The protection of grasslands, prairies, deserts and canyonlands heralded a completeness of conserved landscapes.View image in fullscreenThe counterattack to undo public lands conservation began at that point. By the 1940s, some western cattle kings and sheep barons, historically used to monopolizing western ranges, attacked the Grazing Service. Their tool was the Nevada senator Pat McCarran – a role model for senator McCarthy. McCarran toured the US west staging hearings about public lands in which he brazenly gave priority and preference to cattle kings and sheep barons.A McCarran aide explained that a purpose of these hearings was to affect conservation workers “psychologically” – to hurt their morale. McCarran would order employees to attend his hearings and forbid them to speak, while encouraging his curated audiences to shout insults at them.Mass layoffs followed – similar to the purge we saw this February. Disparaged and defunded, the service was amalgamated in 1946 into a new, enfeebled and industry-friendly agency called the Bureau of Land Management.The political exploitation of fear, paranoia, conspiracy, false accusations, show trials, refusal of fair play and apocalypticism could be called McCarranism as accurately as McCarthyism.McCarran’s work still fills our headlines today: it was he who legalized peacetime concentration camps in the case that the president declares an emergency – which Trump does frequently. And it was he, over President Harry Truman’s veto, who passed the 1952 law that Trump is using to jail foreign-born students without arrest warrants.If history offers any hope, it may be worth looking at what happened after McCarthy was shamed off the national stage.In the 1960s and early 1970s came an American renaissance in conservation, and with it the passage of historic environmental legislation. With broad, bipartisan support came laws like the Clean Air Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act.Federal conservation workers today may prove as resilient as those who withstood the red scare – who themselves proudly showed they had the same tenacity and psychological toughness as their forebears in other times of national duress.We only have to look back in time to see plenty of examples. In 1910, the forest service was in its infancy when its understaffed and under-equipped employees battled a deadly Northern Rocky Mountains forest fire as big as the state of Connecticut.In earlier decades, members of the army’s famous all-Black cavalry, the “Buffalo soldiers”, showed the mettle to protect western national parks through an era of resurgent white supremacy.View image in fullscreenDuring the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps put more than 3 million poor, jobless and hungry young men to work planting 3bn trees. The morale and spirit they developed in those hard times is reflected in the unofficial motto they developed: “We can take it!”But we are also running out of time. Trees take centuries to grow, ecosystems take millennia to congeal, and this climate is the only livable one humankind has ever known. An unmerciful fact about public lands is, like some store signs say: all sales are final.A few years after Peterson was fired, his case was re-examined; he was found never to have joined the Communist party. He was offered his old job back.Because of the way he had been treated, he refused. They had broken his morale.This is the point of what is going on. At stake is our Eden. The Bible also has a story about what happens if we lose that.

    Nate Schweber is a journalist and the author of This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild More

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    Cooking the books? Fears Trump could target statisticians if data disappoints

    Summarizing his befuddlement with numbers, Mark Twain observed that there were “lies, damned lies and statistics”.The acerbic phrase later become so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that it once formed the title to an episode of The West Wing, NBC’s portrayal of a fictitious US president played by Martin Sheen.Now professional economists and number-crunchers fear the aphorism could become a White House theme in real life. Buffeted by global markets and public opinion – both of which show a wary skepticism of Donald Trump’s affinity for trade wars – the president may be about to turn his renowned hostility to truths at odds with what he believes towards public servants charged with producing accurate information.A proposed rule change making it easier to fire civil servants deemed to be “intentionally subverting presidential directives” could pave the way for the White House to fire statisticians employed to produce objective data on the economy but whose figures prove politically inconvenient, experts warn.Statistics released by agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) are used by the Federal Reserve Bank to set inflation policy and interest rates. They also form the basis on which businesses and investors take decisions.The US’s global reputation as a stable economic power and a reliable partner goes hand-in-hand with its long history of producing accurate data, dating back to the establishment of the BLS in 1884. Interfere with the latter and you risk sacrificing the former, experts warn.But with Trump under pressure to explain shrinking gross domestic product (GDP) figures amid economists’ warnings that tariffs could trigger a recession, the administration could use new employment rules to pressure workers into “cooking the books”.“There are a number of changes to the civil service that make it much easier for the administration to try to interfere with the activities of the statistical agencies and that worries me,” said Erica Groshen, a specialist in government statistics at Cornell University.While acknowledging that there is as yet “no evidence” the Trump administration has done so, Groshen, a former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), fears a new rule proposed last month by the White House’s office of personnel management threatens the future integrity of federal agencies’ figures.The change, based on an executive order signed by Trump on 20 January immediately after his inauguration, would reclassify about 50,000 as-yet-unspecified permanent civil servant positions to “policy/career” category, thus enabling their removal for “poor performance or misconduct”.The precise roles to be so redefined have yet to be revealed but Groshen fears statistic specialists will be in the administration’s crosshairs.“Bureau of Labor Statistics’ leaders could be fired for releasing or planning to release jobs or inflation statistics unfavorable to the president’s policy agenda,” she wrote in a briefing paper that urges organizations dependent on BLS figures to submit comments criticizing the proposal.“By making it easier to remove employees if a president determines that they are interfering with his or her policies, it increases the potential for passivity or political loyalty to be prioritized over expertise and experience.”Trump regularly cast doubt on the accuracy of economic data when in opposition – calling positive BLS jobs figures during the Obama and Biden administrations “fake” but hailing them as accurate when they painted a rosy picture of the economy during his first presidency.Last month, when GDP figures showed an economic contraction during the first 100 days – partly fueled by tariffs – Trump put the blame on Biden.“We had numbers that, despite what we were handed, we turned them around and we were getting them really turned around,” he told reporters.The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick – who has direct responsibility over many of the statistical agencies – has suggested changing the way GDP is calculated in a way that might provide more upbeat figures but which would mark a departure from established practice and international standards.Diluting data agencies’ impartiality risks adding the US to the category of countries which have had the veracity of their economic statistics openly doubted, critics say. Groshen cited Argentina, whose official inflation figures were rejected as false by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Greece, where government statisticians were said to have miraculously made inflation and disqualifyingly high budget deficits “disappear” to enable it to join the European Union’s single currency, the euro, in the late 1990s.The sleight of hand had dire consequences. The 2008 global financial crash propelled the country’s economy into a tail-spin, forcing it to seek huge loans from the IMF and the EU, which were only given on condition of harsh austerity measures and cuts to public services.Popular anger over the conditions in Greece destabilised establishment political parties and led to a rise in support for radical and populist alternatives, including the leftwing Syriza, which won power in 2015. Frequent elections and changes of government since have raised concerns about the health of the country’s democracy.The IMF also censured Argentina and threatened it with expulsion in 2013 after officials were found to have been grossly understating the inflation rate for the previous six years.Argentina – historically one of the IMF’s biggest borrowers – did not receive another loan from the organisation until 2018. That loan, followed by another in 2022, failed to stabilise the country’s economy and in 2023, Javier Milei, a far-right candidate and professed admirer of Trump, was elected president pledging drastic spending cuts to address its chronic economic problems.Last month saw the fund agree to another $20bn bailout for Milei’s government.Despite these baleful precedents, the Trump administration’s sensitivity to economic figures indicating a tariff-driven slowdown creates a potential spur to follow a similar path, argued Erasmus Kersting, an economics professor at Villanova University.“I would say that there’s definitely an incentive to cook the books, but I don’t think that it is going to be very easy or feasible to do,” he said, citing the US’s long tradition of producing accurate economic figures.“The Bureau of Economic Analysis would essentially need to be silenced or defunded and replaced with some other statistical agency, which would then result in different figures. The same would be true of the Bureau of Labor statistics.”Accurate and unbiased figures are crucial in helping the Federal Reserve form sound policy, Kersting said. In their absence, Trump might have more scope to attack the Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, who he has already accused of “playing politics” by not bowing to his demand to cut interest rates.Kitty Richards, a former treasury and White House official under the Biden and Obama administrations, said data collection had been impaired by Elon Musk’s attacks on federal agencies under the auspices of the unofficial “department of government efficiency,” or Doge.“We should view attacks on government data collection as hand in glove with attacks on journalism,” said Richards, now a senior fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, a thinktank. “Undermining data collection and casting doubt on data that is released is part of a program of undermining the public’s ability to learn the truth.”Even a temporary interruption of the US’s established data-collecting capacity would be a “real tragedy” and lead to a permanent loss of knowledge, she said. “You can’t go back and fix it. If you have a data series stretching back 50 years, then it gets cut for two or three years, you no longer have that 50-year data series. You’ve lost knowledge forever.”Greshen, who is calling on users of government statistics to object to the proposed civil service changes before a 30-day window expires on 23 May, said the fate of US democracy could hinge on the continued production of accurate figures.“In a democracy, you want to be feeding people the right information so they will make the right choices. But if the goal is to destroy democracy, you’d want to control the statistics to fit your story … you want to be promoting your own version of reality.” More