Evelyn Reynolds

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    in US Politics

    Quakers march 300 miles to protest Trump’s immigration crackdown

    A group of Quakers were marching more than 300 miles from New York City to Washington DC to demonstrate against the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.The march extends a long tradition of Quaker activism. Historically, Quakers have been involved in peaceful protests to end wars and slavery, and support women’s voting rights in line with their commitment to justice and peace. Far more recently, Quakers sued the federal government earlier this year over immigration agents’ ability to make arrests at houses of worship.Organizers of the march say their protest seeks to show solidarity with migrants and other groups that are being targeted by Donald Trump’s second presidency.“It feels really daunting to be up against such critical and large and in some ways existential threats,” said Jess Hobbs Pifer, a 25-year-old Quaker and march organizer, who said she felt “a connection” to the faith’s long history of activism.“I just have to put one foot in front of the other to move towards something better, something more true to what Quakers before us saw for this country and what people saw for the American Experiment, the American dream,” she said.Their goal was to walk south from the Flushing Quaker Meeting House – across New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania – to the US Capitol to deliver a copy of the Flushing Remonstrance, a 17th-century document that called for religious freedom and opposed a ban on Quaker worship.Quakers say it remains relevant in 2025 as a reminder to “uphold the guiding principle that all are welcome”.“We really saw a common thread between the ways that the administration is sort of flying against the norms and ideals of constitutional law and equality before the law,” said Max Goodman, 28, a Quaker, who joined the march.“Even when they aren’t breaking rules explicitly, they’re really engaging in bad faith with the spirit of pluralism, tolerance and respect for human dignity that undergirds our founding documents as Americans and also shows up in this document that’s really important in New York Quaker history.”The Quakers, whose formal name is the Religious Society of Friends, originated in 17th-century England.The Christian group was founded by George Fox, an Englishman who objected to Anglican emphasis on ceremony. In the 1640s, he said he heard a voice that led him to develop a personal relationship with Christ, described as the Inner Light.Fox taught that the Inner Light emancipates a person from adherence to any creed, ecclesiastical authority or ritual forms.Brought to court for opposing the established church, Fox tangled with a judge who derided him as a “quaker” in reference to his agitation over religious matters.Following the faith’s core beliefs in nonviolence and justice, Quakers have demonstrated for the abolition of slavery, in favor of the suffrage movement, against both world wars, and the US role in the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, said Ross Brubeck, 38, one of the Quaker march organizers.They also joined protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and the Black Lives Matter protests after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.“Quakers have had a central role in opposition to repression within the United States since its founding,” said Brubeck, who was marching along a trail in New Jersey with companions waving an upside-down American flag, intended to serve as a signal of distress.One the most well-known Quakers was William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania following the faith’s emphasis on religious tolerance. The group became influential in cities like Philadelphia.But members of the group have also faced scorn for refusing to join wars due to their belief in pacifism and nonviolence. Some were persecuted and even killed for trying to spread their religious beliefs.Earlier this year, five Quaker congregations filed a lawsuit challenging a Trump administration move giving immigration agents more leeway to make arrests at houses of worship.Trump has insisted that immigrants are an existential threat to the US. Immigration into the US, both legal and illegal, surged during Joe Biden’s presidency, and Trump assailed that influx before winning November’s election.Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has launched a campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him.“Immigrants are the ones experiencing the most acute persecution in the United States,” Brubeck said. “The message to Trump is that the power is not his to make.” More

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    in US Politics

    The insidious doublespeak of Trump’s freedom of ‘choice’

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    View image in fullscreenFreedom of choice is a venerable American value. Donald Trump’s attachment to it is, however, highly selective.Over the first four months of his administration, Trump has been eagerly promoting the expansion of choice in our economic lives. That’s especially the case when it comes to our role as consumers. Think kitchens, baths and automobiles; the stated goal every time he talks about commodities has been increasing the number of options so we can select and buy what we like best – environmental effects notwithstanding. Even his tariffs are only supposed to bring temporary pain, as in emptier toy shelves, before American-made abundance starts to rule the day once again.In our political lives, though, it’s a different story: the president and his administration have been busy instituting new restrictions on both the possibilities on offer and the picking itself. As citizens rather than consumers, we’ve been explicitly told our options are permanently contracting to “save our country”. No longer, for example, should it be possible to share “radical, anti-American ideologies” in our classrooms or decide how we want to be addressed.As a result, our economic and political existences are now on rapidly diverging paths – with questions about what choice is good for, where it counts, and who is in charge of the menu at the core. What we are seeing is the emergence of a new kind of authoritarianism that still pays homage to libertarianism, but only in the realm of consumer choice.View image in fullscreenA choice explosionThere is a long backstory here. Ordinary people, wherever they found themselves in the world, once had many fewer choices to make than we typically do today – and they didn’t attach as much meaning to the act of choosing either. One of the things that made one free prior to the modern era was not having to make a lot of decisions about where to live, how to make money, whom to marry, what to own or which political philosophy to back.But over the last two and a half centuries, the range of both options and opportunities for choice-making – from determining what to eat for lunch to deciding with whom to spend one’s days and nights – has increased exponentially. The categories of people given the formal power to exercise this kind of self-determination have expanded, too, even as the possibility of being able to use this power has remained wildly unevenly distributed. This isn’t just an American story either. Something similar has happened in countries around the globe that consider themselves capitalist democracies.The roots of this choice explosion extend all the way to the 17th and 18th centuries. The expansion of global commerce in the first age of empire is one major source. That’s when advertisements and displays of new products in western European cities made use of increasing variety in goods, such as colored and patterned fabrics from south Asia, to develop the idea of consumer choice. The Reformation is another point of origin insofar as it shattered the unity of European Christendom, eventually putting religious and then intellectual choice on the table as well.Shopkeepers, auctioneers, itinerant preachers and printers helped lead the way, alongside philosophers and novelists. We might think of all of those figures as early versions of what behavioral economists today call “choice architects”: people whose job is to construct the menus of options and, often without calling much attention to themselves, establish the rules for the game of selection. Their power, even when limited, stemmed from creating the conditions for the flourishing of what we have come to experience as the “freedom of choice”.But it was the late 19th and 20th centuries that truly sped the process along, turning choice-making into a habitual part of life. Along with more to choose with every passing year came a mass movement towards imagining ones’ life story as constructed out of free choices made in our free time. Democracies were a final piece of the puzzle. Though the era of the American and French Revolutions had already established elections as vital to self-rule, after about 1870, one nation after another began instituting and standardizing technologies like the secret ballot that brought political determinations into line with a range of other individualized, preference-based activities.View image in fullscreenToday – at least in theory – we shop for goods, entertainments, courses of study and vacations. We pick our friends, lovers and life partners. We vote for our favorite candidates. We select where we want to live, what we want to do for a profession (though, exceptionally, not what we do when we are actually on the job), whether to have children, and even insurance plans to hedge our bets when facing situations beyond our control. Whole sciences explain how and why we choose what we do and with what consequences. The promise is that, with our own choices, we can get what we personally prefer. And we can be the autonomous people that we yearn to be.None of this is to suggest that the proliferation of choice has been an unmitigated boon for humanity, as critics have pointed out repeatedly along the way. Voices on the right of the political spectrum have long bemoaned the way an emphasis on choice upends tradition, especially in the moral sphere – making almost every decision into a form of marketplace transaction in which individual taste rules the day. Many on the left have agreed to an extent, suggesting that modeling life on a shop window or bazaar – in which a product, human or otherwise, exists for every desire – leads to the obfuscation of deep inequalities of opportunity and the neglect of our obligations to each other along with the planet itself. They have also complained (quite rightly) that choice is always a lot less free, in the sense of unconstrained, than we might think.Still, “choice” has long been a favorite word on both sides of the aisle in US politics (and not least when the issue is contentious, like the future of healthcare). That helps explain why “the right to choose” seemed like a promising slogan in the early 1970s to abortion rights defenders who were eager to find an uncontroversial framing device for their advocacy work in the aftermath of Roe v Wade. Who could object to simply having more choices, especially when the promise was that one could pick in accord with one’s personal values and desires? From billboards to human rights decrees and constitutions, choice has come to stand for freedom itself. It is even a marker now on global happiness indexes; more of one means more of the other. Ever since the end of the second world war, this assumption has made our economic and political lives seem intrinsically linked.View image in fullscreenA shrinking political menuBut that isn’t where we are now. Despite its sporadic and often misleading appeal to the language of choice, the Trump administration is intent on undoing this historical pact between consumer and political choice and thus of a key element of the liberal paradigm. While expanding consumer options, or at least giving the impression this is the plan, this presidency is working hard to limit options in almost all other spheres.Something similar is being attempted by many of Trump’s counterparts in other increasingly illiberal capitalist democracies, from Hungary to India, around the globe. (And perhaps this is not just a story about capitalist democracies – even China could now be understood as a nation in thrall to consumer choice at the expense of other forms of freedom.) But this disjunction is becoming especially pronounced in the US, where choice is continuing its ascent in one sphere (albeit within the constraints of an ever-changing policy on tariffs), just as it is being rapidly circumscribed, in both practice and lingo, in most others.When it comes to freedom of choice for consumers, which has long been offered up as the flip side of deregulation for industries, Trump and his minions are all in – at least rhetorically. They borrow cliches that are recognizable from 18th-century sales pitches promising “the greatest choices” in fabrics all the way to Milton and Rose Friedman’s bestselling 1980 book and TV series, Free to Choose. The argument is as much about personal liberty as economic benefit.Right off the bat, in his inaugural address this January, Trump promised Americans that he was ending the electric vehicle mandate, as well as the rest of Joe Biden’s environmental initiatives, not just to save the auto industry but also so “you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice.” Consecutive executive orders have extended that same logic to appliances, lightbulbs, plumbing and even K-12 education. Undoing regulations that save water and energy and reduce global warming will “safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances”. Getting rid of “federal meddling” will also restore “shower freedom”, which depends upon Americans being “free to choose their showerheads”. As for schools, in which the right has long supported a voucher system so that families can select the educational approach they prefer in a marketplace that includes religious and for-profit along with public options, the executive order states: “Pres. Trump will provide every available opportunity for parents to enrich the education of their children through individual choice.”“Making America Great Again” thus turns out to be largely a promise about an odd kind of consumer paradise. It is not competitive pricing and affordability Trump is after. Nor is it safer or improved goods that would lead to better health and welfare. Rather, just having more options from which to pick is the new holy grail, whether we are talking about dishwashers or elementary schools. Never mind that high tariffs and protectionism will likely make everything more expensive or constrict the field of choice itself at least for a while, forcing parents to buy, in Trump’s words, “two dolls instead of 30”. In fact, under pressure from the business wing of his party, he’s already backed away from the most dramatic of these measures. In the Maga utopia, the deregulation of businesses, especially when it comes to abandoning rules about environmental concerns or racial equity or even corrupt practices, ultimately creates a cornucopia of possibilities for purchasers, who are going to be newly empowered to vote with their wallets for whatever products they like best. Consumer choice is recast as a fundamental right and freedom.Yet apart from the arena of consumption, Trump is little invested in expanding individual, preference-based selection making. On the contrary, in the political sphere, the president seems to be looking to move the US in precisely the opposite direction. Even with falling approval ratings, he is still counting on considerable popular support for a vision of the world in which Amazon offers up thousands of potential possibilities, from movies to toasters, for our pleasure, but nativist chauvinism and a limited repertoire of Christian values curtail options and opportunities for choice in most other domains. He and his fans view it as the function of a strong executive to make both our reality.View image in fullscreenWhen it comes to things that don’t take the form of sellable commodities, the parallel framing around freedom as choice has all but disappeared from the vocabulary of this administration. It’s also fast disappearing from policy itself, as representatives of Trump’s brand of Republicanism challenge both the traditional understandings of executive power and constitutional protections around civil and political rights. The latter are precisely those rights outside the consumer sphere – such as religious rights, marriage rights, and rights to determine political representatives – that have been redefined as matters of choice ever since the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the aftermath of the second world war. This isn’t how they are being defined by the US government now.The ability to make one’s own determinations in ideas, expression and ideology, despite some early Trump administration bromides about the importance of freedom of speech, is on the chopping block as a result of yet another set of executive orders and agency moves. That includes bans, wherever federal dollars or other forms of federal patronage are at stake, on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the investigation of the climate crisis, the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments, or the promotion of history, art or literature that runs counter to so-called “patriotic” education, among other topics. Such menu limitations are already being felt from classrooms and laboratories to federal agencies and cultural institutions, even as court challenges are growing in number. Restrictions on people’s choice of residency or travel are also more visible by the day, not least in the actions of Ice. Let’s not forget, either, new limits on options in our sexual and familial lives – such as efforts to further reduce abortion rights at the federal level and refusals to allow people to determine their own identities – especially when it comes to gender.Then there are efforts to curtail voting itself, which is the primary form of political choice. Kamala Harris tried during her brief presidential campaign last year to tie support for voting rights to abortion rights as similarly threatened “fundamental freedoms”, though the idea never gained much traction. This administration sees things differently.Elections themselves are not likely to disappear entirely any time soon; almost every nation state in the world, no matter how dictatorial, continues to enable some form of voting by citizens. That’s because voting is so closely associated today with the idea that, in any legitimate state, the people’s interests need representation. Trump, moreover, likes to claim a popular mandate for his actions, even as he sometimes flirts with the idea that he is a “king” who is unbeholden to anyone but himself.Still, the Trump administration is already eagerly suggesting that elections won’t be happening in the same way as they once did, after long insisting that any Trump defeat would be a sure sign of election fraud, thus delegitimizing in advance all but one predetermined result. Indeed, as a slate of proposed new rules designed to actually discourage voting in future federal elections makes clear, much of his administration’s energy in these first months has gone into trying to find new ways to limit who has access to political or intellectual or even cultural choices; to take off the table or reduce rather than increase the set of options available; and to narrow the parameters within which choices can be made and registered. What other purpose could, say, new restrictions on the due dates for mail-in ballots in federal elections serve?Even the study of choice-making, one of the great developments of 20th-century social science including psychology and economics, is now being reduced by every means possible, from cuts to whole research-funding programs to the blockage of grants for projects making use of certain prohibited words.View image in fullscreenChoice architect in chiefWhat Trump is doing is not so much abandoning the idea or practice of choice as making himself our nation’s premier “choice architect”. And he’s doing it – at the expense of both the other branches of government and much of the private sector – as part and parcel of the expansion of executive power. That is, he is using the authority of his position to grant the rest of us sets of approved options, from ideas to identities, but also continually reminding us that it is he, as the nation’s chief executive, who determines who gets to choose and how and when and where. Even threats of high tariffs are meant as leverage – pressure tools in a competitive environment, so that the president can tilt the field the way he likes and remake the set of options on behalf of the US consumer. (Artificial intelligence will surely help.)This is a new, 21st-century form of authoritarianism marked by an enduring quasi-libertarian streak when it comes to consumption rather than citizenship. Of course, the freedom of the shopper has never been total freedom. It has always been shaped and bounded by multiple forces, from the interests of business owners and for-profit taste makers to the “nudges” characteristic of anonymous, technocratic policy making, such as using incentives to get people to willingly choose to save more for retirement. But over the last 75 years, much of this choice architecture has become both ubiquitous and invisible, with the promise that personal choice meant personal liberty and that freedom in one sphere would be matched by a similar form of freedom in another.The age of choice isn’t fully going away any time in the near future. It is both too entrenched and too profitable. But in a sharp break from much of recent history, our political and economic lives seem to be heading in opposite directions: investment in consumer choice (even if tempered for now by tariffs) is expanding in the Trump era in part as cover for the fact that political choice, along with choice in how to think and live, is on a steep decline.Sophia Rosenfeld is Annenberg professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (2025). More

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    Casey Means: influencer, RFK Jr favorite – and Trump’s pick for surgeon general

    Donald Trump nominated Casey Means, a wellness influencer and medical doctor with an inactive license for US surgeon general this week – the president’s second nominee to serve as “the nation’s doctor”.Trump abruptly withdrew his first nominee, Dr Janette Nesheiwat, before her Senate confirmation hearing, amid criticism from the right and confusion about her medical credentials.His new nominee, Means, is a 37-year-old Los Angeles-based medical entrepreneur who shot to prominence in right-leaning wellness circles by criticizing mainstream medicine and advocating for a healthier food supply.In a social media post, Trump said that Means “has impeccable ‘Maha’ credentials”.Means’s nomination is a testament to the influence of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr in the administration. Just a day after Trump nominated Means, he told reporters: “I don’t know her. I listened to the recommendation of Bobby.”Kennedy is the figurehead of “Make America healthy again” (Maha), a loosely defined wellness movement embraced by the right alongside vaccine skepticism, new food politics and criticism of the medical establishment.Means’s brother, self-described former food lobbyist Calley Means, already works for the administration. He serves as a senior adviser to Kennedy and as one of the secretary’s leading online mudslingers.However, major hurdles remain for Means’s nomination – including her inactive medical license and criticism from the same rightwing forces that helped tank Trump’s first nominee.“We should not toss out the window everything Casey is saying, but I would proceed with caution given her training,” said Gabby Headrick, as assistant professor and director of nutrition programs at George Washington University’s Milken School of Public Health.“Typically and historically, the person appointed to that role and confirmed is someone who has an active medical license, someone who has completed residency, and has held a leadership role in a medical institution. Casey Means does not have the resumé … She also is not trained in nutrition.”Means also faces opposition from the far right. Activist Laura Loomer, who was critical of Trump’s first nominee, is skeptical of Means – calling her “unfit” for surgeon general and promoting events with Means’s critics.Loomer previously described Nesheiwat as “a pro-Covid vaccine nepo appointee who is currently embroiled in a medical malpractice case”. Covid vaccines and the technology that underpins them have become a target of right-leaning politicians.Similarly, anti-vaccine activists have sought to reassure the “medical freedom” base of Means’s bone fides. The anti-vaccine activist John Leake argued in a newsletter: “I have not seen any evidence that Casey Means is serving the vaccine cartel with her stated objective of scrutinizing the food supply.”Means describes herself as a “medical doctor, New York Times bestselling author, tech entrepreneur … aspiring regenerative gardener, and outdoor enthusiast who lives in a state of awe for the miracle and mystery of existence and consciousness”.She and her brother wrote a bestselling book called Good Energy: the Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. The pair shot to fame on the political right around the time that Kennedy dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. They began appearing at Maha events, on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s podcast, on The Joe Rogan Show and on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.Casey Means’s public statements about how Americans should be wary about microplastics and agricultural chemicals and the importance of organic produce could easily serve as liberal dinner-party chatter. They also show how Maha has adopted concerns once considered the dominion of the left.“The thing that is so imperative for people to understand is that the reasons we’re having surgery, the reasons why we’re getting sick, the reasons American competitiveness is plummeting, the reasons why our kids are chronically ill … are all from preventable issues,” Means told Carlson.Means has adopted more inflammatory aspects of Kennedy’s agenda – including questioning the value of vaccines and criticizing Ozempic, the blockbuster GLP-1 drug.“I bet that one vaccine probably isn’t causing autism. But what about the 20 that they’re getting before 18 months?” she said on Rogan’s podcast.Nutrition experts such as Headrick have applauded Good Energy for its effort to elevate disease prevention. But Means ignores the “root causes” of chronic conditions, she says.“Not once in this book does Casey Means point out that millions of Americans do not have access to a full-service grocery store,” said Headrick.Means graduated from Stanford University in 2014 with a medical degree, and attended residency at Oregon Health & Science University the next year, but she left in 2018 before the five-year program finished. She said she left because she became disillusioned with medicine, while professors and former classmates said it was due to stress and anxiety, per the Los Angeles Times. Her medical license lapsed in 2024, according to the Oregon medical board.By 2019, she and a few others founded Levels, a business based around selling continuous glucose monitors and a subscription health tracking app. The devices, once available only to diabetics, have become popular in the “bio-hacking” movement. Such apps also collect reams of data on their customers, a valuable asset.“I am terrified about any company having this granular a look at my life and my medical information,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.“This should be someone committed to protecting [and] promoting public health, and I’m terrified to see this administration double down on its willingness to treat health as just another commodity.”One of her co-founders is Sam Corcos, who has become a key figure in the Elon Musk-led “department of government efficiency” inside the Internal Revenue Service. The unofficial department helped eliminate more than 280,000 federal workers, including nearly a quarter of the federal health workforce. The company’s backers have also included Trump advisers.Similarly, Calley Means has also invested in health technology. He co-founded TrueMed, a business that helps people purchase wellness devices – including Levels glucose monitors – through taxpayer-subsidized health savings accounts (HSAs) and flexible spending accounts (FSAs). About one in five Americans has access to an HSA, according to the American Bankers Association. Republicans have proposed expanding the accounts for decades.Although Means’s lack of a medical license would normally be disqualifying, health law experts said they would not rule out the administration attempting an end-run around the requirement.“A medical license requires that the individual maintains her medical knowledge through mandatory continuing medical education,” Gostin told NPR. “She is not licensed and therefore should be ineligible to become surgeon general of the United States.” More

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    Arts groups for people of color steel themselves after Trump’s NEA cuts: ‘They poked the bear’

    Summertime at the Upijata Scissor-Tail Swallow Arts Company, an artistic program located on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, is usually bustling. The arts community center, created to help combat high youth suicide rates on the reservation, would normally offer twice-a-week classes to enrolled students. Traditional artists – quilters or beadworkers – would be paid to teach interested participants. It was all a part of Upijata’s mission to emotionally and economically support the vulnerable community, the poorest reservation in the US.But this year Upijata will have to significantly reduce its programming. Classes will now only be held monthly. Instead of hosting 20 students for workshops, Upijata will only be able to accommodate six. The cuts at Upijata come after a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was rescinded last week. The funding, the first time Upijata has received an NEA award since being founded in 2019, made up about half of the company’s budget.Upijata is one of hundreds of groups facing severe budget deficits after the Trump administration swiftly cut millions of dollars in NEA grants. Now, arts organizations nationwide, such as Portland Center Stage and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, are scrambling to cover the shortfall. Groups specifically catering to marginalized communities are also caught in the fallout.“We’re [building] a community where we’re creating a sense of belonging to combat the suicide rates,” said Upijata’s executive director, Shannon Beshears. “If we cannot be that sense of belonging, because we don’t have the consistency, the ability to impact our participants’ lives in a positive way decreases dramatically.”An email sent out to grant recipients on 2 May said that the NEA would “focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President”, several outlets reported. Recipients of rescinded grants were given only seven days to appeal the decision. Several top officials at the NEA have since resigned from the agency following the grant terminations. The NEA did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.Projects being prioritized by the Trump administration instead include initiatives that “elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, [and] empower houses of worship to serve communities”, among others.Grant terminations have affected artistic programming in every corner of the US, and organization administrators have taken to social media to share their shock and outrage. Many of the funded projects are already underway. In the interim, institutions have launched emergency funding campaigns, urging community members to donate. Others say they are appealing to other streams of donation, including private philanthropists. Many have filed appeals with the NEA to have their grants restored. Several of the funded programs are also the signature projects for impacted organizations, such as the annual Uptown Shakespeare in the Park initiative for the Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) in New York City.CTH, known for its contemporary takes on Shakespeare classics and Greek tragedies, was only a month out from rehearsals for their production of Memon, a new play about an Ethiopian king who fought with the city of Troy, when they received news that their $60,000 grant had been cancelled. “They sort of signaled that they were going to do something like this a couple of months ago,” said CTH’s producing artistic director, Ty Jones. “Did I think they would follow through? No, I didn’t.”The production is a part of the theatre’s annual Uptown Shakespeare in the Park festival, which sees about 2,000 attendees a performance. The event generates foot traffic for local businesses. Representatives from New York City’s department of health and mental hygiene also provide community members with onsite services, including blood pressure checks and social service references.In Philadelphia, the advocacy group Asian Americans United (AAU) lost a $25,000 grant meant to support their annual mid-Autumn festival ahead of the event’s 30-year anniversary in October. The event was first founded by local youth who couldn’t be with their families for the mid-Autumn celebration, said AAU’s executive director, Vivian Chang. The festival has since grown substantially, exposing upwards of 8,000 attendees annually to more than 100 local performers.“For a lot of people, it’s a very accessible way to reach a new audience. These aren’t groups that will be on a super mainstream stage, or maybe they’re performing an art form that’s undervalued,” said Chang. “Where do they get to celebrate this? Where do they get to display? The festival is one of the few places for that.”For many organizations catering to disenfranchised groups, the alleged reprioritization is especially frustrating and contradictory. Upijata, for example, works with tribal groups and theoretically should be considered eligible under the NEA’s newly outlined goals, which include projects that “support Tribal communities”. “They said supporting tribal communities [in their new priorities], but in their effort to prioritize supporting tribal communities, they are directly taking funding from them,” said Beshears. “It feels like there is so much back and forth, so much dishonesty.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMany affected organizations were not surprised to see the Trump administration’s attack on funding. Prior to last week’s cuts, the NEA was ordered to require grant applicants not to promote “gender ideology”, as a part of a broader executive order.The National Queer Theater (NQT), a non-profit theater based in Brooklyn, New York, had a $20,000 grant rescinded for its Criminal Queerness Festival, a showcase featuring work by queer artists from countries where queerness is criminalized or censored. The group joined a lawsuit in March with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to sue the NEA over its anti-LGBTQ+ policy. As for the latest NEA cuts, NQT’s artistic director, Adam Odsess-Rubin, said he and staff members are “upset by the NEA cuts, but I can’t say we’re surprised”.“These cuts are part of the larger story of how Elon Musk and Doge have tried to gut the federal government and really focused on eliminating any programs they see as potentially counter to this administration’s priorities,” said Odsess-Rubin. “That includes any programming related to LGBTQ+ issues, any programming focused on Black and brown communities, as well as programming around climate change or healthcare”.Many groups are hopeful that they’ll be able to close the gaps in funding, especially given outcry from the community. But questions of how to handle attacks on the arts in a long-term capacity remain.CTH ultimately decided not to request an appeal, instead opting to focus on future actions against NEA attacks. The theatre hopes to work with the other organizations who have also seen their funds stopped, possibly through legal means.In the meantime, CTH is moving ahead with their Memon production and is confident their community will help them raise $60,000 by June. “I’m one of these crazy people that believes that the power of people is stronger than the people in power,” said Jones. “I don’t fear these people. If anything, they poked the bear. It’s a spark that’s put a flame in motion.” More

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    This Mother’s Day, lets talk about why birth rates are really declining | Katrina vanden Heuvel

    Mother’s Day is here, and while Donald Trump may seem an unlikely celebrant of the occasion, his administration has recently floated several proposals to incentivize motherhood – or, more accurately, giving birth. There’s the $5,000 “baby bonus” for every American mother, free classes educating women on their menstrual cycles and a National Medal of Motherhood for moms who have at least six children. (Want to guess which regime also awarded such a medal?)As usual, the president has offered ridiculous solutions to a very real problem. He’s certainly right that every American should be able to afford to raise children, and that programs like social security depend on stable demographics. But of course, every other action he has taken to undermine gender equality would suggest that this sudden interest in the wellbeing of mothers is less than sincere. That’s exactly why progressives have an opening to break up what the Republican party believes to be its ideological monopoly on pro-family policies.The roots of the fertility crisis engage the bread-and-butter issues that have long been the domain of Democrats. US birthrates have hit a record low not because the nation has become “almost pathologically anti-child”, as JD Vance asserted to the New York Times. Instead, surveys have shown that would-be parents want to own a home, repay student debt and have money for childcare before starting a family. Yet the average age of a homebuyer has climbed to 56, almost double what it was 40 years ago. And 43% of young people currently carry student debt, compared with 28% in 1993. The problem isn’t lack of interest – it’s too much interest being paid on record high loans.But most of the Trump administration’s floated fixes are unoriginal swipes from the undemocratic leaders they admire. In 2017, Vladimir Putin declared a “Decade of Childhood in Russia”, an innocent name for a program that calls for everything from defending so-called family values to encouraging conjugal trysts during workplace coffee breaks to censoring “childfree propaganda”. Meanwhile, Viktor Orbán has dedicated 5% of Hungary’s GDP to pronatalist policies, which include nationalized IVF services and lifetime tax exemptions for mothers with three children. These men are carrying on an authoritarian tradition begun by the original strongman, Benito Mussolini, whose “Battle for Births” portended literal battles that decreased Europe’s population by 20 million people.That’s why those who really care about real solutions would be wise to start offering their own plans, and, in fact, some already have. What the Trump administration didn’t plagiarize from autocrats, they took from progressives, which is why “baby bonuses” sounds an awful lot like the “baby bonds” proposed in 2021 by Senators Tammy Baldwin and Cory Booker and Representative Ayanna Pressley. The legislation would put $1,000 in a savings account at birth for every American child. The Biden-era American Rescue Plan also almost doubled the child tax credit, which nearly halved the child poverty rate. Though making that expansion permanent received bipartisan support, it was ultimately killed by the centrist triangulating of Joe Manchin.Four years later, Democrats have the chance to embrace a genuinely progressive agenda that doubles as a pro-family platform. Bernie Sanders has long called for cancelling all student debt, Elizabeth Warren has campaigned for universal childcare, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among the first politicians on Capitol Hill to offer three months of paid parental leave to her entire staff. The Congressional Progressive caucus has also called for a whole raft of policies that would lower the cost of living, from expanding Medicaid to investing $250bn in affordable housing. They understand that real relief will come not from handing out medals but from having the mettle to fight for working families.Still, even if Democrats manage a progressive populist revival not seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it probably wouldn’t be enough to lift birthrates. In social democracies like Finland and Sweden – which offer 13 months of paid parental leave and cover 90% of preschool costs, respectively – fertility remains below replacement levels.Does that indicate the problem may be more fundamental? One sociologist, Dr Karen Benjamin Guzzo, has attributed this dilemma to apprehension: “People really need to feel confident about the future.” But whether it’s 60% of young people feeling very worried about the climate crisis, or 80% of new mothers feeling lonely, or 90% of voters feeling that American politics is broken, the state of the world doesn’t seem too conducive to domestic bliss. The right’s response to this anxiety is embodied by Elon Musk, who keeps siring children with women he meets on X to create a “legion-level” brood “before the apocalypse”.To help avert said apocalypse, what should be on offer are authentically family-friendly policies that benefit parents and non-parents alike. In doing so, there’s a chance to persuade Americans that the next generation still might have a brighter future than the last. Or, at the very least, that progressives have a more compelling vision for American families than the one whose budget is about to take billions from children’s education, food and healthcare.It’s one thing to incentivize giving birth. Americans deserve leaders who will fight for those kids after they’re born.

    Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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    Maren Morris: ‘I never said I’m leaving country music’

    The year 2023 was a tough one for Maren Morris. The country singer, then 33, reached the end of her tour for her third studio album, Humble Quest, and the end of her rope with the conservative politics of country music industry. Her marriage to fellow country singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd, with whom she shares a young son, fell apart. That summer, her future professional life in question and her personal life imploding, she found herself in the UK touring with the Chicks – three fellow trailblazing, outspoken female artists in a male-oriented music scene who, 20 years earlier, got infamously blacklisted from country radio for daring to criticize George W Bush during a concert at Shepherd’s Bush.“It couldn’t have been a better musical hero backdrop for everything in my life crumbling,” Morris, a five-time Country Music Association Awards winner for such hits as The Bones, tells me in early April. The Chicks, of course, spun the hard-earned wisdom of the outsider’s high road into Grammy gold with 2006’s Taking the Long Way, an album of righteous anger burned to peace. “Any woman who has faced any sort of professional adversity or feeling that betrayal from a community – they just have the perfect album and attitude for it,” says Morris, with typical forthrightness.Morris, too, went her own way that summer. By September, the Texas native – one of the few big country stars willing to call out peers for, say, anti-trans comments, excusing away a video of Morgan Wallen saying the N-word, or general refusal to reckon with racism, homophobia and sexism in Nashville – publicly distanced herself from the industry where she started a decade earlier as a scrappy songwriter. “I thought I’d like to burn it to the ground and start over,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But it’s burning itself down without my help.” She released the two-track EP The Bridge, signifying her move to Columbia from the label’s Nashville division, with a music video that seemed to call out the racial vigilantism suggested by country star Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town. A month later, she filed for divorce from Hurd after five years of marriage.Two years of turmoil later, at 35, Morris can see a clearer picture. “I tried everything I could to make that part of myself work,” she says of her marriage. “I tried everything I could to make the part of myself within mainstream country work. And I think I was just growing apart from all of it.”Things are much brighter these days, though we have escaped the scorching afternoon sun at Coachella’s record-hot first weekend for an air-conditioned trailer to discuss what emerged from the ashes: Dreamsicle, a honey-hued album of reckoning and healing, out this week. In person, Morris is poised and thoughtful, more circumspect than her past burn-it-down comments would suggest. True to her decade-plus career blurring the line between country and pop, she is dressed somewhere between Nashville and California – crochet halter top, denim cut-offs, cowboy boots, multicolor silk headscarf set. She’s in town for some coveted Coachella guest spots – revisiting her breakout country hit My Church with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing her feature on Zedd’s inescapable 2018 party staple The Middle. And also, of course, to take in some wide-ranging sets, from Clairo to Charli xcx – with whom she shares, if nothing else, a career-long interest in the catharsis that is being loud while driving fast; her Grammy-winning single My Church, released in 2016, likened belting in the car to a religious experience, neatly twisting Nashville’s penchant for nostalgic faith into secular gospel.As a debut, My Church evinced Morris’s independent streak, though she came up through the country music system. Raised on 90s female country-pop stars such as Shania Twain, the Chicks and LeAnn Rimes, she had no other plan than to become a singer. Relentless touring as a teen around the state, plus failed auditions for nearly every talent show – American Idol, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, Nashville Star – cemented her country-pop sensibility and vocal chops, if not a route out of Texas. On the advice of Kacey Musgraves, a friend from the Texas honky-tonk circuit, Morris moved to Nashville in 2013 to work as a songwriter for the likes of Kelly Clarkson; she met Hurd the same year, when they co-wrote Last Turn Home for Tim McGraw.This was the height of so-called “bro country”, the prevalent sound of Solo cups, tailgates, cut-off jeans and nameless girls, almost all performed by white male artists occasionally inflected by hip-hop. As an aspiring solo artist, Morris was “deeply respectful to the machine” of Nashville, she told the New York Times Popcast in 2023. Her 2016 debut, Hero, emerged out of a period of questioning who she was writing for, then penning tracks for herself and posting them on Spotify, where she gained enough traction that country’s gatekeepers scrambled to sign her.View image in fullscreenHero immediately shot to No 1 on the country charts and solidified Morris’s precarious outsider-insider status as a new type of Nashville artist – musically voracious, open-minded and social media-literate, where she was unwilling to mince words on racial justice, abortion rights or respect for queer people. With a chameleonic and expansive voice, able to sustain torrential belt, delicate falsetto and a sharp turn of phrase, Morris moved seamlessly between genres and savvy collaborations, duetting with Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys, Hozier, Brothers Osborne and EDM artist Zedd – not to mention the Highwomen, a supergroup with Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires and Natalie Hemby that served as a triumphant, rootsy rebuttal to the country manosphere.Dreamsicle has that all in the rearview, instead preoccupied with present-tense mess given a rose-gold tint familiar to Morris’s ouevre. The album, named for the “perfectly fickle” sweet treat that definitionally cannot last, builds on her longstanding pop-lite sensibilities and stable of collaborators – Greg Kurstin, Jack Antonoff and Julia Michaels, among others – with the roving focus and intensity of someone in the thick of a breakup, broadly construed. “I’m not shying away from the elements of divorce on the record, but I think it’s so much bigger than that,” she says, lightly buffeted by the bass of Coachella’s early sets. “That’s a part of me and will be forever, but it’s not a defining characteristic of me. It’s how you put yourself back together.” Dreamsicle skips through those stops and starts – there is getting by with the help of your friends (grand bouquet), the awkwardness of the morning after with someone new (bed no breakfast), the moment of devastating clarity (this is how a woman leaves), the horniness of the newly liberated (push me over), and the overwhelmed freak-out (cut!).What there is not is any direct jab at Hurd, with whom she co-parents their five-year-old son, Hayes, in Nashville. “We had this amazing love and we do in a different way now,” she says with the tranquility of the therapized. “Now we’re partners in a different sense. We have to be really good, on the same page as much as we can, as co-parents.”Morris also seems intent on distancing herself from the story distancing herself from country music, describing the initial LA Times headline – “Maren Morris is getting the hell out of country music: ‘I’ve said everything I can say’” – as “really unfortunate”.“I never said I’m leaving country music, because that’s not really how I feel at all,” she explains calmly. “You hear country music on this album. You can’t just intentionally take the parts away. There would be nothing left of the sound of me. Because it’s just there. It’s in my bones and it’s in the way I write.”The story “caused a ton of unnecessary drama for me from that community because I was already sort of on the outs. I’m not backtracking what I said, I just never said that,” she adds, noting that she’s lived in Nashville for 12 years – “it’s not going to be some tussle that’s going to make me change my address.” Yes, she moved label divisions, no longer does the country radio circuit, nor submits her music to the CMA or ACM awards, but “I live in Nashville and I work with all my same friends,” she says. “It would be strange to be like: ‘This music isn’t me anymore.’ That makes me feel like I’m shitting on the music I’ve already put out, and that’s not how I feel at all.”“The fans that I’ve made and the communities those fans have made through being a fan of my music is so important to me,” she continues, “so to ever come out of my mouth saying: ‘I’m leaving you behind’ – I’d never be so reckless and stupid.” When I ask what she wished the conversation would have been, a representative interjects – the focus, it’s clear, is onwards and upwards. But Morris clarifies that that was just two years ago, “very much inside the storm that was still brewing” v the “more zoomed-out, healed phase” now. “If you dive deep enough, or if you just listen to the album, it’s very clear that I haven’t left anything behind.”View image in fullscreenMorris may not be up for directly challenging Nashville today, but she is clear on the values it should have, and what history is remembered. We’re in the Cowboy Carter era, where pre-existing mainstream stars from Beyoncé to Chappell Roan, Lana Del Rey to Post Malone, are taking on steel guitars and banjos. “It’s great when people come in and obviously have such a deep respect for the lore and the roots of country music, which people of color started,” Morris says. “Beyoncé telling the history of that in a correct way was so important.” Cowboy Carter’s collaborators, including Shaboozey, Rhiannon Giddens, Linda Martell, Brittney Spencer, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and others, “felt like this amazing melting pot of country music”, she adds. “That’s what it should be.”For a genre, and a country, often so focused on invoking a fictional past, Morris offers a different tradition – the many collaborations between Ray Charles and Nelson, a favorite of hers growing up in Texas and evidence of country music’s multi-racial, genre-porous past. “It’s like, do people remember that that happened? That listen to mainstream country music now?” she wonders. “We’ve been doing this for a very long time. Or at least, really badass artists have.”She offers others – Kris Kristofferson, an army man who advocated for veterans’ aid; Johnny Cash, performing for incarcerated people; Parton’s Imagination Library and status as a gay icon. “These people are famous for this long and this globally for a reason, and it’s not just because they’re from the south,” she says. “It’s because they have an identity and they stand up for the marginalized. They were real outlaws.“If there’s any crisis [in country music], I think it’s that the people that have an issue with any of that forget that their heroes were talking about that stuff before they were born.” And with that, along with one more nod to an album of past heartache – “I hope [audiences] hear themselves in it, whether it’s a past self or who they want to be,” she says – we’re out of trailer, back into the light.

    Dreamsicle is out now More

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    Trump health cuts create ‘real danger’ around disease outbreaks, workers warn

    Mass terminations and billions of dollars’ worth of cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have gutted key programs – from child support services to HIV treatment abroad – and created a “real danger” that disease outbreaks will be missed, according to former workers.Workers at the HHS, now led by Robert F Kennedy Jr, and in public health warned in interviews that chaotic, flawed and sweeping reductions would have broad, negative effects across the US and beyond.While Donald Trump’s administration is cutting the HHS workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 through firings and buyouts, grant cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have also had a stark impact on state governments – and resulted in firings at state public health agencies.At the South Carolina department of public health, for example, more than 70 staff were laid off in March due to funding cuts.“Disease surveillance is how we know when something unusual is happening with people’s health, like when there are more food-poisoning cases than usual, or a virus starts spreading in a community,” an epidemiologist at the department, whose role was eliminated, said. “It’s the system that lets us spot patterns, find outbreaks early, and respond before more people get sick.”“When you lose public health staff, you lose time, you lose accuracy, you lose responsiveness, and ultimately that affects people’s health,” they added. “Without us, outbreaks can fly under the radar, and the response can be delayed or disorganized. That’s the real danger when these roles get cut.View image in fullscreen“It’s invisible work, until it’s not. You may not think about it day to day, but it’s protecting your drinking water, your food, your kids’ schools and your community.”A spokesperson for South Carolina’s public health department declined to comment on specifics, but noted employees hired through grants are temporary. “When funding for grants is no longer available, their employment may end, as happened with some temporary grant employees who were funded by these grants,” they said.In Washington, the HHS has been cut harder by Doge than any other federal department. Hundreds of grants to state, local and tribal governments, as well as to research institutions, have been eliminated, worth over $6.8bn in unpaid obligations.The HHS receives about a quarter of all federal spending, with the majority disbursed to states for health programs and services such as Medicare and Medicaid, the insurance programs; medical research; and food and drug safety. Trump’s budget proposal calls for cutting the department’s discretionary spending by 26.2%, or $33.3bn.RFK Jr, who has a history of promoting conspiracy theories and medical misinformation, was nominated by Trump and approved by the Senate along party lines, with Mitch McConnell the sole Republican dissenter.Following a reduction in force of 10,000 employees on 1 April, Kennedy Jr claimed 20% of the firings were in error and that those workers would be reinstated, though that has not happened.An HHS spokesperson blamed any such errors on data-collection issues, and did not comment on any other aspects of the Guardian’s reporting.Aids relief program ‘dismantled’At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an operating division of the HHS, employees working on maternal and child health at the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) program were shocked to be included in the reduction in force, as earlier in the administration their work had received a waiver for parts of the program from federal funding freezes.All federal experts on HIV prevention in children overseas were fired as part of the reduction in force.“Our concern initially was that it was a mistake with the name. We hoped around that time it came out that there were 20% errors, that we would be included,” said an epidemiologist who was included in the reduction in force, but requested to remain anonymous as they are currently on administrative leave. They also noted that they were in the middle of planning and delivering a new pediatric HIV treatment medication set to be dispersed this year, and that that work was now at risk.View image in fullscreenThey said 22 epidemiologists in the branch of their CDC division had been fired. Pepfar was created in 2003 by George W Bush to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission and credited with saving 26 million lives.“We were very shocked on April 1 that we were put immediately on admin leave,” said another epidemiologist affected by the reduction in force at the CDC. “We really feel our branch being cut was a mistake. The state department had said services were a priority and needed to continue, but then we were cut by HHS.”They noted HIV treatment had already stopped in regions of countries that had been reliant on USAID programs, such as Zambia.“It is one of the most successful global health programs in history, data driven with high levels of accountability and the dollars spent achieve impact. Our concern now is, yes, they are continuing Pepfar in name, but they are dismantling all the systems and structure that allowed it to succeed,” they added. “The US made a huge investment in this program in 20 years and a lot of it is now undone. We’ve now disrupted those systems that could have reduced and eventually removed US investment in these programs.”‘Long-term impact’ on US familiesInside the HHS, the Administration for Children and Families is responsible for enforcing court-ordered child-support payments. For every dollar it receives in federal funding, ACF says it is able to collect $5 in child support.A child-support specialist with the HHS, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said reductions in force at the department have increased workloads on those who were not fired by multiple times, making it so state and tribal agencies have no way of ensuring they are compliant with federal requirements.“The regional staff with direct oversight of the program are gone,” they said. “There are entire regions that have two staff members managing a quarter of the work for the program with no management, no support, no knowledge of the program.”After the Trump administration took office, the agency was under an unofficial stop-work order, where staff were not permitted to provide guidance or support to grantees or even answer phones, until late February, the specialist said. A reduction in force followed on 1 April, when, the child-support specialist claimed, about half the ACF staff working on child support were fired.Their department is responsible for overseeing child-support programs at state, tribal and local levels. States “could very well lose millions of dollars in funding” if ACF does not provide key training and assistance and the states do not have qualified staff, the specialist cautioned. “And that is the long-term impact to vulnerable children and families in the country.”They added: “The entire function of the program is to give economic stability to children and families, so that they do not depend on any other government program, or their reliance on these programs is lower, because the children are supported by both parents.”‘A living hell’At the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also within the HHS, one of 300 workers terminated as part of a reduction in force claimed it had been illegal, and had not followed any proper procedures. The National Treasury Employees Union has filed a grievance over how the firings were carried out, including incorrect information on notices.They explained that, on 1 April, they received a generic letter informing them of an intent of reduction in force. Hours later, they were locked out of their government logins. “We started emailing the management that was left, trying to get clarification on what our status was. Nobody could give us an answer,” the worker said.On 7 April, they discovered through their paystub that they had been placed on administrative leave, despite never receiving a notice. They didn’t receive an RIF notice until weeks later, after requesting it.“Based on my tenure, and as a disabled veteran, I should at least have a chance of reassignment,” they said. “I’m not mad about losing my job. It happens. I’ve been laid off. The first time was in the private sector, and it was way more humane, more empathetic, and I was given different offers.“This, on the other hand, is unbridled hate. This administration has gone out of their way to make it a living hell for all of its public servants.” More

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    Trump to embark on Middle East trip to meet Gulf allies

    Donald Trump this week will embark on the first foreign trip of his second administration with a tour of the Middle East, as he looks to secure investment, trade and technology deals from friendly leaders with deep pockets amid turbulent negotiations around numerous regional conflicts, including Israel’s war in Gaza.The tour through the Middle East is largely a repeat of his first international trip in 2017, when he was feted in the region as a transactional leader eager to secure quick wins and capable of providing support for the regional monarchies’ economic and geopolitical interests.His negotiations in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will focus on a number of topics, including oil and trade, investment deals, the regional conflicts in Israel-Gaza and Yemen, and negotiations over the Iran nuclear programme among other issues.But Trump’s key goal is to come out of the region saying that he put America first, say observers.“I think what he’s clearly looking to get out of this is deals, the announcement of multiple multi-billion dollar deals,” said Steven A Cook, the senior fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.“The president’s approach to foreign policy is heavily influenced by … his version of economic statecraft, which is to look towards the wealthy states in the Gulf and their very large sovereign wealth funds as sources of investment in the United States,” he said.Trump has already announced Saudi Arabia’s commitment to invest $1tn into the US economy and is hoping to secure big-ticket investments on Monday’s visit. That would be consistent with his America First policy of prioritising domestic interests, Cook said.Those countries may also seek access to advanced US semiconductor exports, and Saudi Arabia will want to ink a deal on civilian nuclear infrastructure, which had previously been tied to the country’s normalisation of relations with Israel. In a departure from previous policy, the Trump administration has indicated the two issues are no longer linked.The Middle East trip is notable for the US president’s lack of plans to visit Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet have floated plans to launch a larger invasion of Gaza and expel the Palestinian population there in what critics have called a broad plan of ethnic cleansing.The Israel-Gaza war will loom large over the negotiations, as Saudi Arabia has said it will not normalise relations with Israel unless there is a clear path to a two-state solution, and many countries in the Middle East have spoken out against a proposal that began with Trump to expel Palestinian from Gaza to other Arab countries.“He could have gone to Israel like he did last time,” said Elliot Abrams, former deputy national security advisor under President George W Bush and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, had cancelled a planned trip to Israel. “I think there’s some tension here … [Israel] knows that Trump is going to be spending a week in the Gulf hearing about Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza every day. So it’s not the best moment in US-Israel or Trump-Israel relations.”There is a growing understanding in Washington and Israel that Trump has taken a step back from attempting to mediate the war in Gaza. His administration said that they would negotiate a new aid deal without the direct involvement of the Israeli government to renew deliveries of aid into Gaza, which is suffering its worst humanitarian crisis of the war since a ceasefire collapsed in March.“He’s the only one who speaks the same language as Netanyahu, and he’s the only one who can speak to Netanyahu in a language that Netanyahu will understand,” said Ami Ayalon, a former director of the Israel Security Agency, also known as the Shin Bet.“Trump again, when it comes to to the hostages, when it comes to our relations in the Palestinians, has become the center of everything in the Middle East,” he said.That turns Trump’s attention to the things he can get done.He has said that he plans to decide on his trip to Saudi Arabia on an announcement that the US could refer to the Arabian Gulf or the Gulf of Arabia rather than the Persian Gulf.That has angered Iran at a moment when the Gulf states appear largely in support of US efforts in talks on the future of the Iranian nuclear programme. As opposed to 2017, the Gulf states have largely spoken in support of renewed negotiations between the United States and Iran over the nuclear programme, but those governments were said to be unclear on the details of any deal as of yet.“US partners have confided to me that there are US statements on all of these issues, but they don’t yet see US policies,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at CSIS, a thinktank. “The US government doesn’t speak with one voice and its actions remain uncoordinated.”In Saudi Arabia, Trump has enlisted his son-in-law Jared Kushner to act as a point man for the discussions ahead of the trip, CNN has reported. Kushner, who was Trump’s envoy to the region during his first administration, is said to be tasked with making progress in discussions of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham accords. But his role is also tainted by a perceived conflict-of-interest given his family’s business interests in the region.Yet with such a complicated tableau of economic and geopolitical interests in the region, there are questions about whether the Trump administration has the focus and the team to pursue a comprehensive policy in the region. Many in Trump’s orbit say that US policy should place lower priority on the Middle East, and focus instead on China and the Indo-Pacific region.“I think the sense that there’s these pieces that the President is negotiating don’t respond together, and that his priority really is essentially domestic focus, securing, you know, agreements to invest in the estates,” said Cook. “Regionally, the president would like these issues to go away, and that’s why he has these compressed timelines he doesn’t want to focus on.” More