Evelyn Reynolds

More stories

  • 200 Shares62 Views

    in US Politics

    DC rally protests cuts to US veterans programs: ‘Promises made to us have come under attack’

    A flurry of red, white and blue American flags fluttered across the National Mall on Friday as more than 5,000 military veterans and their allies descended on Washington to protest against the planned elimination of 80,000 jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the cancellation of hundreds of contracts for veterans services with community organizations.“I hope that in the future veterans will be able to get their benefits,” said David Magnus, a navy veteran who decided to travel from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after his doctor told him she was quitting during a recent mental health appointment. Before Donald Trump returned to office in January, “the VA was good”, he said, but since then medical staff have faced harassment that puts the entire system at risk.“It used to be, you’d call and get an answer,” he said. “Now, so much is going on that they don’t know where to put you.”Organizers said that in addition to the march in Washington, there were more than 200 corresponding actions across the country, from watch parties to vigils held at VA clinics. Many veterans told the Guardian they came to the nation’s capital on their own after hearing about the rally online.The VA secretary, Doug Collins, has said the efforts are designed to trim bureaucratic bloat and will have no impact on veterans’ healthcare or benefits. Reporting by the Guardian last month found the agency, which provides healthcare to more than 9 million veterans, has already been plunged into crisis. Across the nation, appointments have been cancelled, hospital units closed, the physical safety of patients put at risk.View image in fullscreenDemonstrators said the Trump administration is seeking to destroy the VA, the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, with 170 government-run hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics, and replace it with a private voucher program that will provide substandard care.“We’re a generation of service. We volunteered and stepped up to lead. Now we are seeing the promises made to us come under attack,” said Kyleanne Hunter, the chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and a Marine Corps veteran who flew multiple combat missions as an AH1-W Super Cobra attack pilot.The administration’s proposed budget for the VA, released on Friday, slashes spending for “medical services” by $12bn – or nearly 20% – an amount offset by a corresponding 50% boost in funding for veterans seeking healthcare in the private sector.“We’re already being starved,” said Sharda Fornnarino, a Navy veteran and one of about three dozen nurses brought to the rally by the National Nurses United union. Fornnarino, who works at the VA in Denver, Colorado, said that while politicians in Washington debate permanent staff reductions, essential healthcare positions are being left vacant.With fewer staff on the floor, veterans on hospice “are being left to die in their own piss and shit”, said Teshara Felder, a Navy veteran and nurse at the agency’s hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, said.A blue-ribbon commission established by the agency last year found veterans received significantly better care at lower cost from the public system. Private providers operated with little oversight, they wrote, and “are not required to demonstrate competency in diagnosing and treating the complex care needs of veterans nor in understanding military culture, which is often critical to providing quality care for veterans”.The VA says the budget submission “prioritizes care for our most vulnerable veterans, including those experiencing homelessness or at risk of suicide” and “eliminates nonessential programming and bureaucratic overhead that does not directly serve the veteran”.View image in fullscreenThe march was held on the 81st anniversary of D-day, when Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, a decisive turn in the war against Nazi Germany during the second world war. Organizers said their inspiration goes back even further – to the “Bonus Army” march on Washington in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression, when thousands of first world war veterans gathered on the National Mall to demand promised benefits, only to have the US military deployed against them.Christopher Purdy, an Afghanistan war veteran and organizer of today’s march, said the Bonus Army rally helped set the stage for the New Deal social programs and eventually the GI Bill, which provided higher education, healthcare and home ownership to veterans returning from the second world war.Other speakers criticized Trump’s decision to impose a travel ban on visitors from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, where many of the demonstrators served alongside translators who risked their lives for the US. Shortly after taking office in January, Trump ordered a pause on the US refugee admissions program, putting translators’ safety in doubt.“We all left behind people who are now marked,” said Nadim Yousify, who immigrated to the United States in 2015 after working as a US government translator in Afghanistan and later joined the Marine Corps. More

  • 138 Shares66 Views

    in US Politics

    Outrage after Republican representative disparages Sikh prayer in the US House

    A Republican congresswoman is facing widespread backlash after saying that a Sikh should not have conducted a prayer in the US House.Mary Miller, an Illinois representative, on Friday published – then deleted – a post on X saying that Giani Singh, a Sikh Granthi from southern New Jersey, should not have delivered the House’s morning prayer.Miller at first mistakenly identified Singh as a Muslim and said that it was “deeply troubling” someone of that faith had been allowed to lead prayer in the House and it “should never have been allowed”, Miller posted on X.“America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it,” Miller continued. “May God have mercy.”Miller first edited her post to change Muslim to Sikh – then opted to delete it.Her comments triggered swift outrage, with the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, saying: “It’s deeply troubling that such an ignorant and hateful extremist is serving in the United States Congress. That would be you, Mary.”Similarly, David Valadao, a Republican congressman of California, said on Friday: “I’m troubled by my colleague’s remarks about this morning’s Sikh prayer, which have since been deleted. Throughout the country – and in the Central Valley – Sikh-Americans are valued and respected members of our communities, yet they continue to face harassment and discrimination.”Jared Huffman, another Democratic US House member from California, wrote on X: “I often say that I serve in Congress with some of the greatest minds of the 18th century. With [representative] Miller I may need to take it back a few more centuries.”Meanwhile, the Democratic congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey said on X: “It’s deeply troubling that someone with such contempt for religious freedom is allowed to serve in this body. This should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as free nation, and I believe the conduct of its legislators should reflect that truth, not drift further from it.”Grace Meng, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, also weighed in on Miller’s tweets, saying: “What’s deeply disturbing is the blatant ignorance and anti-Sikh, anti-Muslim xenophobia coming from my colleague across the aisle. There is no place in our country, and especially the halls of Congress, for this hate and intolerance.”Meng went on to add: “The tweet may have been deleted, but we still have the receipts.”The Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus (Capac) also condemned Miller, saying she had engaged in “anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim bigotry”.“Sikhs and Muslims practice two separate and distinct religions, and conflating the two based on how someone looks is not only ignorant, but also racist,” Capac said in a statement.The Sikh Coalition also responded on X, saying: “To be clear, deleting the tweet is not enough. Congresswoman Miller should apologize for her remarks – to both the Sikh and Muslim communities, because no one should be targeted on the basis of their identity.”Similarly, the Hindu American Foundation said: “Whichever version of the tweet [Miller] was going with, it is racist, xenophobic and plainly un-American to lash out over a Sikh prayer. When you took your oath of office [congresswoman] Miller, you swore to uphold our constitution, whose first amendment prohibits your establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another.”Miller’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. More

  • 150 Shares39 Views

    in US Politics

    Money can’t buy him love: Republicans give Elon Musk the cold shoulder

    Elon Musk may believe his money bought the presidential election and the House of the Representatives for the Republicans. But he is discovering painfully and quickly that it has not bought him love, loyalty or even fear among many GOP members of Congress on Capitol Hill.Faced with the choice of siding with Musk, the world’s richest man, or Donald Trump, after the two staged a public relationship breakdown for the ages on Thursday, most Republicans went with the man in the Oval Office, who has shown an unerring grasp of the tactics of political intimidation and who remains the world’s most powerful figure even without the boss of Tesla and SpaceX by his side.The billionaire tech entrepreneur, who poured about $275m into Trump’s campaign last year, tried to remind Washington’s political classes of his financial muscle on Thursday during an outpouring of slights against a man for whom he had once professed platonic love and was still showering with praise up until a week before.“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk posted to his 220 million followers on X, the social media platform he owns – and which he has used ruthlessly to reshape the political agenda.It was a variation on a theme from a man who has repeatedly threatened to deploy his untold millions in funding primary challengers to elected politicians who displease him or who publicly considered blocking Trump’s cabinet nominations.But a gambit that had been effective in the past failed to work this time – and might not be enough to sink the “big, beautiful bill” that Musk this week condemned as a deficit-inflating “abomination”.One after another, Republican House members came out to condemn him and defend Trump, despite having earlier been told by Musk that “you know you did wrong” in voting for what has become Trump’s signature legislation that seeks to extend vast tax cuts for the rich.Troy Nehls, a GOP representative from Texas, captured the tone, addressing Musk before television cameras: “You’ve lost your damn mind. Enough is enough. Stop this.”It chimed with the sentiments of many others. “Nobody elected Elon Musk, and a whole lot of people don’t even like him, to be honest with you, even on both sides,” Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey congressman, told Axios.“We’re getting people calling our offices 100% in support of President Trump,” Kevin Hern, a representative from Oklahoma, told the site. “Every tweet that goes out, people are more lockstep behind President Trump and [Musk is] losing favour.”Greg Murphy, a North Carolina Republican, called Musk’s outburst of social media posts – that included a call for Trump’s impeachment, a forecast of a tariff-driven recession and accusation that the president is on the Jeffrey Epstein files – “absolutely childish and ridiculous”. Musk had “lost some of his gravitas”.There were numerous other comments in similar vein.They seemed to carry the weight of political calculation, rather than principled sentiment.Republicans were balancing the strength of Trump’s voice among GOP voters versus the power of the increasingly unpopular Musk’s money – and most had little doubt which matters most.“On the value of Elon playing against us in primaries compared to Trump endorsing us in primaries, the latter is 100 times more relevant,” Axios quoted one unnamed representative as saying.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother said: “Elon can burn $5m in a primary, but if Trump says ‘that’s the person Republicans should re-elect,’ it’s a wasted $5m.”Trump said on Thursday that he would have won the battleground state of Pennsylvania even without his former benefactor’s significant financial input.But it is also evidence-based. In April, Musk discovered how finite his influence was when a Republican judge he had backed with $25m of his own money lost by 10 percentage points in an election for a vacant supreme court seat in Wisconsin.It was a chastening experience that bodes ill for any hopes he has of persuading Republicans to change their minds on Trump’s spending bill.Yet Musk still has his sympathisers on Capitol Hill, even if they are a minority.With the “big, beautiful bill” still likely to pass through the Senate, Thomas Massie, a senator for Kentucky – who has been labelled “a grandstander” by Trump for his consistent criticism of the legislation – was unambiguous when CNN asked which side he choose between Trump and Musk.“I choose math. The math always wins over the words,” he replied. “I trust the math from the guy that lands rockets backwards over the politicians’ math.”It was a rare case of economics trumping politics on a day when political self-interest seemed paramount. More

  • 225 Shares52 Views

    in US Politics

    The Guardian view on the Trump-Musk feud: we can’t rely on outsized egos to end oligopoly | Editorial

    It would have taken a heart of stone to watch the death of the Trump-Musk bromance without laughing. Democrats passed the popcorn on Thursday night as the alliance between the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest imploded via posts on their respective social media platforms.Less than a week ago they attempted a conscious uncoupling in the Oval Office. Then Elon Musk’s attacks on Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending plan escalated to full-scale denunciation of a “disgusting abomination” – objecting to its effect on the deficit, not the fact it snatches essential support from the poor and hands $1.1tn in tax cuts to the rich.The president said that Mr Musk had “gone crazy” and was angry that electric vehicle subsidies were being removed, claimed he had fired him, threatened to terminate his government contracts, and mocked the billionaire’s recent black eye. Steve Bannon chipped in, suggesting that Mr Musk should be deported.Mr Musk said Mr Trump should be impeached and alleged the government had not released files on the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein because the president was in them. He threatened to immediately start decommissioning the Dragon spacecraft – now key to Nasa’s programme – and suggested it was time for a new political party. The ultimate insult: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” he wrote.Mr Musk later appeared minded to limit the damage, backing away from the spacecraft threat – not surprising, perhaps, when he had just watched $152bn wiped off Tesla’s value. Each man knows that the other could hurt him, via government fiat or political war chest. Yet both are so unpredictable that the row could still reignite.Two narcissists used to imposing their will were never likely to coexist happily for long, despite the advantages of doing so: this was less a marriage of convenience than of naked self-interest. Mr Trump loathes sharing the limelight; the Tesla boss frequently grabbed it. The president is surely as resentful of as he is dazzled by Mr Musk’s spectacular wealth. He was angered to discover that Mr Musk had arranged private briefings on the Pentagon’s plans for any potential war with China – not only a blatant conflict of interest, but perhaps more upsettingly, a sign of his growing power. Mr Musk’s behaviour has also appeared increasingly erratic. A recent New York Times report alleged he took large amounts of drugs including ketamine while advising Mr Trump prior to the election. Mr Musk has described the story as “bs”.His departure from the president’s orbit is good news. Mr Musk implausibly claimed he would save $2tn annually – approaching a third of the federal budget – by taking a chainsaw to bureaucracy. Wild decisions by the so-called department of government efficiency are mired in the courts. But he has nonetheless caused real damage which will not easily be remedied, gutting agencies and departments which took decades to build. People are dying because of his demolition of USAID.Yet while the bond between the peak of power and the peak of wealth has been severed, politics remains in thrall to money. Mr Trump’s approach is particularly noxious, turning wealth directly into political favours and power, and power into further wealth. This is the new oligopoly. He oversees a cabinet of billionaires, and has directed his real estate tycoon friend Steve Witkoff, a man with no diplomatic experience, to bring peace in the Middle East and Ukraine. But though megadonors are heavily skewed towards the Republicans, Democrats too depend on billionaires. Mr Musk is a symptom of the underlying malaise. Democracy requires better safeguards against the unhealthy marriage of wealth and power than the rampant egos of those who command them. More

  • 275 Shares59 Views

    in US Politics

    Musk and Trump are enemies made for each other – united in their ability to trash their own brands | Jonathan Freedland

    The scriptwriters of Trump: the Soap Opera are slipping. The latest plot development – the epic falling-out between the title character and his best buddy, Elon Musk – was so predictable, and indeed predicted, that it counts as the opposite of a twist. Still, surprise can be overrated. Watching the two men – one the richest in the world, the other the most powerful – turn on each other in a series of ever-more venomous posts on their respective social media platforms has been entertainment of the highest order. X v Truth: it could be a Marvel blockbuster.But this is more than mere popcorn fodder. Even if they eventually patch things up, the rift between the president and Musk has exposed a divide inside the contemporary right, in the US and beyond – and a fatal flaw of the Trump project.Naturally, much of it is personal. That’s why so many declared from the start that this was a star-cross’d bromance, whose destiny was only ever heartbreak. Even as Musk was declaring, back in February, that “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” wiser heads knew it was doomed. The egos were too large, the narcissism too strong, for their love to survive. In the Trump universe, as in the Musk galaxy, there is room for only one sun.In their case, the personal combines with business. On this reading, Musk’s disenchantment began in his pocket, his opposition to Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, or “BBB”, currently before Congress, fuelled chiefly by the legislation’s axing of a $7,500 tax credit on the purchase of electric vehicles. With Tesla sales plunging, Musk needed that incentive to lure potential Tesla customers and was furious with Trump for scrapping it. That’s certainly the story Trump is telling. “I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted … and he just went CRAZY!” Trump posted.The suggestion that Musk’s driving motive was profit seems to have particularly antagonised the billionaire, prompting him to call for his former paramour to be impeached and to claim that Trump is named in the Jeffrey Epstein files, in effect implicating the president in a paedophile ring. Musk wants to present his objection not as self-serving but as ideological, casting himself as the fiscal conservative appalled by Trump’s “disgusting abomination” of a bill because it will increase the already gargantuan US deficit by trillions of dollars.Who’s right? It seems a stretch to argue that Trump’s hostility to electric cars was the problem: as Trump himself pointed out, Musk knew about that when he jumped on the Maga train last year. As for ballooning the deficit, you can see why that would irritate Musk. Adding trillions in red ink makes a mockery of the “cost-cutting” drive he headed up with his so-called department of government efficiency.The billionaire was already smarting from the failure of Doge to cut anything like the $2tn in spending he promised would be easy. All he succeeded in doing by, for instance, feeding the US agency for international development, or USAID, into “the wood chipper” was to take the lives of 300,000 people, most of them children, who had depended on that agency and its grants, according to a Boston University study. Even if you are minded, charitably, to accept Musk’s own estimate, he only shrank the federal budget by about $150bn. To watch as that effort was cancelled out by a $600bn tax cut to people earning more than $1m a year would be a humiliation indeed.Whatever its true cause, the Trump-Musk spat has illuminated a fault line in the right – and not only in the US. Battered and quieted by the Trump phenomenon, there still remain a few old-school conservatives with a vestigial presence in the Senate, for whom fiscal rectitude remains an article of faith. While Democrats oppose the “BBB” because its cuts to Medicaid will deprive more than 10 million Americans of basic health cover, these traditional Republicans are queasy about the Liz Truss-style risks of a massive unfunded tax giveaway. Overnight, Musk has become their champion.Ranged against them are the forces of nationalist conservatism, embodied by former Trump strategist and ex-convict Steve Bannon. They don’t have a libertarian yearning for a minimal state; on the contrary, they quite like muscular displays of state power. Witness Trump’s insistence on a Pyongyang-style military parade to celebrate his birthday, and note Bannon’s response to Musk’s impudence in challenging the ruler – he called for Musk’s businesses, Starlink and SpaceX, to be nationalised. Indeed, nationalist conservatism might not be quite the right term for what Bannon offers: nationalist socialism might be more apt, though something close to that has already been taken.There have been other manifestations of this divide. Musk opposed Trump’s tariffs; Bannon is for them. Musk wanted to see the US remain open to high-skilled, tech-savvy immigrants; Bannon wants to shut the door on them. These, then, are the two camps. (You can see similar faultlines on the British right, dividing Thatcherite Conservatives from Reform UK.) For a while, the anti-woke loathing of DEI policies was strong enough to keep the opposing blocs – free traders and protectionists; deficit hawks and big spenders – together. But that glue, as Trump said of Musk, is “wearing thin”.That has some serious implications for US politics and Trump’s presidency. It is conceivable that Trump won’t have the numbers to pass this bill, his central legislative goal, in its current form: the Republican majority in the House is wafer-thin, and one more defecting Republican could sink the proposal in the Senate. Musk has given would-be dissenters cover. The gazillionaire had promised to spend big to help Republicans in the November 2026 midterm elections. Much can happen between now and then, but Trump may now need to look elsewhere for a patron. Who knows, Musk might even follow through on his threat to fund the president’s Democratic opponents. Even if he does not go that far, he controls a prime platform of the right: X could soon become hostile territory for Trump. The point is, Musk is not your usual Trump antagonist. He has as loud a megaphone, and more money, than the president.It all adds up to a sad tale of two men who once had so much in common – perhaps one thing above all. Each has been lucky enough to find themselves in charge of a brand that once enjoyed global admiration and clout – and each man has systematically set about trashing that brand in the eyes of the world. Musk has done it more than once. He bought what had become an admittedly imperfect meeting place of some of the planet’s most influential people, Twitter, and turned it into a sewer of bigotry and lies, X. He built a company, Tesla, whose most obvious customers were high earners concerned about the planet and repelled them by association with a nationalist authoritarian who wants to “drill, baby, drill”.Trump, meanwhile, has taken the US, once a magnet for talent from across the globe, and done his best to dismantle all that made it attractive: its stability, its protection of free speech, the independence of its institutions, the quality of its science and universities. This week’s moves – the travel ban, the suspicion of overseas students, the war on Harvard – to say nothing of the ongoing hostility to democratic allies and coddling of foreign dictators, are just the latest instances of Trump doing to the US brand what Musk has done to Twitter and Tesla. No wonder Trump and Musk have broken up: they were always far too alike.

    Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

  • 150 Shares66 Views

    in US Politics

    Trump’s new travel ban is a gratuitously cruel sequel | Moustafa Bayoumi

    I’m not much for horror movies, but I have just read that the film Black Phone 2 “will creep into cinemas” in October and that, compared to the original, it’s supposed to be a “more violent, scarier, more graphic” film. I’ll pass on the movie, but that description seems pretty apt to what living under this Trump administration feels like: a gratuitously more violent sequel to a ghoulish original.Consider the Muslim ban. Back in late 2015, candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. He signed the first version of the Muslim ban on 27 January 2017, and protests erupted at airports across the nation at the revival of a national policy, similar to the Chinese Exclusion Act, that bars entry of whole swaths of people based on our national prejudices. It took the Trump administration three attempts at crafting this policy before the supreme court tragically greenlit it.While Joe Biden later reversed the policy, congressional moves to restrict the president’s ability to institute these blanket bans – such as the No Ban Act – have not succeeded. And on the first day of his second term, Trump indicated he was prepared to institute a wider-reaching travel ban. He has now done just that. The new executive order will “fully restrict and limit the entry [to the US] of nationals of the following 12 countries: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen” and will also “partially restrict and limit the entry of nationals of the following 7 countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela”.Yes, there are key cutouts in the latest travel ban that make it a different animal from the original 2017 ban, but it still derives from the same family. Green-card holders, those with valid visas issued before the executive order was proclaimed, and professional athletes representing their countries in the forthcoming World Cup, for example, are exempt, illustrating how the administration has learned to write more litigation-resistant immigration exclusion orders.But make no mistake. Such a policy is alienating, counterproductive and simply racist. For one thing, Trump claims that the ban is necessary because the selected countries exhibit either “a significant terrorist presence”, a lack of cooperation in accepting back their nationals, or high rates of visa overstays. According to the Entry/Exit Overstay Report for fiscal year 2023 (the last one available), the number of people from Equatorial Guinea, a small African country, who overstayed their B1/B2 visas (travel to the US for business or pleasure) was 200. From the United Kingdom, it was 15,712.It’s true that the percentage (as opposed to the number) of people overstaying their visas from Equatorial Guinea is significantly higher than UK overstays. But Djibouti, which hosts the primary US military base in for operations in Africa, has an even higher percentage of B1/B2 visa overstayers than Equatorial Guinea – yet it isn’t part of the ban, illustrating how much it is based on narrow political calculations and cheap theatrics.The capriciousness of the policy was immediately evident after Trump released a video explaining his decision. “The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed for our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstayed their visas,” he said, adding: “We don’t want them.” Yet, as everyone knows, the suspect in the Boulder, Colorado, attack is an Egyptian national, another key US ally. And Egypt is not on the list.Nor should it be, because these lists of banned countries collapse individuals into vague categories of suspicion and malfeasance. Why should the actions of one person from any given country mark a completely different person as inadmissible? Trump may sound tough to his supporters when announcing the ban, but such broad-brush applications against basically all the nationals of comparatively powerless countries is hardly the flex that Trump thinks it is. In the eyes of the rest of the world, the new policy mostly makes the administration look like a bully, picking on a handful of Muslim-majority countries, a few African and Asian states, a couple of its traditional enemies, and Haiti.Meanwhile, the rest of the world also sees how the Trump administration has withdrawn temporary protections from more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua, suspended refugee resettlement from around the world, and yet welcomed in dozens of white Afrikaners from South Africa to the United States as refugees. The ethnocentrism of the policy is as naked as it is opportunistic.The truth is that the damage from Trump’s first-term Muslim ban was long-lasting and had all kinds of collateral impact, including on the mental health of family members living in the United States. And immigrant advocacy organizations are already sharply criticizing this latest version. AfghanEvac, a non-profit organization that facilitates the resettlement of Afghans who worked with American troops, stated that the new ban “is not about national security – it is about political theater”. To include Afghanistan among the banned countries, even as thousands of Afghans worked alongside American forces, is to Shawn VanDiver, the group’s founder and president, “a moral disgrace. It spits in the face of our allies, our veterans, and every value we claim to uphold.”Trump’s latest travel ban, his ramped-up immigration deportation regime, his international student crackdown, and his all but ending asylum in the United States add up to a clearly a concerted attempt to stave off the inevitable while vilifying the marginal. Demographers have been telling us for years now that the US will be a “majority minority” country around 2045, a prospect that has long frightened many of the white conservatives who make up Trump’s base. In response, Trump is pursuing a policy that draws on the most basic kind of nativism around, and one we’ve seen before in the United States.The 1924 Immigration Act severely restricted immigration to the US to keep America as white and as western European as possible. Only in 1965 were the laws finally changed, with the national immigration quotas lifted, laying the foundation for the multicultural society we have today. That earlier movie of epic exclusion lasted some 41 years. So far, this sequel is violent, scary and authoritarian. It had better be a short film.

    Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

  • 138 Shares32 Views

    in US Politics

    Trump v Musk: 10 ways they can further hurt each other

    The falling-out between the world’s richest person and the president of the world’s largest economy will have consequences – for both of them.Elon Musk, as the boss of multiple companies including Tesla, and Donald Trump, who has benefited from Musk’s support in his journey to the White House, have had a mutually beneficial relationship up until now.Here are 10 ways in which Musk and Trump could hurt each other if they fail to broker a peace deal.What Trump could do to MuskCancel government contracts related to Musk’s businessesResponding to Musk’s criticism of his tax and spending bill, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday that cancelling the billionaire’s government contracts would be a straightforward way to save money.“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” Trump said.In 2024, the New York Times reported that Musk’s companies – which include electric vehicle maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX – have over the past year been promised $3bn across nearly 100 different contracts with 17 federal agencies.Investigate Musk’s alleged drug useThe New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have made allegations of heavy drug use by Musk, raising questions about Nasa requirements for its contractors – including SpaceX – to maintain a drug-free workforce. The Times alleged that Musk has received advanced warning of the tests. SpaceX has been contacted for comment.Responding to the Times allegations on X last month, Musk wrote: “to be clear, I am NOT taking drugs!” In 2024 he said he sometimes used ketamine on a doctor’s prescription.Challenge Musk’s immigration statusSteve Bannon, a Trump ally and influential “alt-right” figure, told the Times on Thursday that Musk’s immigration status should be investigated.“They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately,” Bannon said of South Africa-born Musk, who is a US citizen.Use general presidential powers against MuskWhen Trump was elected, observers pointed to the myriad ways in which a Musk-friendly White House administration could benefit the financial interests of the world’s richest person. That benign environment, which includes awarding of government contracts and directing federal agencies giving Musk’s businesses an easier ride, could of course be turned hostile.Richard Pierce, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in government regulation, told the Guardian at the time: “All federal regulators and prosecutors work for the president. He can tell them to do something or not to do something with the understanding that he will fire them if they disobey.”Ostracise Musk from the Maga movementTrump, as the leader of the “Make America great again” vanguard, can close doors on Musk. The Republican congressman Troy Nehls excoriated the billionaire on Thursday, telling him: ““You’ve lost your damn mind.” He added: “Enough is enough.”Musk can handle such opprobrium and, given his considerable wealth, he is an important source of funding for Republican politicians.What Musk could do to TrumpTurn X against the White HouseMusk used his X platform, and his more than 220 million followers on it, to rally support for Trump’s victory in the 2024. It also provided a platform for rightwing views that helped publicise the Maga agenda.Theoretically, Musk could at least use his own X account to criticise Trump with as much regularity as he pumped the president’s policies (the Tesla chief executive is a prolific user of his own platform).However, this also depends on Musk’s influence with the US electorate. Five out of 10 US adults say they have an unfavourable view of Musk, according to the Pew Research Center. But it should be noted that seven out of 10 Republicans or Republican-leaning adults hold a favourable view – he’s not going to sway many Democrats who dislike Trump anyway.Form a new political movementMusk, who is worth more than $300bn (£220bn), could divert his considerable financial resources away from the Republican party and start a new political entity. Musk spent $250m on getting Trump elected in 2024, signalling his willingness to invest heavily in politics.On Thursday he posted a poll on X and asked: “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” More than 80% of the 4.8 million respondents voted “yes”.Create geopolitical problems with his businessesThe Starlink satellite broadband platform, owned by Musk’s SpaceX, is playing a key rule in Ukraine’s fight against a Russian invasion, while China is an important manufacturing and consumer base for Tesla. Through his businesses, Musk also has political contacts around the world and is regularly photographed in the company of global leaders. However, any damage Musk causes to Trump’s international standing or interests will have to be balanced with any knock-on effect on his own businesses.Create problems for NasaNasa has a close relationship with Musk’s SpaceX, with the company’s Dragon spacecraft being used to transport the agency’s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Musk immediately pledged to decommission Dragon in the wake of the Trump spat on Thursday – before quickly signalling an about-face. Nonetheless, SpaceX is a crucial part of Nasa’s ISS operations.Tell-all on TrumpMusk has been a fixture of Trump’s inner circle for a considerable period of time and, as the contents of his X account show, he is capable of taking multiple damaging swipes at people. However, members of Trump’s inner circle will have had the same access to Musk, whose personal life is becoming a media staple. More

  • 163 Shares32 Views

    in US Politics

    Minnesota’s Boundary Waters are pristine. Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ could pollute them forever

    The story is co-published with Public Domain, an investigative newsroom that covers public lands, wildlife and government
    A little-known provision of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would open thousands of acres of public lands at the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness to a foreign-owned mining company.The move amounts to a giveaway “in perpetuity” to a company that has lobbied in Washington for years, environmental campaigners say, potentially opening up one of the US’s most famous wilderness areas to water-pollution risks.Earlier this month, conservationists cheered when Congress withdrew from the reconciliation bill several provisions that would have sold off hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land in Nevada and Utah. Those provisions had sparked fury among public land advocates and staunch opposition even from some Republicans, including the representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who vowed to oppose the bill if the land sell-off provisions were retained.Despite that fury, a lesser-known public lands giveaway remained in the reconciliation bill. If approved as currently written, the provision could lease in perpetuity land near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness, an enormous complex of pristine lakes and untrammeled forests, to Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta PLC.Becky Rom, the national chair of Save the Boundary Waters, a campaign to protect the wilderness area from mining, described the provision as “a giveaway of critical and sensitive federal public land forever to a single mining company”.“It is a giveaway,” Rom added. “This is forever.”An ‘irreplaceable’ wilderness areaFirst set aside by Congress in 1964, the 1.1m-acre Boundary Waters canoe area wilderness, as it is officially known, is the only large-scale protected sub-boreal forest in the lower 48 states. Each year, about 150,000 visitors come to partake in the all-American tradition of canoe travel and enjoy a pristine landscape where wolves, moose, loons, bears and bald eagles thrive. Those who come to explore it help contribute to Minnesota’s $13.5bn outdoor recreation economy. According to the US Forest Service, the landscape contains “healthy forests with extremely high water quality”. It is “irreplaceable”.But the Boundary Waters also sit atop mineral-rich lands. Antofagasta has for years sought to develop a copper and nickel mine on public land near the wilderness, amid the headwaters that feed its famous lakes. The company and its American subsidiary, Twin Metals Minnesota, came close to success during the first Trump administration, which overturned an Obama-era denial and renewed mining leases for the project.The Biden administration, recognizing the threat the proposed mine posed to the environment, subsequently rescinded those discretionary leases, arguing that they were legally deficient. The Biden administration also issued an order that prohibited mining for 20 years in the portion of the Superior national forest where Antofagasta wants to extract copper and nickel. Twin Metals Minnesota, which declined to comment for this story, filed litigation to fight the Biden policies in court. That lawsuit is ongoing.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, the companies went to Capitol Hill in their quest to build their mine, which they say will directly employ more than 750 people and could revitalize “the entire region”. In the last three years alone, Antofagasta and Twin Metals have poured more than $1.6m into lobbying efforts in Washington DC, according to OpenSecrets.Among the lobbying shops they retained is Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the powerful firm that was the longtime home of David Bernhardt, interior secretary during Trump’s first term. Brownstein’s employees and its political action committee, in turn, were together among the top 10 donors last election cycle to the campaign committee of representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, the powerful chair of the House natural resources committee.Last month, that lobbying apparently bore fruit. Westerman’s committee unveiled its portion of the president’s reconciliation bill and it contained a major win for Antofagasta and Twin Metals.The bill, which passed the House and is now being considered by the Senate, includes provisions that rescind the Biden administration’s 20-year mining prohibition in the Superior national forest and grants Twin Metals 20-year mining leases to pursue its copper-nickel project on nearly 6,000 acres (2,500 hectares) of public land near the Boundary Waters. It also grants Twin Metals rights in perpetuity to lease renewals and it prohibits judicial review of the leases, meaning that citizens cannot sue to challenge them. Only one party retains rights to judicial review per the legislation: Twin Metals. If the federal government fails to comply with the reconciliation bill, Twin Metals can sue to enforce it.“The reconciliation bill compels the issuance of four leases forever,” said Rom. “To get there it expressly overrides four federal laws, it expressly overrides BLM regulations, so all of those rules that apply to everybody else in the world, the laws, the regulations, for Antofagasta they don’t apply.”“There is a heavy hand in here,” she added. “The heavy hand of Antofagasta.”Pollution fears and pushbackNeither Antofagasta nor Westerman’s office responded to requests for comment. Twin Metals has said its mine will provide a supply of strategic minerals that are important to national security and the emerging green energy economy.For conservationists like Rom – who grew up helping her father run an outfitting business in the Boundary Waters wilderness and has since spent decades working to protect the wilderness area – the major threat from Twin Metals’ proposed mine is water pollution. That threat was described in a 2016 letter by the US Forest Service, when it initially denied its consent to the Twin Metals mine leases during the waning days of the Obama administration. There is “inherent potential risk that development of a regionally-untested copper-nickel sulfide ore mine within the same watershed as the BWCAW might cause serious and irreplaceable harm to this unique, iconic, and irreplaceable wilderness area”.The agency’s letter particularly drew attention to the risk of acid mine drainage, a potent form of water pollution that is a well-known risk of the sort of sulfide-ore mining that Twin Metals and Antofagasta wish to undertake. Any drainage from the “mine workings and mining wastes are likely to be highly acidic”, the agency said of the Twin Metals mine. Any failure to contain such waste could have “potentially severe consequences for the BWCAW” and could “cover a very broad region”.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenTwin Metals Minnesota has denied that acid mine drainage will be a potential threat, calling it a “nonissue”.As the reconciliation bill moves through the Senate, conservationists as well as their allies in Congress are hoping it will be stripped out of the bill before it lands on Trump’s desk. They argue, among other things, that the bill’s Twin Metals provision may run afoul of Senate rules governing the reconciliation process, which disallows the body from including “extraneous provisions” in budget bills.Among the opponents of the Twin Metals provision is Minnesota’s junior senator, Tina Smith, though the state’s congressional delegation is split on the issue.“Senator Smith strongly opposes the reckless Republican provision in the US House-passed Big Beautiful Bill that would give a foreign conglomerate full permission to build a copper-nickel sulfide mine right on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters watershed,” wrote a spokesperson for Smith in a statement to Public Domain. “By including this language in their massive budget bill, Republicans in Congress have made it clear they don’t care about the science or the data, which shows unequivocally that this type of mining poses an unacceptable risk and stands to irreversibly pollute this pristine wilderness.” More