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The genteel, silver-tongued thinker who fathered US conservatism – and paved the way for Trump
4 June 2025, 11:00
Back when the “public intellectual” was still a thriving species in America, the conservative writer William F Buckley Jr was one of the most famous – of any political stripe.On the PBS television show Firing Line, which he hosted weekly until 1999, he debated or interviewed people ranging from ardent rightwingers to black nationalists. In between, he edited the magazine National Review, wrote three columns a week, wrote or dictated hundreds of letters a month, and was known to dash off a book while on vacation. He was photographed working at a typewriter in the back of a limousine as a dog looked on. In Aladdin (1992), Robin Williams’s genie does Buckley as one of his impressions.Buckley’s extraordinary energy is captured in a sweeping new biography that also uses its subject to tell a larger story of the American right. “As far as I’m concerned, he invented politics as cultural warfare, and that’s what we’re seeing now,” the writer Sam Tanenhaus said.View image in fullscreenTanenhaus spent nearly three decades researching an authorized biography that was published on Tuesday, titled Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America.Buckley is often remembered as the architect of the modern conservative movement. For decades he worked to unite anti-communists, free marketeers and social conservatives into the coalition behind the Reagan revolution. Yet today, almost two decades since Buckley’s death in 2008, the conservative landscape looks different. Free trade is out, economic protectionism is in. The Republican party’s base of support, once the most educated and affluent, is now increasingly working-class.Even as Donald Trump remakes the right in his own image, however, Tanenhaus sees Buckley’s thumbprints.One of the biggest is Trumpism’s suspicion of intellectual elites. Although Buckley was a blue blood and loved the company of artists and literary people, he memorably said that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University”. His first book, in 1951, accused professors of indoctrinating students with liberal and secularist ideas – more than half a century before the Trump administration’s bruising attempts to pressure Ivy League universities into political fealty.Tanenhaus, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review, spoke to me by video call from his house in Connecticut. He is a gregarious and funny conversationalist. At one point, he paused a digression about Joan Didion to observe: “Wow. There’s a vulture in my backyard. For God’s sake.” He said he looked forward to reading my piece about him, “unless you’re saying bad stuff about me. Then send it to me and say: ‘My editors made me write this.’”Our free-flowing, one-and-half-hour conversation gave me some sense of why Tanenhaus’s biography took so long to write. It also made me better understand how the conservative Buckley was charmed into the decision to allow a self-described “lifelong unregistered liberal Democrat” unfettered access to his papers, and to give that person the final – or at least most comprehensive – word on his life.The outcome is a lively, balanced and deeply researched book. At more than 1,000 pages, including end matter, the hardback is an engrossing, if occasionally wrist-straining, read.View image in fullscreenTanenhaus was born in 1955, three weeks before Buckley published the first issue of National Review. Writing the book, he said, often felt like a kind of “reconstructive journalism” where he relived history that he had experienced but never considered in its context. As a liberal and an “unobservant, ignorant, secular Jew”, he also had to try to understand someone with whom he had little in common, politically or culturally.Although Buckley’s views on some subjects evolved over time, “he was pretty and firmly entrenched with two foundational ideas,” Tanenhaus said. “One was Catholicism, which was the most important thing in his life. The second was a kind of evangelical capitalism.”Unlike many of his mentors and allies, who tended to be ex-Marxists or ex-liberals, Buckley was not an ideological convert. His father, a wealthy, devoutly Catholic and rightwing oilman from Texas who raised his large family in Connecticut and across Europe, loomed large over his early life.Buckley and his nine siblings were desperate to impress their father. He was loving to his family and also racist, in a “genteel Bourbon” way, and antisemitic, in a more vitriolic way. In 1937, when Buckley was 11, his older siblings burned a cross in front of a Jewish resort. He later recounted the story with embarrassment but argued that his siblings did not understand the gravity of what they were doing.Although Buckley came to make a real effort to purge the right of racist, antisemitic and fringe elements, Tanenhaus thinks his upbringing held sway longer than most people realize. One of the most interesting sections of the book concerns Camden, South Carolina, where Buckley’s parents had a home. In the 1950s the town became notorious for violence against black people and white liberals.View image in fullscreenDuring his research, Tanenhaus discovered that the Buckleys – who were considered by their black domestic workers to be unusually kind relative to the white people of the area – also funded the town’s pro-segregation paper and had ties to a local white supremacist group. After a spate of racist attacks in Camden, Buckley wrote a piece in National Review condemning the violence, but not segregation itself. He defended segregation on the grounds that white people were, for the time being, the culturally “superior” race.Buckley’s views on race began to change in the 1960s. He was horrified by the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls. During his unsuccessful third-party campaign for mayor of New York in 1965, he surprised both conservatives and liberals by endorsing affirmative action. In 1970 he argued that within a decade the United States might have a black president and that this event would be a “welcome tonic”.Despite his patrician manner and distinct accent, Buckley had a savvy understanding of the power of mass media and technology. National Review was never read by a wide audience, but Buckley and his conservative vanguard fully embraced radio, television and other media. A technophile, he was one of the first to adopt MCI mail, an early version of email. Tanenhaus thinks he would thrive in the age of Twitter and podcasts.Yet the current era feels a world away in other respects. For one, Buckley’s politics rarely affected his many friendships. “His best friends were liberals,” Tanenhaus said. He greatly admired Jesse Jackson. It was not strange for Eldridge Cleaver, the black nationalist, and Timothy Leary, the psychonaut, to stop by his house.Buckley was deeply embarrassed by the notorious 1968 incident in which Gore Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi”, on-air, and Buckley responded by calling Vidal an alcoholic “queer” and threatening to punch him. It was an exception to a code of conduct that Buckley generally tried to live by.“If he became your friend, and then you told him you joined the Communist party, he would say: ‘That is the worst thing you can do, I’m shocked you would do it, but you’re still coming over for dinner tomorrow, right?’” Tanenhaus laughed. “It’s just a different worldview, and we don’t get it because we take ourselves more seriously than he did.”Being the authorized biographer of a living person entails a special relationship. You become intimately familiar with your subject – perhaps even good friends, as Tanenhaus and his wife did with Buckley and his socialite wife, Pat. Yet you also need critical distance to write honestly.It was impossible to finish the book “while he was still alive”, Tanenhaus said. He realized in retrospect that Buckley’s death was “the only way that I could gain the perspective I needed, the distance from him and the events that he played an important part in, to be able to wrap my arms around them”.He thinks Buckley also understood that a true biography would be a full and frank accounting of his life. “I think that, in some way, he wanted someone to come along and maybe understand things he didn’t understand about himself.”Despite his disagreements with Buckley’s politics, Tanenhaus was ultimately left with a positive assessment of him as a person. “He had a warmth and generosity that are uncommon. When you’re a journalist, part of your business is interacting in some way with the great, and the great always remind you that you’re not one of them. They have no interest in you. They never ask you about yourself. Buckley was not like that.”He is not sure what he would have made of Trump. Buckley was willing to criticize the right, and was an early critic of the Iraq war, Tanenhaus said. Yet “conservatives can always find a way to say: ‘Whatever our side is doing, the other side is worse.’”View image in fullscreenThis is Tanenhaus’s third book about conservatism. I asked what he thinks the left most misunderstands about the right.He instantly responded: “They don’t understand how closely the right has been studying them all these years.” He noted that Buckley surrounded himself with ex-leftists and that he and other conservatives made a point of reading left and liberal books and studying their tactics of political organizing.But that doesn’t seem to go the opposite direction. Leftists and liberals “don’t see that the other side should be listened to, that there’s anything to learn from them. And they think, no matter how few of them there are, that they’re always in the majority.”Buckley once said that his “idea of a counter-revolution is one in which we overturn the view of society that came out of the New Deal”, Tanenhaus said. Today, Trump is aggressively moving, with mixed success, to roll back the federal administrative state – a vestige of Buckley’s vision of unfettered capitalism, even if Trump’s other economic views aren’t exactly Buckley’s.“It would not be far-fetched to say we are now seeing the fulfillment of what he had in mind,” Tanenhaus said. More
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Trump keeps being overruled by judges. And his temper tantrums won’t stop that | Steven Greenhouse
4 June 2025, 11:00
It’s hard to keep track of all the temper tantrums that Donald Trump has had because he’s so ticked off that one judge after another has ruled against his flood of illegal actions. In seeking to put their fingers in the dike to stop the US president’s lawlessness, federal judges have issued a startling high number of rulings, more than 185, to block or temporarily pause moves by the Trump administration.Livid about all this, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has railed against “judicial activism”, while Trump adviser Stephen Miller carps about a “judicial coup”. As for Trump, the grievance-is-me president has gone into full conniption-mode, moaning about anti-Trump rulings and denouncing “USA-hating judges”. On Truth Social, he said: “How is it possible for [judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP’? What other reason could it be?”Trump is acting like the 10-year-old bully who pummeled a dozen classmates in the schoolyard, but when his teacher called him out for his thuggishness, he burst into tears and screamed: “This is so unfair! Why are you picking on me?”A word of advice to Trump: you should realize that dozens of judges keep ruling against you because you have flouted the law more than any previous president and because you and your flunkies keep misinterpreting and stretching the nation’s laws far beyond their meaning.Take Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, when he announced steep, across-the-board tariffs against 57 countries. On that day, Trump became the first president to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose tariffs. To Trump’s dismay, three judges on the US court of international trade unanimously ruled that he had overstepped his authority and gone far beyond what that 1977 law allows presidents to do. The trade court wrote that the constitution gives Congress, not the president, power over tariff policy and that the 1977 law didn’t give Trump “unbounded” authority to impose tariffs.After that 28 May ruling, Trump’s latest tantrum began.Then, there’s his chest-thumping, cold-hearted rush to expel as many immigrants as possible. To accomplish that, Trump became the first president to invoke the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act in peacetime. twisting that law’s language to declare that several dozen gang members from Venezuela constitute a war-like invasion force, similar to an enemy army, who could therefore be deported without due process. But several sane, sober judges told Trump that he is full of it. There’s no war-like invasion here.And then there’s Trump’s effort to stomp on several prestigious law firms that have done things or hired people he doesn’t like. Trump became the first president to essentially put a gun to various law firms’ heads to try to make them submit to him. He sought to undermine those firms’ business with astonishingly vengeful executive orders that not only said that their lawyers couldn’t enter federal buildings and would lose their security clearances, but that their corporate clients might lose their federal contracts. And then there was the unspoken threat that Trump would block corporate deals that those firms’ lawyers were working on. This is poisonous stuff, punishing law firms for doing what our legal system has long called on firms to do: represent clients, even unpopular ones (even ones Trump doesn’t like).Here, Trump was engaging in a shakedown, in effect saying: “That’s a nice law firm you have. It’s a shame if something happens to it. (So you’d be smart to submit to my demands.)” Again, several judges told Trump he’s full of it, that the law firms hadn’t done anything wrong to warrant such illegal shakedown efforts.There are cases galore in which judges found that Trump acted illegally. Judges have provisionally blocked his push to bar international students from attending Harvard and ordered the release of several immigrant graduate students his administration arrested. Judges have ruled against Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education, his freezing up to $3tn in funding for the states and his firing thousands of federal civil servants.Hating to see judges rule against his boss, Stephen Miller absurdly asserted: “We are living under a judicial tyranny,” while Leavitt carped that judges have “usurp[ed] the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him”. (What mandate? Trump didn’t even receive 50% of the vote, beating Kamala Harris by a mere 1.5 percentage points. Nor did Americans vote for Trump’s tariff chaos or his all-out war against universities.)What we’ve heard from Trump (and mouthpieces Leavitt and Miller) is dangerous stuff. Trump is essentially rejecting the idea of judicial review. Like many authoritarian rulers, he hates having judges weigh whether his actions have violated the law. Trump forgets that under the constitution, judges (not the president) are the umpires who rule whether the president or Congress is following or flouting the law. As Ty Cobb, a former lawyer for Trump, said: “Trump’s attack on the judges is an attempt to undo the separation of powers. It’s an attempt to take what is three coequal branches and make it one dominant branch.”Trump’s attacks against the judiciary are dangerous in another way – they have literally endangered judges’ safety. In the five months before 1 March, 80 judges received threats, but after Trump’s tirades against judges began to crescendo in February, the number of threats soared: more than 160 judges received threats in the six weeks after 1 March. On Memorial Day, Trump loosed another rant, calling judges who ruled against him “monsters who want our country to go to hell”.With these diatribes, Trump is seeking to delegitimize the judiciary and turn the public against judges, just as his unrelenting attacks against the news media have helped cause many people to lose faith in the media, no matter that many news organizations are as accurate and fair-minded as ever (and far more truthful than Trump).Trump’s war against the judiciary has taken another form – his administration has evaded, skirted and ignored numerous judicial orders – stonewalling a judge’s request for information in an immigration case, failing to comply with the US supreme court’s call to “facilitate” the return of a wrongly deported immigrant, dragging its feet in restoring funding that had been illegally frozen.After the trade court’s ruling, Leavitt griped that judges issued more “injunctions in one full month of office, in February, than Joe Biden had in three years”. Leavitt is blind to the obvious reason for this – Trump, in churning out more than 150 executive orders, a record number – has far too often violated the law and the constitution with abandon, while Biden was far more scrupulous in complying with the law.Trump and cronies should recognize that there’s a very simple way to get judges to stop overruling his actions. All Trump has to do is stop taking all these illegal, vindictive actions and stop issuing all these destructive, lawless executive orders. What’s more, considering that Trump once tweeted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he needs to stop acting like a modern-day king or Napoleon who is above the law.
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More
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‘This isn’t just about Trump’: the Rev William Barber arrested after prayer-protest against Republican-led budget
4 June 2025, 10:00
A police officer’s sense of timing seemed to illuminate the Rev William Barber’s moral mission with startling clarity.During a prayer vigil on Monday in the Capitol Rotunda, close to the very heart of US democracy, Barber was lamenting that Congress starts each day with its own prayers to the Almighty even while preying on the poor. A Capitol police captain, John Hersch, serendipitously choose that very moment to intervene.“Your activity right now is taking the form of a demonstration,” Hersch told Barber and an accompanying gathering of clergy. “It is unlawful to demonstrate in the Capitol Rotunda. If you do not cease your demonstration at this time, there is a possibility you will be placed under arrest.”Moments later, after two further warnings, Barber and seven accomplices – standing in front of the portrait of three 19th-century women’s suffrage campaigners – were arrested as police sealed off the Rotunda.The arrests marked the climax of the latest Moral Monday protest organised by Repairers of the Breach, a group founded by Barber that’s trying to derail Donald Trump’s planned tax and spending bill on the grounds that it will slash vital health and social services to lower-income Americans.It was the third Moral Monday Barber had led at the Capitol since April – and the third time he and his cohorts had been arrested.Barber, a social activist and founding director of Yale Divinity School’s centre for public theology, had earlier led a rally outside the US supreme court attended by an estimated 2,000 protesters.As a band belted out gospel songs, demonstrators held signs with slogans such as “Slashing the safety net is moral murder” and “Don’t cut Snap for 40 million poor people.”Wearing a white robe emblazoned with the words “Jesus was a poor man,” Barber – the son of civil rights workers who campaigned for racial desegregation – enjoined demonstrators to crusade against legislation that the US president has termed his “big, beautiful bill” and deemed essential to extending his 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire this year.The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the bill last month by a single vote, 215 to 214. It now goes forward to the Senate against a chorus of criticism over its potential impact on the most vulnerable.Passage would result in 13.7 million people losing access to Medicaid and health insurance, Barber said.“This bill represents the worst kind of evil, which is the love of money … the root of all evil,” he said “This isn’t just about Trump. Two hundred and fifteen Republicans in the House voted for this bill – and now every senator is going to decide whether they’re going to vote for the ‘we’re all going to just die’ approach to politics.”Barber was referring to remarks by Joni Ernst, a Republican senator for Iowa, who faced criticism for telling a town hall last week that “we’re all going to die” after a constituent warned that health cuts could result in some people dying.Ernst doubled down by issuing a mock “apology” filmed in a cemetery, saying: “For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.”Barber compared Ernst’s rhetoric with justifications used by slaveowners.“That’s the same language that slave masters used to tell slaves,” he said in an interview. “They would say: ‘Don’t fight for freedom, but believe in Jesus so that in the eternal life …’“It’s so cynical. What she said was one of the most contradictory misinterpretations of faith I’ve ever heard. It’s theological malpractice.“As Dr [Martin Luther] King once said, we’re not talking about over yonder. We’re talking about over here and people need healthcare over here. People need food over here. For her to bring up religion and bring up Jesus – if Jesus did anything, he provided everybody he met free healthcare. He never charged a leper, or a sick person, or a blind person, for their healing.”The Moral Monday protests have been adapted from similar demonstrations Barber started in North Carolina in 2013, following the election of rightwing Republican Pat McCrory as governor. The protests lasted two years, recalled Barber, resulting in thousands of arrests for civil disobedience but also spurring thousands more to register to vote.As protests against Trump ramp up, Barber is vowing to make Moral Mondays a regular feature of the landscape of dissent.“Moral Monday is not a one-time event,” he said. “If this budget passes the way it is, it will have a negative impact on this country for 10 years. It could possibly not be fully reversed for up to 50 to 60 years. This is serious business.”The protests are likely to expand to encompass a broader pro-democracy agenda. “Our role is not just the budget passing or not passing, but mobilizing poor and low-wage folk. We stand against any attacks on voting rights, on public education, [or] on healthcare,” said Barber.“Poor and low-wage people now represent 30% of the electorate in this country, and in battleground states, over 40%,” he said, making them the largest potential expansion for voting power in the country.In an acknowledgment of Moral Monday’s growing significance, this week’s rally was addressed by Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the progressive Indivisible movement, which spearheaded nationwide Hands Off protests in April that drew millions of participants.Levin praised protesters for having the courage to overcome fear.“People see us organized, and they say, wow, you are fearless,” he said. “Oh no. If you are fearless in this moment, you’re not paying attention. The authoritarians over there, they’re taking over our democracy.”But congressional Republicans, too, felt fear, he said. “They are projecting strength right now. They’re acting as if this is inevitable. They’re acting as if they have the power, you know, passing a bill through the House in the middle of night. [But] that’s not strength, pushing it through before the public can comment on it“The truth is, they’re terrified. They are terrified their voters are going to see what they’re doing. They’re terrified they’re going to lose their majority. And you know what? They should be terrified.” More
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Antisemitic and Islamophobic violence is rising in the United States. Both must stop | Moustafa Bayoumi
4 June 2025, 10:00
This must stop. Two incidents of political violence, both targeting groups of Jewish people, are two incidents too many. Less than two weeks ago, a gunman shot and killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC, yelling “Free Palestine” as he was being detained. This week, a man used a “makeshift flamethrower” along with other incendiary devices to attack a Boulder, Colorado, rally organized by Run for Their Lives, a group which organizes events “calling for the immediate release of the hostages held by Hamas”. Eight people were injured in this latest assault, at least two of them seriously.These horrific acts will no doubt increase the anxiety many Jewish people have about increasing – and increasingly violent – antisemitism in the US. Understandably so. Antisemitism must not be given any oxygen to breathe. One can oppose Israel’s 600-plus day war, relentlessly pounding innocent people in Gaza, while vigorously opposing all forms of antisemitism. In fact, one must oppose both. Such is our duty to each other in a civilized world.And as we have a duty to call out antisemitism when we see it, we also have an equal duty to remember that Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims have also been subjected to extreme forms of violence and bigotry in the US since the beginning of this terrible war. And while we are certain to hear much about today’s rising antisemitism in the coming days, as we should, we must also make sure to acknowledge the rising threats against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.Consider what happened to Wadea al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy. Wadea was murdered in October 2023 by his landlord, who stabbed the young boy 26 times in his home in Plainfield Township, Illinois. The landlord also attacked the boy’s mother, Hanan Shaheen, stabbing her over a dozen times while telling her “you, as a Muslim, must die.” Joseph Czuba, 73, the landlord, was found guilty of murder, attempted murder, and hate crime charges last month and sentenced to 53 years in prison.Or there are the three Palestinian friends, all college students, who were out for a stroll in Vermont during the Thanksgiving long weekend in 2023. They were gunned down in what many are assuming is a hate crime. The three were speaking a mixture of Arabic and English and were sporting keffiyehs, and one of the three, Hisham Awartani, is now paralyzed from the neck down due to the shooting. The alleged assailant, Jason Eaton, is currently on trial for the shooting.And there’s the time, in May 2024, when a woman attempted to drown a three-year old Palestinian girl in a swimming pool in an apartment complex in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Euless. The suspect, Elizabeth Wolf, was arrested after the attack and, in September 2024, a grand jury indicted Wolf on attempted capital murder and bodily injury to a child under and intentionally causing bodily injury to a child. The grand jury also included a hate crime enhancement in the indictment.Or what about the evening when Zacharia Doar and three of his friends were attacked while they were in their truck, which had a keffiyeh hanging off its side. They were returning from a rally for Palestine in Austin, Texas, in February 2024. Their alleged attacker, Bert James Baker, was yelling racial slurs at them when he reportedly pulled Doar out of the truck and stabbed the 23-year-old Palestinian American in the back. Austin police labeled the attack a hate crime, though the grand jury did not include a hate crime finding in their indictment of Baker for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.We should recall that more than 30 protestors for Palestinian rights have filed a lawsuit against campus officials at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and law enforcement agencies, alleging that their civil rights had been violated during protests on campus. Last year, a mob of at least a 100 masked young men descended on an encampment for Palestine that had been erected on campus. The mob attacked the protest for hours while law enforcement watched from the sidelines. As the New York Times described it, “counterprotesters swarmed individuals – sometimes a group descended on a single person. They could be seen punching, kicking and attacking people with makeshift weapons, including sticks, traffic cones and wooden boards.” Dozens of people were injured and taken to the hospital for treatment, according to the Los Angeles Times.These are just a few of the stories of violence and abuse. There are, unfortunately, plenty more, such as the Illinois woman who allegedly attacked a man and his pregnant wife at a Panera Bread because the man was wearing a shirt that said “Palestine.” The woman was charged with two counts of a hate crime and one count of misdemeanor disorderly conduct. Or there’s the bizarre case of the Jewish man in Miami Beach who allegedly shot at two men he believed to be Palestinians but who were in fact Jewish Israeli tourists. While in custody, the shooter told the police “he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both,” according to arrest documents. Stranger still, one of the men who was shot reportedly posted on social media that he and his father “survived an attempted murder motivated by antisemitism,” and then ended his message writing “death to Arabs.”The organizations which track antisemitism and Islamophobia have each recorded record high incidents and complaints in the past year, as the violence of this war blows back our shores. None of this should be happening, and it’s clear that our first line of defense, and our responsibility as Americans, is to stop this war immediately, “before this violence grows and spreads further, consuming even more innocent lives in its monstrous path.” I wrote those words just over a week ago after the murder of embassy staffers in Washington DC. In a grim turn of events, they are even more true today.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More
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Elon Musk attacks Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ tax bill as ‘outrageous’ and says it will cause deficit to grow to $2.5tn – US politics live
4 June 2025, 09:39
Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the coming hours.We start with news that Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, opened a new rift with Donald Trump by denouncing the US president’s tax and spending bill as a “disgusting abomination”.Musk’s online outburst could embolden fiscally conservative Republican senators – some of whom have already spoken out – to defy Trump as they continue crucial negotiations on Capitol Hill over the so-called “one big, beautiful bill”.“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote on his X social media platform on Tuesday. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”Musk, who had previously voiced criticism of the proposed legislation, quipping that it could be big or beautiful but not both, added on X: “It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”He continued: “Congress is making America bankrupt.”A top donor to Trump during last year’s election campaign, Musk departed the White House last week after steering its so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) with the stated mission of slashing fraud and abuse within federal departments. He has argued that the Republican bill will undermine Doge’s work and drive the US further into debt.For the full report, see here:In other developments:
Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene has drawn widespread criticism from Democratic colleagues for admitting that not only did she not read Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill before voting for it, but she would have voted against it had she read thoroughly.The White House gloated on social media about the arrests of the wife and five children of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the suspected Boulder attacker, and joked about providing them with “six one-way tickets”.
In the 48 hours since the firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado, on a demonstration in support of Israelis held hostage in Gaza, Republicans politicized the attack, attempting to blame Democrats, including the state’s multiple Jewish leaders.
Democrats denounced the Trump administration’s “cruel” decision to rescind health department guidance issued in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, striking down the right to an abortion, that required hospitals to provide abortions to women in medical emergencies even in state’s with local bans on the procedure.
Millions of legal immigrants may be left unable to work after the US Social Security Administration quietly instituted a rule change to stop automatically issuing them social security numbers.
A US judge on Tuesday ruled the US Bureau of Prisons must keep providing transgender inmates gender-affirming care, despite an executive order Donald Trump signed on his first day back in office to halt funding for such care. More
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BBC accuses White House of misrepresenting fatal Gaza attack report
4 June 2025, 09:30
The BBC has defended its reporting on the war in Gaza and accused the White House of misrepresenting its journalism after Donald Trump’s administration criticised its coverage of a fatal attack near a US-backed aid distribution site.Senior BBC journalists said the White House was political point-scoring after Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused the corporation of taking “the word of Hamas with total truth”. She also falsely claimed that the BBC had removed a story about the incident.Leavitt launched her attack on the BBC after being asked about reports that Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution centre in Rafah. Brandishing a print-out of images taken from the BBC’s website, she accused the corporation of having to “correct and take down” its story about the fatalities and injuries involved in the attack.The Hamas-run health ministry had said at least 31 people were killed in the gunfire. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) later said at least 21 Palestinians were killed by IDF troops.In a briefing on Tuesday, Leavitt said: “The administration is aware of those reports and we are currently looking into the veracity of them because, unfortunately, unlike some in the media, we don’t take the word of Hamas with total truth. We like to look into it when they speak, unlike the BBC.“And then, oh, wait, they had to correct and take down their entire story, saying: ‘We reviewed the footage and couldn’t find any evidence of anything.’”The BBC swiftly issued a robust statement. It said that casualty numbers were updated throughout the day from multiple sources, as is the case of any incident of the kind in a chaotic war zone. It also clarified that the accusation from Leavitt that the BBC had removed a story was false.“The claim the BBC took down a story after reviewing footage is completely wrong,” it said. “We did not remove any story and we stand by our journalism.View image in fullscreen“Our news stories and headlines about Sunday’s aid distribution centre incident were updated throughout the day with the latest fatality figures as they came in from various sources … This is totally normal practice on any fast-moving news story.”It said the White House had conflated that incident with a “completely separate” report by BBC Verify, the corporation’s factchecking team, which found a viral video posted on social media was not linked to the aid distribution centre it claimed to show. “This video did not run on BBC news channels and had not informed our reporting,” it said. “Conflating these two stories is simply misleading.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe BBC called on the White House to join forces with its calls for “immediate access” to Gaza. International journalists are prevented from entering by Israel.Jonathan Munro, the deputy director of the BBC News, said the claims were wrong, adding: “It’s important that accurate journalism is respected, and that governments call for free access to Gaza.”Jeremy Bowen, the corporation’s international editor, accused the White House of launching a political attack. “To be quite frank, the Trump administration does not have a good record when it comes to telling the truth itself,” he said. “She’s making a political point, basically.“Israel doesn’t let us in because it’s doing things there, clearly I think, that they don’t want us to see otherwise they would allow free reporting.“I’ve reported on wars for the best part of 40 years. I’ve reported on more than 20 wars. And I’m telling you, even when you get full access, it is really difficult to report them. When you can’t get in, it’s even harder.” More
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The spirit of Liz Truss, ridiculous but relentless, still stalks British politics | Rafael Behr
4 June 2025, 05:00
We need to talk about Liz Truss, although there are reasons not to bother. The prime minister who failed faster than any previous holder of the office has much to say about her dismal record, but nothing insightful. She cuts a pitiful spectacle padding out the schedule at rightwing conferences, chasing attention and relevance with an addict’s fervour.Last week, Truss was at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, sharing the big lesson she learned in government. It was that British institutions have been captured by a leftist doctrine and that they “hate western civilisation”. She couldn’t possibly counter this threat from No 10 because supposedly the real power was wielded by a well-financed “globalist network”, operating through such engines of anti-democratic subterfuge as the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization.Truss believes these nefarious forces authored her downfall. They taught her that gradual reform is impossible. Only a “Trump-style revolution” will do. This is her routine spiel. Indeed, it was the theme of her paranoid, self-pitying memoir-cum-manifesto, Ten Years to Save the West, published last year. Her disquisitions on the topic go unreported in her home country. She made more headlines last week from a two-month-old cameo appearance in a promotional video for a whiskey brand launched by a bare-knuckle fighter with a conviction for violent assault. (How that endorsement advances the restoration of western civilisation was unclear.) But a thorough summary of the CPAC speech was dutifully published by Tass, Russia’s main state news agency. Their report led with the claim that “globalists are trying to control the political process across Europe”.It is standard practice for Russian news channels to weave selective quotes from western politicians into tendentious propaganda, except there is no need to take Truss’s words out of context. She narrates the west’s slide into godless decadence without an edit. She provides the frothy conspiracy theories that Kremlin-friendly bots amplify on social media, and hallmarks them with the authority of a former prime minister.A British audience knows the caveats to that status: Truss was ousted within 50 days; a lettuce had more staying power. But the title stands. She really did rise to the top, and not through some freak system malfunction. She played and won the Westminster game by its rules. She had multiple ministerial briefs under three prime ministers. She persuaded a clear majority of members of Britain’s venerable establishment party to make her their leader.Colleagues who suspected (or knew from experience) that Truss was unhinged stayed silent or endorsed her candidacy once her momentum looked unstoppable. Client journalists who had benefited from her notorious indiscretion, and looked forward to ever greater intimacy with power, colluded in the fiction of her fitness to govern.Even now, when the former prime minister’s name is a byword for economic incompetence, Conservatives are euphemistic in contrition. When invited to apologise on behalf of her party for the disastrous mini-budget of September 2022, Kemi Badenoch has said only that she wants to “draw a line” under the episode.The obstacle is not a residue of loyalty but a continuity of belief. The dogmatic engine of Trussonomics – that tax cuts always pay for themselves by stimulating enterprise to generate growth – is still an axiom of mainstream Conservatism. So is Trussite suspicion of the public sector as a redoubt of bureaucratic socialism.Badenoch, like Truss, backs a Maga-style revolution to rip chunks out of the government apparatus. She has spoken enthusiastically about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, adding that Doge methods are not “radical enough” for the bloated British state.The fact that Musk’s purgative rampage through Washington has failed to produce the advertised cost savings doesn’t deter imitators. Nigel Farage has announced the creation of a mercenary Doge “unit” to hunt down waste in the councils that Reform UK won in last month’s local elections.This exercise serves a double function. First, Farage will scapegoat any local officials whose duties can be branded under the rubric of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Second, he will overstate the expense of such schemes, generating improbable nationwide savings to justify tax cuts in a Reform manifesto. Trussonomics will be rehabilitated and rearmed with imported US culture war rhetoric.Farage was once a fan of Truss’s economic policy. He praised her fiscal farrago as “the best Conservative budget since 1986”. The year harked back to the heyday of Thatcherism. These days Farage has to be careful about fetishising the Iron Lady. His party’s electoral base lives in Labour’s former heartlands, so he is a convert to the cause of industrial nationalisation. He now shakes his magic money tree to the left as well as the right.The Tories lack such ideological elasticity. In any case, Badenoch doesn’t seem interested in economics. She is more animated by the crusade for free speech. This, like the demonisation of DEI, is a fixation borrowed from the US right. When JD Vance declared that European democracy was more imperilled by censorious liberals than by Russian military aggression, Badenoch admired the US vice-president’s deployment of “truth bombs”. Here, too, she is on the same page as Truss, who told last week’s CPAC audience that free-thinking dissidents from Keir Starmer’s Britain find refuge in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. (Orbán is Europe’s foremost admirer of Vladimir Putin. He has suffocated independent media and political opposition.)It is hard to know how much of this derangement is conviction and how much is cupidity. There is money to be earned bad-mouthing Britain on the ultra-nationalist lecture circuit, but it is also easy to self-radicalise in that milieu.It is also hard to know how receptive a UK audience is to US conservative manias. Much of the UK right dwells in a US-coded online hallucination of Britain where criminal hordes of migrants have turned city centres into no-go areas and liberal thought police harass law-abiding white Christians.The danger is not that millions of voters will recognise the bleak dystopia as a factual representation of their country, but that it resonates as an allegory of national decline. It is not the complaint that Britain is in bad shape – dilapidation and economic strife are self-evident – but the cultivation of despair by projecting hard problems through a facile, conspiratorial lens. It is the insinuation that existing democratic institutions are not merely failing to make life better but maliciously orchestrating misery.This is the nihilistic cynicism that vaporises trust, corrodes civic culture and makes simple, authoritarian solutions attractive. It is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears and grist to his digital disinformation mills.Perhaps we should be grateful to Liz Truss for playing the archetype of unwitting accomplice to tyranny – the “useful idiot” of cold war parlance – so ineptly. She contaminates any cause she touches.That is why the British right shuns her. But social ostracism isn’t ideological repudiation. The current Tory and Reform leaders are embarrassed by association with Truss, not because they despise what she says but because she looks ridiculous. Her offence was not the grift, but its exposure in ways that might discredit more skilful practitioners. She is not too extreme, only artless in applying the camouflage. She is the crumpled, discarded packaging from a product that, rewrapped, could be delivered once again to Downing Street.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
One year of Labour, with Pippa Crerar, Rafael Behr and more
On 9 July, join Pippa Crerar, Raf Behr, Frances O’Grady and Salma Shah as they look back at one year of the Labour government and plans for the next four years More
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‘Saying Trump is dangerous is not enough’: Bernie Sanders on Biden, billionaires – and why the Democrats failed
4 June 2025, 04:00
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‘I think what Trumpism is about, is an understanding that the system in America is not working for working-class people,” says Bernie Sanders, sitting in the Guardian’s offices in London. “In a phoney, hypocritical way, Trump has tapped into that. His quote-unquote ‘solutions’ will only make a bad situation worse.”View image in fullscreenIn person, Sanders’ 83 years read differently than in photograph, perhaps because of how conversational he is. His voice is magnetic – a Brooklyn accent that feels both warm and tough. “But what I have been aware of, and I’ve talked about it for years, is that in America, the very richest people are doing phenomenally well, while 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck.”Later, he will say the same thing to an audience in London – only with more emphasis and passion. “Sixty per cent. Six-zero. Do you know what paycheck to paycheck means?” It’s exhilarating to hear Sanders speak to a crowd: his zeal is reflected back in their faces, his moral clarity is such a relief, set against the cynicism and resignation of most of the Democratic party’s opposition to Trump and his administration. Class war is as old as time, but it’s a peculiarity of this age that you rarely hear a politician name it. “I do,” he tells me. “There is a class war going on. The people on top are waging that war.”It’s a look at what could have been. Sanders ran, of course, to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, and again in 2020. The first time, there was a real sense, in the US and abroad, that something incredible might happen: that someone with “almost no name recognition,” he says, a senator from the small state of Vermont, might successfully challenge Hillary Clinton, whom the party had already anointed. We all know how that worked out. Was it the greatest disappointment of his political life? “Well, you’re too busy to feel things,” he says. “You’re just working very hard.”What is absolutely unequivocal is his criticism of the Democrats. The party, he thinks, lacks any real progressive promise. “What they say is, ‘The status quo is working pretty good, and we will tinker around the edges’, and that is not a message that resonates with working people”. He refuses to indulge in any personal ill-will towards Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. The most he’ll voice is a weary resignation about 2020, when his campaign “won the first three states, primary states, in terms of popular votes. Then the Democratic establishment made sure the other candidates dropped out, and they rallied around Joe Biden. You know, that’s the world that we live in. We are taking on not just the Republican leadership, we are taking on a Democratic establishment which is tied to elements of corporate America.”During the 2024 election, he “worked very hard to see that Kamala Harris was elected. I was all over the country and was one of her major surrogates. We begged our campaign to start talking about the needs of working people. But their consultants and the money people behind them thought of another strategy, showing that she was more conservative, that she worked with people like Liz Cheney, worked with Republicans, had billionaires going out and saying that she’s wonderful. They thought that was the right approach. I did not think that was the approach, and I was public about that.” He pauses, and not for effect: it’s hard to relive November 2024. “But my voice did not carry,” he says.Sanders started his political life in 1981, when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. His brother, Larry, is 90 and lives in Oxfordshire. He stood as a Green candidate in David Cameron’s old parliamentary seat in 2016. In a speech that year, supporting Sanders as the Democratic nominee, Larry gave a brief portrait of their parents. “Eli Sanders and Dorothy Wexford Sanders. They did not have easy lives, and they died young,” he said. Dorothy was born in New York, to Jewish immigrant parents fleeing Russian pogroms. Eli arrived in the US in 1921, most of his family remaining in what is now Poland and what was then Austrian Galicia, to be “wiped out by Hitler,” Sanders has said in the past. Eli worried constantly about providing for his family and both he and Dorothy were political, Larry said in the speech: “They loved the New Deal of Franklin D Roosevelt, and would be especially proud that Bernard is renewing that vision.”View image in fullscreenSanders’ charge to the Democrats now is twofold. “Their weakness is, I think, that their credibility is now quite low. And they don’t have much of a message for working people, other than to say Trump is dangerous. I think that’s just not enough.” He point blank refuses to get into Trump’s administration – its excesses, surprises, non-surprises, without first walking through everything that was already wrong with the US. “What the Democrats have to absolutely make clear is this: we’re going to take on the billionaire class. They’re going to start paying their fair share of taxes. We’re going to have healthcare for all people as a human right. We’re going to have a strong childcare system that every American can afford. We’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. We’re going to create millions of jobs transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel. We’re going to build housing – boy, housing is like it is here, just a huge crisis. We’re going to build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing. Do Democrats say that? No.”That Sanders will not be drawn on every new Trump calumny, instead focusing on an economic reality that’s been worsening for decades, does help him keep on course. And it definitely doesn’t stop him giving Trump both barrels. “We don’t usually have presidents suing the media, threatening the media if they write bad stories about them. We don’t usually have presidents threatening to impeach judges. We don’t have presidents suing law firms. You add all that together, it is a movement for authoritarianism.” Is it worse than he predicted? I was thinking specifically about the extrajudicial detentions and deportations, students dragged off campus and held for weeks, perfectly legal migrants sent to El Salvador, when they weren’t even from there. “First time around, Trump was not as well organised. They’ve had four years to get their act together, so to speak. And that’s what this Project 2025 document was about.”Project 2025 was a document published by rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation in 2024, offering a terrifying vision for a second Trump term. An outright proposal to dismantle the US government, it was a roadmap to crackdown on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion rights – as well as being against action on the climate crisis and against vaccines. If it looked like a blueprint for The Handmaid’s Tale and The Road combined, none of the alarm last year could ever have encompassed the reality that would come. Among many other things, the Trump administration would go on to deport people without due process, and then ignore a supreme court ruling that an 18th-century wartime declaration about “alien enemies” was not a proper legal instrument.I ask a question about who funds the Heritage Foundation – as it keeps all donations secret, which raises questions about whose interests Project 2025 is really serving. His reply is impatient: “It doesn’t matter who it is they have. There’s no lack of well-paid, right-wing consultants and intellectuals who can move this country to an oligarchic authoritarian society.” His tone is clear – stop getting lost in detail, stop looking for hidden connections, stop messing around and start fighting.“One of the frightening aspects of what’s going on is the degree to which the establishment-type folks have caved in, and so quickly,” he says. “That was much less the case, during Trump’s first term.” He mentions Jeff Bezos, “who one had assumed was kind of a moderate Democrat”, losing his editorial board because they were going to endorse Kamala Harris. “Same thing in the Los Angeles Times. When you have ABC agreeing to a settlement with Trump; the bogus lawsuit against CBS that Paramount are negotiating right now. When you have major, billion-dollar law firms saying, ‘OK, we plead guilty to having clients who went to court against you and your friends, that was a terrible crime, we’re going to give you millions of dollars.’ Harvard has buckled up a little bit and appears not to be caving in, but a lot of universities have. None of this was the case eight years ago. They are creating the overall mentality that it will be dangerous to be strongly critical of Donald Trump.”View image in fullscreenIn other areas, money is talking so loudly in politics that it’s all you can hear. Sanders has used Gaza as an example when he says that politicians are afraid to speak out on Israel’s actions in case Super Pacs – which can put forward unlimited amounts of money for a candidate – will penalise them at the next election. Today, he says it’s not just Gaza, but a host of other issues. “If you say, ‘Do you really think it’s a good idea to cut Medicaid and give tax breaks to billionaires? Do you really think that climate change is a hoax?” there will be a number, not a majority, but a number of Republicans who would say: ‘No. But if I stand up and vote ‘no’, the next day, Elon Musk would say, “All right, you are going to be primaried [a candidate will be fielded against you], and Trump will support your opponent. I will put unlimited sums of money to elect your opponent.”’ Good luck to you.’”While that pattern is undoubtedly visible across many issues, the example of Gaza is particularly stark – with groups such as Aipac, funded by pro-Israel billionaires, putting tens of millions of dollars against congressional candidates, mainly Democrats, that it did not deem to be sufficiently supportive of Israel in the run-up to 2024. As the atrocities in Gaza leave many in civil society dumbfounded, what is the long game here, I ask. “That’s a difficult question, and I don’t know the answer. I will tell you that the United States has had a long-term relationship with Israel, and there are many people who have intellectually chosen not to understand that Netanyahu does not represent the Israel of 20 years ago. The moderate democratic society is now controlled by right-wing racist extremists who have done, and are doing today, absolutely horrific things to the Palestinian people in violation of American law and international law. They refuse to recognise that.” In Dublin, he was heckled for not using the word genocide, and some US progressives were dismayed, two years ago, when he didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire. He speaks out now, choosing his words carefully; he’s not on the fence.Since the end of March, Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (he always calls her that, never AOC), have been holding campaign rallies all over the US from Arizona to Utah. They are deliberately not skipping the diehard Democratic states – but have been more surprised by the numbers they’ve been getting in red states. “This is not a campaign. This is a political rally, and I think the numbers are almost unprecedented. Large numbers of people, including in conservative areas, do not want to see oligarchy in America, do not want to see authoritarianism, do not want to see massive tax breaks for the rich and cuts to the programmes that working-class people desperately need.” Sure, he and AOC sometimes disagree, “my wife and I disagree on issues! But Alexandria, I think, comes pretty much from where I come from.”View image in fullscreenHe has hope for the future, too. There are a couple of dozen people in the house Progressive Caucus – a 98-strong group of the more left-wing members of the Democratic party in Congress – that are “strong progressives”, he says. “Alexandria is maybe one of the most articulate and charismatic, but there are others there as well.” Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib to name a few.Sanders is clear that he and Ocasio-Cortez are not trying to start a third political party. Instead, they’re “trying to build a grassroots movement of working-class people and young people … If you’re seeing candidates now arising who are progressive, that’s down to a lot of the work that we are doing for the 2026 midterms.”Sanders in person is very much as he is in his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, in which he lays out some principles, among them, “wars and excessive military budgets are not good”; “carbon emissions are not good”; “racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are not good”; “exploiting workers is not good”. It’s really the sight of him igniting a crowd that’s so hopeful, which holds for him, too – he keeps his optimism because he has the “fortune of being able to go around the country and speak to large numbers of wonderful people”. The message doesn’t change, though – it doesn’t have to be new: it just has to be true.As he leaves to make his way upstairs to the photography studio, he strides on ahead, his wife Jane O’Meara Sanders, an activist herself, making small talk with me in his wake. It’s not that he’s performing vigour in an era where politicians’ ages are relentlessly analysed. It’s just his manner – all this urgent change should have happened yesterday. More

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