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    Trump and Musk trade barbs as rift over tax and spend bill erupts into open

    A public feud erupted between Donald Trump and Elon Musk on Thursday, with the president saying he was “very disappointed” by the former adviser’s opposition to his top legislative priority, and Musk firing back that Trump would not have won election without his financial support.The falling-out came days after Musk had stepped down as head of Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and then pivoted to attacking the One Big Beautiful Bill, which would extend tax cuts, fund beefed-up immigration enforcement and impose new work requirements for enrollees of federal safety net programs.While the Tesla CEO has focused his complaints on the price tag of the bill, which the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will add $2.4tn to the deficit over the next decade, Trump accused him of turning against it because of provisions revoking incentives for consumers to purchase electric vehicles.“I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot,” Trump said, adding that “he knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody, and he never had a problem until right after he left.”“Look, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will any more,” the president said.Musk responded almost immediately on X, saying that the president’s comment was “false”, and “this bill was never shown to me even once”. He then pivoted to personal attacks on Trump, after praising him just days earlier in an Oval Office appearance to mark the end of his time leading Doge.“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” he said, responding to a video of Trump’s remarks. “Such ingratitude.”The tech boss’s criticism has become the latest obstacle facing the One Big Beautiful Bill , which the House of Representatives approved last month by a single vote.The Senate this week began considering the bill, not long after Musk commenced the barrage of tweets over its cost, which he warned would undo Doge’s efforts to save the government money by cancelling programs and pushing federal workers out of their jobs. Musk said he believed the initiative could reduce spending by $1tn, though its own dashboard shows it has saved less than 20% of that amount since Trump was inaugurated.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, spent weeks negotiating with his fractious Republican majority to get the bill passed narrowly through his chamber, and on Wednesday said he had been trying to speak with Musk about his concerns. In an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday, he called the Tesla CEO “a good friend” and said the two had exchanged text messages ahead of a call he expected to take place that morning.View image in fullscreen“I just want to make sure that he understands what I think everybody on Capitol Hill understands. This is not a spending bill, my friends, this is a a budget reconciliation bill. And what we’re doing here is delivering the America first agenda,” Johnson said.“He seems pretty dug in right now, and I can’t quite understand the motivation behind it,” the speaker added.Later in the day, Johnson told reporters at the Capitol that the call did not take place, but that the disagreement “isn’t personal”. On X, Musk publicly questioned Johnson’s resolve to cut government spending, prompting the speaker to reply that he “has always been a lifelong fiscal hawk”.The Senate’s Republican leaders have shown no indication that they share Musk’s concerns. Instead, they are eyeing changes to some aspects of the measure that were the result of hard-fought negotiations in the House, and could throw its prospects of passage into jeopardy.One issue that has reappeared is the deductibility of state and local tax (Salt) payments, which the tax bill passed under Trump in 2017 limited to $10,000 per household. House Republicans representing districts in Democratic-run states that have higher tax burdens managed to get a provision increasing the deduction to $40,000 into the One Big Beautiful Bill act.But there are almost no Republican senators representing blue states. The majority leader, John Thune, said after a meeting with Trump on Wednesday that his lawmakers were not inclined to keep that provision as they negotiate the bill.“We also start from a position that there really isn’t a single Republican senator who cares much about the Salt issue. It’s just not an issue that plays,” Thune said.That could upset the balance of power in the House, where Republicans can lose no more than three votes on any bill that passes along party lines. More

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    US state department says World Cup fans ‘want to see’ Donald Trump’s travel ban

    A US state department spokesperson on Thursday claimed that attendees of the upcoming World Cup and Olympics should support the restrictions on travel from 19 countries ordered by Donald Trump.On Wednesday evening, the US president signed a sweeping order banning travel from 12 countries and restricting travel from seven others, reviving and expanding a policy from his first term.“I think people from around the world, and Americans going to these events, would want to see actions like this,” said US state department spokesperson Tommy Pigott at a press briefing on Thursday afternoon. “This is part of what it means to host an event. We take security concerns extremely seriously, we want people to be able to go to the World Cup and do so safely.”The order claims at various points that the restrictions are a response to supposed deficiencies in each country’s own vetting procedures. Pressed on Thursday on what relevance other country’s procedures had on the US’s ability to vet immigrants themselves, Pigott declined to elaborate.Nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen will be “fully” restricted from entering the US, according to Wednesday’s proclamation. Meanwhile, the entry of nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela will be partly restricted. The order is set to go into effect on 9 June.The order does contain an exception for “any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives, travelling for the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event as determined by the secretary of state.” However, that exception does not explicitly cover a number of specific cases or situations that will be relevant for players from affected countries who intend to play in the United States.First, the exception does not specify whether the “World Cup” referred to in the order includes the Club World Cup, which starts this month and is being hosted by the US. Asked by the Guardian whether the Club World Cup – in which a number of players from the banned countries are due to play – was included in the exception, a state department spokesperson declined to comment other than to say they would not get into hypotheticals or specific cases.Fifa also declined to comment to the Guardian when asked about this distinction and whether the organization was involved in lobbying Trump to carve out this exception as part of the travel ban.The definition of “major event” is also left open to interpretation, making it unclear whether or not this summer’s Gold Cup qualifies. That tournament, the regional soccer championship for North and Central America and the Caribbean will feature Haiti, who are scheduled to play the United States in Austin, Texas on 19 June in addition to group games in San Diego, California and Arlington, Texas.A spokesperson for Concacaf, the confederation that oversees the Gold Cup, did not respond to a request for comment. The state department declined to comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe order also lays out a number of exceptions regarding current visa holders, providing a list of visa types for which holders will not be subject to travel restrictions. The P-1 visa most often issued to professional soccer players in MLS, the NWSL and other leagues is not listed among those who qualify for the exception, but specific type of banned visas are specified for individual countries in the order.Venezuela, for example, has various types of B, F, M and J visas that are banned under the order. That means that the order does not impact P-1 visas issued to nationals of Venezuela. MLS currently has three players on international duty with Venezuela. One, the San Jose Earthquakes’ Josef Martínez, became a US citizen last year. The other two, Inter Miami’s Telasco Segovia and LAFC’s David Martínez, are recent arrivals to MLS and do not yet have permanent residency. Venezuela are set to play a World Cup qualifier on Thursday night against Bolivia, and are scheduled for another at Uruguay on Tuesday 10 June – one day after the ban is set to be enforced.An MLS spokesperson declined to elaborate when asked if there were concerns about the Venezuelan players’ immigration status. Asked on Thursday if the travel ban could impact current US visa holders from these countries, Pigott said that the exceptions will apply on a “case-by-case basis.” More

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    Trump and Musk’s spectacular bust-up – podcast

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    Why the reaction to Trump’s travel ban is different this time

    Many of Donald Trump’s critics may have become so inured to the treadmill of iniquities that his second presidency has brought, that a long-expected travel ban announced against citizens of a dozen countries failed to register the same intense shock and outrage as his similar move made during his first presidency.Of course, there was condemnation. Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, accused the president of “bigotry”, while Chris Murphy, his Democratic colleague from Connecticut, suggested the timing may have been designed to deflect attention from the negative economic impact of his “Big Beautiful Bill” currently wending its way through Congress.But the denunciations seemed to carry a rote, lost-in-the-noise quality.It is easy to forget the storm of opprobrium that initially greeted the proposal for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” when then candidate Trump first made it nearly a decade ago. Even some of his fellow Republicans on the primary campaign trail at the time denounced the idea of a “Muslim ban” as “unhinged”.The context then was a spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks, first in Europe and then, in December 2015, in the California city of San Bernardino, where a radicalized husband and wife shot and killed 14 people at a health workers’ Christmas party.The policy met fierce legal and popular resistance after Trump tried to impose it immediately after taking office in January 2017, targeting seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.Chaotic scenes ensued, as protesters descended on US international airports. Only after the administration retooled the policy following protracted courtroom fights was it able to implement it – only for Joe Biden to rescind it in 2021 as “a stain on our national conscience”.The immediate and narrow backdrop to the latest ban is similar: an attack in Boulder, Colorado, this time by an Egyptian citizen, on an event in support of hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.“The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” Trump said in a video message announcing the policy. “We don’t want them.”Yet the broader context is vastly different – and illustrative of how successful the president has been in shifting the Overton window of political acceptability compared with eight years ago. This new ban is taking place against a backdrop of creeping authoritarianism, brutal government cuts and an ideological attack on civic institutions ranging from universities to scientific and cultural organisations.Effective legal challenges to the travel ban this time round seem much less likely, experts believe. “They seem to have learned some lessons from the three different rounds of litigation we went through during the first Trump administration,” Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University law center, told the New York Times.The length of time taken in preparing the restrictions – in contrast with the hastily imposed 2017 ban – and the varied character of the 19 countries singled out make it less susceptible than its predecessor, Vladeck said.Strikingly, Egypt – a signatory to the 1979 Camp David peace accords with Israel and a recipient of US military aid – is absent from the list of countries affected, strongly suggesting that last weekend’s attack was merely a pretext for a move already in the works.Of the 12 included on the main ban list, some are predominantly Muslim, but five – Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Myanmar, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea – are not. The others are Iran, Afghanistan, Chad, Somalia, Libya, Sudan and Yemen. Of course, all are non-white and part of the developing world.Additionally, less stringent restrictions have been imposed on another seven countries: Cuba, Venezuela, Laos, Togo, Burundi, Sierra Leone and Turkmenistan – but only the last two have Muslim majorities.Rather than being based in Islamophobia, the latest crackdown is playing out on a wider canvas of xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment, manifested most visibly in Trump’s drive to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Some groups, namely Venezuelans and Haitians, have already lost temporary protected status in a move that has been upheld by the courts.It is also happening in tandem with a prohibition issued against Harvard University from enrolling foreign students as Trump resorts to all levers available in an effort to prevail in a power struggle with the world’s wealthiest higher education institution.Yet the ban has roots in prejudices that emerged early in Trump’s first term, when he railed at an Oval Office meeting with congressional leaders against immigration from “shithole countries”, an unflattering description which, according to the New York Times, included Haiti.“Why do we want people from Haiti here?” Trump said in the January 2018 meeting, when told that they were among those who could benefit from a proposed immigration bill. At the same gathering, the president lamented the failure to woo immigrants from white European countries like Norway.At an earlier meeting, he complained – based on a policy paper given to him by Stephen Miller, now the White House deputy chief of staff – that 15,000 Haitians had entered the country since his inauguration, adding that “they all have Aids”. Similar complaints were issued against the entry of 2,500 Afghans.The anti-Haitian animus re-emerged in last year’s presidential election campaign. Trump, in a debate with Kamala Harris, his Democratic presidential opponent, issued his notorious “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” accusation against a Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, based on a false internet rumor that police had previously officially denied.That backdrop will surely condemn Trump in the court of public opinion, whatever rulings the judiciary may decide.Amid a chorus of condemnation from Democrats, many of whom compared this ban to his first “Muslim ban”, Amnesty International captured the more universal principle at play.“Trump’s new travel ban is discriminatory, racist, and downright cruel,” the organization said. “By targeting people based on their nationality, this ban only spreads disinformation and hate.”Even if judges issue future rulings upholding the policy, it seems a fitting judgment likely to stand the test of time, if not the strict letter of the law. More

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    Trump’s crypto ventures may be his most dangerous moneymaking scheme | Mohamad Bazzi

    Throughout his business career, Donald Trump sought new ways to leverage his name to make easy money. He ran an airline, a university and a winery. Thanks to the Apprentice show that made him a reality TV star, the US president slapped his name on real estate projects around the world built by other companies – along with Trump-branded steaks, vodka, deodorant and bottled water. Many of these businesses ultimately failed, but Trump rarely invested his own funds and he still walked away with hefty licensing fees.Today, as the most powerful person in the world, Trump has found perhaps the easiest way to profit off his name: cryptocurrency. Days before his inauguration for a second term on 20 January, Trump’s family business launched a meme coin, called $Trump, which is a type of digital currency often connected to an online joke or mascot. It has no inherent value beyond speculation. The coin quickly soared in value up to $75 per token, but it crashed days later. No matter the ultimate price, Trump and his family rake in millions of dollars in fees as the coin is traded by speculators hoping to turn a quick profit, or those trying to curry favor with him.It’s difficult to keep up with all the ways that Trump is corrupting the US presidency and using it for personal profit, but his crypto ventures are among the most dangerous because they potentially allow him and his family to collect hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign investors and governments that would normally have a harder time funneling money to a US politician. Thanks to the memecoin and other deals, the Trump family’s wealth increased by nearly $3bn in the last six months. Trump has proven himself the most successful president – at monetizing the presidency.While he is exempt from conflict of interest laws that ban federal employees from profiting off their positions, every US president since the 1970s had voluntarily abided by these rules – until Trump. Previous occupants of the White House either sold their financial holdings or set them aside in blind trusts. But in his first term, Trump refused to divest from his business empire, which is mostly centered around the Trump Organization and is still managed by his sons.Since Trump’s first term, his family business has also evolved beyond a real estate conglomerate that licenses the Trump name to hotels, luxury towers and golf courses around the world, earning millions of dollars in branding and management fees without investing its own funds in most projects. The business now includes a portfolio of social media and crypto ventures, providing Trump with new ways to profit from being in office. And Trump is more emboldened to ignore norms set by past presidents, thanks to a compliant Congress led by Republicans and a US supreme court ruling last year which gave Trump “absolute immunity” from prosecution for his official acts as president.Trump’s foray into cryptocurrency underscores the ways he can leverage the presidency for personal gain by exploiting his sense of impunity and an industry that is notorious for fraud and a lack of transparency. After the value of his memecoin collapsed, Trump’s crypto venture announced in April that the 220 largest buyers of the token would be invited to a private gala dinner with the president at his Virginia golf club, while the top 25 buyers would get access to a VIP reception with Trump and a White House tour. Once that contest was under way, the $Trump coin got a new round of media attention and its value jumped by more than 50%. The more people bought the token, the more Trump and his family profited from crypto transactions that are usually shrouded in anonymity. Since the memecoin’s launch in January, Trump-affiliated businesses received $312m from crypto sales and $43m in other fees, according to a Washington Post analysis of trading data.Of course, US presidents for decades have used private dinners and gatherings to grant special access to wealthy donors and raise funds for their political parties or their own campaigns. But campaign contributions carry legal restrictions on how they can be spent, and US donors can’t remain anonymous and must disclose all of their donations to political candidates. The sweepstakes dinner organized by Trump’s crypto business was not a fundraiser or campaign event – it was a gathering arranged to directly enrich him and his family.Beyond the inherent conflict of Trump doing business within an industry that he has immense power to regulate as president, Trump also opened himself up to foreign influence as his memecoins became a vehicle for foreign actors to funnel money to his family. While Trump’s crypto business has refused to release a list of those invited to last month’s dinner at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, media organizations compiled lists of attenders that included foreign citizens who would normally be forbidden from donating funds to US politicians. (The Washington Post found that nearly half of the top 220 Trump memecoin holders purchased their coins from crypto exchanges that reject US-based customers, meaning they are probably foreign buyers. And 19 of the top 25 buyers, who were invited to a VIP reception with Trump before the dinner on 22 May, and a “special tour” the next day, had bought coins from similar exchanges.)The best-known foreign investor who attended Trump’s dinner was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who founded the crypto platform Tron and had spent more than $20m on the president’s memecoins, earning him the distinction of being the contest’s top buyer. In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission, under Joe Biden’s administration, charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. But a few weeks after Trump took office, the SEC asked a federal court to pause its lawsuit.What could be behind the SEC’s change of heart about pursuing charges against Sun under the second Trump administration? Sun is one of the top investors in World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture launched by Trump’s family in September. After Trump won the November election, Sun bought $75m in World Liberty tokens, and he was named an adviser to the company.World Liberty is at the heart of another foreign entanglement – and potential conflict of interest – for Trump and the crypto industry. On 1 May, the president’s son Eric and a business partner, Zach Witkoff (who is also the son of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy), announced that an investment fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi would invest $2bn using a stablecoin – a form of digital currency – offered by World Liberty. That transaction could eventually generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the president and his family.Years before he got into the business, Trump had dismissed cryptocurrencies as “a scam” which have values that are “based on thin air”. But Trump changed his tune dramatically when he met with the highest-paying customers of his personal memecoin at last month’s dinner. “The past administration made your lives miserable,” Trump told his guests, referring to a Biden administration crackdown on crypto companies. And then the president promised to do things differently: “There is a lot of sense in crypto. A lot of common sense in crypto.”Already, the Trump administration has been pushing to deregulate the industry and in April instructed the justice department to disband a unit that focused on investigating crypto-related fraud. Last year, a federal judge sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the now bankrupt FTX crypto exchange, to 25 years in prison for perpetuating one of the largest financial frauds in modern history, and bilking his customers out of billions of dollars.Once Trump dismantles regulation and law enforcement of the industry, he has promised to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet”. And the president will continue to enrich himself and his family along the way.

    Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University More

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    Trump’s tariffs have become his Vietnam – and the right is breaking ranks | Sidney Blumenthal

    Donald Trump’s trade war has become his quagmire: legal, economic and political. On 28 May, the court of international trade ruled his tariffs exceeded his constitutional authority. Point by point, the decision decimated Trump’s arguments as flimsy and false, implicitly castigated the Republican Congress for abdicating its constitutional responsibility, and reminded other courts, not least the supreme court, of the judicial branch’s obligation to exercise its authority regardless of the blustering of the executive and the fecklessness of the legislative branches.Trump’s tariffs, along with his withdrawal of active support for Ukraine and passivity toward his strongman father figure Vladimir Putin, have broken the western alliance, forcing the west to make its own arrangements with China, and cementing the idea for a generation to come that the United States is an untrustworthy and unstable partner.On the economic front, Trump’s tariffs have already begun to increase inflation, shutter trade, devalue the dollar, and undermine manufacturing. They will soon create shortages of all sorts of goods, ruin small business, and force layoffs that bring about stagflation that has not been seen since the 1970s, which was then the result of an external oil shock, not self-harm. On 3 June, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that as a result, principally, of Trump’s tariffs, the US will suffer a decline in the rate of growth from what had been forecast this year. “Lower growth and less trade will hit incomes and slow job growth,” the OECD stated.As a political matter, besides being unpopular, Trump’s tariffs, in combination with his assaults on the institutions of civil and legal society, have drawn out the most intelligent and skillful members of the conservative legal establishment, who themselves have been some of the most crucial players in the rise of the right wing, to man the ramparts against him. These are not the familiar Never Trumpers, but newly engaged and potentially more dangerous foes.While corporate leaders uniformly abhor Trump’s tariffs, they have stifled themselves into a complicit silence on the road to serfdom. But Trump’s new enemies coming from the conservative citadel of the Federalist Society are filing brief after brief in the courts, upholding the law to halt his dictatorial march.Trump naturally cannot help but turn everything he touches into sordid scandal. After announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which tanked the stock market, Trump declared a pause during which he promised he would sign, seal and deliver 90 deals in 90 days. But he has announced only a deal with Britain. Most of the deals Trump has seen have been with the Trump Organization. Under the shadow of a threatened 46% tariff, Vietnam, after a visit from Eric Trump, granted a $1bn Trump Tower in Ho Chi Minh City and a $1.5bn golf club and resort near Hanoi with “two championship golf courses”, relative crumbs alongside the billions the Trump family has accrued from across the Middle East, not to mention the $400m jet that his team solicited from Qatar to serve as his palatial Air Force One.Standing before the white marble plinth of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington national cemetery on Memorial Day, 26 May, after reading prepared remarks about “our honored dead” to a gathering of Gold Star families, Donald Trump fell into a reverie about his divine destiny. “I have everything,” he said. He spoke about the parade of troops and tanks he has ordered for 14 June, his 79th birthday, which happens to coincide with the date that George Washington created the Continental army. “Amazing the way things work out. God did that, I believe that too. God did it.”Two days after Trump had mused about his election by heaven to possess “everything”, the court of international trade issued what the Wall Street Journal called the “ruling heard ‘round the world … proving again that America doesn’t have a king who can rule by decree’”.The US court of appeals for DC then temporarily stayed the ruling while it considered the case. But the trade court’s decision to deny Trump his toys was comprehensive, blistering and devastating. Now, Trump’s trade war is his Vietnam, a quagmire of his own.Trump’s entire program dances on the head of his tariffs. By fiat, without congressional approval, he has willfully invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as cover for his helter-skelter gyrations to reshape the global economy according to his desire for domination of the Earth. He has further explained that his tariffs are necessary to pay for the vast tax cuts for the wealthy in his budget bill that would increase deficits. He claims that the tariffs will replace the revenue raised from income tax, fixed in the constitution by the 16th amendment, ratified in 1913. Without tariffs on the scope he projects his dream house of cards collapses. With his tariffs even as his stated minimal goal he blows up the world.The court of international trade, a court based on specialized expertise, whose judges have lifetime appointments, flatly stated that Trump’s use of the emergency law under which he claimed his authority does “not permit the president to impose tariffs in response to balance-of-payments deficits”, “exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the president”, “would create an unconstitutional delegation of power”, and is “contrary to law”.Having ruled that Trump’s worldwide tariffs are illegal, the court deemed his “trafficking tariffs” imposed on Canada and Mexico also lawless. Trump has asserted them on a contrived national security rationale of preventing the importation of fentanyl. But the court stated that Trump’s “use of tariffs as leverage … is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective but because … [the federal law] does not allow it”. Thus, the court concluded in both instances, “the worldwide and retaliatory tariff orders exceed any authority granted to the president … to regulate importation by means of tariffs. The trafficking tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders.”The trade court’s ruling suddenly exposed the extent to which Trump’s relationship with the conservative legal movement is unraveling. The fissure runs deeper and wider than name-calling. Trump’s trade war has morphed into a widespread civil war within the right with the core of the conservative legal establishment resisting him.Trump’s venomous social media posts against Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society co- chairman and rightwing powerhouse, reads like a memoir of an ingenue taken advantage of in the big city by strangers. “I was new to Washington,” Trump explained, “and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”Slowly, Trump has come to the realization that this Leonard Leo “openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court”. Trump was revealing that Leo understood his power beyond his influence over Trump on appointments. “Backroom ‘hustlers’ must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!” He is victim of a con, Donald Chump.“Talk about friendly fire,” editorialized the Wall Street Journal. But there was more to the story than Trump revealed, which the Journal’s editorial page, Leonard Leo’s friend in court as it were, happily provided. The judge on the trade court whom Trump appointed and blames on Leo, Timothy Reif, was in fact, according to the Journal, “recommended to the White House by Robert Lighthizer, who was Mr Trump’s first-term trade representative. Mr Leo had nothing to do with it.” Perhaps Trump is suffering from memory loss.Trump bellowed that the reason for the trade court’s ruling must be “purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP’? What other reason could it be?” “Well,” suggested the Journal, “how about the law and the constitution?” After Leo had been the one to give Trump the names of the three justices he appointed to the supreme court who made possible the infamous decision granting him “absolute immunity” for “official acts” that enabled his evasion of prosecution during the 2024 campaign, this was a thick and rich ragu.The Journal also rushed to Leo’s side with a podcast featuring John Yoo, who as deputy assistant attorney general under George W Bush and the author of the notorious Torture Memos. Yoo said it was “truly outrageous to accuse Leonard Leo, one of the stalwarts or the conservative movement, of being something like a traitor”. Yoo stated: “Why would President Trump turn his back on one of his greatest, if not his greatest achievements from the first term, appointing three justices?” Indeed, Yoo was right that Leo had dictated Trump’s choices, exactly as Trump confessed. What neither disclosed is that it was the price Trump paid for a political armistice with the mighty rightwing Koch political operation. Some deal, some art.And Yoo added in an admission of truth-telling about the supreme court’s invention of absolute presidential immunity for “official acts”: “If it weren’t for Federalist Society judges, he would be in jail right now because it was the Roberts court that said former presidents just can’t be prosecuted for crimes.”But to Trump, the betrayal is cutting. The trade court’s ruling against him echoed the amicus brief filed by a bipartisan group of legal eminences that included leading conservative lights. There was Steven Calabresi, professor at Northwestern Law School, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Federalist Society, and the chief theorist of the conservative doctrine of the “unitary executive”. There was Michael W McConnell, former federal judge, Stanford law professor, and a chief defender of religious right lawsuits. There was Michael Mukasey, former federal judge and George W Bush’s attorney general. There was Peter Wallison, President Reagan’s White House counsel. They all signed the brief stating: “The president’s tariff proclamations bypass the constitutional framework that lends legitimacy and predictability to American lawmaking.”The breaking of ranks on the right is not isolated. Other well-known members of the conservative legal establishment have done more than submit an amicus brief. They have become counsels to some of the most important institutions in Trump’s crosshairs – Harvard University, National Public Radio and the WilmerHale law firm.William Burck and Robert Hur are co-counsels representing Harvard in its suit against the Trump administration order denying its enrollment of international students unless the university submits to his draconian control over its academic processes.Burck, former deputy White House counsel to George W Bush and a current member of the board of directors of the Fox Corporation, is the head of “one of a few top US firms that seemed well placed not only to avoid Donald Trump’s wrath but also benefit from connections to the president’s inner circle”, according to the Financial Times. He was hired to be an ethics adviser to the Trump Organization – that is, until he chose to represent Harvard. Trump ranted against him: “Harvard is a threat to Democracy, with a lawyer, who represents me, who should therefore be forced to resign, immediately, or be fired. He’s not that good, anyway, and I hope that my very big and beautiful company, now run by my sons, gets rid of him ASAP!” Eric Trump, who had previously called Burck “one of the nation’s finest and most respected lawyers”, wielded the executioner’s axe for his father.Hur had been appointed the US attorney for Maryland by Trump and served as the special counsel investigating President Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents stored in boxes in his home’s garage. Hur filed no charges, but said of Biden that he was “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.In Harvard’s suit against the Trump administration, Burck and Hur state that its actions against the university are “a blatant violation of the first amendment, the due process clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act. It is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its first amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students. The government’s actions are unlawful for other equally clear and pernicious reasons.”For its representation in its suit against the Trump administration, which seeks to slash its funding, National Public Radio has hired Miguel Estrada, a star of the conservative legal firmament, whose nomination to the federal bench by George W Bush was blocked by Senate Democrats in 2002. According to the NPR complaint, Trump’s action “violates the expressed will of Congress and the first amendment’s bedrock guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association, and also threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information”.When Trump issued executive orders against big law firms that had somehow offended him, coercing their surrender to his whim, one of those firms, WilmerHale, subject to such an order for having had as a senior partner Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who headed the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election, did not cave. Instead, it hired Paul Clement, George W Bush’s solicitor general, who has argued on behalf of many of the most controversial conservative causes before the supreme court, including against the Defense of Marriage Act and against the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.Citing the example of John Adams, who defended British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, Clement argued against the Trump administration that “British monarchs’ practice of punishing attorneys ‘whose greatest crime was to dare to defend unpopular causes’ – which threatened to reduce lawyers to ‘parrots of the views of whatever group wields governmental power at the moment’ – helped inspire the Bill of Rights”.Then, Ed Whelan, who holds the Antonin Scalia chair in constitutional studies at the rightwing Ethics and Public Policy Center, and is a close surrogate for Leonard Leo, savaged Trump’s nomination of Emil Bove, who was his personal attorney in the New York hush-money trial and whom he had appointed as deputy attorney general, to be a judge on the US court of appeals for the third circuit.Bove ordered corruption charges dropped against the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, which a federal judge said “smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions”. The US attorney for Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, a conservative Republican, resigned in protest, stating that the deal “amounted to a quid pro quo” and that Bove had ordered her not to take notes during meetings. Seven members of the public integrity section of the justice department also resigned.Whelan, writing in the conservative magazine National Review, called Bove Trump’s “henchman”, decried his “bullying mishandling” of the Adams case, and suggested he might be put on the federal bench to “position him well for the next supreme court vacancy. A rosier possibility is that Bove is tired of being Stephen Miller’s errand boy.”Now, Trump is worried about what conservatives on the supreme court might rule when presented with the trade court’s decision. He rails in private against Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom he appointed to the supreme court, for her unexpected occasional independence. The Journal, with the inside track, writes that “the White House boasts it will win at the supreme court, but our reading of the trade court’s opinion suggests the opposite. Mr Trump’s three court appointees are likely to invoke the major-questions precedent” – which would uphold the trade court and force Trump either to bring his policy before the Congress or drop it.Trump is enraged that his betrayers from the Federalist Society have claimed roles in the resistance. He has no loyalty to anyone or thing, but demands personal fealty, certainly now above any ideological litmus tests. The only ideological tests are to be imposed on universities. Trump has learned his lesson. In his insistence on obedient judges, Trump is returning to his first principle as he was taught in the beginning by his mob attorney Roy Cohn, who said: “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.”

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