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      Trump’s third term trial balloon: how extremist ideas become mainstream

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      It is noon on 20 January 2029. In the biting cold of Washington DC, thousands of people are gathered on the national mall to witness the swearing in of a new US president or, more accurately, an old US president: Donald Trump, aged 82, starting his third term in office.The scene is the realm of fantasy or, for millions of Americans, the stuff of nightmares. But in the president’s own mind it is apparently not so far-fetched at all. Last weekend he told an interviewer that he is “not joking” about another run and there are “methods” to circumvent the constitution, which limits presidents to two terms.For longtime Trump watchers it smacked of a familiar playbook of the American right and the Maga movement. Float a trial balloon, no matter how wacky or extreme. Let far-right media figures such as Steve Bannon make the case it’s not so outlandish because, after all, Democrats are worse. Stand by as Republicans in Congress avoid then equivocate then actively endorse. Watch a fringe idea slowly but surely normalised.“One of the most important lessons of the last decade is the way that ideas have migrated from the fever swamp into the mainstream,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster. “How Steve Bannon will say some crazy thing only to see it become Republican orthodoxy a few years later. We’ve seen that migration of ideas that seem absurd and are perhaps dismissed but develop a constituency.”This one is a long shot. The constitution’s 22nd amendment, ratified in 1951, clearly states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Legal experts and constitutional scholars firmly reject any credible legal basis for a third term.Yet for months Trump, who began his first term in 2017 and his second in 2025, has been testing the water by suggesting that he could run again anyway. Initially treated by some as jokes or political manoeuvering, the comments have recently moved beyond veiled suggestions to become more explicit.Asked whether he wanted another term, Trump told NBC News: “I like working. I’m not joking. But I’m not – it is far too early to think about it.” Pressed on whether he has seen plans to enable him to seek a third term, the president replied: “There are methods which you could do it.”None of these “methods” is straightforward. Trump could try to whip up political support to repeal the 22nd amendment. But the procedural and political difficulties of amending the constitution make this extremely unlikely. Democratic-led states could also refuse to put Trump on the ballot.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island: “The technical hurdle is very high. Given the political configuration now, and the control of state legislatures now, it would be impossible not only to repeal the 22nd amendment but to get him on the ballot in all 50 states.”Some argue that a constitutional loophole allows JD Vance to run for president with Trump as vice-president. Once elected, Vance would hand over power, much as Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev handed back the keys to the Kremlin to Vladimir Putin. But experts say this would violate the 12th amendment’s requirement that the vice-president be constitutionally eligible for president.Alternatively and most simply, Trump could run for president again and gamble that the supreme court, which contains six conservatives including three Trump appointees, would not stop him. Time and again over the past decade, he has crashed through barriers through brute willpower.None of it seems likely, but then nor did a reality TV star with no political or military experience winning election, nor did the instigator of the January 6 insurrection maintaining his grip on the Republican party, and nor did a man with 34 felony counts of falsified business records returning to the White House.Sykes, the author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, commented: “My instinct is to to regard it as a distraction but that’s a mistake because the opposition has suffered from a lack of imagination on occasion of what Donald Trump is capable of doing and what he intends to do. Clearly he’s putting this out to soften the ground.”Once unthinkable ideas have a habit of becoming very unthinkable in the Trump era. In the immediate aftermath of the US Capitol riot, Republican leaders moved to distance themselves from Trump and his “big lie” of a stolen election. Senator Lindsey Graham declared: “All I can say is count me out, enough is enough.”But Bannon and other rightwing influencers worked tirelessly to promote Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Before long Republicans were rallying around Trump again, suggesting that he was right to raise concerns over election integrity and dismissing a congressional panel that investigated January 6 as a witch hunt. Last year a CNN poll found that 69% of Republicans sayJoe Biden’s win was not legitimate.Sykes noted another recent example: presidential ally Elon Musk suggesting that federal judges who rule against the Trump administration be impeached. Now opinion polls suggest that a majority of Republican voters are in favour of the move.Sykes added: “If Donald Trump keeps putting this idea out there, there’s no reason to believe that he can’t get Maga [the Make America great again movement] behind him and then the question is whether the courts would go along with it. What happens if the court says, no, you can’t serve another term, but enough states put him on the ballot anyway? Who’s going to stop him?”View image in fullscreenTrump’s third-term talk may also be a strategy to maintain political relevance and influence, wrongfooting opponents by keeping them guessing. It prevents him from being seen as a “lame duck” president and keeps the spotlight on him rather than his potential successors.The comments could also serve to deflect attention from other controversies. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Trump mused about a third term in the same week that his administration had been rocked by a scandal over senior officials accidentally inviting a journalist into a Signal group chat about military attack plans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Republicans are downplaying Trump’s remarks as jokes or simply an effort to “get people talking”. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, stated: “It’s not really something we’re thinking about. He has four years. There’s a lot of work to do.”But the issue is gaining traction on the right. Just three days after Trump was sworn in on 20 January, Republican representative Andy Ogles proposed a House of Representatives joint resolution to amend the constitution so that a president can serve up to three terms – provided that they did not serve two consecutive terms before running for a third (this would continue to bar Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama from running again).At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Bannon proclaimed, “We want Trump in 28,” and argued forcefully for a constitutional change. The case was also put by Third Term Project, a thinktank exploring presidential term limits, with a logo portraying Trump as Julius Caesar.Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump, has seen this movie before. “It starts out as ha-ha, Trump is trolling the libs, and then it’s well, Trump is trolling the libs but he’s got a good point. Well, he’s got a good point and the Democrats are so evil we should set aside any restraint to pursue this idea. Then it’s why aren’t you getting in line with this idea, every Republican?”Wilson added: “That arc is a known pattern now with Trump. Remember January 6. Every Republican – almost – came out and condemned that the day it happened and the idea became less and less defensible the more we knew about Trump’s role in it. But they became less and less willing to speak the truth. They became less and less willing to to resist and so I think that pattern is real, it exists, it’s been visible to us for a long time.”Democrats are moving to counter Trump’s remarks and Ogles’ proposed resolution. Congressman Dan Goldman has introduced resolutions reaffirming support for the 22nd amendment.He told the MSNBC network: “I’ve unfortunately been spending enough time studying Donald Trump to know that he’s not a comedian. He doesn’t joke and he has a very set MO, which is to float a crazy idea, claim that he’s joking, have some sycophantic Republicans start to run with it, like in this case, Representative Ogles, and then all of a sudden it becomes normalized and socialised.”The two-term standard began when America’s first president, George Washington, voluntarily stepped down. Four of the next six presidents won a second term but passed on a third. In 1940 Franklin Roosevelt became the only president to successfully win a third election, couching his decision as one of necessity, not ambition, during the second world war. Roosevelt won again in 1944 but died the following year.Not long after, Congress began discussion of what became the 22nd amendment, limiting presidents to two elections, and ratified it in 1951. There has been occasional talk of repealing it since. Ronald Reagan, another two-term president, publicly supported repeal, telling an interviewer that he “wouldn’t do that for myself, but for presidents from here on”.Trump, however, has shown no qualms about grabbing power for himself, claiming that the public demands it because he has the highest poll numbers of any Republican for the past 100 years. Asked this week about a hypothetical showdown with Obama in 2028, he replied: “I’d love that, boy, I’d love that.”Some observers note that Trump’s approval rating is already on the slide. Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, insisted: “This is not a serious effort. This is an effort to make Donald Trump into the most powerful politician that ever happened. The guy is not God. He will fall to the normal rhythms of politics. He’ll lose the midterms in 2026 and then people will be sick of the guy.”Others, however, warn that Trump has been written off to easily before. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, said: “This is no joke and no distraction. It needs to be taken seriously. Trump just saying, ‘Fuck it I’m running’ and daring people, the party, the media, the military, the courts, to stop him – I don’t know that he could be stopped.“It’s been an utter failure of imagination to be prepared for how far this guy will go. People never thought January 6 will happen; we never thought a president would try to overthrow an election. A guy who would do that, if he wanted to, would try to do anything to stay in office and run again.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: anti-Trump protests draw huge crowds across the US

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      Crowds of people angry about the way Donald Trump is running the country marched and rallied in scores of American cities on Saturday in the biggest day of demonstrations yet by an opposition movement trying to regain its momentum after the shock of the US president’s first weeks in office.The so-called “Hands Off!” demonstrations were held in more than 1,200 locations in all 50 states by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans and elections activists.Demonstrators voiced anger over the administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close social security administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut funding for health programs.Here are the key stories at a glance.More than 1,000 ‘Hands Off’ anti-Trump protests hit cities across the USPeople across the US took to the streets on Saturday to oppose what left-leaning organizations called Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda”.Organizers estimated that more than 500,000 people demonstrated in Washington DC, Florida and elsewhere.Read the full storyTens of thousands rally against Trump at DC protestDemonstrators estimated to be in the tens of thousands gathered in Washington on Saturday in a display of mass dissent against Trump’s policies that organizers hoped would snowball into a rolling cycle of protests.Anger with Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, the SpaceX and Tesla leader Elon Musk, was expressed in a sea of placards and banners on the Washington mall. Multiple messages denounced the two men for shuttering government agencies, cutting jobs and services and – in often graphic terms – for threatening the survival of US democracy.Read the full storyCory Booker urges action in first event since historic speechThe Democratic senator Cory Booker took a version of his record-breaking Senate floor speech on the road Saturday to a town hall meeting in a New Jersey gymnasium, calling on people to find out what they can do to push back against Donald Trump’s agenda.Booker took questions at suburban New Jersey’s Bergen Community College the same day that more than 1,200 ‘Hands Off’ demonstrations took place around the country. The town hall event was punctuated both by celebratory shouts of “Cory, Cory” as well as at least a half-dozen interruptions by protesters.Read the full storyObama calls on Americans to defend democratic values in face of TrumpBarack Obama has called on US citizens, colleges and law firms to resist Trump’s political agenda – and warned Americans to prepare to “possibly sacrifice” in support of democratic values.“It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are a progressive or say you are for social justice or say you’re for free speech and not have to pay a price for it,” Obama said during a speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, on Thursday.Read the full storyUS revokes all visas for South Sudanese over country’s failure to repatriate citizensWashington is revoking all visas for South Sudanese passport holders and blocking new arrivals, secretary of state Marco Rubio said on Saturday, complaining the African nation is not accepting its nationals expelled from the US.The state department “is taking actions to revoke all visas held by South Sudanese passport holders and prevent further issuance to prevent entry”, Rubio said in a statement.Read the full storyMahmoud Khalil says his arrest was part of ‘Columbia’s repression playbook’Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student activist who led campus pro-Palestinian rallies and is now resisting the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, has accused the university of laying “the groundwork for my abduction” and called on the student body to continue demonstrations and protests.Khalil, a green-card holder who is in custody in Louisiana as his case moves through the courts, was detained on 8 March. The Trump administration is seeking to deport him under a provision in federal immigration law that permits the state department to deport non-citizens considered to be a threat to US foreign policy.Read the full storyTrump administration apologizes for telling Ukrainian refugees to leave USTrump’s presidential administration has acknowledged and apologized after it says it accidentally informed some Ukrainian refugees fleeing their country’s invasion by Russia that they needed to leave the US because their legal status was being revoked.About 240,000 Ukrainians have been settled in the US as part of the Uniting for Ukraine – or U4U – program launched during Joe Biden’s presidency. But according to CBS News, some resettled Ukrainians received emails this week telling them that the US Department of Homeland Security would be terminating their legal protections.Read the full storyTed Cruz warns of midterm ‘bloodbath’ if Trump tariffs cause a recessionTed Cruz, the US senator from Texas, has warned that his fellow Republicans risk a “bloodbath” in the 2026 midterm elections if Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs cause a recession.Cruz also warned that the president’s tariffs, if they stay in place for long and are met by global retaliation on American goods, could trigger a full-blown trade war that “would destroy jobs here at home, and do real damage to the US economy”.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Another round of torrential rain and flash flooding on Saturday hit parts of the US south and midwest already heavily waterlogged by days of severe storms that also spawned deadly tornadoes. Forecasters warned that rivers in some places would continue to rise for days.

      New York state officials have told the Trump administration that they will not comply with its demands to end diversity, equity and inclusion practices in public schools, despite the administration’s threats to terminate federal education funding.

      Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the US for a month as it considers how to mitigate the cost of Trump’s tariffs. The 25% tariff imposed by the US on imported cars and light trucks took effect on 3 April.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 April 2025. More

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      Cory Booker urges action in first event since historic speech: ‘This is a moment for America’

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      The Democratic senator Cory Booker took a version of his record-breaking Senate floor speech on the road Saturday to a town hall meeting in a New Jersey gymnasium, calling on people to find out what they can do to push back against Donald Trump’s agenda.Booker took questions at suburban New Jersey’s Bergen Community College the same day that more than 1,200 “Hands Off” demonstrations took place around the country. The town hall event was punctuated both by celebratory shouts of “Cory, Cory” as well as at least a half-dozen interruptions by protesters.It was Booker’s first in-person event in his home state since his speech this week, where he held the Senate floor for 25 hours and 5 minutes in opposition to Trump’s policies. In doing so, he broke the record for the longest floor speech, which was set by the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957.Questioner after questioner asked what they could be doing to show their disagreement and worry over the president’s policies. Booker told them it only takes a little bit more – could they afford a trip to Washington to lobby against budget cuts? One of the loudest moments of applause came after he addressed a woman who said she worried about what potential Medicaid cuts could mean for her son with autism.“A gathering like this can’t be the end of our activism,” Booker said. “This has got to be a moment in America where all of us begin to say, what more can I do?”The questions and Booker’s response mirror what voters and other Democrats have been hearing during town halls. He said he didn’t want to focus on the Democratic party, which has struggled to find a message since losing the 2024 election. Instead, he said, he would focus on “the people of our country”.“I think the Democratic party lost a lot of elections because people didn’t believe that they cared about them. So let’s stop worrying about the politics and get more focused on the people,” Booker said.After the event, Booker said he was reluctant to tell people the exact tactics to use, citing civil rights activists like the late John Lewis. He said creativity has a role to play.“I know one thing it’s not, is sitting down and doing nothing and just watching on TV and getting stuck in a state of sedentary agitation,” he said. “Everybody has to be taking measures to put the pressure on to change.”Booker, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020, said after the event that he was focused on running for re-election to the Senate in 2026 and that 2028 “will take care of itself”.Booker, 55, is in his second full term in the Senate. He chairs the Strategic Communications Committee, his party’s messaging arm. His team is focused on boosting Senate Democrats’ presence across social platforms through more frequent and casual content.Booker himself has amassed one of the largest followings on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and X, where his commentary appears to connect with the party’s base. But staffers are now focused on how to transfer that success to Booker’s fellow senators, who are often less digitally fluent and face different political landscapes in their home states.That has involved turning the communications committee into a nerve center for testing and coordinating the easiest-to-use formats for lawmakers looking to boost their digital brands.Booker hopes to double the engagement that senators receive with their content directly online and increase the caucus’s appearances with online digital media personalities.The start of Saturday’s event included six disruptions, including by several people who decried the treatment of Palestinians. Police in the gymnasium escorted them from the arena.“I hear you and I see you,” Booker said. More

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      Tens of thousands rally against Trump at DC ‘Hands Off’ protest

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      Demonstrators estimated to be in the tens of thousands gathered in Washington on Saturday in a display of mass dissent against Donald Trump’s policies that organizers hoped would snowball into a rolling cycle of protests that could eventually stymie the US president in next year’s congressional elections.Anger with Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, the SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk, was expressed in a sea of placards and banners on the Washington mall, in the shadow of the Washington monument. Multiple messages denounced the two men for shuttering government agencies, cutting jobs and services and – in often graphic terms – for threatening the survival of US democracy.“Resist like it’s 1938 Nazi Germany” and “Fascism is alive and well and living in the White House”, read two slogans at the Hands Off gathering, organized by the civil society group Indivisible and featuring speeches from a host of other organizations as well as Democratic members of Congress.The rally, which coincided with roughly 1,000 other similarly themed events across the country, was punctuated by a fusillade of barbs aimed at Trump as well as Musk, whose infiltration into government agencies through the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, without congressional approval, and cash-fueled interventions in election races have been seen as anti-democratic affronts.View image in fullscreen“They believe democracy is doomed and they believe regime change is upon us if only they can seize our payments system,” said Jamie Raskin, a Democratic representative from Maryland who is the party’s top figure on the House judiciary committee.He added: “If they think they are going to overthrow the foundations of democracy, they don’t know who they are dealing with.”Saturday’s events followed weeks of anxiety among anti-Trump forces that the president had railroaded through his agenda in the absence of adequate resistance from congressional Democrats and minus the displays of popular mass opposition that appeared early in his first presidency.But they also came days after the Democrats drew encouragement from victory in a race for a vacant supreme court seat in Wisconsin into which Musk had unsuccessfully ploughed $25m of his own money to support the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate.It also followed the roll-out of Trump’s flagship policy of import tariffs, which triggered massive plunges in international stock markets and fueled fears of an economic downturn.Multiple speakers and attendees said they hoped the rallies would embolden other American disillusioned by Trump’s policies to join future rallies, giving a fledgling protest movement much-needed momentum.View image in fullscreen“We want to send a signal to all people and institutions that have been showing anticipatory obedience to Trump and showing they are willing to bend the knee that there is, in fact, a mass public movement that’s willing to rise up and stop this,” said Leah Greenberg, Indivisible’s executive director.“If our political leaders stand up, we will have their backs. We want them to stand up and protect the norms of democracy and want them to see that there are people out there who are willing to do that. The goal of this is building a message.”Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights advocacy group, told the crowd: “There’s only one thing that can face down the authoritarian moment we are facing, and that’s the movement we see here today.”Asked by the Guardian whether the mass demonstrations were sufficient to stop Trump, he said: “It’s not a one-time thing. It’s got to be a sustaining phenomenon. There’s been a lot of criticism of the Democrats for not standing up in Congress, so an event like this will stiffen their spine.“It’s about making the Democrats better and giving them courage – and it will. That’s also true for ordinary people, because Trump’s authoritarian playbook is designed to make people think it’s useless to resist. This demonstrates power and it will bring in more people.”Several congressional Democrats predicted the rally would inspire more protests, ultimately fueling an electoral triumph in next year’s congressional midterms, when control of the House of Representatives and the Senate will be up for grabs.“This is what freedom fighting against fascism looks like,” said Eric Swalwell, a representative for California. “This is not the last day of the fight, it’s the first day. When it all comes to [be] written about, you will see that April 5 is when it all came alive. Energy and activism beget energy and activism.”View image in fullscreenSeveral members acknowledged that protests were rarely enough to supplant authoritarian governments, as demonstrated in countries like Turkey and Hungary, whose strongman leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Viktor Orbán respectively, have survived in office despite repeated episodes of street protests.“We invited some historians in to discuss that question,” said Raskin. “They said, in some countries there was just a legislative parliamentary strategy, and that only succeeded about one-third of the time.“In other countries, there was just a popular-resistance strategy, and that succeeded a little bit more than a third of the time. But when you have a popular-resistance strategy and an effective legislative strategy, it wins more than two-thirds of the time. It’s not a guarantee, but you need to have national mass popular action at the same time that you’ve got an effective legislative strategy, too.”Representative Don Beyer, whose northern Virginia district – home to 75,000 federal workers – has been disproportionately affected by Musk’s assault on government agencies, compared the effect of Trump’s actions to the upheaval wrought by Mao Zedong in the Chinese cultural revolution.But, he said, Trump would be derailed by next year’s election, which he said he was “somewhat confident” would be ‘“free and fair”.“They’re not perfect [but] the people do have a chance to speak,” Beyer said. “Elections are very much decentralized and organized precinct by precinct. There are lots of chances to push back. We just saw that in Wisconsin.” More

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      ‘Hands Off’ protests take off across US and Europe to oppose Trump agenda – live

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      Also speaking at in Washington DC was Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March.Carmona said:
      We are exercising the People’s Veto on Musk, Trump, Zuck–all these broligarchs–who want a country ruled by bullies to benefit billionaires. And they don’t care what–or who–they have to bulldoze to make it happen.
      But here’s the thing: We are the majority. Workers. Students. Parents. Teachers. Activists. We are the backbone of this country. Not the elites. They’re scared that a movement this large can threaten their power.
      But despite all the nonsense they’ve put us through, we’re still here and our numbers are growing.
      What I know is true about Women’s Marchers, and what I suspect to be true about everyone here today is that we are not afraid of hard work. That’s who we are: regular people who stepped up when there was work to be done…We are enough, and I believe that we will win.
      The strength of a movement isn’t measured by our easy wins, but by the hard days when we showed up anyway. And that’s what we need to do. Work hard. Work together. That is true people power. That is how we win.”
      Speaking in Washington DC, the former commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Martin O’Malley, told demonstrators:
      You and I are different. We do not believe, as Elon Musk believes, that you only have value as a human being in our country if you contribute to his economic system that makes him wildly rich.
      No, you and I are different. Elon Musk thinks that the greatest waste and inefficiency are people that don’t contribute to his economy. Therefore, the elderly who can’t work, people with disabilities who can’t work, they’re the wasteful inefficiency. Elon Musk is going after you and I.
      Protesters across the US rallied against Donald Trump’s policies on SaturdayThe “Hands Off” demonstrations are part of what the event’s organisers expect to be the largest single day of protest against Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk since they launched a rapid-fire effort to overhaul the government and expand presidential authority.Here are some images coming from Hollywood, Florida, where demonstrators are protesting against Donald Trump’s administration:Hundreds of protesters – including Americans living abroad – have taken to the streets across major European cities in a show of defiance against Donald Trump’s administration.On Saturday, demonstrators rallied in Frankfurt, Germany, as part of the “Hands Off” protest organized by Democrats Abroad, Reuters reports.In Berlin, demonstrators stood in front of a Tesla showroom and the US embassy in protest against Trump and the Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Some held signs calling for “an end to the chaos” in the US.In Paris, demonstrators, largely American, gathered around Place de la République to protest the US president, with many waving banners that read “Resist tyrant”, “Rule of law”, “Feminists for freedom not fascism” and “Save Democracy”, Reuters reports.Crowds in London gathered in Trafalgar Square earlier on Saturday with banners that read “No to Maga hate” and “Dump Trump”.Protesters also gathered in Lisbon, Portugal, on Saturday with some holding signs that read “the Turd Reich”.In addition to large US cities, anti-Donald Trump protests are also taking place through the US’s smaller towns, including in red counties.Here are some photos coming through BlueSky from St. Augustine, a small town in Florida of 14,000 people in a red county:Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland and the party’s ranking member on the House justice committee, said today’s demonstration was part of a “creative and nimble” strategy to resist Donald Trump.Talking to the Guardian, he said mass protests needed to be combined with a “smart legislative strategy” to be effective.Studies of authoritarian regimes abroad had shown that a strategy of either mass protest or legislature resistance did work on their own, he said, in response to a question about the failure of demonstrations to unseat strongman leaders in countries like Hungary, Serbia and Turkey.Here are some images coming through the newswires from across the country as thousands take to the streets in demonstrations against Donald Trump’s administration:About 600 people registered for the event, billed as a “Hands Off” rally, at the Ventura Government Center on Victoria Avenue in California.Ventura, with a population of 109,000, is a laidback beach and agricultural community with a vibrant cultural scene, about 65 miles north of Los Angeles.Leslie Sage, mother of two, drove up from nearby Thousand Oaks and said: “I’m a white woman and I want everyone to know white women don’t support Trump.” Sage’s sign read: “Russian Asset, American Idiot.”She came with her friend Stephanie Gonzalez. “As a double lung transplant recipient, I’m outraged that access to medical care and funding for research is at risk. This president is deranged.”People showed up from Ventura but also Ojai, Thousand Oaks, Westlake Village, Camarillo and Simi Valley.Harlow Rose Rega, an eight-year old from Ventura, came with her grandmother Sandy Friedman. Harlow made her own sign: “Save my future.”Friedman is worried about her social security. “I worked my whole life and so did my husband. Now I’m afraid Trump will take it away,” she said. Signs indicated protesters are worried about a range of issues – racism, national parks, health care, environment, veteran benefits, grocery costs and more. Some people said AI helped with their signage but refused to create anti-Trump slogans specifically so they worked around that.In Ventura, a chant of “Donald Trump has got to go. Hey hey ho ho!” started amid lots of cheers and honking cars.A mix of English and Spanish songs is also blasting from the mobile sound system. People are in good spirits and friendly with peacful though loud protests and no evidence of Trump support.Several hundred vociferous anti-Trump demonstrators converged on a traffic circle in Florida’s Fort Lauderdale suburb of Hollywood Saturday morning to vent their rejection of the 47th president’s policies and myriad executive orders.Chanting “hey hey, ho ho, Trump and Musk have got to go,” the predominantly white protestors jeered motorists in Tesla Cybertrucks and hoisted a variety of colorful placards that left little doubt where they stand on the topic of Donald Trump.“Prosecute and jail the Turd Reich,” read one. Some reserved special ire for the world’s richest person: “I did not elect Elon Musk.” Others emphasized the protestors’ anxieties about the future of democracy in the U.S.“Hands off democracy,” declared one placard. “Stop being Putin’s puppet,” enjoined another.“This is an assault on our democracy, on our economy, on our civil rights,” said Jennifer Heit, a 64-year-old editor and resident of Plantation who toted a poster that read, “USA: No to King or Oligarchy.”“Everything is looking so bad that I feel we have to do all we can while we can, and just having all this noise is unsettling to everyone,” Heit said.Heit attended a protest outside a Tesla dealership in Fort Lauderdale last week, and the Trump administration’s frontal assault on the rule of law and the judiciary has outraged her.“We’re supposed to be a nation of laws and due process,” she said, “and I am especially concerned about the people who are being deported without any due process.” More

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      New York schools tell Trump administration they won’t comply with DEI order

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      New York state officials have told the Trump administration that they will not comply with its demands to end diversity, equity and inclusion practices in public schools, despite the administration’s threats to terminate federal education funding.Daniel Morton-Bentley, counsel and deputy commissioner of the state’s department of education, said in a letter dated Friday to the federal education department that state officials do not believe the federal agency has authority to make such demands.“We understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems ‘diversity, equity & inclusion,’” he wrote. “But there are no federal or state laws prohibiting the principles of DEI.”Morton-Bentley also wrote state officials were “unaware” of any authority the federal Department of Education has to demand that states agree with its interpretation of court decisions or to terminate funding without a formal administrative process.The US Department of Education did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.The Trump administration on Thursday ordered K-12 schools nationwide to certify within 10 days that they are following federal civil rights laws and ending any discriminatory DEI practices, as a condition for receiving federal money. Federal funding comprises about 6% of the total funding for New York K-12 schools.“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement when the demand was made. He said many schools have flouted their legal obligations, “including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another.”The certification demand asked state and school leaders to sign a “reminder of legal obligations” acknowledging their federal money is conditioned on compliance with federal civil rights laws. It also demands compliance with several pages of legal analysis written by the administration.The demand specifically threatens Title I funding, which sends billions of dollars a year to US schools and targets low-income areas.Morton-Bentley wrote that the state education department (NYSED) has already certified to the federal government on multiple occasions that it is complying with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, most recently in January. He said the federal department is basing its demands to end DEI programs on a faulty legal interpretation.“Given the fact that you are already in possession of guarantees by NYSED that it has and will comply with Title VI, no further certification will be forthcoming,” he wrote.He also said the administration’s stance is an “abrupt shift” from the one taken by the first Trump administration, citing comments in 2020 made by the then US education secretary, Betsy DeVos, that diversity and inclusion were “cornerstones of high organizational performance”. He wrote the administration has provided no explanation of why it changed positions.Critics of the certification demand said it conflicted with Trump’s promise to return education to schools and states.The threat of financial sanctions is similar to ones the Trump administration has been leveraging against colleges in its effort to crack down on protests against Israel that it deems antisemitic.New York state has similarly refused to comply with a demand by the Trump administration to shut down a program to fund mass transit in New York City with tolls on cars that drive into Manhattan. More

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      Trump administration apologizes for telling Ukrainian refugees to leave US

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      Donald Trump’s presidential administration has acknowledged and apologized after it says it accidentally informed some Ukrainian refugees fleeing their country’s invasion by Russia that they needed to leave the US because their legal status was being revoked.About 240,000 Ukrainians have been settled in the US as part of the Uniting for Ukraine – or U4U – program launched during Joe Biden’s presidency. But according to CBS News, some resettled Ukrainians received emails this week telling them that the US Department of Homeland Security would be terminating their legal protections.More than 20,000 Ukrainians who flew to Mexico at the start of the war were also allowed into the US, which allows DHS officials to offer temporary work permits and deportation protections to migrants on humanitarian grounds.“DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole,” read the notice dated 3 April, referring to the temporary legal status (TPS) granted to Ukrainians after Russia invaded its neighbouring state. “Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate 7 days from the date of this notice.”If recipients failed to leave the US, the message warned, they would “be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States” and encouraged the recipients to sign up for self-deportation.“Do not attempt to remain in the United States – the federal government will find you,” the notice warned. “Please depart the United States immediately.”But the DHS said in a statement to the outlet on Friday that the notice had been sent in error to some Ukrainians under the U4U program. “The U4U parole program has not been terminated,” the DHS statement read. And the missive had been corrected with a follow-up message that said: “No action will be taken with respect to your parole.”Ukraine nationals have not been caught up in the cancellation of Biden administration immigration programs that include Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, and ordered them to self-deport by 24 April. Nonetheless, the rescinded notice caused panic with Ukrainians in the US who have been widely fearing that they could face the same cancellations affecting those of other nationalities.On Friday, a federal judge gave the Trump administration until the end of Monday to return a Maryland man who was inadvertently deported under a controversial use of the Alien Enemies Act to El Salvador in March.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJudge Paula Xinis ruled that federal officials had acted without “legal basis” when they arrested Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national living in Maryland legally, and deported him without due process.Administration officials have said there was little they can do to get Garcia returned, despite acknowledging that his deportation last month had been a mistake. The justice department said that it intended to appeal Xinis’s decision. More