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      The US supreme court paved the way for Texas’s gerrymandering mess | Steven Greenhouse

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      With Texas Republicans rushing to fulfil Donald Trump’s wish to gerrymander to the max, many Americans are no doubt wondering why there isn’t some referee to stop this hyperpartisan race to the bottom that is poisoning our democracy. The supreme court should be the referee that puts a halt to this ugly, undemocratic mess, but in a shortsighted, 5-4 ruling in 2019, the court’s conservative majority essentially told state legislatures that anything goes when it comes to gerrymandering. Their message was: no matter how extreme the gerrymandering, we’ll look the other way.Writing the majority opinion in that case, Rucho v Common Cause, chief justice John Roberts declared that gerrymandering was a political matter that federal courts shouldn’t intervene in (unless it involves racial discrimination). Many legal experts said the conservative justices were defaulting on the court’s responsibility to prevent absurdly unfair, undemocratic elections, where the fix is in even before people vote. In a prescient dissent, justice Elena Kagan warned that the huge permission slip the court was giving to gerrymandering would encourage “a politics of polarization and dysfunction” and might “irreparably damage our system of government”.Trump and his team have been shrewd enough and shameless enough to seek to take maximum advantage of that ruling, and in doing so, they’re showing how right Kagan was. Trump and company are seriously damaging our system of government and our democracy by seeking to insulate Trump from the majority’s will, an expected Democratic-leaning vote in the 2026 congressional elections. Trump and team are also ratcheting up the “polarization and dysfunction” Kagan warned us about. Democratic lawmakers have fled Texas to prevent a GOP power grab, while Texas governor Greg Abbott has called for their arrest and removal from office.Gerrymandering further fuels polarization because November elections become largely irrelevant for choosing candidates. With gerrymandering, what counts are the party primaries, and there, the extremes, rather than moderate swing voters, determine who the winning candidate is. This in turn leads to increasingly polarized, dysfunctional legislative bodies, like the House of Representatives, where there’s plenty of performative, partisan showboating and very little legislation passed.In Rucho, the conservative majority declined to overturn a gerrymander in which the North Carolina GOP had rigged congressional districts so that Republicans would win 10 of the state’s 13 House seats even when the GOP won a bare majority of the statewide vote. (The case also involved some flagrant gerrymandering by Maryland’s Democrats.) It’s thanks to Roberts and the conservative justices’ indifference to gerrymandering that a person close to Trump could say that the administration’s attitude was “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time”.Seeking to maximize the chances of maintaining Republican control of the House, where the GOP has a mere three-seat majority, many Republicans also want GOP-led legislatures in Missouri, Florida, Ohio and Indiana to gerrymander to the max. In Texas alone, Trump hopes the GOP can pick up five House seats through redistricting. Even though Trump beat former vice-president Kamala Harris by 56% to 42% in Texas in 2024, the newly unveiled gerrymander aims to guarantee Republicans 30 out of Texas’s 38 House seats (a 79% to 21% ratio). Democrats accuse Trump and the Texas GOP of cheating, and it should be no surprise that they want to respond to fire with fire, with the Democratic governors of California, Illinois and New York saying that they, too, will push through gerrymanders.This unseemly electoral arms race results directly from the supreme court’s dodging of responsibility. In Rucho, chief justice Roberts shrugged at gerrymandering, saying that redistricting shenanigans were part and parcel of US history. Pointing to examples of gerrymandering from the 1780s and early 1800s, Roberts pooh-poohed this phenomenon, writing: “Partisan gerrymandering is nothing new. Nor is frustration with it.” He also voiced skepticism and snark about judges’ use of standards and election experts’ predictions to determine when partisan redistricting crosses the line into unconstitutional gerrymandering that violates the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause.In contrast to Roberts’ who-cares casualness, justice Kagan was an I’m-warning-you Cassandra. In a stinging dissent joined by justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, she correctly predicted that terrible things would result from Roberts’s decision. She wrote that his opinion showed “a saddening nonchalance about the threat that such [extreme] redistricting posts to self-governance”.Kagan didn’t mince her words about how Roberts’s decision threatened our democracy and undermined the ability of Americans to elect a government of their choosing. “For the first time ever,” she wrote, “this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”In Rucho, Roberts wrote that the constitution neither expressly bans gerrymandering, nor points to a standard to determine when partisan redistricting is so unfair that it becomes unconstitutional. He suggested it would be a grievous, arbitrary wrong to select some legal or mathematical standard to determine when gerrymanders are illegal. Roberts wrote: “There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments, let alone limited and precise standards that are clear, manageable, and politically neutral.”Today’s headlines make clear that Roberts and his Rucho decision have left us with a far more grievous wrong. It has encouraged ultra-partisan gerrymandering that is sabotaging our democracy and the majority will – in this case with an eye to preventing Democrats from winning back control of the House and serving as a check on Trump, the most authoritarian president in US history. If Texas Republicans prevail and enact their gerrymander, despite Democratic lawmakers’ exodus from the state, then the votes of millions of Texas Democrats will become meaningless, their votes in effect erased by the Trump/GOP gerrymander juggernaut. The same thing will happen to many Republican voters in states where Democrats gerrymander.Roberts was dismayingly myopic in failing to realize how his Rucho decision would someday lead to a push for maximum, hyperpartisan redistricting and how new electoral and computer models would make gerrymandering far more sophisticated – and sinister. Roberts was flatly wrong when he wrote that there can’t be “clear, manageable, and politically neutral” standards that define when redistricting crosses the line from mere partisanship to over-the-top, undemocratic, grossly unfair ultra-partisanship. One study put forward a smart standard that says gerrymandering crosses the line into illegality when a certain, high percentage of votes are wasted, deliberately rendered meaningless through partisan redistricting.What we’re seeing right now in Texas is one political party seeking to squeeze every last drop out of a filthy gerrymandering sponge – fair play and democracy be damned. Foreseeing ugly episodes like this, Kagan cited the vision of James Madison, the main author of the constitution, who once wrote that the “power is in the people over the Government, and not in the Government over the people”.The whole purpose of Trump’s gerrymandering power grab is to prevent the people from having power over him and his increasingly unpopular government. Unfortunately, Roberts gave Trump a green light for such a power grab.Like Trump, Roberts hates admitting mistakes, but it’s not too late for him to admit how shortsighted and harmful his Rucho ruling was. Nor is it too late for the chief justice to get the court to set some sane, healthy limits on gerrymandering to safeguard our democracy as well as Madison’s vision that the “power is in the people over the Government”.

      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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      The Voting Rights Act is facing the biggest threats in its 60 years

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      Facing images of violent white mobs defending racial segregation, the condemnation of the world and of its own citizens, Congress in 1965 passed the Voting Rights Act, a law meant to end the hypocrisy of a democratic country that denied Black people the power of their vote.Sixty years later, race remains at the center of American politics. Cases before the US supreme court, and a platoon of Texas legislators fleeing the state to prevent redistricting, demonstrate how the Voting Rights Act – and its erosion – remains on the frontline of the political battlefield.“Democracy is at stake,” said Todd Cox, associate director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Even as voting rights advocates use the act to win additional congressional representation in Alabama and press cases in Louisiana and North Carolina, a conservative supreme court makes gains precarious, he said.“We wouldn’t be under such a threat if we weren’t doing so well in making sure our communities were engaged, that they were turning out and that their rights were protected,” Cox said. “This is a cyclical part of history, that when we see some success in advancing rights, there’s always backlash.”Veterans of the struggle for civil rights view passage of the act as a revolutionary, historical demarcation point equal to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Confederate general Robert E Lee’s surrender at Appomattox or the establishment of women’s suffrage. Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act fundamentally rewrote politics in America.“I know I stand on the shoulders of folks … who fought and died in some cases,” Cox said.Though constitutional amendments passed after the American civil war ended slavery and commanded racial equality before the law, American lawmakers regularly found ways to keep Black citizens from exercising political power. Literacy tests, poll taxes, separate ballot boxes for Black and white voters, white-only primary elections, purges of Black voters from the rolls and discriminatory district lines rigged elections for white voters in the US’s Jim Crow era.Each time a court struck down a state law or demanded the end of a discriminatory practice, obstructionist local lawmakers – mostly but not exclusively in southern states – would quickly adapt, often enacting new election changes without enough time for a court to intervene. Civil rights laws at the time held insufficient authority to stop the practice.After years of campaigns for voting rights and racial equality across the south, the civil rights struggle came to a head in March 1965 in Selma, Alabama. The death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Baptist deacon and local voting rights activist, at the hands of state troopers led 600 people to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.State troopers attacked demonstrators with truncheons and teargas. As networks broadcast the assault, the US watched future US representative John Lewis get beaten into unconsciousness by white police officers live on national television. Support crystalized for civil and voting rights after the events of the “Bloody Sunday” broadcast.Congress wrote the Voting Rights Act to prevent the case-by-case whack-a-mole games local lawmakers were playing with election rules. It forced jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to clear elections changes with the Department of Justice before they could go into effect. It banned literacy tests to vote and allowed challenges to district maps when those maps would not allow proportional representation for minority voters.The principles of the Voting Rights Act have shaped the way lawmakers from the halls of Congress to a city council hearing room have to respond politically to voters of color.Congress has reauthorized the Voting Rights Act four times since its enactment, each time under a Republican president. But the law’s protections have suffered a death of a thousand cuts.In the Shelby County v Holder case of 2013, the US supreme court held that the data defining jurisdictions with a history of discrimination was too old to be relied upon; Congress must update it for the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance rules in Section 5 to remain constitutional, the court ruled. Republicans in Congress have blocked legislation – the John Lewis voting rights advancement act – updating the law, effectively ending pre-clearance.“It was a pretty significant blow to the project of ensuring voting free of racial discrimination in this country,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s voting rights project. “I think it really accelerated in this moment the attacks on voting access across the country.”States previously restricted by pre-clearance enacted a wave of election legislation following the ruling, closing polling places, changing voter registration rules and redrawing district lines unhindered.The 5-4 decision in Rucho v Common Cause in 2019 further eroded the power of the Voting Rights Act, by explicitly permitting political gerrymandering, even as racial gerrymandering remained off-limits.The mid-decade redistricting in Texas proposed by Donald Trump presents a particularly vivid example of the consequences of an end to pre-clearance and recent supreme court decisions. Democratic state representatives have fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum to pass the redistricting legislation, which would likely grant Republicans an additional five congressional seats in Texas by concentrating some minority voters into fewer districts while diluting clusters of other voters.“Those maps would have had to be reviewed by the federal government coming in after the fact to challenge them, and winning,” Lakin said.In 2003, the eighth circuit federal appellate court further restricted the use of the Voting Rights Act, ruling in Arkansas State Conference NAACP v Arkansas Board of Apportionment that private groups do not have a right to challenge state election laws under the act; only the Department of Justice can bring a voting rights case to court. A second eighth circuit decision extended the ban on private voting rights suits from redistricting cases to suits challenging restrictions on voter assistance.Of the 180 or so successful claims brought under the Voting Rights Act, only 15 have been brought by the Department of Justice, said Jacqueline De León, senior staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. The Department of Justice’s voting rights division used to have about 30 staff attorneys; under the Trump administration, it has lost all but two or three, she said.“We know the Department of Justice is not going to be in the business of enforcing voting rights,” De León said. “Right now, we don’t know if there will be a future where a Voting Rights Act is available to our country. This is really a moment for concern and reflection on this anniversary.”Lakin said she expects the eighth circuit ruling to be appealed to the supreme court.Meanwhile, a case in Louisiana that has reached the US supreme court threatens the last leg standing of the Voting Rights Act.On Friday, the court signaled that it will consider the constitutionality of section 2, asking for supplemental briefs in Louisiana v Callais. The case, to be heard later this year, asks whether the state’s creation of a majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th amendment to the constitution.“I think this is, unfortunately, another opportunity for the court to continue to attack this pillar of our democracy, the Voting Rights Act,” Lakin said.In Callais, a group of “non-African-American voters” filed suit against the state of Louisiana, arguing that lawmakers acting on the order of the federal court drew a congressional district map that unconstitutionally considered race.The Equal Protection Clause of the US constitution and the 15th amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote cannot be denied because of race says that lawmakers cannot consider race predominantly over other factors when redistricting without a compelling reason. But section 2 of the Voting Rights Act requires lawmakers to consider race when it is necessary to ensure that the voting power of racial minorities has fair representation.The cases are an effort to create conflict between the Voting Rights Act and the constitution as a rationale for a conservative court to chip away, Lakin said.“Congress can enact laws to ensure the 14th and 15th amendments are given life,” she said. “I think that there’s an attempt to create tensions around this and say that there’s a disconnect with the Voting Rights Act. But as the supreme court has stated … the act is a properly, constitutionally authorized use of Congress’s powers.”Such a finding would turn hard-fought civil rights law on its head. It would establish a legal basis for white voters to challenge laws meant to protect minority voters from discrimination.“I would say it’s a perversion of what the Department of Justice has symbolized, specifically what its historic role, its purpose was meant to be,” Lakin said. More

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      Trump cuts shut down an LGBTQ+ youth suicide lifeline. What happens now?

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      Becca Nordeen had just left a town hall for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline when she received some shocking news. As the senior vice-president of crisis intervention at the Trevor Project, a non-profit focused on suicide prevention for queer youth, Nordeen’s team had provided counseling to LGBTQ+ individuals through 988, a national suicide and crisis hotline, for nearly three years. But a few minutes after the meeting, Nordeen received an email notifying her that those services would be terminated in a month.“There’s an emotional hangover of dealing with the grief and the work of shutting down the program,” Nordeen said. “In the days and weeks that have followed, we have looked at, ‘well, there are still young people who need us, and in our remaining service, how can we be there to meet that need?’”From 988’s inception, trained counselors had answered 1.5m online chats, calls or texts from LGBTQ+ youth in crisis. The Trevor Project was one of several groups contracted by the federal agency the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Samhsa) to field calls from LGBTQ+ people, nearly 10% of the lifeline’s overall contacts. Nordeen’s team had responded to about half of the requests for services from the high-risk population. Samhsa cited financial constraints as the reason for closing its line geared toward the LGBTQ+ community, though opponents of the closure say that it was politically motivated.The 988 general hotline still exists and specialized services for veterans remain. But free, 24/7 counseling is no longer available for LGBTQ+ youth through the “press 3” option. According to 2023 survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20% of queer youth attempted suicide between 2022 and 2023. They are more than three times more likely to do so than their cisgender and heterosexual peers.Since the closure of 988’s LGBTQ+ services on 17 July, Nordeen said that the Trevor Project has been “picking up the pieces”. The closure of the 988 lifeline has also meant that the Trevor Project lost the $25m federal contract that allowed the non-profit to more than double its impact by reaching 270,000 people. More than 200 counselors from the Trevor Project were let go upon the national lifeline’s termination. But through donations from individuals and foundations, the non-profit retained 30 counselors who will join their privately funded 24/7 suicide prevention hotline that started in 1998.Now, the Trevor Project has 130 counselors to answer the 20% surge in calls over the past two months. It’s too early to predict how long the influx will last, said Nordeen, but in the meantime, she wants youth to know that the non-profit is still there to help them. Over the past couple of weeks, Nordeen’s team has monitored the volume of requests and reached out to off-duty counselors and their network of more than 400 volunteers to respond to calls and texts during influxes.More than 53,000 people signed the Trevor Project’s petition to protect the lifeline, some of whom shared their personal experiences using it. One signer from California wrote that it saved their child’s life during a mental health crisis last year, and another person from Pennsylvania wrote that they had used the service countless times and would not be here today without it.“These youth resources make us the adults we are today,” a signer from New York wrote in the petition. “They’re not extras or luxuries, they’re lifelines. They’re the affirming spaces, the trusted adults … the moments where we were told: ‘You belong.’ Without them, many of us wouldn’t have made it.”‘An erasure of a population’A Samhsa spokesperson told the Guardian in an email that the “press 3” option had run out of congressionally directed spending and that “continued funding of the Press 3 option threatened to put the entire 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in danger of massive reductions in service”. Congress had appropriated about $519m for 988 in the 2025 federal fiscal year that began on 1 October 2024 and ends on 30 September 2025. The LGBTQ+ services were allotted $33m, which had been exhausted by June, Samhsa said in a statement. “The 988 Lifeline will continue to be a direct connection to immediate support for all Americans,” the spokesperson said, “regardless of their circumstances.”View image in fullscreenBut Dr Sunny Patel, a child psychiatrist and former senior adviser for children, youth and families at Samhsa, said that the agency was under pressure from the Trump administration to close 988’s “press 3” option to adhere to executive orders aimed at dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. “One of the things that I find very challenging to believe is that it’s related to a lack of funding,” Patel said.The National Suicide Hotline Designation Act of 2020, which created 988 and was signed into law by Donald Trump during his first term, specified that Samhsa must be prepared to provide specialized services for LGBTQ+ youth. But now, the Trump administration has taken a special interest in targeting the healthcare of transgender individuals, Patel said. “They don’t want anything to do with LGBTQ populations,” he added. “There is this air of, ‘Well, everything should be for everybody, and so why should we have any specialized services for anybody?’”Patel said that he believed that the agency was obliged to continue a lifesaving service, and that ending it would generate harm and confusion. “I fear for the direction that we’re going in,” Patel said, “where there’s an erasure of a population and its needs.”Mark Henson, the Trevor Project’s vice-president of government affairs and advocacy, is hopeful that the decision will be reversed, in light of support from members of Congress who are pushing the Trump administration to reinstate the 988 lifeline. In the meantime, the non-profit is fundraising to try to hire more counselors to handle the potential for a continued surge in calls. And in July, the office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced that California would partner with the Trevor Project to train 988 counselors in the state to better serve LGBTQ+ youth.“We’re trying to flood the zone in any way that we can, to the extent that resources allow us to keep these services going,” Henson said, and to ensure that “the LGBTQ+ youth know that there are services out there, that they belong, and that their life has value”.‘What happens if there’s only one?’When the announcement was made that the lifeline would be terminated, Henson heard from youth that they would use 988’s LGBTQ+ services as a backup if surges on the Trevor Project’s hotline prevented them from quickly accessing a counselor and vice versa. “If there was an increase in wait time on one line, they would go to the other. There was an equilibration there that enabled them to have these multiple options,” Henson said. Now, he said, youth are asking: “What happens if there’s only one?”Specialized services from trained counselors provided a safe and affirming space for LGBTQ+ youth, Nordeen said, so that they felt less alone even if they did not have community or local support. “When you take that network away,” Nordeen said, “you are essentially invalidating that young person and their experiences and the crisis that they might feel.”The specialized services were also effective because the counselors sometimes shared similar experiences to the callers and were better able to relate to those in crisis, said Hannah Wesolowski, chief advocacy officer at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (Nami), where she advocates for policies to help people affected by mental health conditions. Youth and LGBTQ+ people were the most aware of 988, she said, so she’s concerned that dropping services could lead to “tragic outcomes”.“I fear in this time of really heated political rhetoric and partisanship,” Wesolowski said, “that this is another message point that tells young people: ‘You’re not important, you’re not the priority.’”Nami, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) and other organizations are working with members of Congress to try to return funding to the hotline in the 2026 fiscal year, or to pass legislation that would require specialized services for LGBTQ+ people. And from a state level, Nami’s local chapters are brainstorming with politicians on potential crisis service options for queer youth in their nearby communities.For Bob Gebbia, the CEO of AFSP, an organization that researches suicide prevention and that advocated for the formation of 988, it is ironic that the specialized service that received widespread bipartisan support during its creation is now the subject of fierce debate. The argument for maintaining LGBTQ+ services is simple, he said: it’s based on need. “It isn’t a political issue,” he said, “it’s a public health issue.” More

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      Sixty years after the Voting Rights Act, our voices are being eroded | Al Sharpton

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      In a moment when we should be celebrating one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, we are in fact at a worse place as a nation than when it was passed. Those of us fighting to protect the right to vote find ourselves against a movement that doesn’t want to take us back to 1965. They want to create an America that more closely resembles the one of 1865.Sixty years ago, in a rare and profound act of consensus, Congress passed a law to end the centuries-old rigging of American democracy. Yet today the system is as rigged as ever, with the battered Voting Rights Act on life support.The erosion of our rights is playing out before our eyes. Purged voting rolls have helped to install a regime that arrests undocumented people and American citizens alike. A loss of faith in the system led many people to stay at home on election day; now they live in fear of walking outside their door. Empowering states to create restrictive laws has yielded less access to not only the right to vote, but to healthcare, jobs and home ownership.At the center of this is Donald Trump – a man whose legacy as president is marked by rampant voter disenfranchisement. This is a man whose claim to fame is fame itself, who views voting as nothing more than a popularity contest that he’s terrified to lose. It’s why he questioned the integrity of our democratic network in 2020 instead of graciously accepting that 7 million more Americans preferred Joe Biden over him.Trump’s campaign against voting rights marches on, as he fills the courts with judges who will continue to kill civil rights through a thousand cuts. Barriers to voting and the silence of those still able to cast ballots has emboldened and empowered him to bully media conglomerates into complacency and corporations into abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Free of fear from the voters, Trump has gone full bore in desecrating the legacy of the civil rights movement – going so far as to use government files on Dr Martin Luther King Jr to distract from his own political headaches.But we cannot in this moment forget the power King saw in the right to vote. In his 1957 Give Us the Ballot speech at the Lincoln Memorial, King declared to 25,000 people that with the vote: “We will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.”Yet today that fear persists, perhaps stronger than ever. We have indeed come full circle from March 1965, when the nation was rattled by the images of a young John Lewis and dozens of peaceful protesters getting their heads cracked open and their organs bruised on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The national outrage of Bloody Sunday that sparked mobilization toward passage of the Voting Rights Act has been replaced by a numbness to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, the arrests of elected officials and the snipping of social safety nets.The solution to it all remains the right to vote. A week after the brutal beatings in Selma, King declared voting “Civil Right No. 1” in the New York Times. He called it the “foundation stone for political action”, one we must build upon today. Within five months, Congress bravely voted to end racist literacy tests, enable federal examiners to protect voter registration, and fight the ugliest forms of voter suppression.America was stronger for a generation, until the election of her first Black president sparked a conservative backlash that is today at its peak. The opening salvo came in 2013, when the supreme court gutted the law’s core federal pre-clearance provisions in Shelby county v Holder. It chipped away more eight years later, giving states further authority to enforce stricter voter ID laws, purge voter rolls, and reverse early and absentee programs meant to expand access to the polls. In short, Shelby v Holder opened the door for a manicured version of Jim Crow.It is for these reasons that we will lead a March on Wall Street later this month. The 28 August demonstration, held on the anniversary of the March on Washington, will send a message to Trump and his Maga allies in Congress. You may restrict our ability to vote in the president, the senators and the Congress members we support. But you cannot restrict how we vote with our dollars. Black voters have a skyrocketing buying power expected to hit $1.7tn by 2030. We must use it to make sure those we support stand by us.Until we get to a day when the integrity of voting is restored, when we can finally pass the John R Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, we will use the power we have. Trump may use the bully pulpit of the White House to influence companies’ investments in Black America, but we have the ability to hit their bottom line.Celebrating this anniversary of the Voting Rights Act means honoring the sacrifices of those who shed their blood and laid down their lives for our most fundamental freedom and recommitting ourselves to the struggle by tapping into the unwavering hope and persistence that fueled the civil rights movement. To settle for anything less would be unconditional surrender to the segregationists against whom King, congressman Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer and the other great civil rights leaders stood.

      Rev Al Sharpton is an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and radio talkshow host More

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      My travels in Trump’s Florida: Maga superstars, gen Z Republicans – and the shame of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

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      The mezzanine floor of the Tampa Convention Center buzzes chaotically with rightwing chatter: conspiracy theories, grievance politics and Christian nationalism. Look in any direction and someone in front of you, washed in sharp studio lights, is drawing a crowd and creating content.Ahead of me, Russell Brand sits on a white sofa, broadcasting live on the conservative video-streaming service Rumble – his guest is the “alt-right” influencer Jack Posobiec. To the left, along an alleyway lined with small broadcast booths, is the longtime Donald Trump adviser and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who is holding court on a podcast. To the rear, on a large metal scaffold, is Steve Bannon’s War Room channel, busy cutting between live footage of a small protest outside the event and adverts for various Trump-aligned products.View image in fullscreenThe panorama serves as a realisation of one of Bannon’s notorious PR idioms: flooding the zone with shit. This is the Turning Point Student Action summit, an annual gathering targeted at gen Z conservatives, which draws thousands from across the US. It was a driving force in Trump’s success among younger male voters at the last election.In the arena next to the mezzanine, a conveyor belt of Maga superstars walk out to deliver keynote speeches, accompanied by spitting-flame cannon, pounding dubstep, spinning lasers and strobe lights. Brand delivers a bizarre diatribe – part standup comedy, part evangelical sermon – about his newfound conversion to Christianity in a word salad of alliteration and non sequiturs. Unsurprisingly, he makes no mention of the multiple rape and sexual assault charges he faces in the UK (to which he has pleaded not guilty).He is immediately followed by Tom Homan, Trump’s loudmouth border tsar, who is met with cries of “USA, USA!” as he refers to himself in the third person: “Tom Homan is running one of the biggest deportation operations this country has ever seen!” It is hard to keep up with this melange of fearmongering, severity and self-congratulation. It’s the epitome of Trump’s America.My colleague Tom Silverstone and I came here as the first stop on a journey across southern Florida. Once the quintessential swing state, it is now solidly Republican – and home to some of the president’s vast sources of personal wealth, including his beach club, Mar-a-Lago. It is also one of the hubs of his mass‑deportation programme.It seems no coincidence that the fast pace at Turning Point mirrors the first six months of Trump’s second term, which has lurched from scandal to extreme policy to blatant self-dealing at extraordinary speed – from the administration’s acceptance of a $400m luxury jet from the state of Qatar to his family’s creation of a private members’ club in Washington DC, charging $500,000 (£380,000) in annual fees.The apex of these brazen efforts to monetise the presidency is Trump’s venture into the world of cryptocurrency. He lauched his $TRUMP memecoin three days before he was sworn into office. These digital currencies have little to no financial use and are prone to rapid market fluctuations. Analysts estimate that the president’s family has netted about $315m since the venture launched into this volatile and speculative market and hundreds of thousands of investors have lost out. The whole episode lends itself to the argument that Trump’s return to power marks the advent of a second gilded age, last seen in the US after the civil war, when the unprecedented dominance of industry and technology led to rampant corruption and pronounced inequality.In May, some of the largest $TRUMP coin investors were invited to a dinner with the president at his Virginia golf course, then on a VIP tour of the White House, which some observers described as a blatant pay-to-play. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has said that Trump abides by all conflict of interest laws “that are applicable to the president”.No one at Turning Point seems particularly concerned about any of these apparent grifts, though. Anthony Watson, a contributor, stands in the merchandise area of the convention, where limited-edition gold Trump golf shoes are $500. He flicks away my questions about the Qatari jet with little thought.“What’s wrong about accepting it?” he says, after I point out it might fall under the general definition of a bribe. “Well, what did they get in exchange? Until you know, it’s speculation.”I track down Stone to ask how he thinks the founding fathers, who authored the foreign emoluments clause of the US constitution to block corruption and limit foreign influence, might view Trump’s move into memecoin. “I don’t think they could envisage cryptocurrency, period, or the technological age that we’re in,” he says, dodging the question.Beyond sheer audacity, these money-making schemes also strike at a clear contradiction within the Maga movement and its America First agenda. While most remain anonymous, some of the largest investors in Trump’s memecoin have been revealed as foreign nationals, one with ties to the Chinese Communist party. How does that tally with America First?View image in fullscreenI address this question to Bannon, who greets me with a smile and professes his love of the Guardian, despite labelling us “fucking commies from England”.He is willing to acknowledge a degree of unease, particularly when I mention the Chinese Communist party. But he still finds a way of reconciling it, arguing that the VIP event at the White House underscored a drive for “entrepreneurial capitalism”. “I’ve just got so much on my plate right now, I just don’t even focus on the memecoins,” he says, adding that “the crypto thing is not at that big a level”.It seems to mark a turn for Bannon who, in 2019, described cryptocurrencies as having a “big future … in this global populist revolt” and – according to reporting by ABC News – partly took control of an anti-Joe-Biden memecoin in 2021, along with the Republican strategist Boris Epshteyn. He seems uneasy when I ask about this venture, named $FJB (officially Freedom Jobs Business, unofficially shorthand for Fuck Joe Biden), given allegations of missing funds, reported failures to donate promised money to charity and a potential examination by the US justice department (DoJ) in 2023.“I think I put $500,000 into it,” Bannon recalls. Did he lose it all? “Yes. I think I lost all of it,” he says. He calls reports of a DoJ probe “fake news”.We leave Turning Point shortly after Bannon’s keynote address, which includes a flurry of praise for the immigration crackdown and receives a large round of applause. “Mass deportations now. Amnesty never,” he says. We drive about four hours south of Tampa to the centre of the Everglades, where a single‑lane highway is surrounded by cypress trees and mangroves.The administration’s immigration enforcement efforts are, in some ways, as brash and open as the Trump family’s presidential profit-making. Half a mile out, a large, newly installed bright-blue road sign announces we are approaching “Alligator Alcatraz”, a hastily constructed tent-like detention centre, surrounded by mosquito-infested swampland, about 50 miles outside Miami.View image in fullscreenIn a calculated display of draconian showmanship, Trump toured the facility in July, seeming to revel in its harsh conditions. It has become a symbol of this era of removals. Of the 57,000 people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more than 70% have no criminal record.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis morning, a small congregation of protesters stand by the roadside looking on in dismay. “This place is shameful,” reads one sign.View image in fullscreenI explain where we have come from in Tampa and ask how they think the centre they are protesting against is connected to my conversations about Trump’s self-enrichment at the convention.“It’s all part of the same thing,” says one older female protester. “For Trump, it’s about power and money. He’s doing everything he can to make money while he’s president. But he knows he has to be in power to maintain that, and this is all about power,” she says, gesturing towards the detention centre. “Power and fear.”View image in fullscreenA few minutes later, a white SUV emerges from a roadway leading to the centre. The car pulls over to a grassy embankment and a family emerges. They had tried to gain access to a relative named Martin Sanchez. They were blocked from entering.Sanchez, they tell me, has lived in the US without paperwork for the past 25 years, since coming from Mexico. He has two young children and no criminal record; he pays his taxes and works as a landscaper in the city of Palm Beach. He was arrested there four days earlier while on his way to work, mowing lawns.“He calls me a lot,” says his cousin Janet Garcia. “He hasn’t showered. They treat him like a prisoner. He got caught for working and that’s it.”She stares back towards the detention centre in the piercing sunlight. “Without immigrants, this country is gonna go down,” she says. “We have a felon in the White House, but the people they’ve got in here don’t even have a [traffic] ticket.”There is something stark about the location of Martin’s arrest. Palm Beach county, on Florida’s eastern coast, is the location of some of the most pronounced and expanding income disparities in the state. Average house prices here exceed the median income by six times. Known as the “Wall Street of the south”, its corporation-tax-friendly climate has drawn many of the world’s biggest finance groups and it is home to at least 67 billionaires. The highest profile of these is, of course, Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago club is situated on a tree-lined street by the sea. A year ago, it raised its annual membership fees to $1m.We drive to a food pantry a short distance from Trump’s club, where a line of about 20 people are waiting for the doors to open. A laminated sign on the wall warns that immigration officials will need a valid warrant to enter the premises and that the pantry, run by a local non-profit group, continues to serve people regardless of their legal status.The county has a significant population of people from Haiti, many of whom are under threat of deportation after Trump moved to end their temporary immigration protections, despite the security crisis in the country. “Some of them are afraid to come,” says a volunteer minister. “It’s hard, you can imagine. You have no food, but, because of your immigration status, you stay home.”The programme’s director, Ruth Mageria, shows me the large stockpiles of food in the fridges and tells me the pantry has seen a 71% increase in use over the past five years. Things are expected to get worse, as a spending bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Trump will cut basic food-assistance benefits for an estimated 22.3 million families across the country, while securing a host of tax cuts for the wealthy. The pantry has started preparing to ration its reserves.With a thunderstorm rolling in over the Atlantic and dark clouds forming like a tidal wave on the horizon, we seek out Mar-a-Lago. We stand on a bridge, on the newly renamed President Donald J Trump Boulevard, and look out over billionaires row. I’m reminded that this community was founded during the US’s first gilded age.It is an inauspicious end to this 400-mile journey across the state. The roads have emptied, but a small crew of landscapers, already drenched, are trimming the tall palms outside the club. Oliver Laughland is the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief More

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      RFK Jr’s health department to halt $500m in mRNA vaccine research

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      The US Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it would terminate 22 federal contracts for mRNA-based vaccines, questioning the safety of a technology credited with helping end the Covid pandemic and saving millions of lives.The unit, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, helps companies develop medical supplies to address public health threats, and had provided billions of dollars for development of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.HHS said the wind-down includes cancellation of a contract awarded to Moderna for the late-stage development of its bird flu vaccine for humans and the right to purchase the shots, as previously reported in May.The US health agency said it was also rejecting or canceling multiple pre-award solicitations, including proposals from Pfizer, Sanofi Pasteur, CSL Seqirus, Gritstone and others.In total, the affected projects are worth “nearly $500 million”, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said. Certain late-stage projects were excluded from the move “to preserve prior taxpayer investment”.This is the latest development under US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a longtime vaccine skeptic who has been making sweeping changes to reshape vaccines, food and medicine policies.“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” Kennedy said in a statement.Kennedy said the HHS is terminating these programs because data show these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”, but did not offer scientific evidence.“We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate,” Kennedy said.HHS said the decision follows a comprehensive review of mRNA-related investments initiated during the Covid-19 public health emergency.Since taking office, Kennedy, who spent two decades sowing misinformation around immunization, has overseen a major overhaul of US health policy – firing, for example, a panel of vaccine experts that advise the government and replacing them with his own appointees.In its first meeting, the new panel promptly voted to ban a longstanding vaccine preservative targeted by the anti-vaccine movement, despite its strong safety record.He has also ordered a sweeping new study on the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.Unlike traditional vaccines, which often use weakened or inactivated forms of the target virus or bacteria, mRNA shots deliver genetic instructions into the host’s cells, prompting them to produce a harmless decoy of the pathogen and train the immune system to fight the real thing.Though in development for decades, mRNA vaccines were propelled from lab benches to widespread use through Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed – a public-private partnership led by Barda that poured billions into companies to accelerate development.The technology’s pioneers, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, were awarded the 2023 Nobel prize in medicine for their work contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times”. More

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      Trump news at a glance: president says Republicans ‘entitled’ to more seats in Texas amid spiralling redistricting fight

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      A day after Texas Democrat lawmakers fled the state in an effort to halt Republican efforts to redraw their congressional map, Donald Trump said that his party was entitled to the five more seats they could pick up if the updated maps pass through the state’s congress.“We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” Trump said. “We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”Democrats in other states have said they will retaliate, setting the stage for a nasty and prolonged redistricting tit-for-tat that could last for years.Here are the key US politics stories of the day:Texas senator asks FBI to help locate and arrest Democrats for leaving stateThe US senator John Cornyn of Texas has asked the FBI to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who left the state to forestall a plan sought by Donald Trump to aggressively redraw the state’s congressional map in a way that could help Republicans keep their House majority after the 2026 midterm elections.Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, announced what experts say is likely a longshot bid to convince a court to declare the seats of “any rogue lawmakers” vacant if they do not return to work at the statehouse by Friday.Read the full storyEpstein scandal broadens as new trove of letters publishedThe long-running scandal surrounding the disgraced late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein broadened on Tuesday after the New York Times published a trove of previously unseen letters to Epstein from numerous powerful figures as well as unseen photographs from inside his Manhattan mansion.Read the full storyHouse panel subpoenas Clintons for Epstein testimonyThe Republican-led House oversight committee on Tuesday issued subpoenas to Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as several former attorneys general and directors of the FBI, demanding “testimony related to horrific crimes perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein”.Read the full storyRwanda agrees to take up to 250 migrants from the USThe Rwandan government has said it would accept up to 250 migrants from the US under a deal agreed with Washington but gave no details on who could be included. The Trump administration’s deportation drive has included negotiating arrangements to send people to third countries, among them South Sudan and Eswatini.Read the full storyPam Bondi seeks grand jury review of origins of Trump-Russia investigationThe US attorney general, Pam Bondi, is said to be ordering prosecutors to present evidence to a grand jury investigating the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia inquiry, according to the Associated Press.The criminal probe follows referrals from Trump administration intelligence officials and targets the investigation that established Moscow interfered in the 2016 election on Donald Trump’s behalf, a source who spoke on condition of anonymity told AP.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      News Corp has warned Donald Trump that AI is cannibalizing the content of his books, including The Art of the Deal.

      Donald Trump said he would soon announce his pick for an open seat on the Federal Reserve board and possibly his choice for Fed chair, but ruled out treasury secretary Scott Bessent.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 August 2025. More