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      Is Trump’s expansion of presidential powers setting the stage for future Oval Office holders?

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      Near corn dog and cookie vendors, Ray Seeman was washing his hands on a sweltering day. He had come to the rally in a Maga cap and a T-shirt that proclaimed: Cult 45: proud member. Is this a cult? “It seems like it,” he laughed. “It seems like you’re either in or you’re out.”A cult, perhaps, but not an imperial presidency, Seeman insisted, though he does understand Donald Trump’s frustrations. “I don’t like executive orders,” he said. “I like it to go through due process. But at the same time you’ve got to get stuff done sometimes.”A few thousand people had gathered at the Iowa state fairgrounds on Thursday to witness the president kick off a year-long celebration of the US’s 250th anniversary of independence from a tyrannical king. No one here seemed concerned that the US might now be propping up a monarch of its own. But Trump’s critics warn of an expansion of presidential power unlike anything seen in modern American history.In less than six months, Trump has taken a series of executive actions that have established new norms for the authority of whoever occupies the Oval Office. Longstanding mechanisms designed to limit executive power – Congress, the judiciary and internal safeguards – are being undermined or proving ineffective in restraining him.Last month, Trump ordered a military strike on Iran without seeking congressional approval. A solitary Republican, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, spoke out to describe the move as unconstitutional because only Congress has the power to declare war. Trump scorned him and, setting another dangerous precedent, imposed a limit on classified information shared with senators and representatives.Trump took unilateral action to impose tariffs under the cover of declaring a national emergency. He dismantled agencies, fired civil servants and froze spending that was approved by Congress and assumed to be protected by law; he has, for example, blocked more than $6bn in federal funding that helps fund after-school and summer programmes.Trump shattered another norm when he took control of California’s national guard and deployed it to quell mostly peaceful protests over immigration raids in Los Angeles, despite opposition from state governor Gavin Newsom and other state officials.The president has breached the justice department’s traditional independence, ordering it to scrutinise his political opponents and punish his critics through measures such as stripping their Secret Service protections. At the same time, he pardoned his supporters who took part in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, abandoning any notion that pardons be used sparingly.While courts have acted to block some executive actions, the US supreme court’s recent ruling limiting nationwide injunctions and Trump’s direct attacks on judges signal the weakening of another democratic guardrail.And even as Trump brazenly accepts gifts from foreign countries, seeks to profit from the presidency through a cryptocurrency venture and bullies law firms, media companies and universities – all unthinkable under his predecessors – there is only token resistance from Congress.Republicans hold the majority in both chambers and have a cultish devotion to Trump, or visceral fear of his wrath. On Thursday, they rammed through his “big, beautiful bill” despite warnings that it will rip the social safety net from millions of Americans and add trillions of dollars to the national deficit.Hours later, a triumphant Trump was greeted in Des Moines, Iowa, by supporters in a car park festooned with 55 national flags. One man wore a T-shirt entirely covered with a photo of a bloodied Trump with fist raised after last year’s assassination attempt. A bearded vendor in a red T-shirt, checked shorts and plastic flip-flops spread red Trump 2028 caps on the ground. Flags and T-shirts declared: “Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president.”Michelle Coon, 57, a psychotherapist, denied that Trump is behaving like an autocrat. “I don’t think he has been given that kind of power,” she said. “I see people in Congress having a voice. He’s lucky enough to have both houses right now; he might not have that in two years. The supreme court has come down both on his side and against his perspective so I see it fairly balanced right now.”Coon added: “He’s a great leader but I don’t think that’s necessarily authoritarian. He’s trying to gather a lot of people around him to get good wisdom from others. I don’t think we have anything to fear here.”Josue Rodriguez, 38, a pastor who works for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, was equally sanguine. “We have a wonderful system called checks and balances where, if they feel that an individual has become all too powerful, too mighty, they have the right to take him to court and the supreme court will decide what is correct and not correct,” he said.Rodriguez also retains faith in political parties, saying: “If they feel that the president is acting in a manner that goes against the American people or what is allowed legally, he will be challenged within his own party. At the end of the day, these people want to get re-elected and they’re not going to allow things that will cause them to lose their re-elections.”But some analysts suggest that extreme partisanship is preventing effective congressional oversight, as members of the president’s party are unwilling to challenge Trump’s overreach. They are sounding the alarm about an erosion of democratic norms that could have lasting implications for future presidencies.Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, this week initiated a new executive power project because he considers it the most important constitutional issue of the moment.“It didn’t start with President Trump but it may end there,” Galston said. “It’s hard to imagine a subsequent president seeking to advance executive power as a deliberate project to the extent that President Trump has been doing.“This is not an accident. This was something that was carefully planned as both a political strategy and a legal strategy and I have to say I’m impressed with the administration’s strategic focus on the issue of presidential power and the elimination of long-established limits to it.”Galston pointed to a drive to undermine the autonomy of so-called independent agencies. A legal challenge has been set in motion that will likely culminate in a supreme court decision next term that, Galston suspects, may effectively eliminate a 90-year precedent that guaranteed the independence of agencies.Trump is not the first American president to see how far he can go. In 1973, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr published The Imperial Presidency, acknowledging that, while he had cheered on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the expansion of executive authority now threatened to “override the separation of powers and burst the bonds of the Constitution”.The book was timely because the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam war saw a reassertion of congressional authority in the domestic and foreign spheres. Presidential power began to expand again, however, under Ronald Reagan.Galston noted: “Young conservatives who came of age serving in the Reagan administration chafed more and more against congressional restraints, culminating in the publication in 1989 of a collection of essays by the American Enterprise Institute called The Fettered Presidency.“So in 16 years, the adjective switches from ‘imperial’ to ‘fettered’ and I trace a lot of the modern conservative drive to expand the powers of the president at Congress’s expense to that experience.”The trend accelerated with George W Bush’s aggressive response to the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks. But other factors were in play: whereas divided government was once cause for negotiation, deepening polarisation between the parties made gridlock more likely, much to the frustration of the White House occupant.Barack Obama duly used an executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme. He stepped up his use of such actions in 2014 as he became frustrated with how difficult it was to push legislation through Congress, saying: “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There’s a long history here and it’s not just Trump. Look at just this century. Bush expanded presidential powers in ways that Obama took advantage of and then Obama expanded presidential powers in ways that Trump then expanded on.“You can think of this as a loaded gun that’s left on the table in the Oval Office. It’s quite alarming. The next president who comes in, whether Democrat or Republican, is going to see the office through the eyes of their predecessor, not through the eyes of George Washington, who was leery of using his powers.” More

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      The other winner in New York’s mayoral contest: ranked-choice voting | David Daley

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      The polls did not look good for New York progressives this winter when the Working Families party began making its endorsements for city elections. An early February poll from Emerson College showed Andrew Cuomo with a 23-point lead in a hypothetical Democratic primary matchup. None of the four leading progressives even approached double-digit support – including the then unknown assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. He polled at 1%.In the days before ranked-choice voting, the Working Families party’s endorsement process might have looked quite different. Like-minded candidates would have drawn sharp distinctions between each other. Party officials might have looked to nudge candidates toward the exits, behind closed doors. Before any votes had been cast in the primary, the party would consolidate behind just one choice. It would have been bloody and left a bitter taste for everyone.Instead, the opposite happened. Working Families, knowing that majorities rule and that no one can spoil a ranked-choice race, endorsed four candidates. Instead of a single endorsement that served as a kiss of death for other progressives, they backed a slate, allowing voters time to tune in and for candidates to make their pitches. Now Mamdani is the Democratic nominee and the overwhelming favorite to go from 1% all the way to Gracie Mansion.There are many reasons why this 33-year-old pulled off a seemingly unthinkable upset and soared from obscurity to the most talked about Democrat in the nation overnight. He energized young people, reached voters where they are on social media and built an unstoppable coalition. He and his volunteers talked to everyone, everywhere.Ranked-choice voting (RCV) encouraged and incentivized that joyous, barnstorming approach. And while Mamdani ultimately would have won a plurality contest or a ranked-choice one, his super-long-shot candidacy might have been squelched at the very beginning under the old system with its different electoral incentives. His victory shows how much more real power voters have under ranked-choice voting.To be clear: RCV is a party-neutral and candidate-neutral tool. Its job is to produce a majority winner with the widest and deepest support from any field of more than two candidates. It puts an end to spoilers and to the impossible, wish-and-a-prayer calculation that voters otherwise have to make when faced with multiple candidates, some of whom they really like and some of whom they do not. Liberals, conservatives, independents and moderates have run and won under RCV, from coast to coast.But while RCV might be strictly non-partisan, it is decidedly pro-voter – and almost always produces a more positive, issue-focused campaign that looks to drive up turnout and appeal to as many people as possible. A ranked-choice campaign rewards engagement and encourages coalitions; it’s a race where instead of tearing down opponents, candidates point out areas of agreement and ask to be a voter’s second choice.Voters love RCV and find it easy to use. According to a new SurveyUSA poll of New York voters, 96% said their ballot was easy to fill out. More than three-quarters of voters want to keep or expand RCV. And 82% said they had taken advantage of RCV and ranked at least two candidates. (These numbers are similar across RCV elections, and a powerful rejoinder to critics who insist, despite evidence to the contrary, that it’s too confusing.)A remarkable number of New Yorkers saw first-hand how RCV makes our votes more powerful – they had the freedom to express themselves and rank a long-shot first, but still had their vote count for either Mamdani or Cuomo in the ranked choice tally.Perhaps the high marks are of little surprise: voters received a campaign unlike most any other. The tone remained positive and issue-based. Instead of cutting each other down, candidates lifted each other up: Mamdani and Brad Lander cross-endorsed each other, cutting joint ads, riding bicycles together to shared events, sharing the couch on Stephen Colbert, and even sharing a stage at Mamdani’s victory party. Jessica Ramos and Whitney Tilson endorsed Cuomo and said that they would rank him second. Mamdani helped Adrienne Adams with fundraising.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVoters always say that they want more choice at the polls, candidates who engage with them, and a genuine, issue-based campaign. They got exactly that in New York City because of ranked choice. And the historic turnout levels – more than 1 million New Yorkers cast ballots, the highest number since the 1980s – shows that when voters get that kind of elevated, engaging campaign, they show up and get involved.When voters have the opportunity to consider new candidates campaigning in creative new ways, the frontrunner with the early name recognition and largest donors can be eclipsed by a newcomer who started at 1%. And instead of going scorched-earth on each other before the general election, even some of the “losers” seem to have had their status elevated: Lander finished third, and instead of being an asterisk, he has now expanded his base and likability for a future campaign.The majority winner in this race was Zohran Mamdani. But it’s also easy to suggest the real winner might be ranked-choice voting. In a moment when so many of our elections are fraught and polarized, all of us looking for a more unified and hopeful path forward – the “politics of the future”, as Mamdani called it when he declared victory – should take a close look at what just happened in New York as proof that stronger elections are truly possible.What’s giving me hope nowOutside of Washington, cities and states are becoming laboratories of democracy once again. New York’s adoption of ranked-choice voting led to just the kind of campaign our politics so desperately needs: a giant field of candidates presenting their vision of the future, building coalitions, without any time squandered on “spoilers” or anyone pushed to drop out and consolidate early. In Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, voters modernized government and moved to proportional representation to elect the city council, broadening representation to groups and neighborhoods that have never before had a seat at the table. When voters make these changes, they like them, defend them, and expand them, as we have seen in New York, Maine and Alaska. And it won’t take long for people to ask why they can’t have ranked choice and proportionality in all their elections.

      David Daley is the author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More

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      Maga influencer and de facto national security adviser Laura Loomer holds outsized sway on Trump

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      After years of claiming to be the vanguard of a new “America First” isolationist movement rebelling against the neoconservative policies of the George W Bush administration that led to the bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Maga’s online influencers are cheering for another war in the Middle East.And not just any war: they are applauding Donald Trump’s high-risk decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, a move that was considered a war too far even by the Bush administration.Maga’s quick flip-flop has made it clear that Maga was never really anti-war. Maga is about xenophobia, not isolationism, and its support for Trump’s decision to bomb a Muslim country fits in with its support for his draconian campaign against immigrants.But above all, Maga is about fealty to Trump.That formula certainly helps explain why Laura Loomer, who has emerged as the most prominent Maga America First influencer in the early days of Trump’s second term, has given her full support to his Iran strike.In early April, Loomer, a 32-year-old pro-Trump online influencer widely seen as a rightwing conspiracy theorist, met with Trump and gave him a list of names of people on the staff of the national security council that she believed were not loyal enough to Trump or at least had professional backgrounds that she considered suspect. Trump fired six staffers. Later, national security adviser Mike Waltz, whom Loomer had criticized for his role in the Signalgate chat leak scandal, was ousted as well.Loomer doesn’t have a job in the government, but she has still emerged as one of Trump’s most important and most polarizing foreign policy advisers in the early days of his second administration. She has had direct access to Trump and has used it to push for ideological purges inside the administration, instilling fear and anger among national security professionals.In fact, when it comes to the national security side of the Trump administration, Loomer has been something akin to a one-woman Doge. Now the big question is how long her influence with Trump will last, or whether she will soon go out the same way as Elon Musk.Loomer’s power in the Trump administration is ill-defined. Her many critics say she has just been taking credit for moves that Trump was already planning. But Trump himself has said he takes her seriously, so it may be more accurate to describe her as Trump’s de facto national security adviser.Press reports recently suggested that Loomer’s status in the White House was waning because she had overreached, much like Musk. She has left a trail of bitter Trump aides, while there have also been reports that Trump himself has grown weary of her. But, as if to disprove the reports that she was getting frozen out, Loomer had a private meeting with JD Vance in early June.In a revealing interview on journalist Tara Palmeri’s podcast in late April, Loomer said that her White House access came directly from Trump himself, and that she maintained her relationship with the president even as his aides tried to keep her out. “Donald Trump is my biggest ally in the White House,” she said.“I don’t have delusions of grandeur, but I certainly do believe that a lot of the information I have given him has protected him and has prevented disasters from happening,” she added. “I believe that the information that I provide is valuable. And I believe that it has proven itself to be an asset to President Trump and his apparatus. I don’t know why some of the people that work for him don’t want that information around him. But I’m not going to let that stop me. I’m going to keep on uncovering information and finding ways to get it to President Trump – and informing President Trump about individuals within his inner circle that are working against his agenda.”Loomer added that “it all comes down to vetting at the end of the day”.Loomer’s close ties to Trump first became big news during the 2024 presidential campaign, when she traveled with the Republican candidate on his campaign plane despite repeated efforts by Trump aides to keep her away. The aides were particularly upset that Loomer traveled with Trump on September 11, since she had earlier gained online infamy after posting a video claiming that the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was an “inside job”. To be sure, fears by his aides that Trump was associating with a conspiracy theorist ignored the fact that he relishes in spreading conspiracy theories far and wide. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promoted a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio; that xenophobic lie became the hallmark of Trump’s fall campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOnce Trump returned to office, Loomer began to flex her newfound power, and even professional ties to top Trump administration officials weren’t enough to protect staffers from being fired after Loomer gave her list of names to Trump. Among those fired at the NSC was Brian Walsh, who had worked on the staff of the Senate intelligence committee for Marco Rubio, now serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser, when Rubio was in the Senate.The most stunning purge attributed to Loomer came in April when Trump fired Gen Timothy Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency, along with his top deputy, after they had found their way on to Loomer’s list as well. The fact that Loomer could trigger the firing of a senior military officer in charge of the nation’s largest intelligence agency finally led to a bipartisan outcry in Washington. A group of Senate Democrats wrote to Trump saying that the firings were “inexplicable”, while Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican senator who is now a leading Trump critic, lamented that experienced military leaders were being ousted while “amateur isolationists” are in senior policy positions. The moves even troubled Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican senator and Trump loyalist who is the chair of the cybersecurity subcommittee of the Senate armed services committee. Rounds made a point of praising Haugh during a subcommittee hearing soon after his firing and noted that “men and women capable of leading the National Security Agency … are in short supply. We do not have enough of these types of leaders, and a loss of any one of them without strong justification is disappointing.”But like Musk, Loomer has been so red-hot in the early days of Trump’s second term that her fall seems almost inevitable, especially after she began to call out White House actions she didn’t like.In May, for example, she publicly criticized Trump’s decision to accept a luxury jet from Qatar.When news of the gift was first reported, Loomer posted a statement saying: “This is really going to be such a stain on the admin if this is true.” She added: “I say that as someone who would take a bullet for Trump. I’m so disappointed.” She later backtracked and became more supportive. But later she was critical of Trump’s decision to withdraw the nomination of billionaire Jared Isaacman to be the head of Nasa, whose nomination she had supported. “There is reason to believe that Isaacman may be facing retaliation because of his friendship with @elonmusk,” Loomer posted as the news first broke. Days later, Isaacman suggested that he also believes that his nomination was withdrawn because of his ties to Musk.Loomer has been careful to try to limit her criticism to Trump’s aides, and not to Trump himself. But it is an open question how long that distinction will make a difference for Loomer. During the Palmeri podcast, Loomer said that she is “not going to be a sycophant and sit there and pretend that every little thing is great”. She added that “there’s a lot of incompetence in the White House. There’s a lot of people in positions they shouldn’t be in and they embarrass the president on a daily basis.”That is the backdrop for Loomer’s strong support for Trump’s decision to attack Iran. Perhaps concerned that her earlier criticism was damaging her ties to Trump world, Loomer has been profuse with her praise of Trump’s Iran attack, while also defending her America First credentials. In one post, she asked “How is it not AMERICA FIRST to congratulate those who just made sure Islamists who chant ‘DEATH TO AMERICA’ … never have an opportunity to have a nuke?” She has even gone on the offensive against other rightwing influencers, including Tucker Carlson, who have dared criticize the Iran strike. “I am screenshotting everyone’s posts and I’m going to deliver them in a package to President Trump so he sees who is truly with him and who isn’t,” Loomer posted. “And I think by now everyone knows I mean it when I say I’m going to deliver something to Trump.”For Maga influencers, staying on Trump’s good side seems to matter more than issues of war and peace. More

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      So big, so beautiful: Fox News ignores the critics and champions Trump’s bill

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      Donald Trump’s mega-bill has been widely criticized in the press. News outlets and Democrats have warned that millions of people could be stripped of their health coverage through cuts to Medicaid, that cuts to food programs would see children go hungry, and that the legislation would cause the deficit to balloon.Fox News sees it differently.“This legislation is packed with massive, huge, important wins for you, the American people,” Sean Hannity told viewers on Monday, as US senators debated the bill in Washington.“Here’s what the bill doesn’t do. It does not decrease Medicaid, Medicare, Snap or social security benefits,” Hannity continued, a claim that completely contradicted the assessment of the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates the bill will cut Medicaid across the US by 7.6 million to 10.3 million people.Hannity had more.“The big, beautiful bill also does not increase the deficit. Instead, the deficit will go down around a little shy of $2tn – that’s to begin with, according to estimates,” he said.“Because guess what? That’s what happens when you cut taxes. It stimulates the economy, creates jobs, gets people off the welfare rolls. Guess what? People are working, now they’re paying taxes.”It was unclear where Hannity got his $2tn number from, because he didn’t say. But the CBO says the bill would add at least $3.3tn to the national debt over the next nine years, while the tax cuts will benefit high earners more than others.Hannity held up Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 as an example of how the deficit will be reduced – a take that ignored that those tax cuts saw an increase of the deficit, and had to be reversed over the rest of Reagan’s presidency.Still, Hannity was sold.“The American people are on the verge of a level of prosperity they have never experienced before,” he said.Hannity’s interpretation was starkly different from the one many Americans were seeing.Even Republican senators have been dubious about the bill’s benefits, with three voting against it in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and House Republicans wavering on Wednesday.Yet, on Tuesday, Laura Ingraham largely ignored the bill – framing it only as Democrats losing a battle to “derail” the legislation before going on a minutes-long riff about a “slide in patriotism” in the US.She went on to offer complaints that there were “more foreign flags waving” in America’s streets and that leftwing politicians believe that “America can only be redeemed when she’s totally dismantled and then remade, with millions of new people from other countries”.Elsewhere, there were occasional, albeit small, concessions that the “big, beautiful bill” might not quite be the masterly piece of legislation the White House would have people believe.“It’s not perfect, but it does need to pass if we want this tax cut,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox & Friends at the start of the week. Her co-host Brian Kilmeade at least presented some of the negative points in an interview with Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, on Tuesday, challenging him to address the claim that “this is a tax break for the rich”. But Bessent didn’t even attempt to address that, and Kilmeade was unwilling or unable to press him further.Later that day, the theme continued. Trace Gallagher pulled up data from the Tax Foundation and the Tax Policy Center during his show, with a series of bullet points claiming that if Trump’s bill failed it would lead to tax increases for families and small business owners.Gallagher left out the part of the Tax Foundation’s analysis where the organization said the bill would reduce incomes by 0.6% and result in a nearly $3.6tn deficit increase, and ignored the Tax Policy Center’s verdict that most of the tax cuts in the bill would go “to the highest-income households”.His guests seemingly overlooked those bits, too, as they kept up the ruse.“No bill is perfect,” Elizabeth Pipko, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, told Gallagher, as she claimed “the Democrats seem to have forgotten that” before accusing the mainstream media, with no irony, of not accurately representing the bill.Pipko added: “I think it will pass, and I think it’ll go down in history as again another false alarm from the legacy media, from the Democrats, and another victory for President Trump.” More

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      ‘I want my vote back’: Trump-voting family stunned after Canadian mother detained over immigration status

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      The family of a Canadian national who supported Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations of immigrants say they are feeling betrayed after federal agents recently detained the woman in California while she interviewed for permanent US residency – and began working to expel her from the country.“We feel totally blindsided,” Cynthia Olivera’s husband – US citizen and self-identified Trump voter Francisco Olivera – told the California news station KGTV. “I want my vote back.”Cynthia Olivera, a 45-year-old mother of three US-born children, thus joined a growing list of examples contradicting the Trump administration’s claims that the immigration crackdown it has spearheaded since the president’s return to the Oval Office in January has prioritized targeting dangerous criminals.Being in the US without legal status is generally a civil infraction rather than a criminal violation. Nonetheless, despite its claim that the immigration crackdown is mainly meant to rid the US of violent criminals, the White House has maintained that anyone in the US who lacks legal status is a criminal subject to deportationOlivera was unwittingly thrust under the weight of those policies after Trump spent his successful 2024 presidential campaign promising to pursue them, earning her husband’s vote along the way, according to what he told KGTV. She was just 10 when her parents brought her to the US from Toronto without permission, she said to the station.By 1999, US immigration officials at the Buffalo border crossing had determined Olivera was living in the country without legal status and obtained an expedited order to deport her. But she was able to return to the US by driving to San Diego from Mexico within a few months.“They didn’t ask me for my citizenship – they didn’t do nothing,” Olivera would later say to KGTV. “They just waved me in.”She recounted spending the next 25 years working in Los Angeles, paying taxes and providing for her family. KGVT reported that its investigative team scoured California and federal court databases, but the unit found no criminal charges under Cynthia Oliver’s name.In 2024, toward the end of his presidency, Joe Biden’s administration granted her a permit allowing her to work legally in the US. She had also been navigating the process to obtain legal permanent US residency – colloquially referred to as a green card – for years.Nonetheless, instead of supporting the candidate Biden endorsed to succeed him, then vice-president Kamala Harris, Olivera’s husband supported Trump in November’s White House election. He told KGTV that Trump’s promises to deport criminals en masse appealed to both him and Cynthia. And, echoing other mixed immigration status families who have had members affected by Trump’s policies, the Oliveras did not believe she would be hurt by her lack of legal US residency.They learned she would in fact be affected by her immigration status when she went for a green card interview in Chatsworth, California, on 13 June. She was detained there by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, according to a change.org petition pleading for compassion on behalf of Cynthia.Olivera has since been transferred to an Ice detention center in El Paso, Texas, to await being deported.Speaking to KGTV over a video call from the El Paso facility, Olivera suggested her treatment was undeserved.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The US is my country,” Olivera remarked to the station in an interview published on 3 July. “That’s where I met my husband. That’s where I went to high school, junior high, elementary [school]. That’s where I had my kids.”But the Trump administration had little sympathy for Olivera, despite her husband’s support of the president, with a spokesperson saying in a statement that Cynthia was “an illegal alien from Canada”.Olivera had been “previously deported and chose to ignore our law and again illegally entered the country”, said the spokesperson’s statement, as reported by Newsweek. The statement noted that re-entering the US without permission after being deported is a felony, and it said Olivera would remain in Ice’s custody “pending removal to Canada”.Canada’s government commented to KGTV that it was aware of Olivera’s detention but could not intervene on her behalf because “every country or territory decides who can enter or exit through its borders”.Francisco Olivera, for his part, summed up his and his wife’s disillusion by saying: “My wife … up until [a couple of weeks] ago, was a strong believer in what was going to happen the next four years.”Cynthia Olivera, meanwhile, said she has told officials she and her husband are willing to pay for her to fly to Canada, where she plans to stay in Mississauga with a cousin. Yet there had been no immediate indication when she may be able to travel to Canada.As she fought back tears, Olivera said to KGTV: “The only crime I committed is to love this country and to work hard and to provide for my kids.” More

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      The UN is our best defence against a third world war. As Trump wields the axe, who will fight to save it? | Simon Tisdall

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      The United Nations and its agencies have long struggled with funding shortfalls. Now an entrenched problem is becoming an acute crisis in the shadow of Donald Trump’s executioner’s axe. The US is the biggest contributor, at 22%, to the UN’s core budget. In February, the White House announced a six-month review of US membership of all international organisations, conventions and treaties, including the UN, with a view to reducing or ending funding – and possible withdrawal. The deadline for decapitation falls next month.Trump’s abolition of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and scrapping of most aid programmes, has already badly damaged UN-led and UN-backed humanitarian operations, which rely on discretionary funding. Yet Trump’s axe symbolises a more fundamental threat – to multilateralism and the much-battered international rules-based order. The basic concept of collective responsibility for maintaining global peace and security, and collaboration in tackling shared problems – embodied by the UN since its creation 80 years ago last week – is on the chopping block.The stakes are high – and Washington is not the only villain. Like the US, about 40 countries are behind in paying obligatory yearly dues. Discretionary donations are declining. The UN charter, a statement of founding principles, has been critically undermined by failure to halt Russia’s illegal war of aggression in Ukraine (and by last month’s US-Israeli attack on Iran). China and others, including the UK, ignore international law when it suits. The number and longevity of conflicts worldwide is rising; UN envoys are sidelined; UN peacekeeping missions are disparaged. The security council is often paralysed by vetoes; the general assembly is largely powerless. By many measures, the UN isn’t working.A crunch looms. If the UN is allowed to fail or is so diminished that its agencies cannot fully function, there is nothing to take its place. Nothing, that is, except the law of the jungle, as seen in Gaza and other conflict zones where UN agencies are excluded, aid workers murdered and legal norms flouted. The UN system has many failings, some self-inflicted. But a world without the UN would, for most people in most places, be more dangerous, hungrier, poorer, unhealthier and less sustainable.The US is not expected to withdraw from the UN altogether (although nothing is impossible with this isolationist, ultra-nationalist president). But Trump’s hostile intent is evident. His 2026 budget proposal seeks a 83.7% cut – from $58.7bn to $9.6bn – in all US international spending. That includes an 87% reduction in UN funding, both obligatory and discretionary. “In 2023, total US spending on the UN amounted to about $13bn. This is equivalent to only 1.6% of the Pentagon’s budget that year ($816bn) – or about two-thirds of what Americans spend on ice-cream annually,” Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted. Economic development aid, disaster relief and family planning programmes would be gutted.The impact is potentially world-changing. Key UN agencies in the firing line include the children’s fund, Unicef – at a time when the risks facing infants and children are daunting; the World Food Programme (WFP), which could lose 30% of its staff; agencies handling refugees and migration, which are also shrinking; the International court of justice (the “world court”), which has shone a light on Israel’s illegal actions in Gaza; and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran’s and others’ nuclear activities.Trump is already boycotting the World Health Organization, the Palestinian relief agency (Unrwa) and the UN Human Rights Council, and has rescinded $4bn allocated to the UN climate fund, claiming that all act contrary to US interests. If his budget is adopted this autumn, the UN’s 2030 sustainable development goals may prove unattainable. US financial backing for international peacekeeping and observer missions in trouble spots such as Lebanon, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kosovo, currently 26% of total spending, will plunge to zero.The withdrawal of USAID support is already proving lethal, everywhere from Somalia and Sudan to Bangladesh and Haiti. UN officials describe the situation in post-earthquake, conflict-riven, aid-deprived Myanamar as a “humanitarian catastrophe”. Research published in the Lancet found that Trump’s cuts could cause more than 14m additional deaths by 2030, a third of them children.The WFP, the world’s largest food aid supplier, says its projected $8.1bn funding deficit this year comes as acute hunger affects a record 343 million people in 74 countries. And other donor states are failing to fill the gap left by the US. So far in 2025, only 11% of the $46.2bn required for 44 UN-prioritised crises has been raised. The UK recently slashed its aid budget by £6bn, to pay for nuclear bombs.UN chiefs acknowledge that many problems pre-date Trump. António Guterres, the secretary general, has initiated thousands of job cuts as part of the “UN80” reform plan to consolidate operations and reduce the core budget by up to 20%. But, marking the anniversary, Guterres said the gravest challenge is the destructive attitude of member states that sabotage multilateral cooperation, break the rules, fail to pay their share and forget why the UN was founded in the first place. “The charter of the United Nations is not optional. It is not an à la carte menu. It is the bedrock of international relations,” he said.Guterres says the UN’s greatest achievement since 1945 is preventing a third world war. Yet respected analysts such as Fiona Hill believe it’s already begun. The UK and other democracies face some pressing questions. Will they meekly give in to Trump once again? Or will they fight to stop this renegade president and rogue states such as Russia and Israel dismantling the world’s best defence against global anarchy, forever wars and needless suffering?Will they fight to save the UN?

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump news at a glance: Elon Musk announces new political party targeting sway in Congress

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      The fallout between the US president, Donald Trump, and tech billionaire Elon Musk has reached a new low, with Musk declaring this weekend that he will bankroll a new political party to rival the president.Musk, the world’s richest man, only departed from the White House this May but has been critical of Trump’s signature policy bill, which he has described as “utterly insane and destructive”.“Today, the America party is formed to give you back your freedom,” Musk wrote on X on Saturday, adding that: “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party, and you shall have it! When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.”Here are the key stories:Elon Musk’s ‘America’ party could focus on a few pivotal congressional seatsThe new US political party that Elon Musk has boasted about bankrolling could initially focus on a handful of attainable House and Senate seats while striving to be the decisive vote on major issues amid the thin margins in Congress.The Tesla and SpaceX’s multibillionaire CEO mused about that approach on Friday in a post on X, the social media platform he owns, as he continued feuding with Donald Trump over the spending bill that the president has signed into law. On Saturday, without immediately elaborating, the former Trump adviser announced on X that he had created the so-called America party.Read the full storyHegseth falsely cited weapon shortages in halting shipments to Ukraine, Democrats sayPete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, unilaterally halted an agreed shipment of military aid to Ukraine due to baseless concerns that US stockpiles of weapons have run too low, it has been reported.A batch of air defense missiles and other precision munitions were due to be sent to Ukraine to aid it in its ongoing war with Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022. The aid was promised by the US during Joe Biden’s administration last year.Read the full storySocial Security Administration email praising Trump’s tax bill blasted as a ‘lie’An email sent by the US Social Security Administration (SSA) that claims Donald Trump’s major new spending bill has eliminated taxes on benefits for most recipients is misleading, critics have said.The reconciliation bill – which the president called the “one big, beautiful bill” before signing it on Friday after Republicans in Congress passed it – includes provisions that will strip people of their health insurance, cut food assistance for the poor, kill off clean energy development and raise the national debt by trillions of dollars.Read the full storyTrump is waging war against the media – and winningBernie Sanders, the venerable democratic socialist senator from Vermont, was not in a mood to pull punches.“Trump is undermining our democracy and rapidly moving us towards authoritarianism, and the billionaires who care more about their stock portfolios than our democracy are helping him do it,” he fumed in a statement last week.Such outbursts have been common in recent months as Sanders has taken up a leading position opposing Donald Trump’s second term, and flagging his concern that the president is waging a war against the media – and winning.Read the full storyRevealed: the far-right, antisemitic men’s club network spreading across USA nationwide US network of dozens of far-right, men-only fraternal clubs has what members describe as “literally hundreds” of participants who include past and currently serving military personnel, lawyers, civil servants and prominent antisemitic influencers, a Guardian investigation can reveal.The Old Glory Club (OGC) – which has at least 26 chapters in 20 US states and until now has drawn little attention – exemplifies the alarming rise of organized racist political groups in the past few years but especially during the rise of Donald Trump and his return to the White House.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Texas continues grim flood recovery with at least 32 killed, including 14 children

      US hit with mass shootings and fatal accidents on Fourth of July holiday
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 July 2025. More

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      Hegseth falsely cited weapon shortages in halting shipments to Ukraine, Democrats say

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      Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, unilaterally halted an agreed shipment of military aid to Ukraine due to baseless concerns that US stockpiles of weapons have run too low, it has been reported.A batch of air defense missiles and other precision munitions were due to be sent to Ukraine to aid it in its ongoing war with Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022. The aid was promised by the US during Joe Biden’s administration last year.But the Pentagon halted the shipment, with NBC reporting that a decision to do so was made solely by Hegseth, Donald Trump’s top defense official and a former Fox News weekend host who has previously come under pressure for sharing plans of a military strike in two group chats on the messaging app Signal, one of which accidentally included a journalist.Hegseth has now halted US military supplies to Ukraine on three occasions, NBC said, with the latest intervention purportedly coming due to concerns that the US’s own weapons stockpile is running too low.When the president was asked about the pause in shipments to Ukraine by a reporter on Thursday, he claimed that it was necessary because “Biden emptied out our whole country, giving them weapons, and we have to make sure we have enough for ourselves”.A White House spokesperson said last week that the decision “was made to put America’s interests first following a [defense department] review of our nation’s military support and assistance to other countries across the globe. The strength of the United States armed forces remains unquestioned – just ask Iran.”“This capability review,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told reporters on Wednesday, “is being conducted to ensure US military aid aligns with our defense priorities.”“We see this as a commonsense, pragmatic step towards having a framework to evaluate what munitions are sent and where,” Parnell added. He also seemed to confirm that there is no current shortage of arms for US forces. “Let it be known that our military has everything that it needs to conduct any mission, anywhere, anytime, all around the world,” he said.The decision surprised members of Congress, as well as Ukraine and the US’s European allies. Democrats said there is no evidence that American weapon stocks are in decline.“We are not at any lower point, stockpile-wise, than we’ve been in the three-and-a-half years of the Ukraine conflict,” Adam Smith, a Democrat and ranking member of the House armed services committee, told NBC. Smith said that his staff had “seen the numbers” on weapon supplies and that there is no justification to suspend aid to Ukraine.The weapons being delayed include dozens of Patriot interceptor missiles that can defend against Russian missile attacks, as well as howitzers and other missile systems.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRussia has recently stepped up its bombardment of Ukrainian cities, using missiles and drones to wreak havoc and terror among Ukrainian civilians. The delay in getting help to fend off these attacks is “painful”, a senior Ukrainian lawmaker said last week.“This decision is certainly very unpleasant for us,” said Fedir Venislavskyi, a member of the Ukrainian parliament’s defense committee, according to Reuters.“It’s painful, and against the background of the terrorist attacks which Russia commits against Ukraine.”The Department of Defense did not reply to a request for comment on the aid pause. More