US Politics

Donald Trump and his allies have for years called for the closure of the southern border. Now, Joe Biden is doing that, albeit only occasionally, and specifically when arrivals of new asylum seekers exceed 2,500 a day.How did we get here? The answer can be found earlier this year, when a bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise to tighten access for migrants and approve a new infusion of aid to Ukraine and Israel’s military that the Biden administration said was desperately needed by two of Washington’s top allies.But despite the fact that one of their own lawmakers negotiated the deal, which contained hardline immigration policies Democrats normally would not support, the GOP voted it down, ostensibly so Trump could campaign on his own draconian approach to immigration.Which brings us to today. Congress went on to approve the foreign aid bill separately, and today, Biden used his presidential policies to limit access to asylum seekers on days when the border is “overwhelmed” as the White House put it – while repeatedly training his ire on Trump and his allies.“I’ve come here today to do what the Republican Congress refuses to do – take the necessary steps to secure our border,” Biden said as he began his speech.Trump “told the Republicans … that he didn’t want to fix the issue, he wanted to use it to attack me. That’s what he wanted to do. It was … an extremely cynical political move and a complete disservice to the American people who are looking for us to not to weaponize the border, but to fix it.”Here’s more on Biden’s new border policy:After months of ultimately fruitless haggling over immigration policy in Congress, Joe Biden announced new rules that will see the southern border temporarily shut to most new asylum seekers at periods when it becomes “overwhelmed”. The president blamed Republicans and Donald Trump for blocking legislation he said would be better suited to dealing with the issue, while warning the country’s hospitality was “wearing thin” amid the migration wave. The policy change comes amid signs voters are increasingly concerned about migrants arriving in the United States, but risk alienating some of Biden’s allies, who warn it amounts to a draconian response to what is essentially a humanitarian crisis. Back at the Capitol, the GOP continued its counteroffensive against Biden after Trump’s felony conviction last week. Speaker Mike Johnson blamed Democrats for the guilty verdict, saying it represents “a new low”, while attorney general Merrick Garland faced a tough crowd during a hearing before the judiciary committee.Here’s what else happened today:
Republicans said Biden’s new policy amounted to an “election-year border charade”, and demanded tougher action on migrants.
Biden attacked Trump as a “convicted felon” who should not be let back into the White House at a Monday evening fundraiser.
Wisconsin’s attorney general filed charges against three Trump associates for attempting to disrupt Biden’s election victory in the state four years ago, including notorious attorney Kenneth Chesebro.
An official with ties to a group promoting lies about the 2020 vote sits on the elections board in Fulton county, the most-populous in swing state Georgia.
Opening arguments began in Hunter Biden’s trial on gun charges in Delaware, with prosecutors telling the jury that “no one is above the law”.
In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump responded to Joe Biden’s executive order with a host of insults, and a recitation of his typically hardline rhetoric on immigration.“Crooked Joe Biden has totally surrendered our Southern Border. His weakness and extremism have resulted in a Border Invasion like we have never seen before,” Trump said in the post, which segues into a three-minute video in which he calls Biden “pathetic”.Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center provides legal services to migrants on both sides of the US and Mexican border, and, in a statement, executive director Marisa Limón Garza condemned Joe Biden’s new immigration policy:
Today’s decision clearly illustrates that this administration is ignoring lessons from the failed deterrence measures put in place by its predecessors.
Being strong on immigration doesn’t require an assault on asylum seekers or cruelty toward people seeking protection at our southern border. The Biden administration doesn’t need to rely on harsh deterrence tactics like Trump’s failed Muslim travel ban and Latino ban, which were also created to close the doors on refugees and send families back to the violent conditions they fought to escape.
Together, these policies represent a concerning trend of political manipulation and irresponsible immigration practices. This does nothing to mitigate the violence and family separations, ignores due process, and moves us away from a humane, safe, and orderly system, inevitably forcing migrants into the hands of cartels and traffickers.
Donald Trump and his allies have for years called for the closure of the southern border. Now, Joe Biden is doing that, albeit only occasionally, and specifically when arrivals of new asylum seekers exceed 2,500 a day.How did we get here? The answer can be found earlier this year, when a bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise to tighten access for migrants and approve a new infusion of aid to Ukraine and Israel’s military that the Biden administration said was desperately needed by two of Washington’s top allies.But despite the fact that one of their own lawmakers negotiated the deal, which contained hardline immigration policies Democrats normally would not support, the GOP voted it down, ostensibly so Trump could campaign on his own draconian approach to immigration.Which brings us to today. Congress went on to approve the foreign aid bill separately, and today, Biden used his presidential policies to limit access to asylum seekers on days when the border is “overwhelmed” as the White House put it – while repeatedly training his ire on Trump and his allies.“I’ve come here today to do what the Republican Congress refuses to do – take the necessary steps to secure our border,” Biden said as he began his speech.Trump “told the Republicans … that he didn’t want to fix the issue, he wanted to use it to attack me. That’s what he wanted to do. It was … an extremely cynical political move and a complete disservice to the American people who are looking for us to not to weaponize the border, but to fix it.”Here’s more on Biden’s new border policy:While Joe Biden has warned that his executive order intended to turn away some asylum seekers is a necessary step in the face of Republican opposition to broader immigration reforms, some Democrats have signaled their wariness – or outright objection.Here’s California congresswoman Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus:
I am disappointed at the enforcement-only strategies that the President announced today. Rather than address humanitarian issues at the border effectively and with the nuance they deserve, today’s actions will gut protections for countless migrants exercising their legal right to claim asylum. Rather than decimate the ability for those fleeing violence or persecution to seek asylum based on an arbitrary numerical cap, we should be redirecting our efforts to modernize ports of entry, expand legal pathways for migrants, and address the root causes of migration.
And Raúl Grijalva, whose Arizona district encompasses most of the state’s frontier with Mexico:
This executive action represents a significant departure from President Biden’s promise of a more humane and just approach to immigration. It tramples on the universal right to claim asylum and prevents migrants from attempting to legally access safety and security in the United States. It is ripe for legal challenges and antithetical to our values.
Rather than appeasing Republicans who continuously refuse to work on bipartisan legislation and block immigration solutions for political gain, I urge President Biden, instead, to use his authority to take concrete action to help fix our broken immigration system. That starts with sending more resources to border communities, expanding legal pathways, streamlining the asylum seeking process, making it easier for individuals and families to work and live here, and creating a pathway to citizenship to give millions the certainty they deserve.
Other Democrats welcomed the president’s actions. Here’s California’s Norma Torres, who serves on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s executive board:
I strongly support the changes to expedite the process of deporting or removing individuals at the border who pose a national security risk or public threat. However, I have significant concerns about implementation, transparency, and the risk of curtailing fair, legal representation for legitimate asylum seekers.
If rushed and without proper protections, these changes could embolden future anti-immigrant administrations to limit legitimate, eligible asylum seekers from obtaining the protections they seek.
This executive order is a difficult but necessary measure to address the growing crisis at our border, but deeply underscores the urgent need to resolve the root causes of migration throughout Central America. I look forward to working closely with the administration on the implementation of these changes to ensure we stem the crisis at the border while ensuring asylees are processed expeditiously and fairly.
The president’s executive order has faced criticism from progressive lawmakers and immigration reformers, who say it undermines protections for migrants fleeing humanitarian crises.Joe Biden addressed those concerns in his just-concluded White House speech, warning that the country was losing patience with the flow of migrants:
For those who say the steps I’ve taken are too strict, I say to you … be patient. The goodwill of the American people are … wearing thin right now. Doing nothing is not an option – we have to act. We must act consistent with both our law and our values, our values as Americans.
Joe Biden made a point of mentioning how his views of immigration differ from those of Donald Trump, who presided over a policy of separating migrant children from their parents as president, and has mulled deploying the military to round up undocumented people in the country, if re-elected.“I believe that immigration has always been a lifeblood of America. We’re constantly renewed by an infusion of people and new talent. The Statue of Liberty is not some relic of American history. It stands for who we are as the United States,” Biden said.He then laid into Trump:
So, I will never demonize immigrants. I’ll never refer to immigrants as poisoning the blood of a country. And further, I’ll never separate children from their families at the border. I will not ban people from this country because of the religious beliefs. I will not use the US military to go into neighborhoods all across the country, to pull millions of people out of their homes and away from their families, to put detention camps while we’re waiting deportation, as my predecessor says he will do if he occupies this office again.
Biden then went on to describe how his executive order would work, while saying new legislation would be more effective.“Today, I’m moving past Republican obstruction and using the executive authorities available to me as President to do what I can on my own to address the border,” Biden said. “Frankly, I would have preferred to address this issue through bipartisan legislation, because that’s the only way to actually get the kind of system we have now that’s broken fixed – to hire more Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, more judges.”Joe Biden did not hold back in blaming Donald Trump for the failure of a bipartisan immigration compromise negotiated in the Senate earlier this year, saying it would have been more effective than the executive order he signed today.“Four months ago, after weeks of intense negotiation between my staff and Democrats and Republicans, we came to a clear, clear bipartisan deal with the strongest border security agreement in decades. Then Republicans in Congress … walked away from it. Why? Because Donald Trump told them to,” the president said.He gestured to the officials flanking his podium, which he said were Democratic and Republican officials from border states.“They know the border is not a political issue to be weaponized – it’s a responsibility we have to share, to do something about it. They don’t have time for the games played in Washington. Neither do the American people.”Joe Biden is now speaking on his new immigration rule from the White House.He is flanked by a group of officials, including Arizona’s Democratic senator Mark Kelly.Joe Biden is scheduled to soon begin delivering remarks from the White House on his just-announced policy to close the southern border to new asylum seekers when authorities determine it is “overwhelmed”.He was supposed to start at 2pm ET, but, as always, is late. Mark Kelly, the Democratic senator representing border state Arizona, earlier appeared before reporters at the White House, and described the new rule as a “good step forward”.He then turned to blaming Republicans for rejecting a legislative compromise in Congress that would have made an array of changes to US immigration laws to stem the flow of migrants.“For three years the president has been calling on Congress to take action on this issue,” Kelly said.After months of ultimately fruitless haggling over immigration policy in Congress, Joe Biden has announced new rules that will see the southern border temporarily shut to most new asylum seekers at periods when it becomes “overwhelmed”. The policy change comes amid signs voters are increasingly concerned about migrants arriving in the United States, but risk alienating some of Biden’s allies, who warn it may amount to a draconian response to what is essentially a humanitarian crisis. Back at the Capitol, the GOP is continuing its counteroffensive against Biden following their standard bearer Donald Trump’s felony conviction last week. Speaker Mike Johnson blamed Democrats for the guilty verdict, saying it represents “a new low”, while attorney general Merrick Garland faced a tough crowd during a hearing before the judiciary committee.Here’s what else has happened so far today:
Biden attacked Trump as a “convicted felon” who should not be let back into the White House at a Monday evening fundraiser.
Wisconsin’s attorney general filed charges against three Trump associates for attempting to disrupt Biden’s election victory in the state four years ago, including notorious attorney Kenneth Chesebro.
Election denialism remains a concern in Georgia’s populous Fulton county, where an official with ties to a group promoting lies about the 2020 votes sits on its election board.
At Hunter Biden’s trial, US justice department lawyer Derek Hines walked jurors through the events of October 2018, when prosecutors have said the president’s son lied on his background check about his drug use while buying the gun, Reuters reports.
It was illegal because he was user of crack and a drug addict. No one is above the law,” Hines said.
Biden has pleaded not guilty to three felony charges accusing him of failing to disclose his use of illegal drugs when he bought a Colt Cobra .38-caliber revolver and of illegally possessing the weapon for 11 days in October 2018.Defense attorney Abbe Lowell urged jurors to listen carefully to evidence that would be presented. Lowell said the gun purchase form asked Hunter Biden only if he was currently an addict, not whether he had used in the past, adding that his client had no “intent to deceive”.US special counsel David Weiss, a Donald Trump appointee, brought the case against Hunter Biden and was present in the courtroom on Tuesday. Weiss has separately filed federal tax charges against Hunter Biden in California.The trial is expected to offer a tour of Hunter Biden’s years-long struggles with drug and alcohol addiction.First Lady Jill Biden attended court today, as did her and Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden.The prosecution laid out its case on Tuesday in the historic criminal trial of Hunter Biden on gun charges, telling jurors that Joe Biden’s son was addicted to drugs and lied on paperwork to obtain a revolver. “No one is above the law,” the jurors were told, according to Reuters.The jury in federal court in Delaware heard opening statements from prosecution and defense lawyers before the first witness, an FBI agent, was called.Defense attorney Abbe Lowell told the jury that evidence presented in the trial will show that Hunter Biden, 54, did not knowingly violate the law.It is the first ever criminal trial of the child of a sitting US president, with US district judge Maryellen Noreika presiding. Donald Trump last week became the first US president (sitting or former) to be convicted of a crime.In a speech on the Senate floor, Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer welcomed Joe Biden’s new actions on asylum seekers, but faulted Republicans for blocking legislation he said would better address the problems at the southern border.“As the president makes his announcement, let’s be very clear about one thing: legislation would have been the more effective way to go. President Biden has been clear from the beginning he prefers legislation, but given how obstinate Republicans have become – turning down any real opportunity for strong border legislation – the president is left with little choice but to act on his own,” Schumer said.He continued:
Shame on our Republican friends. They say they want to protect the border. Donald Trump comes out with a very crass statement, let’s keep it in chaos so I might win the election. And they go along. They do a 180-degree turn. That’s a disgrace, and it’s forced President Biden to act the way he does, which is a lot better than doing nothing, but not as preferable as passing legislation, as the president admits.
We had an opportunity to pass a strong bipartisan border bill back in February, and just over a few weeks ago.
Both times, Republicans put politics ahead of bipartisanship, and blundered the best chance we have seen in decades to pass a border security bill America urgently needs. Americans will not easily forget it.
Republicans have spent years insisting to voters that Joe Biden is not doing enough to address illegal immigration, and are not impressed by his just-announced policy to bar asylum seekers when the southern border becomes “overwhelmed”.“It’s window dressing. Everybody knows it … If he was concerned about the border, he would have done this a long time ago,” House speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference today. His office dubbed the new policy an “election-year border charade”, while Johnson added he did not believe the policy would do enough to discourage migrants. “From what we’re hearing, it will ignore multiple elements that have to be addressed,” he said.The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, was similarly dismissive:
With an election just months away, the President hopes that issuing an executive order will demonstrate that he cares about this crisis and is trying to fix it.
Never mind that his order would still allow more than 900,000 illegal aliens to come in every year at the southern border. This is on top of the half-million illegal parolees President Biden intends to continue waving into the country. Combined, that’s more than the population of 10 states. It’s a new Dallas, Texas, every year.
This is like turning a garden hose on a five-alarm fire. And the American people are not fools. They know that this play is too little, too late.
Joe Biden’s actions to limit migrant arrivals at the southern border come after months of ultimately futile negotiations aimed at passing an immigration policy compromise in Congress. But as the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino and Joan E Greve report, the new policy risks alienating some of the president’s supporters, who view it as a draconian response to a humanitarian crisis:The White House on Tuesday announced an executive order that will temporarily shut down the US-Mexico border to asylum seekers attempting to cross outside of lawful ports of entry, when a daily threshold of crossings is exceeded.The order would take effect immediately, senior administration officials said on a press call. Those seeking asylum would be held to a much more rigorous standard for establishing credible fear of returning to their home country, although certain groups – including trafficking victims and unaccompanied children – would be excluded from the ban.“Individuals who do not manifest a fear will be immediately removable, and we anticipate that we will be removing those individuals in a matter of days, if not hours,” one official said. “The bottom line is that the standard will be significantly higher. And so we do anticipate that fewer individuals will be screened in as a result.”The move comes amid rising public concern over the number of migrants crossing into the US, with polls showing a majority of Americans dissatisfied with the president’s handling of the border. The White House has been under immense pressure from Republicans and some Democrats to reduce the number of migrants arriving at the southern border. More

A US federal court of appeals panel has suspended Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based, Black woman-owned venture capitalist firm, from continuing the firm’s Fearless Strivers Grant Contest, a grant program for Black female business owners.In the 2-1 ruling, the panel of three judges, two appointed by Donald Trump and one appointed by Barack Obama, ruled that the grant program “is substantially likely to violate” section 1981 of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits the use of race in making contracts. The act aimed to fully integrate formerly enslaved Black Americans as citizens, give them the full rights of American citizenship and to make it illegal to deprive any Americans of rights “on the basis of race, color, or prior condition of slavery or involuntary servitude”.American Alliance for Equal Rights, founded by Edward Blum, the conservative activist who led the supreme court case that ended affirmative action in college admissions, brought the case against Fearless Fund last August. The fund is one of several firms, organizations and government institutions that have been targeted by conservative, rightwing groups working to make it illegal for public and private entities to pursue diversity initiatives.Less than than 1% of venture capital funding goes to Black and Hispanic women-owned businesses, according to Digitalundivided, a non-profit advocacy organization. The group found that firms started by Black women received only .0006% of VC funding raised by startups between 2009 and 2017. And in 2019, a report found that “Black entrepreneur’s loan requests are three times less likely to be approved than white entrepreneurs”.Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was referenced in the ruling, guarantees citizens the right “to make and enforce contracts … and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens”.The panel of judges ruled that Fearless Fund is unlikely to enjoy first amendment protection and that its program “inflicts irreparable injury”.The Fearless Fund CEO and founder Arian Simone expressed disappointment at the ruling.“I am shattered for every girl of color who has a dream but will grow up in a nation determined not to give her a shot to live it,” she said in a statement. “On their behalf, we will turn the pain into purpose and fight with all our might.”The ruling is a victory for conservative groups that continue to target diversity initiatives, but it may not be a cut and dry harbinger of what’s to come. Last week, a federal judge in Ohio dismissed a lawsuit against the insurance company Progressive and the fintech platform Hello Alice, which jointly offer a grant program that helps Black-owned small businesses purchase commercial vehicles.In a statement, Simone vowed that the ruling against Fearless Fund was “the beginning of a renewed fight.“We are committed more than ever to advocating for equity, pushing forward with resilience, and ensuring that women of color receive the opportunities they rightfully deserve,” the statement reads. Fearless Fund and the organization’s legal representatives have indicated that they are evaluating all options to fight the lawsuit. More

Wisconsin’s attorney general, Josh Kaul, filed felony charges on Tuesday against three men who played a key role in the effort to appoint fake electors in the state as part of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.Kenneth Chesebro, Jim Troupis and Michael Roman were each charged with one felony count of forgery, according to court documents. The crime is a class H felony punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to six years in prison.Chesebro was the architect of the fake elector plan. Five days after the election, he emailed Troupis, a retired judge who was leading the Trump campaign’s legal efforts in Wisconsin, to muse about the possibility of throwing out Joe Biden’s win in Wisconsin and appointing a Trump slate of electors. The two developed the scheme over the next few months. Chesebro would later work with Roman to coordinate the efforts across states and to get the slates of fake electors to Washington.Chesebro pleaded guilty to conspiracy to filing false documents for his role in the scheme in a separate case in Georgia earlier this year. Roman faces charges in Georgia and is also a defendant in an Arizona case.This is the first time Troupis, who sits on a judicial ethics panel in Wisconsin, has been charged.Wisconsin governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, released a one-word statement praising the charges. “Good,” he said.The Wisconsin complaint lays out how Chesebro, Troupis and Roman – a Trump campaign aide – coordinated to draft false electoral certificates to be signed by swing state Republicans for Trump and the former vice-president, Mike Pence. The men debated the language to be used on the false elector certificates, considering adding language to qualify that the unofficial slate of electors were contingents in the event that somehow the election results in those key swing states changed before the election was certified.In Wisconsin, the complaint notes, the false elector documents contained “no qualifying language” and presented the Trump-Pence electors as duly elected.On 14 December, the day that the Wisconsin false electors convened, Chesebro celebrated in messages to Troupis and Roman: “WI meeting of the *real* electors is a go!!!”Even as Wisconsin’s slate of false Trump electors submitted their electoral certificates, their chances of reversing the results of the 2020 election appeared increasingly slim. By a narrow 4-3 ruling, the Wisconsin supreme court on 14 December tossed Trump’s lawsuit attempting to overturn the election, accusing the campaign of “challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began”.Chesebro and Troupis were not ready to give up.In the days after the Wisconsin Trump electors met to submit their unofficial certificates, the two men flew to Washington DC to meet with Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn 17 December, Chesebro acknowleged in a message to Roman that the scheme was looking “less plausible”. Still, he argued, the Electoral Count Act could be “weaponized” to deliver Trump the election.The charges in Wisconsin come after prosecutors in four other swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Michigan – have filed criminal charges against those involved in the fake elector plot.Unlike his counterpart in the other states, Kaul did not file charges against the fake electors themselves. Earlier this year, Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors reached a settlement in a civil suit in which they agreed to never serve as presidential electors again in an election involving Trump. They also acknowledged Biden’s win.The indictments come as Trump has successfully maneuvered to delay the two criminal cases he faces for subverting the 2020 election until after November. More

Joe Biden has called Donald Trump “reckless and dangerous” over the former president’s claim that the trial leading to last week’s felony conviction in a Manhattan court was rigged.In his sharpest criticism yet of his predecessor’s drive to undermine the legal integrity of the prosecution against him, the president also said a second Trump presidency would be a much greater threat to American democracy than his first. He likened Trump’s rejection of the court verdict against him to his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election.“[Trump] wants you to believe it’s all rigged. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Biden told a fundraising audience in Greenwich, Connecticut.“It’s reckless and dangerous and downright irresponsible for anyone to say that it’s rigged just because you don’t like the verdict.”Biden’s comments followed a concerted onslaught from Trump following last Thursday’s conviction on 34 counts of document falsification charges relating to hush-money payments made to an adult film actor, Stormy Daniels, shortly before the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won.They came on the eve of testimony from the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, on Capitol Hill after being summoned by Republicans on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee to answer their accusations that the justice department has been weaponised against Trump and his allies.Trump has accused Biden of directing the prosecution brought by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, that led to last week’s conviction – which has made the first ever former president to become a convicted felon.But Biden pointed out that the trial was based on a New York state, rather than a federal case, and said the jury who convicted Trump was chosen in the same way juries are selected across the US. The guilty verdict followed five weeks of evidence.He also said an independent judicial system was an essential bedrock of US democracy, adding: “We should never allow anyone to tear it down.”Trump is due to be formally adopted as the Republican nominee at the party’s national convention which opens in Milwaukee on 15 July – four days after he is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over his trial and whom he has called “a devil”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking at a fundraiser hosted by Richard Plepler, the former chief executive of HBO, Biden appeared to question Trump’s mental state, suggesting he had been literally driven “crazy” by his 2020 election defeat.“Here’s what is becoming clearer and clearer every day: the threat Trump poses in his second term would be greater than it was in his first,” Biden said. “This isn’t the same Trump that got elected in 2016. He’s worse.”Echoing a theme touched on by the actor Robert De Niro in a recently released pro-Biden campaign, the president suggested that Trump had “snapped” mentally after his election defeat, which prompted an attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by a mob inspired by him trying to overturn the result.“Something snapped in this guy – for real – when he lost in 2020,” Biden said. “He can’t accept the fact that he lost, it’s literally driving him crazy.”He cited some of Trump’s extremist language, including a suggestion that he could “terminate the [US] constitution” and a message to his supporters that “if he loses there will be a bloodbath in America”.“What kind of man is this?” Biden said.He did not mention the trial of his son Hunter for the illegal possession of a firearm, which opened on Monday in a court in Delaware.Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, dismissed Biden remarks, saying: “[Biden] will do anything to distract from Hunter’s trial.” More

What happens when two of the most influential and insufferable people in the universe join forces? Looks like we’re about to find out. Rumour has it that Elon Musk is cosying up to convicted felon, adjudicated fraudster and presidential hopeful Donald Trump, in the hopes of securing a job in the White House.Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the pair speak on the phone several times a month, and have discussed a possible advisory role for Musk if Trump is elected president again. It’s not clear what political pies Musk wants to stick his little fingers in: “The role hasn’t been fully hammered out,” the WSJ said. But, according to “people familiar with the talks”, Musk might get a position advising on border security and the economy.Is Musk really the right person to advise on these issues? Perhaps. As an immigrant from South Africa, he does have first-hand experience of border security. Indeed, his brother, Kimbal, publicly admitted that when the Musk bros first tried to set up business in the US they didn’t have the right work documents. “We were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal joked during a 2013 conference. Elon sheepishly protested that it was a “grey area”, while Kimbal, rather awkwardly, kept insisting it wasn’t: they didn’t have work authorisation. Meanwhile, the audience laughed uproariously. Working illegally makes for a fun little anecdote if you’re rich and white, it seems. But it’s grounds for immediate deportation and dehumanisation if you’re not. Elon himself is fond of demonising “illegal immigrants” and has said that migration has “invasion vibes”.Trump, of course, won’t have any issues with Musk’s border hypocrisy. Despite striking a hard line on immigration, he doesn’t seem to have been particularly bothered by an Associated Press investigation finding that his wife, Melania, modelled in the US before she had legal permission to work in the country. Melania also sponsored her Slovenian-born parents to become US citizens through a process that the Trump administration scornfully termed “chain migration” and aggressively tried to end. Musk and Trump seem firmly in agreement that there are rules for thee but not for me.As for Musk’s potential advice to Trump on the economy? One imagines it will somehow involve his companies getting even more government subsidies than the billions they’ve already received. Perhaps he’ll wangle a government contract to send migrants to Mars. Or – as he’s previously joked – send “space dragons with ‘lasers’” to Ukraine. Whatever he advises, you can expect it to be less policy and more publicity stunt.But I’m getting ahead of myself. Trump is not president yet and Musk has rebutted claims that he’s interested in Ivanka Trump’s old job. “There have not been any discussions of a role for me in a potential Trump presidency,” he tweeted on Thursday.Still, there is no denying that he’s been having a bit of a bromance with Trump. This is a significant shift: Trump and Musk are both afflicted with “main character syndrome” and their huge egos have rubbed each other the wrong way in the past. In 2022, for example, Trump declared Musk a “bullshit artist” for saying he hadn’t voted for a Republican before. Musk, in response, said it was time for Trump to “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”. He added that Trump’s presidency was “too much drama. Do we really want a bull-in-a-china-shop situation every single day!?”It seems a bunch of billionaires have decided: yes we do. Musk isn’t the only mogul cosying up to Trump: depressingly, a number of wealthy donors have thrown their weight and money behind the ex-president in the past week. On Friday Musk also confirmed that X will host a livestream town hall-style event with Trump some time soon. Linda Yaccarino, who is somehow still CEO of X, chimed in with a fire emoji to tweet: “The People’s Town Hall!” More like Fracas With a Felon, surely? Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he said he wanted to give the storied but struggling newspaper the “runway” it needed to take off in the digital age.A few years later, the plane seemed to be soaring. Readership was up, revenue – built on new digital subscriptions – was up, and the newsroom’s scrappy staff was trading scoops daily with the New York Times, and doing essential journalism, particularly during the campaign and administration of Donald Trump.Bezos, wisely, had left the renowned editor Marty Baron in place until he retired in 2022. The billionaire owner, who paid only $250m for the paper, even gave the Post its now-famous motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The Post had regained the swagger it had under its legendary publisher Katharine Graham when it broke the Watergate scandal that helped bring down a corrupt president in the 1970s.But these days, the Post is struggling once again. It lost an estimated $100m last year, readership has dropped dramatically, and a roughly 1,000-person newsroom staff has been shrunk through buyouts and layoffs.Enter Will Lewis, a hard-driving British journalist who had been publisher of the Wall Street Journal. In January, Bezos named him the Post’s publisher and CEO.So far, it’s been a rocky reign, with this past week especially chaotic.Lewis made several heavy-handed moves that have alienated and angered an extraordinarily talented journalistic staff. He abruptly forced out Sally Buzbee, who had succeeded Baron to become the paper’s first female editor, and immediately replaced her with two of his former colleagues, even as he revealed his plans for a radically restructured newsroom. (The former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Matt Murray and former Telegraph deputy editor Rob Winnett will lead two adjacent Post newsrooms, including a new one dedicated to “service and social media journalism”; and then they’ll switch roles after November’s election. Yes, it’s all very weird.)Taken by surprise and baffled, the staff reacted angrily and with skepticism. At a “town hall” meeting on Monday, the prominent politics reporter Ashley Parker challenged Lewis’s decision-making, earning applause from her colleagues. “Now we have four white men running the newsroom,” she said, according to the news non-profit Notus. (She was referring to Lewis himself, Murray, Winnett and David Shipley, the opinion section editor; it’s worth noting that, although the Post considers itself a global, not local, newsroom, more than 40% of Washington DC residents are Black.)And a top investigative reporter, Carol Leonnig, reportedly pushed back on leadership changes, noting “you’ve chosen people with a very different culture from the Washington Post,” apparently because they reflect Fleet Street’s tabloid culture and the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal.Lewis grew testy and defensive, according to published reports and my own conversations with Post journalists.“We are going to turn this thing around but let’s not sugarcoat it,” Lewis said, according to the Post’s own reporting. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”He also claimed that he enjoyed working with Buzbee and wished that could have continued. That came off as disingenuous, as did his pledges of diversity in leadership.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“No one was buying what he was selling,” Notus quoted one attendee.I worked at the Post as media columnist from 2016 to 2022. I know my former colleagues to be top-flight and much of their journalism to be essential. They are also nimble and, in general, not resistant to change. They fully understand that we’re in a challenging new era. But they also are tough-minded journalists who demand to be treated with transparency and honesty and respect.Journalists don’t delude themselves that newsrooms are democracies; they know they don’t get a vote. But successful newsrooms aren’t dictatorships, either.If Lewis is going to be successful in his quest to make the Post soar again, he’ll need to have the journalists with him all the way. Right now, they’re not. And that means a course correction is in order.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

Everything is weird and everyone is wrecked. This is maybe the biggest and least acknowledged truth of life in the United States and a lot of places beyond right now. It’s the pandemic; the eight years of Trumpism; the distortions, disruptions and corruptions Silicon Valley has promulgated and other looming menaces, including climate chaos. We all know this, because we’re living it, but maybe we should talk more about the fact that our political catastrophes are inseparable from widespread psychic devastation, that the public and private, political and personal, are entangled – or rather that the former has wrought havoc on the latter.The wisest people I know are aware that the stresses, atrocities, divisions and divergences from norms of recent years have made them (and everyone else) exhausted and brittle. The less wise but no less brittle either lash out with the sense that what’s wrong is definitely someone else or take refuge in cults and oversimplified versions in which they are at least in control of what it all means.Public life has private impact; some of it breaks our brains, and some of it breaks our hearts. Not to leave our consciences out of this – to watch so much malice and willful destruction, to witness so much injustice, from genocides around the world to gross injustices at home, has an impact. That impact is probably best described as moral injury, which a veterans’ organization defines as “the psychological, social and spiritual impact of events involving betrayal or transgression of one’s own deeply held moral beliefs and values occurring in high stakes situations”.Most of us have a sense of what’s reasonable or possible based on what’s happened before; but we are now lost in a sea of unprecedenteds. We have not had authoritarian threats like this arise in all three branches of the federal government (if you count a former president aspiring to be a dictator as well as the supreme court and Congress). We have not previously had the wild corrosion of information and our ability to pay attention to it the way we do now, thanks to an internet dominated by corporations eager to offer us addictive social media and distorted search results and algorithms.For those paying attention, climate change is also an immense moral injury, a reminder that we are part of a system shredding the beautiful tapestry of life on earth and devastating beloved species. Although Covid was a scourge across the globe, far more people – about 8 million – die every year from breathing air polluted by burning fossil fuel, and that’s only one aspect of the devastation, and only to our species.Nevertheless the pandemic was devastating. I was surprised when the fourth anniversary of the global coronavirus pandemic was met largely with silence. Apparently almost no one wants to remember it, and of course it’s not exactly over, since people are still getting sick and dying of this new disease. Trauma, a term resorted to constantly these days, is an experience so devastating you cannot forget it; it dominates you. The opposite of trauma, in which you refuse to remember and process an experience, is also devastating, if not in the same way; you suppress an experience at the cost of operating with a reduced sense of self and reality.One of the positive aspects of many kinds of disaster is the sense of shared experience. But we had wildly different experiences of the pandemic: it killed some of us, bereaved some of us, bankrupted some of us, made some of us frontline workers facing danger and death, or unemployed, or suddenly isolated from the sociability of school or work and everyday life outside the home. The impact was profoundly different depending on your age, financial circumstances and domestic situation, among other factors. I hear a lot from teachers and professors about how their students have not recovered well from two years of isolation and online learning that often involved too little learning and too much being online.It is hard to imagine how different the Covid pandemic might have been had the country not been headed by someone who himself became a major source of divisive misinformation about Covid. In the US, a huge factor in the crisis in our psyches is four years of Trump in power, followed by nearly four more years of Trumpism. When the most powerful people in the country say and do whatever they want mostly without consequences, we are launched into incoherence and meaninglessness.A US flag flies upside-down in front of the supreme court justice Samuel Alito’s home for several days in early 2021, in seeming support of the January 6 insurrection, but he declines to recuse himself from matters concerning Trump. Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was an active part of that insurrection, also declines to recuse himself or account for the outrageous gifts he’s accepted from billionaires. The evangelical Christian who became the speaker of the House shows up to support Trump in his criminal election fraud trial due to hush money paid to a porn star and decries his guilty verdict and with it the justice system. The corruption is open and the loyalty to the ex-president rather than the rule of law is obvious.In any previous era, these outrages and dozens of others would have been treated as shocking scandals; now each outrage seems to crowd out the next so that, for example, Trump’s dinner with fossil fuel executives, in which he asked for a $1bn campaign contribution in return for slashing climate legislation, has been reported on almost with complacency. That a man who was found liable in civil court for rape is a leading candidate for the presidency has been likewise normalized.The examples are well-known – but perhaps more should be said about the impact. Trumpism has inspired Trump’s followers with the transgressive boldness he demonstrated first and best: that actually you can say anything you want, truth be damned, deny you said it, or contradict it. And with enough accrued power, you can break the law with impunity.Authoritarians want control not only over the economy, military, courts and media, but also fact, science, history – over meaning itself. To violate the independence of truth and fact, to insist they are whatever you want them to be, is to enter the realms of meaninglessness. Authoritarianism is nihilism. As Hannah Arendt said, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.”Another crisis of our times is that the internet has isolated us, shattered our capacity to concentrate, undermined existing news media and created fertile ground for the spread of hate, misinformation and propaganda. The internet has isolated us from more face-to-face forms of contact and put us in spaces where combative shouting is normal and emotional honesty risky and rare, where in-group performativity is everywhere and dissent is dangerous. The loneliness epidemic Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, has talked about has everything to do with the internet and how it’s sucked us in in ways that have made other forms of contact wither away.That’s my diagnosis. My prescription might be simple: be kind to each other, remembering the distress we’ve all lived through; defend the facts with ardor; fight fascism and climate chaos in the ways you’re best equipped to (and if you’re lucky, that will connect you to other good people doing that crucial work). And if you’re lonely know that even in that you’re not alone; millions are, in large part because of how our world got rearranged. But diagnosis is the first step of treatment or cure, and just talking about how personal the impact is of this chaotic new era matters.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

In the opening scene of Stormy, the documentary about Stormy Daniels’ life, she says: “I have just been tormented for the last five years or so. And here I am, I’m still here.” Probably the worst of the torment has been from Donald Trump’s supporters, though they’ve never got together to explain what they’re angry about. Is it that Daniels claims she had sex with Trump, in 2006? That she accepted $130,000 to keep quiet about it? Surely, if he’s the richest and most virile man America ever produced, you’d think that was no big deal for him, and nice for her?Instead, as she described on the stand, giving evidence against Trump, the Maga lot have made her life a misery. Death threats layered with lurid threats of sexual violence, enough that she was constantly worried for the safety of her family, have poured in since 2018, when the Wall Street Journal first broke the story.Most likely, they are angered at Daniels’ failure to take Trump seriously. Was it the closely observed descriptions of his penis, in her memoir, or her Make America Horny Again strip club tour? Whatever you make of her, she has never seemed cowed; and in the peculiar cross-hatch of prurience and misogyny through which the hard right sees the world, a porn star is golden while she agrees with you, and contemptible once she doesn’t.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAll that virulent hatred alone would be enough to sink a regular person, but Daniels has also spent the past six years in court, on and off, asking Trump to stop lying about her. She lost her defamation case, then lost again on appeal, leaving her owing Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. She came out pretty gung-ho on this debt, vowing not to pay it, but that’s not really how courts work. It’s not a game of chicken.And now, finally, she is not just vindicated but at the white-hot centre of Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions, which is 34 more than any former president in the country’s history. Other former members of his team who have been convicted in court include his campaign chairman (Paul Manafort Jr), his deputy campaign manager (Rick Gates), one of his lawyers (Michael Cohen), his chief strategist (Steve Bannon), several advisers (Peter Navarro, Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos) and his company CFO (Allen Weisselberg). I just couldn’t be more thrilled for Ms Daniels – that she’s one of very few people to cross paths with Trump and not end up with a criminal record. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More