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      Gavin Newsom’s podcast has featured Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. Is this the way to the White House?

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      On the latest episode of This Is Gavin Newsom, the California governor interviewed his Minnesota counterpart, the 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz. “Thanks for having me,” Walz said, flashing a cheeky smile. “I’m kinda wondering where I fall on this list of guests.”Walz was not only the first Democrat to make an appearance on Newsom’s splashy new podcast, but also the first participant who had not cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election results or expressed sympathy for the mob that stormed the capitol on January 6.Newsom has billed his podcast, launched at the beginning of March, as a platform for “honest discussions” with those who “agree AND disagree with us”. Many Democrats share his desire to expand their reach and influence across platforms – but his critics recoil at the approach. Newsom doesn’t seem to conduct the interviews as a blue-state leader raring to defend progressive values – or even as a governor whose response to one of the costliest and most destructive natural disasters in recent memory was undermined by a relentless rightwing campaign of rumors and lies. Instead, he seems to take on the role of an anthropologist conducting fieldwork on the forces fueling Maga fervor – and Democrats’ descent into the political wilderness.It’s a potentially high-stakes gambit for the term-limited governor widely believed to have national ambitions.“You’re taking a risk, doing a podcast, doing something to try to fill a void that’s out there and hopefully using it as a platform to try and articulate our values to a broader audience,” Walz told Newsom. “But we’ve not figured this out yet.”Since launching the podcast earlier this month, Newsom has taped a trio of friendly chats with rightwing figures reviled by the left: Steve Bannon, an architect of Donald Trump’s political rise; Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA and a Maga-world darling; and Michael Savage, a longtime conservative talk-radio host whose Trumpian rhetoric preceded the president’s rise. (According to the Wall Street Journal, Newsom sought help from his ex-wife and Trumpworld insider Kimberly Guilfoyle to connect with Kirk and Bannon.)Then came Walz. But the parade of conservatives on the Newsom podcast isn’t likely to stop. At one point during the second episode, Savage suggested another guest: Tucker Carlson. “I agree,” Newsom concurred. “I’m fascinated by him.”Media watchdogs have criticized the lineup, arguing Newsom is elevating and legitimizing rightwing extremists like Kirk, who once suggested Joe Biden should face the death penalty for unspecified “crimes against America”. They were baffled by his praise of Bannon, whom he commended for his “advocacy” and calling “balls and strikes” on the Trump administration.Many Democrats meanwhile have been infuriated by Newsom’s lack of pushback against his guests’ false or misleading claims, and his agreement with them on issues they had long thought he opposed. Newsom didn’t challenge the baseless assertion by Bannon that Trump won the 2020 election. And in his conversation with Kirk, he shocked longtime allies when he agreed that allowing transgender women and girls to compete in female sports was “deeply unfair”.Newsom and his representatives did not answer questions from the Guardian about his podcast. But he has said previously that the idea for it was born from a private conversation with a conservative figure he wished had been recorded. A cross-partisan conversation, he had said, could show that “we don’t hate each other”, despite holding deeply opposing political views.“The world’s changed. We need to change with it in terms of how we communicate,” Newsom told reporters at a press conference in Los Angeles last month. “We’d be as dumb as we want to be if we continue down the old status quo and try to pave over the old cow path. We’ve got to do things differently.”After the 2024 election, Democrats offered many theories about why they lost. There was widespread agreement that to win again, Democrats needed to do a better job of breaking out of their ideological bubbles and reaching voters the party had alienated in recent years. What they needed, some strategists argued, was a “Joe Rogan of the left”.Who is Newsom’s intended audience?For many Democrats and critics of the Maga movement, Newsom’s overtures have gone too far. His chats are doing little to diagnose the problem, and even less to position himself as a solution, they argue.“If you’re running to be a Republican nominee, this is a great strategy,” the California state assembly member Alex Lee, a member of the LGBTQ+ caucus, said earlier this month in response to the governor’s comments on trans athletes. “But if you want to run as a Democrat and someone who is pro-human rights, this is a terrible look.”“Cuddling up to the Charlie Kirks and Steve Bannons of the world and truckling to the Michael Savages … is a strange way to try to build national support among fellow Democrats,” the Los Angeles’s Times longtime political columnist, Mark Barabak, wrote.Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky who is also seen as a presidential hopeful, told reporters that the left should be willing to debate “just about anyone” – but that turning over the mic to Bannon was a bridge too far. “Bannon espouses hatred and anger and even at some points violence, and I don’t think we should give him oxygen on any platform, ever, anywhere,” Beshear said.And Adam Kinzinger, a Republican former representative from Illinois turned anti-Trump campaigner who sat on the January 6 committee, said it was “stupid” to talk to Bannon.“Bannon is the author of this chaos we’re seeing right now,” he said in a video posted on X.“Many of us on the right sacrificed our careers taking these people on and Newsom’s trying to make a career with them,” Kinzinger continued. “This is insane.”But perhaps progressive Democrats, and never-Trump Republicans, aren’t Newsom’s intended audience – at least for the moment.“He wants to be in the national conversation for the possibility of running for president,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University.If he does seek the White House, Newsom will need to prove to his skeptics that he is more nuanced than the rightwing caricature of him as a “knee-jerk liberal”, McCuan argued, the same attack conservatives leveled against Newsom’s “political cousin”, Kamala Harris, in last year’s election.View image in fullscreenThe podcast is the latest iteration in a much broader effort by the governor’s team to show that Newsom has matured politically, McCuan said, and make the case that he is capable of taking on Trump and the heir to Maga.It has certainly catapulted Newsom into the national political conversation, at a moment when his party appears rudderless, divided and desperate for new leadership.Each episode has generated headlines and the endeavor has sparked a wider debate about whether the governor is being savvy, cynical – or both.Howard Polskin, who documents rightwing media on his website TheRighting, said Newsom’s podcast is more about marketing and public relations for Newsom himself than a platform for making content or clearly articulating his political views.“Its value is that he’s getting people talking about himself,” he said. “This is like a page out of the Trump playbook. Doesn’t matter what they’re saying, they are talking about Gavin Newsom.”His conservative guests don’t gain converts from their appearances on Newsom’s show – they already have far larger audiences than the governor anyway, Polskin said, while the governor’s supporters are likely turned off by the rightwing figures he has invited on.But his guests gain something else: access. “Who wouldn’t want a relationship with the governor of California?” Polskin said. “It’s power. It’s proximity to power, someone who could arguably become the next president of the United States.”Polskin said it’s a smart move for Newsom as a branding play, and it’s “gutsy” for him to engage directly with top Magaworld influencers and try to have civil discussions. Whatever Democrats have been doing before clearly wasn’t working, he argued, so why not try something new?It’s a play he expects more Democrats to attempt in the run-up to the next presidential election. “He’s taken a controversial stand here. He’s getting a lot of attention for it. I think that’s smart,” he said.From antagonistic to calculatedWhen asked by a reporter whether the podcast was a “distraction” from his day job as a governor, Newsom said it was not. Opening new lines of communication with constituents – and providing a forum for civil dialogue between political opponents – was “essential” and “important” in an era defined by deep polarization and media fragmentation, he argued.It reflects a slight shift in tactics for the California governor.During Trump’s first term, Newsom, the leader of the largest blue state, embraced the role of liberal antagonist, holding up California as a bulwark against the administration’s attacks on immigrants and the environment.After soundly defeating a Republican recall effort in 2021, and handily winning re-election in 2022, an emboldened Newsom grew his national profile, acting as a prominent surrogate for Joe Biden and frequently taking the fight directly to the right.Before the 2022 congressional midterms, he implored Democrats to launch a “counteroffensive” to defend abortion rights and LGBTQ+ protections. He debated the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, on Fox News. His political action committee ran ads in Republican states – including ones a Democratic nominee would never hope to win, such as Alabama.But he’s also hedged his bets, barring state legislation that might have wound up in ads fueling California’s ultra-liberal image: Newsom has used his veto pen to reject bills that would have required a warning label on gas stoves and provided free condoms in schools. California’s prison system has long cooperated with federal immigration authorities, and this year the governor vetoed a bill that would have limited state prison officials’ cooperation with Ice.Newsom is taking a far more cautious approach with Trump, too, in the president’s second term. As Trump threatened to withhold federal disaster aid for the state following the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, Newsom greeted Trump warmly on the tarmac when Trump came to survey the damage. Shortly after, Newsom traveled to Washington for a lengthy Oval Office meeting. “We’re getting along, Trump and I,” he said in one of his podcast episodes.Mike Madrid, a California-based Republican consultant and podcast host, has argued that Newsom not only grasps the depth of Democrats’ engagement deficit but also the the urgency of creating a liberal “media infrastructure” to counter the right’s influence.“He knows he needs to get into that cultural space to be relevant,” Madrid said, noting that the governor is a longtime observer of rightwing media. “It doesn’t necessarily need to be the rightwing media ecosystem, but he’s keenly aware that you can’t just have a large Twitter account like he does and be a dominant national force.” He pointed out that it’s not Newsom’s first foray into podcasting. He also hosts Politickin’ with the former NFL star Marshawn Lynch and his agent, Doug Hendrickson.In an opinion piece for Fox News, Kirk wrote that his invitation to appear on Newsom’s podcast had been part of a “calculated play” by the governor to “present as a centrist” and shed his image in conservative media as the well-coifed leader of liberal America.“It might work,” Kirk warned. “One thing I learned in my podcast experience: the governor isn’t a joke. He has a shark’s instincts and is hoping that voters will have a goldfish’s memory.”Barabak, the LA Times columnist, couldn’t disagree more: “If Newsom really hopes to be president someday, the best thing he could do is a bang-up job in his final 22 months as governor, not waste time on glib and self-flattering diversions.” More

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      Greenpeace says Dakota Access pipeline defamation verdict risks ‘destroying right to peaceful protest’ – live

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      Steven Donziger is perhaps the best-known member of the trial monitoring committee that has been in court throughout the Energy Transfer v Greenpeace case.Donziger is an environmental lawyer who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over contamination in the Lago Agrio region, but ended up under house arrest for years, after the oil giant countersued him seeking $60bn in damages.Here, in a video released this week before the verdict, is how Donziger explains what is at stake in this legal effort to silence dissent he compares to the government’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil:Here is some useful background on the lawsuit against Greenpeace, from an article published last month by our colleagues Nina Lakhani and Rachel Leingang.Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company worth almost $70bn, had accused Greenpeace of defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline (Dapl).The anti-pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017 were organised by Standing Rock and other Sioux tribes and supported by more than 300 sovereign tribal nations, inspiring an international solidarity movement after Energy Transfer’s private security unleashed attack dogs and pepper spray against nonviolent protesters.Tens of thousands of people from across the country and world participated in the Dapl protests, and Greenpeace was among scores of non-profit groups that supported the Standing Rock tribe’s opposition to the pipeline.But Energy Transfer alleges in court filings that thousands of protestors were “incited” to come to North Dakota thanks to a “misinformation campaign” by Greenpeace.The lawsuit has been widely denounced as a classic strategic lawsuit against public participation (Slapp) – a form of civil litigation increasingly deployed by corporations, politicians and wealthy individuals to deliberately wear down and silence critics including journalists, activists and watchdog groups.For more, read the whole article, here:A team of 12 independent prominent civil rights attorneys and advocates who monitored the Greenpeace trial amid concerns about judicial bias and violations of due process released the following statement deploring the verdict:
      It is our collective assessment that the jury verdict against Greenpeace in North Dakota reflects a deeply flawed trial with multiple due process violations that denied Greenpeace the ability to present anything close to a full defense. Attorneys on our team monitored every minute of the proceedings and found multiple violations of due process that denied Greenpeace its right to a fair trial. The problems included a jury that was patently biased in favor of Energy Transfer, with many members working in the fossil fuel industry; a judge who lacked the requisite experience and legal knowledge to rule properly on the complex First Amendment and other evidentiary issues at the center of the case; and incendiary and prejudicial statements by lawyers for Energy Transfer that tried to criminalize Greenpeace and by extension the entire climate movement by attacking constitutionally-protected advocacy.
      Our fear that this was an illegitimate corporate-funded SLAPP harassment case was confirmed by our observations. We will be issuing a full report documenting these violations and larger flaws in the case in the coming weeks. While the trial court verdict is in, the case is far from over. Greenpeace has a right to appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. Our committee will continue its work monitoring this critically important case that raises troubling concerns for all advocates in the country.
      The monitors who released the statement include: Marty Garbus, a trial attorney who has represented Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, Cesar Chavez, and Vaclav Havel; Natali Segovia, director of Water Protector Legal Collective; Steven Donziger, an environmental and human rights advocate (and Guardian US columnist); Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers; Scott Wilson Badenoch, Jr., a fellow of the American Bar Foundation; Wade McMullen, a distinguished fellow of the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.As our colleagues Rachel Leingang and Nina Lakhani report, a jury in North Dakota has decided that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable over defamation and other claims over protests in the state nearly a decade ago.Greenpeace, which had denied the claims, said in a statement after the verdict that lawsuits like this were aimed at “destroying the right to peaceful protest”; constitutional rights experts had expressed fears that case could have a wider chilling effect on free speech.Here is the complete statement on the verdict from Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal advisor, Greenpeace USA, sent to the Guardian:
      What we saw over these three weeks was Energy Transfer’s blatant disregard for the voices of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. And while they also tried to distort the truth about Greenpeace’s role in the protests, we instead reaffirmed our unwavering commitment to non-violence in every action we take. After almost eight years, we were proud to share our story with the people of Mandan and beyond. To be clear, Greenpeace’s story is not the story of Standing Rock; that is not ours to tell, despite the allegations in the lawsuit. Our story is how an organization like Greenpeace USA can support critical fights to protect communities most impacted by the climate crisis, as well as continued attacks on Indigenous sovereignty. We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech. Greenpeace will continue to do its part to fight for the protection of these fundamental rights for everyone.
      Kristin Casper, the general counsel for Greenpeace International said:
      The fight against Big Oil isn’t over today, and we know that the truth and the law are on our side. Greenpeace International will continue to campaign for a green and peaceful future. Energy Transfer hasn’t heard the last of us in this fight. We’re just getting started with our anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Energy Transfer’s attacks on free speech and peaceful protest. We will see Energy Transfer in court this July in the Netherlands. We will not back down, we will not be silenced.
      Read Rachel and Nina’s detailed report on the verdict, and its implications here:A North Dakota jury has found Greenpeace liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to an energy company over protests against a pipeline being constructed in the state.The verdict stems from a lawsuit filed by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, which sought $300m in damages from Greenpeace for defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Greenpeace has warned paying such a large judgment could bankrupt their US operation.Here’s more on the verdict:Last week, the Trump administration asked the supreme court to quickly overturn lower court rulings that blocked its attempt to curtail birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.The Associated Press reports that the request may also offer the conservative-dominated bench the opportunity to cut down on the practice of a single judge halting a policy nationwide. But, for whatever reason, the justices do not seem interested in ruling quickly on the issue.Here’s more, from the AP:
      The Supreme Court seems to be in no hurry to address an issue that has irritated Republican and Democratic administrations alike: the ability of a single judge to block a nationwide policy.
      Federal judges responding to a flurry of lawsuits have stopped or slowed one Trump administration action after another, from efforts to restrict birthright citizenship to freezes on domestic and international spending.
      While several justices have expressed concern about the use of so-called nationwide, or universal, injunctions, the high court has sidestepped multiple requests to do something about them.
      The latest plea comes in the form of an emergency appeal the Justice Department filed with the court last week, seeking to narrow orders issued by judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington that prohibit the nationwide enforcement of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to restrict birthright citizenship.
      The justices usually order the other side in an emergency appeal to respond in a few days or a week. But in this case, they have set a deadline of April 4, without offering any explanation.
      The Trump administration’s cancellation of an affordable repayment plan for student loans has prompted a lawsuit from the American Federal of Teachers, the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reports:A top teachers union has sued the US Department of Education after it stopped processing applications for affordable repayment plans of student loans last month and disabled the online application for the programs.The American Federation of Teachers, or AFT – one the country’s largest unions, representing 1.8 million workers – filed a lawsuit alleging the sweeping action violates federal law.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington DC, seeks a court order to restore access to these programs.Another court order last month shut out borrowers of student loans from participating in four income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, which tie income to student loan payments, designed to keep payments affordable and avoid defaults on loans.“By effectively freezing the nation’s student loan system, the new administration seems intent on making life harder for working people, including for millions of borrowers who have taken on student debt so they can go to college,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT. “The former president tried to fix the system for 45 million Americans, but the new president is breaking it again.”The Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, is standing by his vote to fund the government, even as the calls for him to step aside grow.“I believe so strongly I did the right thing for all the flack I’m getting,” Schumer said in an interview on Morning Joe.He said he understood Democrats’ desire to stand up to Trump, but warned that forcing a shutdown was not the way to do it. “Let’s stand up to him smart. Let’s not give him the keys to the kingdom.”One major activist group, Indivisible, has already called on Schumer to resign as leader and constituents are raising the issue at town halls. According to Axios, at least two House Democrats responded yes when asked at a town hall whether Senate Democrats need new leadership.Schumer this weekend cancelled several stops on a tour for his forthcoming book, citing security concerns after progressive groups announced plans to protest the New York Democrat’s decision to lend his vote to a Republican funding bill.Schumer has argued that he does not support the bill, but feared a government shutdown at the exact moment Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to downsize the federal workforce would have been a far worse outcome.“If we shut down the government and they started doing all these bad things, in a month, those folks would be saying, hey, save Medicaid, save our rural hospitals, save this, save that, and we’ll say we can’t, there’s a government shutdown. And then they would come to us and say, so why’d you let it happen?” Schumer argued on Morning Joe. “I prevented that from happening, and I think my caucus, no matter which way they voted, understands that.The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has declined to say publicly whether he continues to support Schumer. On Tuesday the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi offered a sharp critique of Schumer’s strategy: “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. I think that’s what happened the other day,” she said, according to Politico. Unlike Jeffries, Pelosi said she still has confidence in Schumer’s leadership.Officials at the US Federal Reserve cut their US economic growth forecasts and raised their projections for price growth as they kept interest rates on hold.“Uncertainty around the economic outlook has increased,” the central bank said in a statement, as Donald Trump’s bid to overhaul the global economy with sweeping tariffs sparks concern over inflation and growth.Policymakers at the Fed expect inflation to increase by an average rate of 2.7% this year, according to projections released on Wednesday, up from a previous estimate of 2.5%.They expect US gross domestic product (GDP) – a broad measure of economic health – to rise by 1.7% this year, down from an estimate of 2.1% in December. Officials also revised down their projections for GDP growth in 2026 and 2027, to 1.8%.Uncertainty is “unusually elevated”, the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, cautioned, as the Trump administration attempts to engineer radical economic change. Some of the increase in the Fed’s inflation expectations was “clearly” due to tariffs, he said. More

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      Judge rules against Musk and Doge, finding USAid shutdown ‘likely violated’ constitution – US politics live

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      A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to stop their dismantling of USAid, saying their move to rapidly shut down the agency tasked with managing foreign assistance was likely illegal.“The court finds that defendants actions taken to shut down USAid on an accelerated basis, including its apparent decision to permanently close USAid headquarters without the approval of a duly appointed USAid Officer, likely violated the United States constitution in multiple ways, and that these actions harmed not only Plaintiffs, but also the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress,” wrote Maryland-based judge Theodore D. Chuang.He ordered Musk and Doge officials to halt any work meant to shut down USAid, reinstate email access for all USAid employees and contractors and not disclose any employees’ personal information publicly.He also said Musk and Doge have two weeks to either certify that USAid’s Washington DC headquarters has been reopened or have a top USAid official agree to close it down.The two Democratic commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, both said on Tuesday that they were “illegally fired” by Donald Trump on Tuesday.Trump is already being sued for firing members of other independent regulatory agencies including the National Labor Relations Board.Bedoya posted a statement on X in which he said: “This is corruption plain and simple”.“The FTC is an independent agency founded 111 years ago to fight fraudsters and monopolists”, Bedoya wrote. “Now the president wants the FTC to be a lapdog for his golfing buddies”.Slaughter said in a statement to the American Prospect that Trump’s illegal action violated “the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent”.As Deepak Gupta, former senior counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, explained recently on Slate’s Amicus podcast, in the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v United States, the US supreme court upheld a law that permitted FTC commissioners to be fired only for good cause, such as neglecting their duties. That ruling shields a number of independent, bipartisan multi-member agencies from direct control by the White House.As Gupta noted, the idea that government needed independent agencies and people with experts to solve complex problems was introduced during the New Deal era, to replace what was known as “the spoils system”, in which the incoming president rewarded friends, campaign staffers and other supporters with appointments to federal government positions for which they had no qualifications or expertise.Ed Martin, the combative interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, and a 2020 election denier who helped lead the Stop the Steal movement, plans to use his office to investigate possible election law violations, according to an email seen by Bloomberg Law.Martin, who publicly called the 2020 “rigged” in 2021, said in the office-wide email that he had established a “Special Unit: Election Accountability,” or SUEA.The unit “has already begun one investigation and will continue to make sure that all the election laws of our nation are obeyed”, Martin wrote. “We have a special role at this important time.”David Becker, the director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Talking Points Memo that Martin “seems to be misunderstanding his jurisdiction and the federal laws around elections and voting, and without more information, it’s unclear what is being done here other than furthering conspiracy theories that he’s embraced in the past”.Martin is a veteran anti-abortion activist who has argued for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest, falsely claimed that “no abortion is ever performed to save the life of the mother” and discussed the possibility of jailing doctors who perform abortions and women who get abortions.Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, has criticized the chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts, for defending the federal judge who tried to block the government’s showy deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.After Donald Trump reacted to Judge James Boasberg’s ruling by calling for his impeachment, Roberts said in a statement: “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”Responding on X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, Lee wrote:
      Impeachment is a non-justiciable political question assigned by the Constitution to Congress—one of the two political branches of the U.S. government—and not to the courts
      Frankly, I’m surprised that Chief Justice Roberts is publicly opining on such matters
      Musk himself had posted a similar comment hours earlier. Lee, a former critic of Trump who had called on him to drop out of the 2016 campaign before becoming a public convert, also shared Musk’s comment and added, of the arch-conservative Roberts, “This isn’t the first time he’s treaded on legislative power”.Here is more from our colleagues Hugo Lowell and Joseph Gedeon on the Roberts intervention:Trump’s trade war has had an incredible impact on the popularity of Canada’s Liberal Party, as new polling suggests a stunning reversal of public opinion.For the first time, projection shows the Liberals with a 55% chance of a majority government, according to the closely watched website 338Canada, which tracks and aggregates national polls, converting those figures into projected election results. In January, these odds stood at less than 1%.The shifting polls reflect the outsized role played by a teetering and unpredictable US president, and it underscores the incentives for newly minted prime minister Mark Carney to call a snap election in the coming days.Read more about it here:Of all that Donald Trump has done since being sworn in on 20 January, there’s a good argument to be made that dismantling USAid was the most impactful, though not necessarily within the United States. The Guardian’s Katy Lay has a look at how the global fight against HIV has suffered from USAid’s stripping:This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.Many fell under the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) programme, which has been the backbone of global efforts to tackle HIV and Aids, investing more than $110bn (£85bn) since it was founded in 2003 and credited with saving 26 million lives and preventing millions more new infections. In some African countries it covered almost all HIV spending.Judge Theodore D Chuang’s ruling that the dismantling of USAid was likely unconstitutional landed just as top officials at the agency were planning for it to be completely shut down by the end of September, the Bulwark reports.Employees at USAid were informed that their jobs will likely be wrapped into other federal departments, while workers overseas will be sent back to the United States. Chuang’s ruling could disrupt these plans, though the Trump administration could also appeal it.Here’s more from the Bulwark of what was planned for USAid’s final months:
      Tim Meisburger, the head of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, recently briefed staff about plans and pegged a final day for the agency’s existence at September 30, 2025 (notably, when the just-struck government funding deal runs out). According to notes of the briefing, which were obtained by The Bulwark, Meisburger expected that the agency would have a new structure, new names for subsections, and that there would be a “minimal overseas footprint,” with the possibility to expand in the future. They’d be incorporated into the State Department and officials had to “mentally prepare” to go from being agency leaders to senior staffers.
      “Most of the madness is behind us,” Meisburger said, according to the notes. It was time to “make lemonade out of lemons.”
      But what if you can’t get the lemons home? That’s one of the problems USAID is currently confronting.
      Last week, Jason Gray, who was serving as acting administrator for USAID, sent an email to staffers outlining the process for overseas officials to use the agency portal to come back to the United States. According to one person familiar with those concerns, the American Foreign Service Association is seeking information about the use of the portal. As of now, some USAID employees stationed abroad face a Catch-22. Some fear that if they relocate voluntarily, they may not be eligible for all the reimbursements associated with relocation costs (such as the shipment of personal effects). Other overseas employees worry that if they don’t voluntarily return to the United States, they could be fired. But at least that would potentially make the government liable to cover more of the end-of-contract relocation costs (assuming the current administration doesn’t just choose to leave fired employees abroad).
      A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to stop their dismantling of USAid, saying their move to rapidly shut down the agency tasked with managing foreign assistance was likely illegal.“The court finds that defendants actions taken to shut down USAid on an accelerated basis, including its apparent decision to permanently close USAid headquarters without the approval of a duly appointed USAid Officer, likely violated the United States constitution in multiple ways, and that these actions harmed not only Plaintiffs, but also the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress,” wrote Maryland-based judge Theodore D. Chuang.He ordered Musk and Doge officials to halt any work meant to shut down USAid, reinstate email access for all USAid employees and contractors and not disclose any employees’ personal information publicly.He also said Musk and Doge have two weeks to either certify that USAid’s Washington DC headquarters has been reopened or have a top USAid official agree to close it down.Federal judge James Boasberg has given the Trump administration until noon tomorrow to provide answers to specific questions about three flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that left the United States despite his order preventing their departure.Boasberg informed the justice department they have until 12pm ET tomorrow to answer the following questions:
      1) What time did the plane take off from U.S. soil and from where? 2) What time did it leave U.S. airspace? 3) What time did it land in which foreign country (including if it made more than one stop)? 4) What time were individuals subject solely to the Proclamation transferred out of U.S. custody? and 5) How many people were aboard solely on the basis of the Proclamation?
      The government, which has cited national security concerns in refusing to answer Boasberg’s questions, is allowed to reply under seal.The Pentagon said that fewer than 21,000 employees have accepted voluntary resignations after they announced plans to cut up to 60,000 civilian jobs, the Associated Press reports.The defense department announced last month that it would fire 5-8% of its civilian workforce, with layoffs of 5,400 probationary workers. The defense department is the largest government agency, with the Government Accountability Office finding in 2023 that it had more than 700,000 full-time civilian workers.A man accused of battling police with a baseball bat and shield during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol has announced a run for the US Senate in Florida.Jake Lang, a prominent January 6 defendant, has announced on social media that he is seeking the seat recently vacated by the current secretary of state Marco Rubio in 2026.“WE ARE TAKING OVER THE CAPITOL AGAIN,” Lang wrote in a post on X.Lang continued to be politically active during his time in the DC jail, reportedly attempting to organize a militia and creating fundraisers for the January 6 defendants.Lang did not stand trial for charges related to his role in the insurrection due to continuous delays. He was pardoned alongside about 1,600 others who participated in the Capitol attack when Donald Trump took office.Read more about it here:The Trump administration has moved to reinstate at least 24,500 recently fired probationary workers following a pair of orders from federal judges last week.The reinstatements were outlined in a filing by the Justice Department in federal court in Maryland on Monday.US District Judge James Bredar, an appointee of former President Obama, previously ordered the mass reinstatement of fired probationary workers at 18 federal agencies. He determined that the government’s claims that the terminations were because of performance issues “isn’t true”.The majority of the reinstated employees were placed on paid administrative leave, according to the Washington Post. According to the filings, some workers were fully reinstated with pay, and some were reinstated without pay if they had been on unpaid leave before their termination.Voters in Wisconsin are casting the first ballots in a pivotal state supreme court race that will decide whether liberal or conservative justices control the highest court in the state.The first day of early voting comes two weeks before the April 1 election between the Republican-supported Brad Schimel and Democratic-supported Susan Crawford.The race, which is in an important presidential battleground state, can be seen as a barometer of public opinion early in Trump’s presidency. The outcome will have far-reaching implications for a court that faces cases over abortion and reproductive rights, the strength of public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.The White House said in a statement that Trump and Putin “spoke about the need for peace and a ceasefire in the Ukraine war” in a phone call that lasted over an hour.
      “Both leaders agreed this conflict needs to end with a lasting peace,” reads the statement. “The leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, as well as technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace.”
      Putin and Trump also discussed the Middle East, the “need to stop” the proliferation of strategic weapons, and Iran, according to the statement.The justice department told the judge considering the legality of deporting suspected Venezuelan gang members that they did not violate his order to stop the planes from departing, but refused to immediately offer more details of their itinerary.The filings came after judge James Boasberg yesterday gave the administration a deadline of today at noon to share details of how the three planes were allowed to fly to El Salvador even though he ordered that they not depart, and turn back if they were in the air.In response, Robert L. Cerna, an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official based in Texas, said that two of the planes had already left US airspace by the time that Boasberg issued his order, while the third carried migrants who had been ordered deported through the typical legal process – not the Alien Enemies Act, which is at issue in the case Boasberg is considering.From Cerna’s filing:
      On March 15, 2025, after the Proclamation was publicly posted and took effect, three planes carrying aliens departed the United States for El Salvador International Airport (SAL). Two of those planes departed U.S. territory and airspace before 7:25 PM EDT. The third plane departed after that time, but all individuals on that third plane had Title 8 final removal orders and thus were not removed solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue. To avoid any doubt, no one on any flight departing the United States after 7:25 PM EDT on March 15, 2025, was removed solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue.
      Separately, attorney general Pam Bondi and other top justice department officials signed a notice to Boasberg in response to his demand for details about the planes and their departure time, essentially refusing to provide him with what he wanted:
      The Court also ordered the Government to address the form in which it can provide further details about flights that left the United States before 7:25 PM. The Government maintains that there is no justification to order the provision of additional information, and that doing so would be inappropriate, because even accepting Plaintiffs’ account of the facts, there was no violation of the Court’s written order (since the relevant flights left U.S. airspace, and so their occupants were “removed,” before the order issued), and the Court’s earlier oral statements were not independently enforceable as injunctions. The Government stands on those arguments.
      Here’s more on the legal wrangling over the deportations, and Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act: More

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      I’m a recent Stem grad. Here’s why the right is winning us over

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      When my friends and I graduated with our math degrees this past May, we felt like we could do anything.After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs.That’s because, for decades, the progressive movement worldwide has failed to organize technical talent for its own interests.Upon graduation, an average science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) student often faces a binary choice between industry and academia: BlackRock or grad school. Sure, there’s a handful of research non-profits out there, like Radical Data or the inactive Algorithmic Justice League; but they mostly focus on advocacy instead of governance. While there is excellent progressive work in data science being done by organizations such as OpenSecrets, Split Ticket, ProPublica’s Data Store, and even Twitter accounts such as Stats for Lefties, there is no systematic effort by progressives to recruit technical talent at scale.Meanwhile, financial and tech industries begin targeting Stem students with aggressive recruitment tactics as early as freshman year: over time, these industries become the only careers students can imagine outside of grad school. It’s no wonder that Stem students are more conservative than humanities and social science students, even though scientists tend to be more liberal. There are really only two things you can do with a Stem degree: stay in the ivory tower, or – to paraphrase Audre Lorde – go build the master’s house.In an interview with Ross Douthat, the tech investor Marc Andreessen claims that the left alienated Silicon Valley because “companies are being hijacked as engines of social change”: gone are the days of the agitprop 1984 Apple ads, or the naive “coding for good” movements of the 2010s. After the term “Stem” was coined in 2001, the next two decades saw the further division of science and the humanities into two opposing, irreconcilable systems of knowledge at the institutional level. While educational policy-makers obsess over Stem enrollments, funding and research as metrics to assess an education’s worth, students were incentivized to concentrate on one discipline, all while a liberal arts education diminished in appeal and practical utility.This made a generation of Stem students into technical ideologues. Starting from high school olympiads, they learn to worship technical capability above all else – and value the acquisition of technical skills above everything else. In college, they are never taught problem-solving frameworks outside those offered by programming or economics courses: game theory, homo economicus, Pareto efficiency. Crucially, these approaches always attempt to simplify the world instead of tackling society’s complexities head on: simplifying, as an impulse, has given rise to neoliberal, Silicon Valley-funded social movements such as “effective altruism” that do nothing to tackle crucial inequalities. Without alternative paradigms, these theories become real and universal ways to see the world and solve its problems.And so, empowered by Trump and Musk, it is the rightist technocrats who get to change the world today. With flashy tech stacks and a blind confidence to code up a solution to any and every problem, they set out to fix our government once and for all, armed with only three principles – simplify, automate, optimize. And so Doge runs the government as if solving an optimization problem: cut employees, retain key workers, minimize losses, simplify the structure. But already, Doge is reinstating fired federal workers who were working on crucial issues. Classic tech bro blunder: what else did they expect from trying to solve the problems of society without even bothering to understand their nuances?As the technocrat right rises into power, a luddite left also emerges in America – a narrowing base of grassroots organizers, local politicians, activists, academics and non-profits, that increasingly disaffiliate from technology with fear and distrust. As technical industries become more explicitly aligned with the agendas of the new American right in the post-Covid years, there has been little effort from progressive political organizations to recruit self-starting hackers and radical technologists, who exist in abundance on the decentralized internet. Did anyone even try to scoop up the workers who walked out of Google in 2018? Now, in 2025, we realize that a generation of politically naive engineers have already built a singular matrix of algorithmic oppression and universal surveillance that we cannot opt out of. Today’s progressives not only do not understand technology; worse, we have completely ceded technological power to the right.The dearth of efforts to recruit technical talent on the left essentially create a failure of imagination. Talented young engineers fail to imagine how their skills can be used to challenge existing power structures, and movements fail to imagine how technology can be used as a tactic to seize power. As Justin Joque argued in Revolutionary Mathematics, progressive movements need technical people who “understand the current metaphysics of capitalism – not in order to de-reify them, but rather to understand how they can be replaced”. One wonders whether more sophisticated data scientists could have made past Democratic campaigns more effective, or whether a collaboration between engineers and progressive thinkers could have led to more online platforms such as Bluesky.In order to hack and dismantle the technocrat right, American progressives must teach the engineers to dream again. Today’s engineers may be hard at work building the master’s house, but with the right organization and renewed senses of purpose, they, too, can learn to turn the master’s tools against him.

      Jaye Chen is a writer based in New York City More

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      Chuck Schumer postpones book tour stops amid shutdown vote backlash

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      The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has postponed several stops on a tour to promote his new book, citing security concerns, as the New York Democrat faces intensifying backlash over his vote to support a Republican-drafted spending bill and avert a government shutdown.Schumer was scheduled to participate in events in Baltimore, Washington DC, New York City and Philadelphia this week to discuss his new book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning, which is set to be released on Tuesday. The tour dates were expected to be rescheduled but the cancellation drew criticism from both political wings.Progressives erupted in fury over his decision last week to relent and help Republicans pass a stopgap funding bill many Democrats warned would hand Donald Trump and Elon Musk even greater discretion to slash government programs and services. Schumer had said Senate Democrats faced a “Hobson’s choice”: either vote for a “terrible” bill or shut down the government, which he argued would have been a far worse outcome for the party and the country.But Democrats are desperate for the party to stand up to Trump, as the administration embarks on a series of radical and potentially unlawful moves to slash the government, deport thousands of immigrants and launch a global trade war.“People are furious about Democrats not having a plan to fight Trump – and supposed ‘leaders’ folding [over] and over again,” Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement, accusing Schumer of attempting to “hide” from constituents. “We hope other Democratic senators continue meeting with their constituents and demand that their leadership fight with backbone.”Democrats have been organizing protests against Republican members of Congress, voicing their fury over the administration’s federal overhaul led by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” as well as their fears over Republican proposals that would probably result in cuts to safety-net programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.But this week, several Democratic groups are targeting Schumer and other Senate Democrats who voted for the spending bill. Some have staged protests outside of the minority leader’s Brooklyn home while others are calling on him to step down.In an interview with the New York Times, Schumer brushed aside questions about whether the self-described institutionalist was the right leader for this moment. The New York Democrat said he knew how to win seats and compared himself to an “orchestra leader” skilled at highlighting the diverse talent in his caucus. He said he encouraged the senator Chris Murphy, one of the sharpest Democratic critics of the second Trump administration, to ramp up his media appearances, and the independent senator Bernie Sanders to lead a cross-country “fighting oligarchy” tour.When asked about the prospect of a primary challenge, perhaps by the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as some have reportedly encouraged her to do, Schumer demurred, saying 2028 was “a long time away”.But Schumer’s decision to relent rather than fight has shaken his party’s activist base.After the vote last week, Indivisible, one of the major groups organizing against Trump, said it was time for new leadership in the Senate.“This is a painful decision, the gravity of which we take very seriously. Senator Schumer has contributed to and led many important accomplishments that Indivisible is grateful for,” Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of Indivisible, wrote in a statement. “But with our democracy on the line, he let us, the country, and the Democratic party down.”The group is encouraging members to call their Democratic senators and ask them to pressure Schumer to “step aside”.The funding fight also exposed a deep rift with House Democrats, all but one of whom opposed the bill in a floor vote. On Friday, the congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, declined to answer a question about whether it was time for new leadership in the Senate. More

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      Why is Gavin Newsom handing Steve Bannon a megaphone? It’s becoming clear | Margaret Sullivan

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      Gavin Newsom’s choice of guests – a parade of rightwingers – on his new podcast might seem baffling.After all, the California governor is seen as a mostly progressive Democrat from a very blue state whose reputation is that of a coastal elite. That’s the kind of person the American right, and plenty of centrists, love to hate, as we learned once again when Kamala Harris lost the presidential race to Donald Trump. His image is that of a rich, pretty boy who probably thinks jumper cables are just oversized iPhone chargers.It’s understandable that he would want to reposition himself as he looks ahead to a possible 2028 presidential run.But the way he’s going about it is bizarre and deeply misguided.Still in its infancy, This Is Gavin Newsom has hosted several rightwing media figures including Michael Savage, Charlie Kirk and – almost unbelievably – Steve Bannon, one of the most regrettable people to emerge into public life in decades. This is the guy who trashes the reality-based press as the “opposition party”, and who believes in bamboozling the American people into submission by “flooding the zone with shit”.If you had to name the five people most responsible for Trump’s still-shocking rise to power, Bannon’s name would belong on that list. Don’t forget that he was sent to prison for criminal contempt of Congress after refusing to cooperate with the House of Representatives investigation of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.But Newsom found Bannon worthy of a cordial chat blasted out to his growing podcast audience.For some, it boggles the mind.“I know what Steve Bannon got out of that interview – his fringe views were elevated and validated,” one prominent Democratic member of Congress told the journalist Oliver Darcy. “I don’t know what Gavin or Democrats got out of it.” Those “views”, naturally, included the repeated lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.As Martin Pengelly reported in the Guardian, one red-state Democrat – someone who knows a lot about bridging the gap in American politics – heartily disapproves.“We shouldn’t be afraid to talk and to debate just about anyone,” said Andy Beshear, the Kentucky governor, “but Steve Bannon espouses hatred and anger, and even at some points violence, and I don’t think we should give him oxygen on any platform, ever, anywhere.” (Beshear, it should be noted, may also be looking at a presidential run, and was considered as Harris’s running mate last year.)So what the heck is Newsom’s strategy, exactly?If you ask one of his podcast guests – Kirk, the pro-Trump extremist and podcaster – it’s simple enough.In an opinion piece on the Fox News website that followed his podcast appearance, Kirk called the California governor savvy and charming, but most of all ambitious. Newsom, Kirk quipped, wanted to be president more than any other person alive – and maybe dead, too.“He has a shark’s instincts and is hoping the voters will have a goldfish’s memory,” he posited.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAdam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman and vocal anti-Trumper, finds that infuriating.“Many of us on the right sacrificed careers to fight Bannon, and Newsom is trying to make a career and a presidential run by building him up,” Kinzinger told Pengelly.Make no mistake. There is a legitimate issue underlying this disagreement.Democrats are justifiably searching for a way to reach that wide swath of voters who seem permanently turned off to their party.And whatever one’s politics or affiliation, we all know that the US is terribly and destructively polarized. We must find a way to talk to each other across the great divide. We really do need to seek common ground.But the way to do it is not to normalize conspiracy theorists who have already done so much damage. It’s not to offer chummy chats – with little or no pushback – to those who want to trash vulnerable people, including transgender individuals and immigrants, or to repeat lies about a stolen election.This “rebrand” may help Newsom’s efforts to present himself as a healer or a centrist as he prepares to run for president in 2028.But anybody who’s paying close attention should know that what he’s doing is deeply cynical and ultimately counterproductive.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Democrats train fire on Musk as unelected billionaire dips in popularity

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      For most of the 17-minute interview, Elon Musk stuck to a script. He was just a tech guy on a mission to “eliminate waste and fraud” from government.His slash-and-burn cost-cutting crusade was making “good progress actually”, he told the Fox Business commentator Larry Kudlow on Monday, despite sparking a backlash that has reverberated far beyond Washington.“Really, I just don’t want America to go bankrupt,” he said.But then Kudlow asked Musk to look forward. Would the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) still be in place in a year? He thought so – his assignment wasn’t quite complete. Musk, the world’s richest man, then pointed to social security, a widely popular federal program that provides monthly benefits to retirees and people with disabilities, and other social safety net programs: “Most of the federal spending is entitlements. That’s the big one to eliminate.”For weeks, Donald Trump and Republicans have insisted that social security, Medicaid or Medicare would not “be touched”. Now Musk was suggesting the programs would be a primary target. Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, Democrats pounced.“The average social security recipient in this country receives $65 a day. They have to survive on $65 a day. But you want to take a chainsaw to social security, when Elon Musk and his tens of billions of dollars of government contracts essentially makes at least $8m a day from the taxpayers,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a floor speech the following day. “If you want to uncover waste, fraud or abuse, start there.”As the second Trump era comes into focus, Democrats have found a new villain: an “unelected billionaire” whose bravado – and sinking popularity – they believe may offer their party a path out of the political wilderness.“There’s nowhere in America where it is popular to cut disease research, to gut Medicaid and to turn off social security,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “So it’s hard to see a place where what Musk is doing for Trump doesn’t become an albatross for Republicans.”The White House has championed Doge’s work while reiterating that Trump would “protect” social security and other entitlement programs. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.The Social Security Administration , which serves more than 70 million Americans, has announced plans to reduce its workforce by more than 10% and close dozens of offices nationwide as part of Doge’s federal overhaul. Officials with the group have been installed at the agency since early last month.Despite mounting criticism of Musk, the president has embraced his beleaguered ally, who spent close to $300m helping elect him to the White House. This week, Trump hailed Musk as a “patriot” as he showcased Teslas from the south lawn of the White House. The president selected a red sedan, hoping to boost the electric car company, which has suffered a sharp decline in sales and stock prices since its chief executive launched his Doge operation. The White House has said that if conflicts of interest arise, “Elon will excuse himself from those contracts”.But Musk and his chainsaw-wielding approach to downsizing government is playing a starring role in early Democratic ads and fundraising appeals. Progressive activists have staged “nobody elected Elon” protests across the country while other groups are targeting Tesla showrooms and dealerships. On a “fighting oligarchy” tour across the country, Senator Bernie Sanders pointed to Musk’s growing political influence as a central threat to American democracy.“Most American people, they can’t name us. They don’t know who Chuck Schumer is, but they do know what this administration and Elon Musk and the GOP are planning for them,” Katherine Clark, the House minority whip, said on Friday. “It’s why you’re seeing this uproar in town halls.”While Democrats have much to say about Musk, they are less sure of how to stop him.Many of Doge’s actions have been halted or stopped in the courts. This week two federal judges ordered government agencies to rehire tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired as part of Doge’s purge of the federal workforce.Locked out of power in Washington, Democrats are under enormous pressure to use any leverage they have to block Trump and Musk. A Republican-authored bill to fund federal agencies through September and avert a shutdown fiercely divided Democrats this week. House Democrats and progressive activists erupted in anger at Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who ultimately relented and helped pass the measure rather than risk a funding lapse and, in his words, give Musk and Doge an opportunity to “exploit the crisis for maximum destruction”.Public polling underlines Democrats’ interest in Musk. A new CNN survey found that just 35% of Americans held a positive view of the billionaire Trump adviser, a full 10 percentage points lower than the president. The poll also found that he is notably better known and more unpopular than the vice-president, JD Vance.More than six in 10 Americans said Musk had neither the right experience nor the judgment to carry out a unilateral overhaul of the federal government, though views broke sharply along partisan lines. Roughly the same share said they were worried the reductions would go “too far”, resulting in the loss of critical government programs.A survey conducted by the left-leaning Navigator Research polling firm late last month found that views of Doge as a standalone cost-cutting initiative were marginally favorable, in line with other polls that have found Americans are broadly supportive of its stated mission to root out waste and improve efficiency. But there are signs Americans don’t like the approach or implementation so far.When the effort was framed as “Elon Musk’s Doge”, views turned sharply more negative. The poll also captured the far-reaching impact of the cuts: 20% say they or someone they know has lost access to a federal service, 19% say they or someone they know has lost access to a federal grant, and 17% say they or someone they know has quit or been laid off from a federal government job.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Musk is the face of everything that people are worried about in the Trump administration,” Ferguson said, adding: “To a lot of people, putting Elon Musk in charge of protecting the middle class is like putting Jeffrey Dahmer in charge of protecting a morgue.”Democrats believe Musk’s comments on entitlement programs are particularly potent – the world’s wealthiest man advocating for steep cuts to programs designed to help retirees and vulnerable Americans.In the Fox Business interview, Musk claimed the programs were rife with waste and fraud, suggesting as much as $600bn to $700bn – or nearly a quarter of their budget – could to be cut. Federal watchdogs have long identified improper spending as a problem, but Musk’s figure exceeds their estimates.Musk has derided social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”. As evidence of widespread fraud, Musk repeated a debunked theory, favored by Trump, that social security benefits are being paid to dead centenarians. The head of the agency has rejected the premise. Democrats have warned that Trump and Musk were using false or exaggerated claims of fraud as a “prelude” to slash the program or privatize it, as many conservatives have long desired.After Musk’s comments aired, the White House swiftly issued a “fact check” insisting that Musk had only advocated for eliminating waste and highlighted several occasions in which Trump has vowed to protect Americans’ benefits.Republicans also rushed to clarify Musk’s comments. “Look, Elon Musk is a brainiac with an IQ that I cannot even fathom. He is not a master of artful language,” Mark Alford, a Republican representative of Missouri, said on CNN. “We are not going to eliminate social security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s sheer nonsense.”It was a rare break with Musk, whom Republicans have been loath to cross, well aware that he not only has the president’s full support and ear but a fortune to squash any dissent within the ranks. During Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month, Republicans gave Musk a standing ovation as the president heaped praise on his work. They publicly warn that Democrats oppose Musk’s fraud-and-waste removal efforts at their own political peril.Yet there are signs that Republicans are beginning to worry. Despite Trump’s close alliance with Musk, even he seemed to indicate it was time to rein him in. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet’,” the president wrote in a social media post.House Republicans have reportedly been advised not to hold in-person town halls after several widely publicized confrontations with constituents furious over loss of government jobs and services. At the few meetings that did take place this weekend, constituents confronted Republican members of Congress with their concerns about possible cuts to social security.Republicans are weighing deep cuts to entitlement programs as a way to offset the cost of extending Trump’s sweeping tax cuts aimed largely at the wealthy. Trump has praised the House plan.“The Republican party at this point has wrapped both arms around the third rail and is holding on as the electricity flows,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic party in Wisconsin, where a contest next month will provide an early test of the party’s anti-Musk strategy.On Thursday night, Wikler hosted a People v Musk grassroots event to discuss the billionaire’s impact on the 1 April state supreme court race, which will determine the balance of power between conservative and liberal justices on Wisconsin’s highest bench. Musk has spent millions of dollars through his America Pac in an effort to tip the scales in favor of Brad Schimel, a county judge and former Republican attorney general. Democrats are supporting Susan Crawford, a county judge and former attorney for Planned Parenthood.Wikler said Musk’s ascendancy in Washington – and his influence in the race – has turned liberal voters in the state from “concerned to panicked to outraged with the heat of 1,000 suns”.“If Susan Crawford wins this race, and Musk and Schimel lose,” he said, “then that will be a big bat signal in the sky to Democrats everywhere that fighting back is not only the right thing to do, it’s good politics.” More

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      Trump administration briefing: Democrats divided as funding bill passes; president rails against justice department

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      The US Senate averted a government shutdown just hours before a Friday night deadline after 10 Senate Democrats joined nearly all Republicans to clear a key hurdle that advanced the six-month stopgap bill.The vote deeply dismayed Democratic activists and House Democrats who had urged their Senate counterparts to block the bill, which they fear would embolden Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s overhaul of the US government.Meanwhile, the US president used a speech at the Department of Justice – billed as a policy address for the administration to tout its focus on combating illegal immigration and drug trafficking – to focus on his personal grievances with that department.Here’s more on the key US politics news of the day:Senate averts shutdown but Democrats dismayedThe US Senate on Friday approved a Republican bill to fund federal agencies through September, averting a government shutdown hours before the midnight deadline after Democrats relented.The bill passed the Senate in a 54-46 vote, overcoming steep Democratic opposition. It next goes to Donald Trump to be signed into law.Read the full storyTrump vents fury about criminal cases in DoJ ‘victory lap’Taking over the justice department headquarters for what amounted to a political event, Donald Trump railed against the criminal cases he defeated by virtue of returning to the presidency in an extraordinary victory lap the department has perhaps never before seen.Read the full storyPutin praises Trump, likely raising alarm bells in Ukraine and Europe Vladimir Putin has praised Donald Trump for “doing everything” to improve relations between Moscow and Washington, after Trump said the US has had “very good and productive discussions” with Putin in recent days.The exchange of warm words between Trump and Putin is likely to cause further alarm in Kyiv and European capitals, already spooked by signs of the new US administration cosying up to Moscow while exerting pressure on Ukraine.Read the full storyVance booed at classical concertJD Vance, the US vice-president, was booed by the audience as he took his seat at a National Symphony Orchestra concert at Washington’s Kennedy Center on Thursday evening.Exclusive Guardian footage shows the vice-presidential party filing into the box tier. Booing and jeering erupted in the hall as Vance and his wife, Usha, took their seats.Read the full storyNewsom under fire for Bannon podcastGavin Newsom, the governor of California, was criticised for welcoming far-right provocateur Steve Bannon on to his podcast.Fellow potential future Democratic presidential candidate Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, said “Bannon espouses hatred” and added “I don’t think we should give him oxygen on any platform, ever, anywhere”.Read the full storyMark Carney says Canada will never be part of USMark Carney has said Canada will never be part of the US, after being sworn in as the country’s 24th prime minister in a sudden rise to power.“We will never, in any shape or form, be part of the US,” the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England told a crowd outside Rideau Hall in Ottawa, rejecting Donald Trump’s annexation threats. “We are very fundamentally a different country.”Read the full storyPro-Israel group touts US ‘deportation list’ of ‘thousands’ of namesA far-right group that claimed credit for the arrest of a Palestinian activist and permanent US resident who the Trump administration is seeking to deport claims it has submitted “thousands of names” for similar treatment.Mahmoud Khalil, an activist who recently completed his graduate studies at New York’s Columbia University, was detained this week and Donald Trump has said his arrest was the “first of many”. Betar US quickly claimed credit on social media for providing Khalil’s name to the government, adding that it had “been working on deportations and will continue to do so”.Read the full storyDemocratic senator ditches his Tesla over Musk cutsThe Arizona Democratic senator Mark Kelly announced he was ditching his Tesla car, because of brand owner Elon Musk’s role in slashing federal budgets and staffing and attendant threats to social benefits programs.“Every time I get in this car in the last 60 days or so, it reminds me of just how much damage Elon Musk and Donald Trump is doing to our country,” the former navy pilot said, in video posted to X.Read the full story60% of US voters disapprove of Musk cost-cuttingDonald Trump and Elon Musk face increasing headwinds in their attempt to slash federal budgets and staffing, after two judges ruled against the firing of probationary employees and public polling revealed strong disapproval of the Tesla billionaire’s work. A new Quinnipiac University poll found 60% of voters disapprove of how Musk and his so-called department of government efficiency are dealing with federal workers, while 35% approve.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Marco Rubio told reporters that more visas of anti-war protesters who are on temporary status in the US will be revoked, Reuters reported.

      Former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi released a statement in response to the government funding bill, calling it a “devastating assault on the wellbeing of working-class families”.

      Elon Musk’s Tesla has warned that Trump’s trade war could expose the electric carmaker to retaliatory tariffs that would also affect other automotive manufacturers in the US. The company said it “supports fair trade” but that the US administration should ensure it did not “inadvertently harm US companies”.
      Catching up? Here’s the roundup from 13 March. More