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      Democrats’ problem isn’t just messaging – it’s the electoral math | David Daley

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      It’s much worse than the usual disarray. Even after hopeful election results last week, Democrats are shut out of power in Washington, bewildered over the 2024 election, and staggered by Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s blitz to rapidly assert power over the media, universities and the courts, while dismantling huge swaths of the federal government.Exiled to the political wilderness, Democrats have blamed their messaging and messengers. They have sought different ways to talk about trans rights, abortion, immigration and populist economics. They have sought their own network of social media influencers and podcasters so that they can talk to young or occasional voters.None of this will make the difference. Democrats could spend as much time as they like fine-tuning the perfect pitch on trans women and high school sports. They could develop an army of faux-Joe Rogan podcasts for future candidates to make their case. They could even win the occasional upset special election. And they will still remain powerless.That’s because while Democrats might have a messaging and messenger problem, they have a much larger issue: math. And it’s a cruel math, where just coming close to a majority doesn’t count.A captured supreme court, gerrymandered legislatures, a radically malapportioned Senate, and the electoral college mean that the basic math that paves any road toward 270 electoral votes, 218 members of the House, 51 senators and five members of the supreme court is tilted dramatically against Democrats. All of it is likely to get much worse before it gets any better. Before the midterms, Republicans seem determined to pass new voting restrictions that will place new barriers before tens of millions, make registration and voting itself decidedly more difficult, and call into question the very possibility of free and fair elections. Until Democrats fully recognize that the structural barriers before them could doom them to opposition status even if they reassemble a majority coalition, they are not grappling with the cold reality of this moment. Politics and public opinion could move in their direction. The structural math might only get worse.The House mapStart with the US House, the heart of the party’s midterm dreams. Republicans hold seven seats more than Democrats, and history suggests that the opposition party often gains that many seats in a midterm off anti-incumbent frustration alone. Listening to Democrats, you get the sense that they feel it’s almost a given they will take back the House. The conventional wisdom suggests the national House map is balanced. Neither is the case. Better balanced, perhaps, from the last decade, but Republicans still benefit from a gerrymandered advantage of 16 seats, according to the non-partisan Brennan Center.Getting close to a majority, as Democrats did in the current House, is one thing. Getting over the top is harder than it looks. On a map that is nearly maximally gerrymandered to eliminate competitive seats – only 37 of 435 races were within five points in 2024 – flippable seats are rare and difficult to target. Democrats won, and must defend, 22 of those – which leaves just 15 competitive seats to provide the necessary yield. Only four of those districts are in states carried by Kamala Harris in 2024.Beyond that, one might start by identifying vulnerable GOP members from districts that also backed Harris. There are only three of those: Nebraska’s second, New York’s 17th and Pennsylvania’s first. These have been Democratic targets for some time. The incumbents remain safe and Democrats would have a lot of voters to persuade; those aren’t among the 15 competitive districts. Nebraska’s Don Bacon and New York’s Mike Lawler won by seven percentage points. In Pennsylvania, Brian Fitzpatrick won by nearly twice that, 13 points.Democrats meanwhile must defend 13 districts carried by Trump where incumbents have, thus far, managed to outrun national trends of partisan polarization. What that means is that in many ways, Democrats are overextended on the current map; they’ll need a strong year simply to defend what they already hold.But the operative phrase is “current map”. That’s not the same as “2026 map”. The other challenge comes from redistricting and from the US supreme court. In Ohio, where Democrats have narrowly held two Trump-leaning districts, the GOP will be able to redraw the congressional map ahead of the 2026 elections. Two of the competitive seats carried by Democrats in 2024 are in the Buckeye state. The GOP will probably gerrymander those seats so that they are uncompetitive for even an incumbent Democrat, pushing a 10-seat to five-seat GOP edge in the state to a 12-3 advantage. More redistricting dominos could fall. A potential decision by the US supreme court in a racial gerrymandering case from Louisiana could lead to Black-majority seats there as well as in Alabama and Georgia being wiped off the map. Suddenly Democrats don’t face just a seven-seat gap; they need to find their way to several more on a difficult map.The Senate mapThe Senate map looks even harder. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority. Democrats need to gain four seats to win the chamber – if, that is, they successfully defend one seat in Georgia, as well as open seats in purple New Hampshire, Michigan and Minnesota, where Democratic incumbents have announced retirements. Democrats will once again target the Maine senator Susan Collins. Beyond that, it’s a tough road: they will need to hold the four purple seats, defeat a popular survivor in Maine, and then take three more from this unforgiving, unlikely list where the best bets are North Carolina, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Iowa or South Carolina.Ouch. The longer-term Senate trends don’t look much more favorable given how nationally polarized these races have become. In 2024, there were 24 solid red states that Trump won by double digits. There were 19 blue ones. Republicans now hold all 48 Senate seats in the red states. Democrats (or independents who caucus with them) hold 37 of the 38 from blue states. Democrats would need to defeat Collins and then win 13 of the 14 from seven swing states – which means maintaining two in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan, and finding a way to win in North Carolina. Otherwise, they need inroads into states where Democrats have had almost no statewide success for more than a decade.Political realities can change. But the road to 51 seats requires challenging the current math and maps in quite dramatic ways. Texas, Florida, Ohio, Iowa and South Carolina is change that is difficult to believe in.Population changesPopulation shifts don’t favor Democrats, either. By 2035, experts suggest, 70% of the nation will live in the 15 largest states, with just 30 senators. Right now, two-thirds of Americans live in the largest 15 states, according to census data. They are represented by 30 senators – 21 Democrats and nine Republicans. The other third of us? These smaller 35 states aren’t only whiter than the nation at large, they tilt decisively to the Republican party, represented by 46 Republicans and 24 Democrats.Those population shifts will affect the House as well when it is reapportioned after the 2030 census. Early Census Bureau estimates suggest that California will lose four seats, New York two, and Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin one apiece. Maybe Democrats will find a way to gerrymander Illinois so completely that a red seat is lost. But on balance, this will almost certainly cost Democrats several current blue seats. Those seats would each shift to states where Republicans have locked in huge advantages via controlling the redistricting process, and where they have long drawn lines that outpace demographic trends: four each to Texas and Florida, and one for Arizona, Idaho, North Carolina and Utah.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThe presidency and supreme courtElectoral college power will shift as well. The projected 2030 reapportionment would have cost Joe Biden in 12 electors in 2020; in 2024 it would have been a loss of 10 for Harris. That shifts the fight for the White House. This decade, a Democrat could win the White House simply by carrying the reliably blue states, as well as the once-mighty “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the Omaha, Nebraska, elector. But subtract those 12 electors and that’s not close to enough. Beginning in 2032, if these projections hold, Democrats would have to win the blue states, the “blue wall”, plus either North Carolina or Georgia, or both Arizona and Nevada.One place where conservative power won’t shift any time soon: the supreme court. The Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections, yet they are in a terrible position. The 6-3 Republican supermajority should prove enduring for decades. If Trump replaces Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito with younger justices, the advantage could last even longer. In order to break this hold, Democrats will not only need to control the White House when openings arise, but also the Senate. Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland was stonewalled by a Republican Senate in 2016; the chamber has only become more aggressively ideological – let alone tougher for Democrats to win – in the decade since. It is easy to imagine a Republican Senate simply refusing to consider any Democratic president’s nominee.So what do Democrats do?None of this is intended to be oppressively bleak. It is to paint a realistic picture of what Democrats face and to explain where they must win to pry back any levers of federal power and sustain it.Of course, nothing is static. Plenty of events over the next two and four years, from a recession to further national security embarrassments, could scramble American politics. Democrats have already flipped some 2025 state legislative races few expected them to win. Still, winning November races when turnout and polarization are at the highest is much more difficult – and picking up double digits in the US House with limited targets is a demanding task. Last week’s results in Florida, where Republicans easily held the congressional seat that belonged to the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, despite Democratic energy, breathless coverage in the national press, and a massive fundraising advantage, should be a brutal reality check. And that’s assuming free and fair elections, and before factoring in the extreme, voter-suppressing Save Act making its way through Congress that would make it more difficult for tens of millions of Americans to vote.It’s tougher still to see the road to a Senate majority near term. Hoping for polarization to ebb, or the Maga grasp on the GOP to ease, is coming to a gun fight with good vibes and crossed fingers.Messaging and messengers are not unimportant. They’re crucial. Especially if Democrats hope to change a brand that is toxic in many states where they must find a path to victory if they want any hope of reaching 270, 218 or 51. But math remains the far bigger challenge – and even perfect messaging crashes against structural and geographic realities. Too many Democrats, and the party’s polling/consulting complex, want to bleed the ActBlue accounts of supporters on lost causes like the Florida special election.The focus for Democrats must be on something different: defending free and fair elections, and building a coalition right now behind reforming redistricting, the courts, statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico, and imagining the Senate reapportionment that Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned 30 years ago we would soon desperately need.That’s what needs to be communicated: structural reforms represent everyone’s only hope to create a level playing field, meaningful elections and an accountable democracy for all.The good news is that these reforms are already popular with Americans: 70% back supreme court term limits and ethics codes. Gerrymandering is loathed in red, blue and purple states. It’s time to make the same serious case for reapportioning the Senate, adding states, a more proportional House, ranked choice voting, and additional judicial reforms. The National Popular Vote interstate compact keeps getting closer to revamping presidential elections so that every vote is equal. “A more perfect union” fundamentally means that American democracy must evolve with the times.Call it the Contract to Reform America, or Project 2029, or “make American politics fair again”. Get all the influencers and future podcasters onboard. Until Democrats fix the math and reform the system, the few will control the many for decades to come.Messaging that basic unfair reality is something even these Democrats should be able to do. If they can’t, we are in the kind of authoritarian fix that no election will be able to undo.

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

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      Republicans trying to change rules to avoid House vote on Trump tariffs

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      Republicans are quietly pushing a procedural rule that would curb the power of the US Congress to override Donald Trump’s chaotic tariff policy.The House of Representatives’ rules committee on Wednesday approved a measure that would forbid the House from voting on legislation to overturn the president’s recently imposed taxes on foreign imports.The sleight of hand was embedded in procedural rule legislation setting up debate on a separate issue: the budget resolution that is central to Trump’s agenda.If adopted, the rule would in effect stall until October a Democratic effort to force a floor vote on a resolution disapproving of the national emergency that Trump declared last week to justify the tariffs. This mirrors a similar tactic used previously to shield Trump’s earlier tariffs.The move came as Trump announced a major reversal on Wednesday, with a 90-day pause on tariffs for most countries while raising them to 125% for China.Despite concerns that Republicans were set to endorse another potential expansion of presidential power, Mike Johnson, the House speaker, asserted the tariffs were an “America First” policy that required space to be effective.He told reporters: “I’ve made it very clear, I think the president has executive authority. It’s an appropriate level of authority to deal with unfair trade practices … That’s part of the role of the president is to negotiate with other countries … and he is doing that, in my estimation, very effectively right now.”Republicans moved against a resolution introduced by Gregory Meeks of New York, along with other House Democrats, seeking to end the national emergency declared on 2 April. This declaration was used by Trump to implement sweeping new tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.Republicans’ blockade specifically targets the expedited process for reviewing national emergencies outlined in the National Emergencies Act. It stipulates that the period between 9 April and 30 September will not count towards the 15-day window that typically allows for fast-tracked floor votes on disapproval measures.Democrats strongly condemned the action, accusing Republicans of obstructing debate and prioritising Trump over the economy and congressional oversight.Teresa Leger Fernandez, a congresswoman from New Mexico, said: “We only need four Republicans, only four Republicans to vote with Democrats to review the tariffs and stop this madness … Do you support tariffs that are throwing our economy into recession? Do you support tariffs that are hurting our families? … Then get up on the floor and debate that. But don’t prevent us from having that debate.”Congresswoman Suzan DelBene of Washington added: “Congress should have a role here. It’s terrible that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle aren’t willing to have a vote, too.”Although the rule change hinders the expedited process under the National Emergencies Act, it does not completely eliminate other avenues for forcing a vote, such as a discharge petition, though these are often difficult to achieve.Meeks said: “They can run but they can’t hide. At some point they’re going to have to vote … We’re not going to stop. The American people have a right to know whether you’re for the tariffs or against them. And if they vote this rule in, that will show that they’re trying to hide.”But Republicans countered that Democrats had used similar procedural tactics to block votes on issues such as ending the Covid-19 national emergency when they held the House majority.The rules committee chair, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, said: “A reminder about those who live in glass houses … This is a tool utilised by both Democrat and Republican majorities.”This is not the first time Republican leadership has employed such a tactic to shield Trump’s tariff decisions. A similar rule was adopted previously to prevent votes on resolutions targeting earlier tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada, as well as levies on Canada specifically. More

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      Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and didn’t mention Gaza once. That’s no surprise | Judith Levine

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      Seven and three-quarters hours into his 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, the New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker uttered the word “Gaza”. He was not talking about the war. He stepped nowhere near the 50,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli armed forces since 8 October 2023, or the US’s military and political support of the genocide.Rather, Booker was searching for a particularly ludicrous lie from a presidential administration that has told thousands. “There are lies about USAID, like, I don’t know, 5 million condoms going to Gaza or something outrageous,” he said. Considering the other outrageous things Trump has said about Gaza – such as his plan to “clean out” the strip to make room for luxury resorts – the remark felt trivializing.The word “Gaza” came up once more, when the senator mentioned his “humanitarian and peace-building work” with the UN there.It was not until hour 13, more than halfway through his oratorial marathon, that Booker engaged at any length with the subject of Israel and Palestine. This time it was not about the war, either. Instead, he was condemning the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech at universities and its summary deportation of legally resident foreign students who “espouse certain views on topics like Israel and Palestine”.The senator recounted the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish Tufts University graduate student who was surrounded on the street by masked plainclothes agents, handcuffed and hustled into an unmarked vehicle, then shipped to a hellish Louisiana detention center, where she faces deportation – all apparently because she co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper urging the college to divest from Israel. “Her arrest,” said Booker, “looks like a kidnapping that you might expect to see in Moscow rather than in the streets of Boston.” True.Denouncing censorship, the senator self-censored. “Certain views on topics”: he neglected to specify which views. He didn’t say that punishment is being meted out exclusively to critics of Israel and never to its supporters, or that those supporters are supplying homeland security with the names of the critics – in other words, collaborating in the very violations of constitutional rights that he decries.The atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza since the temporary ceasefire collapsed are arguably the worst yet. Trump is cheering Bibi on like a fan at a wrestling match. His support of Israel’s policies is not only unconsciously racist, like Biden’s, but blatantly racist. Yet few Democrats are saying – or, more importantly, doing – anything to stop him. In fact, a few days after the speech, Booker voted against Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block $8.8bn in arms sales to the Netanyahu government. Only 14 of his colleagues voted in favor.Perhaps senators are hoping their constituents won’t notice their inaction. Indeed, as the mudslide of executive orders buries immigrants, federal workers, transgender people, science, regulation, the economy, the rule of law and US democracy, it is hard for the press, or anyone else, to take their eyes off what is going on at home. Even when horrors are taking place abroad. Especially if they’re taking place in Palestine.For example: senior national security officials discussed classified military operations on the commercial message app Signal and inadvertently included a reporter on the call. The super-blunder got a name, and Signalgate was all over the news. But on the subject of that discussion – US airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen – virtual silence.Only the most tuned-in of US news hounds know who the Houthis are, let alone why we might bomb them: their attacks on ships in the Red Sea, perpetrated in support of the Palestinians. Was the US strike a good idea? Was it consonant with the US’s Middle East strategy – if there is a Middle East strategy? Do the Houthis pose a threat to national security? Is the Yemen bombing an escalation of US involvement in the Gaza war? Don’t ask the mainstream media. Fixated on the incompetence of Trump’s cabinet and the president’s laid-back attitude toward classified information, Signalgate turned a military aggression in a country against which we have not declared war into a domestic story – about Trump.As in Booker’s speech, as last spring, when university administrators called in the police to break up student Palestine-solidarity encampments, the press focused narrowly on individual Americans’ acts in relation to a response to the war in Gaza, rather than on the war itself.Antiwar activists are having a hard time catching anyone’s eyes – including the eyes of those who are sympathetic to their cause. This Saturday, at opposite ends of the National Mall in Washington, two demonstrations occurred simultaneously: the Emergency March for Palestine and the much larger Hands Off rally, one of about 1,500 taking place nationwide.At the former event, a ribbon-like white banner inscribed with the names of the Palestinian dead flowed from hand to hand above the heads of the participants, drawing the crowd together like a seam stretching into the distance. Solemn, elegant, a symbol of the interminable war and the immensity of its damage, it was the kind of mediagenic political spectacle that deserved to be broadcast widely, at least at the end of the newscast. But it can be viewed only on social media.Why did these two events happen at the same time anyway? Was there no communication between Indivisible and the other Hands Off organizers and the groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace and the Palestinian Youth Movement, that planned the Palestine action? Did Indivisible consider the war too divisive for an action seeking to attract everyone from socialists to Republicans worried about their 401ks? Or was Trump’s stance on Israel not on the bill of indictments against him?What the Trump administration is doing to the US and what he is eagerly helping Netanyahu to do to the Palestinians are of a piece. Both are criminal, immoral campaigns against domestic and international law, causing immense suffering. Yes, it’s exhausting to contend with two major catastrophes at once. But we don’t have the time or the privilege to put either one aside.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is at judithlevine.substack.com More

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      ‘What if we didn’t suck?’: the leftist influencer who wants to campaign for Congress differently

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      Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old progressive TikTok star, wants to do campaigns differently. So the very online candidate for a solid blue congressional seat in Illinois is channeling her energy into in-person events.The entry fee for her campaign’s kick-off event was a box of tampons or pads to be donated to The Period Collective, a Chicago-based non-profit that distributes free menstrual products to low-income communities in the area. The debut was such a success, she said, they filled her campaign manager’s SUV with donations. (“I want him to get pulled over so bad,” Abughazaleh quipped in a video for her YouTube series How to Run for Congress.) It’s part of her pledge to disrupt politics as usual and run a campaign that promotes mutual aid and community organizing rather than a candidate-centered “vanity project” that relies on expensive TV ads and “grifty” fundraising texts.“This is about trying a new type of campaign,” Abughazaleh said in an interview with the Guardian shortly after launching her campaign, with a video that asked: “What if we didn’t suck?”Abughazaleh’s campaign arrives at a moment when Democrats are furious with their party’s leadership and demanding change to a political status quo long dominated by septuagenarians and octogenarians. Despite a string of recent electoral gains, polls show the party is demoralized: their popularity is at an all-time low and, according to one survey, the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters say elderly leaders should pass the torch to the next generation of leaders. The party is also desperate to expand their presence – and influence – on social media where their carefully crafted messaging often falls flat.Her pitch seems to have struck a chord. In the week after Abughazaleh launched her campaign, she said it had raised more than $300,000 and received more than 1,000 volunteer sign-ups.“I am sick of waiting around for someone to do something,” she said, speaking via videoconference from her apartment in Chicago, where she has a set-up for recordings and interviews. “There is no mythical, perfect candidate that’s coming out of the woodwork to save us.”After Democrats’ devastating 2024 defeat, Abughazaleh has criticized what she describes as the party’s lack of a post-Trump vision and its attachment to political norms and bipartisanship that Republicans have long abandoned.“This is [the result of] just continually not listening to voters, not considering any other solutions, even if they might be different,” she said. “There’s a lot of talk about being a big tent, but it feels like they’re only extending that tent to the right, and they’re kicking the rest of us out.”Abughazaleh, who boasts more than 200,000 followers on TikTok, flatly rejects the view that Democrats’ losses are the result of the party becoming “too woke” or too supportive of trans rights and pro-Palestinian protests. A Texas native and the daughter of a Palestinian immigrant, Abughazaleh displays her keffiyeh – the black and white checkered headscarf that has long symbolized Palestinian rights – prominently in her campaign video. Last year, she was one of the more than 200 content creators credentialed to cover the Democratic national convention in Chicago, where pleas to include a Palestinian American speaker were dismissed.“The Democratic party ignored us during 2024,” she said. “I kept saying, like, talk to one Arab person to just show, like, some empathy on the issue of Gaza, which now we know impacted a lot of voters staying home.”Having worked as an extremism researcher at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, she warns that authoritarian regimes often begin their power grab by cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights and implored Democrats not to be complicit in the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people.“Democrats deciding that trans people are the reason they lost the election in 2024 – it’s ridiculous. It’s offensive, and frankly, they are contributing to Trump’s authoritarianism,” she said in a recent CNN interview that her campaign clipped and promoted. “A far bigger issue is that we aren’t giving people something to vote for.”Illinois’s ninth district, anchored in Chicago’s North Side and stretching west, is one of the most reliably blue congressional districts in the state and has been represented by Jan Schakowsky since 1999 – the year Abughazaleh was born. In the interview, Abughazaleh said her candidacy was not intended as a “referendum” on the 80-year-old Democrat who has not said yet whether she intends to seek re-election. Nor is it a leftwing challenge, she said, acknowledging Schakowsky’s progressive record.“This is about: we need to try something different,” Abughazaleh said, arguing that the party has lost touch with many of its voters, especially young people. “A lot of these people in Congress never had to go through school shooting drills at school. I did. A lot of them haven’t had to worry about insurance ever in their lives. I don’t have insurance. I use GoodRx as my insurance. These are things that are very common for young people and just not for most people in Congress.”In a statement, Schakowsky said she planned to make a decision on her re-election “soon” but she welcomed “new faces getting involved as we stand up against the Trump administration”.Abughazaleh’s candidacy has also piqued interest on the right. “Now, even longtime liberals are facing the wrath of their own movement,” Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign said in a statement that claimed Democrats were so astray that they were now “eating their own”.Asked by a reporter whether Abughazaleh’s entry into the race was a worrying sign for Democratic incumbents, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said at the time that he was unaware of her campaign and hailed Schakowsky as a “longstanding, stalwart progressive member”.But he also acknowledged that Democrats were confronting “a lot of energy, a lot of angst, a lot of anxiety” in response to Trump’s return to power.Sharing a clip of Jeffries’ response, Abughazaleh replied: “Nice to meet you, Hakeem! It’s time to get familiar.”Despite her desire to campaign differently, there are some old rules of politics that may be harder to break.Abughazaleh is a recent Chicago transplant who doesn’t technically live in the district, at least not yet, a status that has generated accusations of “carpetbagging”. Addressing the criticism in a YouTube video, Abughazaleh said she and her partner moved to the city abruptly last year and took the first furnished apartment they could find – a place “literally one bus stop” away from the ninth district. The move had nothing to do with her desire to run for office, a decision she said she made after Kamala Harris lost the election and she felt the urge to get involved. Abughazaleh said she intends to move in-district, but cited the cost of breaking her lease as part of the reason she hasn’t done so yet.Supporters also raised concerns about her pledge not to spend money on TV ads, which some argued would put her at a disadvantage in a competitive contest. She said her campaign would re-evaluate the policy.Before entering politics, Abughazaleh spent years monitoring Fox News and other rightwing media at Media Matters. She was laid off last year after legal battles with Musk sapped the progressive group of its resources, in a move that the Freedom of the Press Foundation warned at the time was a worrying example of “billionaires and pandering politicians abusing the legal system to retaliate against their critics”. Musk celebrated her job loss on X: “Karma is real.”In that sense, Abughazaleh can empathize with the tens of thousands of government employees who have lost their jobs as part of Musk’s chainsaw-approach to downsizing the federal workforce.“People are pissed off for good reason. They’re losing their jobs, they’re losing their healthcare, they’re losing the people in their community who are being deported without any due process. Of course, they’re mad, and we should be matching that with anger.”After watching Fox News nearly every day for four years, Abughazaleh said there were some lessons Democrats could learn from the right.“Throwing some metaphorical punches, not reacting to everything,” she said. “What if we didn’t just let them set the agenda all the time? What if we came out strong?” More

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      Donald Trump threatens additional 50% tariffs on China over retaliatory levies – US politics live

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      Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the top news lines over the next few hours.We start with news that Donald Trump has threatened to impose an additional 50% tariff on imports from China on Wednesday unless the country rescinds its retaliatory tariffs on the United States by Tuesday.The news comes on the third day of catastrophic market falls around the globe since Trump announced his trade war last Wednesday with tariffs on the US’s trading partners.As part of that move the White House announced it would impose a 34% tariff on Chinese imports. In response, Beijing announced a 34% tariff on US imports.In a statement on Truth Social on Monday morning, the US president said that China enacted the retaliatory tariffs despite his “warning that any country that Retaliates against the U.S. by issuing additional Tariffs” would be “immediately met with new and substantially higher Tariffs, over and above those initially set”.“If China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th,” Trump wrote.“Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!” he added. “Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately.”China’s US embassy said on Monday it would not cave to pressure or threats over the additional 50% tariffs. “We have stressed more than once that pressuring or threatening China is not a right way to engage with us. China will firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests,” Liu Pengyu, an embassy spokesperson, told Agence France-Presse.Read the full report here:In other news:

      Donald Trump took questions from reporters during an Oval Office meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu today. In it, Trump indicated that he would attend “direct talks” with Iran on Saturday, that it “would be a good thing” to have the United States “controlling and owning the Gaza Strip”, and that European Union “rules and regulations” are “non-monetary barriers” on trade.

      Shortly after Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu, Iranian officials and state media disputed Trump’s claims that the US is scheduled to participate in “direct talks” with the country this weekend, indicating that the country understood it was entering indirect talks moderated by Omani officials.

      In a 5-4 decision, the US supreme court will allow the Trump administration to continue deporting Venezuelan migrants under an 18th-century wartime law.

      After a phone call with Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba this morning, Trump directed US treasury secretary Scott Bessent to open negotiations with the Japanese government.

      During speeches this afternoon, Democratic leadership in the House and Senate warned that Trump’s tariffs are teeing up “a nationwide recession”.

      After US stock markets opened this morning on bear market territory, the Cboe Volatility Index, also known as Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, reached “crisis levels” as it skyrocketed to its highest level since the Covid-19 pandemic.

      Canada has requested World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute consultations with the US over Trump’s decision to impose a 25% duty on cars and car parts from Canada, the WTO said today.

      Mexico is seeking to avoid retaliatory tariffs against the US but is not ruling them out, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said.

      The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is ending a half century of partnerships with the federal government to serve refugees and children, saying the “heartbreaking” decision follows the Trump administration’s abrupt halt to funding for refugee resettlement.

      Health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr will direct the CDC to stop recommending states add fluoride to their drinking water.

      In a social media post, Trump backed the Senate’s budget proposal – lending his support to the plan as House speaker Mike Johnson tees up a vote on the budget later this week despite still not having enough votes to guarantee its passage.
      President Donald Trump’s administration is considering drone strikes on drug cartels in Mexico to combat trafficking across the southern border, NBC News reported on Tuesday.It cited six current and former US military, law enforcement and intelligence officials with knowledge of the matter.The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, met with Donald Trump on Monday for the second time since the US president’s return to office, marking the first effort by a foreign leader to negotiate a deal after Trump announced sweeping tariffs last week.Speaking alongside Trump in the Oval Office, Netanyahu said Israel would eliminate the trade deficit with the US. “We intend to do it very quickly,” he told reporters, adding that he believed Israel could “serve as a model for many countries who ought to do the same”.Trump said the pair had a “great discussion” but did not indicate whether he would reduce the tariffs on Israeli goods. “Maybe not,” he said. “Don’t forget we help Israel a lot. We give Israel $4bn a year. That’s a lot.”Trump denied reports that he was considering a 90-day pause on his tariff rollout. “We’re not looking at that,” he told reporters. “We have many, many countries that are coming to negotiate deals with us, and there are going to be fair deals.”European stock markets have risen on Tuesday in early signs of a rebound from the punishing global sell-off triggered by US trade tariffs.Stock markets in the UK and across the EU were in positive territory in early trading on Tuesday, as some investor optimism returned after heavy falls as a result of Donald Trump’s “liberation day’” tariff announcements last Wednesday.London’s FTSE 100 index of blue-chip stocks was 106 points higher, up 1.4%, at 7811. In Frankfurt, Germany’s Dax was 1.5% higher while France’s CAC jumped by 1.4%. The pan-European Stoxx 600 index rose 1.4%.On the FTSE, theindustrial companies Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems were the biggest risers, up 5% and 4% respectively, followed by miners, oil companies and banks.Investors are hoping that the market could stabilise as reports have emerged that the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, will lead trade talks with Tokyo, in a sign that the Trump administration will be open to negotiate on tariffs.The news drove a modest rebound in Asian markets overnight, led by Japanese stocks. Tokyo’s Nikkei index recovered by 5.6%, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose by 1.6% after its steepest drop since the 1997 Asian financial crisis on Monday.Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the top news lines over the next few hours.We start with news that Donald Trump has threatened to impose an additional 50% tariff on imports from China on Wednesday unless the country rescinds its retaliatory tariffs on the United States by Tuesday.The news comes on the third day of catastrophic market falls around the globe since Trump announced his trade war last Wednesday with tariffs on the US’s trading partners.As part of that move the White House announced it would impose a 34% tariff on Chinese imports. In response, Beijing announced a 34% tariff on US imports.In a statement on Truth Social on Monday morning, the US president said that China enacted the retaliatory tariffs despite his “warning that any country that Retaliates against the U.S. by issuing additional Tariffs” would be “immediately met with new and substantially higher Tariffs, over and above those initially set”.“If China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th,” Trump wrote.“Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!” he added. “Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately.”China’s US embassy said on Monday it would not cave to pressure or threats over the additional 50% tariffs. “We have stressed more than once that pressuring or threatening China is not a right way to engage with us. China will firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests,” Liu Pengyu, an embassy spokesperson, told Agence France-Presse.Read the full report here:In other news:

      Donald Trump took questions from reporters during an Oval Office meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu today. In it, Trump indicated that he would attend “direct talks” with Iran on Saturday, that it “would be a good thing” to have the United States “controlling and owning the Gaza Strip”, and that European Union “rules and regulations” are “non-monetary barriers” on trade.

      Shortly after Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu, Iranian officials and state media disputed Trump’s claims that the US is scheduled to participate in “direct talks” with the country this weekend, indicating that the country understood it was entering indirect talks moderated by Omani officials.

      In a 5-4 decision, the US supreme court will allow the Trump administration to continue deporting Venezuelan migrants under an 18th-century wartime law.

      After a phone call with Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba this morning, Trump directed US treasury secretary Scott Bessent to open negotiations with the Japanese government.

      During speeches this afternoon, Democratic leadership in the House and Senate warned that Trump’s tariffs are teeing up “a nationwide recession”.

      After US stock markets opened this morning on bear market territory, the Cboe Volatility Index, also known as Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, reached “crisis levels” as it skyrocketed to its highest level since the Covid-19 pandemic.

      Canada has requested World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute consultations with the US over Trump’s decision to impose a 25% duty on cars and car parts from Canada, the WTO said today.

      Mexico is seeking to avoid retaliatory tariffs against the US but is not ruling them out, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said.

      The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is ending a half century of partnerships with the federal government to serve refugees and children, saying the “heartbreaking” decision follows the Trump administration’s abrupt halt to funding for refugee resettlement.

      Health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr will direct the CDC to stop recommending states add fluoride to their drinking water.

      In a social media post, Trump backed the Senate’s budget proposal – lending his support to the plan as House speaker Mike Johnson tees up a vote on the budget later this week despite still not having enough votes to guarantee its passage. More

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      in US Politics

      Abigail Disney: ‘Every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath’

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      My conversation with Abigail Disney opens with the kind of bog-standard line that starts most chats. But because she is a left-leaning American, with a record of righteous criticism of the man now once again in charge of her country, I suspect it might invite a very long answer indeed.Still, out it comes: “How are you?”“It’s a good question,” she says, “because we’re all struggling with it.”A deep breath. “I spend a lot of time trying to think of reasons to be optimistic, because I don’t know how to function without that. And I want to find the energy and the grit for a really long fight. This isn’t just four years … you know, there’s a whole civilisation-level reset to be done. I mean, I heard the other night when Trump spoke, he mentioned that we would get Greenland one way or another. And then there was laughter. Laughter! I just thought, ‘Oh, we have sunk so low.’”The film-maker (and the grand-niece of Walt Disney) is speaking to me on video call from her home in Manhattan. She talks with a mixture of speed, eloquence and certainty – partly because her view of Donald Trump and his allies is all about something with which she is well acquainted: wealth, and what it does to people.“Trump is an inheritor,” Disney tells me. “He never acknowledges it, but he wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things he did without an inheritance. He absorbed the lessons of inheriting money almost unfiltered: ‘You have this money because you’re special.’ If you read about his childhood, it’s like the textbook worst way to raise a person – you know, he was violent, he was a bully and he was rewarded for that, even as a very small child. And the more money he had, the more he exhibited these bad qualities, and the more people told him he was wonderful.”I then mention something she well knows: that Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk is also from a very wealthy background, having started his first business ventures with money provided by his father, and then becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This, she tells me, partly explains the frazzled morals of someone who has just imposed all those cuts to overseas aid, with apparently no regard for the consequences.Among the schemes Musk has frozen, Disney points out, was the Pepfar programme, AKA the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which is estimated to have saved 25 million lives by supplying medicine to people with HIV and Aids around the world. “There are people suffering and dying today because of that cut,” she says. “There are children who have HIV who shouldn’t because of Elon Musk. Now. As we sit here and talk.”She exhales. “That natural human proclivity to say, ‘Hmm, that doesn’t feel right’ – he doesn’t have it. Trump doesn’t have it. They’re spending no time in shame, and shame is a righteous emotion. It’s not an emotion you want to live in, but it’s an emotion you want as a motivator sometimes. And where is it? Where’s the shame?”View image in fullscreenWhat makes Abigail Disney fascinating is that she is also an inheritor. To quote from a speech she recently made – at the Vatican, where she took part in an event focused on making wealthy people around the world pay more tax, and the idea that large concentrations of wealth now threaten democracies – she acknowledges that she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”Now a 65-year-old mother of four, she is the granddaughter of Roy O Disney, who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney company in 1923. In her early 20s, she resolved to start giving away large chunks of her inheritance. By 2021, she had donated approximately $70m to causes centred on women living with HIV, women in prison and women affected by domestic violence. She has long been a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation focused on changing the system so that people as rich as its members – and those who have even more money – pay more of their income in tax.“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath,” she says. “Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of. And so by just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire. It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”She has also campaigned – successfully – to improve wages and conditions for workers in the theme parks that bear her family name (she still owns shares in Disney, though not, she says, enough to give her substantial clout). As an active Democrat, she was among the big political donors who, in the summer of 2024, said they would withhold money from the party until Joe Biden stepped down as its candidate in the presidential election.View image in fullscreenBut aside from all that work and her advocacy on wealth and tax, Disney is chiefly known as a film producer and director, some of whose work has presciently looked ahead to the polarised, angry country the US seems to have become.In 2015, for example, she made The Armor of Light, an acclaimed and very sobering documentary about Rob Schenck, an evangelical pastor based in Washington DC who was long associated with the American hard right, with views on abortion to match. The film portrays him trying to find the courage to speak out about the scourge of American gun violence and pull his followers out of their love affair with firearms; after it was released, he and Disney began to regularly make their case to gatherings of rightwing Christians.But as Trump began his march towards the White House, they started to get a sharp sense of what his politics were going to do to American society. “When I first started asking about Trump, the people we met were like, ‘Are you kidding? No way – he’s a joker, he’s nothing.’ And then, halfway through the summer of 2016, it was like the iron curtain came down, and we stopped getting invitations. And when Trump was elected, we never got another request to speak.”For Schenck, things were about to get very ugly indeed. Over decades, he had been involved in the campaign to nullify Roe v Wade, the US supreme court judgment that established women’s constitutional right to abortion – which, in 2022, was overturned. But three years before that watershed decision, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times announcing that he had changed his mind. At that point, Disney tells me, former allies who were now staunch Trump supporters turned on him.“Death threats and all kinds of things came in,” she says. “He was told he was going to hell by people he had been friends with for 40 years. It’s horrible what he’s been through.”That kind of belligerent nastiness is arguably the defining feature of the mindset of the president and his followers, but Disney is adamant that the roots of his politics lie in wealth and privilege, and how Americans view those things. As she sees it, Trump and Trumpism are not some sudden bolt from the blue: his rise to power, she says, highlights a cultural shift that began in the 1980s, when the US really started to venerate the wealthy.“Our magazine covers did not used to be littered with CEOs,” she says. “They used to have pictures of Martin Luther King on them, or a war hero, or the woman who founded the Girl Scouts. Just look at the magazine covers and you’ll see the way this country has lost its way.”Soon enough, along came reality TV, the frenzied worship of a new kind of celebrity, and social media. Trump, clearly, has skilfully used them all. “We all laughed and said he was stupid, but obviously he’s not,” she says. “In the 19th century he would have sold a lot of snake oil. He came along right at the correct moment. And he played his role brilliantly. You’ve got to give it to him.”View image in fullscreenOne question hangs over the whole of our conversation: what is to be done?For now, Disney tells me, pursuing political activism via film-making probably isn’t an option. She is understandably worried about what Trump and Musk might have planned for such outlets as the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which might once have played a key role in holding them to account. The fact that the TV and movie industries are in crisis – thanks to recent writers’ strikes, and the impossible economics of streaming – makes things even more difficult. “I’m thinking of maybe pivoting to short videos – just talking at the camera, and doing that low-maintenance kind of thing,” she says. “I feel like I’m missing an opportunity if I don’t go on social media and try to be present as a public voice.”As the Trump revolution gathers pace, I tell her, I often wonder when massed opposition will materialise. Put another way, why aren’t millions of people already in the streets?She sighs. “We could all show up on the streets. But what would be the uniting message? The chaos is deliberate: it’s meant to give us too much to handle. Do we go out there about the environment? Do we go out there about DEI [diversity, equality and inclusion policies]? Do we go out there about gay rights, about women’s rights?“You know, the difficulty of being progressive is that it’s difficult to unite everybody around a single issue. So most of the progressives I know are trying to figure that out. And even if we did go out [on the streets], what is our leverage? We have none.”What does she mean by leverage?“Well, we [Democrats] have a minority in the House and the Senate. We have a cabinet that is so radical, and they are lining the government with people who are beyond radical and there is no place where we can exercise visible dissent … We’re being shut out. And the way of communicating has completely changed. An op-ed in the New York Times isn’t going to change things.”View image in fullscreenDisney is at pains to talk about the necessity of slow and arduous work: building opposition from the grassroots up – which will be helped, she says, by the fact that Trump and his cronies will sooner or later hit no end of problems.“I really don’t think it will take very much time for a lot of the people who voted for him to regret it, especially on the economy,” she says. “We’re going to have so much inflation: the tariffs are terrible. I think that there’s going to be some turning, and in the meantime we have to really work on building institutions. Black associations, neighbourhood associations, PTAs – we need to do the work of rebuilding those spaces. We need the basis of a really vibrant progressive society. We let it die.”When I mention the progressive flag-bearers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have recently been organising Fight Oligarchy events across the US, Disney speaks with an urgency that sounds almost optimistic.“We need Bernie barnstorming,” she says. “We need AOC barnstorming. We need, you know, the people we have that are greeted as authentic in the real world, not focus groups, to go out and be authentic with their passion and their smarts about where to go from here.”She mentions a handful of impressive young Democratic politicians such as Maxwell Frost, the 28-year-old congressman from Florida who had a key role in the pro-gun-control movement March for Our Lives. “There’s a bunch of people,” she says. “And what we need to do is put together a coordinated campaign. But you’ve got to build the infrastructure to do it.”We end as we began, with Donald Trump, and how awful he has made so many Americans feel. “He has a critical mass of 35% to 40% of the American public – which is far too many people – who are completely on board with the cruelty and the derision and the trolling,” Disney says. “But that leaves everybody who’s either too tired, or too alienated or estranged from the process.”She suddenly brightens. “They’re ours,” she says. “But we have to do the work.” More

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      in US Politics

      Senior Trump officials give conflicting lines on tariffs after markets turmoil

      by

      Senior officials within Donald Trump’s administration gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs that have caused a meltdown in stock markets, prompted warnings of a world recession and provoked rare expressions of dissent from within his Republican party.Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talk shows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariff on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. If the intention was to calm nerves with a clear statement of intent, then it backfired as top officials gave starkly contrasting signals.Howard Lutnick, the billionaire commerce secretary, struck an aggressive note on CBS News’s Face the Nation in which he portrayed the tariffs as here to stay. Asked whether there was a chance that tariffs would be postponed to allow countries to negotiate a deal with Washington, he replied: “There is no postponing – they are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks, that is sort of obvious.”Lutnick added that Trump intended to “reset global trade”.“The president has made it crystal, crystal clear,” he said.However, two other cabinet members gave the opposite take, suggesting that negotiations with individual countries were very much on the cards. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told Meet the Press on NBC News that Trump had “created maximum leverage for himself, and more than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs, stopping currency manipulation”.The agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, echoed Bessent by flagging up possible talks. “We’ve got 50 countries that are burning the phone lines into the White House,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.The scale of Trump’s tariffs have sent shockwaves around the world, catching US investors as well as top Republican politicians by surprise. In just two days last week, more than $6tn was wiped off Wall Street’s market value.Trump told US consumers in a post on his Truth Social network to “hang tough, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic”. Yet as he spent the weekend golfing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, his unprecedented tax increase goaded senior Republicans to speak out, in a vanishingly rare display of criticism of their leader.Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, denounced the tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax hike in US history”. Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, said: “Anyone who says there may be a little bit of pain before we get things right needs to talk to farmers who are one crop away from bankruptcy.”Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, warned of a “bloodbath” for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections should the tariffs force the US into recession.Democrats are detecting opportunity in such unusual challenges to Trump from within his own party. Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California, floated on Meet the Press what sounded like a draft campaign strategy for the midterms.“If we head into a recession, it will be the Trump recession,” he said. Of Trump, Schiff also said: “He’s wrecking our economy.”Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who ran as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in last November’s defeat to Trump, called the tariffs “really, really terrifying” on State of the Union. He warned that if you punish dependable trading partners like Mexico and Canada, “they don’t come back overnight.”As the tariffs kick in, analysts are increasingly pointing to the chances of a recession, which is normally assessed as being two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. The head of economic research at JP Morgan, Bruce Kasman, has raised the probability of global recession to 60%, a figure that he included in a memo titled There Will Be Blood.Larry Summers, the US treasury secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency, called the tariffs the “biggest self-inflicted wound we’ve put on our economy in history”. Speaking on ABC News’s This Week, he gave his own estimate of the total loss to US consumers at $30tn – equivalent to doubling petrol prices at the pump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s cabinet members attempted to use rhetorical devices as a way of assuaging rattled investors and consumers. Rollins said the markets weren’t crashing – they were “adjusting”.Asked what he would say to Americans close to retirement who had just watched their lifetime savings drop significantly in recent days, Bessent called that a “false narrative”.“Americans who want to retire right now, they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening,” Bessent said.Bessent’s answer was coloured, perhaps, by his own net worth, which has been put at more than $521m.There were moments of the surreal in the exchanges between Trump’s top officials and the political show hosts. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper why 10% tariffs had been placed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which are populated by penguins near Antarctica but no humans, Rollins said: “I mean, come on, whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic – the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”Tapper then pushed back on the agriculture secretary’s justification for the 20% “reciprocal” tariffs that have been imposed on EU goods sold to the US. Rollins said that Honduras bought more pork from the US than the entire European Union.Tapper pointed out that the EU had tight restrictions on hormone use in livestock production. The EU banned use of synthetic hormones in 1981, and blocked imports of animals that had been treated in that way.Rollins then accused the EU of using “fake science” to prohibit US products. “That’s just absolute bull,” she said. “We produce the safest, the most secure, the best food in the world.” More