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      Trump’s tax bill helps the rich, hurts the poor and adds trillions to the deficit | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      The blush is off the rose, or, rather, the orange. The erstwhile “First Buddy” and born-again fiscal hawk Elon Musk recently said he was “disappointed” by Donald Trump’s spendthrift budget currently under debate in the US Senate. Squeaking through the House of Representatives thanks to the capitulation of several Republican deficit hardliners, this “big, beautiful bill” certainly increases the federal debt bigly – by nearly $4tn over the next decade.Equally disappointed are those who have been busy burnishing Trump’s populist veneer. Steve Bannon had repeatedly promised higher taxes for millionaires, but he has confessed he’s “very upset”. That’s because the bill would cut taxes by over $600bn for the top 1% of wage-earners, also known as millionaires. It amounts to the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.Yet this double betrayal will do nothing to impede the sundry Maga apparatchiks’ breathless support for their dear leader. Musk has already tweeted his gratitude to the president for the opportunity to lead Doge (that is, slash funding for cancer research). So this bill has once again proven Republicans’ willingness to relinquish their convictions as long as they can keep their grasp on power. And for Trump, it has reaffirmed that his pledged golden age is really just a windfall for the uber-wealthy like him. Now there can be no mistaking that Republicans’ governing philosophy is neither conservatism nor populism but unabashed hypocrisy.Expecting the self-proclaimed King of Debt to balance the budget – or hoping workers would be protected by the billionaire whose personal motto is “You’re fired” – was always imaginative thinking at best. In his first term, Trump added $8tn to the national deficit. Even excluding Covid relief spending, that’s twice as much debt as Joe Biden racked up during his four years in the White House. Almost $2tn of that tab came from Trump’s vaunted tax cut, which delivered three times more wealth to the top 5% of wage earners than it did to the bottom 60%. Nor did its benefits trickle down, with incomes remaining flat for workers who earn less than $114,000.Trump’s disingenuousness on the deficit continues a hallowed Republican tradition. All four Republican presidents since 1980 have increased the federal debt. By combining reckless militarism with rampant corporatism, George W Bush managed to balloon it by 1,204%. When Bush’s treasury secretary Paul O’Neill expressed concern about that spending, Dick Cheney, the then-vice president, reportedly retorted: “Deficits don’t matter.”Except, of course, when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. During his campaign for the US Senate in 2022, JD Vance derided Biden’s signature $1tn infrastructure package as a “huge mistake” that would waste money on “really crazy stuff”. Like improving almost 200,000 miles of roads and repairing over 11,000 bridges across the country.Apparently less crazy, but certainly more callous, are the vertiginous cuts to the social safety net proposed in Trump’s current budget bill. Its $1tn evisceration of Medicaid and Snap would leave 8 million Americans uninsured and potentially end food assistance for 11 million people, including 4 million children. When the Democratic Representative Ro Khanna introduced an amendment to maintain coverage for the 38 million kids who receive their healthcare through Medicaid, Republicans blocked it from even receiving a vote.But for all the budget’s austerity, it also provides $20bn in tax credits to establish a national school voucher program. And equally outrageous are its provisions that have nothing to do with the pecuniary, from easing regulations on gun silencers to hamstringing the power of courts to enforce injunctions.Perhaps most breathtaking of all, though, is how shamelessly the bill enriches the already mega-rich. In its first year, its tax breaks will grace Americans in the top 0.1% of the income bracket with an additional $400,000, while decreasing the earnings of people in the bottom 25% by $1,000. In other words, those who can least afford it are financing relief for those who least need it.When the 50% of working class Americans who broke for Trump in last year’s election realize they voted for a pay cut, they might begin to feel a bit disillusioned with the crypto trader-in-chief. They might even feel pulled to the authentically populist vision outlined by the progressives Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their nationwide Fighting Oligarchy Tour.In the meantime, it is almost an inevitability that Republican senators will wring their hands before pressing the green button to vote “yea.” Josh Hawley has called the budget bill “morally wrong and politically suicidal”, criticism which Trump has previously mocked as “grandstanding”. The insult contains a typically Trumpian flash of psychological insight, because Hawley and his colleagues will no doubt do exactly what their counterparts in the House have already done – cave.Once Trump has scribbled his oversized signature onto the bill, his vision for the US will have become unmistakable. Try as they might, not even the spinmeisters at Fox News will be able to deny that he runs this country the way he ran his Atlantic City casinos, leading working Americans to financial ruin while he emerges all the richer for it.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a contributor to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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      White House insists Trump tariffs to stay despite court ruling – US politics live

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      Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.We start with news that president Trump’s top economic advisers have said they would not be deterred by a court ruling that declared many of the administration’s tariffs illegal.They cited other legal options the White House could use to pressure China and other countries into trade talks.They also indicated that Trump had no plans to extend a 90-day pause on some of the highest tariffs, making it more likely those duties will take effect in July.“Rest assured, tariffs are not going away,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Fox News Sunday.Asked about the future of the suspended reciprocal tariffs first announced in April, Lutnick added: “I don’t see today that an extension is coming.”It comes as China accused the US of “seriously violating” the fragile US-China detente that has been in place for less than a month since the two countries agreed to pause the trade war that risked upending the global economy.China and the US agreed on 12 May to pause for 90 days the skyrocketing “reciprocal” tariffs that both countries had placed on the others goods in a frenzied trade war that started a few weeks earlier.Tariffs had reached 125% on each side, which officials feared amounted to virtual embargo on trade between the world’s two biggest economies.In other news:

      The US veterans agency has ordered scientists not to publish in journals without clearance. The edict, laid down in emails on Friday by Curt Cashour, the VA’s assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs, and John Bartrum, a senior adviser to VA secretary Doug Collins, came hours after the article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

      Russell Vought, the director of the office of management and budget (OMB), on Sunday cast doubt on the constitutional obligation of the White House to ask Congress to sign off on Donald Trump’s massive cuts to the federal workforce spearheaded by Elon Musk. Vought indicated the White House preferred to rely on “executive tools” for all but a “necessary” fraction of the cuts instead of submitting the whole package of jobs and agency slashing that took place via the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), to the congressional branch for its official approval.

      The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) removed a list of “sanctuary” states, cities and counties from its website following sharp criticism from a sheriffs’ association that said a list of “noncompliant” sheriffs could severely damage the relationship between the Trump administration and law enforcement.

      The White House budget director Russ Vought on Sunday dismissed as “totally ridiculous” fears expressed by voters that cuts to benefits in the huge spending bill passed by the House will lead to premature deaths in America. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, now awaiting debate in the US Senate, will slash two major federal safety net programs, Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps people afford groceries, which will affect millions of people if it becomes law. More

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      Trump news at a glance: veterans affairs department muzzled after critical article

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      Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered VA physicians and scientists not to publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump.Veterans advocates say the decision fits into a pattern of censorship by the Trump administration, and came hours after the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective co-authored by two pulmonologists who work for the VA in Texas.The article warned that cancelled contracts, layoffs and a planned staff reduction of 80,000 employees in the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system jeopardizes the health of a million veterans who served in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.Here are the key stories at a glance:Exclusive: US veterans agency orders scientists not to publish in journals without clearanceThe edict, laid down in emails on Friday by Curt Cashour, the VA’s assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs, and John Bartrum, a senior adviser to VA secretary Doug Collins, came hours after the article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.“We have guidance for this,” wrote Cashour, a former Republican congressional aide and campaign consultant, attaching the journal article. “These people did not follow it.”Read the full storyVought says Trump may not need Congress’s approval to cut federal workforceRussell Vought, the director of the office of management and budget (OMB), on Sunday cast doubt on the constitutional obligation of the White House to ask Congress to sign off on Donald Trump’s massive cuts to the federal workforce spearheaded by Elon Musk.Vought indicated the White House preferred to rely on “executive tools” for all but a “necessary” fraction of the cuts instead of submitting the whole package of jobs and agency slashing that took place via the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), to the congressional branch for its official approval.Read the full storyUS homeland security removes list of ‘sanctuary’ cities after sheriffs’ criticismThe US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) removed a list of “sanctuary” states, cities and counties from its website following sharp criticism from a sheriffs’ association that said a list of “noncompliant” sheriffs could severely damage the relationship between the Trump administration and law enforcement.Read the full storyTeen trans athlete at center of rightwing attacks wins track events in CaliforniaA teenage transgender athlete in California, who has been at the center of widespread political attacks by rightwing pundits and the Trump administration, won in two track events over the weekend. The 16-year-old athlete, AB Hernandez, tied for first place alongside two other athletes in the high jump, and tied for first place in the triple jump.This comes as the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding from California for allowing trans athletes to compete in girls’ sports.Read the full storyUS budget chief calls fears that cuts to benefits will lead to deaths ‘totally ridiculous’The White House budget director Russ Vought on Sunday dismissed as “totally ridiculous” fears expressed by voters that cuts to benefits in the huge spending bill passed by the House will lead to premature deaths in America.Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, now awaiting debate in the US Senate, will slash two major federal safety net programs, Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps people afford groceries, which will affect millions of people if it becomes law.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The is FBI investigating a multiple-injury attack in downtown Boulder, Colorado.

      One person died and 11 other were injured after 80 shots fired at North Carolina house party.

      A British businessman was accused of plotting to smuggle US military technology to China.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on Saturday 31 May. More

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      Exclusive: US veterans agency orders scientists not to publish in journals without clearance

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      Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered that VA physicians and scientists not publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned.The edict, laid down in emails on Friday by Curt Cashour, the VA’s assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs, and John Bartrum, a senior adviser to VA secretary Doug Collins, came hours after the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective co-authored by two pulmonologists who work for the VA in Texas.“We have guidance for this,” wrote Cashour, a former Republican congressional aide and campaign consultant, attaching the journal article. “These people did not follow it.”The article warned that cancelled contracts, layoffs and a planned staff reduction of 80,000 employees in the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system jeopardizes the health of a million veterans seeking help for conditions linked to toxic exposure – ranging from Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who developed cancer after being exposed to smoke from piles of flaming toxic waste.“As pulmonologists in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), we have been seeing increasing numbers of veterans with chronic bronchitis, pulmonary fibrosis, asthma, and other respiratory conditions,” doctors Pavan Ganapathiraju and Rebecca Traylor wrote.The authors, who practice at the VA in Austin, Texas, noted that in 2022 Congress dramatically expanded the number of medical conditions presumed to be linked to military service. “But legislation doesn’t care for patients, people do,” they wrote.The article sparked an immediate rebuke from Trump’s political appointees, according to internal emails obtained by the Guardian. “We have noticed a number of academic articles and press articles recently,” Bartrum wrote, attaching a copy of the journal article. “Please remind the field and academic community that they need to follow the VA policy.”Cashour, the assistant secretary, wrote that approval for publication in national media was delegated to his office. Local and regional directors were to inform Washington “as soon as possible” when situations exist “that have the potential for negative national exposure”.In an email statement, the VA press secretary Peter Kasperowicz said the agency’s policy on publications and public comments “simply requires VA employees to properly coordinate with public affairs staff prior to speaking with the media. Virtually every organization both inside and outside government has similar policies.”The policy “has been in place for several years across both Democrat and Republican administrations”, he said.Ganapathiraju told the Guardian that the article was in full compliance with the VA regulations, which state that employees are encouraged to publish in “peer-reviewed, professional or scholarly journals”. Coordination with public affairs officers is encouraged, but not required, when sharing personal or academic opinions, the rules say.Ganapathiraju said neither he nor his co-author had yet faced punishment. “We have received emails and messages from other VAs across the country (including doctors, department chiefs, chief of medicines, and chief of staff) supporting our article,” he wrote in an email. “No communication from our local VA or from National.”Still, VA workers and veterans advocates say Friday’s warnings fit a pattern of censorship by the Trump administration, which critics say is waging a “war on science”. Since taking office, Trump administration officials have cancelled billions of dollars in grants funding medical research at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Nearly 2,000 leading scientists, including dozens of Nobel Prize winners, signed an open letter released in April saying science was being “decimated” by cuts to research and a growing “climate of fear” that put independent research at risk.In his statement, the VA’s Kasperowicz said it is “absurd” to suggest that enforcing the agency’s media policy is part of a “war on science”.Trump issued an executive order on 23 May titled “Restoring Gold Standard Science”. It accused his predecessor, Joe Biden, of misusing scientific evidence when crafting policies on climate change, public health during the Covid-19 pandemic and other issues. Thousands of academics signed a new open letter that protested the move, arguing it opens the door to political interference.On 28 May, the secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, said he was considering barring government scientists from publishing in top journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, calling these publications “corrupt”.The Department of Veterans Affairs has long been one of the nation’s most important centers of medical research. Funded by Congress with nearly $1bn annually, VA scientists operate at 102 research sites and are engaged in 7,300 ongoing projects, while publishing more than 10,000 papers in scientific journals last year.VA scientists invented the nicotine patch and the pacemaker and developed the CT scan. The agency runs the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which has pioneered mental health treatments that benefit not only veterans but also rape victims and survivors of natural disasters and other violent crimes.Harold Kudler, a psychiatrist and researcher who served as the national mental health policy lead for the VA under the Obama and first Trump administrations, said the rebuke to the pulmonologists’ article was “powerful in its impact and frightening in the threat it represents”.It was “another attack on freedom of speech”, he said. “Veterans will suffer because of it. Plus, all research programs will take note.” More

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      Vought says Trump may not need Congress’s approval to cut federal workforce

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      Russell Vought, the director of the office of management and budget (OMB), on Sunday cast doubt on the constitutional obligation of the White House to ask Congress to sign off on Donald Trump’s massive cuts to the federal workforce spearheaded by Elon Musk.Vought indicated the White House preferred to rely on “executive tools” for all but a “necessary” fraction of the cuts instead of submitting the whole package of jobs and agency slashing that took place via the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), to the congressional branch for its official approval.The White House budget director, in an interview with CNN on Sunday, also defended the widespread future cost-cutting proposed by the US president’s One Big Beautiful Bill act that was passed by the House last week, which covers budget proposals for the next fiscal year starting in October.But, as Dana Bash, CNN’s State of the Union host, pointed out, Doge cut “funding and programs that Congress already passed”. And while those cuts, cited by the departing Musk as being worth $175bn, are tiny compared with the trillion or more he forecast, Vought said OMB was only going to submit about $9.4bn to Congress this week for sign-off. That amount is understood to mostly cover the crushing of the USAID agency and cuts to public broadcasting, which have prompted outrage and lawsuits.Leaders of Congress from both parties have pressed for the Trump administration to send details of all the cuts for its approval. “Will you?” Bash asked Vought.“We might,” Vought said, adding that the rest of the Doge cuts may not need official congressional approval.As one of the architects of Project 2025, the rightwing initiative created to guide the second Trump administration, Vought is on a quest to dismantle the federal workforce and consolidate power for the US president, and to continue the Doge cuts.Vought said that one of the executive tools the administration has is the use of “impoundment”, which involves the White House withholding specific funds allocated by Congress. Since the 1970s, a law has limited the presidency from engaging in impoundment – typically requiring the executive branch to implement what Congress signed into law.Bash said: “I know you don’t believe that that is constitutional, so are you just doing this in order to get the supreme court to rule that unconstitutional?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVought said: “We are not in love with the law.” But he also said, in response to criticism from some on Capitol Hill: “We’re not breaking the law.”Meanwhile, on the Big Beautiful bill, the Congressional budget office (CBO) and many experts say it could swell the US deficit by $3.8tn, and business tycoon Musk said it “undermines the work the Doge team is doing”.Vought disagreed. “I love Elon, [but] this bill doesn’t increase the deficit or hurt the debt,” he said.Vought – and later on Sunday, the House speaker Mike Johnson on NBC – argued that critics’ calculations don’t fully account for extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts and slashing regulation.Vought also chipped in that Trump is “the architect, the visionary, the originator of his own agenda”, rather than the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the administration, Project 2025, although he did not deny that the two have dovetailed. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump and children: protect the innocent from this dark vision of the US soul | Editorial

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      “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children,” Nelson Mandela observed 30 years ago. Though the ugly heart of the Trump administration has hardly been hidden, there is an especially grotesque contrast between its vaunted family values and its treatment of the young.On the campaign trail, Donald Trump declared: “I want a baby boom.” JD Vance, his vice-president, says he wants “more happy children in our country”. Maga pro-natalists are pushing incentives for families to have more children.Yet Bruce Lesley, president of the advocacy organisation First Focus on Children, says that we may never have seen an administration “so laser-focused on targeting the nation’s children for harm”. Its dismantling of the Department of Education is on hold thanks to a judge. But it has already slashed staff at agencies overseeing key services such as child protection and the enforcement of child support payments. Mr Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget sacrifices the interests of babies for those of billionaires, slashing foundational programmes that provide healthcare and food to more than two-fifths of American children.One detail is telling: it would also deny the child tax credit to families with mixed immigration status. Mr Trump’s vision of the nation is the antithesis of Mr Mandela’s inclusivity. Unaccompanied migrant children as young as four are facing immigration hearings without lawyers. That’s unlikely to concern him: as many as 1,360 children separated from their parents at the border in his first term have never been reunited with them.An estimated 5.6 million US-citizen children live with at least one undocumented parent. Almost 4% are at risk of being left with no parent in their home in the event of mass deportation. Mr Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship makes explicit the belief that these children are not truly American either. They are what the historian Prof Mae Ngai has called “alien citizens”, whose standing is deemed suspect – if not denied – due to their race. Young US citizens have been deported alongside parents who say they were given no option to leave their children, one of whom had late-stage cancer. In another case, a two-year-old was sent to foster care when her parents were deported: this time, her mother was reportedly given no option to take her.The immigration crackdown will further encourage employers short of workers to turn to children – often those born to migrants – for badly paid, dirty and dangerous jobs. “Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts?” asked Florida’s governor, Ron deSantis. Child labour laws are already too frequently ignored, yet Republicans have loosened them further in 16 states in the last few years, and sought to do so in many more.Florida’s House of Representatives recently approved legislation allowing children as young as 14 to work overnight without breaks. Yet the state Senate chose not to move the bill – and overall more states strengthened than diluted labour protections last year. For now at least, the administration appears to have reversed course on eliminating the Head Start early education programme. Mr Trump and his allies are exposing their grim vision of a nation in which only some children deserve to be treated with care and basic respect. Others must continue to fight to protect the most vulnerable.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      ‘Insidious fear’ fills universities as Trump escalates conflict during commencement season

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      It is graduation season in the United States and with it comes a tradition of commencement speeches to departing college students, usually from high-profile figures who seek to inspire those leaving academia.But, as with many things under Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, commencement season this year has been far from normal, especially as the US president and his allies have waged conflicts against the nation’s universities.Amid concerns about the Trump administration undermining US residents’ free speech rights, some commencement ceremonies have featured speakers who have warned about the president’s abuses of power, while others have hosted pop culture figures who have delivered more innocuous remarks. Trump himself went off script at the nation’s most famous military academy.The politically charged speeches could hold increased significance this year as university leaders grapple with how to respond to Trump’s efforts to exert more control over federal funding to schools; campus protests and curriculum; and which international students are allowed to study in the United States, according to people who study such addresses.“A lot of folks this spring will turn to these commencement speeches, especially now with the advent of social media, which allows us to distribute the clips much more widely, to see what people are saying in this critical moment, where our democracy is so fragile,” said James Peterson, a Philadelphia columnist and radio show host who has written about commencement addresses.US graduation ceremonies have long provided a forum for speakers to not only deliver a message to students but also to shape public opinion.In 1837, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech at Harvard University titled The American Scholar in which he argued that colleges “can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame”.The US supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr described the speech as the country’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence”.More recently, some of the most famous speeches have included those from then president John F Kennedy in 1963 at American University, David Foster Wallace in 2005 at Kenyon College and Apple founder Steve Jobs the same year at Stanford University.While plenty of commencement speakers have sparked a backlash – after delivering another speech in 1838, Emerson was banned from Harvard for 30 years – the stakes could be higher this year for universities that host speakers who criticize Trump, who has withheld federal funding from universities that didn’t agree to his demands.In recent weeks, the administration halted Harvard’s ability to enroll international students and ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with the school because it “continues to engage in race discrimination” and shows a “disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students”.A Harvard spokesperson said the ban on international students was “unlawful” and “undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission”.“This is not a time when colleges and universities are trying to attract a ton of attention,” said David Murray, the executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association. “Nobody wants to put their head above the fray and give anybody any reason to single them out as the next Harvard.”But some speakers have delivered fiery remarks aimed at Trump. Wake Forest University hosted Scott Pelley, a longtime reporter for the famous CBS show 60 Minutes, amid turmoil at the network. The program’s executive producer resigned because he said he no longer had editorial independence. Trump had filed a lawsuit against CBS’s parent company, Paramount, over an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, wants to sell the company and needs approval from federal regulators. She reportedly wants to settle the case.Pelley did not mention Trump by name but said: “Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes and into our private thoughts.”The speech sparked backlash from rightwing media. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host, said Pelley was a “a whiny liberal and still bitter”.At the University of Minnesota, Tim Walz, the state’s governor and a former vice-presidential candidate, described the president as a “tyrant” and called the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo”.The Department of Homeland Security account on X posted that Walz’s remarks were “absolutely sickening” and that Ice officers were facing a “413% increase in assaults”.The department did not respond to the Guardian’s question about how many assaults have occurred and which time periods they were comparing.Ben Krauss, the CEO of the speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and former chief speechwriter for Walz, said he thinks commencement addresses are important because there are not many opportunities where you have “a captive audience, even if it’s for 10 minutes”.For speakers to “break through to society is probably a tall order, but I think the goal of a good commencement should be just to break through to the people in the room”, said Krauss, who shared that his agency worked on more than a dozen commencements this year but did not disclose which ones.Still, Murray isn’t sure the speeches from Pelley and Walz will have a big impact.“Pelley’s speech made a lot of people mad on the right, and I don’t know how much it did on the left or in the center,” Murray said. “It’s really hard to give a speech that really unites everyone, and giving a speech that divides everyone just seems to make the problems worse.”Trump also took political shots during his address to graduating cadets at the United States military academy at West Point. He said past leaders “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars”.He also spoke about postwar housing developer William Levitt, who married “a trophy wife”.“I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out,” Trump said.“It’s great to hear someone speak truth to power,” Peterson said of Pelley’s address. “It’s also sobering to hear a president be, as I think, in many folks’ perspectives, disrespectful of a longstanding American institution.”Earlier this week, Trump ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with Harvard. On Thursday, the school held its commencement ceremony. Meanwhile, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the administration’s efforts to prevent the school from enrolling international students.Many speakers at the school’s events over the last week addressed Trump’s impact on the school and worldwide.Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, a Chinese graduate who studied international development, said she grew up believing that the “world was becoming a small village” and that she found a global community at Harvard, the Associated Press reported.These days, her worldview has changed.“We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently, whether they are across the ocean or sitting right next to us, are not just wrong – we mistakenly see them as evil,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”Other commencement speakers included actor Elizabeth Banks, who at alma mater University of Pennsylvania argued that the main problem affecting the world was not race, religion, ability or gender but the extreme concentration of money, and encouraged graduates to “wrap it up and keep abortion legal”.At Emory University, the artist Usher argued that a college degree still matters “in a world where credentials can feel overshadowed by clicks and followers and algorithms”.“But it’s not the paper that gives the power – it’s you,” Usher said.Then there was Kermit the Frog at the University of Maryland, the alma mater of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson. The frog, voiced by Matt Vogel, told graduates that life is “like a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing. Keep pretending.”He then closed by asking the crowd to join him in singing his classic tune, Rainbow Connection.“Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,” they sang. “The lovers, the dreamers and me.” More

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      Stakes are high for US democracy as conservative supreme court hears raft of cases

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      A year has proved to be a long time on the scales of US justice.Less than 12 months ago, the US supreme court was in serious disrepute among liberals following a series of ethics scandals and a spate of highly contentious, conservative-leaning rulings. It culminated in a ruling last July vastly expanding a president’s immunity from prosecution, virtually guaranteeing that Donald Trump would escape criminal censure for the 6 January 2021 insurrection and retaining classified documents.So far had the court’s stock with Democrats fallen, that Joe Biden called for radical reforms on how the court was run and a constitutional amendment asserting that no president was above the law or immune for crimes committed in office.Now, with a re-elected and vengeful Trump having run rampant over democratic norms by issuing a fusillade of often illegal and unconstitutional executive orders, the same court – with the same nine justices on the bench – is being cast in the unlikely role of potential saviour of American democracy.Critics who once derided the judicial consequences of the court’s six-three conservative majority hope that the justices will show enough fealty to the US constitution to mitigate the effect of Trump’s all-out assault on a range of rights, from birthright citizenship to basic due process appeals against deportation, and preserve the constitutional republic’s defining contours.“The court is certainly a very important institution at this moment since Congress is completely pliant and not asserting its own prerogatives and the executive branch doesn’t seem to be guided by any internal legal constraint,” said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University and a former high-ranking justice department official in the Biden administration.The court has already adjudicated in several high-profile cases since Trump’s return – notably ruling against the administration in ordering it to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador.But it has ruled in Trump’s favour, at least temporarily, in several others.The stakes are about to be raised further still as a spate of cases arising from rulings against the administration by lower-court judges awaits the supreme court’s final say before its current term ends this month.These include: the rights of lower courts to issue injunctions against Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed in the constitution; an attempt by Tennessee to ban or limit transgender care for minors; a complaint by parents in Maryland against allowing LGBTQ+ books in elementary schools; the need for insurers to cover preventive healthcare costs under the Affordable Care Act; and attempts to cut off public funding for Planned Parenthood.Added to that daunting schedule, the justices can expect additional unaccustomed summer workload in the shape of seemingly unending emergency cases generated by Trump’s no-holds-barred attempt to transform government.Most experts believe the court will ultimately rule against Trump’s attempt to undermine birthright citizenship rights, given that they are so clearly defined in the 14th amendment of the constitution. Yet the devil may be in the detail. Some analysts believe the court has already lent the administration’s case unwarranted credibility by agreeing to consider its challenge against lower courts’ powers to issue nationwide injunctions on the subject. Perhaps tellingly, the court has not called for a supplemental briefing on whether Trump’s 20 January executive order was legal.Hopes that the current court can act as a brake on Trump seem forlorn given its conservative majority and the fact that three of its members – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed to the bench by Trump himself. In addition, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito consistently take hardline positions that seem predisposed to favour Trump.Yet speculation that the chief justice, John Roberts, and Coney Barrett have become disenchanted by the brazenness of Trump’s actions has fueled optimism. Some believe they could vote with the court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – who consistently issue dissenting opinions on rightwing rulings – frequently enough on key occasions to form an effective bulwark.But Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of a book on the court entitled Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, is sceptical.A recent ruling upholding the president’s firing of the head of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, which gave Congress the power to limit a president’s ability to remove officials from independent agencies – shows the conservative justices’ reverting to type, she said.“Some people wondered: ‘Was the court going to have second thoughts about, for example, their immunity decision giving Donald Trump such leading powers, including powers to act outside of the law and above it?’” Litman argued. “I think the Wilcox ruling underscored that the answer is definitively no.”Underpinning the conservative justices’ approach is the unitary executive theory, which posits that the president has sole authority over the government’s executive branch, allowing him to fire members of nominally independent agencies without cause.“They have been pushing this theory for over three decades and now they have a chance to make a pretty muscular version of it the law,” Litman said. “Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett understand that the court can’t let Donald Trump get away with everything, including usurping Congress’s power or obviously depriving individuals of due process. But short of that, I don’t think they are having any kind of second thoughts about their own views of executive power or about the law more generally.”The few cases of the court standing up to Trump, argues Litman, have been “overplayed” and pale in importance compared with other rulings that have emboldened the president, including upholding the stripping of temporary protected status from about 300,000 Venezuelans.Greene defined the court’s approach as “formalist” and ill-suited to counter Trump’s lawbreaking. He contrasted it with the much bolder ethos under Chief Justice Earl Warren’s leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, when the court became renowned for creatively enforcing racial desegregation and civil rights orders in the south.“Trump’s modus operandi is to exploit what he perceives as weaknesses in the system of enforcement and accountability,” Greene said. “If he thinks that courts are not going to be able to step in, he will try to exploit that as much as he can, unless and until he’s stopped by some political actor or an actor with more power.“The Trump administration is exploiting the formality and the lack of creativity of courts in general, but the supreme court in particular.”The court’s writ has already been exposed as limited by Trump’s failure to comply with its order to facilitate the return of Ábrego García to the US.According to Greene, the White House’s failure to police its own actions to ensure they are in line with the law and the constitution already amounts to a constitutional crisis, because the courts lack the time and resources to counter unbridled violations.That puts added onus on the supreme court to fulfill its role as ultimate arbiter, argues Litman.“We should continue to demand that they actually do uphold the law,” she said. “I don’t think we should just give up and give in to their inclination to not enforce the law and allow Donald Trump to get away with legal violations. If they don’t, force them to expend the capital and pay a price in their public approval rating.” More