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      Trump’s student loan changes leave borrowers facing soaring repayments

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      Many of the nearly 43 million Americans who have federal student loan debt are seeing their carefully budgeted monthly payments soar amid Donald Trump’s overhaul of education in the United States.In the last few weeks, the Trump administration closed applications for all income-driven repayment plans (even ones not blocked by courts) and limited those eligible for public service loan forgiveness (PSLF). That program forgives the loans of government and select nonprofit workers after completing 10 years of service and making 10 years of minimum payments.“The student loan system was broken when President Biden was responsible for it. All we’ve seen since President Trump has come in as an effort to provide fewer rights and fewer resources for working people that have student debt, making the cost of living go up,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.“Things are worse now than they’ve ever been, and nothing is on the table that will make life better for people with student loans.”Jordan, a public high-school English teacher in Redding, California, and his wife, who also works in public education, have student loans totaling $200,000. The couple, who recently welcomed a second child, just bought a house to accommodate their growing family. An even higher student loan payment each month wasn’t a consideration when they took out a mortgage, he said.“We’re going from making $600 in payments – that’s what Save (saving on a valuable education) is supposed to do, which we can absorb to an extent. But if we go off of income-based payments, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Jordan, 37, said.“Today I tried to calculate what’s going to happen, and the calculators don’t work on the webpage. I couldn’t even tell you real numbers if I wanted.”With a new mortgage and childcare exceeding $15,000 on a teacher’s salary, Jordan and his family are stretched thin.He said: “It’s been alarming, but I’ve tried to enter into zen mode. I’ll just move my money and I guess wait until they figure out how to garnish my wages, if I even have money. I don’t know. What am I supposed to do?”Aaron, a pharmacist in Ohio, started looking for a second job when Trump got elected in preparation for higher monthly payments.“I’m nervous about it. I basically knew on election night what was going to happen to the Save Plan. It was going to go away. I did a second pharmacist job filling in some [pro re nata] hours,” Aaron, 47, said. “I’m still looking for additional hours to try to pick up.”Aaron took out around $180,000 in loans to cover pharmacy school tuition and living expenses for him and his family. With the Save plan and PSLF, he expected to pay $700 a month and have his loan forgiven after 10 years since he works for the state. Without an income driven repayment plan as an option, he fears a possible monthly payment of $1,800 for the next 30 years on a standard extended repayment plan with no chance of forgiveness.“The more that you go to school, have an advanced degree, you earn more over your lifetime. You pay more in taxes. Not just income taxes, but property taxes, sales taxes, everything else. So it’s actually a pretty good deal to invest in somebody to go to school,” he said. “I don’t see [loan forgiveness] as a handout, which is what people try to say ‘well, you know, I didn’t go to school, so I shouldn’t pay for anything.’ Yeah, but if I told you about all the stuff that I shouldn’t be paying for, you could play that game all day.”Reina Chilton-Mayer is a homemaker and caregiver for her disabled teenage son. Despite her husband having a master’s degree and stable income for many years, the unstable rental market alongside the cost of caretaking has left them with few choices, she said. She and her husband’s combined $140,000 worth of student loans has left them so burdened that they are considering defaulting on their debt for the first time.“I hate defaulting on something. It could have career impacts for my husband,” Chilton-Mayer, 44, said. “If you wanted to change jobs, of course there are going to be financial background checks. So we’re not 100% on whether or not we’re going to do that, but at the end of the day, it just comes down to making ends meet every month.”Ebrahim Ghazali, the chief of pediatrics at a clinic in Springfield, Massachusetts, has just one year left of payments until the rest of his loans would be forgiven under PSLF. The recent changes to federal student loans have paused his payments and left him unsure about the future of his debt.“With these giant student loans, my payments were initially close to $2,000 a month. When I got on the Save plan, it brought it down to between $600 and $700 a month, which I can budget a lot better,” Ghazali, 41, said.But now, with the application websites down, he said he is “unable to progress towards forgiveness and with the application site down. I can’t restart them on a different repayment plan. I’m not even sure if my current employment is going to count towards repayment at this point.”As the potential shuttering of the department of education looms, Pierce noted that “the worst things that could happen are already happening right now, and we don’t need to wait for the education department to shuffle the deck chairs around on the Titanic”.“Borrowers have a right to make payments based on their income,” he said. “They have a right to have their debt canceled that they work in public service, and those rights have been shut down by President Trump.” More

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      Deporting speakers over supposed ‘propaganda’ is a stock authoritarian move | Sarah McLaughlin

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      The dust is starting to settle on the conflicting reports emerging after immigration officers’ arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest leader and green card holder, last weekend – and Americans should be alarmed by the similarities to authoritarian regimes’ speech policing.The White House has confirmed the arrest took place under a law granting the secretary of state unilateral power to act when given “reasonable ground to believe” an immigrant’s “presence or activities in the United States … would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the country.The Trump administration has not been shy in asserting that Khalil’s political expression is at the root of efforts to deport him. The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed Khalil distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda”. A White House officially reportedly added that the “allegation here is not that he was breaking the law”. Their actions are not about conduct, but speech.Trump himself claimed Khalil’s arrest was “the first of many to come” against students engaging in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”.Americans must ask ourselves whether we are comfortable with our government wielding its power to deport speakers for what it claims is pro-terrorist propaganda. If your answer is “yes”, you should know this method is often employed by authoritarian governments with significantly weaker national commitments to free expression than our own.In recent years, India has increasingly canceled or failed to renew the work visas of journalists in the country whose writing has challenged the government, including one whose reporting “crossed the line” and another, married to an Indian citizen, who created a “biased negative perception about India” through her journalism. Officials are also targeting the overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status, available to certain individuals of Indian origin or married to Indian citizens, while it takes aim at those it accuses of “tarnishing the image” of India.These denials serve multiple purposes: they not only diminish government critics’ ability to speak but they also limit the viewpoints that citizens of those countries can access – and warn everyone else to shut up.Similar efforts are under way elsewhere.Russia’s targeting of the press, especially after its invasion of Ukraine, has included the expulsion of foreign journalists including Politico’s Eva Hartog and El Mundo’s Xavier Colas. Hong Kong authorities refused to renew the visa of Rowena He, a scholar and Tiananmen massacre researcher, resulting in her removal from the city and her job at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kuwait revoked citizenship from the blogger and critic Salman al-Khalidi and has since in absentia convicted him for social media posts and extradited him from Iraq. The list goes on.Governments retain significant authority over who can enter and reside within their borders. But that authority should not be used as a weapon to reflect the government’s preferred political opinions or sift out their critics. Unfortunately, in many places, it is, often on the basis of spurious national security-related claims.The question at hand today is not whether Khalil’s views are popular or beloved among American citizens or politicians. That should never be the question we ask in our most challenging questions about our speech rights. What we must ask instead is: should we approve of the use of government power to expel speakers whose political views the government loathes?Because, through its many comments about Khalil’s case, that is the question the Trump administration has undoubtedly posed to us. If constitutionally protected speech “adversarial” to the political positions of the US and allies can make Khalil eligible for deportation, this administration is ultimately threatening the authority to revoke the status of any lawful immigrants whose views it dislikes. You don’t need to hold any sympathy for Khalil’s views to see why this is an immense threat to free expression.Here in the United States, I advocate for the rights of international students originating from authoritarian regimes who study on our nation’s campuses and carry fear that research or political activity challenging their governments will create consequences at home. Now, immigrants legally in the United States on either a green card or a student visa may be forced to make some of the same calculations as those who live or work in authoritarian states abroad – but about our own government.Is it safe for me to speak my mind? Is it worth the risk? Is the government going to target me for my views?America’s immigration holding cells should not become detention centers for speech the government intends to target.

      Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and author of the forthcoming book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech More

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      The threat of Trump is vast. But don’t underestimate incremental change | Michael Brownstein

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      Donald Trump is attempting to dismantle American constitutional democracy before our eyes. For the past six weeks, many of us have been telling ourselves we have to do something about this before it’s too late. And yet many people who feel this way – no matter how outraged they are or how genuinely worried they are about our country’s future – are doing very little but handwringing and doomscrolling.Elected leaders in the Democratic party are mostly failing to provide inspiration for people who are alarmed about the president’s actions. The protest paddles they held up at Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress underscored the fact that they’re flailing more than they’re leading. Meanwhile, for most of us, the chance to vote again is almost two years away.The problem is not that there aren’t meaningful things ordinary people can do. There is strong evidence that protesting, calling our elected representatives and even just talking with people about our political concerns can create change. Fighting back against Trump’s naked power grab requires a whole “ecosystem of resistance”, as Sherrilyn Ifill, a law professor and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, recently put it. Each bit of that ecosystem adds up to more than the sum of its parts.The question isn’t whether there are meaningful steps to take. It’s why we don’t take them more often.The work of making change is difficult. Most of it is boring, unsexy and, at best, modestly incremental from day to day. But if asked to describe a success story of political change – for example, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which is widely credited with paving the way for the 1964 Civil Rights Act – what comes to mind is an image of hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in a triumphant, decisive moment. Images like these can be inspiring, but they can also cloud the imagination. What doesn’t always come to mind are the thousand small steps that led to that moment and carried the work forward the day after.An anti-incrementalism bias keeps many of us from taking action. As the economist Albert Hirschman put it: “It is the poverty of our imagination that paradoxically produces images of ‘total’ change in lieu of more modest expectations.” The thing about modest expectations, though, is that they have a way of being met. Then they can grow a little. Then grow a little more. And before you know it, diseases such as smallpox are eradicated, global poverty has plunged and the average human lifespan has doubled.One reason we resist incrementalism is because we mistakenly think it requires tolerating injustice, such as moderating on an issue like transgender rights in an effort to court swing state voters. But embracing incrementalism doesn’t determine whether you are a moderate, a liberal, a progressive or a radical. Incrementalism is about the means with which we achieve change, not the ends we seek. No matter one’s goals – growing local support for clean energy projects, persuading elected representatives to consider proportional representation or even amending the constitution – change requires small steps, each one pushing a bit further beyond the status quo.Activists, organizers and other social change entrepreneurs are frequently incrementalists, even if they don’t say so. For example, members of the Black Panther party were no milquetoast moderates, yet they were serving breakfast to kids each morning in Oakland starting in 1969. Their work expanded to similar programs across the nation, which eventually inspired the federal school breakfast program, which now feeds millions of kids. Love or hate the Panthers, they showed up day after day, knocking on doors, gathering signatures, planning budgets, making the coffee.The same is true for successful public policy. In most cases, incremental steps – such as ratcheting up social security through successive revisions over decades – are the most efficient path to transformative change. Whatever one’s goals, there’s no avoiding “doing the work”.Another barrier to incrementalism is how easy social media makes it to put off doing the work while simultaneously helping us feel as if we’re actually doing it. In a survey from 2018, the political scientist Eitan Hersh found that one-third of respondents reported spending at least two hours a day reading, discussing and thinking about political news. Yet virtually none of these people spent any time working or volunteering for a political organization. Hersh worries that too many of us, especially on the left, misunderstand what politics is – or, at least, what it’s actually for. As he wrote in a 2020 essay for the Times: “Politics is about getting power to enact an agenda. It’s about working in groups to turn one vote into more than one vote, one voice into more than one voice, by getting others on board with you. If you aren’t doing that, you aren’t doing politics. But hey, congratulations on your interesting hobby.”Other barriers to embracing incremental change run deeper: imagine two city governments, each of which sets a goal for policing reform. Their goals are basically identical, but government A gets much closer than government B to the target, even though neither of them reaches it. In a 2022 paper titled Losing Sight of Piecemeal Progress, the psychologist Ed O’Brien shows that, once a threshold for success is clear, people often lump nearly complete failures together with partial successes as “all the same”. Even though government A made real progress compared with government B, we’re liable to discount its efforts if they don’t result in total success. Worse, O’Brien shows that when we chalk up partial progress as failure, we lose motivation to keep working for change.Some climate activists worry that we’ll apply the same logic to the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5C. Indeed, the climate crisis demonstrates what is perhaps the greatest barrier to incrementalism: if we don’t know about progress, why would we doggedly keep working for it? Per capita, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are currently down to 1920s levels. Annually, our country now emits about what we did in the 1980s. But as Hannah Ritchie discusses in her book Not the End of the World, when asked whether emissions have increased, decreased or stayed the same in the US over the past 15 years, only one out of five people correctly say they’ve decreased. This lack of awareness of partial victories can breed cynicism and despair.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmerican conservatives have often been successful incrementalists, perhaps most notably in their decades-long assault on reproductive rights that culminated in the overturning of Roe v Wade. Even as progressives recoil at this rollback of rights, they should learn from how this political goal was accomplished.Acknowledging partial success isn’t tantamount to complacency. While the United States and other countries have made important progress on the climate crisis, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, paving the way for a tremendous amount of suffering. Yet not acknowledging partial success is a recipe for inaction. It leaves us with the idle hope for a moment of liberation, delivered on the wings of a social change angel who doesn’t exist.What’s giving me hope nowWhat gives me hope is the unoriginal, even banal thought that most people are trying to be decent, most of the time. Of course, that leaves a lot of room for bad things to happen. We can do terrible things to one another under the misapprehension that we’re doing good. We’re biased about how, and to whom, we extend our decency. And the indecent few can manipulate the many to look away while they steal and plunder. But justice wouldn’t be possible if most of us didn’t care about it, however fallibly we pursue it. And most of us do, I think.

      Michael Brownstein is professor and chair of philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center, Cuny. He is the author, along with Alex Madva and Daniel Kelly, of the forthcoming Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change. More

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      Schumer decision to vote for Republican funding bill a ‘huge slap in the face’, says AOC – US politics live

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      The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has warned Congress has a funding shortfall of $2bn for this fiscal year, Axios reported on Friday, citing two people familiar with the matter.The European Union has the resources to respond to president Donald Trump’s threats to levy more tariffs on the European Union, French central bank governor and European Central Bank (ECB) board member François Villeroy de Galhau said on Friday.According to Reuters, he added that he wanted to see the escalations in a possible spiraling trade war cease. Villeroy de Galhau added that Trump’s view of the economy is a “losing” view.The Trump administration has called on the Pentagon to provide military options to ensure the country has full access to the Panama canal, two US officials told Reuters on Thursday.Donald Trump has said repeatedly he wants to “take back” the Panama canal, which is located at the narrowest part of the isthmus between North and South America and is considered one of the world’s most strategically important waterways, but he has not offered specifics about how he would do so, or if military action might be required.One US official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said a document, described as interim national security guidance by the new administration, asked the military to look at options to ensure “unfettered” access to the Panama canal.A second official said the US military had a wide array of potential options to guarantee access, including ensuring a close partnership with Panama’s military.The Pentagon last published a national defense strategy in 2022, laying out the priorities for the military. An interim document sets out broad policy guidance, much like Trump’s executive orders and public remarks, before a more considered policy document like a formal NDS.The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.BMW said it does not expect newly imposed US tariffs to remain in place until the end of the year, adding that if the situation changed, so would its outlook, reports Reuters.BMW forecast a 5-7% earnings margin for its automotive segment in 2025, but that calculation was based on the assumption that the tariffs imposed so far would remain in place until the end of the year, which the carmaker does not expect to be the case, executives Oliver Zipse and Walter Mertl said. “If the situation changes, we will need to adjust the outlook,” chief financial officer Mertl added.This week on the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Heather Boushey, an economist and former adviser to Joe Biden, about what Donald Trump’s long game is with his trade war, and how voters will view his handling of the economy should there be a “Trumpcession”. You can listen to the podcast at the link below:Here’s a little more on the comments to reporters by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. According to a post on X by Kadia Goba, political reporter at Semafor, Ocasio-Cortez said:
      There are members of Congress who have won Trump held districts in some of the most difficult territories in the United States; who walked the plank and took innumerable risks in order to defend the American people … just to see some Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk. I think it is a huge slap in the face, and I think that there’s a wide sense of betrayal.”
      The Senate finds itself on Friday in a familiar position, working to avoid a partial government shutdown with just hours to spare as Democrats confront two painful options: allowing passage of a bill they believe gives president Donald Trump vast discretion on spending decisions or voting no and letting a funding lapse ensue.Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer gave members of his caucus days to vent their frustration about the options before them, but late on Thursday made clear he will not allow a government shutdown. His move gives Democrats room to side with Republicans and allow the continuing resolution, often described as a CR, to come up for a vote as soon as Friday, reports the Associated Press. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that Senator Chuck Schumer’s statement was “a huge slap in the face, and I think that there’s a wide sense of betrayal.”A procedural vote on Friday will provide a first test of whether the package has the 60 votes needed to advance, before final voting likely later in the day. At least eight Democrats will need to join with Republicans to move the funding package forward.“While the CR still is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse,” Schumer said.Senate majority leader John Thune and others used their floor time on Thursday to make the case that any blame for a shutdown would fall squarely on Democrats.Schumer said Trump would seize more power during a shutdown, because it would give the administration the ability to deem whole agencies, programmess and personnel non-essential, furloughing staff with no promise they would ever be rehired.“A shutdown would give Donald Trump the keys to the city, the state and the country,” Schumer said.More on that in a moment, but first, here are some other key developments:

      Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, said that he will vote to allow the deeply partisan Republican spending bill become law because a government shutdown would do more harm.

      Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that Senator Chuck Schumer’s statement was “a huge slap in the face, and I think that there’s a wide sense of betrayal.”

      Stocks plunged again after Trump’s threat to impose a 200% tariff “on all wines, Champagnes, and alcoholic products” from European Union countries if the trading bloc makes good on its threat to retaliate for steel and aluminum tariffs announced by the US president by adding a 50% tariff on American products, including Kentucky bourbon.

      In a letter sent to the president of Columbia University and the co-chairs of its board of trustees on Thursday, the Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce demanded nine specific changes to university policies and structures before negotiations over federal funding would begin.

      Columbia announced the same day it received the letter that it had complied with item one on the list of demands: expelling and suspending pro-Palestinian student protesters who occupied a campus building last year or took part in a Gaza Solidarity encampment.

      Representative Raúl Grijalva died after a long battle with cancer, his office announced on Thursday. His seat will remain vacant until at least September.

      In 1996 a federal judge found the legal provision now being used to target Mahmoud Khalil unconstitutional. She was Donald Trump’s sister.

      The Trump administration has appealed to the supreme court to uphold the president’s executive order curtailing birthright citizenship.

      The US Postal Service will reduce its staff by 10,000 through early retirements, and has signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) to streamline its operations, postmaster general Louis DeJoy announced. More

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      Tesla tells US government Trump trade war could ‘harm’ EV companies

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      Elon Musk’s Tesla has warned that Donald Trump’s trade war could expose the electric carmaker to retaliatory tariffs that would also impact other automotive manufacturers in the US.In an unsigned letter to Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, Tesla said that it “supports fair trade” but that the US administration should ensure that it did not “inadvertently harm US companies”.Tesla said in the letter: “As a US manufacturer and exporter, Tesla encourages the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to consider the downstream impacts of certain proposed actions taken to address unfair trade practices.”The company, led by Musk, a close ally of Trump who is leading efforts to downsize the federal government, said it wanted to avoid a similar impact to previous trade disputes which resulted in increased tariffs on electric vehicles imported into countries targeted by the US.Tesla said: “US exporters are inherently exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to US trade actions. The assessment undertaken by USTR of potential actions to rectify unfair trade should also take into account exports from the United States.“For example, past trade actions by the United States have resulted in immediate reactions by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on electric vehicles imported into those countries.”Trump has imposed significant tariffs that will affect vehicles and parts made around the world.The EU and Canada have announced large-scale retaliations for tariffs on steel and aluminium imports into the US, while the UK has so far held off on announcing any countermeasures.Tesla’s share price has fallen by more than a third over the last month over concerns about a potential buyer backlash against Musk, who has shown support for Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, theatrically brandished a chainsaw at a conservative conference, and accused Keir Starmer and other senior politicians of covering up a scandal over grooming gangs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis week Trump said said he was buying a “brand new Tesla” and blamed “radical left lunatics” for “illegally” boycotting the EV company – a day after Tesla’s worst share price fall in nearly five years.Tesla said: “As USTR continues to evaluate possible trade actions to rectify unfair trade practices, consideration should also be given to the timeline of implementation. US companies will benefit from a phased approach that enables them to prepare accordingly and ensure appropriate supply chain and compliance measures are taken.” More

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      Musk’s entitlement remarks show Trumpworld can’t keep its story straight | Austin Sarat

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      The Trump administration is setting records and shattering norms in many ways, including in its almost daily policy flip-flops and rhetorical missteps. The latest started on Monday, when Elon Musk torched Trumpism by trumpeting the need to make cuts in federal entitlement programs.He did not clearly say whether or how those cuts would affect Medicaid, Medicare and social security benefits. But he was clear that those programs will be on his target list.Entitlements are “the big one to eliminate,” he told Larry Kudlow, an economic adviser during Donald Trump’s first term, on Fox Business Network. “Maybe half a trillion or $600, $700bn a year.”Throughout the 2024 campaign, the president promised not to cut social security and Medicare benefits. Even so, Musk appeared to tee up changes to those programs.He called entitlements “a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters”.“That’s why,” he continued, “Democrats are so upset about this situation. If we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave and they will lose voters.”As the AP notes in its report on the Musk-Kudlow interview: “The allegation echoed the ‘great replacement’ theory which claims that politicians are trying to expand their power by reshaping the country’s racial demographics.” Pinning the blame for entitlement cuts on undocumented immigrants is a Trumpist way of stoking the base, even as Musk lays the groundwork for making the lives of many Maga loyalists more difficult.The red meat Musk tossed to hardcore, anti-immigrant voters will not long be satisfactory if he follows through on cuts to programs on which many of them depend. In addition, Musk’s musings about entitlements will drive home the widening split between its plutocratic and populist wings.Last month, Steve Bannon, representing the populist wing of the Maga movement, gave a taste of what is to come in Trumpland when he warned that Republicans making cuts to Medicaid would affect members of Trump’s fan club.As the New Republic puts it: “On the Thursday episode of War Room, while gushing over massive government spending cuts, Bannon warned that cutting Medicaid specifically would prove unpopular among the working-class members of Trump’s base, who make up some of the 80 million people who get their healthcare through that program.”“Medicaid,” Bannon warned, “you got to be careful, because a lot of Maga’s on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are deeeeeead wrong. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.”And it is not just Medicaid that has strong support. Polls have “consistently shown that the American public strongly supports social security, across party and demographic lines”, per the National Academy of Social Insurance.A 2024 survey found “87 percent of Americans agree that social security should remain a priority for the nation no matter the state of budget deficits, and this support holds strong across party affiliation. Ninety per cent of Democrats, 86% of Republicans, and 88% of independents support keeping social security a priority.”In the wake of the November election, a Pew survey reported: “Republicans and Democrats have long differed over the size and scope of government, and that continued that continued in this election cycle.” But “large majorities of Trump (77%) and Harris supporters (83%) opposed any reductions in the social security program.”The president prepared the way for Musk’s remarks during his recent address to Congress when he delivered a litany of false claims about people receiving social security benefits well beyond anyone’s capacity to live. Musk followed suit with what he said about undocumented immigrants getting federal entitlement benefits.The fact is that if they work, they pay into the social security system, but they are not eligible to receive benefits. As KFF, a health policy research, polling and news organization, explains: “Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in federally funded coverage including Medicaid, Chip, or Medicare.”We got a glimpse of the trouble that Musk caused in Magaworld when, the day after his remarks, the White House tried to clean up the mess. It issued a press release saying: “The Trump administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).”Then, never missing a chance to bash the media, the White House insisted: “Elon Musk didn’t say that, either. The press is lying again.” The press release also insisted that Musk was only talking about plans to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.The Musk-led assault on the federal government may talk a lot about doing so, but that is a cover for a bigger project. As professor Jack Schneider observes: “We all know that there are ways our government could become more efficient or more effective. But this project isn’t really about trimming the fat – it’s about cutting you loose.”The Trump-Musk project is also designed to cripple government agencies, deprive government of the funds it needs to deliver necessary services, and further erode the public’s trust in government.That is why Musk has not been shy about denigrating the entire social security system, calling it a “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all times”. The White House effort to whitewash Musk’s faux pas is another example of the continuing saga of its baffling inability to get its story straight.The president may think that he gets more than he loses from his “billionaire in a china-shop” sidekick. But, in the end, while Trump may survive his association with the Musk, Trumpism may not.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 hundred books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      Creating art under Trump will become harder but it will remain vital | Seph Rodney

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      One of the most pernicious effects of a bully’s intimidation is making victims afraid of being true to themselves, because it’s the essential and authentic parts of them that incite the bully’s contempt.During his first week in office Donald Trump issued a blitzkrieg of executive orders. Among them, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity and Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, among the things these orders direct the administration’s agencies and staff to do are:
      Terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, positions, and programs in the federal government; terminate equity-related grants and contracts; and repeal prior executive orders designed to ensure equal opportunity in the workplace, including a decades-old executive order from the Johnson Administration … ”
      In the art scene these moratoriums had almost immediate consequence. Cheryl Edwards, a visual artist and curator based in Washington DC, had been working on an exhibition titled Before the Americas which was to be mounted at the Art Museum of the Americas, a cultural venue managed by the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization established in 1948 that includes all 35 independent nations of the western hemisphere. In 2021 Edwards was approached by the current museum director, Adriana Ospina, and the previous director, Pablo Zúñiga, to, in her words, curate an exhibition to include African American artists in the DC area. They agreed on a framework engaging the question “Because we are people in a society that existed before slavery, how does that manifest itself in the work of artists in this area and the work of artists in their collection?” She was given a budget of $20,000 (with a $5,000 curator’s fee), the money being allocated by the previous US ambassador to the OAS under Joe Biden, Francisco O Mora. Edwards’s show was scheduled to open on 21 March, but she was informed by Ospina on 6 February that her show was “terminated”. Edwards attests this happened “because it is DEI”.Similarly, Andil Gosine, a Canadian artist and curator, who is also a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University in Toronto, invested several years into an exhibition at the same museum. His show, titled Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, was essentially a collaborative project with 50 artists, writers and technicians exploring the themes he had examined in his book of the same title. It was to include artwork by a dozen artists from across the Americas, many of them LGBTQ+ people of color. He received a phone call from Ospina on 5 February informing him that the show had been canceled, despite none of the funding for it coming from OAS (that came from Canada Council). For him that that was “heartbreaking news”. He says: “This is the most time, money and heart I’ve put into anything. This was going to be the pinnacle of my last 15 years of work in the arts.”View image in fullscreenWith his background in international relations (working at the World Bank after graduate school) Gosine understood that the museum’s response had to do with fear of losing their budget by showcasing queer artists in the wake of yet another executive order, this one promising a process of “Reviewing United States Support to all International Organizations”. He explains: “This is a content question, a gamble on how to deal with a shifting political tide: to conform enough, sacrifice some people, sacrifice your values to survive, and then maybe not get the budget.” According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2023 OAS had a budget of $145.2m, with the US contributing 57% of that. Having the United States rescind their support would clearly lacerate the organization’s operations. Nevertheless, Gosine thinks that their anticipatory acquiescence may be for nought. He asks how an organization that is fundamentally concerned with human rights and social justice can reinvent itself enough to mollify this vengeful and disdainful regime.The cancelation of art exhibitions negatively impacts the lives of curators, but these executive orders have an even more corrosive effect on the lives of artists – particularly those whose immigration status is in flux. Erika Hirugami, a formerly undocumented Mexican-Japanese immigrant, doctoral candidate at UCLA, and Los Angeles-based curator who has been working in the arts for 10 years, told me that the pressures placed on immigrants impel them to erase themselves, anticipating law enforcement officials incarcerating and deporting them. She attests that she knows more than 80 artists who “are terrified because having an exhibition at a museum that says that this artist is undocumented signals a reality that generates a kind of violence”.To better understand this, it helps to think of the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who extensively studied European art museum visitors in the 1960s, concerned with why most art museum visitor profiles seemed to be correlated with a certain socio-economic class. What he found was that given the proliferation of middle-class aesthetics throughout the museum, the majority of working-class people self-selected to not attend, feeling that the museum was not the place for them. He called this de facto rejection of the poor and working class “symbolic violence”, meaning a non-physical violence expressed through the imposition of social norms by a group with greater social power. Worse still, these norms are internalized by all social groups who come to believe that social hierarchy and inequality are natural and inevitable.View image in fullscreenHirugami explains that for artists who are undocumented, this administration has sought to normalize living in fear. Practically this means that some artists now forgo being paid for their work for fear of having their means of remuneration traced. Thus, their labor goes unrecognized and unpaid. To protect themselves some artists, according to Hirugami, go “zero social”, making themselves digitally invisible by taking down their websites and social media pages.Arleene Correa Valencia, a formerly undocumented artist living in Napa, California, understands this dread. “There’s no handbook to how to lose that fear,” she says. Valencia was an enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, and a college student during the previous Trump administration, when she was under almost constant threat of losing her scholarship and means of staying in the country legally. Even now, having achieved permanent resident status, she still worries. “I still feel like I’m very much a target, especially having come to my residency as a Dreamer. There is this feeling that I did it the wrong way.”Less than two months after taking charge of the federal government, Trump and his agents have devised ways to not only erase certain artists and certain types of art; but also to compel these artists to erase themselves, in the name of self-protection. This is exactly the opposite of their most essential work: to engage the public to experience their work and to move them toward transformation. What is a possible solution? Valencia turns toward her art. She says:
      My practice has changed in that now I’m more grounded in knowing that my people have this beautiful language of painting. And with that I also, tattooed my head to recognize, my Indigenous background and my connection to Mexico. This is the time where we have to make our markings known, not just on our bodies, but in our work, marks that are true to ourselves.”
      Indeed, it’s crucial to refuse the option of doing violence to oneself by denying those very aspects of the self targeted in the culture war being waged by this administration. To maintain who you are can be its own kind of victory. More