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      The Cracker Barrel mess exposes the cynicism of the rightwing culture war | Sidney Blumenthal

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      First they came for the Smithsonian. Then they came for Cracker Barrel.Whether it’s the museums or the corporations – or the universities, law firms, federal departments and agencies – the attack lines of the Trump culture war and its culture warriors are the same. The vicious full-scale assault on the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain after the company naively wandered on to the battle zone by altering its “Old Timer” logo exposes the cynicism of the whole operation and its ulterior motive to impose an authoritarian regime over every aspect of American society.On 19 August, Donald Trump launched his purge campaign against the Smithsonian with a post denouncing it as “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE’ …where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”Within 24 hours, the son echoed the father, but with a different target in the crosshairs. The day after Trump denounced the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Jr took umbrage at Cracker Barrel, joining a rightwing social media mob.Cracker Barrel’s sales had gone flat partly due to its creaky image, symbolized by a logo featuring a geezer in overalls seated cross-legged and leaning on a barrel, promoted as the “Uncle Herschel” of the store’s founder. At the company headquarters in Lebanon, Tennessee, the “Uncle Herschel Memorial” features statues of “Uncle Herschel” seated on a bench listening to a Cracker Barrel waitress. Marketing research, however, showed that the rickety ambience was off-putting to a younger suburban clientele. So “Uncle Herschel” was retired, the logo cleaned up with just the brand name front and center, the interiors with dark brown log cabin walls whitewashed and more brightly lit.But this marketing facelift, a common corporate design “refinement”, as it is known, was a new frontier beyond “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE’”. Don Jr retweeted a post by an account called the Woke War Room attacking Julie Felss Masino, the Cracker Barrel CEO: “She scrapped a beloved American aesthetic and replaced it with sterile, soulless branding. She should resign and be replaced with leadership that will restore Cracker Barrel’s tradition.”If Don Jr had ever eaten at a Cracker Barrel, he would have had to leave the confines of Manhattan and Palm Beach. There is not a single Cracker Barrel to be found in any borough of New York City, or on Long Island either. His personal experience with “tradition” is not located in the biscuit mix section of the country store. If Don Jr’s complaint is with “soulless branding”, it does not extend to the sale of the $DJTJR (Donald J Trump Jr) crypto memecoin. But this bit of brazen hypocrisy is lost in the ocean of the Trump family’s grifting.When the right launched its version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, now with the power of the Trump administration behind it, nobody predicted that Cracker Barrel would become collateral damage. The Tennessee-based chain, founded in 1969, trafficked in faux rustic pre-second world war nostalgia, an image from before the existence of supermarkets, shopping malls and the interstate highways where most of the restaurants are located. Cracker Barrel was a little theme park. Customers entered through a retail outlet that resembled a country store. On the restaurant’s walls hung old advertising signs, farm implements and framed antique photos of 19th-century folk with a grim American Gothic look. The menu consisted of “homestyle food”, including “the best classic meatloaf” with mashed potatoes and gravy.But in the 1990s and early 2000s the business suffered protests after the firing of employees suspected of being gay and reached an agreement with the justice department to change its management practices after allegedly segregating Black diners. The clientele that favored the kitsch decor also dwindled. In response, the company shed its old prejudiced practices and recently unveiled its makeover to update its tired image. That provided the pretext for the calculated Maga explosion.Hillsdale College, a rightwing citadel in southern Michigan that has been vehement in ramping up the culture wars, posted on X the plain Cracker Barrel logo on one side of a frame with a statue of George Washington splattered with red paint on the other under the line: “Same energy.” The Hillsdale account added: “Cracker Barrel is a beloved cultural icon, tied to the lifestyle and memories of truth-seeking Americans.”According to this college, a center of conservative thought, the restaurant chain is apparently the cultural equivalent of the Smithsonian, or should be exhibited there, and its customers who have pulled in for the chicken fried steak are “truth-seeking Americans”, presumably as opposed to those who stop for the chicken wings at Chili’s. The culture war doesn’t stop at the logo’s edge.The Woke War Room that aroused Don Jr used the attack line that Cracker Barrel perpetrates a “DEI regime”. The CEO’s picture was placed next to the rainbow logo of the LGBTQ+ Alliance. The post also noted that America First Legal, a far-right group founded by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy involved in Ice raids, the culture war against universities and apparently much else, had filed complaints with the Equal Opportunities Employment Commission and the Tennessee attorney general alleging racial discrimination by Cracker Barrel because of its DEI policy. The Maga mob piled in with misogynistic tweets against the female CEO.A Maga social media influencer, Robby Starbuck, advancing himself within the rightwing constellation as an anti-DEI activist, threatened: “Oh my goodness. When you see what we’ve got on Cracker Barrel … Wow. I don’t think anyone knew it was as bad as the stuff we received. We’re talking total capture by leftism at the exec level. We have photos, videos, etc. Should I put it all in 1 video or release 1 by 1?”In 2022, Starbuck, whose given name is Robert Newsom, was excluded from running in the Republican primary for the Tennessee fifth congressional district by the Tennessee Republican party, which found that he was not “a bona fide Republican”. His exclusion was upheld by the Tennessee supreme court.On 23 August, Fox News featured his video denouncing Cracker Barrel for its involvement in gay pride events – “a microcosm of the parasitic operating procedure of leftwing activists” with a “soulless, godless, hedonistic vision of the future”. This month, he began advising Meta “on efforts to curb what they describe as political bias in its AI tools”, according to the Wall Street Journal. His advisory role comes amid a defamation settlement after a Meta AI chatbot inaccurately said he had been involved in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. He has only been part of social media mobs.Stoking the ferocity of the onslaught against Cracker Barrel, Starbuck spoke with Christopher Rufo, who has positioned himself among the chief culture war activists on the right. He had been the key adviser to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, in his crusades to ban books, attack the Walt Disney Company as “woke” and assail universities.Rufo is a certain kind of zealot who has achieved his greatest influence under Trump, like Miller and Project 2025’s Russell Vought, now the head of the office of management and budget, self-styled ideological commissars with a Bolshevik mentality.In a speech in 2022 at Hillsdale College, which Rufo titled Laying Siege to the Institutions, he boasted of his “very aggressive” campaign against Disney. “You have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good,” he said, in a Leninist spirit, describing a “narrative war” with American corporations and institutions. “We get in there, we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe following year, Rufo spent six weeks in Hungary as a fellow at the Danube Institute, a thinktank closely aligned with the country’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. “My deepest interest,” Rufo wrote, “was to understand how Hungary … is attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media … Hungary’s leaders are serious people combatting the same forces confronted by conservatives in the West.” One lesson Rufo drew from Orbán’s “culture-war strategy” was that there would be, “for the foreseeable future, a large state that has power over family, education, and culture, and conservative political leaders are abdicating their responsibility if they do not employ it to advance conservative aims”.When Trump won the 2024 election, Rufo contributed his battle plan alongside the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. “In the transition period, I laid out a counterrevolution blueprint that outlined my strategy for how the president and the administration could take decisive action in the war against these left-wing ideologies.”He crowed about the accusation of reverse discrimination against virtually every institution public and private – ”anti-white bigotry should face just as severe a sanction as anti-Black bigotry” – and said he sought “to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, Unless we change what we’re doing, we’re not going to be able to meet our budget for the year.”But until Rufo talked to Starbuck about the villainy of Cracker Barrel, he said, he had not paid attention. “At first, I dismissed the story as trivial. I have never set foot in a Cracker Barrel and, as such, have little stake in what is emblazoned above its doorways,” Rufo wrote in City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative thinktank where he is a senior fellow. “The logo change might have caught the public’s initial attention, but the underlying political story had real stakes. If companies that depend on conservatives adopt radical left-wing policies, they must face the consequences.”Rufo decided that Cracker Barrel was a worthy target for the overarching culture war. “Some might dismiss the Cracker Barrel campaign as minor, or even embarrassing … But there is enormous value in making an example of the company and cementing a fear that conservatives can spontaneously lash out at any institution that crosses the line. Today, it’s Cracker Barrel; tomorrow it might be Pepsi, Target, or Procter & Gamble.”Cracker Barrel’s “Old Timer” logo had to be manufactured into a cause célèbre for a larger purpose. “Even if we don’t care about Cracker Barrel in particular,” Rufo wrote, “we should all care about the ideological capture of American institutions and use whatever power we have to reverse it. And for that to occur, the Barrel must be broken.”With that call to arms, Rufo gives the game away. He doesn’t really take the conspiratorial fiction seriously. It is useful only as an instrument for bludgeoning those designated as objective enemies in order to build toward absolute power. In the gradation of his hierarchy of conservative principles, the highest value is cynicism. Rufo’s rhetoric has the characteristic tone of Stalin’s statement on 29 July 1936 declaring his Great Purge: “The inalienable quality of every Bolshevik under present conditions should be the ability to recognize an enemy of the Party no matter how well he may be masked.”On 26 August, Trump entered the fray, saying that Cracker Barrel should “admit a mistake … Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again. Remember, in just a short period of time I made the United States of America the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. One year ago, it was ‘DEAD.’ Good luck!”That evening, Cracker Barrel executives reportedly called the Trump White House to offer unconditional surrender. “They thanked President Trump for weighing in on the issue of their iconic ‘original’ logo,” Taylor Budowich, the cabinet secretary, posted. “They wanted the President to know that they heard him … and would be restoring the ‘Old Timer.’ So smart! Congrats Cracker Barrel and America!” The White House issued an official statement announcing the restoration as if it were a decisive presidential action: “Congratulations Cracker Barrel!” Nobel prize!“Uncle Herschel” was back, the “woke” conspiracy again defeated, another victory in the culture war. Today Cracker Barrel. Tomorrow the Federal Reserve.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist. More

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      ‘It happened so fast’: the shocking reality of indoor heat deaths in Arizona

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      It was the hottest day of the year so far when the central air conditioning started blowing hot air in the mobile home where Richard Chamblee lived in Bullhead City, Arizona, with his wife, children, and half a dozen cats and dogs.It was only mid-June but the heat was insufferable, particularly for Chamblee, who was clinically obese and bed-bound in the living room as the temperature hit 115F (46C) in the desert city – situated 100 miles (160km) south of Las Vegas on the banks of the Colorado River.The family could not afford to immediately replace or repair the AC system, so instead they bought a window unit and installed it next to Chamblee’s bed. They positioned fans, ice packs and cold drinks close by in an effort to keep Chamblee cool and hydrated, checking in on him every couple of hours.But the mobile home is old, open-plan and poorly insulated. Despite their efforts, the temperature hovered close to 100F in the house, according to Chamblee’s son John.Chamblee overheated and struggled to breathe. His core temperature measured 108F when he was rushed to the emergency room, but doctors were unable to cool him down, according to the death report obtained by the Guardian using the Freedom of Information Act (Foia). Chamblee’s heart stopped working.View image in fullscreenHe had died just two days after the AC went out.“It was the end of the day and it was cooling off slightly, so we thought he’d be OK. He thought he would be OK,” said his wife, Sherry Chamblee, who works three jobs including as assistant manager at a local grocery store. “We had no idea the heat could be so dangerous so quickly inside. It just happened so fast.”Chamblee was just 52 years old. He was a devout Baptist, smart and happy-go-lucky, and he loved playing video games.“We did our best to cool him down, but we live a couple of hours from Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth, and my dad couldn’t move,” said John, 21. “My mom lives paycheck to paycheck and if the AC breaks down in the summer and you can’t afford to fix it, you will die here. My dad proves that.”Nationwide, one in five of the lowest-income households have no access to air conditioning, while 30% rely solely on window units, according to exclusive analysis by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada) for the Guardian.As many as 60% of American households live paycheck to paycheck, while one in three report forgoing basic necessities such as food or medicine to pay energy bills and avoid disconnection.Heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the US and globally, killing almost half a million people worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization. The death toll is rising as human-caused climate crisis drives more frequent, more brutal and longer heatwaves.Last month marked 30 years since what was then an unprecedented five-day heatwave in Chicago that killed more than 730 people and sent thousands to hospital. The majority were elderly, Black, isolated, low-income residents either lacking air conditioning or the money to run it.Since then, deadly heat domes have hit every corner of the country, including northern states unaccustomed to extreme heat, such as Oregon and Massachusetts. Yet the US has failed to implement a robust methodology to count and understand the scale of the heat-related illnesses and deaths.View image in fullscreenAs the planet heats up, experts warn that indoor heat deaths among elderly, sick and low-income people could surge amid deepening financial hardship driven by Donald Trump’s energy policies, trade wars and his administration’s dismantling of the social safety net.“The United States is being governed by a regime that depends on denying scientific findings from climate science to economics and medical science to sociology,” said Eric Klinenberg, the author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.“We’re not just failing to protect vulnerable people, we’re actively making life here more precarious. And while some will be able to buy their way out of the problem, most people can’t. This is an existential crisis,” said Klinenberg.Energy poverty in the world’s richest countryOne in three American households experiences energy poverty – the inability to access sufficient amounts of energy due to financial hardship, according to one recent study.And it’s getting worse. The average household electric bill during the summer months, when cooling drives up usage, will reach $784 in 2025 – a 6.2% rise from $737 last year, according to analysis by Neada for the Guardian. This will be the highest recorded in more than a decade, and will place a disproportionate burden on low-income Americans. Families in the south and south-west are disproportionately affected.The Chamblee family experienced severe energy poverty until 2023, when they saved $1,000 to install residential solar panels that qualified for tax credits, and cut the family’s summer electricity bills from around $400 to $60 a month. The federal solar tax credit included in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act ends in December, however, thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act – a decade earlier than planned.Trump’s budget will lead to residential electricity bills in Arizona increasing by $220 on average by 2035, by truncating the development of new, cost-effective solar energy capacity in the sunny state, according to analysis by Energy Innovation. Trump’s signature legislation will also slash access to food stamps and healthcare, relied upon by millions of low-income households, in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.View image in fullscreenNationwide, meanwhile, his unprecedented and chaotic rollback of federal incentives and permits led to the cancellation of $22bn of clean energy projects in the first six months of 2025, more than half in Republican states.Earlier this month, Arizona’s Republican-controlled regulator also voted to begin the process of repealing the state’s renewable standard, which required that at least 15% of utility energy supplies should come from renewable sources by 2025. Consumer and environmental advocates – and the state’s attorney general – warn the move will further drive up energy bills.And in Arizona and across the country, private utilities have submitted proposals for multibillion-dollar rate increases, in order to cover infrastructure upgrades, inflation and new fossil fuel projects – driven, at least partially, by the unchecked expansion of massive datacentres promoted by the Trump administration.“Families are already struggling with high energy bills, and forcing them to cross-subsidize some of the world’s wealthiest corporations violates both fairness and common sense,” said Mark Wolfe, an energy economist and director of Neada.“It will worsen energy poverty, erode public trust, and turn utilities into vehicles for corporate welfare.”Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, dismissed criticism of Trump’s energy policy as “fearmongering”.“The best source of energy in a heat wave is baseload energy from coal and natural gas, which the president has unleashed and made more affordable, not intermittent energy sources like solar,” Rogers said. “By increasing energy production, eliminating burdensome regulations, and streamlining permitting, President Trump is ensuring that US energy meets the energy demands for heat waves, data centers, and grid stability.”Energy … on the credit cardHousehold utility debt is reaching crisis levels, jumping from $17.5bn in January 2023 to $21bn in June 2025 and forecast to climb as high as $25bn by the end of this year. Currently, only 26 states and the District of Columbia have rules restricting some utility shutoffs over the summer, and disconnections could hit 4m by the end of 2025, according to Neada.Amid soaring energy costs, shrinking federal aid, hotter summers and a zip code lottery when it comes to utility disconnection rules, health experts warn that households on fixed incomes and those with medical issues such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity and addictions will be most vulnerable.“These are preventable deaths, and the situation is going to get worse as bills go up and hardship increases,” said Vjollca Berisha, a former senior epidemiologist at the Maricopa county department of public health who tracked energy insecurity and indoor deaths. “It only takes a little push to knock down people with underlying conditions if they don’t have options.”View image in fullscreenIn Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, last year, almost a quarter of the 608 confirmed heat-related fatalities happened inside, with people over 50 accounting for the vast majority of those who died at home.A quarter of the county’s indoor deaths took place in RVs or mobile homes, a popular source of affordable housing, especially for retirees, but which are often poorly insulated and too rundown to qualify for weatherization programs.The vast majority of those indoor heat victims had AC at home, but the unit was broken in 70% of cases – while one in 10 had no electricity to run even a fan, according to Maricopa county’s 2024 report.Patricia Miletich, a 70-year-old woman with memory issues, died in June 2024 at a 55+ RV resort with pickleball courts, a golf course and bistro in the hot and dusty city of El Mirage north-west of Phoenix. According to her autopsy report obtained by the Guardian, a neighbor told death investigators that Miletich had forgotten to pay her bills on multiple occasions, resulting in her electricity being turned off in the past.The power was on when she died, but the AC was not functioning. Like Chamblee’s, it blew hot air from the vents, between 109F and 117F. The resort’s manager confirmed to the Guardian that Miletich’s power had been disconnected several times, but declined to answer further questions about what support the retiree received.“It’s a sad situation that should never have happened, but she wanted to be left alone and the family didn’t know” about her memory decline and electricity shutoffs, said her brother Michael Miletich.In nearby Mohave county, a Guardian analysis of death reports obtained under Foia found that 70% of the 67 confirmed heat-related deaths in 2024 occurred indoors – of which the vast majority lived in RVs or mobile homes.This includes Stephen Patterson in Lake Havasu City, a 69-year-old with multiple health challenges tied to a childhood road traffic accident, chronic pain and alcohol addiction. Patterson relied on his $1,000 monthly social security check – the sole source of income for around 40% of seniors, according to one 2020 study.According to Regina, his sister and main carer, Patterson rationed his AC use because he believed he could cope with the heat but not without alcohol. He also incorrectly blamed the AC for a mold issue.When he died, the temperature inside Stephen’s house was 102F, according to the medical examiner’s report. The daily high in Lake Havasu City was 116F.View image in fullscreen“I begged him to turn on the AC,” said Regina, who is 75 and, like her brother, is also on a fixed social security income. “I would have paid his bill on my credit card, but my brother was a stubborn man. It was like a furnace when I found him.”Regina uses credit cards to pay her electric bill, currently $211 a month, as well as her water, trash, car insurance and cable. The cards charge as much as 35% interest. Around 60% of her monthly income covers the house payment, and the rest goes to service the credit card debt, which currently stands at more than $12,000 – in addition to almost $1,000 owed to the energy company.She diligently documents each month’s payments and remaining credit in an A4 notebook that sits on the coffee table next to the TV remote.View image in fullscreenRegina has been disconnected multiple times over the years, but has received some financial help from the Salvation Army and Goodwill to avoid a shutoff. Yet she was unaware of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (Liheap), the chronically underfunded federal program to help families pay their energy bills, which the Trump administration proposed cutting after firing the entire workforce in April.In Arizona, 24,000 households received Liheap assistance in the 2025 fiscal year. A third of recipients included a household member with a disability or children under six, while 16% included an older adult. Liheap was saved amid bipartisan protests, but its future remains uncertain. Arizona, where heat deaths are known to occur from April to November, currently only has enough funds to help struggling families through the end of September.On his first day back in the White House, Trump declared a national energy emergency, promising to lower prices by boosting fossil fuels and rolling back Joe Biden’s renewable energy ambitions. To Regina Patterson, it all now rings hollow.“The price of everything keeps going up and I get into more debt every month. Trump is evil and only cares about the rich,” she said.“If I were to lose my electric in this heat, I would lose my head.” More

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      How Trump and corporations have hobbled US labor watchdog

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      Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the Biden administration, was one of the first officials to be fired by Donald Trump once he took office in January. She wasn’t the last.Since then, Trump has fired a slew of government officials, including the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chair, Gwynne Wilcox, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, and most recently, he has attempted to fire the Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.Abruzzo served at the agency for nearly 30 years before Trump fired her in January 2025, a move recommended in Project 2025. Now she is warning that the attacks on the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to return workers’ rights to levels unseen since 1935 and empower corporations to run roughshod over the agency.“My fear is that if this continues, where corporations and corporate billionaire donors have an outsized voice and directly influence our democracy, we’re going to find ourselves living in an environment such as what we lived in before 1935 when the National Labor Relations Act was enacted,” said Abruzzo. “Working families will be dealing with lower wages, substandard working conditions, and no real channels for them to fight back.”In May, the supreme court declined to reinstate Wilcox while she challenges Trump’s decision to terminate her without cause. A lower court will now have to rule on the issue, with the supreme court likely to follow on appeal. In the meantime, the agency’s powers have been effectively blocked and, Abruzzo worries, worse may be to come.The move was seen by opponents as a challenge to a landmark 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v United States, that ruled Congress can limit the president’s power to remove officials from independent administrative agencies.Abruzzo worries that Wilcox’s firing could pave the way for the National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935 to federally protect workers’ rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining, to be repealed entirely.“If the supreme court majority eliminates or limits the reach of Humphrey’s Executor and allows the president to fire decision-making officials in the executive branch, including at the NLRB, at his whim, then I anticipate the next step will be figuring out whether or not, if they are found unconstitutional, those provisions should be severed, or the whole [NLRA] act could conceivably be repealed,” Abruzzo said.In the meantime, Abruzzo argues, the NLRB has been rendered toothless.“It’s going to take years to sort out, the agency’s going to be completely ineffective in enforcing the statute, and working families are going to continue to suffer and not be able to get any redress for the violations of their rights. It’s why I think states need to step in and protect their citizenry.”Major corporations are already making ground against the agency after the ruling. On 19 August, the US court of appeals fifth circuit ruled preliminary injunctions halting unfair labor practice cases against Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two other employers can remain in place as the employers’ challenge the constitutionality of the NLRB.The NLRB declined to comment. SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment.“I think we’re going to see a flood of employers forum shopping and flocking into district courts in the fifth circuit area seeking to get preliminary injunctions preventing the NLRB cases that frankly are seeking to hold corporations accountable for their law breaking from moving forward, and that’s going to put an end to the NLRB being able to enforce the act in any meaningful way,” said Abruzzo. “This is all about elevating corporate interests above workers’ rights.”The firings have also left the NLRB without a quorum throughout most of the Trump administration, rendering it unable to issue decisions on cases.In January 2025, after Trump fired Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as chair of the NLRB board. Trump nominated two members to the board. They are awaiting a vote in the Senate for confirmation, while the term of one of two remaining board members, Marvin Kaplan, expired on 27 August.The agency has also proposed a 4.7% budget cut of $14m for fiscal year 2026, after noting the agency expects to lose nearly 10% of its staff to voluntary resignation and early retirements.The acting general counsel of the NLRB argued earlier this month that the board “has largely been unaffected” by the lack of quorum. But since Trump took office, the NLRB has only issued six decisions compared with fiscal year 2024, when the board issued 259 decisions.“Unless an employer is willing to go along with what the board says, the employer can stall a case indefinitely right now,” said Lauren McFerran, who served as chair of the NLRB during the Biden administration and as a board member from December 2014 to December 2019 and again in July 2020 to January 2021.“So whether it’s a [union] election case, whether it’s an unfair labor practice case, the minute the employer says that they’re not willing to go along and that they want to raise an objection to the board, you’re stuck for the foreseeable future at this point,” added McFerran.Abruzzo argues the firing of Wilcox by Trump, if allowed to stand by the courts, would eliminate the independence of the NLRB in favor of corporations. It’s up to the public to push back on these trends of stripping away protections for workers at the behest of wealthy, powerful corporations and billionaires like Musk, she said.“There is strength in numbers, and we all need to remember we matter. We make an impact on each other’s lives each and every day, and we can’t let the voice of corporate billionaires drown out our voices or squelch our actions and our spirit,” said Abruzzo.“We’re not powerless, and we have the power to demand changes to the way we’re governed, to the way we live our lives. That includes taking to the streets, frankly, and protesting over inadequate wages and working conditions and over economic, social and racial injustice. We need to do more in amplifying our voices, to make sure we’re heard and that actions are taken that are going to benefit us, because that’s, in my opinion, how the tactic of divide and conquer is going to be vanquished.” More

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      ‘He’s trying to rig the midterms’: Trump intervenes to protect his allies in Congress

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      They are more than a year away – a lifetime in today’s fast and furious political cycle. But one man is already paying attention, pulling the levers of power and trying to tip the scales of the 2026 midterm elections.Donald Trump has made clear that he is willing to bring the full weight of the White House to bear to prevent his Republican party losing control of the US Congress in the midterm elections next year, orchestrating a more direct and legally dubious intervention than any of his predecessors.The US president’s multipronged approach includes redrawing congressional district maps, seeking to purge voter rolls, taking aim at mail-in voting and voting machines, and ordering the justice department to investigate Democrats’ prime fundraising tool.“Nobody’s ever tried to do this,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “Most American presidents, Democratic or Republican, have basically played by the same rules and been careful of the constitution. But in his business career Trump never cared about whether he was doing something legal or not; he just went to court and same thing here.”Campaigning, not governing, has often been Trump’s comfort zone. He is constitutionally barred from running for president again but already has an eye on the November 2026 elections that will determine control of the House of Representatives and Senate.He senses that law and order, a populist cause long exploited by Republicans, could play to his advantage. Earlier this month Trump deployed the national guard to reduce crime in Washington DC and threatened similar federal interventions in other big cities. Fifty-three per cent of the public approve of how he is handling crime, according to an AP-NORC poll, higher than other issues.Trump told a cabinet meeting this week: “I think crime will be the big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election. I think it’s going to be a big, big subject for the midterms and I think the Republicans are going to do really well.”But this is no ordinary campaign. Trump said at the same marathon meeting: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”Taking a familiar political manoeuvre to new extremes, he has pushed Republican state legislators in Texas to redraw their congressional map because he claims “we are entitled to five more seats”, and he is lobbying other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to take similar steps to pad the margin even more.Other steps involve the direct use of official presidential power in ways that have no modern precedent. He ordered his justice department to investigate ActBlue, an online portal that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in small-dollar donations for Democratic candidates over two decades.The site has been so successful that Republicans launched a similar venture, called WinRed. But Trump did not order a federal investigation into WinRed.Trump’s appointees at the justice department have also demanded voting data from at least 19 states in an apparent attempt to look for ineligible voters. Earlier this year he signed an executive order seeking documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other changes, though much of it has been blocked by courts.Last week the president announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to end mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly one in three Americans, and threatened to do away with voting machines. He claimed that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told him mail-in voting was responsible for his 2020 election loss.There is nothing remarkable about a sitting president campaigning for his party in the midterms and trying to bolster incumbents by steering projects and support to their districts. But Trump’s actions constitute a unique attempt to interfere in a critical election before it is even held, raising alarms about the future of democracy.Allan Lichtman, a distinguished history professor at American University in Washington, said: “We’re seeing a new concerted assault on free and fair elections, harkening back to the discredited efforts of the white supremacists in the Jim Crow south. He’s trying to rig the midterms and then of course beyond that the next presidential election in his political favour.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump previously attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in an insurrection by his supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. On that occasion, he was constrained by elected Republicans such as his then vice-president, Mike Pence, and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. This time he has locked down near-total loyalty from the party and assembled a cabinet that again this week offered an ostentatious display of fealty.His power grab will not go entirely unchallenged. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, signed legislation that will allow voters to decide in November on a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more House seats next year, neutralising Republicans’ gerrymandering in Texas.But Democrats, activists and lawyers will have to find others ways to “fight fire with fire” when it comes to Trump’s more extreme meddling.Lichtman, author of a new book, Conservative at the Core, added: “Republicans have no principles; Democrats have no spine. Democrats need to grow a spine. They need to stop playing not to lose – that’s a sure way to lose. They need to respond to these outrages powerfully and aggressively by whatever means are possible or we’re going to lose our democracy.”Yet while Trump’s gambit is a flex of executive power, it could also be seen as an admission of potential weakness. The incumbent president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections. In 2018, Democrats won enough to take back the House, stymieing Trump’s agenda and leading to his impeachment.Only 37% of voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on Wednesday, while 55% disapprove. House Republicans, who currently have just a three-seat margin, have faced a series of raucous town halls that bode ill for their fortunes.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “President Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to stack the deck if they didn’t think they were going to lose the hand. They are looking at poll numbers and they know midterms are bad to incumbent presidents over the last 60 years and it’s a very slim margin in the House.“In order for Trump to sustain the loyalty of the House – he’s already gotten everything he pretty much wants – he needs them to think he’s on their side so he’s going to go out and be very public about rigging the voting system to keep them in power.”But Schiller added: “Will that be enough to overcome general unhappiness at the moment that the voters seem to have with the economy, inflation, even Trump’s border policies? It’s not enough to keep the Republicans in line. You have to get independent voters to vote for you again and that’s at risk for the Republicans right now.” More

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      Trump’s anti-press tactics are bad enough in the US. Now Reform is importing them to the Midlands | Jon Allsop

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      On the day that he returned to office in January, Donald Trump signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. A few days later, the Associated Press, a leading global news agency that is also a linguistic bible for newsrooms across the US, said that while it would acknowledge Trump’s order, it would mostly continue to use the original name. In response, the White House banned AP journalists from certain media availabilities. Trump accused the agency of failing to follow the law. The AP said the government was trying to dictate what words it can and cannot use.This week, Nottinghamshire’s Reform-led county council said that it would impose a sweeping ban on the Nottingham Post, its affiliated website and BBC-funded reporters who work there. At issue, apparently, was a story that the paper had written about a proposed reorganisation of local government. The leader of the council insisted that he welcomes scrutiny, but has a “duty” to combat “misinformation”. The Post’s editor called the decision “a massive attack on local democracy” – and it’s hard to disagree.The ban has clear echoes of Trump’s tactics, and some critics said as much explicitly. In the US, there is a clear longer-term trend of Republican officials imposing poorly justified restrictions on the press. But one doesn’t need to look as far as that to understand the Nottinghamshire ban. Indeed, Reform has been accused before of shutting out reporters, or otherwise treating them with disrespect: last year, the party reportedly excluded certain adversarial outlets and journalists from its conference; earlier this summer, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage accused local reporters in Scotland of helping to coordinate protests against him. It all seems to add up, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, to a moment in which hard-right politicians, in particular, feel that they don’t need to engage with traditional news outlets to get their message out, and that they won’t suffer electoral consequences for shutting them out. They might even benefit from doing so, turning the media into a foil as part of a broader war against the establishment.And yet, there are also reasons to doubt these conclusions, or at least to texture them. It’s true that Trump, for example, has shut out journalists whose stories displease him. (In addition to the AP imbroglio, his White House recently barred a reporter from the Wall Street Journal from a trip to the UK, after that paper reported unflatteringly on Trump’s alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein.) At the same time, though, Trump will routinely talk to pretty much anyone who will listen, the mainstream media very much included. (Earlier this year, he called the editor of the Atlantic a “sleazebag” – then granted him an interview not long after.) Indeed, Trump has long used media coverage successfully to set the political agenda.In the UK, Farage seems to be using the same playbook. Sure, he has leaned, in particular, on the rightwing press. But such papers aren’t necessarily natural allies for Reform given their deep cultural ties to the Conservatives. And Farage has sucked up oxygen in more hostile quarters, too. This week, just as Nottinghamshire council was banning journalists, Farage was being praised, by Politico, for answering questions about his mass deportation plans with a directness that other parties should seek to emulate.Trump has clearly proven that there aren’t hard electoral consequences for press-bashing. But there are still important differences between UK and US political culture. Trust in the media is at a low ebb here, too. But in the recent past, rightwing political figures who have used Trumpian rhetoric to deflect blame for their own failures on to the media haven’t always been successful. Dominic Cummings goaded the press after his Covid-era drive to Barnard Castle, but could not escape massive public anger. Boris Johnson dodging tough questions – from the Today programme, for example, which his government boycotted – didn’t spare him from the glare of scandal in the long run.This doesn’t guarantee that the leaders of Nottinghamshire council will suffer from banning their local paper. Indeed, it might very well be to Reform’s advantage to let Farage suck up attention nationally while dodging scrutiny for the actions of the party’s councillors across the country; the party surely wants the media talking about immigration, not the reorganisation of local government. And local outlets might seem an easy target, diminished in power and reach in an age of cuts to local news and unchained online discourse.View image in fullscreenAnd yet Reform’s leadership of councils is an important test for the party in a country where voters still, to some extent, value competent governance. “If Reform can’t even face questions from the Nottingham Post,” the Conservative party chair Kevin Hollinrake wondered this week, “what hope is there that they could ever face the serious responsibilities of government?” He’s surely not the only one asking that question. Even in the US, where the culture of political press-bashing is more entrenched, local Republican legislators in some states are cooperating with proposals to steer more resources to their dwindling local news outlets. This isn’t some act of altruism, advocates say, but one born of the realisation that they need voters to know what they’ve been doing when elections roll around.The Reform ban might hold. But at some point, local Reform councillors will want to trumpet an achievement, and when they do, it would not be a massive surprise if they go running to the Nottingham Post. Politicians can, of course, reach voters on social media these days. But established local news brands can still confer prestige. And good publicity is good publicity. For now, Trump hasn’t let up on the AP. But he hasn’t been shy about showcasing its journalism when it suits him. An artwork based on the iconic image of Trump pumping his fist after his attempted assassination last year now adorns a White House wall. It was taken by an AP photographer.

      Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter The Media Today

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      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ audiences face discrimination from advertisers, editors warn

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      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ and other diverse audiences are facing “good old-fashioned discrimination” as advertisers avoid them after political attacks on diversity and inclusion campaigns, editors have said.Senior figures at publications aimed at the gay community and other minority groups said a previous “gold rush” to work with such titles was over.There has been a backlash in the US over corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the past 18 months, which has led to some big names rolling back their plans.Tag Warner, the chief executive of Gay Times, said his publication, which had been growing digitally in the US, had lost 80% of its advertisers in the past year. It has also lost in excess of £5m in expected advertiser revenue.Warner, who has led the outlet since 2019, said his title’s growth had been accompanied by an enthusiasm from brands to embrace LGBTQ+ audiences. He blames an anti-DEI drive in the US for the dramatic shift.“I know that media and marketing is also going through a challenging year anyway, but when we’re thinking about other organisations that don’t talk to diverse themes, they’re not nearly as impacted as we are,” he said. “This is just good old-fashioned discrimination. Because discrimination doesn’t have to make business sense. Discrimination doesn’t have to be logical. Discrimination is discrimination.“We’re really experiencing the impact of what happens when voices that are pressuring organisations to give in to less inclusive perspectives start winning. Then it creates this massive behavioural shift in brands and organisations.”Nafisa Bakkar, the co-founder of Amaliah, a publication aimed at “amplifying the voices of Muslim women”, said there had been a “change in mood” among brands and advertisers. “There was this DNI [diversity and inclusion] gold rush,” she said. “It is, I would say, well and truly over.“We work with a lot of UK advertisers, but I would say that the US has a lot more emphasis on what they would call ‘brand safety’, which I think is a code word for ‘we don’t want to rock the boat’. I would say there is a lot more focus on this element.”Ibrahim Kamara, the founder of the youth platform GUAP, which has a large black and ethnically diverse audience, said he had detected a “relative difference” from 2020 in approaches from brands.He and others cited the economic pressures on advertisers generally in recent years. However, he said the “hype and the PR around wanting to support and connect with diverse audiences” had also subsided.“The thing that most people within these kind of spaces can probably agree on is that the energy and the PR is very different now,” he said. “It was almost a badge of honour to be able to say that you’re supporting certain communities. Now, I’ve seen that lots of the diversity and inclusion people that were hired around that period have probably lost their jobs. It doesn’t have the same PR effect any more.”Warner said the anti-DEI impact pre-dated the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Figures such as the conservative pundit Robby Starbuck have been engaged in a long-running anti-DEI campaign, pressuring firms to drop their diversity efforts. However, Warner said Trump’s arrival “gave everyone, I think, permission to be honest about it”.Not all publications in the sector have been hit in the same way as Gay Times. Companies with business models less reliant on US advertising, as well as some big players with long-established relationships, said they had managed to negotiate the changing political environment.“Brands are nervous, that’s for sure, or careful – or a combination of both,” said Darren Styles, the managing director of Stream Publishing, which publishes Attitude magazine. “They’re aware it can be a lightning rod for a vocal minority. But our experience is that most people are holding their ground, if not doubling down.”Styles also said he was not complacent, however, given the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK and its lack of historical support for the LGBTQ+ community.“I’m not incautious about the future,” he said. “Who knows what next year will bring, because that narrative is not going away. Obviously, there’s the rise of Reform in the polls.“[Farage] is quite clearly not an ally to our community and he’s expressed disdain in the past at the awards we’ve given out to people in the trans community. So it is a worry as political momentum gains around there. But I think broadly, consumers in the UK are a bit more capable of thinking for themselves.”Mark Berryhill, the chief executive of equalpride, which publishes prominent US titles like Out and The Advocate, said some brands and agencies “may have been a little bit more cautious than they have been in the past”. However, he said it had so far meant deals had taken longer to be completed, in a tough economic climate.He said the political headwinds made it more important to highlight that working with such titles was simply a sound business decision. “We’ve tried to do a better job in this political climate of just selling the importance of our buying power,” he said. “Everybody’s cautious and I don’t think it’s just LGBTQ. I think they’re cautious in general right now with their work with minority owned companies.“The one thing that maybe this whole controversy has helped us with a little bit is to really make brands realise it’s a business decision. It’s not just a charity or something you should do because you feel guilty.“You should do it because it’s the right thing to support LGBTQ journalism. We’re small. We need to get the word out. We have important stories to tell. But it’s also a good business decision. The more we show that side, certain brands will come along.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: Backlash in Chicago as mayor defies president’s immigration crackdown

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      Resistance is growing to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, with the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, signing an executive order to counter the president’s move.The order prevents the Chicago police department from collaborating with federal authorities on patrols, immigration enforcement, or conducting traffic stops and checkpoints. It also restricts officers from wearing face coverings to hide their identities.Johnson has accused the president of “behaving outside the bounds of the constitution” and of being “reckless and out of control”, while the White House insists the potential flood of federal agents is about “cracking down on crime”.“If these Democrats focused on fixing crime in their own cities instead of doing publicity stunts to criticize the president, their communities would be much safer,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.Here are the key stories.Chicago mayor signs executive order directing city to resist Trump’s immigration raidsThe mayor of Chicago has signed an executive order outlining how the city will attempt to resist Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.Brandon Johnson pushed back on Saturday against what he called the “out-of-control” Trump administration’s plan to deploy large numbers of federal officers into the country’s third-largest city, which could take place within days.The Chicago police department will be barred from helping federal authorities with civil immigration enforcement or any related patrols, traffic stops and checkpoints during the surge, according to the executive order Johnson signed.Read the full storyMore than 500 workers at Voice of America and other broadcasters to be laid offThe agency that oversees Voice of America and other government-funded international broadcasters is eliminating jobs for more than 500 employees, a Trump administration official said. The move could ratchet up a months-long legal challenge over the news outlets’ fate.Kari Lake, the acting CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, announced the latest round of job cuts late on Friday, one day after a federal judge blocked her from removing Michael Abramowitz as VOA director.Read the full storyBernie Sanders demands RFK Jr step down as health secretaryBernie Sanders has joined in on growing public calls for Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to resign after recent chaos across US health agencies.In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Saturday, the Vermont senator accused Kennedy of “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future”, adding: “He must resign.”Read the full storySenior Pentagon official had affair with ‘notorious’ astrologer who stalked him, lawsuit saysA senior Pentagon official in the Trump administration had a months-long extramarital affair with a woman claiming to be “the internet’s most notorious astrologer” – and claims in a defamation lawsuit filed in Florida that she cyberstalked him and his wife after they split up.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

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      Bernie Sanders demands that RFK Jr step down as health secretary

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      Bernie Sanders has joined in on growing public calls for Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to resign, after recent chaos across US health agencies.In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Saturday, the Vermont senator accused Kennedy of “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future”, adding: “He must resign.”“Mr Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr Kennedy have done exactly the opposite,” Sanders wrote.Sanders pointed to the White House’s firing of Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as four other top CDC officials who resigned in protest this week after Monarez “refused to act as a rubber stamp” for Kennedy’s “dangerous policies”.“Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts,” Sanders wrote.“Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are secretary Kennedy’s views? … He has absurdly claimed that ‘there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective’… Who supports secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading ‘experts’ that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.”Sanders went on to add: “The reality is that secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of [the Department of Health and Human Services] he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.”Pointing to what he described as “our broken health care system”, Sanders said that Kennedy’s repeated attacks against science and vaccines will make it more difficult for Americans to obtain lifesaving vaccines.“Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs – if they can manage to get a vaccine at all,” he wrote.The senator warned that Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, which involves a list of recommended vaccines for children to protect them from diseases including measles, chickenpox and polio.“The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm,” Sanders said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn recent days, the Trump administration has faced rare bipartisan pushback following its firing of Monarez, which came amid steep budget cuts to the CDC’s work as well as growing concerns of political interference.Meanwhile, Kennedy has continued to make questionable medical and health claims – and has been lambasted in response by experts and lawmakers alike.Since he assumed leadership over the health department, Kennedy – a longtime anti-vaccine advocate – has fired health agency workers and entertained conspiracy theories. Last week, more than 750 current and former employees at US health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an “existential threat to public health”.The health agency workers went on to accuse the health secretary of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information”.The letter comes after a deadly shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a 30-year-old gunman fired more than 180 rounds into the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shooter had been struggling with mental health issues and was influenced by misinformation that led him to believe the Covid-19 vaccine was making him sick, according to the gunman’s father. More