Donald Trump

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares178 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump says Maduro’s days are numbered but ‘doubts’ US will go to war with Venezuela

      by

      Donald Trump has sent mixed signals about potential US intervention in Venezuela, playing down concerns of imminent war against the South American nation but saying its leader Nicolás Maduro’s days were numbered.The president’s remarks, made during a CBS interview released on Sunday, come as the US amasses military units in the Caribbean and has conducted multiple strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels, killing dozens.Asked during the 60 Minutes program if the US was going to war against Venezuela, Trump said: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.” However, when asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, he replied: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”Maduro, who faces indictment on drug charges in the US, has accused Washington of using drug trafficking as a pretext for “imposing regime change” in Caracas to seize Venezuelan oil.More than 15 US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific have killed at least 65 people in recent weeks, with the latest taking place on Saturday, prompting criticism from governments in the region.Washington has yet to make public any evidence that its targets were smuggling narcotics or posed a threat to the US.In the same interview, Trump alleged countries including Russia and China had conducted underground nuclear tests unknown to the public, and that the US would test “like other countries do”.“Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it,” he told 60 Minutes.“I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test,” he said, adding North Korea and Pakistan to the list of nations allegedly testing their arsenals.Confusion has surrounded Trump’s order that the US begin testing, particularly if he meant conducting the country’s first nuclear explosion since 1992.Trump first made his surprise announcement in a social media post on Thursday, minutes before entering a summit with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, in South Korea, saying he had “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis”.The announcement came after Russia said it had tested a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, and a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone.Asked directly if he planned for the US to detonate a nuclear weapon for the first time in more than three decades, Trump told CBS: “I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes.”No country other than North Korea is known to have conducted a nuclear detonation for decades. Russia and China have not carried out such tests since 1990 and 1996, respectively.Pressed on the topic, Trump said: “They test way underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test. You feel a little bit of a vibration.”However, Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, on Sunday downplayed any possible tests by the US, telling Fox News on Sunday: “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests. These are not nuclear explosions.”The US has been a signatory since 1996 to the comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty, which bans all atomic test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes.Other topics addressed in the interview included:

      Trump said he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats to reopen the government, making clear that he has no plans to negotiate as the government shutdown will soon enter its sixth week.

      Asked to clarify whether he would try to run for a third term, which is barred by the constitution, Trump said: “I don’t even think about it,”

      Trump said immigration enforcement officials hadn’t gone far enough in deporting people who were in the country without legal authorisation.
      With Agence France-Presse More

    • 213 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: Republicans insist Trump is ‘desperate’ to resolve shutdown as Snap payments end

      by

      Republicans are insisting that Donald Trump is “desperate” to end the government shutdown, which has now entered its 33rd day.The comments by the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, come as the US president delays food assistance funding for millions of low-income Americans but steams ahead with construction of his $300m gilded White House ballroom.Johnson presented Trump as a man angry and desperate to break the impasse so as to ease mounting pain for ordinary Americans. “He’s just desperate for the government to open, he’s tried everything he can,” Johnson said, adding that Trump was a “big-hearted president, he wants everybody to get their services”.Yet Trump continues to exert an iron grip on the shutdown, resisting political and even federal court pressure to ease the burden on vulnerable Americans while protesting that he has no power to end the impasse.Here are the day’s key Trump administration stories at a glance.Johnson claims ‘big-hearted’ Trump wants to reopen US governmentHouse speaker Mike Johnson’s claims that Donald Trump is desperate to reopen the US government come two days after the president hosted a lavish, Great Gatsby-themed soiree at Mar-a-Lago.Two federal court judges ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must use $5bn in contingency funds to keep paying food assistance Snap benefits for up to 42 million low-income Americans. The payments stopped on Saturday under the shutdown, posing the risk of hunger for millions of people.Read the full storyFBI fires top official amid Patel’s outrage at reports of agency jet useA top FBI official with 27 years standing has reportedly been fired by the bureau after its director, Kash Patel, became enraged by press stories revealing he had used a government jet to travel to see his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a wrestling match.Steven Palmer, who had worked at the bureau since 1998, was fired as head of the FBI’s critical incident response group, which is responsible for handling major security threats as well as overseeing the agency’s fleet of jets. He was the third head of the unit to be dismissed since Patel became FBI director in February.Read the full storyThree killed in US military strike on alleged drug vessel in CaribbeanThe US military has carried out another lethal strike on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth said.He said on Saturday the vessel was operated by a US-designated terrorist organization but did not name which group was targeted. Three people were killed in the strike, he said.It is at least the 15th such strike carried out by the US military in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific since early September.Read the full storyICE spoils celebrations in ChicagoImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Chicago mean that celebrations of Halloween, All Saints Day on 1 November and Día de los Muertos have been muted in the neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village.“Clearly it’s because of ICE,” said resident Cecilia Romero. Referring to how JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, had unsuccessfully requested that the Trump administration pause immigration enforcement operations for the Halloween weekend that began Friday, Romero added: “I think people are just scared. It’s just kind of sad that kids are not allowed to have fun on a day where they should be [kids].”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      California voters appear poised to approve a redistricting measure placed on the ballot in August by Democrats and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who have cast it as a chance to check Trump’s power.

      As the US president builds his palace, Americans are going hungry, writes David Smith.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 1 November. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans argue ‘big-hearted president’ Trump is keen to end shutdown

      by

      Top Republicans are portraying Donald Trump as a “big-hearted president” who is desperate to reopen the US government, even as he delays food assistance funding for millions of low-income Americans but steams ahead with construction of his $300m gilded White House ballroom.As the government shutdown entered its 33rd day, the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, presented Trump as a man angry and desperate to break the impasse so as to ease mounting pain for ordinary Americans. “He’s just desperate for the government to open, he’s tried everything he can,” Johnson said, adding that Trump was a “big-hearted president, he wants everybody to get their services”.The speaker’s claims, made in an interview with Fox News Sunday two days after Trump hosted a lavish, Great Gatsby-themed soiree at Mar-a-Lago, gave a slanted take on the president’s position. Trump continues to exert an iron grip on the shutdown, resisting political and even federal court pressure to ease the burden on vulnerable Americans while protesting he has no power to end the impasse.Two federal court judges ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must use $5bn in contingency funds to keep paying food assistance Snap benefits for up to 42 million low-income Americans. The payments stopped Saturday under the shutdown, posing the risk of hunger for millions of people.Despite the two court orders, it remains unclear when or whether the administration will restart the payments. Trump has said he is waiting for clarification from the federal judges on where the money should come from.The federal court orders require that partial payments of Snap start as early as Wednesday. Asked by CNN’s State of the Union whether that deadline could be met, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said: “Could be”. He said that the administration would not be appealing Friday’s rulings.Instead of authorising use of the contingency funds, Trump has instead exhorted fellow Republican senators to break the impasse by ending the Senate filibuster. The mechanism requires 60 votes in the 100-vote chamber for most kinds of legislation – including an end to the shutdown – to pass.The House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries accused Trump on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday of “weaponising hunger”. He said that the funds exist to continue food assistance benefits through November.Without mentioning by name the president’s $300m ballroom construction project, Jeffries added that Trump and his administration can find funding “for other projects, but somehow they can’t find money to make sure that Americans don’t go hungry”.As the impact of the shutdown begins to bite across the country, threatening poorer Americans and generating mounting delays at US airports, opinion polls suggest that Trump’s Republican party is facing most of the blame from citizens. An NBC News poll carried out at the end of October found that 52% of voters blamed Trump and congressional Republicans for the stalemate, with 42% blaming Democrats.The split fell along familiar partisan divisions, with those identifying as liberal, young people, Black and higher-educated voters blaming Trump – and Democrats being blamed by self-identified supporters of the president’s Make American great again (Maga) movement, white men and rural voters.So far Democrats in the Senate are holding firm with their refusal to support Republicans in reopening the government. Only three Democratic senators have broken ranks so far, with the majority insisting that any deal on the shutdown must be tied to extending healthcare tax credits to avoid steep rises in premiums in 2026 under Affordable Care Act health plans.One of the three Democrats who have joined Republican senators to vote for ending the shutdown, John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, turned on his own party on Sunday. He told CNN’s State of the Union that “Democrats really need to own the shutdown, I mean, we’re shutting it down … This is wrong, we are hurting the very people that we fight for.”Airports are starting to experience delays amid shortages of air traffic controllers who are deemed to be essential federal employees and are obliged to work – yet have ceased being paid. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said 80% of controllers did not show up for shifts in the busy New York region on Friday.At least 35 FAA facilities, including some of the largest airports in the country, are reporting staffing issues.The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, told CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday that safety would not be compromised, adding: “The real consequence is, what kind of rolling delays do you have throughout the system? I think it’s only going to get worse.”He said that as the shutdown continued, more air traffic controllers would “make the decisions of funding their families, putting food on their table, gas in their cars, versus coming into work. That’s not what I want, but I’m a realist.” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      California set to approve Prop 50 as voters signal displeasure with Trump

      by

      California’s Proposition 50 began as a warning from the nation’s largest blue state to its largest red one: don’t poke the bear. But when Texas moved ahead with a rare, mid-decade gerrymander, pushed by Donald Trump as Republicans seek to shore up their fragile House majority in the midterm elections, California made good on its threat.Now, California voters appear poised to approve a redistricting measure placed on the ballot in August by Democrats and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who have cast it as a chance to check Trump’s power.“California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes,” Newsom said at a rally, formally announcing the initiative, known as the Election Rigging Response Act.Proposition 50 asks voters to temporarily scrap the state’s independently-drawn congressional district lines in favor of new maps carved up to help Democrats win five additional safe seats – a tit-for-tat response to Texas, where Republicans secured five new, friendlier districts earlier this year.Voting has been underway for weeks in the Golden State. As of Saturday, nearly 6m ballots had been returned, about one in four of the total mailed out, according to Political Data Inc, a firm that tracks voter data. Voting ends on Tuesday, 4 November.Early returns and polling suggest the ballot measure is on track for a comfortable victory. Though it can be difficult to predict turnout in an off-year special election, several recent surveys showed it passing by more than 20 points.The focus on Trump has galavanized Democrats in the deep-blue state, averting what some initially feared: an esoteric debate about the political minutiae of redistricting, a process that until just a few months ago typically took place at the start of each decade.National Democrats lined up behind California’s retaliatory plan. Their closing ad features Barack Obama, Newsom, and prominent congressional Democrats – including New York House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – telling voters they have the power to “stand up to Donald Trump”.“Democrats have won the messaging war in California because they’ve successfully framed it as an anti-Trump campaign,” said Dave Wasserman, the senior elections analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Republicans just did not cobble together the resources or the momentum to stop it.”Opponents of the effort initially promised a formidable fight, but their campaigns were vastly outraised and support from national Republicans never materialized. In the final weeks, Republicans had largely retreated from the airwaves.California Republicans focused part of their attack on Newsom, denouncing the plan as a “Gavinmander” designed to help the term-limited governor build a national profile and donor base ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. Millions of conservative voters in the state will be disenfranchised, they’ve warned, appealing to the fairness of the independent redistricting commission’s current work.California representative Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose district would be redrawn under the new maps, has called for a nationwide ban on mid-decade redistricting. The proposal has not gained traction.“What Newsom is trying to do here is to entrench even more power in the hands of a corrupt political class that has caused California to go from being the most beautiful state in the country to being the most popular state to leave,” Kiley said in an interview this week on Fox Business Network.Republicans hold just nine of the state’s 52 House seats. If successful, the gerrymander could slash the number of Republicans California sends to Washington by more than half.Former California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Trump critic who championed the commission’s creation, harshly criticized Proposition 50. And Charles Munger, the wealthy Republican donor and longtime supporter of independent redistricting, poured more than $30m into the effort to stop California from “returning to the evils of partisan gerrymandering”.Amid the immigration raids and the federal takeover of US cities, California voters were more concerned with the stopping the Trump administration than saving their fair maps, said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist advising Munger’s opposition group, the Protect Voters First committee. Madrid suspected that most people who voted for Proposition 50 hadn’t even bothered to study the new districts.“It has nothing to do with redistricting,” he said. “This is about sending a message to Donald Trump.”National good governance groups such as Common Cause, which has historically fought partisan redistricting, opted to stay neutral on California’s gerrymander.“The question was, are we going to unilaterally disarm one side?” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the CEO and president of Common Cause. Instead, the group developed a six-point “fairness” criteria, an effort to put “guardrails” on the process, which she said were reflected in the California measure.The view that politicians should not draw their own districts remains popular in California. Trump, however, is not. Nearly two in three voters agree that the president treats California “worse” than other states, according to a CBS News/YouGov survey. Among those voting for the measure, 75% said opposition to Trump was a factor in their decision.“It brings me no joy to see the maps that the commission drew being pushed aside,” said Sara Sadhwani, a professor of politics at Pomona College who served as one of the mapmaking panel’s Democratic members in 2020. “However, I do believe that in this moment, there is a greater fight that we have to wage in order to ensure a level playing field across the nation for the 2026 election.”Sadhwani appeared in one of the yes campaign’s first ads, in which she warned: “Donald Trump’s scheme to rig the next election is an emergency for our democracy”.View image in fullscreenThough Trump is at the center of the yes campaign, he was unusually muted on the ballot measure itself. Last month, he weighed in on Truth Social to preemptively discredit, without evidence, the “totally dishonest” results of Tuesday’s election.The Trump administration announced that it was deploying federal election monitors to New Jersey and California to watch the vote. In response, Newsom accused Trump of attempting to “suppress the vote” while the Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, said the state would dispatch its own observers to watch the federal monitors.Heading into election day, Democrats’ confidence has given the campaign an air of inevitability – so much so that Newsom, to the surprise and delight of supporters, took the unconventional step of telling them last week: “You can stop donating now.”But the yes campaign say it is taking nothing for granted. Newsom spent the final weekend before Tuesday’s special election traveling “up and down” the state, his team said, as tens of thousands of volunteers knocked doors and sent text messages reminding voters to return their ballots. “This election is not over,” the governor cautioned.Meanwhile, in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Newsom made it a point to say he was “deeply confident” that California voters would approve Proposition 50 – and said Trump was “changing the rules” and Democrats had to adapt.“We want to go back to some semblance of normalcy, but you have to deal with the crisis at hand,” he said.In the national redistricting arms race, California remains the farthest along of any Democrat-led state to retaliate. Wasserman estimates that passage of the California ballot initiative would probably improve Democrats’ chances of winning the House majority next year by between 10% and 15%. But, with Trump having pushed Republican-led states such as Missouri and North Carolina to approve new maps and others poised to follow suit, he noted: “The problem for Democrats nationally is that they don’t have enough Californias.”As the gerrymander war escalates, supporters outside the Golden State are pleading with Californians to, in the words of their governor, “fight fire with fire”.“We’re depending on California to help a friend out, to help us out as a country,” said Texas state representative Nicole Collier, who fled the state with roughly two dozen of her Democratic colleagues to prevent a vote on the Republican gerrymander there. “The future direction of this country hangs in the balance.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The ghost of Ronald Reagan has spooked Trump over tariffs | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      Halloween came early for Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan spooked him. Trump had a startled reaction to the TV ad that appeared during the first game of the World Series, placed by the provincial government of Ontario, featuring excerpts from President Reagan’s radio talk in April 1987 in which he explained the danger of trade wars. “Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump posted. It was, he falsely claimed, a “serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act”. In retaliation, he slapped an additional 10% tariff on Canada.Trump was apparently horrified at the sudden presence of the ghost of conservatism past, who had kept the outlandish bounder at arm’s length and whom Trump regarded warily if not nervously. Reagan was the original, bigger and more successful performer, whose appeal was as the harbinger of morning in America, not the grim reaper of a zombie nightfall. Canada is being punished for Trump’s fright.Trump seemingly fears Reagan’s image might be taken as a warning to the supreme court to rule against him in the impending case of Trump v VOS, in which the basis of his tariff regime is at stake. “Canada is trying to illegally influence the United States Supreme Court in one of the most important rulings in the history of our Country,” Trump claimed.Two courts have already ruled against Trump for his invocation of national security under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on whomever he wishes without the approval of the Congress. In late May, the US court of international trade held that most of Trump’s tariffs were “contrary to law”. He appealed to the US court of appeals for the federal circuit, which on 29 August affirmed the CIT ruling. The appeals court observed that “tariffs are a core Congressional power”. The IEEPA does not explicitly grant the president the authority to impose tariffs. Even if the IEEPA were interpreted to allow tariffs, it would represent an unconstitutional delegation of Congress’s power to the president.Twice rebuffed, Trump has appealed to the supreme court. The argument is scheduled for 5 November. Trump’s hair-trigger response to the sudden appearance of Reagan’s shade revealed his deep unease with how the court might rule. Even though the court has permitted many of his policies to proceed temporarily without legal justification through the “shadow docket”, he seems to know he might be on shaky ground here. In the tariff case, the amicus briefs against Trump were filed by some of the leading lights of the conservative legal world. Trump accused the appeals court judges of “hatred” and called Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, which provided Trump with the lists of nominees for judgeships, a “sleazebag”. Trump is clearly afraid.On 15 October Trump announced that he might attend the oral arguments in person, to become the first sitting president ever to witness a supreme court case. Trump apparently has no concern about tainting the perception of the court’s objectivity or legitimacy. Either the court works for him or it does not; the justices fall in line or they are among the enemies within. To Trump, the Republican court should be no different from the Department of Justice under his thumb. He evidently views the separation of powers as a personal affront, unfairly stealing from him. Everything is a zero-sum game, not just international trade. “I’m the speaker and the president,” Trump has joked, according to the New York Times.Trump’s appearance in the sanctum of the court would let them know who’s the real chief. Just as the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and her deputy, Todd Blanche, sat behind Emil Bove, Trump’s henchman and nominee for the federal appeals bench, as Bove faced the senators at his confirmation hearing, Trump could sit behind his solicitor general, D John Sauer, to glower at the black-robed justices. His presence would threaten to strip away the veneer of the court’s independence as well as show his distrust for his own lawyer’s ability to prevail on the merits. Whether he wins or loses the case, he has personalized it. Winning would be interpreted as a victory for intimidation; losing would be flouting him rather than ruling on the merits. Either way, he would be poison and the decision would be, as it is said in the law, the fruit of the poisonous tree.Trump has been losing his case so far because of his transparently weak and sham argument, part economic illiteracy and part glaring cynicism, though there is a blurred line with Trump. Granting Trump his boneheaded economics, assuming he’s just a crude real estate operator who does not know the most basic things about international trade, may lend his primitivism a patina of dumb clumsy earnestness. Contrary to Trump’s stubborn ignorance, however, trade deficits are not a mercantilist zero-sum game and tariffs are not a tax on foreign countries. His complementary point that he must be able to impose universal tariffs by fiat whenever he likes without congressional authority, the only president ever to grab power for himself unilaterally under the statute in its 50-year history, because of the non sequitur of fentanyl trafficking, is so ridiculously phoney that it colors his whole case as typically dishonest.Trump’s snap imposition of 50% tariffs on Brazil for its supreme court’s judgment convicting his ally the former president Jair Bolsonaro of an attempted coup and Trump’s additional 10% tariff on Canada in his fit of pique at the Reagan TV ad may only serve to undermine his already tenuous argument that he is compelled to usurp sole power based on the IEEPA in the interest of national security. His tantrums are gifts to the opposing attorney, who may well hold them up as obvious refutations of his claims.In advance of Trump’s date with the court, he has raced around Asia tossing concessions which he hails as victories. Dropping the tariff rates for Japan, South Korea and China, while Beijing lifted its retaliatory threats to withhold rare earth minerals and stop purchasing American soybeans, he has to that extent reduced the harm he alone has been responsible for inflicting.The previously perfectly submissive Republican Congress has begun to crack up in reaction to the stress that Trump’s policies have placed on the rural Republican base. In symbolic votes, five GOP senators joined Democrats to oppose Trump’s tariffs on Brazil and four voted against his tariffs on Canada. The Republicans are in an uproar, following American ranchers, over his approval of importation of more Argentinian beef, apparently as a favor to his rightwing ally Javier Milei, to whom he has also authorized the payment of $20bn in support of the waning Argentinian currency. While Trump has grudgingly acknowledged that he cannot run for a third term, the Republican members of the Congress still have to face the music.The illegality of his tariffs aside, Trump’s retreat reveals the lasting damage he has already done to the US economy, his enhancement of Chinese power and his alienation of our allies, and it exposes his performance as a pantomime strongman on the world stage. Though some of his tariffs will be reduced, even those that remain stand at an unprecedented level in living memory.“Consumers face an overall average effective tariff rate of 17.9%, the highest since 1934,” the Yale Budget Lab reports. For small businesses, which account for one-third of US trade, 78% expect higher costs, and, unable to absorb them, 71% anticipate needing to pass them on as price increases. The Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development projects that as a result of Trump’s tariffs the US Gross Domestic Product growth rate will fall from 2.8% in 2024 to 1.5% in 2026 – a decline of nearly half.Trump’s atavistic return to the Republican protectionism of the 1930s, which deepened the Great Depression, rejects the lessons that Ronald Reagan sought to teach. “The memory of all this occurring back in the 30s made me determined when I came to Washington to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity,” Reagan, the former New Dealer, said in the speech that enraged Trump enough to punish Canada for reviving it.Reagan’s talk was a prophetic warning of the peril of Trump’s tariffs: “You see, at first, when someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works – but only for a short time … High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars … Then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s relationship with Reagan was always uneasy. Throughout the 1980s, he sought Reagan’s imprimatur. In 1983, Reagan was asked to send a congratulatory telegram on the opening of Trump Tower. A few years later, Trump invited the president to attend a LaToya Jackson concert at his Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino at Atlantic City. Several attempts to edge close to Reagan were rejected, according to the Washington Post. The White House counsel’s office wrote “NO” on the telegram request. Offering advice on calling Trump, Reagan’s political director advised, “He has a large ego” – “large” was underlined.Nancy and Ronald Reagan lavished attention on the wealthy, but Trump was apparently too vulgar. It seems not even Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, who was close to Nancy Reagan, could gain him access. Finally, Trump got himself invited to a social event at the White House, stood in the photo line and took a standard picture shaking hands with the president, and received the signed picture. Unfortunately, it was signed from “Reagan Reagan”. A corrected photo was sent, but Trump featured the original image as a token of his significance in The Art of the Deal.In that book, published in 1987, Trump suggested that Reagan was a hollow construct, “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile”. That year Trump briefly considered his first run for the presidency. He made a foray into New Hampshire and bought full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe scathingly attacking Reagan for weakness. His “Open Letter” stated, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” He blamed the federal deficit on our alliances. “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend to allies,” he wrote. “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.” It was the complaint he would retail for decades regardless of the circumstances. At the bottom, the ads reproduced his squiggly signature, nearly identical to the one on the lewd birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein that he denies he ever wrote. Now, “Reagan Reagan” has returned to haunt him.There’s a twist characteristic of the Trump era. If Trump loses his tariff case, the duties collected from companies will have to be refunded. The Wall Street financial firm of Cantor Fitzgerald reportedly anticipates a market on the rights to the tariff refunds. Its former head Howard Lutnick is the secretary of commerce, and his sons now run the firm. A Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiary is offering 20% to 30% in cash upfront rather than wait for litigation to resolve the claims, according to Wired magazine. In exchange, the company would eventually get the full refund. But if Trump prevails, the claims would be worthless. A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald calls the report “absolutely false”, saying in a statement that it is “not in the business of positioning any risk, taking views or facilitating business in litigation claims involving the legality of US tariffs”.In August, however, the senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter on 13 August to Brandon Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald’s CEO, seeking information. “Given that one of the purported architects of President Trump’s tariff policy is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, your father and the former Chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, LP, the firm’s actions raise obvious conflict-of-interest and insider dealing concerns.”The senators inquired: “Has anyone at Cantor or Cantor Fitzgerald, LP communicated with any individual representing the Administration’s interest or working on the court cases on these matters? If so, please provide a list of all such conversations, including the date, the individuals involved, and the nature of the conversation.”A spokesperson for the commerce department stated in an email to Wired, “Secretary Lutnick knows nothing about this decision because he has no insight or strategic control over Cantor Fitzgerald.” He remains busy working on Trump’s tariffs. This article was amended on 4 November 2025 to add a response from Cantor Fitzgerald to the Wired report.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to 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

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump policies spur economic anxiety in US Republican heartland: ‘Tariffs are affecting everything’

      by

      For decades, a line of storefronts in Jeffersonville, Ohio, a town of 1,200 people 40 minutes south-west of Columbus, lay empty.But now locals are hard at work renovating the downtown and paving streets in anticipation of a potential economic boom fueled by a huge new electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant.Two miles south of Jeffersonville, Korean and Japanese companies LG Energy Solution and Honda are in the midst of sinking $3.5bn into a facility that is expected to begin production in the coming months.Hundreds of people have been employed in the construction of the plant, and more than 525 people have been hired to work in engineering and other manufacturing roles at the facility. In total, about 2,200 people are expected to be employed on a site that, until several years ago, was open farmland.But some locals are concerned.A host of Trump administration policies – tariff measures and the end of clean vehicle tax credits worth thousands of dollars to car buyers – are causing multinational manufacturing companies to consider pausing hundreds of millions of dollars in future investments, a move that would hit small, majority-Republican towns such as Jeffersonville especially hard.Moreover, a raid by ICE immigration officers on a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Ellabell, a small town in south-east Georgia in September that saw more than 300 South Korean workers detained and sent home has sent shock waves through places like Jeffersonville and the C-suites of international companies alike.View image in fullscreen“The construction process has been slowing down. My fear is that the whole thing is going to stop, and we’re left with just unfinished concrete out there,” says Amy Wright, a Fayette county resident, of the under-construction battery plant.“What’s more, a lot of the people hired to do the construction of the plant are not locals. They are from out-of-state; I’ve met them at the gym.”While in last year’s presidential election, 77% of voters in Fayette county backed Trump, recent polls suggest his popularity in rural America has taken a nosedive.One poll suggests that his approval rating among rural Americans has slipped from 59% in August to 47% in October. Others chart his net approval rating in states he won in last year’s presidential election – Ohio, Michigan and Indiana – in negative territory by as much as 18.9 points.Wright says her son, who works for a local company that supplies Honda with parts, recently received notice that a prior promise of overtime work was being rescinded. She says she believes Honda is reeling in spending due to US government policies.“Tariffs are affecting everything,” says Wright.What’s happening in Jeffersonville is being mirrored across the midwest.In Kentucky, Michigan and elsewhere, global giants Toyota and Stellantis have spent billions of dollars in small communities, much of which came in the form of clean energy tax breaks from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.Toyota’s biggest production facility on the planet is in a small Kentucky town called Georgetown, where the company employs more than 10,000 people and has invested $11bn in the local economy since the late 1980s. These workers churn out nearly half a million vehicles and hundreds of thousands of engines every year.However, in August Toyota warned that it faced a $9.5bn financial hit to it and its suppliers due to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, the largest estimate of any automotive manufacturer. In July, Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, said Trump’s tariffs were undermining investments in the state such as Toyota’s, calling them “chaos”.View image in fullscreenSixty-three per cent of voters in Georgetown’s Scott county backed Trump in last year’s presidential election.Last April, Stellantis laid off 900 workers at locations across the midwest due to Trump’s tariffs.In Indiana, one of the largest employers in the state, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche is reportedly considering pulling out of $50bn worth of investment in the coming years if Trump follows through on his executive order to target companies that don’t reduce drug prices.“No [manufacturer] wanted to alienate customers, but those days are past. So, the bulk of tariff price increases will hit in the coming months. This matters, because factory employment is a major share of rural counties in the midwest – about 30% in Indiana, and similar in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin,” says Michael Hicks, an economist and professor at Ball State University in Indiana.“These things will clearly have a political effect, but my hunch is not fully for several months. Overlaying all this is the risk of a significant [economic] downturn, where tariffs combine with a financial bubble that would surely hit rural – red – communities very hard.”Still, others believe that the tariffs will benefit small American towns in the long run.“Toyota is doing fine and I don’t see [tariffs] as being a big hurt for us here in Georgetown,” says Robert Linder, co-owner of the Porch restaurant that’s situated a mile north of the huge facility, and who worked at the plant for 29 years.In April, Toyota suggested it might move more vehicle production to Georgetown to beat the tariffs, though that move could be years in the making. Sales of Toyota brands in the US have been growing this year, with the company thus far eating the cost of tariffs rather than passing it on to consumers.“They just announced a $10bn investment in the United States for more Toyota plants. If Toyota was worried about [tariffs] they wouldn’t be expanding,” says Linder. Recent reports, however, suggest the $10bn figure referred to previously announced investments.However, large multinationals have a track record of announcing major projects only for reality to play out in a very different way.In Wisconsin, the Taiwanese tech company Foxconn claimed it would spend $10bn on a facility outside the town of Mount Pleasant. Instead, local taxpayers today find themselves on the hook for $1.2bn spent on highways, attorneys and other infrastructure for a facility that has never transpired.In Arizona, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), backed directly by Trump, has been plagued with lawsuits related to safety and other issues, and missed project deadlines following promises to become a major employer of local talent.Despite Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, recently claiming there was no need to worry about the future of the LG-Honda battery plant, on 28 October, Honda announced it was reducing production at plants across Ohio due to a semiconductor chip shortage.While more than two dozen jobs are available at the Jeffersonville site, according to the LG-Honda plant’s hiring website, it’s a far cry from the more than 2,000 positions cited by officials previously.For Amy Wright, policies coming out of the White House are having a clear effect on residents of rural Ohio. As an organizer of four local No Kings protests against Trump’s policies she’s noticed a change in the people who are coming to the rallies.“We’ve had more and more people who have voted for [Trump] show up and say: ‘This is not good, this is not what we voted for,’” she says. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      The luxury gap: Trump builds his palace as Americans face going hungry

      by

      It was a feast fit for a king – and any billionaire willing to be his subject. From gold-rimmed plates on gold-patterned tablecloths decorated with gold candlestick holders, they gorged on heirloom tomato panzanella salad, beef wellington and a dessert of roasted Anjou pears, cinnamon crumble and butterscotch ice-cream.On 15 October, Donald Trump welcomed nearly 130 deep-pocketed donors, allies and representatives of major companies for a dinner at the White House to reward them for their pledged contributions to a vast new ballroom now expected to cost $300m. That the federal government had shut down two weeks earlier scarcely seemed to matter.But two weeks later, the shutdown is starting to bite – and throw Trump’s architectural folly into sharp relief. On Saturday, with Congress still locked in a legislative stalemate, a potential benefit freeze could leave tens of millions of low-income Americans without food aid. Democrats accuse Trump’s Republican party of “weaponising hunger” to pursue an extreme rightwing agenda.Images of wealthy monarchs or autocrats revelling in excess even as the masses struggle for bread are more commonly associated with the likes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of France, who spent lavishly at the court of Versailles, or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, who siphoned off billions while citizens endured deepening poverty.But now America has a jarring split-screen of its own, between an oligarch president bringing a Midas touch to the White House and families going hungry, workers losing pay and government services on the brink of collapse.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen“Are you fucking kidding me?” exclaimed Kamala Harris, the former vice-president, during an interview on Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central podcast The Weekly Show. “This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that babies are going to starve when the Snap benefits end in just hours from now.”For years Trump has cultivated the image of a “blue-collar billionaire” and, in last year’s presidential election, he beat Harris by 14 percentage points among non-college-educated voters – double his margin in 2016.Yet he grew up in an affluent neighbourhood of Queens, New York, and joined the family business as a property developer, receiving a $1m loan from his father for projects in Manhattan. He attached his name to luxury hotels and golf clubs and achieved celebrity through the New York tabloids and as host of the reality TV show The Apprentice.View image in fullscreenAs a politician, however, Trump has successfully branded himself as the voice of the left-behinds in towns hollowed out by industrialisation. His formula includes tapping into grievance, particularly white grievance, and into “Make America Great Again” nostalgia . His speeches are peppered with aspirational promises that his policies will guarantee his supporters a share of the nation’s wealth.This has apparently given him leeway with Trump voters who, despite their own struggles, turned a blind eye to the largesse of his first term and how it might benefit his family. But it was clear from his inauguration in January – when he was surrounded by the tech titans Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg – that part two would be different.Trump has made a personal profit of more than $1.8bn over the past year, according to a new financial tracker run by the Center for American Progress thinktank, which says the lion’s share came from launching his own crypto ventures while aggressively deregulating the industry. Other sources of income include gifts, legal settlements and income from a $40m Amazon documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump.There have been brazen “let them eat cake” moments. In May, Trump said he would accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One despite concerns that it could violate the US constitution’s emoluments clause. In October, it was reported he was demanding the justice department pay him about $230m in compensation over federal investigations he faced that he claims were politically motivated.View image in fullscreenLarry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There is a glaring gap between the life of Donald Trump, which is gold-plated and luxurious, and the life of so many Americans who are now being hit by the government shutdown.“You have to go back in history to examples in the 1920s or the Gilded Age in the late 19th century to find this kind of opulence that’s not just going on but being advertised. That goes along with all the other efforts to enrich Donald Trump and his family and his friends. It’s a shocking display of the use of public power for private gain.”It is hard to imagine a more resonant symbol than the ballroom. Last month, Trump left presidential historians and former White House staff aghast by demolishing the East Wing without seeking approval from the National Capital Planning Commission, which vets the construction of federal buildings. He also fired all six members of the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent agency that had expected to review the project.He claimed the destruction was a necessary step towards building a long-needed ballroom which, at 90,000 sq ft, would be big enough to hold an inauguration and dwarf the executive mansion itself. It will be funded not by the taxpayer but the new masters of the universe.Among the companies represented at the 15 October dinner were Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton, Coinbase, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms and T-Mobile. The Adelson Family Foundation, founded by the Republican mega-donors Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, also had a presence.The oil billionaire Harold Hamm, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler and her husband, Jeff Sprecher, and crypto entrepreneur twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss – who were portrayed by the actor Armie Hammer in the film The Social Network – were all on the guest list.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEthics watchdogs condemned the dinner as a blatant case of selling access to the president with the potential for influence peddling and other forms of corruption. Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist, said: “It’s par for the course for Donald Trump. Millionaires and billionaires wine with him and dine with him and everything is fine with him. There’s a cost and there’s consequences.“They’re not donating this money because it’s a nice thing to do. Certainly there’s some sort of benefit to them and it could be the largest wealth transfer in American history with the big ugly bill [the Working Families Tax Cut Act] just a few months ago.”View image in fullscreenThat legislation delivers tax cuts for the rich while reducing food assistance and making health insurance more expensive for working families. The mood is only likely to darken as the second-longest government shutdown in history threatens to rip the social safety net away from millions of people. John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, warned on Wednesday: “It’s going to get ugly fast.”A number of essential public services are approaching the end of their available funds, a situation likely to be felt directly in households, schools and airports from this weekend.The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), also known as food stamps, is set to lapse for 42 million people, raising the spectre of long queues at food banks. On Friday, two federal judges ruled that the Trump administration must continue to fund the programme with contingency funds. But the decisions are likely to face appeals. It was also unclear how soon the debit cards that beneficiaries use to buy groceries could be reloaded.Schemes that provide early years’ education for low-income families and subsidised air travel to remote communities are also set to run aground. At the same time, thousands of federal employees will soon miss their first full paychecks since the shutdown began, raising the prospect of staffing shortages in areas such as airport security and air traffic control.The timing is awkward because Saturday also marks the start of open enrolment for health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. Premiums are expected to soar, reflecting insurers’ doubts that Congress will renew enhanced tax credits before they lapse at year’s end – one of the key points of contention in the current standoff.Trump can often appear immune to political crises. But in a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos opinion poll released on Thursday, only 28% of Americans say they support the ballroom project, compared with 56% who oppose it. The same survey found that 45% blame Trump and Republicans for the government shutdown while 33% hold Democrats responsible. Notably, independents blame Trump and Republicans by a 2-1 margin – handing Democrats an opportunity.View image in fullscreenJohn Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “For the first time in a while, they have an opening with rural voters. Medicaid and Snap are infrastructural necessities in the poorest counties. Without programmes like this being funded, you’re not just talking about hurting poor people or rural people who are invisible; you’re talking about shutting down hospitals and clinics, and that matters to people. Democrats should be fanning out in rural areas and people should be telling their stories.”It is safe to assume that, had Barack Obama or Joe Biden built a ballroom during the crippling austerity of a government shutdown, Republicans and rightwing media would have gone scorched-earth against them. Trump’s ostentatious display of wealth and cronyism comes against a backdrop of widening social and economic inequality. Democrats, however, are often accused of lacking a killer instinct.Joe Walsh, a former Republican representative aligned with the conservative Tea Party who four months ago became a Democrat, said: “Democrats don’t know how to fight and I can see they’re already squirming on this ballroom issue. We’ve got a guy in the White House who every day is taking a blowtorch to this country and most Democrats don’t understand the moment. He ploughs ahead and tears down the East Wing because he knows he can get away with it.”Walsh believes that the next Democratic president should commit to demolishing Trump’s ballroom. “This is somebody who’s a tyrant who believes he can ignore all laws, rules, norms and processes,” he added. “You have to draw the line on that. No, he cannot unilaterally demolish the East Wing and build a big old ballroom. This guy has no clue what America is. We don’t have palaces in America.” More

    • 200 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: president threatens military action in Nigeria over alleged killings of Christians

      by

      In describing his foreign policy agenda, Donald Trump has proclaimed an “America First” policy.But on Saturday the US president threatened to launch attacks in Nigeria in response to alleged violence against Christians, saying he had instructed his newly named department of war to “prepare for possible action”.“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump posted on social media.The warning of possible military action came after Nigeria’s president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, earlier on Saturday pushed back on Trump announcing the day before that he was designating the west African country “a country of particular concern” for allegedly failing to rein in the persecution of Christians.Here are the key storiesTrump threatens to go into Nigeria ‘guns-a-blazing’ over attacks on ChristiansDonald Trump on Saturday said he had ordered the Pentagon to begin planning for potential military action in Nigeria as he stepped up his criticism that the government was failing to rein in the persecution of Christians in the west African country.“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action,” he wrote on social media. “If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!”Read the full storyJD Vance repeats comments he wants wife Usha to convert to ChristianityJD Vance is doubling down on comments he made about wanting his wife, Usha Vance, who is Hindu, to convert to Christianity – remarks that drew political backlash from some quarters.At an event with Turning Point USA at the University of Mississippi to honor the conservative group’s slain founder Charlie Kirk, an audience member questioned the US vice-president about how he sees the links between American patriotism and Christianity.Read the full storyTrump’s immigration raids continue through Halloween in Chicago and Los AngelesDonald Trump’s immigration crackdown continued on Halloween night as federal agents were seen in Chicago and Los Angeles on the holiday, according to multiple reports.In Chicago, where the president has unleashed military troops to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as agents carry out arrests and push back against protesters, several people were arrested on Friday. ICE agents descended on the city and its suburbs as part of their operations, and protesters were also detained during clashes with law enforcement.Read the full storyObama criticizes Trump and Republican policy in stump speech for Abigail SpanbergerBarack Obama headlined a rally Saturday in Virginia to try to secure a victory for the state’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, who leads in polls days before the election.Obama moved between criticizing Donald Trump and Republican policy and rhetoric – with a bit of humor – while also explaining how Abigail Spanberger could help counter what Democrats see as the country’s downward trajectory.Read the full storyFlights delayed across US amid air traffic controller shortages as shutdown drags onNearly 50% of the 30 busiest US airports faced shortages of air traffic controllers, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Friday, leading to flight delays nationwide as a federal government shutdown hit its 31st day.The absence of controllers on Friday is by far the most widespread since the shutdown began, with one of the worst-hit regions being New York, where 80% of air traffic controllers were out, the agency said.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      As Barack Obama stumps for other Democrats, the party gets to see what it lost, writes David Smith in this politics sketch about the former president.

      Trump policies loom large over New Jersey’s unpredictable governor’s race, writes Anna Betts in New Jersey.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 31 October, 2025. More