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      Trump news at a glance: immigration agents to ‘flood’ US sanctuary cities as marines withdraw from LA

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      The Trump administration is targeting US sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive, after an off-duty law enforcement officer was allegedly shot in New York City by an undocumented person with a criminal record.Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s hardline border tsar, vowed to “flood the zone” with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents, saying: “Every sanctuary city is unsafe. Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for criminals and President Trump’s not going to tolerate it.”In Los Angeles, meanwhile, 700 active-duty US marines was being withdrawn, the Pentagon confirmed, more than a month after Trump deployed them to the city against the objections of local leaders.Here’s more on these and the day’s other key Trump administration stories at a glance.Trump’s border tsar to target US sanctuary cities Tom Homan has vowed to “flood the zone” of sanctuary cities with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents in an all-out bid to overcome the lack of cooperation he said the government faced from Democrat-run municipalities in its quest to arrest and detain undocumented people.The pledge from Donald Trump’s hardline border tsar followed the arrest of two undocumented men from the Dominican Republic after an off-duty Customs and Border Protection officer suffered gunshot wounds in an apparent robbery attempt in New York City on Saturday night.Read the full story700 active-duty marines withdrawn from LAThe Pentagon confirmed to the Guardian on Monday that the full deployment of 700 active-duty US marines was being withdrawn from Los Angeles more than a month after Donald Trump deployed them to the city in a move state and city officials called unnecessary and provocative.Read the full storyTrump tax bill to add $3.4tn to US debt over next decadeThe president’s signature tax and spending bill will add $3.4tn to the national debt over the next decade, according to new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released on Monday.Major cuts to Medicaid and the national food stamps program are estimated to save the country $1.1tn – only a chunk of the $4.5tn in lost revenue that will come from the bill’s tax cuts.Read the full storyLegal group asks DoJ to look into ‘illegal DEI practices’ at Johns HopkinsA legal group founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller has requested the justice department investigate “illegal DEI practices” at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.In a letter to the justice department’s civil rights division, America First Legal asked an assistant attorney general to investigate and issue enforcement actions against the prestigious medical university for embracing “a discriminatory DEI regime as a core institutional mandate”.Read the full storyHundreds of Nasa workers rebuke ‘arbitrary’ Trump cutsAlmost 300 current and former US Nasa employees – including at least four astronauts – have issued a scathing dissent opposing the Trump administration’s sweeping and indiscriminate cuts to the agency, which they say threaten safety, innovation and national security.Read the full storyTrump officials release FBI records on MLK JrThe Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr, despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.Read the full storyEpstein accuser urged FBI to investigate Trump decades ago – reportAn artist who first accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexual assault almost three decades ago has told the New York Times that she had urged law enforcement officials back then to investigate powerful people in their orbit – including Donald Trump.The artist, Maria Farmer, was among the first women to report Epstein and his partner Maxwell of sexual crimes in 1996 when, according to the new interview with the Times, she also identified Trump among others close to Epstein as worthy of attention.Read the full storyHarvard argues Trump’s $2.6bn cuts are illegalHarvard University appeared in federal court on Monday to make the case that the Trump administration illegally cut $2.6bn from the college – a major test of the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education institutions by threatening their financial viability.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Michael Bloomberg is calling on Senate Republicans to oust Robert F Kennedy Jr from his post as Trump’s health secretary.

      The US Federal Reserve is pushing back against claims from the White House that it is undergoing extravagant renovations with a video tour showing the central bank’s ongoing construction.

      Hunter Biden gave a profanity-laced interview during which he attacked George Clooney, denied owning the cocaine found in the White House and spoke about his father’s last efforts in the 2024 race before dropping out.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 20 July 2025. More

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      Trump tax bill to add $3.4tn to US debt over next decade, new analysis finds

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      Donald Trump’s new tax bill will add $3.4tn to the national debt over the next decade, according to new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released Monday.Major cuts to Medicaid and the national food stamps program are estimated to save the country $1.1tn – only a chunk of the $4.5tn in lost revenue that will come from the bill’s tax cuts.The cuts will come through stricter work requirements and eligibility checks for both programs. The CBO estimates the bill will leave 10 million Americans without health insurance by 2034.The bill also makes permanent tax cuts that were first introduced by Republicans in Trump’s 2017 tax bill. The cuts included a reduction in the corporate tax rate, from 35% to 21%, and an increase to the standard deduction. It also includes a tax dedication for workers receiving tips and overtime pay, and removes tax credits that support wind and solar power development, which could ultimately raise energy costs for Americans.Increased costs will also come from boosts to immigration and border security funding. The bill allocates nearly $170bn to immigration law enforcement, including the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency and funding for a wall along the southern border.The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that, with interest, the bill will actually add $4.1tn to the deficit. The US national debt currently stands at more than $36tn.“It’s still hard to believe that policymakers just added $4tn to the debt,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement. “Modelers from across the ideological spectrum universally agree that any sustained economic benefits are likely to be modest, or negative, and not one serious estimate claims this bill will improve our financial situation.”Trump signed the bill into law earlier this month after weeks of debate among congressional Republicans. The bill passed the Senate 51-50 before it passed the House 218-214.While Republicans largely celebrated the bill, with Trump calling it “the most popular bill ever signed in the history of the country”, only a quarter of Americans in a CBS/YouGov poll said that the bill will help their family.Democrats meanwhile universally criticized the bill, with Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee saying that while “the GOP continues to cash their billionaire donors’ checks, their constituents will starve, lose critical medical care, lose their jobs – and yes, some will die as a result of this bill.” More

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      Pentagon withdraws all 700 marines from Los Angeles – live updates

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      The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, confirmed to the Guardian on Monday that the entire deployment of 700 active-duty US marines is being withdrawn from Los Angeles.The redeployment of the marines comes after 2,000 National Guard troops were withdrawn from the city last week. The troops were sent to the city last month by the federal government after violence broke out on the fringes on protests against immigration enforcement sweeps in LA.According to Parnell, the deployment of the marines, which state and city officials called unnecessary and provocative at a time when protests against immigration raids were already under control, had achieved it aim.“With stability returning to Los Angeles, the Secretary has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: lawlessness will not be tolerated”, Parnell said in a written statement. “Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law. We’re deeply grateful for their service, and for the strength and professionalism they brought to this mission.”Citing concerns over possible violations of bribery laws, senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden wrote on Monday to David Ellison, whose company Skydance is about to buy CBS owner Paramount, to ask if he struck a “secret side deal” with Donald Trump in exchange for federal approval of the purchase, or played any part in the decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night CBS show.In their letter, the senators asked Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle and a friend of Trump, to reply to 7 detailed questions, probing whether he was involved in any “quid-pro-quo arrangement” that could violate the law.The questions about a possible secret side deal were prompted, in part, by Trump’s own claims, after he accepted $16 million from Paramount to drop his lawsuit over the routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, that the deal was worth twice as much.There have been recent reports that Ellison has been considering a possible role for the conservative journalist Bari Weiss in remaking CBS News.Among the questions Ellison is asked to reply to by 4 August are:

      “Is there currently any arrangement under which you or Skydance will provide compensation, advertising, or promotional activities that in any way assist President Trump, his family, his presidential library, or other Administration officials?” the senators ask Ellison in the letter.

      “Have you personally discussed with President Trump, any of his family members, any Trump Administration officials, or presidential library fund personnel any matters related to the Paramount-Skydance transaction?”

      “Has Skydance agreed or have you personally agreed to make changes to Skydance’s content or Paramount’s or CBS’s content at the request of the Trump Administration, to facilitate approval of the transaction?”
      The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, confirmed to the Guardian on Monday that the entire deployment of 700 active-duty US marines is being withdrawn from Los Angeles.The redeployment of the marines comes after 2,000 National Guard troops were withdrawn from the city last week. The troops were sent to the city last month by the federal government after violence broke out on the fringes on protests against immigration enforcement sweeps in LA.According to Parnell, the deployment of the marines, which state and city officials called unnecessary and provocative at a time when protests against immigration raids were already under control, had achieved it aim.“With stability returning to Los Angeles, the Secretary has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: lawlessness will not be tolerated”, Parnell said in a written statement. “Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law. We’re deeply grateful for their service, and for the strength and professionalism they brought to this mission.”Democrats this afternoon are forcing another vote to push for the release of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents, further placing pressure on Republican lawmakers, according to a report from Politico.The Democratic lawmakers are planning to offer Republican representative Thomas Massie’s bill as an amendment during a Rules Committee meeting Monday afternoon. Massie’s bill, a bipartisan effort, seeks to push for the release of Epstein-related documents.On Monday, Politico also reported that the Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson does not have plans to put forward a Republican-led alternative Epstein bill before August’s recess break.The White House is removing the Wall Street Journal from the group of reporters covering Trump’s trip to Scotland, Politico reports.The Wall Street Journal’s removal from this upcoming weekend’s press pool follows the paper’s report that alleged Trump wrote a sexually suggestive letter to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Trump has sued the paper and its owners for its report, demanding $10 billion.“Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico. “Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump wrote a “bawdy” note to Epstein for his 2003 birthday.The Trump administration has flouted court orders in just over one-third of the lawsuits filed against its policies, a Washington Post analysis found. The Post’s analysis says it suggests a “widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system” by the White House.A number of plaintiffs that have sued the Trump administration say that agencies and officials are ignoring rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence and quietly acting in defiance of court rulings.Since Trump took office, there has been a battle between the White House and the judiciary, during which officials have defied numerous court orders. Trump administration officials have repeatedly criticized federal judges as “activist judges.”According to the Post, despite judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents agreeing that the administration is flouting court orders, “none have taken punitive action to try to force compliance.”The Post analyzed 337 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration since January. Courts have ruled in 165 of the lawsuits. And the Post found that the Trump administration is accused of defying court orders in 57 of those cases.Two suspects are in custody for the alleged shooting and wounding of a customs officer in New York, officials said on Monday, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports.During a press conference on Monday, homeland security secretary Krsiti Noem and Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, also said the episode was a direct result of New York’s sanctuary city policies and the approach to border security under Joe Biden’s presidency.On Saturday night, an off-duty customs officer was shot and wounded during an apparent attempted robbery. The officer was not in uniform at the time and police said there was indication he was targeted because of his occupation.A suspect in the incident, Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, was later taken into custody after turning up at a hospital in the Bronx with gunshot wounds to the leg and groin.During Monday’s press conference, Noem also focused on the profile of Nunez, who she said had been arrested four times since entering the US illegally in 2023. She also discussed the profile of his accomplice, Christhian Aybar-Berroa, saying he had “entered the country illegally in 2022 under the Biden Administration and was ordered for final removal in 2023 by an immigration judge.”“There’s absolutely zero reason that someone who has scum of the earth like this should be running loose on the streets of New York City,” Noem said, referring to Nunez. “Arrested four different times in New York City and because of the mayor’s policies and was released back to do harm to people and to individuals living in the city. Make no mistake, this officer is in the hospital today, fighting for his life because of the policies of the mayor of the city and the city council and the people that were in charge of keeping the public safe.”Homan said “sanctuary cities are cities for criminals.” He said the administration would “flood the zone” with immigration, customs and enforcement (Ice) officials to detain undocumented people in sanctuary cities.“What we’re going to do [is deploy] more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy so sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want – more agents in the community and more agents in the worksite,” he said.“I’m sick and tired of reading in the media every day how Ice is not doing what the Trump administration has promised, that we’re not arresting criminals, that most of the people we arrested are not criminals. I look at the numbers every day. The numbers I looked at [are] 130,000 arrests and 90,000 criminals. Do the math. That’s 70%.”Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has blamed the sanctuary city policies applied by Democratic mayors for the wounding of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer in an attempted robbery, allegedly carried out by undocumented immigrants, one of whom was reportedly subject to a deportation order, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports.The 42-year-old officer sustained gunshot wounds to his face and arm after being attacked in a Manhattan park shortly before midnight on Saturday night.He was shot after drawing his service weapon after being approached by two men on a scooter as he sat on a bench with a female companion. The officer was not in uniform at the time and police said there was indication he was targeted because of his occupation.At a news conference on Monday, Noem, flanked by Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, and several law enforcement officials, said the episode was a direct result of the sanctuary city policy adopted by New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, as well as the approach to border security adopted during Joe Biden’s presidency. Noem also criticized Adams during the conference.Noem’s criticism of Adams came despite widespread reports of a deal made between the mayor and the Trump administration that involved New York giving greater cooperation than before on immigration. The agreement was reached around the same time that the justice department moved to dismiss federal corruption charges against Adams, although the mayor has insisted there was no quid pro quo.Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles had also suffered crime waves, according to Noem, because their mayors and municipalities were “protecting criminals” by declaring them sanctuary cities, whereby local authorities give only limited cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agencies.President Donald Trump has appointed Mike Rigas, a Bush-era official from the General Services Administration (GSA), as acting administrator of the agency, Politico reports.The move is seen as a further step by the White House to curb Elon Musk’s influence in the GSA, which is one of the federal agencies that Musk’s initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) nearly fully controlled.Rigas previously worked under the Trump administration as Deputy Secretary of State for management and resources. The former acting administrator was selected by a Musk ally to lead DOGE. The Rigas appointment is seen as a strategic move by the White House to rein in DOGE leadership.Border czar Tom Homan said Monday that immigration officials will escalate operations in New York and other so-called sanctuary cities.“Sanctuary cities are now our priority,” Homan said. “We’re gonna flood the zone.”Homan’s comments follow an attempted robbery and shooting of an armed, off-duty customs officer in Manhattan this weekend. The New York City Police Commissioner said the officer was not likely targeted due to his employment.When two men approached the off-duty officer to rob him and a companion in a Manhattan park, the officer withdrew a gun and engaged in a shootout with one of the robbers. The robber was arrested after being taken to a hospital. The customs officer is recovering from gunshots.Trump administration officials have said that so-called sanctuary policies were to blame for the shooting. New York and other cities have policies that limit local government cooperation in federal immigration matters.President Donald Trump threatened to appeal a federal judge’s decision in Massachusetts amid the ongoing and escalating battle between his administration and Harvard University.In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the federal judge hearing the case is a “TOTAL DISASTER” and that when “she rules against us, we will IMMEDIATELY appeal, and WIN.”Massachusetts district judge Judge Allison Burroughs heard arguments from lawyers with Harvard and the federal government on Monday, in a case that may decide whether the Trump administration’s attempts to cut billions of dollars in university funding is legal. Burroughs has not yet ruled on Monday’s arguments.In his Truth Social post, Trump also said Harvard is “anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-America.”The US Border Patrol chief patrol agent for the El Centro Sector in southern California posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) saying that federal immigration officials “are not leaving” Los Angeles until “the mission is accomplished.”“Better get used to us now because this is going to be normal very soon,” Gregory K. Bovino, the Border Patrol agent said in a video. “I don’t work for [Los Angeles mayor] Karen Bass, the federal government doesn’t work for Karen Bass.”Border Patrol and other immigration officials have been conducting operations in Los Angeles to arrest, detain and deport undocumented immigrants. The operations gained widespread backlash in early June. Protests, opposing immigration arrests, engulfed certain areas of the city.Texas’s Republican-led state legislature is pushing to redistrict the state in a way that would favor Republicans when electing House representatives, the Washington Post reports.During the state’s special legislative session, beginning today, Trump is pushing for lawmakers to redistrict the state to add up to five more House districts.National Democratic Redistricting Committee, an anti-gerrymandering group, threatened to file lawsuits to stop attempts to redistrict the state.The special session was called by Texas’s state governor Greg Abbott after devastating floods in central Texas.Four US senators met with Canadian prime minister Mark Carney amid the looming 1 August deadline to strike a new trade and security deal.The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is being renegotiated and has faced strain from the Trump administration regarding a few key points, including lumber, digital services taxes and metal tariffs.This is the second congressional delegation to visit the Canadian prime minister in the past three months, Politico reports.Democratic senator Maria Cantwell, from Washington, is pushing for the Trump administration to bolster the US government’s weather disaster readiness, after recent tragic floods, hurricanes and wildfires, and as the administration seeks to slash resources.This comes as the Trump administration is pushing to drastically reduce the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).The Trump administration is looking to cut the NOAA’s budget by 27%, a reduction of $2.2 billion.In a letter, Sen. Cantwell made five recommendations. They include modernizing weather data collection, funding more research and modernizing alert systems.“Communities across the United States are experiencing more frequent, intense, and costly flash floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, atmospheric rivers, landslides, heatwaves, and wildfires,” Cantwell wrote. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create the world’s best weather forecasting system that would provide Americans with much more detailed and customized alerts days instead of minutes ahead of a looming extreme weather event.” More

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      Are non-voters the key to Democrats winning in 2028? | Alex Bronzini-Vender

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      Since Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign, the electoral theory of the American left has rested upon the idea that a sizable bloc of Americans – alienated from the traditional politics of left and right – have withdrawn from politics entirely. They stand closer to the Democrats on many issues, but, seeing little by way of material benefit from the party’s soaring rhetoric of “defending democracy”, they have opted out of the political process. And, as the theory goes, a bold, populist candidate – someone like Sanders himself – could bring this silent constituency back into the fold.If that logic once explained how Sanders might have won, it might now explain why Kamala Harris lost. And, as new troves of post-election data surface, the debate over whether Democrats might have avoided last year’s defeat by mobilizing non-voters has become one of the party’s hottest factional disputes.Among those strategizing within the Democratic party, one’s confidence in voter activation is often a proxy for their broader politics. Those who believe Harris’s campaign failed to activate non-voters typically argue her platform lacked the populist edge needed to mobilize disaffected Americans. Their critics tend to believe the problem ran in the opposite direction: the electorate had moved right and the Democrats’ failure lay in their inability to meet it there.Detractors of the activation theory point to a 26 June Pew Research report – which found Donald Trump leading Harris by three points among non-voters – as decisive proof that non-participants lean Republican. The catch, though, is that the survey concluded less than two weeks after Trump’s victory. Polling taken in the aftermath of a race is notoriously vulnerable to distortion, and the bandwagon effect can temporarily inflate a victorious candidate’s popularity. That effect is especially pronounced among disengaged or loosely affiliated voters. That number almost certainly marks the high-water line of Trump’s support among non-voters.Another oft-cited figure from the New York Times/Siena College, which the Democratic strategist and data scientist David Shor referenced during his own interview with the Times’s Ezra Klein, found Trump leading by 14 points among 2020 non-voters. But it uses survey data collected before Biden dropped out of the race. Then there is Shor’s own post-election poll, conducted through his polling firm Blue Rose Research, which found Trump leading by 11 points among non-voters – though the underlying data remains private and the methodology undisclosed.The Cooperative Election Study (CES) – a late-November survey of more than 50,000 voters – offers one of the few high-quality, public windows on 2024. An analysis of the CES data by political scientists Jake Grumbach, Adam Bonica and their colleagues found that a plurality of non-voters identified themselves as most closely aligned with the Democratic party – and an absolute majority of registered voters who declined to cast a ballot in 2024 considered themselves Democrats. The non-electorate certainly wasn’t blue enough to have swung the race, but by no means as red as the activation theory’s opponents claim.What’s even clearer is the geography of turnout. Voter participation dropped especially sharply in Democratic strongholds – particularly urban counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. By contrast, turnout in Republican areas held steady or even increased modestly. In other words, the Democratic campaign had more to gain from energizing its own base than from chasing centrist swing voters.Harris wouldn’t have prevailed under conditions of 100% turnout. (Grumbach, Bonica, etc don’t claim as such.) But a more focused strategy – mobilizing the Democratic base, speaking directly to material concerns, and resisting the pull toward bland centrism – might have narrowed the margin significantly.Ironically, the aforementioned Pew report concludes the same. “As in prior elections, a change in voters’ partisan allegiances – switching from the Democratic to the Republican candidate or vice versa – proved to be a less important factor in Trump’s victory than differential partisan turnout,” write the authors. “Republican-leaning eligible voters simply were more likely to turn out than Democratic-leaning eligible voters in 2024.”Even so, the CES data may disappoint progressives, if not for the reasons their critics imagine. An analysis of the CES from the Center for Working Class Politics’s Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella found that Democrats who stayed home in 2024 were, on average, less ideologically liberal on hot-button social questions – more skeptical of an assault-rifle ban, receptive to a border wall, less concerned with climate change, and cooler to the language of structural racism – than the Democrats who showed up.Yet, as Abbott and Guastella found, those same non-voters were more economically populist: disproportionately working-class and non-college, while eager for bigger public investment programs, a higher corporate tax rate, and a stronger social safety net.The Democratic non-electorate doesn’t clearly align with progressive orthodoxy. Equally clear, though, is that a blanket lurch toward cultural moderation, absent populist economics, would do little to fire up non-voters who already share many progressive economic instincts.Making decisive claims about non-voters is necessarily difficult. By definition, they are the least likely to respond to pollsters, and their political preferences are often tentative or inconsistent. Yet certain commentators’ eagerness to cast non-voters as Trump supporters reveals more about elite assumptions than about public sentiment.There’s been a rush to cast non-voters as conservatives, not because the evidence demands it, but because the alternative – that Democrats need to speak more directly to the working class – remains uncomfortable for the party establishment. There is no way around the fact that in 2024, those Americans didn’t hear anything worth voting for.

      Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York More

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      Is Trump building a political dynasty? – episode one

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      The United States has had its fair share of political dynasties – the Bushes, the Clintons, the Kennedys … but has Donald Trump been quietly moulding his own family to become a political force long after he leaves office? Who from within the family fold could be a successor to the president? Or does Trump simply see the presidency as an opportunity to enrich himself and promote the Trump family brand?In this first episode, the author Gwenda Blair takes us back through Donald Trump’s family history and how the decisions made by his dad and grandfather led him to where he is today. The reporter Rosie Gray talks us through the role the first lady, Melania Trump, played in supporting her husband. And Ashley Parker profiles the roles of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, as they served as senior advisers to the president during his first term.Archive: ABC News, BBC News, CBS Philadelphia, CNN, the Ellen Degeneres Show, NBC News, PBS Newshour
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More

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      Trump news at a glance: president goes on offensive over NFL and MLB team names

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      Donald Trump has weighed into a new fight – this time with two sports teams. The president wants Washington’s football franchise the Commanders and Cleveland baseball team the Guardians to revert to their former names, which were abandoned in recent years due to being racially insensitive to Native Americans.Trump said on Sunday on Truth Social that: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team …. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past.”Josh Harris, whose group bought the Commanders in 2023, said earlier this year the name was here to stay. The Guardians’ president of baseball operations, Chris Antonetti, indicated before Sunday’s game against the Athletics that there weren’t any plans to revisit the name change.Here is more on this and other key Trump stories of the day:Trump demands Guardians and Commanders change namesDonald Trump has said that he would move to block the Commanders’ plans to build a new stadium at the old RFK Stadium site in Washington DC unless they changed their name. It is unclear if Trump would be able to do so. The RFK Stadium site was once on federal land but Joe Biden signed a bill earlier this year – one of his final acts in office – transferring control to the DC city government for a 99-year term.Trump also posted that the call to change names applied to Cleveland’s baseball team, which he called “one of the six original baseball teams”.Read the full storyIce secretly deports man, 82, from PennsylvaniaAn 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, longtime Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. He and his wife booked an appointment to get it replaced and when he arrived at the office on 20 June he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing.Read the full storyIce chief says he will continue to allow agents to wear masksThe head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said on Sunday he would keep allowing the controversial practice of his officers wearing masks over their faces during their arrest raids.As Trump has ramped up his unprecedented effort to deport immigrants around the country, Ice officers have become notorious for wearing masks to approach and detain people, often with force. Legal advocates and attorneys general have argued that it poses accountability issues and contributes to a climate of fear.Read the full storyUS scientists describe impact of Trump cutsScores of scientists conducting vital research across a range of fields from infectious diseases, robotics and education to computer science and the climate crisis have responded to a Guardian online callout to share their experiences about the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to science funding.Many said they had already had funding slashed or programs terminated, while others feared that cuts were inevitable and were beginning to search for alternative work, either overseas or outside science. So far the cuts have led to a 60% reduction in Johnson’s team, and fear is mounting over the future of 30 years of climate data and expertise as communities across the US are battered by increasingly destructive extreme weather events.Read the full storyTrump fossil-fuel push setting back green progress decades, critics warnEver since Donald Trump began his second presidency, he has used an “invented” national energy emergency to help justify expanding oil, gas and coal while slashing green energy – despite years of scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels has contributed significantly to climate change, say scholars and watchdogs.It’s an agenda that in only its first six months has put back environmental progress by decades, they say.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Trump said he would help Afghans detained in the United Arab Emirates for years after fleeing their country when the US pulled out and the Taliban took power.

      Polls released on Sunday showed falling support among Americans for Trump’s hardline measures against illegal immigration, as the Republican president celebrated six months back in power. Polls from CNN and CBS show Trump has lost majority support for his deportation approach.

      A growing group of African Americans are ditching corporate big-box retail stores that rolled back their DEI programs and instead are shopping at small, minority- and women-owned businesses they believe value their dollars more.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 19 July. More

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      To defeat Trump, the left must learn from him | Austin Sarat

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      In the first six months of his second term as president, Donald Trump has dominated the national political conversation, implemented an aggressive agenda of constitutional reform, scrambled longstanding American alliances, and helped alter US political culture.Pro-democracy forces have been left with their heads spinning. They (and I) have spent too much time simply denouncing or pathologizing him and far too little time learning from him.And there is a lot to learn.Not since the middle of the twentieth century, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt led a constitutional revolution, has any president achieved so much of his agenda in so short a time. But to recognize Trump’s political genius is not to say that it has been put to good use or that he has been a good president.Like others who see “connections and possibilities in circumstances that even people who are smart in conventional ways do not see,” the president has shown himself to be adept at reading the temper of the times, exploiting weaknesses in others, and assembling a coalition of the faithful that others would have never thought possible. What PittNews’ Grace Longworth wrote last September has been confirmed since he returned to the Oval Office.“Trump is not as crazy or dumb as his opposition would like to believe he is,” Longsworth said.Trump’s genius is demonstrated by his ability to transform “calamitous errors into political gold”. In the past six months, he has continued to do what he has done since he first appeared on the national political scene. From then until now, he has convinced millions of Americans to buy into his version of events and not to believe what they see with their eyes.Insurrectionists become patriots. Law-abiding immigrants become threats to America’s way of life. Journalists become “enemies of the people”.It’s magic.Of course, the last six months have not been all smooth sailing for the president, who is now embroiled in a controversy about releasing material about the child sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein.But Trump succeeds because he is undaunted by critics and unfazed by the kinds of barriers that would throw any ordinary politician off their game. When necessary, he makes things up and repeats them until what he says seems to be real.None of this is good for democracy.Trump has done what millions of Americans want done: transform the political system. He has not been afraid to call into question constitutional verities. The greatest, and most dangerous, achievement of the president’s first six months has been reshaping the balance of power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.The president has activated a political movement that has produced what Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman describes as “constitutional moments.” In those moments, fundamental political change happens without any formal change in the language of the Constitution itself.“Normal politics is temporarily suspended in favor of a ‘constitutional politics,’ focused on fundamental principles.” Since January, the Trump administration’s actions have indeed focused the attention of the nation on such principles.Like it or not, Donald Trump is turning the constitution on its head, changing it from a Republican to an authoritarian document. And with every passing day, we see that transformation happening.The Republican majority in Congress seems eager to let the president reshape the constitution and take on functions that it clearly assigns to the legislature. Tariffs, Congress is supposed to decide. Dissolving executive departments, Congress is supposed to decide. War powers, they belong to Congress.But you’d never know any of that from the way the president has behaved since 20 January.The supreme court has followed suit, giving its blessing to his aggressive assertions of executive authority even when they violate the clear meaning of the constitution. The court even severely limited the role of the lower courts by denying them the right to issue nationwide injunctions to stop the president from acting illegally.Beyond Congress and the court, it seems clear that pro-democracy forces did not do all they could have to prepare for this moment. Trump’s opponents have not learned from Trump how to effectively counter his “constitutional moment”.So what can we do?We can learn from Trump the importance of telling a simple, understandable story and sticking to it. Pro-democracy forces need to pick a message and repeat it again and again to drive it home. There is surely no one in America who has not heard the phrase Make America Great Again and does not associate Maga with Trump. We can learn to appeal to national pride and drive home that national greatness requires addressing the daily experiences of ordinary Americans in language of the kind they use.Make America Affordable Again. Make America Work Again for Everyone. Think X, Instagram, and what works on a podcast.Pro-democracy forces can learn to be as determined and undaunted in defense of democracy as the president has been in his assault on it. Take off the gloves. Show your teeth, take no prisoners. Trump has shown that it matters to voters not just what you stand for but also how you go about standing for it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSmile less, swear more.We can learn from the president that political success requires building a movement and not being trapped by the norms and conventions of existing political organizations. Remember Trump has gotten to where he is not by being an acolyte of Republican orthodoxy but by being a heretic.In the age of loneliness, pro-democracy forces need to give people the sense that they are caught up in a great cause.We can learn from the president that if the pro-democracy movement is to succeed, it needs to offer its own version of constitutional reform. Stop talking about preserving the system and start talking about changing it in ways that will make government responsive and connect it to the lives that people live.The six-month mark in his second term is a good moment to dedicate or rededicate ourselves to that work.What’s giving me hope nowEvery Friday since April, I have organized a Stand Up for Democracy protest in the town where I live. People show up.They hold signs and come to bear witness, even if what they do will not convert anyone to democracy’s cause. They want to affirm their belief that democracy matters, and they want to do so publicly.Some are fearful, worried that they will somehow be punished for participating, but they show up.In addition, Harvard University’s willingness to resist the Trump administration’s demands that threatened academic freedom and institutional independence set a powerful example. Whether or not the university reaches an agreement with the administration, Harvard’s example will still matter.It is also true, as Axios reports, that protests against Trump administration policies and allies “have attracted millions in the last few months: Tesla Takedown in March, Hands Off! and 50501 in April, May Day, No Kings Day in June, and Free America on Independence Day”. Another mass event, “Good Trouble Lives On,” occurred on 17 July, “commemorating the fifth anniversary of the death of civil rights leader and former Rep John Lewis”.Those events need to happen more frequently than once a month. But they are a start.Axios cites Professor Gloria J Browne-Marshall, who reminds us that “effective protesting often starts with an emotional response to policy or an event, swiftly followed by strategy … The current movement is reaching that second stage”. In that stage, it has a chance to “‘actually make change in the government’.”I think that the seeds of that kind of opposition have been planted. But there is no time to waste if we are to prevent Trump’s political ingenuity from succeeding in permanently reshaping the institutions and practices of our constitutional republic towards authoritarianism.

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

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      Trump news at a glance: How Robert F Kennedy Jr is cancelling medical science

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      “The current administration is waging a war on science,” warned Celine Gounder, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease expert at New York University in a keynote talk in May to graduates of Harvard’s School of Public Health.That war appeared to enter a new phase in the aftermath of a recent supreme court decision that empowered health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a prominent vaccine sceptic, and other agency leaders, to implement mass firings – effectively greenlighting the politicization of science.Kennedy abruptly cancelled a scheduled meeting of a key health care advisory panel, the US Preventive Services Task Force, earlier this month. That, combined with his recent removal of a panel of more than a dozen vaccine advisers, signals that his dismantling of science-based policymaking is likely far from over.‘Making viruses great again’“Do you enjoy getting sick from preventable diseases?” Arwa Madhawi asks in her Week in Patriarchy column. “Do you have a hankering to make once-declining viruses great again? If so, why not pop over to the US where the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and his anti-vaccine cronies are making a valiant effort to overturn decades of progress in modern medicine.”Measles cases are at their highest rate in 33 years in the US, and while not entirely to blame, Trump’s officials don’t seem bothered. RFK Jr has downplayed the numbers. Kennedy has announced that the federal CDC will stop recommending Covid-19 booster shots for healthy children and pregnant women. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) said in a statement: “It is very clear that Covid-19 infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic and lead to major disability”. Leading medical associations are suing the Trump administration as a result.Two new surveys, published as a research letter in Jama Network Open, have found that only 35% to 40% of US pregnant women and parents of young children say they intend to fully vaccinate their child. That means the majority of pregnant women and parents don’t plan to accept all recommended kids’ vaccines.Read the full storyAttack on ‘heart and brain of the EPA’ The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Friday it is eliminating its office of research and development (ORD) and cutting thousands of staff. One union leader said the moves “will devastate public health” by removing “the heart and brain of the EPA”. The ORD’s work underpins the EPA’s mission to protect the environment and human health.The agency is replacing it with a new office of applied science and environmental solutions that will allow it to focus on research and science “more than ever before”. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin – inevitably, a close Trump ally – said the changes would ensure the agency “is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment, while powering the Great American Comeback”.Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House science committee, called the elimination of the research office “a travesty”. “The Trump administration is firing hardworking scientists while employing political appointees whose job it is to lie incessantly to Congress and to the American people. The obliteration of ORD will have generational impacts on Americans’ health and safety.”Read the full story10 more Gaza hostages may be releasedTen more hostages will be released from Gaza “very shortly”, Donald Trump said at the White House. The news comes as the president continues to push for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.“We’re going to have another 10 coming very shortly, and we hope to have that finished quickly,” Trump said during a dinner with Republican senators. The current Israel-Hamas ceasefire proposal includes terms calling for the return of 10 hostages, and the remains of 18 others. In exchange, Israel would be required to release an unspecified number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.Read the full story‘Arbitrary and completely groundless’The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has reportedly stripped eight of Brazil’s 11 supreme court judges of their US visas as the White House escalates its campaign to help the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro avoid justice over his alleged attempt to seize power with a murderous military coup. In support of the far-right Bolsonaro, Trump has also placed tariffs on Brazil – appalling millions of Brazilians who want to see their former leader held to account.Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won the presidency from Bolsonaro, denounced what he called “another arbitrary and completely groundless measure from the US government”. While the Bolsonaros have hailed Trump’s actions, they also appear to have grasped how the announcement of tariffs has backfired, allowing Lula to pose as a nationalist defender of Brazilian interests and paint the Bolsonaro clan as self-serving “traitors”. Even influential rightwing voices in Brazil have criticised Trump’s meddling in one of the world’s most populous democracies.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The White House is trying to drive out the Federal Reserve chair who is refusing to do the president’s bidding and cut interests rates, as the Fed waits to see how prices respond to Trump’s tariffs. Critics warn deposing Jerome Powell would be a costly bid to pass the buck, Callum Jones writes.

      In post-2024 election polling, defense of democracy was a top issue for Democrats but way down the list for those who voted for Donald Trump: their top concerns were inflation and the economy. Democrats lost the popular vote. If they are to win back voters who abandoned them in the last election, their messaging needs to change, writes Joan C Williams.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 18 July. More