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      Trump wants to rebrand his tax bill as the ‘Working Families Tax Cut’. Don’t be fooled | Steven Greenhouse

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      Just a few months ago, Donald Trump sought to bamboozle the American people into believing that his One Big Beautiful Bill Act – with its trillions in tax cuts for the rich – was a legislative wonder stuffed with one marvel after another. But a Pew opinion poll in August found that millions of Americans have wised up about the measure and now view it as a big, unbeautiful monstrosity.Many Americans have come to realize that Trump’s not-so-beautiful bill – instead of being filled with good things that benefit average Americans – is overflowing with big tax cuts for the wealthy as well as many unfortunate things that will hurt typical working families. As we saw in the town halls held across the US, many Americans are furious about some painful things that Trump and congressional Republicans inserted into the bill: cuts that will make health insurance more expensive, cuts that reduce food assistance, cuts that make it harder for students from working families to afford college. All this is bad news for working families who struggle to make ends meet.President Trump and his administration can’t hide from the fact that many Americans detest the bill — 46% disapprove of it, while just 32% approve (23% say they’re unsure what they think). What’s more, 33% of Americans “strongly disapprove” of the bill.Alarmed that the bill has become a public relations and political disaster, Trump and his allies have embraced a curious strategy to address that problem. Their strategy is not what you might hope – they’re not seeking to amend the bill to make it less painful for average Americans. Rather, their strategy is slick marketing: to simply rebrand the bill, to make it sound better. The White House is telling Republicans to stop calling it the One Big Beautiful Bill and instead call it the nice-sounding Working Families Tax Cut Bill.Unfortunately, that name is another effort to dupe America’s working families. The bill gives 45% of next year’s tax cuts to the highest-earning 5% of US households, while just 1% of the tax cuts go the lowest-earning 20% of households. Under the bill, far more in net tax cuts, $117bn, will go to the wealthiest 1% of households next year than will go to the bottom 60% ($77bn).If the White House and GOP lawmakers want to be accurate, they should call the bill the Billionaires’ and Millionaires’ Tax Cut Act. The bill gives a $13,622 tax cut to households in the top 10% by income, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The top 0.1% of households (those with income of more than $3.3m a year) will receive annual tax cuts of $103,500 on average, according to the Yale Budget Lab.If you’re wealthy enough to have $15m in assets, the bill is very good for you. Under the bill, the first $15m in an individual’s assets are exempt from the estate tax, nearly triple the $5.5m in pre-Trump days. For couples, the first $30m in assets will be exempt. Does anyone think that these sound like working family tax cuts?Frankly, it would be more accurate to call the bill the Working Families Benefits Cut Bill. Containing a painful $1.4tn in Medicaid and other cuts that Republicans insisted on to help finance their tax cuts for the rich, the bill is filled with benefit cuts that hurt working families. Roughly 15 million Americans will lose health coverage and become uninsured because the bill cuts Medicaid funding and reduces subsidies for Obamacare.Other results of the bill: 4 million people will lose some or all of their food aid, while 4.4 million students from working families might lose all or some of their federal aid to go to college.“Who’s getting hit, who’s bearing the cost? It’s people with low and middle incomes, people that the president and many Republican policymakers promised to serve and support in the last election,” said Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.President Trump is correct that the bill contains some tax cuts for working Americans – for instance, it increases the standard income tax deduction by $750 for individuals and $1,500 for couples. The bad news is that for tens of millions of families, the bill’s benefit cuts, especially on health coverage, outweigh the meager tax cuts that the bill gives non-affluent Americans. In many ways, Trump and GOP lawmakers are making this a shell game – they say you’re benefiting from tax cuts, but the fact is that because of the benefit cuts, millions of working families will end up worse off.According to the CBO, Americans in the bottom 10% by income (averaging $23,751) will end up $1,214 worse off on average per year, while the next lowest 10% (averaging $43,092) will end up $392 worse off per year. Those in the third-lowest tenth ($54,453) will receive a mere $23 annual gain. Those in the fourth-lowest decile ($67,637) will see a very modest net gain of $379. Cutting through all these numbers, this shows that for tens of millions of families, the bill is a net loser or a wash.“This really is a big, beautiful bill for billionaires, but for the poor and the working class in this country, you are actually poorer,” said the representative Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House budget committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor those solidly in the middle class, the bill provides modest gains. Middle-class families earning between $86,000 and $108,000 would receive between $800 and $1,200, around 1% of income, the CBO says.Since we’re discussing taxes, we shouldn’t forget Trump’s massive tariffs – they are unarguably a tax, a sales tax on imports that will hit working-class Americans hardest. The reason: the non-wealthy spend a higher share of their income on imports, whether on furniture, electronics or coffee, than the wealthy do. The Yale Budget Lab found that when one combines the effects of Trump’s tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 90% of American families will end up worse off. Seventy per cent of households will face losses ranging from $780 to $2,570 each year.President Trump boasts that two provisions he championed – no tax on tips and no tax on overtime – will be great for working Americans. But those provisions will be far less helpful than people realize. Just 3% of US workers receive tips, and one-third of them earn so little that they don’t pay federal income taxes. So no tax on tips won’t help them.No tax on overtime won’t help workers nearly as much as many think. The deduction applies only to the “half” in “time and a half” overtime pay. So if a worker earns $20 an hour and receives $30 per overtime hour, that worker can deduct only the $10 premium per overtime hour, not the full $30. John Ricco, an analyst at the Yale Budget Lab, says that for the bottom 40% of Americans by income, no tax on overtime will mean “less than a $10 tax cut per year” – “essentially a rounding error”.By seeking to call this bill the Working Families Tax Cut Bill, Trump and the GOP are again seeking to hold themselves out as the best friends of American workers, even though Trump, since returning to office, has taken dozens of anti-worker actions. He halted enforcement of a regulation that protects miners from a debilitating, often fatal lung disease. He has stripped 1 million federal employees of their important right to bargain collectively and has torn up union contracts for hundreds of thousands. He fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving the nation’s top labor watchdog without a quorum to protect workers from companies’ unlawful anti-union actions. Trump is also pushing to end minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers.People who care about working families – whether union leaders, clergy or community leaders – need to make clear to the public that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act hurts many working Americans. It is a bait and switch, telling working families that it’s good for them even as it cuts benefits for millions of working Americans while lavishing big tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      ‘I was reborn’: Cincinnati imam reflects on 10 weeks in Ice custody after release

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      On a recent rain-drenched fall afternoon, the mood at the Clifton Mosque in Cincinnati was one of elation and relief.Last Friday, Ayman Soliman, an Egyptian imam and hospital chaplain who had been detained at a county jail for more than 10 weeks, was released and is expected to have his visa status fully returned.Soliman had been accused by US authorities of a variety of alleged terror-related charges in Egypt and faced deportation having fled the North African country in 2014 after being detained there for his work as a journalist.The legal about-turn marks a major blow to the Trump administration’s aggressive and often illegal deportation campaign that’s seen hundreds of thousands of people forced out of the US, often without due process.Soliman’s ordeal began during a regular check-in with immigration officials in Cincinnati on 9 July, when the 51-year-old from Cairo was subjected to an hours-long interview before being detained by an Ice agent and a representative of the FBI.“Eventually, they said, ‘We’re sorry to tell you that we will detain you.’ I was shocked,” Soliman says.“The Ice officer said that 24 hours ago there was a new order to detain everyone that comes to the Ice offices. He said: ‘I’m so sorry but it’s not my decision.’”Soliman was transported to the Butler county jail and held in freezing conditions for 12 hours in the jail’s waiting room, where he struggled to stay warm wearing just a T-shirt and pants.“The beds were rusted, and the only toilet was in a room with 13 or 14 other people around. It was traumatizing and dehumanizing,” he recalls.Things worsened when Soliman was put in isolation – a cell where he was separated from others and denied nearly all rights granted to other detainees – for five days. He says it followed an argument when Soliman’s request for a quiet space to pray was rejected by a correctional officer who then claimed Soliman failed to comply with a lockdown call, something the imam denies.“There is a multi-purpose room where Christian pastors and Muslim imams come to administer to people, but the officer told me to pray at the gym where people were playing basketball,” he says.“He grabbed my arms, I asked him to take his hands off me, then he pressed an emergency button and in seconds five or six officers rushed in and they handcuffed me.”Correctional officers at Butler county jail have been accused of abusing detainees in the past. In 2020, two men refugees detained by Ice at the jail filed a lawsuit against the jail and an officer, claiming that beatings resulted in serious physical abuse including the loss of teeth.Across the country, 12 people have died while in Ice custody since Trump took office in January.While in isolation, Soliman says he was denied commissary, meaning he could not order paid for food or other items, wasn’t allowed to contact his attorney, or to engage with visitors.“It was one of the most terrible experiences of my life. It was just as brutal as my detention in the torture dungeons in Egypt,” he says.“They treated us like inmates, not detainees.”He says he had one interaction with Richard Jones, the Butler county sheriff known for his long-held anti-immigrant and racist views.“[Jones] said [speaking of Soliman]: ‘I know this guy; he is very famous. You are in the news all the time.’ He didn’t ask me how I was.” According to figures previously provided by Jones, the jail could have expected to net around $5,000 in taxpayer money from Soliman’s detention.He says that nearly everyone he interacted with at the jail had crossed the southern border legally seeking asylum and were awaiting a court appearance to decide their case before being picked up by Ice officers in recent months. Some had been living in the US for decades; one had a son who served in the US Navy.But for Soliman, the threat of being deported was a constant worry.“The jail and its abuse was the least of my worries. My main fear was being put on a plane to Egypt and being tortured until I die. It never left my mind,” he says.“Every day in jail, I felt I was getting closer to that.”He says his experiences over the past several months have taught him that the country has changed, reminding him more of his life in Egypt. The Trump administration’s suing, taking to court and firing of more than a dozen immigration judges in recent months has widened fears that the US is falling deeper into an autocracy.“This government can do whatever they want; if they can take judges to court, if they can fire judges. This government could have sent me home without trial, without immigration court,” he says.“Ayman got his day in court because he could afford good lawyers, thanks to the generosity of the people who know and love him and strangers from around the country,” says Lynn Tramonte, director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.“But there are hundreds of people just like him in immigration jail today, who also don’t deserve to be there. The US government is accusing them of things they aren’t guilty of, and they are facing deportation to countries where they will be harmed.”Soliman’s experience is ultimately a victorious one.“I was reborn. I couldn’t imagine sitting here today, talking freely.” He says he hopes that now his asylum status has been returned that his application for a green card, which would grant him permanent residency, could be completed within several months.“This is a real miracle.”Soliman lost his job as a chaplain at Cincinnati children’s hospital after his asylum status was revoked, but the hospital has since faced a wave of controversy after two chaplains were fired after they spoke out in support of Soliman.“I feel ethically obliged to go back [to work at Cincinnati Children’s hospital] for the families and patients. In the jail, I got 60, 70 letters from families I met [at the hospital]. It was my work as a chaplain that got people to empathize with me. They stood by my side; they fought for me.”Towards the end of a two-hour interview with the Guardian, a man enters the mosque to attend prayers. Seeing Soliman for the first time since before his detention, the worshipper is almost overcome with joy; tears fall down his face.“Alhamdulillah [Thank god], Alhamdulillah, you’re here,” he says. “You’re back.” More

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      They’ve finally gone there: South Park lets rip at Benjamin Netanyahu

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      In the three weeks since South Park last aired, things have changed. The assassination of rightwing pundit Charlie Kirk exploded already fiery political tensions, with the Trump administration and its base embarking on a campaign of retribution the likes of which haven’t been seen since the McCarthy era, and stating, without sufficient evidence, that Kirk’s murder was the result of a wide-ranging leftist plot. Scores of people in the public and private sectors have been punished for commenting on the situation, most notably late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, whose show was briefly pulled off air after the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, put parent company Disney under pressure to do so.Suffice to say, the situation is far too dire to worry about where a cartoon sitcom fits into it all, but South Park is a special case. The first episode of season 27 revolved around the politically motivated cancellation of Stephen Colbert, another late-night talkshow host critical of Donald Trump, while the second directly lampooned Kirk.Many on the right have declared South Park morally complicit in Kirk’s murder, despite the fact that Kirk himself celebrated the parody (going so far as to use its caricature of him as his X profile picture). Repeats of that episode were pulled from Comedy Central, although it remains available to stream on Paramount+. Then, a week to the day after Kirk’s death, it was announced that the new episode of South Park would be postponed. This sparked speculation of censorship, although showrunners Matt Stone and Trey Parker roundly denied this, claiming it was simply a matter of a blown deadline (the result of their famously tight schedule).View image in fullscreenWhile that seems like an all too convenient excuse, Parker and Stone have never backed down from controversy before. Then again, said controversy has never been this furious before, nor hit so close to home for them. The big question ahead of the newest episode was: what would South Park have to say about all this?The answer is … not much.The latest instalment, provocatively titled Conflict of Interest, makes no mention of Kirk, although it does tackle the aftermath in a roundabout way. In one of the two main storylines, Trump, upset over the impending birth of his unholy lovechild with Satan, sets a series of convoluted traps to force an abortion, only for Carr to continually wander into them. By the end of the episode, Carr, badly injured and hosting a brain parasite as a result of toxoplasmosis from being buried in a mountain of cat poo, is at risk of “losing his freedom of speech”.View image in fullscreenDespite avoiding one of the touchiest subjects of the day, South Park steered headlong into another, finally addressing the genocide in Palestine by way of prediction market apps. A bet on one of the platforms – “Will Kyle’s mom strike Gaza and destroy a Palestinian hospital?” – grows so large that Kyle’s mom ends up flying to Israel to put a stop to it.For most of the episode, the outrage is directed at all sides, with Kyle angrily yelling: “Jews and Palestinians are not football teams that you bet on”, and his mother proclaiming: “It’s not Jews versus Palestine, it’s Israel versus Palestine!”However, that outrage is ultimately aimed at a specific party, with Kyle’s mom barging into the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and letting rip: “Just who do you think you are, killing thousands and flattening neighbourhoods, then wrapping yourself in Judaism like it’s some shield from criticism!” If Netanyahu’s comeuppance isn’t as scatologically extreme as Carr’s, it still provides a fleeting moment of catharsis.While not the most outrageous episode of the season, this may be the funniest, with the Looney Tunes-like gags and the prevalence of JD Vance’s impish caricature both earning huge laughs. And if this week’s South Park didn’t quite meet the moment head-on, neither did it back down. It’s good to know that it will continue to go after Trump and his cronies no matter how hot the political temperature grows.

      South Park is on Paramount+ More

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      Trump hangs autopen photo instead of Biden portrait in new presidential gallery

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      President Donald Trump has added a “Presidential Walk of Fame” to the exterior of the White House, featuring portraits of each of the previous commanders-in-chief – except for one.Instead of a headshot of Joe Biden, the Republican incumbent instead placed a photo of an autopen signing the Democrat’s name – a reference to Trump’s frequent allegation that the former president was addled by the end of his term in office and not really the one making decisions.The snub is the latest attempt by Trump to delegitimise a predecessor he routinely belittles, including in front of more than 100 world leaders on Tuesday at the UN general assembly gathering. Trump has never acknowledged his own defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, instead falsely chalking up the outcome to voter fraud.Trump had previously signalled he would represent Biden with an autopen on the walkway. Trump has alleged without evidence that Biden administration officials may have forged their boss’s signature by using the autopen and taken broad actions he was not aware of.He has also cast doubt on the validity of pardons and other documents that Biden signed with an autopen, even though other presidents before him have also relied on the device to sign key papers. A Republican-led House committee is investigating the Biden administration’s autopen use.White House staff sent out a burst of social media posts on Wednesday afternoon gleefully promoting the finished project. The media may get its first in-person glimpse of the display when Trump hosts a dinner on Wednesday night on the new Rose Garden patio that sits adjacent to the West Wing Colonnade on which the portraits hang.The addition is the latest in a series of design changes he has made at the White House since resuming office. The president also added gold flourishes to the Oval Office walls, installed massive new flagpoles on both lawns, replaced the grass in the Rose Garden with patio stone and started construction on a large new ballroom. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Obama says the US caught between two visions of the future as he criticises the president

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      Barack Obama has said the US is in the middle of a “tug of war” between two visions of the future, criticising progressives for becoming “smug” and “complacent” while populists pushed a conservative vision.The former US president said on one side was the progressive view in which change comes through democracy, while the other, driven by populists including Trump, see a return to an older, more conservative worldview.He told an audience in London on Wednesday: “My successor has not been particularly shy about it. That desire is to go back to a very particular way of thinking about America, where ‘we, the people’, is just some people, not all people. And where there are some pretty clear hierarchies in terms of status and who ranks where.”Obama was also critical of progressives who he said became “complacent” and “smug” in the 90s and 00s, “posturing that we believe in all these values because they were never tested. Now they’re being tested”.Obama says Trump linking paracetamol to autism is ‘violence against the truth’Obama said Donald Trump’s claims linking paracetamol to autism in infants is “violence against the truth” that could harm pregnant women if they were too scared to take pain relief.Obama, who was being interviewed by David Olusoga at the O2 Arena, told the audience that Trump’s claims about paracetamol – branded as Tylenol in the US – had been “continuously disproved” and posed a danger to public health.Read the full storyThree immigration detainees shot as Trump jumps to blame DemocratsOne detainee has been killed and two others injured in a shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas, officials said.Authorities have also confirmed that the shooter – named in reports as 29-year-old Joshua Jahn – died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.Trump wrote on social media that he had been briefed on the shooting, calling it “despicable” and that the shell casings contained anti-Ice messaging. He immediately cast blame for the shooting on “radical left Democrats”, instructing them, in capital letters, to “stop this rhetoric against Ice”. There was no indication the shooter had any connection to any organizations, including antifa.Read the full storyEscalatorgate: Trump alleges ‘triple sabotage’ after technical mishaps at UN Trump alleged “triple sabotage” at the United Nations, after the US president was plagued by a series of unfortunate events surrounding his address to the global body. According to Trump, his smooth arrival at the summit in New York on Tuesday was disrupted when the escalator ferrying him and the first lady to the General Assembly Hall “stopped on a dime”. Then, his teleprompter went “stone cold dark”.Stéphane Dujarric, the UN spokesperson, said an investigation indicated that a videographer from the US delegation who had run ahead of the first couple to document their arrival may have “inadvertently triggered the safety function” on the escalatorRead the full storyTrump energy secretary to return billions set aside for green projectsThe US energy secretary, Chris Wright, on Wednesday announced that his department will return to the treasury billions of dollars set aside for green projects, while dodging questions about affordability and grid reliability and claiming international climate policy had not lowered emissions.Read the full storyRolex faces questions over Trump US Open invitation amid tariffs painRolex is facing scrutiny over its “concerning” decision to host Donald Trump in the Swiss watchmaker’s corporate box at the US Open final earlier this month – weeks after the White House imposed steep tariffs on Switzerland.Read the full storyWorld leaders and UN push climate agenda forward despite Trump’s attacksWorld leaders have unveiled new targets to cut planet-heating pollution at the United Nations, in a bid to spur fresh impetus to the beleaguered climate effort a day after Donald Trump called the crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the world”.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The World Health Organization is pushing back against contested claims by the Trump administration that acetaminophen use during pregnancy heightens the risk of autism, further underscoring that no scientific consensus supports such a connection.

      The state superintendent in Oklahoma announced plans to put Turning Point USA chapters in every high school in the state, saying it would counter “radical leftist teachers unions” and their “woke indoctrination”.

      Nearly 100 doctors who have practised at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) issued a mass letter on Wednesday raising “urgent concerns” about Trump administration policies that they said will “negatively affect the lives of all veterans”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 23 September 2025. More

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      Escalatorgate: Trump alleges ‘triple sabotage’ after technical mishaps at UN

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      Donald Trump alleged “triple sabotage” at the United Nations, after the US president was plagued by a series of unfortunate events surrounding his address to the global body.“A REAL DISGRACE took place at the United Nations yesterday,” Trump wrote Wednesday in a 357-word social media chronicle of “Not one, not two, but three very sinister events!”According to Trump, his smooth arrival at the summit in New York on Tuesday was disrupted when the escalator ferrying him and the first lady, Melania Trump, “stopped on a dime”. He expressed relief that the first couple “didn’t fall forward onto the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first”.Then, when he took the green marble podium, his teleprompter went “stone cold dark”.“I immediately thought to myself, “Wow, first the escalator event, and now a bad teleprompter. What kind of a place is this?’” Trump wrote. Adding insult to injury, he recounted a third alleged offense. After being forced to improvise part of his speech to the general assembly, he asked his wife how he had done, and she replied: “I couldn’t hear a word you said.”“This wasn’t a coincidence, this was triple sabotage at the UN,” Trump declared, demanding an “immediate” investigation into the matter, a diplomatic incident so Trumpian it has earned the name “escalatorgate”.View image in fullscreen“All security tapes at the escalator should be saved, especially the emergency stop button. The Secret Service is involved,” Trump’s concluded his post. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”Earlier on Wednesday, the organization responded in a “note to correspondents”, titled “on UN escalators”.Stéphane Dujarric, the UN spokesperson, said an investigation indicated that a videographer from the US delegation who had run ahead of the first couple to document their arrival may have “inadvertently triggered the safety function” designed to prevent people or objects from accidentally getting caught in the mechanism.“As the videographer, who was traveling backwards up the escalator reached the top , the First Lady, followed by President Trump, each mounted the steps at the bottom,” Dujarric said. “At that moment (9:50am), the escalator came to a stop. Our technician, who was at the location, reset the escalator as soon as the delegation had climbed up to the second floor.”Footage showed the 79-year-old president and the 55-year-old first lady stepping onto the escalator at UN headquarters, before it lurched to a stop. Tightening their grip on the handrails, the pair turns around quickly to see what caused them to stall. A moment later, Melania Trump begins to climb the steps, trailed by her husband.Trump’s Wednesday post suggests the president does not accept the UN’s conclusion into the mishap on the moving stairway and believes there was a wider conspiracy afoot.While technical difficulties might have beset his delivery in the General Assembly Hall, Trump’s message was heard loud and clear around the world. In a combative speech, Trump bashed the UN, questioning the purpose of its very existence, and issued a dark warning to European allies that unless they curbed migration, their countries were “going to hell”.During his address, Trump swerved from his prepared remarks to recount his fateful entrance and, in his view, poor treatment at the assembly.“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” Trump said in his Tuesday speech. “If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would have fallen, but she’s in great shape. We’re both in good shape, we’re both still. And then a teleprompter that didn’t work.”However, it seemed unlikely that the audio problem was as bad as Trump made it out to be. Video showed the audience reacting immediately to what Trump was saying, including chuckling when the president declared with a hint of self-pity: “These are the two things I got from the United Nations, a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”Later that evening, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged on Fox News that the elevator stoppage was part of an intentional plot to humiliate the US president.“If we find that these were UN and staffers who were purposefully trying to trip up, literally trip up the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people. And I will personally see to it,” she said.In his lengthy post on Wednesday afternoon, Trump pointed to a report in the Times of London newspaper on Sunday saying that UN staff members had joked that they would turn off the escalators and “tell him they ran out of money” – a jab at the sweeping US funding cuts.“The people that did it should be arrested!” Trump wrote. More

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      Murdoch’s TikTok? Trump offers allies another lever of media control

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      Donald Trump revealed last week the US and China are close to inking a deal to let TikTok continue operating in the US. Details are not final, but should the agreement go through as has been reported, the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels may soon also steer the nation’s most influential social network. The arrangement would gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented.Here’s what we know. Under the known terms of the deal, which Trump declared has the tentative buy-in of Chinese president Xi Jinping, TikTok in the US would get a new group of US investors, led by the US software giant Oracle, which would license TikTok’s vaunted recommendation algorithm and take over its security.Among the other investors, Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday, are media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corporation. Trump said Michael Dell, the CEO of the computer maker Dell, would also be involved.TikTok would get a new seven-member board of directors, six of them Americans. It is a distinct possibility that Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance and Larry’s son, will occupy some of those seats.The MurdochsLachlan Murdoch, the 54-year-old son of 94-year-old Rupert, is executive chair and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News. The Murdoch scion took control of the company following a September legal settlement with his siblings, one of whom, James, reportedly no longer wants anything to do with his father’s conservative empire. The deal for TikTok will likely involve Fox’s parent company investing, rather than Rupert or Lachlan individually, CNN reported.“I hate to tell you this – a man named Lachlan is involved. You know who Lachlan is? That’s a very unusual name, Lachlan Murdoch,” Trump said. “Rupert is probably gonna be in the group, I think they’re gonna be in the group, a couple of others. Really great people. Very prominent people. And they’re also American patriots, they love this country, so I think they’re gonna do a really good job.”Asserting supervision of TikTok would offer the elder Murdoch a mulligan for his abortive ambitions in tech. News Corp purchased Myspace in 2005 for a then-whopping $580m. Three years later, it peaked, becoming the most-visited site in the US. However, the insurgent social network Facebook soon dethroned it, and Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth today amounts to 10 times that of Rupert Murdoch’s, per Bloomberg’s billionaires index.The EllisonsTrump seems to have a fondness for father-son pairs. At the other end of TikTok’s American boardroom may sit Larry and David Ellison, 81 and 42, the founders of Oracle and Skydance Media, respectively.The elder Ellison is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, an enterprise software and cloud-computing company worth nearly $900bn. Ellison himself, who holds roughly 40% of Oracle’s shares, briefly dethroned Elon Musk as the richest person in the world after the company reported superlative earnings earlier this month. He’s a longtime Silicon Valley fixture and Trump donor who hosted a fundraiser for the president at his southern California estate in 2020. He’s known for a jet-setting lifestyle of multiple mega-yachts and the deed to almost all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.The younger Ellison’s company has become an entertainment industry vacuum, sucking up Paramount – which operates CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, Paramount+ and the UK’s Channel 5 and which produces the Mission: Impossible franchise – in August. Hot off the heels of its corporate consummation, Paramount Skydance is now reportedly preparing a majority-cash offer to take over Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN, HBO, DC Comics, the Discovery Channel, HGTV and the Food Network, to name a few.In the months leading up to the merger, CBS News made a series of Trump-friendly moves like settling a lawsuit against 60 Minutes, appointing a Trump ally as an ombudsman and courting “anti-woke” former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss as a potential leader of a changed version of the channel. The moves may serve as a roadmap for how David Ellison would helm TikTok.How powerful would they become?The power centralized in the Murdoch and Ellison families would be enormous should the TikTok deal and David Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros Discovery go through. They would command media outlets that reach both young and old audiences, with high degrees of authority and influence. The only age groups perhaps immune to their sway would be gen X, so suspicious of their parents’ viewing habits, and millennials, just too old for TikTok.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWould this type of consolidation be legal? The Federal Communications Commission’s website is blunt in its anti-monopoly rules when it comes to broadcast television: “FCC rules effectively prohibit a merger between any two of the big four broadcast television networks: ABC, CBS, Fox [Broadcasting Company], and NBC.” The regulation does not pertain to Fox News Channel or CNN, as they require paid subscriptions to view.Still, the rule is instructive. What if the owners of the US’s most powerful cable channels also steer the nation’s most important social network? Would that violate monopoly laws?The answer may lie in a rule change the commission made eight years ago when it eliminated a prohibition on owning both a broadcast station and a daily newspaper in the same region. The reason: “the growth in the number and variety of sources of entertainment, news and information in the modern media marketplace”.If a person can have a town’s TV station and its newspaper, why can’t a billionaire take control of a social network used by hundreds of millions and the president’s favorite channel?Parsing the letter of the FCC’s rules likely does not matter as much as the current currency of high-level US government decisions: Trump’s favor. The president’s takeover of the FCC has already been incredibly successful, establishing a fiat over deals that allows him to pressure networks not under his allies’ control. The supreme court ruled earlier this week that Trump’s firing of the lone Democrat on the commission could stand. Though he denies it, head commissioner Brendan Carr seemed to play a leading role in Disney’s brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC’s airwaves with threats against the network.The landscape of American media is looking very red as Trump’s TikTok deal takes shape. The largest owner of local TV stations in the US, Nexstar, declared fealty to Trump with its decision to no longer air Kimmel’s show, as did local TV titan Sinclair. Now two of the nation’s marquee news networks, CBS and CNN, may follow Fox’s rightwing lead. Online, X has turned from a heterogenous feed into a conservative social network. TikTok may go the same way under its Maga-approved board.At the moment, the Murdochs and the Ellisons must be savoring Trump’s favor. More

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      With Kimmel’s suspension, the FCC chair has made himself Trump’s comedian-in-chief | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Who’s the comedian? Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairperson, pressured the Disney company to indefinitely suspend Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night talkshow host on ABC, for a remark he made about the right wing’s attempts to shape perceptions about the murderer of the far-right political operative Charlie Kirk. (Kimmel is now back on the air.) It was the opening riff of Carr’s stand-up routine.Carr’s choice of venue to issue his threat – a hard-right podcast – indicated the kind of media of which he approves. His pressure against Kimmel is no isolated gesture, but the execution of a calculated plan he himself helped hatch to eradicate critical political speech. But Carr’s exploitation of the death of Charlie Kirk to serve as the trigger for Trump’s repression only succeeded in turning Jimmy Kimmel into a free speech symbol before his return to television on Tuesday.“Free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control,” Carr wrote as an FCC commissioner in 2023. “That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Then, on 17 September, he told the podcast: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.“These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”Now, Carr was fulfilling “the authoritarian’s dream”. He seems indifferent to his duplicity, boldly tossing aside pretense. Dealing with Kimmel, he posed as a stereotypical gangster speaking in clichés from a 1930s movie: “the easy way or the hard way.” Carr seems excited by his own rough language. His display of brass knuckles, however, demolishes his legitimacy to wear a badge. As the violator of free speech, he betrays his office as a protector. He also destroys conservative posturing as the special victim of speech suppression.Carr is using government power to eliminate criticism. He is implementing a policy of censorship he himself authored in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook. Even when he imitates a mobster, he does not issue his threats in a raised voice. His tone does not rise to the histrionics of Stephen Miller. Carr is a zealot of a certain type, the rightwing Leninist with the grim resolve of a commissar, the bureaucrat rigorously checking off boxes – in this case, purging late-night comedians – to fulfill the larger ideological agenda.The operation of Trump’s purge involves not the slightest bit of persuasion, debate or discussion. Carr is executing the will of the leader who is not to be questioned and above all never to be ridiculed. “We’re not done yet” with the changes in “the media ecosystem”, Carr told CNBC on 18 September. He called the erasure of Kimmel a “market correction”. Carr is incapable of comprehending when he is unintentionally funny in a way that is self-undermining. He’s not only Trump’s executioner. He’s Trump’s straight man.Before the identity, let alone the motive, of the Kirk assassin was known, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, raged against “an ideology at war with family and nature”. Weeks before, on Fox News, he had already declared the Democratic party “a domestic extremist organization”. Now, after Kirk’s assassination, taking Miller’s cue, the rightwing site the Federalist stated: “After a long history of condoning, advocating, and participating in political violence, it is time to designate the Democrat party a domestic terrorist organization.”The influential anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo tweeted: “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”JD Vance threatened: “We are working very hard to ensure that the funding networks for leftwing violence, that the radicalization networks for leftwing violence – that if you encourage or fund your fellow Americans or anybody else to commit acts of violence because you disagree with political speech, you are going to be treated like a terrorist organization and we are going to go after you.”Trump went on Fox & Friends to point his finger: “The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy.”All of this occurred before Jimmy Kimmel’s ouster.Meanwhile, gaggles of feverish far-right influencers, whose stock-in-trade is conspiracy theories, tried to debunk one fantasy spinning around the internet that threatened to boomerang on them. Within the Maga hothouse, Kirk had faced backlash in 2019 from the Groypers, led by Nick Fuentes, who once dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and accused Kirk of being too moderate. Kirk later shifted his position to the hard right on immigration. “I’ve noticed people like Charlie Kirk … are now calling for an immigration moratorium,” Fuentes said in June. “That means they want to shut down all immigration. And suffice to say, the Groypers have won. It’s just not even a question at this point.”The theory spread like wildfire that the killer’s cryptic inscriptions on shell casings could be Groyper messages. If they were, he would be an errant rightwing extremist, not a leftwing one. Those etched messages, however, apparently referred to a range of things, including gaming memes. No evidence has emerged that Tyler Robinson, the suspect, had political connections to any group or the involvement of anyone else in his act.But with the far-right’s history of heated factional warfare flaring in the background, Jimmy Kimmel said in his monologue on 15 September : “The Maga gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”Kimmel’s comment condensed, into a line that was not a joke, a complicated and fraught situation, down the rabbit hole of the far right, involving the frenzied Maga effort to pin the blame on the “radical left” and by extension the whole Democratic party, and to deflect scrutiny of their own infighting. Kimmel’s remark assumed a lot of arcane knowledge on the part of his audience.At the same time, the FCC, which Carr chairs, was considering a $6.2bn merger between Nexstar Media, a large owner of TV stations, and the Tegna media company.Within days of Kimmel’s rather innocuous comment, Carr stated that the comedian was “appearing to directly mislead the American public”. Nexstar announced it would no longer broadcast Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Disney followed by suspending him from ABC. Carr praised Nexstar “for doing the right thing”.Ironically, during the Red Scare, in 1950, when Gypsy Rose Lee, soon to be the host of an ABC radio gameshow called What Makes You Tick?, was accused of being a Communist by the American Legion and Red Channels, a conservative publication seeking to root out subversives in the media, ABC executives stood by her. CBS, on the other hand, demanded all of its employees sign a loyalty oath. Gypsy Rose Lee said about the efforts at censorship: “This may be all right for Russia, but I hope not for us.”Sinclair, a rightwing-controlled media outlet that broadcasts ABC shows, announced that suspension of Kimmel was insufficient and that it would pre-empt his program until further notice. But even that was not enough. Sinclair demanded that Kimmel “make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA”. Instead of airing the show, Sinclair said, it would offer to its affiliates a “remembrance” of Kirk, “who boldly and tirelessly defended biblical values and truth as he challenged a new generation to stand firm for Christ”. The piece was sanitized of his racist, nativist, antisemitic and misogynist views, and his assertion that Joe Biden “should honestly be put in prison and/or be given the death penalty for his crimes against America”. Kirk, extolled as an exemplar of free speech and debate, had in fact created a “Professor Watchlist” to blacklist liberal academics across the board. Sinclair made Kirk, touted as an advocate of free speech, into a symbol of its suppression. But, after further stoking the firestorm, Sinclair put its “remembrance” on YouTube and instead ran an episode of Celebrity Family Feud. Once Disney restored Kimmel’s show, Sinclair and Nexstar stated their affiliates would not air it.Carr launched his attack on Kimmel on a podcast called The Benny Show, hosted by Benny Johnson, the former chief creative officer at Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Carr had plunged down a deep rabbit hole of the right with a dubious character.Johnson was fired from BuzzFeed in 2014 after being accused of plagiarism. He was later associated with a political consulting firm called Arsenal Media – “a chaotic working environment, rife with internal bullying, toxic HR practices, and an intense culture of secrecy”, where some contractors said they were not paid, according to an investigative report in the Verge. (Johnson’s own website described him as a co-founder and chief creative officer of the site until April 2022, according to the report, but a spokesperson for Johnson told the Verge in April 2022 that he “is not currently, nor has ever been an owner, executive, or even employee of Arsenal Media”.) Johnson was also exposed last year to be among a group of six rightwing influencers who were funneled $10m from two Russian agents indicted by the justice department. Johnson and the others claimed to have been duped.When Pam Bondi, the attorney general, created an uproar, including on the right, by stating: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Jonathan Karl, the former ABC White House correspondent, asked Trump his reaction.“She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly,” Trump replied to Karl. “You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they will come after ABC. ABC paid me $16m recently for a form of hate speech. Your company paid me $16m for a form of hate speech, so maybe they will have to go after you.” Trump was referring to his suit against ABC for This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos’s comment coming out of the E Jean Carroll trial describing Trump’s sexual violence. It was generally believed that ABC would have won the case, but the prospective threat to the Disney company from the Trump administration prompted its first capitulation.Trump, on his state visit to Britain, slammed Kimmel at a press conference with Keir Starmer, saying the host had been “fired because he had bad ratings” and was “not a talented person”. The old reality-TV host’s jealousy for an actual show-business star shone through. In fact, Kimmel’s show was rated No 1 with the highly valued young adult demographic.On Air Force One, Trump suggested that the FCC look into revoking the licenses of other networks, saying: “They give me only bad publicity or press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”If there are further attempts at impertinent humor, they will be met with even more severe punishments. Will Carr issue a full report to meet the crisis, perhaps to a newly created House committee on the weaponization of humor, the Trump era version of the Red Scare’s House un-American activities committee? Will witnesses be subpoenaed from the writers’ room? Will comics be permitted to sign confessions regretting their past gags? What about the audience members, fellow travelers all, who laughed? An inquisition of comedy would take everyone’s minds off the Epstein files. Are you now or have you ever been a comedian? No joking! That’s an order – an executive order.

      Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist More