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      Companies that spinelessly follow Trump’s cuts to DEI will pay a heavy price | Miriam González Durántez

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      Organising a women’s networking event in the US has become an act of defiance. Companies with equality-driven agendas risk losing government contracts. Some are receiving McCarthy-like letters asking them to confirm that they have no diversity policies. Activities designed to support women, including healthcare research, are being threatened, and companies are backtracking on former commitments. Women’s networking events, the gathering of diversity data and targeted training are being questioned. And some companies are requesting that charities focused on women and girls consider changes to their programmes in order to navigate the current climate. The one I founded, Inspiring Girls, has already been asked to “include men as role models”.This anti-diversity wave isn’t just a social backlash to the many excesses of wokeness – it is politically orchestrated and driven. It crystallised in 2021, when the senator Josh Hawley devoted his entire keynote speech at the second National Conservatism Conference to “reclaiming masculinity”, calling for boys (not girls) to be taught competitiveness, strength, honesty and courage – as if those were only male values. Since then, the movement has reached the highest offices of power: the White House is its headquarters and its commander-in-chief is Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who promised last year to tackle “anti-white racism” if Trump won a second term.The anti-diversity brigade has no shortage of money or allies: several “tech bros” (whether out of conviction or FOMO) have joined in – as have tech venture capitalists and other Maga financiers. These are men who operate in fields dominated almost exclusively by other men and who wield enormous wealth and influence, yet they often cast themselves as victims. They hide their anti-diversity stance under the disguise of meritocracy.On the progressive side, there is a movement claiming that it is actually boys – particularly white working-class ones – rather than girls who are “in crisis”. It is led by the American Institute for Boys and Men, which last week received a $20m grant from Melinda French Gates. They argue that boys lag behind girls in education and employment. It is true, of course, that many of the manufacturing jobs that many young men used to rely on are vanishing due to automation and tech (ironically, for the benefit of mostly male tech moguls). Unfortunately, however, this well-meaning movement is fuelling the anti-diversity brigade’s narrative – because they can now claim that even progressives admit it is white men who are suffering.The Trump administration has not yet imposed specific obligations on businesses to withdraw diversity programmes beyond companies who have contracts with the government – including, now, some companies across the EU, but many are taking spontaneous actions. Some companies are doing so because their diversity policies were just for show, while others are simply acting out of fear. The trend is clear: many are eliminating references to diversity and equality from their websites and in their reporting; others are reneging from aspirational targets, stopping data-gathering on recruitment and promotions, and dismantling training programmes.Some of the companies that are backtracking have headquarters in the UK or Europe. And many of the US tech companies and funds that are leading the diversity backlash have subsidiaries and offices on this side of the Atlantic. Their actions are in straightforward conflict with the letter and the spirit of British and EU legislation on equality, such as EU corporate sustainability reporting rules or equal opportunities and equal pay directives.And yet the equality ministries in the British and other European governments – and in the European Commission – have remained largely silent. Most equality ministries and agencies are led by herbivorous politicians and officials who favour performative programmes over meaningful action. Confronting Trump is far too scary for them, which is why they have not set the limits of what companies can and cannot do, whether specifically or in general guidelines.Over time, it is possible the anti-diversity movement will yield some positives, as it could drive companies who continue to believe in diversity towards more meaningful, effective and data-based policies. Besides, in a litigation-led country such as the US, it is only a matter of time before the courts impose some limits on government-led anti-diversity intimidation. When they do, the backlash against companies that have acted spinelessly will have its own consequences.But the UK and the rest of Europe cannot be passive spectators waiting for the pendulum to swing again. Our equality authorities should counteract Trump’s raid on diversity by providing clear official guidance to companies on what they can and cannot do – it is their legal and moral duty to do so. America First should not mean America Everywhere when it comes to the fundamental principles of diversity, equality and inclusion.

      Miriam González Durántez is an international trade lawyer and the founder and chair of Inspiring Girls

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      Trump signs proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard

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      Donald Trump signed a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard University, the White House said on Wednesday.The order would suspend for an initial six months the entry into the US of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs at Harvard. Trump declared that it would jeopardize national security to allow Harvard to continue hosting foreign students.The proclamation is the US president’s latest attempt to choke the Ivy League school from an international pipeline that accounts for a quarter of the student body, and a further escalation in the White House’s fight with the institution.“I have determined that the entry of the class of foreign nationals described above is detrimental to the interests of the United States because, in my judgment, Harvard’s conduct has rendered it an unsuitable destination for foreign students and researchers,” Trump wrote in the order.Trump’s proclamation also directs the US state department to consider revoking academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard students who meet his proclamation’s criteria.Harvard in a statement called Trump’s proclamation “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”“Harvard will continue to protect its international students.”Trump singled out Harvard’s connections with China as reason for cutting off the university from foreign students. The proclamation said Harvard was linked to research that “could advance China’s military modernisation”.The statement also said Harvard was considered the top “party school” for Chinese Communist party bureaucrats and noted that the daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, attended in the early 2010s.In the early 2000s, Harvard ran a “China Leaders in Development” programme in conjunction with Tsinghua University in Beijing for Chinese government officials.“I don’t think this is going to benefit US universities at all,” said a Chinese undergraduate student with an offer to study at Harvard on a master’s degree starting next term who asked that his name be withheld. “It’s causing normal people, us students, a lot of anxiety.”The Trump administration has been engaged in a tense standoff with Harvard, the US’s oldest and wealthiest university, freezing billions of dollars in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax-exempt status, prompting a series of legal challenges.Harvard argues the administration is retaliating against it for refusing to accede to its demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarvard sued after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on 22 May announced her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which allows it to enrol foreign students.Her action was almost immediately temporarily blocked by a Boston court. On the eve of a hearing before her last week, the department changed course and said it would instead challenge Harvard’s certification through a lengthier administrative process.Trump’s order on Wednesday invokes a different legal authority than the earlier move by the Department of Homeland Security. The legal justification for the ban, Trump said, are sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “which authorize the President to suspend entry of any class of aliens whose entry would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”.Trump officials have repeatedly raised the stakes and sought new fronts to pressure Harvard, cutting more than $2.6bn in research grants and moving to end all federal contracts with the university. The latest threat has targeted Harvard’s roughly 7,000 international students, who account for half the enrolment at some Harvard graduate schools.“President Trump wants our institutions to have foreign students, but believes that the foreign students should be people that can love our country,” the White House said in a fact sheet about the proclamation.Wednesday’s two-page directive said Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries” including China.As well as the spat with Harvard, the White House has pledged to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students across the country, especially those with links to the CCP or in “critical fields”. More

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      Trump orders inquiry into Biden’s actions as president over ‘cognitive decline’ reports

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      Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into Joe Biden’s actions as president, alleging top aides masked his predecessor’s “cognitive decline”.The investigation will build on a Republican-led campaign already under way to discredit the former president and overturn some of his executive actions, including pardons and federal rules issued towards the end of his term in office.Biden issued a statement dismissing the idea of a cover-up as “ridiculous”. “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”GOP lawmakers on Wednesday sought testimony from five of Biden’s top aides and advisers, including his first chief of staff, about his “mental and physical faculties”. The House oversight committee headed by the Republican representative James Comer of Kentucky was already speaking to four others, according to reports from CBS News.A separate inquiry was launched on Tuesday by Ed Martin, a justice department attorney, into clemencies Biden issued in his final days in office to family members as well as death row inmates.Biden’s cognitive abilities during his presidency have been a Republican talking point for several years and Trump has frequently suggested that some of Biden’s actions are invalid because his aides were usurping presidential authority to cover up what Trump claims is Biden’s cognitive decline.Biden, 82, is not significantly older than Trump who turns 79 this month and has also faced questions about cognitive decline. But scrutiny about Biden’s health intensified after a disastrous debate performance going into the 2024 election that led to him dropping out.Concerns about his age and mental acuity have come into sharper focus in recent weeks following the disclosure that the former president was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Reporting in numerous US media outlets and a recent book co-authored by Jake Tapper, a CNN host, have also revealed that top Democrats and people in Biden’s inner circle had serious misgivings about his ability to do the job of president. The book is referenced in an announcement about the House oversight committee’s expanded inquiry.In a memo, Trump took aim at Biden’s use of an autopen – a mechanical device that is used to replicate a person’s authentic signature, as used by presidents for decades – to sign executive actions. The administration’s investigation will focus on “who ran the United States while President Biden was in office”, according to the memo.“This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history,” Trump wrote. “The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.”Trump directed Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and David Warrington, the White House counsel, to handle the investigation.Comer requested transcribed interviews with five Biden aides, alleging they had participated in a “cover-up”.“These five former senior advisers were eyewitnesses to President Biden’s condition and operations within the Biden White House,” Comer said in a statement. “They must appear before the House oversight committee and provide truthful answers about President Biden’s cognitive state and who was calling the shots.”Interviews were requested with White House senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, former deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed and Steve Ricchetti, a former counsellor to the president.Comer reiterated his call for Biden’s physician, Kevin O’Connor, and former senior White House aides Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal, Ashley Williams and Neera Tanden to appear before the committee. He warned subpoenas would be issued this week if they refused to schedule voluntary interviews.Democrats have called the investigations a distraction from issues with the current administration. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, the former president Bill Clinton said he believed Biden was mentally sound.“The only concern I thought he had to deal with was: ‘Could anybody do that job until they were 86?’” Clinton said. “We’d had several long talks. I had never seen him and walked away thinking ‘He can’t do this any more.’”With Associated Press More

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      What is Trump’s new travel ban, and which countries are affected?

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      Nearly five months into his second term, Donald Trump has announced a new sweeping travel ban that could reshape the US’s borders more dramatically than any policy in modern memory. The restrictions, revealed through a presidential proclamation on Wednesday, would target citizens from more than a dozen countries – creating a three-tiered system of escalating barriers to entry.The proclamation represents one of the most ambitious attempts to reshape the US’s approach to global mobility in modern history and potentially affects millions of people coming to the United States for relocation, travel, work or school.What is a travel ban?A travel ban restricts or prohibits citizens of specific countries from entering the United States. These restrictions can range from complete visa suspensions to specific limitations on certain visa categories.Trump’s day one executive order required the state department to identify countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries”.His travel ban proclamation referenced the previous executive order, as well as the recent attack by an Egyptian national in Boulder, Colorado, upon a group of people demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.What is a presidential proclamation?A presidential proclamation is a decree that is often ceremonial or can have legal implications when it comes to national emergencies.Unlike an executive order, which is a directive to heads of agencies in the administration, the proclamation primarily signals a broad change in policy.Which countries are listed in the travel ban?The following countries were identified for total bans of any nationals seeking to travel to the US for immigrant or non-immigrant reasons:

      Afghanistan

      Myanmar

      Chad

      Republic of the Congo

      Equatorial Guinea

      Eritrea

      Haiti

      Iran

      Libya

      Somalia

      Sudan

      Yemen
      He’s also partially restricting the travel of people from:

      Burundi

      Cuba

      Laos

      Sierra Leone

      Togo

      Turkmenistan

      Venezuela
      Why were these countries chosen?The proclamation broadly cites national security issues for including the countries, but specifies a few different issues that reach the level of concern for the travel ban.For some countries, such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Venezuela, the proclamation claims that there is no reliable central authority for issuing passports or screening and vetting nationals traveling out of the country.For other countries, such as Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Burundi, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo and Turkmenistan, the proclamation cites a high rate of immigrants overstaying their visas in the US.Finally, there are several countries that are included because of terrorist activity or state- sponsored terrorism, including Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and Cuba.How does this travel ban differ from the one in 2017?The 2017 ban initially targeted seven predominantly Muslim countries before expanding to include North Korea and Venezuela. This new proclamation is broader and also makes the notable addition of Haiti.During his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Trump amplified false claims made by his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the pets of the people that live there”. The proclamation falsely claims that “hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian aliens flooded into the United States during the Biden administration” and this “influx harms American communities”. In fact, about 200,000 Haitians were granted temporary protected status, which gives legal residency permits to foreign nationals who are unable to return home safely due to conditions in their home countries.Also notable are the restrictions on Afghans, given that many of the Afghans approved to live in the US as refugees were forced to flee their home country as a result of working to support US troops there, before the full withdrawal of US forces in 2021. The agreement with the Taliban to withdraw US troops was negotiated by Trump during his first term.Last month, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem announced “the termination of temporary protected status for Afghanistan”, effective 20 May. More

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      We in the cultural sector must stand up to Trump’s attacks – if not now, when? | Gus Casely-Hayford

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      In one of his recent Truth Social posts, Donald Trump appeared to fire Kim Sajet – the fearless and utterly brilliant director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The president used his social media platform to claim that Sajet’s support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) made her unsuitable for her role. “Upon the request and recommendation of many people, I am hereby terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery”, Trump wrote. “She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly.”Where to start? By now, we all know the arts has become the terrain for a brutal proxy battle for hearts and minds. A culture war 2.0, where not just reputations are at stake, but institutions, whole sectors and ways of thinking. But I am hoping that even Trump’s support base have begun to grow a little bored with these attacks on figures and institutions in the cultural sector. The culture war has moved beyond farce into the deeply tragic.I am sure even many of the president’s most loyal supporters know deep down that the Smithsonian (a vast complex of 21 museums) is a genuine force for good, an institution that represents so much of the US at its very best. And like the Kennedy Center, the cultural institution that Trump took control of earlier this year, or the universities his administration has attacked, the Smithsonian is a fish in a barrel: easy to bully, its financial destiny in significant part tied to public funding, with limited scope to defend itself. This contrived political theatre damages critical institutions, threatens the careers of talented, dedicated people, and its repercussions will be deep and long-lasting.Good museums are not sleepy institutions trapped in heritage-aspic. Across its 178-year history, the Smithsonian has consistently evolved to reflect ambient change and address public need. Like many other national museums around the world, these changes, particularly in recent years, have been driven by an aspiration to engage and enfranchise, to broaden audiences and to catalyse national conversations. I would have thought that seeking to give value back to a greater number of the population is uncontroversial. Institutions this important, mostly sponsored by the public, must simply, continually, work to be ever more universal, inclusive and open. Left or right, that has value. In times like these, when we are, as citizens of western democracies, so riven and divided, the arts have a job to do of being a space for inclusive debate.But the truth is that DEI isn’t some new-fangled indulgence. That drive to be inclusive is what good museums were created to deliver. Twenty-five years ago, I began my career at the British Museum. I still remember reading its founding purpose for the first time. The British Museum was created for “all studious and curious persons”. I remember thinking that the word that does the really hard work in that statement is “all”. The British Museum was created in the mid-18th century around an inclusive imperative, around the idea that we might all hope to find ourselves reflected in its spaces and concerns.Its founders must have recognised the powerful need for a national museum: it was created at a time when Britain was going through a period of existential anxiety, when Scots were rebelling; the country needed a unifying narrative. I am sure the British Museum’s founders knew exactly what they were doing when they committed the institution to that beautifully enfranchising ambition of being for us all. And yes, I know museums have so often failed miserably to live up to these inclusive objectives, but we must never stop trying, nor relinquish the basis on which the public can hold us to account.Universities and museums are vital for healthy societies, and their independence, their bravery, their sometimes maddening honesty, underpins so much that is important. We undermine that at our peril. I spent a number of treasured years as a Smithsonian museum director and fell for its ethos and its dedicated people. It was founded on an ambition to propagate “the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. It was created to enable transformational change through sharing and empowering US citizens with knowledge, with truth. I cannot think of a time when this has been more important.It is unclear whether Trump has the authority to fire Sajet. What is clear is that his move is designed to demoralise her and all my former Smithsonian colleagues. That’s why, directing a different museum now, across the Atlantic, I feel moved to write. We in the cultural sector everywhere need to stand up and be counted, we need to celebrate Kim Sajet, we need to not retreat from diversity here in Britain. To my former colleagues, I say that speaking the truth and having the courage to do so when it is difficult does not make you unsuitable for your roles in a demographically complex democracy; it is probably the most important aspect of what we are called upon to do. It is easy writing the diversity action plan, but having the moral courage to stand up for those principles when they are needed – that is heroic.

      Gus Casely-Hayford is a curator, cultural historian, broadcaster and lecturer who is currently the director of V&A East More

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      Trump keeps being overruled by judges. And his temper tantrums won’t stop that | Steven Greenhouse

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      It’s hard to keep track of all the temper tantrums that Donald Trump has had because he’s so ticked off that one judge after another has ruled against his flood of illegal actions. In seeking to put their fingers in the dike to stop the US president’s lawlessness, federal judges have issued a startling high number of rulings, more than 185, to block or temporarily pause moves by the Trump administration.Livid about all this, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has railed against “judicial activism”, while Trump adviser Stephen Miller carps about a “judicial coup”. As for Trump, the grievance-is-me president has gone into full conniption-mode, moaning about anti-Trump rulings and denouncing “USA-hating judges”. On Truth Social, he said: “How is it possible for [judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP’? What other reason could it be?”Trump is acting like the 10-year-old bully who pummeled a dozen classmates in the schoolyard, but when his teacher called him out for his thuggishness, he burst into tears and screamed: “This is so unfair! Why are you picking on me?”A word of advice to Trump: you should realize that dozens of judges keep ruling against you because you have flouted the law more than any previous president and because you and your flunkies keep misinterpreting and stretching the nation’s laws far beyond their meaning.Take Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, when he announced steep, across-the-board tariffs against 57 countries. On that day, Trump became the first president to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose tariffs. To Trump’s dismay, three judges on the US court of international trade unanimously ruled that he had overstepped his authority and gone far beyond what that 1977 law allows presidents to do. The trade court wrote that the constitution gives Congress, not the president, power over tariff policy and that the 1977 law didn’t give Trump “unbounded” authority to impose tariffs.After that 28 May ruling, Trump’s latest tantrum began.Then, there’s his chest-thumping, cold-hearted rush to expel as many immigrants as possible. To accomplish that, Trump became the first president to invoke the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act in peacetime. twisting that law’s language to declare that several dozen gang members from Venezuela constitute a war-like invasion force, similar to an enemy army, who could therefore be deported without due process. But several sane, sober judges told Trump that he is full of it. There’s no war-like invasion here.And then there’s Trump’s effort to stomp on several prestigious law firms that have done things or hired people he doesn’t like. Trump became the first president to essentially put a gun to various law firms’ heads to try to make them submit to him. He sought to undermine those firms’ business with astonishingly vengeful executive orders that not only said that their lawyers couldn’t enter federal buildings and would lose their security clearances, but that their corporate clients might lose their federal contracts. And then there was the unspoken threat that Trump would block corporate deals that those firms’ lawyers were working on. This is poisonous stuff, punishing law firms for doing what our legal system has long called on firms to do: represent clients, even unpopular ones (even ones Trump doesn’t like).Here, Trump was engaging in a shakedown, in effect saying: “That’s a nice law firm you have. It’s a shame if something happens to it. (So you’d be smart to submit to my demands.)” Again, several judges told Trump he’s full of it, that the law firms hadn’t done anything wrong to warrant such illegal shakedown efforts.There are cases galore in which judges found that Trump acted illegally. Judges have provisionally blocked his push to bar international students from attending Harvard and ordered the release of several immigrant graduate students his administration arrested. Judges have ruled against Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education, his freezing up to $3tn in funding for the states and his firing thousands of federal civil servants.Hating to see judges rule against his boss, Stephen Miller absurdly asserted: “We are living under a judicial tyranny,” while Leavitt carped that judges have “usurp[ed] the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him”. (What mandate? Trump didn’t even receive 50% of the vote, beating Kamala Harris by a mere 1.5 percentage points. Nor did Americans vote for Trump’s tariff chaos or his all-out war against universities.)What we’ve heard from Trump (and mouthpieces Leavitt and Miller) is dangerous stuff. Trump is essentially rejecting the idea of judicial review. Like many authoritarian rulers, he hates having judges weigh whether his actions have violated the law. Trump forgets that under the constitution, judges (not the president) are the umpires who rule whether the president or Congress is following or flouting the law. As Ty Cobb, a former lawyer for Trump, said: “Trump’s attack on the judges is an attempt to undo the separation of powers. It’s an attempt to take what is three coequal branches and make it one dominant branch.”Trump’s attacks against the judiciary are dangerous in another way – they have literally endangered judges’ safety. In the five months before 1 March, 80 judges received threats, but after Trump’s tirades against judges began to crescendo in February, the number of threats soared: more than 160 judges received threats in the six weeks after 1 March. On Memorial Day, Trump loosed another rant, calling judges who ruled against him “monsters who want our country to go to hell”.With these diatribes, Trump is seeking to delegitimize the judiciary and turn the public against judges, just as his unrelenting attacks against the news media have helped cause many people to lose faith in the media, no matter that many news organizations are as accurate and fair-minded as ever (and far more truthful than Trump).Trump’s war against the judiciary has taken another form – his administration has evaded, skirted and ignored numerous judicial orders – stonewalling a judge’s request for information in an immigration case, failing to comply with the US supreme court’s call to “facilitate” the return of a wrongly deported immigrant, dragging its feet in restoring funding that had been illegally frozen.After the trade court’s ruling, Leavitt griped that judges issued more “injunctions in one full month of office, in February, than Joe Biden had in three years”. Leavitt is blind to the obvious reason for this – Trump, in churning out more than 150 executive orders, a record number – has far too often violated the law and the constitution with abandon, while Biden was far more scrupulous in complying with the law.Trump and cronies should recognize that there’s a very simple way to get judges to stop overruling his actions. All Trump has to do is stop taking all these illegal, vindictive actions and stop issuing all these destructive, lawless executive orders. What’s more, considering that Trump once tweeted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he needs to stop acting like a modern-day king or Napoleon who is above the law.

      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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      ‘This isn’t just about Trump’: the Rev William Barber arrested after prayer-protest against Republican-led budget

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      A police officer’s sense of timing seemed to illuminate the Rev William Barber’s moral mission with startling clarity.During a prayer vigil on Monday in the Capitol Rotunda, close to the very heart of US democracy, Barber was lamenting that Congress starts each day with its own prayers to the Almighty even while preying on the poor. A Capitol police captain, John Hersch, serendipitously choose that very moment to intervene.“Your activity right now is taking the form of a demonstration,” Hersch told Barber and an accompanying gathering of clergy. “It is unlawful to demonstrate in the Capitol Rotunda. If you do not cease your demonstration at this time, there is a possibility you will be placed under arrest.”Moments later, after two further warnings, Barber and seven accomplices – standing in front of the portrait of three 19th-century women’s suffrage campaigners – were arrested as police sealed off the Rotunda.The arrests marked the climax of the latest Moral Monday protest organised by Repairers of the Breach, a group founded by Barber that’s trying to derail Donald Trump’s planned tax and spending bill on the grounds that it will slash vital health and social services to lower-income Americans.It was the third Moral Monday Barber had led at the Capitol since April – and the third time he and his cohorts had been arrested.Barber, a social activist and founding director of Yale Divinity School’s centre for public theology, had earlier led a rally outside the US supreme court attended by an estimated 2,000 protesters.As a band belted out gospel songs, demonstrators held signs with slogans such as “Slashing the safety net is moral murder” and “Don’t cut Snap for 40 million poor people.”Wearing a white robe emblazoned with the words “Jesus was a poor man,” Barber – the son of civil rights workers who campaigned for racial desegregation – enjoined demonstrators to crusade against legislation that the US president has termed his “big, beautiful bill” and deemed essential to extending his 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire this year.The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the bill last month by a single vote, 215 to 214. It now goes forward to the Senate against a chorus of criticism over its potential impact on the most vulnerable.Passage would result in 13.7 million people losing access to Medicaid and health insurance, Barber said.“This bill represents the worst kind of evil, which is the love of money … the root of all evil,” he said “This isn’t just about Trump. Two hundred and fifteen Republicans in the House voted for this bill – and now every senator is going to decide whether they’re going to vote for the ‘we’re all going to just die’ approach to politics.”Barber was referring to remarks by Joni Ernst, a Republican senator for Iowa, who faced criticism for telling a town hall last week that “we’re all going to die” after a constituent warned that health cuts could result in some people dying.Ernst doubled down by issuing a mock “apology” filmed in a cemetery, saying: “For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.”Barber compared Ernst’s rhetoric with justifications used by slaveowners.“That’s the same language that slave masters used to tell slaves,” he said in an interview. “They would say: ‘Don’t fight for freedom, but believe in Jesus so that in the eternal life …’“It’s so cynical. What she said was one of the most contradictory misinterpretations of faith I’ve ever heard. It’s theological malpractice.“As Dr [Martin Luther] King once said, we’re not talking about over yonder. We’re talking about over here and people need healthcare over here. People need food over here. For her to bring up religion and bring up Jesus – if Jesus did anything, he provided everybody he met free healthcare. He never charged a leper, or a sick person, or a blind person, for their healing.”The Moral Monday protests have been adapted from similar demonstrations Barber started in North Carolina in 2013, following the election of rightwing Republican Pat McCrory as governor. The protests lasted two years, recalled Barber, resulting in thousands of arrests for civil disobedience but also spurring thousands more to register to vote.As protests against Trump ramp up, Barber is vowing to make Moral Mondays a regular feature of the landscape of dissent.“Moral Monday is not a one-time event,” he said. “If this budget passes the way it is, it will have a negative impact on this country for 10 years. It could possibly not be fully reversed for up to 50 to 60 years. This is serious business.”The protests are likely to expand to encompass a broader pro-democracy agenda. “Our role is not just the budget passing or not passing, but mobilizing poor and low-wage folk. We stand against any attacks on voting rights, on public education, [or] on healthcare,” said Barber.“Poor and low-wage people now represent 30% of the electorate in this country, and in battleground states, over 40%,” he said, making them the largest potential expansion for voting power in the country.In an acknowledgment of Moral Monday’s growing significance, this week’s rally was addressed by Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the progressive Indivisible movement, which spearheaded nationwide Hands Off protests in April that drew millions of participants.Levin praised protesters for having the courage to overcome fear.“People see us organized, and they say, wow, you are fearless,” he said. “Oh no. If you are fearless in this moment, you’re not paying attention. The authoritarians over there, they’re taking over our democracy.”But congressional Republicans, too, felt fear, he said. “They are projecting strength right now. They’re acting as if this is inevitable. They’re acting as if they have the power, you know, passing a bill through the House in the middle of night. [But] that’s not strength, pushing it through before the public can comment on it“The truth is, they’re terrified. They are terrified their voters are going to see what they’re doing. They’re terrified they’re going to lose their majority. And you know what? They should be terrified.” More