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      in US Politics

      Trump has dragged the US to the abyss and Nigel Farage would do the same to Britain. Here’s how to stop him

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      The march towards the darkness is becoming a sprint. In the US, warnings about the autocratic ambitions of Donald Trump that were once dismissed as hyperbole and hysteria now seem, if anything, too mild. Faster than most imagined, he has moved to weaken institutional checks on his power – whether the courts, the universities, the civil service or the press – and now has set to work gagging his critics, even, it seems, to outlaw large swathes of the opposition.This week saw the suspension by a major broadcasting network, Disney-owned ABC, of a late-night talkshow, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, following remarks Kimmel had made about the killing of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Kimmel did not criticise Kirk himself – an act now considered all but blasphemous in the US – but rather Republicans’ reaction to his murder, especially their eagerness to “score political points from it”.That was enough to prompt Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission – the body that grants, or revokes, licences to broadcast – to come on like a wannabe Tony Soprano, all but cracking his knuckles as he said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” The threat worked: Kimmel is off the air.Of course, this is no one-off. Trump is also trying to cow the US’s biggest newspaper, filing a $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times, accusing it of “spreading false and defamatory content”. The NYT has the resources to resist, but smaller US papers will have got the message. They could hardly be blamed if they now pull their journalistic punches, if only because they do not have the money to pay for a protracted legal battle against a billionaire president.But the Trump administration is not confining its assault to the media. The Kirk killing has handed it an opportunity to crack down on dissent itself. Witness the promise Trump aide Stephen Miller made this week – on the Charlie Kirk podcast – to take on those left-of-centre organisations whose “messaging” is “designed to trigger and incite violence”. It is hardly a stretch to assume that Miller will define that category very broadly, so that it sweeps up most of those who express opposition to Trump. If that seems alarmist, recall that, even before Kirk was killed, Miller was calling the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation”.View image in fullscreenIn the UK, we like to think we can watch all this with, if not smug distance, then a measure of relief. It’s true that we are a long way from the precipice to which Trump has taken the US. But last week between 110,000 and 150,000 Britons took to the streets of London, heeding the summons of the rightwing agitator and serial convict who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson.It’s worth stressing that this was not a Reform or Conservative rally that was hijacked by Robinson. This was his event. Britons know who Robinson is and what he represents – and yet up to 150,000 of them marched behind him. They were undeterred by those who had labelled it a far-right protest and, indeed, by the racist rhetoric that came from the platform. Britain has an admirable history of confining the far right to the margins, ensuring that it had not, until now, demonstrated this kind of strength in numbers. So last Saturday should be understood as a watershed.Not least because of one speech in particular. Elon Musk, via video link, told the crowd “violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.” He added that the Labour government, democratically elected a year ago, needed to be brought down. This was one of the most powerful men in the world issuing a call that may not have broken the law but which seemed to give approval in advance for rightwing political violence in Britain.And yet the British prime minister did not rush to condemn this incendiary intrusion into our politics. Indeed, Downing Street said nothing at all until prompted by reporters’ questions, and MPs’ demands, the following day. We often fault those guilty of overreaction. But, at a moment like this, underreaction is the greater sin.The polls are telling a very stark story. Absent a dramatic shift, a party of nationalist populism is on course to beat both Labour and the Conservatives at the next election, and very probably form the next government. Nigel Farage may be no fan of Tommy Robinson, but he is Trump’s loudest UK cheerleader; he does not condemn the current US gallop towards authoritarianism but rather stands alongside those responsible for it. If we want to prevent Farage doing to Britain what Trump is doing to the US, we need to halt the advance of Reform.The first move in that effort is to puncture Farage’s core claim: that he somehow speaks for the British people, that his views reflect the “commonsense” views of the silent majority. It’s not true. On issue after issue, including those that define him, Farage is an outlier, articulating the positions of a noisy but often small minority.He was the chief advocate of Brexit, a decision so calamitous that only 31% now say it was the right move. Indeed, a healthy majority, 56%, favour its reversal and want to rejoin the EU. Farage is on the wrong side of that number.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has long banged the drum for leaving the European convention on human rights. If you read the rightwing papers, you would assume that is now a majority view. Wrong. Support for staying in the ECHR is close to 60% and has actually increased as the subject has been debated. Farage is out of step with the British people.But surely on the issue he has made his own, immigration, he is in tune with the public? After all, Labour seems to have built its entire political strategy on that assumption. And yet, the numbers tell a different story. While 81% of Reform voters believe migrants have undermined Britain’s culture, only 31% of Britons in general believe that. Ask about the effect of migrants on the economy and you get a similar picture. It’s Reform that is badly out of touch.You can keep doing this – and Labour must, pointing out that Farage speaks for the fringes not the centre. Britons don’t support handing Afghan refugees back to the Taliban, as Farage advocates. They do not agree that Britain has become North Korea – and they don’t regard as a patriot someone who sits in Washington and tells a committee of American politicians that we have. They don’t reply to the question, “Which world leader do you most admire?”, with the words “Vladimir Putin”, as Farage did. And nor do they think that the Liz Truss measures that sent the UK economy spiralling represented “the best Conservative budget since 1986”, to quote Nigel Farage.Reform’s opponents need to expose every one of these gaps between Farage and the electorate, recasting Farage as a figure of the fringes. But this can’t be a task for Labour or the Liberal Democrats alone. Any party that claims to value democracy, including what remains of the Conservatives, and that sees how swiftly nationalist populism leads to authoritarianism, needs to engage in the same effort and fast. We all do. As Americans are learning to their cost, you cannot delay – otherwise the freedoms you thought would last for ever can vanish, in the blink of an eye.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. His new nonfiction book, The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them (£25), is available from the Guardian Bookshop at £22 More

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      How Trump has turned the legal system ‘on its head’ to meet deportation goals

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      The Cuban asylum seeker referred to in court papers as EC could not believe his luck, and neither could his lawyers.They had come to immigration court in Miami in late spring expecting only incremental progress in a case that had been grinding away for more than three years. Yet here was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lawyer telling the judge the government was dropping its deportation demands. It seemed EC had won, eligible at last for a green card and permanent residency in the United States.“I was a little taken aback that they were essentially conceding the point,” his lawyer, Javier Taveras, said. “But it was very welcome news.”The judge granted the dismissal and instructed EC, whom the Guardian is not identifying in line with his lawyers’ desire to protect his identity, to wait in the next room while court staff drew up a written order.EC’s team did not know, though, that just the day before, the DHS had issued guidance to its attorneys to look for cases that could be dismissed – not because the government intended to relax its hardline stance on deportations but rather the opposite. The Trump administration was looking to short-circuit the normal judicial procedure and make it easier to arrest, detain and deport migrants by taking them out of the jurisdiction of the court system and reclassifying them as emergency cases requiring immediate enforcement action.In other words, down was suddenly up, and what a day earlier would have been an unequivocal victory for EC was now very bad news indeed. Agents with US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (Ice) slapped him in handcuffs directly outside the courtroom. Taveras’s team raced back to the judge to demand that the case be reopened on the grounds that their client had been deliberately misled, still hoping that the judge might feel similarly himself.“As an officer of the court, the government lawyer can’t argue one thing knowing that what is intended is another,” Taveras charged. “They basically lied to the court.”The judge, though, refused to revisit the decision. Days later, EC’s lawyers and his American wife learned he was in detention at the opposite end of the country, in Tacoma, Washington, under threat of “expedited removal” – a category that, before Trump, was largely reserved for new arrivals, most of them apprehended at or near the border, not people like EC who have been in the country for years and have given the authorities no cause for concern.Chaos in immigration courtsIt wasn’t just EC and his lawyers who were blindsided. In case after case, starting in late May, immigration lawyers around the US have been stunned to see cases they have worked on for years disappear into a black hole and their clients subjected to perils they never imagined. Lawyers from four different states and multiple jurisdictions described how the world they knew – of fixed rules and procedures even in a messy, heavily backlogged system – had in effect vanished overnight, leaving hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of whom have spent years working their way through the courts, at risk of an abrupt reversal in their fortunes.“I was shocked,” Taveras said. “If they can change the rules and move the goalposts mid-game, what are we even doing here?”Dismissing cases in this way may just be the beginning. According to a broad cross-section of immigration professionals, including lawyers, former judges and former federal officials, the administration’s full ambition is not just to bend the rules to fulfill deportation quotas, but to dismantle the immigration court system as it has been configured for the past 40 years – and with it an important plank of the justice system as a whole.“This is about making the executive branch the dictator,” said Ashley Tabaddor, a former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges who served as a senior DHS lawyer under the Biden administration.View image in fullscreenThe attack, Tabaddor and others say, is being mounted on multiple fronts: eliminating courthouses as safe spaces where immigrants can appear in good faith without fear of arrest; eliminating the possibility of bail for immigrants ordered into detention; gutting the infrastructure of help desks and orientation programs designed to help immigrants who cannot afford a lawyer and cutting funds that provide legal representation to unaccompanied children; limiting the independence of immigration judges and firing those who do not appear to be in line with the administration’s desire to hasten deportations; and eroding if not eliminating a carefully erected firewall between the DHS, which is in charge of immigration enforcement, and the justice department, which administers the immigration courts.“All of this shows a callousness and complete disregard for people’s humanity,” Tabaddor added. “They want to be able to deport people like they are shooting fish in a barrel.”In response, the justice department office responsible for the immigration courts confirmed it had rescinded more than 20 policies, which it argued were “unfounded in law or discouraged the timely completion of cases” and added: “Reducing the immigration court backlog is one of the highest priorities for the agency.”The DHS, for its part, defended the arrest of immigrants at courthouses, calling the policy “common sense” since Ice could be sure of finding its targets there and could be sure, too, that they were unarmed since they had passed through courthouse metal detectors.“We aren’t some medieval kingdom,” the DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “There are no legal sanctuaries where you can hide and avoid the consequences for breaking the law. Nothing in the constitution prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them.”The second Trump administration began making some of these moves out of the gate, but the big shift, immigration professionals say, came in May, when Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff in charge of immigration policy, demanded a dramatic increase in deportations from a few hundred to 3,000 a day.While Ice began aggressive new sweeps of immigrant workers, starting in Los Angeles, administration officials issued policy guidelines greatly diminishing the leeway many of those immigrants had to be able to stay in the country.Days after the DHS told its lawyers to press for dismissals of slow-moving asylum cases so they could be reassigned as emergency deportations, two senior immigration court administrators, one in Los Angeles and another in Florida, issued instructions on behalf of the justice department’s executive office of immigration review (EOIR) essentially ordering judges not to stand in the DHS’s way.EC’s family told him about the transfer to Washington state three days later. The government, he said, did not update him.Taveras and his team also made every effort to be with EC when he was summoned for a “risk interview” to assess the dangers he might face back in Cuba. But they were given no notice, and their client was told he would have to face the interview alone if he didn’t want to wait several more weeks in detention for a new date.View image in fullscreenEC is one of tens of thousands of immigrants that the Trump administration has moved long distances around the country, a Guardian investigation has found, a practice at odds with past Ice protocols that immigration advocates say seems designed to limit detainees’ access to their constitutional rights.Another bewildering change that Hayden Rodarte, an immigration specialist with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, and other immigration lawyers say they have seen involves the government’s handling of residency permits for family members once an immigrant has been granted asylum. By law, spouses and minor children have the same right to stay in the US, but increasingly they are subject to close scrutiny and multiple in-person interview appointments, any one of which can lead to arrest and expedited deportation proceedings for reasons that can be hard to anticipate.Rodarte said he now advises close family members they might be better off remaining undocumented, because the risk of claiming their legal due has become “huge”.“What looks at first like a blessing turns into safety planning,” he said. “The administration is using systems that are supposed to protect people as traps and is weaponizing as many pieces of the immigration system as possible to put people on Ice’s radar for the sheer purpose of removing them.”Rodarte likened these tactics to the family separation policy that the first Trump administration pursued in 2017-18, the difference this time being that the separation is not occurring at the border but in homes, workplaces, schools and courthouses. “The upshot is the same,” he added. “This is about cornering humans and making them suffer as much as possible.”Administration critics say it is also making a mockery of the very concept of immigration law. “Defending people against removal proceedings is the heart of what we practice,” said Lisa Anderson, a lawyer in Los Angeles. “If you change that, people are no longer being afforded due process.”A similar argument is at the heart of a federal lawsuit, filed in July, which calls the new courthouse guidelines “arbitrary and capricious” and accuses the Trump administration of breaking multiple federal laws as well as violating the constitution’s due process clause. (The government is yet to respond.)EC is one of eight lead plaintiffs named in the suit, which the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center is spearheading on behalf of two other immigrant rights organizations. It estimates that “hundreds and possibly thousands” of immigrants had their cases dismissed in immigration court and were reassigned for emergency deportation between late May and mid-July. The total number at risk is likely to be much higher – as high as 300,000, according to Tabaddor, based on the number of people working their way through the system.“It’s the first time we’ve seen anything like this at this magnitude,” she said.It was also the first time, she said, that an administration had taken aim at immigration judges. In memo after memo from the justice department’s EOIR, judges have been told that if they do not stick to guidelines of what Trump’s justice department regards as impartial decision-making and “fidelity to the law” they risk losing their jobs – and many of them have.Out of about 750 immigration judges who were serving in January, more than a hundred have been fired, according to court dockets and data collected by a professional union. To address what was already a chronic backlog of cases, the administration has proposed sending in hundreds of military lawyers to serve in their place, offering just two weeks’ training to familiarize them with the relevant areas of the law.View image in fullscreenMany of the veteran judges who have been dismissed granted asylum in a high percentage of cases – sometimes 90% or higher, according to a Syracuse University website that tracks the data. Immigration experts say those rates can depend on jurisdiction as much as personal temperament, but the justice department has decried them as “statistically improbable outcome metrics” for which the judges involved merit professional discipline.The judges themselves were given no reason for being fired, according to at least half a dozen who have shared the short email they received, other than article II of the constitution, which details the president’s executive powers. Some have spoken out to denounce their treatment as arbitrary, unfair and an attack on the rule of law.It’s a sentiment that Tabaddor echoed based on her own 15-plus years on the immigration court and, before that, as a lawyer representing the federal government. “My entire life has been dedicated to the principles of justice and integrity … and humanity, and it feels like I just watched my child being murdered,” Tabaddor said. “Everything has been turned on its head. What’s happening in immigration court is just another symptom of a full-frontal assault and takeover of the Department of Justice. This is not normal. This is not defensible.”The justice department declined to respond.Targeting the judges themselvesThe immigration courts as they are known today were created in 1983 to separate out the functions of immigration enforcement, then still housed within the justice department, and the adjudication of cases. In other words, judicial independence and the constitutional right to due process were the core reason for the courts to exist at all. “They did a study and concluded it doesn’t pass the laugh test to have the same people wearing the enforcement hats and making the final decisions about people’s future,” Tabaddor recounted.The system was far from perfect, and immigration judges enjoyed only what the EOIR described as “quasi-judicial functions”, meaning they were regarded as legal administrators more than full justices. Still, they enjoyed significant job protections and could only be removed for cause.That began to change during the first Trump administration, which pushed to decertify the National Association of Immigration Judges, essentially the judges’ union, that had acted as a guarantor of the judges’ job security and with it their independence. The lone Democrat on a key federal review body denounced the decertification as an exercise in “legal gymnastics”, but it went through at the tail-end of Trump’s first term on a party-line vote.View image in fullscreenThe second Trump administration came in with guns blazing, immediately firing the top leadership of EOIR. It also went after immigration judges themselves, as it did against large swaths of federal workers, designating them “inferior officers” – meaning they needed to defer to more senior political appointees confirmed by the Senate – and firing large numbers of them at will.It wasn’t just senior judges with high asylum approval rates that came under the axe. Senate Democrats noticed the administration was failing to convert roughly half of the newest judicial appointees at the end of their probationary period – in almost all cases ditching the ones who had previously worked as lawyers representing immigrants and keeping the ones who had worked in immigration enforcement.Then, starting in May, came a series of unprecedented rulings and memos from the EOIR. One stripped judges’ ability to grant bail in detention cases. Another set a dauntingly high standard for determining whether Salvadorian nationals faced a legitimate fear of imprisonment and torture if returned home – despite that country’s well-documented history of human rights abuses.The upshot was, once again, to constrain rank-and-file immigration judges’ room for maneuver. An 22 August memo from EOIR’s acting director, Sirce Owen, warned that judicial independence “is not a license to ignore a clear directive from a proper appellate authority … [Immigration judges] do not possess intrinsic, free-floating equitable authority”.The instruction to allow the government to reassign asylum and other ordinary immigration cases, even without cause, fits into the overall pattern of imposing limits on how judges can rule while nominally continuing to defer to their independent authority. Immigration lawyers now routinely petition judges to allow their clients to appear in court remotely so they don’t have to run a gauntlet of Ice agents at the courthouse. But judges are increasingly denying those requests.“Some court judges seem to be in collusion with immigration officials to make these arrests,” said Priscilla Olivarez, a San Antonio-based attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. She said she routinely sees between 10 and 15 Ice officers in the hallways of one of the courthouses where she appears. “It is clear this is calculated,” she added, “to stoke fear in our communities, create misinformation, and prevent people from accessing their right to seek asylum and the different types of relief that stem from it”.The DHS did not respond directly to the charge that it was coordinating with judges, saying only: “The average illegal alien gets far more due process than most Americans.”Recategorizing asylum cases and expediting deportation was not unheard of before this summer, but advocates say it would happen on a case-by-case basis and usually when the contours of a case had changed in a fundamental way – for example, if evidence emerged of a past violent crime. Sometimes, incoming administrations have instructed immigration courts to prioritize certain cases in line with their policy goals – a practice known as “docket shuffling” – but never in a way that threatened the futures of hundreds of thousands of people.View image in fullscreen“All concept of what we as attorneys do, of the rule of law, of what is ethical and what is legal – they’ve blown past all of that,” said Rodarte, the San Francisco lawyer. “They’re even blowing past court orders. They’re doing what they want and saying if you don’t like it, come at us … They’re turning a blind eye to the rules to meet their deportation goals at whatever cost.”What the government’s own immigration lawyers make of the sweeping policy changes they are expected to carry out is not entirely clear. In appearances at two different Los Angeles-area immigration courts recently, some demonstrated a maximalist approach to arguing against asylum, pressing for deportation no matter what, while others took time to show understanding for migrants who have been in the country a long time and face challenges from the burden of paying for an immigration lawyer to caring for sick family members.In one of the hearings, the DHS lawyer, whom the Guardian is not naming because of concerns that her job might be at risk, said the government had no issue with a Mexican couple arguing to stay in the United States because their deportation would create “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” for their US-born disabled son.As the hearing was winding down, Anderson, the lawyer representing the family, turned to her opposing counsel and said: “I imagine you guys are quite busy.”The government lawyer, mindful perhaps of the announced presence of a reporter, offered a nervous giggle, but no answer. More

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      Donald Trump’s base is fraying. Are Democrats up to the moment? | Lloyd Green

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      The 2024 presidential election was a disaster for the Democrats. Donald Trump managed to shake loose the party’s base. Latino voters, Black voters and young Americans swung away from Kamala Harris, resulting in Trump’s first popular vote plurality in three tries. Less than a year later, the shifts may yet prove transitory. Looming cuts to healthcare, rising unemployment and sticky inflation may be yielding buyers’ remorse. Whether the Democrats are up to the moment is an open question.Regardless, the new “American Golden Age”, promised by the president and his minions, is looking more like stagflation for the many and a booming stock market for the few. Topline youth unemployment stands at 10.8%, according to the Trump-maligned Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment rates for young men (11% ), Black youth (14.3%), and Hispanic youth (12.6%) are even higher.With midterms less than 14 months away, the president and his party ought to be concerned. The Democrats narrowly lead on the generic ballot, despite being unloved, incompetent and in disarray. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval remains underwater, hovering between -7% and -8% on average, according to the Silver Bulletin.Disapproval among Latino voters is starker. Immigration and masked Ice agents have soured voters on the administration’s real gains in securing the border: according to one new poll, the incumbent stands 20 points underwater with Latinos.The latest YouGov poll, meanwhile, pegs Hispanic disapproval of Trump at 65%. Among Black Americans, the figure is 84%. White Americans disapprove of him, 50-47. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from August reports that only one-third of Hispanics approve of Trump.Yesterday seems so far away. In November, Trump fought Harris to a near draw among Hispanic voters, 48%-51%. In 2020, they went for Joe Biden 61%-36%.Hispanic people were not alone in moving toward Trump. Americans under 50 and Asian Americans markedly shifted, too. Black communities demonstrated political restlessness as well. Against Harris, Trump garnered 15% of Black voters – up from 8% four years earlier. Among Black men, the change was even more glaring.Hispanic voters do not, of course, march in lockstep with the Democratic party or its establishment. George W Bush won four in nine Hispanic votes in 2004. John Kerry proved a dud. In 2008, Hispanic voters opted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, the eventual nominee. In both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, they showed greater early preference for Bernie Sanders, a proponent of Medicare for all.A commanding win by the senator from Vermont in the 2020 Nevada presidential caucus sent the Biden campaign reeling. The failed one-term President Biden finished 25 points behind Sanders in that contest.The Great Recession and Covid-19 left deep scars. In June 2022, the Democrats lost a key race in south Texas. Mayra Flores, a Republican newcomer, triumphed in a special election and flipped control of a long-held Democratic seat. A coda, Flores failed to win re-election the following November, and again lost in 2024.Fast forward to the current New York City mayoral race. There, younger voters and Hispanic voters comprise Zohran Mamdani’s political core. His victory in the Democratic primary was as much about economic dissatisfaction and uncertainty as demographic and generational change.Overall, Hispanic Americans show the highest workforce participation rates. Lunch-bucket issues possess greater salience. Social issues generally receive less attention from non-college graduates than they do from white Democratic PhDs. As a corollary, what plays well in the faculty lounge is seldom a winner outside those Ivy-covered precincts.The Latino vote is in flux. Trump’s promises to secure the border and crack down on illegal immigration proved less controversial among large swaths of Hispanic voters than Democrats had hoped. Rather, inflation and the kitchen table concerns carried the day for the GOP as Harris refused to distance herself from her boss.In south Texas, thousands of traditional Democrats cast their lot with Trump. Republican redistricting efforts in the Lone Star state now hinge upon those trends continuing, a debatable but plausible premise.The S&P 500 and Nasdaq set new records almost daily. Yet Trump’s promise to “end inflation” and start “saving our economy” beginning on “day one” looks increasingly empty. His unilaterally imposed tariffs bite.Democrats have plenty of material to work with. Their capacity to eventually deliver a coherent message is another matter.

      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      Trump’s take on a court decision on tariffs is bonkers – even for him | Steven Greenhouse

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      Just hours after an appeals court ruled that it was illegal for Donald Trump to impose his unpopular across-the-board tariffs on dozens of countries, he posted a frantic, over-the-top rant that declared: “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America.”So here the president of the United States was asserting that if the courts torpedoed his tariffs, then the US, the most powerful nation on earth, would be destroyed, would “literally” be kaput. Trump seemed to suggest that court rulings that blocked his beloved tariffs would have the destructive power of, say, 100 hydrogen bombs.Call me naive, but I never cease to be amazed when Trump says such egregiously false and ludicrous things. OK, I sometimes forget that he’s the guy who said that noise from wind turbines causes cancer. After narrowly winning the presidency a second time notwithstanding the 30,573 Trump lies, falsehoods and misleading claims in his first term, Trump evidently thinks he can say anything, no matter how false or foolish, and get away with it. As part of his tariff fight, Trump also blurted this absurdity: if the courts don’t uphold his tariffs, “we would become a Third World Nation.”Trump’s statement that ending tariffs will destroy the US is totally bonkers because the US became the world’s richest nation and has largely prospered for nearly 250 years (despite occasional slumps) before Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. In the months before then, the US had solid GDP growth, low unemployment and declining inflation – the Economist magazine even called the US economy “the envy of the world”. But now Trump says that if the courts give a thumbs down to his favorite plaything – I mean weapon – to bang other countries over the head with, it would end the US. Even Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of the conservative National Review, called that “lunatic stuff”.The truth is that if the courts block Trump’s across-the-board tariffs, that would be good news for the US economy. It would prevent Trump’s tariffs from further pushing up inflation and slowing economic growth. By giving a thumbs down to Trump’s tariffs, the courts might be doing him a huge economic and political favor because his tariffs, and the inflation they are fueling, have been dragging his dismal approval ratings even lower.On 29 August, the US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington DC ruled that Trump overstepped his authority when he invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose his Liberation Day tariffs. The court said that act doesn’t give presidents the authority to slap sweeping tariffs on other countries. Trump has appealed the ruling to the supreme court, which might rule on the tariffs this fall.The court of appeals repeatedly noted that the constitution gives Congress, not presidents, the power to impose tariffs. It further noted that the Emergency Act doesn’t mention the word “tariffs” even once among the tools the act authorizes presidents to use to deal with emergency trade problems. (That appellate ruling overturned the bulk of Trump’s tariffs: the blanket 10% to 50% tariffs on exports from more than 70 countries. The court didn’t rule on Trump’s product-specific tariffs on steel, aluminum and auto parts.)As part of his conniptions over the appeals court ruling, Trump also warned of fiscal disaster, complaining that the US would lose hundreds of billions of dollars if his tariffs were halted. But Trump conveniently forgets that it’s embattled US consumers who will be paying most of those hundreds of billions as they pay Trump’s tariffs, essentially import taxes on furniture, cars, coffee, electronics and other foreign goods.In using his hysterical language, Trump evidently had one audience in mind: the supreme court’s six conservative justices who have repeatedly ruled his way. Trump’s goal is evidently to scare the bejesus out of those justices – he hopes that by shrieking “You’ll Destroy the Country If You Rule Against Me,” that will persuade them to overturn the appellate court’s decision and uphold his tariffs. (The appellate court let the tariffs remain in force to allow time for appeal.)So far in his second term, Trump has a remarkable batting average with the supreme court’s six rightwing justices, who seem astonishingly subservient and supine vis-a-vis the most authoritarian, power-grabbing president in US history. The justices have used their emergency docket to grant Trump administration requests 18 times in a row, often vacating injunctions that lower courts put in place to stop what they saw as Trump’s rampant lawlessness. In repeatedly siding with Trump, the supreme court has scrapped lower court injunctions in several highly controversial cases, provisionally letting Trump fire the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, gut the federal Department of Education, and give Doge – with its staff of twentysomethings – access to the highly private social security information of hundreds of millions of Americans.Trump is no doubt worried that the supreme court, though submissive so far, will overturn his tariffs. Many conservative and libertarian scholars and lawyers oppose his tariffs as both harmful and illegal. Not only do they dislike the tariffs for pushing up inflation and disrupting global supply chains, but they see Trump’s tariffs as anti-free market and mucking up the US and world economies.When Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, he invoked a national emergency, saying the US trade deficit and other countries’ tariffs were urgent problems undermining the US economy. Admittedly the trade deficit and other countries’ tariffs are a problem, but in no way do they constitute a national emergency, especially since the US economy was seen as “the envy of the world” before Trump went hog wild with his tariffs. (There’s no denying that the flood of imports from China and other low-wage nations badly damaged many communities in America’s industrial heartland two and three decades ago.) Wouldn’t it be great if, in this tariff litigation, the supreme court stood up to Trump and issued a candid ruling that told him: “Sorry, Mr President, your supposed national emergency is hogwash, a pretext for you to pursue your destructive tariff obsession”?The supreme court’s justices shouldn’t let themselves be cowed, bullied or fooled by Trump’s talk that the nation will be destroyed if they nix his tariffs. Trump is like the boy who cried wolf, forever crying catastrophe if he doesn’t get his way. It’s time for the court and the nation to wise up to Trump’s lies, hype and shenanigans.Virtually every non-Trumpian economist agrees that Trump’s tariffs have hurt the US by increasing inflation, undermining GDP growth, creating huge headaches for corporations and seriously damaging the US’s relations with other nations. The justices shouldn’t buy Trump’s calamitous warnings that if they overturn his tariffs, the world will end.If the justices declare his tariffs illegal, it certainly won’t be a “disaster” for the US, as Trump has claimed. But it might be a disaster for Trump’s ego and for his dangerous dream of having an authoritarian presidency wholly unchecked by the other branches of government.If the supreme court rules against Trump’s tariffs, let’s hope that will serve as a much-needed first step to the court’s developing the backbone to rule many times more against Trump’s authoritarian and lawless actions.

      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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      They managed to get accepted to US universities. But they’re still stuck in Gaza

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      Within days of 7 October 2023, much of Maryam’s world had been wiped out: her home in Gaza City, her children’s schools, and the Islamic University of Gaza, where she was a graduate student in physics, were all destroyed by airstrikes. In early December, Maryam’s mentor – Sufian Tayeh, a prominent Palestinian scientist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza – was killed along with his family in an Israeli strike.The professor has been a “father figure” to her, Maryam told the Guardian. When she learned of his death, she remembers closing the physics notebooks she had grabbed as she fled her home and thinking her studies would be over. “My entire world had collapsed,” she said.But as she repeatedly fled Israel’s bombs, Maryam sought ways to keep not only her family alive, but also her dream of becoming a physicist. While living in a tent in Rafah, with no stable access to internet or electricity, she learned of a spot near the border where she could get a faint internet signal from Egypt. Despite the risks, she started going there to research opportunities abroad, eventually managing to earn admission to a fully funded PhD program at the University of Maryland. After deferring her start date by a year, she was meant to start this month.But Maryam remains in Gaza. She is one of dozens of students from the devastated territory who have been admitted to US universities and colleges but are stuck, advocates say, after the Trump administration suspended nearly all non-immigrant visas for Palestinian passport holders.As part of its campaign against US universities, the administration has made it more difficult for international students to travel to the US, and claims it has revoked the visas of thousands of foreign students already in the US over unspecified violations.But for Palestinians in Gaza, the policy change is uniquely devastating.“I will never forget the moment I received the message confirming my acceptance into a fully funded PhD program. I rushed back to our tent to hold my children tightly and tell them the good news – that we would survive this nightmare,” said Maryam, who is using a pseudonym to protect her and her family. “Everything came crashing down again when I heard about the suspension of visa processing. It felt like my dreams had been destroyed once more.”Leila, a 22-year-old from Gaza City, was four years into a five-year engineering program when the war started. She would walk up to two hours a day to find wifi, relying on solar power to charge her phone, and managed to apply and be admitted to a university in the north-western US as a transfer student. (Leila is also a pseudonym, and she asked that the Guardian not publish the name of the university.)Then came the news that all visas were suspended. “We are just stuck in Gaza right now,” she told the Guardian in a series of voice memos.A spokesperson for the state department said in a statement that the department had suspended the processing of nonimmigrant visas for Palestinian Authority passport holders “while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to vet individuals from Gaza” and that it will “take the time necessary to conduct a full and thorough review”.“Every visa decision is a national security decision,” the spokesperson added.According to a cable viewed by the Associated Press, department officials said the new restrictions were intended “to ensure that such applications have undergone necessary, vetting, and screening protocols to ensure the applicants’ identity and eligibility for a visa under US law”. The suspension doesn’t apply to Palestinians who hold passports from other countries – unless they are found to have ties to the Palestinian Authority, or the Palestine Liberation Organization.The Student Justice Network, a US-based collective formed after Donald Trump signed orders in January targeting international students, has been supporting students from Gaza who are seeking to continue their interrupted studies abroad. But of the dozens of students the group says it has helped with university and visa applications, only a handful have made it to the US. (They declined to provide more specific numbers.)Securing a visa to travel to the US from Gaza was an arduous process even in quieter times. Before the war, Palestinians in Gaza had to secure appointments at US embassies outside the territory – usually Egypt or Israel. Obtaining a permit to travel to Israel has been impossible since the war began, while the border with Egypt has remained largely closed.International students have been targeted with a series of federal actions aimed both at Palestinian students specifically and the broader community of more than one million foreign nationals studying in the country.The state department has enlisted consulates overseas into the effort. Earlier this year, it paused all student visa appointments. They have resumed, but prospective students are now being subjected to additional vetting for, among other things, “anti-American” views.But for Palestinians the restrictions are blanket. “Every single one of them has been impacted by this,” Majid said of the students her group has been helping who were meant to start their studies this fall. “There’s no clear understanding as to when their applications will be processed, and this affects their ability to attend their universities on time – and in some cases it could actually impact whether or not they’re able to maintain their scholarships.”Looking elsewhereThomas Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, told the Guardian that Maryam was one of two physics students from Gaza admitted to the university last year. But getting them out of Gaza proved so difficult that the university ended up deferring the students’ admissions by a year as they tried to get visa appointments.Maryam was able to book an interview at the US embassy in Egypt, and Cohen offered to personally pay for her way there – but the border was shut down when Israeli forces took control of it in May 2024. She was still looking for a way out when the US announced the suspension of visas for Palestinians.Cohen said he tried all he could to help Maryam and the other student – because their academic records earned them a spot at the university but also because he understood that the opportunity could save their lives. He spoke of the Holocaust survivors in his own family, and those who “didn’t survive because they had no way to leave” Nazi-occupied Poland.Cohen is now advising the students to pursue opportunities in Europe or Canada. Even if they were to get a visa to the US, “the political climate we’re in, it’s dangerous for Palestinians”, he says.Majid, of the Student Justice Network, said the group had also been encouraging the students they support to pursue options in other countries. But even if they gain admission elsewhere, the border with Egypt remains sealed shut as Israel has intensified its military campaign.“These are students who have gone through two plus years without an educational infrastructure,” Majid said, noting that all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed.“Think about having applied to university when you were 17 or 18, and then think about applying under bombardments, and starvation, and with limited resources, and having your documents destroyed, and having lost your family members,” she added. “To yank these fully funded opportunities away from them is devastating.” More

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      What does Donald Trump think free speech means? – podcast

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      Archive: CBS, Good Morning America, The Charlie Kirk show, ABC News, Katie Miller Pod, CBS Austin, PIX11 News, Fox News
      Listen to Science Weekly’s episode on the data behind political violence
      Listen to Politics Weekly, all about Trump’s state visit to the UK
      Purchase Jonathan Freedland’s new book, The Traitor’s Circle, here
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More

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      Trump suggests punishing TV networks for ‘negative’ coverage amid outrage over Kimmel suspension

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      Donald Trump suggested on Thursday that TV networks which cover him “negatively” could lose their licenses after his celebration of ABC suspending late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.On Air Force One, the president spoke to reporters on his flight back to the US from his state visit to the UK. The president said major US networks were “97% against me”, though he did not offer evidence to prove this figure or detail how this conclusion was evaluated. He said he read the statistic “someplace”.“Again, 97% negative, and yet I won easily. I won all seven swing states,” Trump said. “They give me only bad press. I mean they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their licenses should be taken away.”Trump supported ABC’s decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, saying on Thursday that the comedian was “not a talented person” who “had very bad ratings”.“Well, Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else, and he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk,” Trump told reporters on Thursday during his state visit to the United Kingdom. “Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. He had very bad ratings, and they should have fired him a long time ago.”According to Nielsen ratings as reported by LateNighter, although Stephen Colbert’s Late Show leads the time slot in total viewers with 2.42 million, Kimmel’s show averaged 1.77 million viewers in the second quarter of 2025 and edged out Colbert in the key 18-49 demographic.However, there was an 11% drop off in his show’s viewership the last month. Kimmel also has over 20 million subscribers on YouTube.The controversy began after Kimmel, in a recent broadcast, suggested that “many in Maga land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk”. Within a day, FCC chair Brendan Carr condemned the comments as “truly sick” and suggested ABC could face regulatory consequences.ABC suspended the show after affiliate operator Nexstar called Kimmel’s remarks “offensive and insensitive”.The indefinite suspension of the popular late-night show has prompted numerous calls for a boycott against Disney, ABC’s parent company, and other major media conglomerates that have refused to air Kimmel’s show.Writers Guild of America union members protested against the suspension of Kimmel outside Disney/ABC in Los Angeles on Thursday, with the union issuing a statement saying: “The right to speak our minds and to disagree with each other – to disturb, even – is at the very heart of what it means to be a free people. It is not to be denied. Not by violence, not by the abuse of governmental power, nor by acts of corporate cowardice.”Carr further raised censorship concerns when he suggested that the FCC might be “looking into” The View, another ABC talkshow. Appearing on conservative podcast the Bulwark, Carr was asked if other shows could face similar issues.He said: “I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these other programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs and therefore exempt from the equal-opportunity regime that Congress has put in place.”The View hosts did not comment about Kimmel during the show’s Thursday broadcast.View image in fullscreenDamon Lindelof, a powerful Hollywood showrunner and creator of the ABC series Lost and other dramas, has promised not to work with Disney unless it puts Kimmel back on the air.Lindelof wrote on Instagram: “I was shocked, saddened and infuriated by yesterday’s suspension and look forward to it being lifted soon. If it isn’t, I can’t in good conscience work for the company that imposed it.”He added: “If you know Jimmy … You know he loves his country. You know he appreciates a good roast and he can take as good as he gives. You know he supported his crew through multiple strikes and you know he is generous and philanthropic and most of all, you know that he is kind.”The feud between Trump and Kimmel stretches back years, most notably when Kimmel hosted the 2024 Academy Awards and Trump posted online calling him a “WORSE HOST”. Kimmel read that message out during the ceremony, and responded by asking Trump if it wasn’t “past your jail time?”The comedian also emerged as a vocal critic during Trump’s first term, leading the fight against Obamacare repeal efforts after revealing his newborn son’s heart surgery had been made possible by the Affordable Care Act.Kimmel is the second prominent US late-night host to lose his show in the past few months. CBS announced in July that it would be cancelling Stephen Colbert’s show after he was also critical of Trump.JD Vance added to the pile-on Thursday, joking on social media that secretary of state Marco Rubio would be taking over as host of ABC’s late night show, a quip referencing Rubio’s multiple roles in the Trump administration.Barack Obama condemned what he called a “dangerous” escalation by the Trump administration. “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” Obama wrote on X.FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat on the commission, also accused ABC of “shameful” corporate capitulation that “has put the foundation of the first amendment in danger”. She said the FCC “does not have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the government dislikes”.House Democratic leaders called for Carr’s resignation, accusing him of forcing ABC to suspend the show through regulatory threats.“Brendan Carr has engaged in the corrupt abuse of power,” said the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and five other lawmakers in a joint statement. “He has disgraced the office he holds by bullying ABC and forcing the company to bend the knee to the Trump administration.”Ro Khanna, a representative of California, issued a motion to subpoena Carr in the House oversight committee. “This administration has initiated the largest assault on the first amendment and free speech in modern history,” he said. “They’re making comedy illegal.”Democrats are also planning legislative action in response to what they see as escalating government censorship. Senator Chris Murphy and Congressman Jason Crow announced Thursday they will introduce bicameral legislation meant to protect anti-government speech from censorship and includes creating “a specific defense for those that are being targeted for political reasons”.In a press conference in Washington, Murphy warned that “Jimmy Kimmel is likely to not be the last person to lose their job, or face retaliation for their criticism of Donald Trump,” while Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called the administration’s threats “an assault on everything this country has stood for since the constitution has been signed”.Chris Stein contributed reporting More

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      Trump v Kimmel: simmering feud ends with comedian’s talkshow yanked off air

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      Donald Trump’s description of the decision to pull from air Jimmy Kimmel’s talkshow as “great news for America” was a gleeful response from the US president over the late-night comedian who has long been the biggest thorn in his side.A spokesman for Kimmel said the host had no immediate comment after ABC pulled the plug on his show following remarks Kimmel made earlier in the week arguing that the US right was using Charlie Kirk’s killing to try to score political points.Trump had no such reservations, declaring “Kimmel has ZERO talent” and claiming he had “worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible”, referring to Kimmel’s fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert, whose show – the highest rated late-night show in the US – was cancelled after he, too, mocked Trump.When Colbert’s show was cancelled, Trump wrote on 18 July on his social media network that “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!”That statement is evidence of how Trump has appeared to reserve specific ire for Kimmel, who has never been shy of critiquing the president. All late-night talkshow hosts criticise Trump – and Biden, and all other political figures on both sides of the aisle – but Kimmel has had a longstanding ability to get under Trump’s skin that has only grown over the years.In 2015, as Trump was running for his first presidential term, he abruptly cancelled an appearance on Kimmel’s show citing a prior obligation.“Donald Trump canceled on us last night,” Kimmel told the shock jock Howard Stern. “I don’t know what happened. We’re delighted, needless to say.” The studio audience booed at the mention of Trump. “Now he’s glad he didn’t come, I guess …” Kimmel said.Kimmel continued: “I’m dying to find out what this major political commitment was. Usually, it means he had to go on CNN to call someone an idiot, or something. Why did he cancel? We told him there were cameras here, right? Are Tuesday nights the night he volunteers down at the orphanage?“Don’t worry,” he added. “We’re giving everyone in our audience a basketball dipped in cologne – so you can fully experience what it would have been like if he was here.”Two months later, Trump did indeed go on the show – where Kimmel presented him a spoof of a children’s book, Winners Aren’t Losers. “Winners aren’t losers, they’re winners – like me!” Kimmel read aloud. “A loser’s a loser, which one will you be?”It was all smiles then, but Kimmel’s criticism grew more pronounced after Trump took office in 2017. He revealed that his son was born with a rare heart defect and said Trump’s planned repeal of the Affordable Care Act meant people without existing health insurance might not be treated. He said Trump would “sign anything if it meant getting rid of Obamacare”.Kimmel later mocked Trump’s proposed national alert text system, calling it “a bad idea” and released a mock Hollywood-style trailer making fun of a system that, it joked, would be used to send Trump messages that had been blocked by users of Twitter.He also took aim at the president for not taking action on gun violence after a Florida school shooting took the lives of 17 people. “Children are being murdered,” Kimmel said, tearfully. “Do something. We still haven’t even talked about it; you still haven’t done anything about it.”Last year, while hosting the Oscars, Kimmel pushed back after Trump criticized his presenting skill. Responding to a Truth Social post Trump sent out, Kimmel said: “Thank you – I’m surprised you’re still watching. Isn’t it past your jail time?”In the same Tuesday monologue for which his show was ostensibly cancelled, Kimmel mocked Trump for responding to a question from a reporter asking how Trump felt about Kirk’s death by saying “Very good” and then immediately discussing the new White House ballroom. Kimmel remarked that Trump’s reaction was “how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish”.Trump may be hoping he has the last laugh after Kimmel’s abrupt cancellation, but if his remarks are anything to go by his ire is likely to fall next on two other major late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Myers. “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” More