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      Trump visits Capitol to urge House Republicans to pass ‘big, beautiful bill’

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      Donald Trump traveled to the Capitol on Tuesday to insist that the fractious House Republican majority set aside their differences and pass his wide-ranging bill to enact his taxation and immigration priorities.In a speech to a closed-door meeting of Republican lawmakers in Congress’s lower chamber, the president pushed representatives from districts in blue states to drop their demands for a bigger State and Local Tax (Salt) deduction, and also sought to assuage moderates concerned that the legislation, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, would hobble the Medicaid health insurance program.“I think we have unbelievable unity. I think we’re going to get everything we want, and I think we’re going to have a great victory,” Trump said as he left the meeting.But it is unclear if the president’s exhortations had the intended effect ahead of the Monday deadline that House speaker Mike Johnson has set to get the bill passed through the chamber, which Republicans control by a mere three votes. Following his meeting, at least one key lawmaker said he remained opposed to the bill as written, while others announced no changes to their position.“As it stands right now, I do not support the bill,” said New York congressman Mike Lawler, one of the Republicans representing districts in Democratic-led states that are demanding a larger Salt deduction.The next test of the bill’s prospects is scheduled for 1am on Wednesday, when the rules committee convenes for a procedural vote that, if successful, clears the way for consideration of the measure by the full House of Representatives.The nearly 1,100-page legislation is Trump’s top priority in Congress, and would codify several of his campaign promises, including making permanent or extending tax cuts enacted during his first term, temporarily ending the taxation of tips and overtime and paying for a wall along the border with Mexico and the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.To offset its costs, House Republicans have approved slashing federal safety net programs like Medicaid, which covers poor and low income Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap). But even with those cuts, the bill is estimated to cost $3.8tn through 2034, rankling rightwing fiscal hardliners who want to see the measure reduce the government’s large budget deficit.Johnson and other Republican leaders have spent weeks trying to square their demands with the blue-state Republicans and moderates wary of slashing safety net programs. As he arrived at the Capitol on Tuesday morning, Trump quickly made it known who he favored in the negotiations, insisting that “we’re not touching” Medicaid and that cuts would only hit “waste, fraud and abuse”.While Salt taxes were once fully deductible on federal returns, the tax cuts Trump signed in 2017, imposed a $10,000 cap . The president said he opposed increasing the deduction, because “we don’t want to benefit Democrat governors.”At his meeting with lawmakers, “he was emphatic, we need to quit screwing around. That was the clear message. You all have tinkered enough, it is time to land the plane,” South Dakota congressman Dusty Johnson told reporters.“Ninety-eight percent of that conference is ready to go. They were enthused. They were pumped up by the president, and I think with the holdouts, he did move them. I don’t know that we are there yet, but that was a hugely impactful meeting.”Under the bill, Medicaid would receive a $715bn budget reduction, mostly by imposing work requirements on recipients. After the meeting, Don Bacon, a Nebraska moderate who had warned against cutting Medicaid too deeply, signaled approval of the bill, saying: “We did as well as we could do.”But David Valadao, whose central California district has one of the large shares of Medicaid recipients nationwide, said he was “very concerned” about the impact of the cuts.The Democratic minority is largely powerless to stop the bill from advancing in the House, and the GOP’s use of the budget reconciliation procedure means the bill cannot be blocked by a filibuster in the Senate. Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and James McGovern, the ranking member on the rules committee, called for the panel’s consideration of the bill to be rescheduled, noting it is currently set to take place “during the dead of night”.“It is deeply troubling that you would attempt to jam this legislation down the throats of the American people. What else are you hiding? It is imperative that you immediately reschedule the meeting so that it may be debated in the light of day,” they wrote in a letter to Johnson and the rules committee’s Republican chair.House GOP leaders cast the president’s visit as a sign to their members that it was time to stop quibbling.Majority leader Steve Scalise told a press conference after Trump departed: “President Trump had a strong and clear message to a packed House Republican conference, and that is, after months of long, intense discussions over really important differences and issues, this One Big, Beautiful Bill has come through the committee process, and it’s time to end the negotiations, unify behind this bill and get it passed on to the Senate.”Yet it was plain that there are kinks left to iron out. Johnson declined to take questions at the press conference, saying he had to leave to “gather up the small subgroups in the House Republican Conference and tie up the remaining loose ends. I’m very confident that we’ll be able to do that.” More

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      Trump is using his assault on government to retaliate against women | Judith Levine

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      Last week, a federal judge blocked the justice department from canceling $3.2m in federal grants to the American Bar Association (ABA). The court agreed with the ABA’s claim that the administration was retaliating against it for taking public stances against Donald Trump.But how had the US president retaliated? Which grants had he clawed back? Those supporting programs that train lawyers to defend victims of domestic and sexual violence.It was just one of Trump’s many acts of aggression against perceived enemies that just happen to – or quite deliberately – target women.During the 2016 presidential campaign, after the release of the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape, Vox’s Libby Nelson noted that there was something fundamentally different about Trump’s sexism from the sexism of his predecessors. “Usually, the critique of Republican candidates has been based on policy – healthcare access and abortion rights – or on attitudes heavily influenced by religion,” she wrote. But “Trump’s anti-feminism owes more to the gleeful vulgarity and implicit threats of violence of 4chan than the traditional debate over what a woman’s role should be in the public square.”Trump II is both a personal and a political misogynist – a chimera with the soul of a snake and the brains of a policy wonk, transplanted from the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.The widest target of Trump’s aggression is the universe of people capable of having babies. Four days after the inauguration, his administration directed the justice department’s civil rights division to cease enforcing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (Face) Act, which prohibits harassment or blockage of patients entering abortion clinics. His administration dismissed three ongoing cases, pardoned 23 convicted violators of the law, and limited future prosecutions to “cases presenting significant aggravating factors, such as death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage”.In March, he began withholding tens of millions of dollars from Title X, the only federal program supporting reproductive healthcare. The move was not explicitly anti-abortion – the Hyde Amendment banned federal funding for abortion 50 years ago – but it was surely aimed at pleasing religious fundamentalists who oppose all interference with “natural” baby-making. Lots of providers, including some Planned Parenthood affiliates, immediately collapsed, leaving millions of people with no family planning, cancer screening or prenatal services. Now, having failed repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood through legislation, Republicans are trying to hide the dirty deed in the budget. And like much of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” targeted by the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), these cuts would cost taxpayers far more than they would save: according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost will be $300m over the next 10 years in unwanted births and shifts of reproductive services to other providers.Trump isn’t sparing mothers who want to be mothers, either. A week ago, funding to study maternal mortality was rescinded and most of the workers who monitor and improve maternal and child health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were placed on leave. The cuts came just after researchers at the National Institutes of Health published a paper documenting a huge rise in mothers’ deaths in childbirth or within a year afterward, most notably among Native American and Black women; the authors urged the government to make combatting these deaths “an urgent public health priority”.Where women’s bodies are now subject to harm by intentional neglect, they will also be more vulnerable to harm by violence. Before his inauguration, Trump called for the execution of rapists. A few months later, the justice department suspended grant applications from non-profits providing emergency shelter, legal assistance, and crisis services to victims of domestic and sexual violence under the Violence Against Women Act. The agencies were caught promoting “woke” agendas – evident from the word “gender”, as in “gender-based violence”, in their mission statements. The grant program appears to be back up on the justice department website, but no one knows for how long.In late April, the administration zeroed out all funding for training, auditing, data collection and victim support under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (Prea), which Congress passed unanimously in 2003. Prea does not protect migrants in detention, but the Department of Homeland Security was nevertheless subject to oversight, and that included investigating sexual abuse by Ice employees. Not any more. In spite of thousands of complaints of sexual violence against detained women and children, the Trump administration closed the department’s three watchdog agencies, including the offices through which detainees could lodge complaints.As part of its elimination of anything suggestive of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the administration halted the military’s sexual assault prevention training. The defense department reported in 2023 that nearly a quarter of active-duty women were subject to sexual harassment – and they are just the ones who risked coming forward.The policies that smash the legal bulwarks against sexual violence and those that put pregnant people’s lives at risk make for the most compelling subject lines on fundraising emails from advocates for women, people of color and other legally protected classes hardest.But the disproportionate harm these folks are suffering from the decimation of the federal workforce by Doge is possibly most consequential, because it may not be reversible. Women and Black people are more likely to work in government jobs than in the private sector; a recent McKinsey analysis found that women, particularly women of color, are promoted at higher rates in public institutions than in private corporations. But government jobs also provide union representation, job security, pensions and other benefits that lift people of color into the middle class and allow them to accumulate the property and wealth denied them since slavery – benefits that do not accrue to home health aides, chambermaids and workers in the other low-paid, precarious occupations where women and people of color predominate.“For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” vowed candidate Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference early in 2023. But it is Trump himself who feels most wronged and betrayed, with women – the pussy-hatted protesters who overran Washington on the second day of his first administration, the sex worker Stormy Daniels, who publicly poked fun at his self-celebrated endowment, the magazine writer E Jean Carroll, awarded tens of millions of dollars in damages for his sexual assault and defamation – perhaps the greatest wrongdoers and traitors. Even Melania is no longer pretending to like him.Like his woman-hating followers, this man, who has used his wealth and his body to impose his will on women, feels sorely victimized by them. Now he has more power than any other man in the world to exact his revenge.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is at judithlevine.substack.com More

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      Jon Stewart on CNN’s Biden book: ‘Selling you a book about news they should have told you’

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      Late-night hosts rip CNN for promoting a book on Joe Biden’s health and weigh in on Donald Trump attacking Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.Jon StewartOn the Daily Show, Jon Stewart tore into CNN anchor Jake Tapper for promoting his book Original Sin, written with Alex Thompson, on his network. The host played several clips of Tapper teasing the book, which reports on Biden’s mental decline while still in the White House. In the final clip, Tapper says: “You will not believe what we found out.”“Don’t news people have to tell you what they know when they find it out?” Stewart wondered on Monday evening. “Isn’t that the difference between news and a secret? ‘You won’t believe what we found out’ – no, that’s why I watch breaking news.”Stewart noted real breaking news on Sunday, which was confirmation from Biden’s personal team that he was diagnosed with “aggressive” prostate cancer and was considering treatment options. “Doing the story seems almost disrespectful,” said Stewart. “Can CNN thread the needle? How do you pivot from excitedly promoting your anchor’s book to somberly and respectfully promoting your anchor’s book?”Well, as one CNN staffer put it: “This was already going to be a tough week, and this makes it much harder. And that is a reference to the fact that our colleagues, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have a book that’s set to be published on Tuesday.”“It’s so hard, it’s such a difficult time, so unfathomable in terms of the pain his family must be feeling,” Stewart mocked. “And yet, if you act now, you use the code ‘backslash tap that book’, it’s 20% off.”Jokes aside, Stewart acknowledged: “How fucking weird it is that the news is selling you a book about news they should have told you was news a year ago, for free.”“I understand the excitement over an insidious Democratic cover-up about Joe Biden’s mental decline,” he added. “The thing is though, it was a terrible cover-up, because we all fucking knew.”“There was no cover-up – poll after poll showed vast majorities of the public thought Biden was too old and too out of it to run again,” he continued. “Dean Phillips mounted an entire primary campaign because of it.”“He along with most of the public knew it was a bad idea for Biden to run. We knew it,” Stewart concluded. “And that’s what’s so hilarious about politicians. The cover-up doesn’t work when everyone knows you’re lying.”Stephen ColbertMeanwhile, Trump spent the weekend “settling back into the White House after his Mideast all-you-can-bribe buffet”, as Stephen Colbert put it on Monday’s Late Show.“He just loved it over there!” he continued. “He was having such a good time with the princes and the palaces and the marble and the gold, and the special souvenir he really wants to bring home: obedience to leaders on punishment of death.”Trump “spent this beautiful weekend viciously attacking anyone who dare defy him”, including Walmart, which recently said his tariffs were “too high” and would force the chain to raise prices. “Which means it’s going to cost you a lot more when you run out for milk, one Goodyear tire and a t-shirt that says ‘Shrek yourself before you wreck yourself,’” Colbert joked.Evidently, Trump did not like Walmart “accurately describing how he has personally affected your pocketbook”, so he posted on Truth Social: “Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain … they should as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS’”Colbert broke out his Trump impression: “As is said, I make a mess, you eat it. That’s how the world works. Which reminds me – JD, there’s some hot dog stuck in my golf cleats. Get over here with your tongue and a positive attitude.”Walmart wasn’t Trump’s only target on social media this weekend. On Friday, out of nowhere, he posted: “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’”“First of all, sir, keep my best friend Taylor Swift’s name out of your filthy nugget hole,” said Colbert. “Second, it’s possible people are talking about her a little less these days because her 149-date Eras Tour ended six months ago.”But attacking Swift was “just a warm-up”, because he also went after Bruce Springsteen, after the musician called him “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” at a concert in Manchester, England.In a rambling Truth Social post, Trump called Springsteen “highly overrated”, said he “never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics” and claimed “he is not a talented guy”.“What are you doing? Attacking Bruce is like attacking America itself!” Colbert marveled.Trump went on: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country.”“Pretty bold to say someone else’s skin is atrophied when your own complexion can best be described as Tandoori Catcher’s Mitt,” Colbert quipped. More

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      Don’t be fooled. Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is typically ugly and typically misnamed | Arwa Mahdawi

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      What’s big, beautiful and kept a lot of Republicans up late on Sunday night? There might be various responses to that question, but the answer I’m looking for is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Coming in at 1,116 pages, the bill isn’t quite War and Peace but it’s definitely big. Whether the mega-package of tax breaks and spending cuts is beautiful, however, is up for debate.And there has certainly been a lot of debate. The bill has been in limbo for a while because a few Republicans who consider themselves “fiscally conservative” are happy with the package’s extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and increased spending for the military and immigration enforcement, but don’t think enough social and climate-related programmes have been slashed to pay for it all. In particular, they want deeper cuts to food stamps and Medicaid, which is a government programme providing health care to low-income people. Late on Sunday, however, in an unusual weekend vote, the hardliners relented a little and the House Budget Committee revived the bill. It still faces some challenges, but it is now closer to becoming law.If you are in a masochistic mood you can read all 1,116 pages of the bill. But the TLDR is that a more accurate name for the package would be the Screw Poor People and Make the Rich Richer Act. Or the Kick Millions Off Medicaid So a Billionaire Can Buy Another Yacht Act. This isn’t to say that every single element of the package is bad. There is one part, for example, where children under eight are given $1,000 for “Money Accounts for Growth and Investment”, AKA “Maga” savings accounts. In general, though, it’s pretty on-brand for Republicans.The deceitful name is on-brand too. The right is very cunning when it comes to legislative framing: it loves hiding nasty intentions behind noble-sounding names that are difficult to argue with. Emotive words such as “protect” tend to come up a lot. If a bill has “protect” and “women” in its name, you can be sure it’s not about protecting women, but about bullying transgender people. The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 (which was blocked by Democrats in the Senate in March), for example, focused on banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. As the National Education Association said at the time, however, it “does nothing to promote equity in resources, funding, or opportunity, or to tackle the sexual abuses of athletes and subsequent cover-ups that have occurred in women’s sports”.Another thing Republicans love to do is to pass entirely unnecessary bills with highly emotive names, in order to amplify misleading information. Take, for example, the rightwing lie (repeatedly amplified by Trump) that Democrats want to execute newborn babies. This is obviously nonsense – infanticide is very much illegal in the US – and is a willful misinterpretation of the fact that doctors may sometimes give palliative care to dying babies. This didn’t stop cynical lawmakers from coming up with the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (a bill that has gone through a number of iterations but was passed by House Republicans earlier this year) requiring doctors to provide care for children born alive during an attempted abortion. Again, there are already laws in place that cover this. The bill was completely unnecessary but it gave Republicans a great opportunity to conflate abortion and infanticide. “Tragically, House Democrats opposed the bill, voted for infanticide, and opted to deny medical care to crying newborns on operating tables struggling to live,” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said after most Democrats voted against the legislation.Republicans have always understood how to use language to manipulate people far better than the Democrats. You may have forgotten the name Newt Gingrich but the former Republican House Speaker has been an integral part in the rise of Trumpism and the current culture wars. Back in 1990 his political action committee distributed a pamphlet called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” that instructed Republican candidates to learn to “speak like Newt”. Gingrich was very keen on exploiting emotive language and saying outlandish things that would make headlines and get the media inadvertently amplifying a preferred narrative. The Republican party may now be full of toadies – but you can’t deny they’re all fluent in Newt. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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      Trump can complain all he wants – but he can’t stop his own economic mess | Sidney Blumenthal

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      With his usual threats, Donald Trump is trying to ward off the dire reality that he has created and is bearing down on him. He can clamp migrants in foreign gulags, coerce white-shoe law firms into becoming his pro bono serfs and try to simply erase the National Endowment for the Humanities, but he can’t rescind his harm to the economy. Trump can slash the National Weather Service, but he can’t stop the storm he’s whipped up. He’s shouting into the wind at his twister.No matter how much he might lower his draconian tariffs after his 90-day breathing spell, the velocity of damage is just building. It’s not a mistake that can be rectified. There’s no do-over. It’s not a golf game at one of his clubs where he gets endless mulligans and is declared the champion. Nor does Trump really want to draw back completely from his tariffs as if he never had proudly displayed his “Liberation Day” idiot board.When the Walmart CEO inevitably announced that prices would have to be raised as a result of Trump’s tariffs, Trump warned: “Between Walmart and China they should, as is said ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!”Trump has falsely insisted that tariffs are levied on foreign importers. But Walmart demonstrated the indisputable fact that tariffs are price increases passed on to consumers. They are a tax. Trump is furious at the early indication of the renewed inflation and price rises that are coming. His natural response, of course, is an attempt at intimidation.The tariffs are a shakedown by which Trump could exercise his control over corporations that must scrape and bow before him, asking for targeted relief in exchange for, perhaps, payments to his personal political action committee, or, perhaps, throwing money into the kitty of his various financial endeavors, his crypto firm and meme-coin scheme. According to his wishful thinking, businesses should “eat the tariffs” to cover up his falsehood and maintain his popularity. For his sake, shut up and “eat” it. Trump is at war with the corporations’ bottom line.He can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but he can’t fool the bond market any of the time. When Moody’s Ratings downgraded the US credit rating, the Trump White House put out a statement attacking Moody’s “credibility” while blaming “Biden’s mess”. Moody’s reasons were an oblique criticism of Trump’s pending “big, beautiful bill” for massive regressive tax cuts in addition to his tariffs, which have led to the suspension of any further cuts in interest rates from the Federal Reserve.Blaming Biden, in any case, hasn’t been cutting it with public opinion. Only 21% of Americans attributed the state of the economy to Biden’s policies in a poll in early April conducted by CBS News/YouGov. In Trump’s first hundred days alone, he denigrated Biden at least 580 times, according to NBC News. Trump sought to make him the scapegoat for his own policies. But the public is certain that Trump and nobody else owns the economy as he desperately tries to restore it to where Biden bequeathed it to him, with inflation and interest rates falling. And, now, very ill, Biden can no longer serve as a convenient target.Even if, after Trump’s 90-day pause on tariffs, he cuts them in half, the result will be devastating to small businesses, family farms and many large corporations. Nearly 90% of American small businesses rely on imported goods. More than 20% of the US agricultural sector depends upon exporting its products, according to the US Department of Agriculture. US manufacturers rely on imports for more than 20% of machinery, products and components. More than 41m American jobs are linked to imports and exports, one in five, according to the Business Roundtable. That does not include the multiplier effect of millions, if not tens of millions, of additional jobs created as a result.The supply chain has been severely distorted. For 12 hours on 9 May, zero cargo ships – none, not one – departed from China to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two major US ports for Asian imported goods. The more than $906bn trucking industry, which had finally regained stability after the Covid disruption, faces another shock. “Trump trade war is wrecking hope for 2025 US trucking rebound,” reads the headline on a Reuters story.The uncertainty factor that Trump has introduced has frozen all planning. The auto companies, among others, have given up issuing any guidance to investors. Their earnings are plunging, their suppliers in chaos. Nobody can predictably produce, order or hire, and so businesses are in a state of suspension. The prospect of a slowdown has already depressed oil prices to the point where it will soon not be profitable to drill at all. In April, Trump called critics of his tariffs “scoundrels and frauds”, but retailers do not know how to price goods, how much to raise them to sustain often razor-thin profit margins. They face a Hobson’s choice of pricing themselves out of their markets or absorbing the costs and going bust.The head of Trump’s council of economic advisers, Kevin Hassett, cheerfully announced on 12 April that he expected the gross domestic product to grow by 2% to 2.5% in the first quarter of this year. On 30 April, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that GDP had fallen by 0.3% in the quarter.Even after Trump agreed to drop his 145% tariff on China to 30%, Paul Krugman points out that “we’re still looking at a shock to the economy seven or eight times as big as Smoot-Hawley, the previous poster child for destructive tariff policy”. Krugman states that on the optimistic lower end, “we’d expect Trump’s tariffs after last weekend’s retreat on China to cut overall US trade by roughly 50%. Trade with China, which would have been virtually eliminated with a 145% tariff rate, would fall by ‘only’ around 65% with a 30% tariff.”The result will be devastating, with rising inflation, higher unemployment, shortages, and lower growth and investment. In short, the economy will plunge into stagflation for the first time since the 1970s. Then, the phenomenon was the outcome of the Opec oil shock. This is the Trump shock, not the consequence of an external factor, but entirely self-induced through a delusion. Does he care? “Well,” Trump said, “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”All of what’s coming was foreseeable. This is not a case in which unintended consequences suddenly emerged without advance warning, like in the 1970s. Here the red lights flashed; Trump raced through them.The uncertainty he’s injected is not a byproduct of happenstance. Uncertainty is the aspiring dictator’s pre-eminent prerogative. Trump resents any limitation on his ability to act however he wishes. The ultimate privilege of a dictator is to be at liberty to be impulsive. The more unpredictable he is, the more he is regarded as omnipotent.Trump has no real policies. There is no actual analysis, no expertise, no peer review. He brandishes atavistic symbols as primitive representations of his unrestrained power. Lowering or raising the tariffs are functionally equivalent if they are perceived as enhancing the perception of his potency. The merits are of no interest. Policies, such as they are, are measured by how well they gild his lily. The more unpredictable he is, the more he thinks of himself and thinks others think of him as almighty.For Trump, experience is meaningless. He never learns. Even his existential moments are forgotten, like his near-death from Covid. He deduces no lessons. It doesn’t inform his health policies, for example, which he’s turned over to oddballs and snake-oil salesmen led by the chief crank with roadkill in his freezer and a worm in his brain, Robert F Kennedy Jr.Trump’s learning curve is a hamster’s wheel. He goes ’round and ’round, repeating belligerent ignorance unaltered over decades. He’s the hamster who thinks he’s making progress if he receives attention. His solipsism is epistemological. Jared Kushner grasped its essence when he surfed on Amazon to find the one discredited economist, Peter Navarro, to provide sham formulas to justify Trump’s preconceived tariff obsession.Trump’s psychological equilibrium requires the constant rejection of his responsibility for the abrasive reality he churns up. Confronting reality exacts fortitude, both politically and intellectually. He considers that a mug’s game he must resist. His inner fragility is shielded by projecting images of muscular strength, now AI generated videos and pictures of himself produced by the White House communications team as a Jedi, a guitar hero (after Bruce Springsteen called him “treasonous”) and the Pope (the new Pope Leo XIV does not much care for the social Darwinism of JD Vance).Meanwhile, there must be a conspiracy theory to deliver up a scapegoat. That opens the door of the Oval Office for malicious fabulists to whom Trump is particularly susceptible and finds useful as his instruments to terrorize even his own staff. Enter loony Laura Loomer as his virtual national security personnel director with a portfolio in hand identifying six officials on the national security council to be purged, soon to be followed by the defenestration of the national security adviser Michael Waltz, who, rather than the thoroughly incompetent secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, served as the scapegoat for the Signal chat group that invited in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic.A 9/11 truther, Loomer claimed the terrorist attack was “an inside job.” During the 2024 campaign, Trump brought her to the 9/11 memorial service. Loomer said that if Kamala Harris won the White House it “will smell of curry”. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right member of the House from Georgia, assailed Loomer as an “appalling and extremist racist”. “You don’t want to be Loomered,” Trump said. “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career in a sense. Thanks, Laura.”Trump famously can’t accept the slightest criticism. He is armored against learning in any case. He is incapable of engaging in any self-examination for both emotional and cognitive reasons. It would be too upsetting even to contemplate. His whole being would become paralyzed if he were ever to suffer a bout of introspection. His system couldn’t tolerate it. His brittle peace of mind requires his fabricated self-image to be constantly apple-polished and worshipped.The split between Trump’s anxious need for his cosseted appearance and the terrible reality he’s making is his ultimate credibility gap. He must sustain a completely self-contained inner world or the walls start to close in.Information must therefore be suppressed. When the intelligence community assesses that the Tren de Aragua gang is not being manipulated by the Maduro regime of Venezuela, which is the invented excuse for Trump’s migrant round-up emergency, then fire the intelligence analysts or tell them to redo their report.When the Democrats in the House attempted to bring up a bill to remove Trump’s claim of a national security emergency for his tariffs – another mythical emergency – Republicans moved to block it in the rules committee. No vote, no debate. It’s a disappearing act.If the lying doesn’t work, try intimidation. That is the rhyme or reason behind Trump’s success in imposing his malignancy. But now he’s created a reality he can’t disguise or bully. The planets are hurdling into collision. He’s done it to himself by himself.The passage of his “Big Beautiful Bill”, with its extravagant tax cuts for the wealthy and deep cuts to Medicaid, wounding his white rural base, of which, depending on the county, are 25% to 40% dependent on the federal healthcare program, will spike the inflationary effect of his tariffs as well as the deficit. Republicans no longer uphold the pretense that their tax cut redistribution of wealth upward will actually lower the deficit by reducing revenue. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics claims, originally dubbed voodoo economics by George HW Bush, in fact proved Bush prescient. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, confessed that the supply side charade was a “Trojan horse” for lowering the upper rate and was just a “horse-and-sparrow” theory of “trickle down.” Thus, Trump’s potential legislative success will only deepen his crisis.Donald turns his lonely eyes to the Federal Reserve to bail him out, like his father, Fred Trump, who always arrived in the nick of time to rescue him from his messes. Trump lies in capital letters: “THE CONSENSUS OF ALMOST EVERYBODY IS THAT, ‘THE FED SHOULD CUT RATES SOONER, RATHER THAN LATER.” There is no such consensus. The consensus is to the contrary.Trump’s begging shifts to threats. If Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, doesn’t do what Trump says he will be turned into the scapegoat: “Too Late Powell, a man legendary for being Too Late, will probably blow it again – But who knows???”But Powell is imperturbable. “Higher real rates may also reflect the possibility that inflation could be more volatile going forward than in the inter-crisis period of the 2010s,” he said in his most measured tone on 15 May. “We may be entering a period of more frequent, and potentially more persistent, supply shocks – a difficult challenge for the economy and for central banks.”It’s not Powell who is “too late.” It’s Trump. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in his novel Decline and Fall: “Too late, old boy, too late. The saddest words in the English language.”

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Trump news at a glance: thinktank finds legal immigrants stripped of protections and sent to El Salvador prison

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      At least 50 Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador had entered the US legally, according to a review by the Cato Institute.Published by the libertarian thinktank on Monday, the report analyzed the available immigration data for only a portion of the men who were deported to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), and focuses on the cases where records could be found.“The government calls them all ‘illegal aliens.’ But of the 90 cases where the method of crossing is known, 50 men report that they came legally to the United States, with advanced US government permission, at an official border crossing point,” Cato said in its report.Analysis finds at least 50 migrants sent to El Salvador prison entered US legallyThe Cato Institute’s analysis goes against the Trump administration’s claim that only undocumented people were deported to El Salvador.The report says that 21 men were admitted after presenting themselves at a port of entry, 24 were granted parole, four were resettled as refugees, and one entered the US on a tourist visa.The Trump administration deported more than 200 alleged gang members to the Cecot mega-prison in March, controversially invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime, as justification.Read the full storySupreme court sides with Trump on Venezuelans’ protected statusDonald Trump’s administration can end legal protections that have shielded about 350,000 Venezuelans from potential deportation, the supreme court ruled on Monday.America’s highest court granted a request by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, to revoke temporary protected status (TPS) for the Venezuelans while an appeal proceeds in a lower court.Read the full storyTrump and Putin phone call fails to bring breakthrough Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have held a rare phone call, which the US leader described as “excellent”, but the Kremlin refused to agree to a ceasefire in the war with Ukraine, despite pressure from Washington and European allies.Trump described the call as having gone “very well”. But the Russian leader declined to support the US-proposed 30-day unconditional ceasefire, which Washington had framed as the call’s primary objective. Putin also suggested his country’s maximalist objectives in the war with Ukraine were unchanged.Read the full storyComey says ‘8647’ Instagram post was totally innocentThe former FBI director James Comey has brushed off criticism about a photo of seashells he posted on social media, saying it is “crazy” to think the messaged was intended as a threat against Donald Trump.“I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it, until I heard … that people were saying it was some sort of a call for assassination, which is crazy,” Comey said in interview on MSNBC.Read the full storyMohsen Mahdawi graduates from Columbia after Ice releaseThe Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, who was released only weeks ago from federal detention, has crossed the graduation stage to cheers from his fellow graduates.The Palestinian activist was arrested by immigration authorities in Colchester, Vermont, while attending a naturalization interview. He was detained and ordered to be deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.Read the full storyTrump signs law to combat fake images and online exploitationDonald Trump has signed into law the Take It Down Act, a measure that imposes penalties for online sexual exploitation that Melania Trump helped usher through Congress.The US president had the first lady sign it, too, despite what sounded like a mild objection on her part.Read the full storyCBS News chief steps down amid tense Trump legal battleThe president of CBS News has announced that she is stepping down, citing disagreements with the network’s parent company as it confronts a $20bn lawsuit from Donald Trump and a looming merger.Wendy McMahon, who has helmed the company’s venerated news division since 2023, said in a memo shared in full on social media that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward”.Read the full storyTrump claims without evidence stars were paid to endorse HarrisDonald Trump lashed out at celebrities who endorsed Kamala Harris in late night and early morning screeds on Monday, saying he would investigate them to see if they were paid for the endorsements – repeating a common refrain on the right about the star-studded list of Harris supporters.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The US has officially closed its Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem, according to an internal state department memo seen by the Guardian, in effect eliminating the Palestinians’ dedicated diplomatic channel to Washington.

      A federal judge has blocked efforts by the Trump administration and its so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to dismantle the US Institute of Peace, at least temporarily.

      The Trump administration has reportedly reached an agreement to pay nearly $5m to the family of the woman who was fatally shot by police while participating in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 18 May 2025. More

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      Trump officials reportedly reach $5m settlement in January 6 wrongful death suit

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      The Trump administration has reportedly reached an agreement to pay nearly $5m to the family of the woman who was fatally shot by police while participating in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol carried out by the president’s supporters.Citing multiple sources, the Washington Post reported on Monday that the Trump administration had agreed to pay the family of Ashli Babbitt to settle the wrongful death lawsuit they filed after the attack.Babbitt was attempting to force her way into the lobby of the US House speaker at the time, Nancy Pelosi, when the Trump supporter was shot dead by a Capitol police officer. The payment of about $5m at the center of the settlement is meant to resolve the litigation from Babbitt’s estate, which initially sought $30m in damages.Attorneys for both Babbitt’s family and the federal government each informed a judge earlier in May that they had agreed to settle the case in principle. The case was scheduled to be tried in July 2026.Although a binding agreement had not yet been signed and details of the settlement were not revealed during a court hearing on 2 May,Judge Ana Reyes of the US district court in Washington DC instructed both parties to provide an update by Thursday.Sources with knowledge of the agreement told the Post that Trump’s justice department would pay just less than $5m, with approximately one-third allocated to the family’s legal team, which includes Judicial Watch, a politically conservative organization, and attorney Richard Driscoll of Alexandria, Virginia. These sources requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing case, the Post reported.Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, reacted to the news of the settlement by calling it a “slap in the face” to the American people.Jeffries said that the settlement was “totally done without any communication to the chief of the Capitol police or his lawyers, and appears solely the result of a political determination that Donald Trump and Republicans are going to try to whitewash what happened on January 6.“This settlement is just an extension of what they’ve previously done, which is to pardon violent felons who violently attacked the Capitol on January 6, including police officers, and now have all been pardoned and sent back to communities across the country where in some cases they’re re-engaging in criminal activity,” he added.“Donald Trump and the extreme Maga Republicans are not going to be able to erase what happened on January 6, no matter how hard they try.”The January 6 Capitol attack that Babbitt chose to partake in was a desperate attempt by a pro-Trump mob to keep him in the White House despite his first presidency ending in defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The attack has been linked to at least eight other deaths, including the suicides of police officers who were left traumatized having defended the Capitol that day.Babbitt’s social media activity showed that she was deeply engaged for months with a conspiracy theory that painted Democratic lawmakers as evil pedophiles with whom Trump was locked in mortal combat. And she also believed lies from Trump and his allies that electoral fraudsters had handed Biden the 2020 election.For weeks before she joined the mob in DC, Babbitt had been retweeting those false claims from Trump himself, as well as the pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, alleging massive voter fraud before his decisive electoral loss to Biden.Trump then clinched a second presidency after defeating Kamala Harris in November’s election. More

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      Judge blocks Trump officials’ efforts to dismantle US Institute of Peace

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      A federal judge on Monday blocked efforts by the Trump administration and its so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to dismantle the US Institute of Peace, at least temporarily.Doge, initially overseen by billionaire Donald Trump supporter Elon Musk, took over the congressionally created and funded thinktank in March and had fired most employees by a late-night email after the US president targeted the institute and three other agencies with an executive order.The takeover prompted a couple of lawsuits against Doge and the Trump administration, including from fired employees, trying to impede the institute’s dismantling. The White House claimed the thinktank was in “non-compliance” with Trump’s executive order, whose purported aim was to shrink the federal government’s size. And Doge staff forcefully entered the thinktank’s building after cancelling its contract for private security.US district court judge Beryl Howell on Monday ruled that Doge illegally took over the institute through “blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers from three separate local and federal agencies”.The judge ruled as “null and void” all actions against the US Institute of Peace – including the removal of its board and the transfer of its property to the government services administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe institute employed about 300 people. Besides human resources staffers and a few overseas employees, most at the institute were fired.A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, claimed in an email that the institute was taken over and most of its employees dismissed because it “has failed to deliver peace” – and that Trump “is carrying out his mandate to eliminate bloat and save taxpayer dollars”.A statement from an attorney who filed the dismissed US Institute of Peace’s employees suit said their workplace’s takeover “was a case of egregious government overreach”.The statement added: “Armed agents forcing their way into an independent nonprofit’s privately-owned headquarters, seizing its assets, and destroying records – all in the name of so-called ‘efficiency.’”The Associated Press contributed reporting More