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      Trump fires labor statistics chief hours after data showed jobs growth slowed

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      Donald Trump fired the federal government official in charge of labor statistics, hours after data revealed jobs growth stalled this summer, prompting accusations that he is “firing the messenger”.The US president claimed that Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of labor statistics, had “faked” employment figures in the run-up to last year’s election, in an effort to boost Kamala Harris’s chances of victory.Trump later claimed: “Today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”.He produced no evidence for these allegations, and insisted that the US economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.But Friday’s employment figures told a very different story, and raised questions about the state of the labor market since Trump’s return to office.“We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”McEntarfer was contacted for comment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) confirmed in a brief statement that she had been dismissed. William Wiatrowski, the agency’s deputy commissioner, will serve as acting commissioner.Trump’s abrupt announcement came as administration officials scrambled to explain a lackluster employment report. Not only did jobs growth fail to meet expectations in July, but previous estimates for May and June were revised significantly lower.The president was promptly accused of trying to hide accurate statistics. “Trump is firing the messenger because he doesn’t seem to like jobs numbers that reflect how badly he’s damaged the economy,” said Lily Roberts, managing director for inclusive growth at the Center for American Progress, a thinktank, said.“Politicizing our country’s collection of data on what’s going on in the economy … will make it harder to create an economy that makes sure everyone has a good job,” added Roberts. “Borrowing from the authoritarian playbook fuels more uncertainty that will cost Americans for years to come.”Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, described the president’s allegation as “very damaging and outrageous”, adding: “Not only does it undermine the integrity of federal economic statistics but it also politicizes data which need to remain independent and trustworthy. This action is a grave error by the administration and one that will have ramifications for years to come.”McEntarfer is a widely respected economist and veteran employee of the federal government. She previously worked at the US Census Bureau under George W Bush and at the US census bureau under Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn January 2024, before McEntarfer’s confirmation for her current post by the US Senate, her nomination was backed by four former BLS commissioners.In a letter also signed by organizations including the American Statistics Association and a string of senior economists, they said there were “many reasons” to confirm McEntarfer as commissioner of labor statistics, citing her “wealth of research and statistical experience”.She was ultimately confirmed by a vote in the Senate, with 86 votes cast in favor and eight against.Gene Sperling, chair of the national economic council under Bill Clinton and Obama, and who worked as an official under Biden, said he expected Trump to “destroy the credibility” of economic data when his administration suffered its first bad jobs report. “Now: first bad job report, and he just fired BLS head over absurd claims of bias,” Sperling wrote on X, formerly Twitter.Trump’s decision to fire McEntarfer was “outrageous but not surprising”, said Julie Su, former acting US labor secretary under Biden. “He hates facts, so he blames truth-tellers.”The US “needs and deserves trustworthy economic data”, added Su. “This is a pathetic attempt by the president to gaslight everyone about the consequences of his disastrous economic policies.” More

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      Trump’s first-term labor statistics chief denounces ‘groundless firing’ of successor – live

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      Bill Beach, a former Heritage foundation economist who was picked by Donald Trump in 2018 to oversee labor statistics, denounced on Friday what he called the “totally groundless firing of Dr Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS”.Beach added that Trump’s order to remove the bearer of bad news on jobs “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau”.He also co-signed a statement with Erica Groshen, who served as the commissioner before him, from 2013 to 2017, which began:
      Today, President Trump called into question the integrity of the Employment Situation report that the BLS released this morning. He accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of deliberately reporting false numbers to reflect poorly on this administration. This baseless, damaging claim undermines the valuable work and dedication of BLS staff who produce the reports each month. This escalates the President’s unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system.
      The President seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news. The Commissioner does not determine what the numbers are but simply reports on what the data show. The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months’ employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information.
      This rationale for firing Dr McEntarfer is without merit and undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families, and policymakers. US official statistics are the gold standard globally. When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science.
      Other experts and elected officials were equally scathing in their response to Trump’s move.“This will make it difficult to trust government sources on economic and financial data,” Rohit Chopra, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, wrote. “Many businesses and investors use these data sets to determine where they want to launch or grow, so this will have real costs.”“Instead of helping people get good jobs, Donald Trump just fired the statistician who reported bad jobs data that the wanna-be king doesn’t like,” Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and bankruptcy law expert, posted.“No. Mr. President,” Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, wrote. “In America, you do not fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for releasing a jobs report that you don’t like. That’s what authoritarians do. We need serious economists in these positions, not hacks who will only tell you what you want to hear.”US stocks slumped on Friday, with the S&P on track for its biggest daily percentage decline in more than three months as Donald Trump unveiled new import tariffs on dozens of trading partners and a surprisingly weak jobs report spurred selling pressure.Shares in Amazon also fell after the company failed to meet expectations for its Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit.Just hours before Trump’s latest self-imposed tariff deadline on Friday, the president signed executive orders imposing import taxes on goods imported from around the globe, including key trading partners such as Canada, Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the 27-nation European Union.Investor confidence was also hit by new data showing that US job growth slowed more than expected in July, and was significantly lower than previously reported in May and June. Those job numbers prompted Trump to fire the messenger, commissioner of labor statistics Erika McEntarfer.The jobs report significantly pushed up expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its next meeting in September.According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 lost 101.60 points, or 1.60%, to end at 6,237.79 points, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 472.78 points, or 2.24%, to 20,649.67. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 543.97 points, or 1.23%, to close at 43,587.01.

      Donald Trump said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in “appropriate regions” in response to “highly provocative statements” from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who said yesterday that the US president should remember Moscow had Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities. It comes amid a spiralling war of words with Medvedev as tensions rise over Trump’s efforts to get Russia to end its war in Ukraine or face economic sanctions. Medvedev had earlier said that Trump’s threats to sanction Russia and a recent ultimatum were “a threat and a step towards war”.

      Leaders of more than 60 countries were plunged into a fresh race to secure trade deals with the US after Trump unleashed global chaos with sweeping new tariff rates last night. Our story is here and a table of all the tariff rates for each country is here.

      Trump ordered the firing of the federal government official in charge of labor statistics, hours after data revealed jobs growth stalled this summer, prompting accusations that he is “firing the messenger”. In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed (with no evidence) that Erika McEntarfer had “faked” employment figures in the run-up to last year’s election, in a bid to boost Kamala Harris’s chances of victory, and implied she “manipulated” today’s numbers for political reasons. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” Trump wrote.

      The Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised job stats today which showed the US economy added only 73,000 jobs in July, far lower than expected, amid ongoing concerns with Trump’s escalating trade war. In the report, the BLS also slashed the number of jobs added in May, revising the figure down by 125,000, from 144,000 to only 19,000, and in June, which was revised down by 133,000, from 147,000 to just 14,000 – a combined 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

      Trump also said once again that Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, should also be “put out to pasture”, as he continued to insist the US economy is booming on his watch and implore the Fed to lower interest rates. The Fed later announced that Federal Reserve governor Adriana Kugler will resign from the central bank’s board as of 8 August, leaving a key vacancy for Trump to fill ahead of schedule.

      Ghislaine Maxwell was “routinely moved” to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, a senior administration official has told NBC News, due to safety concerns. “Any false assertion this individual was given preferential treatment is absurd. Prisoners are routinely moved in some instances due to significant safety and danger concerns,” the official said of Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes. She has appealed to the supreme court to overturn her conviction.
      Continuing his attacks and baseless claims that the employment figures released today were “manipulated” for political reasons, Trump said the numbers were “rigged” to make him and his party look bad.He wrote on Truth Social:
      In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad – Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 Presidential Election, and then, those numbers were ‘taken away’ on November 15, 2024, right after the Election, when the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM. Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell is no better! But, the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!
      The Federal Reserve has announced that Adriana D Kugler will step down early from her position as governor of the Federal Reserve Board on 8 August.Her term was due to expire in January, but her early resignation gives Donald Trump an opportunity to more quickly appoint someone who could eventually replace Jerome Powell as chair.In a speech earlier this month, the New York Times notes that Kugler said the Fed should not cut interest rates “for some time” as tariffs trickle through to consumer prices.Responding to Ghislaine Maxwell’s move to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, a senior administration official has told NBC News that prisoners are “routinely moved” due to safety concerns.“Any false assertion this individual was given preferential treatment is absurd. Prisoners are routinely moved in some instances due to significant safety and danger concerns,” the official said of Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice.In a statement earlier today responding to Maxwell’s move from a Florida facility to the one in Texas, the family of Virginia Giuffre, along with Maxwell and Epstein accusers Annie and Maria Farmer, said:
      It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received.
      The New York Times (paywall) notes that the Senate confirmed Erika McEntarfer to the post of commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024 in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote. Among her supporters at the time was then senator and now vice-president JD Vance.Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s labor secretary, has said she “wholeheartedly” supports the president’s firing of Erika McEntarfer to “ensure the American People can trust the important and influential data coming from [the Bureau of Labor Statistics]”.Trump ordered McEntarfer’s firing hours after data revealed that jobs growth had stalled this summer and administration officials scrambled to explain the lackluster report.“A recent string of major revisions have come to light and raised concerns about decisions being made by the Biden-appointed Labor Commissioner,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote in a post on X.She said William Wiatrowski, the deputy commissioner, would serve as acting commissioner during the search for McEntarfer’s replacement.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, may call a special election in November to begin the process of redrawing the state’s congressional maps in response to Texas’s plans to change their own maps to help Republicans keep their majority in the House of Representatives.Donald Trump is pushing Texas and other Republican-dominated states to carry out mid-decade redistricting that will favor the GOP and potentially stop Democrats from retaking control of the House in next year’s midterm elections. Governors in Democratic-led states have responded by warning they will move to redo their own maps if Texas goes ahead with its plans, which could create an additional five Republican-leaning districts.California is viewed as the best opportunity for Democrats to pick up seats through gerrymandering, but voters will first have to approve changes to an independent redistricting commission that was given the power to draw congressional districts in 2010.Speaking at a Thursday press conference, Newsom said “a special election would be called, likely to be the first week of November” to approve the changes.“We will go to the people of this state in a transparent way and ask them to consider the new circumstances, to consider these new realities,” the governor added.The party out of power typically regains control of the House in a president’s first midterm election, as the Republicans did under Biden in 2022 and Obama in 2010, and Democrats did during Trump’s first term in 2018.Newsom argued that another two years of unified Republican control of Congress would be especially harmful for California, noting that Los Angeles residents were still waiting for lawmakers to approve aid from the wildfires that ravaged the region earlier this year.“They’re doing a midterm rejection of objectivity and independence, an act that we could criticize from the sideline, or an act that we can respond to in kind – fight fire with fire,” Newsom said.While Republicans could gain the most seats by redrawing Texas’s maps, Ohio, another red state, must also redraw its maps before next year’s election, and there’s talk of redistricting to the GOP’s advantage in Missouri and Indiana.Democrats are seen as having a more difficult path to improving their odds of winning the House majority through redistricting, often due to their states’ embrace of independent commissions intended to draw fair congressional amps.Voters created the California Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2008 to draw its legislative maps, and in 2010 expanded its powers to congressional districts. Newsom said, “We’re not here to eliminate the commission,” but rather to respond to what he described as “the rigging of the system by the president of the United States.“And it won’t just happen in Texas. I imagine he’s making similar calls all across this country. It’s a big deal. I don’t think it gets much bigger,” Newsom said.In the same Truth Social post, Trump said Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell should also be “put out to pasture”, as he continued to insist the US economy is booming on his watch.
      The Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP’ despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting ‘Kamala’ elected – How did that work out? Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should also be put ‘out to pasture’.
      Donald Trump has said he’s ordered the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after data showed US employment growth was weaker than expected for the last few months.McEntarfer was nominated by former president Joe Biden to serve in the role in 2023 and was confirmed by the US Senate the following year.In a Truth Social post, Trump suggested (with no evidence) McEntarfer had “faked” the employment figures in the run-up to last year’s election, in a bid to boost Kamala Harris’s chances of victory, and implied she “manipulated” the numbers for political reasons.“We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” Trump wrote.“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”The bureau released revised job stats today which showed the US economy added only 73,000 jobs in July, far lower than expected, amid ongoing concerns with Trump’s escalating trade war.In the report, the BLS also slashed the number of jobs added in May, revising the figure down by 125,000, from 144,000 to only 19,000, and June, which was revised down by 133,000, from 147,000 to just 14,000 – a combined 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.Here is my colleague Andrew Roth’s report:Donald Trump has said that he has deployed nuclear-capable submarines to the “appropriate regions” in response to a threatening tweet by Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, suggesting that he would be ready to launch a nuclear strike as tensions rise over the war in Ukraine.In a post on Truth Social on Friday, Trump wrote that he had decided to reposition the nuclear submarines because of “highly provocative statements” by Medvedev, noting he is now the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council.Medvedev had earlier said that Trump’s threats to sanction Russia and a recent ultimatum were “a threat and a step towards war”.Donald Trump also continues to voice his frustration over the war Russia continues to wage in Ukraine, writing on Truth Social earlier (before the submarine announcement):
      I have just been informed that almost 20,000 Russian soldiers died this month in the ridiculous War with Ukraine. Russia has lost 112,500 soldiers since the beginning of the year. That is a lot of unnecessary DEATH! Ukraine, however, has also suffered greatly. They have lost approximately 8,000 soldiers since January 1, 2025, and that number does not include their missing. Ukraine has also lost civilians, but in smaller numbers, as Russian rockets crash into Kyiv, and other Ukrainian locales. This is a War that should have never happened — This is Biden’s War, not ‘TRUMP’s.’ I’m just here to see if I can stop it!
      As Trump and Medvedev have traded taunts in recent days following Trump saying on Tuesday that Russia had “10 days from today” to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or be hit, along with its oil buyers, with tariffs, Moscow has shown no sign that it will comply with Trump’s deadline.As my colleague Shaun Walker reports from Kyiv, Vladimir Putin has not responded to Trump’s ultimatum. He has claimed he wants a “lasting and stable peace” in Ukraine but has given no indication that he is willing to make any concessions to achieve it, after a week in which Russian missiles and drones again caused death and destruction across Ukraine.“We need a lasting and stable peace on solid foundations that would satisfy both Russia and Ukraine, and would ensure the security of both countries,” said Putin, speaking to journalists on Friday, a week before Trump’s new deadline for hostilities to cease.Trump has said if Russia and Ukraine do not come to an agreement to end the war by next Friday, 8 August, he will impose a package of economic sanctions on Russia.Per my last post, Medvedev on Monday accused Trump of engaging in a “game of ultimatums” and reminded him that Russia possessed Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities of last resort after Trump told Medvedev to “watch his words”.Medvedev has emerged as one of the Kremlin’s most outspoken anti-western hawks since Putin sent tens of thousands of troops to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Reuters notes that while Kremlin critics deride him as an irresponsible loose cannon, some western diplomats say his statements illustrate the thinking in senior Kremlin policymaking circles.The Associated Press also notes that with his frequently wielded nuclear threats and lobbing of insults at western leaders on social media, some observers have argued that Medvedev is seeking to score political points with Putin and Russian military hawks with his extravagant rhetoric.The escalation from Trump comes amid a spiralling war of words with the former Russian president over Trump’s efforts to get Russia to end its war in Ukraine.Trump yesterday called Medvedev a “failed former president”, writing on Truth Social that he should “watch his words” and is “entering very dangerous territory”.
      Russia and the USA do almost no business together. Let’s keep it that way, and tell Medvedev, the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he’s still President, to watch his words. He’s entering very dangerous territory!
      Medvedev, who was prime minister of Russia from 2012 to 2020 and is a very vocal supporter of its invasion of Ukraine, has ridiculed Trump’s ultimatum to the Kremlin to reach a peace deal. He wrote on X earlier this week:
      Trump’s playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 days or 10 … He should remember 2 things:
      1. Russia isn’t Israel or even Iran.
      2. Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war.
      Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country. Don’t go down the Sleepy Joe road!
      In another post on X, Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s security council, called US senator Lindsey Graham “gramps”, after he told him to “get to the peace table”.
      It’s not for you or Trump to dictate when to ‘get at the peace table’. Negotiations will end when all the objectives of our military operation have been achieved. Work on America first, gramps!
      The jabs continued on Telegram, where Medvedev threatened Trump with a cold war-era doomsday weapon known as the “Dead Hand” – a Russian nuclear system designed to automatically launch a retaliatory strike.
      If a few words from a former Russian president can cause such a nervous reaction from the supposedly powerful President of the United States, then clearly Russia is right about everything and will continue its own way.
      And as for the ‘dead economies’ of India and Russia and ‘stepping into dangerous territory’ – well, let him recall his favorite movies about the ‘walking dead,’ as well as how dangerous the supposedly non-existent ‘Dead Hand’ can be.
      Donald Trump has said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in “appropriate regions” in response to threats from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who said on Thursday that Trump should remember Moscow had Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities.Trump said in a post on Truth Social:
      Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter! More

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      in US Politics

      The key to understanding Trump? It’s not what you think

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      View image in fullscreenDonald Trump embodies dealmaking as the essence of a particular form of entrepreneurship. Every deal begins with his needs and every deal feeds his wants. He thus appears to be like other super-rich people: seemingly bottomlessly greedy, chasing the next buck as if it is the last buck, even when they have met every criterion of satiation.But Trump is different, because his brand of greed harks back to an idea of leadership that is primarily about adversarial dealmaking, rather than about innovation or improved managerial techniques. Trump’s entire career is built on deals, and his own narcissism is tied up with dealmaking. This is because of his early socialization into his father’s real-estate dealings in and around New York. Real estate in the United States, unlike the money-making modes of super-rich individuals in other countries, relies on deals based on personal reputation, speculation on future asset values, and the ability to launder spotty career records. Profits and losses over time can be hard to identify and quantify precisely, as Trump’s auditors and opponents have often confirmed, since profits, which depend on speculation and unknown future value, are by definition uncertain.Trump’s incessant boasts about being an apex dealmaker cast light on almost every aspect of his approach to his presidential decision-making. Numerous observers have long cast doubt on Trump’s image as a consummate dealmaker, pointing to his many failures in his long real-estate career, his abortive political and diplomatic deals, his backsliding and reversals, and his overblown claims about deals in progress. But these criticisms miss the point.Deals, whether in finance, real estate, or in any other part of the economy, are just one step in the process of reaching full-fledged, binding agreements subject to the force of law. They are a stage in the negotiation process that has no force until it is finalized as a contract. It is, at best, an agreement to agree, which can turn out to be premature, poorly conceived or unacceptable to one or other party. Put another way, it is an engagement, not a wedding. A deal allows a negotiator like Trump to claim victory and blame the other party or some other contextual variable if things do not work out.In fact, in the hands of someone like Trump, deals are ways to evade, postpone or subvert the efficient work of markets. Trump does not like markets, precisely because they are impersonal and invisible. Their results – for corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders – are subject to clear measures of success and failure.Because deals are personal, adversarial and incomplete, they are perfect grist for Trump’s relentless publicity machine, and allow him to polish his brand, massage his ego and signal his prowess to opponents – without the regulations and measurable consequences of regular market risks. The downside risk for an aborted or interrupted deal is negligible, and the upside is guaranteed by the legal power of fully completed contracts.Trump has figured out to an exceptional degree that dealmaking does not need to be successful in order to massively increase his wealth. Whether or not true, his claims to successful deals are the key to his brand and profitmaking worldwide, either directly or through the business endeavors of his sons. These range from his latest Trump perfume and Trump mobile telephone services, his Maga accessories, Trump golf courses around the world, his real estate and resorts, and of course his highly profitable cryptocurrency holdings. In every case, his deals either lead to further deals, which service his branding machine, or they lead to direct increases in his personal and corporate wealth. Deals, successful or not, are Trump’s magic means to amass money and feed his avarice.Avarice is a vice with a long history in Christian theology. It is widely defined as an excess of greed, an inordinate level of greed, an insatiable greed. It has been viewed by economic historians as a passion that must be curbed and replaced by calculated, moderated self-interest in order for the rationality of the modern market to function as a dominant economic principle. From this perspective, greed can have numerous objects – such as food, sex and power – whereas avarice is single-minded in its focus on money.Trump exemplifies this focus. Though he has to function in a world where avarice is meant to be regulated by the market mechanisms of price and competition, he has managed to successfully pursue his avarice with little obstacle.This driving desire defines Trump’s “egonomics” – the intimate connection between his narcissistic urges and his wish for increasing his stock of money. The governing principles of his economic policy have nothing to do with America getting its due, as his messaging about tariffs argues, or about restoring dignity to the working class, as he signals to his Maga base. Nor are they about power or prestige. The object of everything he does is money, and in the service of the boundlessness of money, which Trump has made the defining object of his desire. Other commodities are of interest to him only insofar as they serve his desire to acquire, hoard and increase his stock – of money.View image in fullscreenMoney for what?The first – and most soothing – theory is that Trump wants money to buy power – more of it, perhaps all of it. More power than China, than his generals, than Harvard. We all know power – via our parents, our teachers, our bosses, our police. It is a force we understand, a pull we recognize. If Trump only wants more of something that many people have, and even more want, he is legible, he is like us.But power for what? To do what? To get what?Perhaps he is chasing an unassailable place in history, both human and eternal. So then it is not just power he endlessly chases, but glory. For this we have some evidence in the clownish thesaurus of words that he uses to describe his achievements, his looks, his wit, his wisdom, his all-round superhumanity: best, most, only, incredible, ever, more. In this orgy of superlatives, he is always curled high up in the clouds, like a Maurice Sendak toddler. But since Trump, from his perspective, brooks no real competition in life, in politics, in real estate, or even in history, there can be no glory for him which is not tainted by the mediocrity of his competitors. And true glory usually requires some form of self-sacrifice, some sense of compassion, some ability to transcend oneself. Given his woeful deficits in these areas, the glory game cannot be the key to understanding Trump.And so we go to a more familiar space: the realm of prestige, status and stardom. This realm is wired into competitions, tournaments and casinos of every sort, where winning is well-defined, losing is for losers and there is usually only one survivor and one winner who takes all. The competition for status is as old as recorded human history and accompanies every human society that has had leaders and followers, more and less skilled competitors for food, shelter and sexual partners. It begins with simple rules for coming out on top and evolves over time into the most elaborate forms of status competition, often driven by males – including wartime exploits, trophy wives, palatial homes and bottomless conspicuous consumption.These tournaments of value can be observed in settings as disparate as auctions, horse races, philanthropic gifts and corporate mergers and acquisitions. There is widespread consensus among thinkers from many eras and regions that status is a limited good, which has its own economics of supply and demand, distinct from those of pecuniary gain. This insight looks, at first, like the key to Trump.But attractive as this argument may seem, it too is a red herring.View image in fullscreenTrump’s signature riffAmong Trump’s own tactics, the one he loves to use most is tariffs. Trump’s obstinate insistence on tariffs as the key to restoring American manufacturing, swelling the US treasury and reducing American consumer prices has flummoxed most mainstream economists. Tariffs are for Trump the ideal way to combine dealmaking, status-grabbing and his penchant for money as its own bottomless value.It is evident that Trump’s understanding of the trade-offs of globalization is rudimentary and often internally contradictory. Indeed, he shows signs of believing that making deals of any sort requires only outsize confidence, charismatic force and bottomless access to financial backing. In fact, Trump’s view of himself as an incomparable dealmaker (a claim at odds with his many entrepreneurial disasters) conceals his deep distaste of real markets – in which a large apparatus of binding promises, the tendency to stable price equilibria, and the connection of supply and demand through pricing – can frustrate his brand of deal-making, which is always oriented to maximizing his personal prestige.Trump’s deep-seated desire to be the winner who takes all in the global prestige economy sheds some light on his weaponization of tariffs. We can catch a glimpse of this logic in a most unlikely context. It was captured in detail by one of the fathers of British social anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski, in his 1922 book on a unique trading system that he found in the Trobriand Islands of Oceania, on several trips there in the years between 1915 and 1917. This anthropological classic, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, casts new light on Trump’s tariff mania.What Malinowski described is a system of trading across about 18 coral islands within a 175 sq mile (453 sq km) area, between “big men”, leaders of lineages who exchanged highly specific valuables (such as decorated shell necklaces and bracelets) and their counterparts in this network of islands. Called the kula system, it had a highly codified set of rules to hedge voyagers against oceanic weather dangers and hostile groups in other islands, some of whom were cannibals. The goods appropriate to kula exchange could never be hoarded, marketed or bartered like normal utilitarian goods. This was a strictly ceremonial system geared to enhancing the prestige of male elites, of moving these well-known objects in a circuit which could last for years.The diplomatic rituals of these exchanges were ensconced in an atmosphere of pretend hostility between the parties, often because other groups in these islands were real enemies, always poised for real warfare. Hanging on the knife-edge between trade and war, these exchange circuits were strictly distinguished from barter or money transactions (what we would today call market transactions). The kula system was a way of organizing exchange, averting war, signaling prestige and making allies through a tightly regulated flow of valuables outside market exchange circuits.Trump does not care about Malinowski, the Trobriand Islands, non-capitalist exchange systems or “big man” politics in kinship-based polities. But his operating system belongs in this type of diplomatic world, one that requires nothing except a non-negotiable interest in winning deals. Trump’s onslaught of tariffs, falling on everyone like nuclear ash, is meant to make him the king of the global prestige market, no matter the cost to diplomatic traditions, financial markets, customer capacities or fair balances of trade. Trump appears to be undistracted by any other economic priority outside the aim to be the apex dealmaker.The kula system is grounded in a non-monetary system of honor, prestige and reciprocity, which helps us understand Trump’s tariff strategy but does not fit his narcissist drive to crush all his fellow players. Even the kula system is about relationships. Trump is strictly about winning deals.So we must beware of seeing the urge to dominate all prestige markets as Trump’s bottom line. Trump’s bottom line is money. Being an avaricious man, Trump worships money – both its power and its pomp – and he seeks it through his extensive networks of children, clients, tax lawyers and cronies, all devoted to the increase of his wealth. This pecuniary drive has a transcendent, epic and unquenchable force which cannot be explained by reference to the other things that money can buy. Even his quest for prestige through arm-twisting tariff deals is primarily about positioning himself to secure future deals in his individual capacity. His is a special brand of avarice.View image in fullscreenThe new cryptocracyThere is no better way to explore the ways in which Trump’s various egonomic strategies come together than in the recent invention and propagation of cryptocurrency, which has spawned a shadow world of speculators, fraudsters, legal hucksters, elected and unelected lobbyists. Their usual victims are vulnerable citizens, low-level grifters, pensioners, badly informed investors and other natural prey. The entire industry lives in a gray economy, attached to mainstream markets, assets and regulators like the tiny remora fish that feast off sharks. It survives in a legal twilight zone, where its currency is accepted only by some businesses as legal tender, and where smart players use pump-and-dump tactics to make fast profits with short-lived “coins” of various kinds. Whatever the utility of cryptocurrency in the real world of goods and services, it is mainly a tool for amassing wealth by gambling on its future convertibility to real money in specialized currency exchanges.Cryptocurrency puts Trump in the position of being a player and the owner of a casino-like system at the same time, so that he always wins, if not in one role, then in the other. The outrageous self-enrichment schemes of Trump and his family in the crypto industry, which have been carefully exposed in several media outlets recently, establish new frontiers for Trump’s shameless violation of even the simplest norms about conflict of interest. The best example of these ventures is his memecoin, $Trump, which has made him and his close associates a fortune by selling access to Trump through a barely regulated crypto mechanism. By some estimates, Trump has gained several billions of dollars in his net worth through his crypto ventures, which combine nepotism, influence-peddling and dealmaking in a unique package.Through cryptocurrency, Trump has found the ultimate way to attach his core impulse – avarice – to the larger machinery of the markets. There is some truth to the argument that Trump wants more of everything he can get, including power, glory and prestige. But what he wants more than anything else is money, which is just a temporary token of more money, and more money for ever more.The unique instinct behind Trump’s avarice, which sets him apart from other billionaires who continue to chase wealth, is that he has found a way to build his fortune through deals – whether deals that make him money by inflating the value of his brand, which can then make him more money through more deals, or through the enforceability of completed contracts.Through his dealmaking, Trump has managed to triumph over the market, making it work for him to amass greater and greater sums of money, whether his deals are seen through to fruition or not. We can summarize Trump’s approach to markets by adapting a famous sentence, spoken by him, about how he grabs women: Trump grabs markets by the deal. Illustrations by Joao Fazenda

      Arjun Appadurai, professor emeritus at New York University, is the former provost of the New School. More

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      FTSE 100 breaks through the 9,000-point barrier to reach new record high

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      Britain’s blue-chip stock index has risen through the 9,000-point mark to touch a new record high.The FTSE 100 share index hit 9,016.98 points in early trading on Tuesday, taking its gains during 2025 to more than 10%.Analysts said the London stock market had benefited from a range of factors this year, including a move by some investors to diversify away from US shares due to concerns over Donald Trump’s economic policies.The US president’s trade war has also helped UK stocks, as Britain is one of the few countries to have reached a trade deal guaranteeing lower tariffs.The AJ Bell investment analyst Dan Coatsworth said: “With the UK having already reached an agreement on a 10% tariff for trade with the US, with exemptions for certain industries, the country is now seen to have an advantage in terms of trade relations.”In recent years, the London stock market has been derided as a “Jurassic Park” index, due to its reliance on companies in long-established industries and a shortage of fast-growing tech companies. However, that has proved an asset in uncertain times.“The UK stock market is the calming cup of tea and biscuit in an uncertain world. There’s nothing fancy on offer, just reliable names that do their job day in, day out. That’s an underrated characteristic and a reason why investors are finally warming to the UK stock market’s appeal in 2025,” Coatsworth added.However, Trump’s trade war has created choppy conditions in financial markets throughout 2025. The FTSE 100 index fell as low as 7,544 points in early April, when tariff announcements sent shares tumbling. It then recovered sharply, as traders embraced the “Taco trade” – the idea that Trump always chickens out if his policies spook investors.The precious metals producer Fresnillo has been the top riser on the FTSE 100 so far this year, up by 155%. It has benefited from surging prices, with gold hitting several record highs this year and silver trading at a 14-year peak this week.The prospect of higher military spending has pushed up shares in the defence contractor Babcock by 120% this year, with BAE Systems up 66%. The engineering firm Rolls-Royce has gained 75%, as its turnaround plan has yielded results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohn Moore, a wealth manager at RBC Brewin Dolphin, said “strong earnings momentum in the banking and defence sectors” had helped push the FTSE 100 to a record high.Moore also credited the UK’s “relative political stability”. “While there may be tax increases to come, which was part of the reason for the sell-off of the pound in early June, the government has a clear mandate and tenure for the next few years.“That compares favourably to other parts of Europe, even, where coalition governments are having a tough time,” he said. More

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      ‘It’s harsh. It’s mean, brutal’: Trump bill to cause most harm to America’s poorest

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      Last November, Donald Trump made a solemn vow to all Americans: “Every citizen, I will fight for you, your family and your future every single day.” Eight months later, Trump is vigorously backing many policies that will mean pain for millions.Trump has pushed to enact the Republican budget bill, which would make significant cuts to Medicaid, Obamacare, and food assistance, and would do the greatest damage to those Americans struggling hardest to make ends meet – the 30% of the US population that lives in households earning under $50,000 a year.Even as Trump and Republican lawmakers are rushing to cut over $1.4tn in health and food assistance for non-affluent Americans, Trump continues to pressure Congress to extend over $3tn in tax cuts that disproportionately help the wealthy and corporations.Trump has embraced these Robin-Hood-in-reverse policies, even though it was voters earning less than $50,000 a year who delivered victory to him last November. They favored him over Kamala Harris by 50% to 48%, according to exit polls, while Trump and Harris tied among voters earning $50,000 or more a year.Several social policy experts said Trump has engaged in hypocrisy at best and betrayal at worst when it comes to the working-class and blue-collar Americans he promised to fight for. Speaking about the Republicans’ “big, beautiful” budget bill, Sharon Parrott, president of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said: “Who’s getting hit, who’s bearing the cost? It’s people with low and middle incomes, people that the president and many Republican policymakers promised to serve and support in the last election.”View image in fullscreenThe budget bill would mean a net financial loss for the bottom 30% of American households by income – after factoring in its tax provisions and cuts in benefits. The House bill would hit the lowest-earning 10% of Americans hardest: for them, it would mean a painful $1,600 cut in income on average (a 3.9% drop), according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). At the same time, the Trump-backed bill would be a boon to wealthy households – it would mean a $12,000 increase in net income, on average, for households in the top 10%, those earning above $692,000 a year. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the top 0.1% – those with income over $3.3m – would receive tax cuts of $103,500 on average.The CBO says the income of the bottom 10% tops off at $22,868 (before factoring in government transfers). The second lowest decile earns from $22,868 to $43,137; the third decile earns up to $55,628; and the fourth up to $68,601.The Yale Budget Lab found that the bottom 20% of US households would see their incomes drop by 2.9% on average over the next decade, and the second lowest quintile – moderate-income households – would suffer a 0.4% loss of income on average. But the richest 20% would see their incomes rise by 2.3%. Those in the top 1% would see their incomes climb by $29,585 on average.Trump is demanding these big tax cuts for the rich even though the CBO says the budget bill will increase the federal debt by $3.3tn – a move that will push up interest rates and make mortgages and home-buying more expensive.According to the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning thinktank, the $121bn tax cuts that would go just to the richest 1% next year are significantly more than all the tax cuts that would go to the bottom 60% of Americans in terms of income.The poorest 20% of Americans would receive just 1% of the bill’s tax cuts next year, while the highest earning 5% would receive 44% of the cuts.Last week, Trump urged lawmakers to enact the bill, saying: “There are hundreds of things in there. It is so good.” At a news conference, the president said the more than $1tn in Medicaid and food assistance cuts wouldn’t hurt anyone.“It won’t affect anybody,” he said. “It is just fraud, waste and abuse.”But Parrott took a sharply different view: “The bill stands alone historically for its unique upside-down mix of large tax cuts for the top, deep cuts that affect low- and middle-income people, and massive increases in deficits and debt.”John Ricco, the Yale Budget Lab’s associate director of policy analysis, said: “It’s unambiguous that low- and moderate-income Americans will be worse off on average under the budget bill, and that’s principally because the cuts in Medicaid and Snap [the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] would by definition fall most heavily on these groups,” Ricco said.Jeanne Lambrew, the Century Foundation’s director of health policy reform, estimates that at least 16 million Americans will lose health coverage because of the budget bill – refuting White House claims that “no one will lose coverage”. Lambrew said the bill would cause a more than 50% increase in the number of uninsured nationwide, to nearly 45 million people.What’s more, the Trump-backed plan sharply reduces Affordable Care Act subsidies, and that will force millions of Americans to either drop coverage or pay far more for coverage. Millions of Americans will find it harder to obtain healthcare, with many forced to take on far more medical debt.While Trump and many Republicans say the Medicaid cuts are all about reducing “waste, fraud and abuse”, Lambrew calculates that a mere 3.5% of the $1tn in healthcare cuts come from cutting waste and abuse. “What Trump has been saying is, ‘We’re not cutting Medicaid. We’re just cutting fraud.’ That’s gaslighting.” Lambrew said.Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent the Senate a letter that harshly criticized the budget bill. “As Pope Leo XIV recently stated, it is the responsibility of politicians to promote and protect the common good, including by working to overcome great wealth inequality,” he wrote. “This bill does not answer this call. It takes from the poor to give to the wealthy.”According to a Quinnipiac University poll, only 27% of registered voters support the GOP budget bill, while 53% oppose it. A Fox News poll found that 38% support the bill, while 59% oppose it.The House bill’s deep cuts in food benefits will cause 7 million people, including over 2 million children, to lose food aid or have their food aid cut significantly. The Trump-supported bill also makes sharp cuts in Pell grant awards. The Center for American Progress says this means 4.4 million students from low- and moderate-income families could lose some or all of their federal grant aid.In another blow to Americans earning under $50,000, Trump pushed to have the budget bill eliminate the “Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program”, which, as one website put it, “keeps poor people from freezing to death at home”. Killing the program would end heating subsidies for 6 million Americans, but so far congressional Republicans have spared the program and not bowed to Trump on this.View image in fullscreenIn another blow to blue-collar Americans, the bill would undo much of Joe Biden’s efforts to speed the creation of clean-energy industries, and that could put hundreds of thousands of potential jobs at risk, many of them factory jobs.“In this bill, folks in Congress went out of their way not to give anything to low-income people,” said Chuck Marr, vice-president for federal tax policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. He noted that in previous tax cut bills that favored the rich, GOP lawmakers made sure to include some sweeteners for low- and moderate-income Americans.“But in this bill,” Marr said, “folks in Congress said: no, we’re going to go after these people. They’re going after healthcare and food, and these are the people who are also going to get hammered by Trump’s tariffs.” Lower-income people spend a higher percentage of their income on goods.“This bill is a major shift,” Marr added. “They’re taking away from poor people and working-class people and channeling it to very high-income people. I think it’s punitive. It’s harsh. It’s mean, brutal.”Trump’s tariffs would also hit less affluent Americans hardest. One study found that Trump’s planned tariffs would cause the bottom 20% of households to pay up to 5.5% of their income toward tariff-caused higher prices. That’s more than two and a half times the percentage that those in the top 20% would pay (2.1% of income).Trump has repeatedly boasted that the bill contains several provisions he championed to help working-class Americans. At a White House event to promote the bill, he pointed to a DoorDash driver from Wisconsin who was on hand to help make his case that the “no tax on tips” provision would help workers.But tax experts say that provision will help only a tiny fraction of those earning under $50,000. Only 4% of workers in the bottom half by income are in tipped jobs. Moreover, nearly two-fifths of tipped workers are already earning so little that they don’t pay federal income taxes.“Given how the current income tax system works, this provision will provide little or no benefit to those workers,” said Ricco. “Those workers tend to have low incomes, and the US system doesn’t basically tax their incomes, and this won’t offer them any additional tax reduction.” In other words, the server making $100,000 a year at a high-end restaurant will benefit substantially from no tax on tips, while the hotel housekeeper or 20-hour-a-week waiter at a diner making $25,000 a year will be helped little or not at all.As for Trump’s much-ballyhooed “no tax on overtime” provision, that, too, will do little for those earning under $50,000, Ricco said. “That provision is really geared to middle- and upper-middle groups,” he said. “People in the bottom 50% aren’t paying much income tax, and so no tax on overtime wouldn’t benefit them much. People in the bottom 40%, they’re often in a precarious employment situation. They’re generally not working 45 or 50 hours a week.”Ricco estimated that for Americans in the bottom 40% by income, the no tax on overtime provision will mean “less than a $10 tax cut per year”. “It’s essentially a rounding error,” he said.Republicans boast that increasing the child-tax credit will help millions of struggling families – the House bill would increase that credit, now $2,000, to $2,500, while the Senate raises it to $2,200. Under current law, one in four children – about 17 million – are ineligible to qualify for the full $2,000 credit because their family’s income is too low to qualify for the full credit. A two-parent family with two children needs to earn over $48,000 to obtain the full credit.Under the House bill, a single parent with two children who earns $16,000 a year would get no additional tax credit, while a married couple with two kids and a $400,000 income would see their tax credit jump by $1,000.With their eagerness to cut the social safety net, Republicans seem to be treating millions of Americans who earn less than $50,000 as undeserving takers. “People earning under $50,000 are major targets of the Republican agenda. Their health coverage is targeted. Their food security is targeted,” said Marr. “They are left out of key provisions expanding tax cuts, like the child tax credit. They are most at risk from the Republican tariffs. They’ll be hurt across the board.”Marr said the budget bill treats “these people very harshly”.“It’s the harshest bill we’ve ever seen since budget deficits became an issue 40 years ago,” he said. “This is the first bill that simultaneously targets programs for poor people and working-class people to pay for it, and then takes that money to pay for tax cuts for very wealthy people. It makes poor and working-class people worse off. That’s not been done before.” More

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      Trump’s ‘revenge tax’ could threaten foreign investment into US, analysts say

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      Foreign investment into the US could be threatened by Donald Trump’s new “revenge” taxes, analysts have warned.A provision within the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will allow the US to apply higher taxes on foreign individuals, businesses and investors connected to jurisdictions that impose “unfair foreign taxes” on US individuals and companies.Companies listed on the London Stock Exchange could choose to avoid the measure by redomiciling in New York.Section 899, as it is called, classes digital service taxes and “diverted profits taxes” as unfair, along with any taxes that target US entities. It would allow US authorities to impose an additional tax starting at 5% and increasing by five percentage points annually, up to 20%.Max Yoeli, a senior research fellow in the US and the Americas programme at Chatham House, says section 899 “threatens to further alienate foreign investors”.It could chill investment into the US by calling into question its “fundamental openness”, he added.The Italian bank UniCredit agrees that section 899 could further damage foreign investor sentiment towards US dollar-denominated assets. It could backfire on the US, it says, given the large amount of domestic assets held by foreigners.“The list of countries that would fall into this category is long and encompasses most European countries, including Italy and Germany,” UniCredit told clients, saying that foreign investors had more than doubled their holdings of US assets over the past decade.“Not only would this additional tax serve to finance corporate tax reductions, but it would also likely be used as a negotiating tool for the US in trade deals, especially as Republicans seem willing to withdraw from the global minimum tax framework.”View image in fullscreenUniCredit also fears the dollar’s safe haven status could be undermined if there are fresh tax disputes between the US and other countries.The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed by the US House of Representatives last month. The Senate is yet to approve the bill, with the White House setting a deadline of 4 July.George Saravelos, the global head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, warned last month that section 899 could allow the US administration to transform its trade war into a capital war by “explicitly using taxation on foreign holdings of US assets as leverage to further US economic goals”.UK companies could certainly fall foul of section 899, as Britain operates a digital services tax aimed at tech multinationals, and a diverted profits tax designed to clamp down on tax avoidance by multinationals.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGoldman Sachs has calculated that UK corporates are “particularly exposed” to section 899, as roughly 30% of the revenues of companies listed on the FTSE 100 are generated in the US.However, as companies that are majority-owned by US shareholders are exempt, City bosses may consider moving their stock market listing to New York, to dodge section 899.“This ownership dynamic not only mitigates tax risk but also reinforces the strategic case for relisting in the US, where investor bases are deeper and more aligned with US revenue exposure,” the Goldman Sachs analysts said.According to Goldman, the large UK companies with the most significant exposure to the US, and who are not majority-owned by US investors, are the media group Pearson, the business services group Experian, the pest control business Rentokil and the pharmaceuticals manufacturer Hikma.Ashtead Group, Compass and Melrose also generate a large proportion of their sales stateside, but as they have majority US ownership they should be exempt from section 899.French companies could also be at risk, as Paris operates a digital services tax on the revenues that large tech companies generate in France. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Saying Trump is dangerous is not enough’: Bernie Sanders on Biden, billionaires – and why the Democrats failed

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      ‘I think what Trumpism is about, is an understanding that the system in America is not working for working-class people,” says Bernie Sanders, sitting in the Guardian’s offices in London. “In a phoney, hypocritical way, Trump has tapped into that. His quote-unquote ‘solutions’ will only make a bad situation worse.”View image in fullscreenIn person, Sanders’ 83 years read differently than in photograph, perhaps because of how conversational he is. His voice is magnetic – a Brooklyn accent that feels both warm and tough. “But what I have been aware of, and I’ve talked about it for years, is that in America, the very richest people are doing phenomenally well, while 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck.”Later, he will say the same thing to an audience in London – only with more emphasis and passion. “Sixty per cent. Six-zero. Do you know what paycheck to paycheck means?” It’s exhilarating to hear Sanders speak to a crowd: his zeal is reflected back in their faces, his moral clarity is such a relief, set against the cynicism and resignation of most of the Democratic party’s opposition to Trump and his administration. Class war is as old as time, but it’s a peculiarity of this age that you rarely hear a politician name it. “I do,” he tells me. “There is a class war going on. The people on top are waging that war.”It’s a look at what could have been. Sanders ran, of course, to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, and again in 2020. The first time, there was a real sense, in the US and abroad, that something incredible might happen: that someone with “almost no name recognition,” he says, a senator from the small state of Vermont, might successfully challenge Hillary Clinton, whom the party had already anointed. We all know how that worked out. Was it the greatest disappointment of his political life? “Well, you’re too busy to feel things,” he says. “You’re just working very hard.”What is absolutely unequivocal is his criticism of the Democrats. The party, he thinks, lacks any real progressive promise. “What they say is, ‘The status quo is working pretty good, and we will tinker around the edges’, and that is not a message that resonates with working people”. He refuses to indulge in any personal ill-will towards Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. The most he’ll voice is a weary resignation about 2020, when his campaign “won the first three states, primary states, in terms of popular votes. Then the Democratic establishment made sure the other candidates dropped out, and they rallied around Joe Biden. You know, that’s the world that we live in. We are taking on not just the Republican leadership, we are taking on a Democratic establishment which is tied to elements of corporate America.”During the 2024 election, he “worked very hard to see that Kamala Harris was elected. I was all over the country and was one of her major surrogates. We begged our campaign to start talking about the needs of working people. But their consultants and the money people behind them thought of another strategy, showing that she was more conservative, that she worked with people like Liz Cheney, worked with Republicans, had billionaires going out and saying that she’s wonderful. They thought that was the right approach. I did not think that was the approach, and I was public about that.” He pauses, and not for effect: it’s hard to relive November 2024. “But my voice did not carry,” he says.Sanders started his political life in 1981, when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. His brother, Larry, is 90 and lives in Oxfordshire. He stood as a Green candidate in David Cameron’s old parliamentary seat in 2016. In a speech that year, supporting Sanders as the Democratic nominee, Larry gave a brief portrait of their parents. “Eli Sanders and Dorothy Wexford Sanders. They did not have easy lives, and they died young,” he said. Dorothy was born in New York, to Jewish immigrant parents fleeing Russian pogroms. Eli arrived in the US in 1921, most of his family remaining in what is now Poland and what was then Austrian Galicia, to be “wiped out by Hitler,” Sanders has said in the past. Eli worried constantly about providing for his family and both he and Dorothy were political, Larry said in the speech: “They loved the New Deal of Franklin D Roosevelt, and would be especially proud that Bernard is renewing that vision.”View image in fullscreenSanders’ charge to the Democrats now is twofold. “Their weakness is, I think, that their credibility is now quite low. And they don’t have much of a message for working people, other than to say Trump is dangerous. I think that’s just not enough.” He point blank refuses to get into Trump’s administration – its excesses, surprises, non-surprises, without first walking through everything that was already wrong with the US. “What the Democrats have to absolutely make clear is this: we’re going to take on the billionaire class. They’re going to start paying their fair share of taxes. We’re going to have healthcare for all people as a human right. We’re going to have a strong childcare system that every American can afford. We’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. We’re going to create millions of jobs transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel. We’re going to build housing – boy, housing is like it is here, just a huge crisis. We’re going to build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing. Do Democrats say that? No.”That Sanders will not be drawn on every new Trump calumny, instead focusing on an economic reality that’s been worsening for decades, does help him keep on course. And it definitely doesn’t stop him giving Trump both barrels. “We don’t usually have presidents suing the media, threatening the media if they write bad stories about them. We don’t usually have presidents threatening to impeach judges. We don’t have presidents suing law firms. You add all that together, it is a movement for authoritarianism.” Is it worse than he predicted? I was thinking specifically about the extrajudicial detentions and deportations, students dragged off campus and held for weeks, perfectly legal migrants sent to El Salvador, when they weren’t even from there. “First time around, Trump was not as well organised. They’ve had four years to get their act together, so to speak. And that’s what this Project 2025 document was about.”Project 2025 was a document published by rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation in 2024, offering a terrifying vision for a second Trump term. An outright proposal to dismantle the US government, it was a roadmap to crackdown on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion rights – as well as being against action on the climate crisis and against vaccines. If it looked like a blueprint for The Handmaid’s Tale and The Road combined, none of the alarm last year could ever have encompassed the reality that would come. Among many other things, the Trump administration would go on to deport people without due process, and then ignore a supreme court ruling that an 18th-century wartime declaration about “alien enemies” was not a proper legal instrument.I ask a question about who funds the Heritage Foundation – as it keeps all donations secret, which raises questions about whose interests Project 2025 is really serving. His reply is impatient: “It doesn’t matter who it is they have. There’s no lack of well-paid, right-wing consultants and intellectuals who can move this country to an oligarchic authoritarian society.” His tone is clear – stop getting lost in detail, stop looking for hidden connections, stop messing around and start fighting.“One of the frightening aspects of what’s going on is the degree to which the establishment-type folks have caved in, and so quickly,” he says. “That was much less the case, during Trump’s first term.” He mentions Jeff Bezos, “who one had assumed was kind of a moderate Democrat”, losing his editorial board because they were going to endorse Kamala Harris. “Same thing in the Los Angeles Times. When you have ABC agreeing to a settlement with Trump; the bogus lawsuit against CBS that Paramount are negotiating right now. When you have major, billion-dollar law firms saying, ‘OK, we plead guilty to having clients who went to court against you and your friends, that was a terrible crime, we’re going to give you millions of dollars.’ Harvard has buckled up a little bit and appears not to be caving in, but a lot of universities have. None of this was the case eight years ago. They are creating the overall mentality that it will be dangerous to be strongly critical of Donald Trump.”View image in fullscreenIn other areas, money is talking so loudly in politics that it’s all you can hear. Sanders has used Gaza as an example when he says that politicians are afraid to speak out on Israel’s actions in case Super Pacs – which can put forward unlimited amounts of money for a candidate – will penalise them at the next election. Today, he says it’s not just Gaza, but a host of other issues. “If you say, ‘Do you really think it’s a good idea to cut Medicaid and give tax breaks to billionaires? Do you really think that climate change is a hoax?” there will be a number, not a majority, but a number of Republicans who would say: ‘No. But if I stand up and vote ‘no’, the next day, Elon Musk would say, “All right, you are going to be primaried [a candidate will be fielded against you], and Trump will support your opponent. I will put unlimited sums of money to elect your opponent.”’ Good luck to you.’”While that pattern is undoubtedly visible across many issues, the example of Gaza is particularly stark – with groups such as Aipac, funded by pro-Israel billionaires, putting tens of millions of dollars against congressional candidates, mainly Democrats, that it did not deem to be sufficiently supportive of Israel in the run-up to 2024. As the atrocities in Gaza leave many in civil society dumbfounded, what is the long game here, I ask. “That’s a difficult question, and I don’t know the answer. I will tell you that the United States has had a long-term relationship with Israel, and there are many people who have intellectually chosen not to understand that Netanyahu does not represent the Israel of 20 years ago. The moderate democratic society is now controlled by right-wing racist extremists who have done, and are doing today, absolutely horrific things to the Palestinian people in violation of American law and international law. They refuse to recognise that.” In Dublin, he was heckled for not using the word genocide, and some US progressives were dismayed, two years ago, when he didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire. He speaks out now, choosing his words carefully; he’s not on the fence.Since the end of March, Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (he always calls her that, never AOC), have been holding campaign rallies all over the US from Arizona to Utah. They are deliberately not skipping the diehard Democratic states – but have been more surprised by the numbers they’ve been getting in red states. “This is not a campaign. This is a political rally, and I think the numbers are almost unprecedented. Large numbers of people, including in conservative areas, do not want to see oligarchy in America, do not want to see authoritarianism, do not want to see massive tax breaks for the rich and cuts to the programmes that working-class people desperately need.” Sure, he and AOC sometimes disagree, “my wife and I disagree on issues! But Alexandria, I think, comes pretty much from where I come from.”View image in fullscreenHe has hope for the future, too. There are a couple of dozen people in the house Progressive Caucus – a 98-strong group of the more left-wing members of the Democratic party in Congress – that are “strong progressives”, he says. “Alexandria is maybe one of the most articulate and charismatic, but there are others there as well.” Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib to name a few.Sanders is clear that he and Ocasio-Cortez are not trying to start a third political party. Instead, they’re “trying to build a grassroots movement of working-class people and young people … If you’re seeing candidates now arising who are progressive, that’s down to a lot of the work that we are doing for the 2026 midterms.”Sanders in person is very much as he is in his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, in which he lays out some principles, among them, “wars and excessive military budgets are not good”; “carbon emissions are not good”; “racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are not good”; “exploiting workers is not good”. It’s really the sight of him igniting a crowd that’s so hopeful, which holds for him, too – he keeps his optimism because he has the “fortune of being able to go around the country and speak to large numbers of wonderful people”. The message doesn’t change, though – it doesn’t have to be new: it just has to be true.As he leaves to make his way upstairs to the photography studio, he strides on ahead, his wife Jane O’Meara Sanders, an activist herself, making small talk with me in his wake. It’s not that he’s performing vigour in an era where politicians’ ages are relentlessly analysed. It’s just his manner – all this urgent change should have happened yesterday. More

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      Trump announces 50% steel tariffs and hails ‘blockbuster’ deal with Japan

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      Donald Trump announced on Friday he was doubling foreign tariffs on steel imports to 50%, as the president celebrated a “blockbuster” agreement for Japan-based Nippon Steel to invest in US Steel during a rally in Pennsylvania.Surrounded by men in orange hardhats at a US Steel plant in West Mifflin, Trump unveiled the new levies, declaring that the dramatic rate increase would “even further secure the steel industry in the United States”.“Nobody is going to get around that,” Trump said, of the tariff rate hike from what was 25%.In a social media post after the conclusion of his remarks, Trump announced that the 50% tariffs on steel would also apply to imported aluminum and would take effect on 4 June.“This will be yet another BIG jolt of great news for our wonderful steel and aluminum workers,” he declared in the post.It was not immediately clear how the announcement would affect the trade deal negotiated earlier this month that saw tariffs on UK steel and aluminum reduced to zero.Trump’s Friday tariffs announcement came a day after a federal appeals court temporarily allowed his tariffs to remain in effect staying a decision by a US trade court that blocked the president from imposing the duties.The trade court ruling, however, does not impede the president’s ability to unilaterally raise tariffs on steel imports, an authority granted under a national security provision called section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act.The precise relationship between Nippon Steel and US Steel raised questions on Friday, even for some of Trump’s allies. The president has thrown his full support behind the deal, months after insisting he was “totally against” a $14.9bn bid by Nippon Steel for its US rival.The United Steelworkers union had previously urged Trump to reject Nippon’s bid, dismissing the Japanese firm’s commitments to invest in the US as “flashy promises” and claiming it was “simply seeking to undercut our domestic industry from the inside”.Speaking to steelworkers, Trump insisted that US Steel would “stay an American company” after what he is now calling “a partnership” with Nippon.But US Steel’s website links to a standalone site with the combined branding of the two companies that features a statement describing the transaction as “US Steel’s agreement to be acquired by NSC”.On the website touting the deal, there were also multiple references to “Nippon Steel’s acquisition of US Steel” and the “potential sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel”.Even pro-Trump commentators on Fox expressed bafflement over the exact nature of the deal.“This is being described as ‘a partnership’, this deal between Nippon and US Steel – but then it’s described as an acquisition on the US Steel website,” Fox host Laura Ingraham pointed out on her Friday night show.She asked a guest from another pro-Trump outlet, Breitbart: “Who owns the majority stake in this company?”When the guest said he did not know, Ingraham suggested Trump might not be aware of the details. “I don’t know if he was fully informed about the terms of the deal. We just don’t know.”Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, had blocked Nippon’s acquisition, citing national security concerns, during his final weeks in office.During his remarks at the rally, Trump gloated that the Nippon investment would once again make the American steelmaker “synonymous with greatness”. He said protections were included to “ensure that all steel workers will keep their jobs and all facilities in the United States will remain open and thriving” and said Nippon had committed to maintaining all of US Steel’s currently operating blast furnaces for the next decade.The president also promised that every US steel worker would soon receive a $5,000 bonus – prompting the crowd to start a round of “U-S-A!” chants.Trump told the steelworkers in attendance that there was “a lot of money coming your way”.“We won’t be able to call this section a rust belt any more,” Trump said. “It’ll be a golden belt.”During the event, Trump invited local members of United Steelworkers on to the stage to promote the Nippon deal, which saw its leader break with the union to support it. Praising the president, Jason Zugai, vice-president of Irvin local 2227, said he believed the investments would be “life-changing”.But the powerful United Steelworkers union remained wary.“Our primary concern remains with the impact that this merger of US Steel into a foreign competitor will have on national security, our members and the communities where we live and work,” United Steelworkers president David McCall said in a statement.“Issuing press releases and making political speeches is easy. Binding commitments are hard.”Trump framed the administration’s drive to boost domestic steel production as “not just a matter of dignity or prosperity or pride” but as “above all, a matter of national security”.He blamed “decades of Washington betrayals and incompetence and stupidity and corruption” for hollowing out the once-dominant American steel industry, as the jobs “melted away, just like butter”.“We don’t want America’s future to be built with shoddy steel from Shanghai. We want it built with the strength and the pride of Pittsburgh,” he said.In his remarks at a US steel plant, Trump also repeated many of the false claims that have become a feature of his rallies including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He gloated over his 2024 victory and, gesturing toward his ear that was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet last year at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, said it was proof that a higher power was watching over him.He also called on congressional Republicans to align behind his “one big, beautiful bill,” urging attendees to lobby their representatives and senators to support the measure.Lois Beckett and Callum Jones contributed reporting More