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    So big, so beautiful: Fox News ignores the critics and champions Trump’s bill

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    Donald Trump’s mega-bill has been widely criticized in the press. News outlets and Democrats have warned that millions of people could be stripped of their health coverage through cuts to Medicaid, that cuts to food programs would see children go hungry, and that the legislation would cause the deficit to balloon.Fox News sees it differently.“This legislation is packed with massive, huge, important wins for you, the American people,” Sean Hannity told viewers on Monday, as US senators debated the bill in Washington.“Here’s what the bill doesn’t do. It does not decrease Medicaid, Medicare, Snap or social security benefits,” Hannity continued, a claim that completely contradicted the assessment of the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates the bill will cut Medicaid across the US by 7.6 million to 10.3 million people.Hannity had more.“The big, beautiful bill also does not increase the deficit. Instead, the deficit will go down around a little shy of $2tn – that’s to begin with, according to estimates,” he said.“Because guess what? That’s what happens when you cut taxes. It stimulates the economy, creates jobs, gets people off the welfare rolls. Guess what? People are working, now they’re paying taxes.”It was unclear where Hannity got his $2tn number from, because he didn’t say. But the CBO says the bill would add at least $3.3tn to the national debt over the next nine years, while the tax cuts will benefit high earners more than others.Hannity held up Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 as an example of how the deficit will be reduced – a take that ignored that those tax cuts saw an increase of the deficit, and had to be reversed over the rest of Reagan’s presidency.Still, Hannity was sold.“The American people are on the verge of a level of prosperity they have never experienced before,” he said.Hannity’s interpretation was starkly different from the one many Americans were seeing.Even Republican senators have been dubious about the bill’s benefits, with three voting against it in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and House Republicans wavering on Wednesday.Yet, on Tuesday, Laura Ingraham largely ignored the bill – framing it only as Democrats losing a battle to “derail” the legislation before going on a minutes-long riff about a “slide in patriotism” in the US.She went on to offer complaints that there were “more foreign flags waving” in America’s streets and that leftwing politicians believe that “America can only be redeemed when she’s totally dismantled and then remade, with millions of new people from other countries”.Elsewhere, there were occasional, albeit small, concessions that the “big, beautiful bill” might not quite be the masterly piece of legislation the White House would have people believe.“It’s not perfect, but it does need to pass if we want this tax cut,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox & Friends at the start of the week. Her co-host Brian Kilmeade at least presented some of the negative points in an interview with Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, on Tuesday, challenging him to address the claim that “this is a tax break for the rich”. But Bessent didn’t even attempt to address that, and Kilmeade was unwilling or unable to press him further.Later that day, the theme continued. Trace Gallagher pulled up data from the Tax Foundation and the Tax Policy Center during his show, with a series of bullet points claiming that if Trump’s bill failed it would lead to tax increases for families and small business owners.Gallagher left out the part of the Tax Foundation’s analysis where the organization said the bill would reduce incomes by 0.6% and result in a nearly $3.6tn deficit increase, and ignored the Tax Policy Center’s verdict that most of the tax cuts in the bill would go “to the highest-income households”.His guests seemingly overlooked those bits, too, as they kept up the ruse.“No bill is perfect,” Elizabeth Pipko, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, told Gallagher, as she claimed “the Democrats seem to have forgotten that” before accusing the mainstream media, with no irony, of not accurately representing the bill.Pipko added: “I think it will pass, and I think it’ll go down in history as again another false alarm from the legacy media, from the Democrats, and another victory for President Trump.” More

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      Trump is waging war against the media – and winning

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      As military is deployed to LA, rightwing media decry protesters as ‘invaders’

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      There were unsavory scenes in Los Angeles over the weekend, as police used teargas and “less-lethal munitions” on thousands of people gathered to protest against the arrest of undocumented immigrants.The events playing out on rightwing TV channels and in the conservative podcasting realm were almost as miserable, as excitable media figures decried protesters as “invaders”, called for both the mass arrest of elected officials and the invocation of a two-century old laws and used the chaos to push racist conspiracy theories.It came as the Trump administration said the military will remain on the ground in LA for two months, after Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. About 700 US marines deployed to the US’s second largest city on Tuesday, after LA’s police chief effectively said their presence would complicate law enforcement’s efforts.The clamor for arrests mainly focused on Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, as rightwing media followed the lead of the US president, who first made the suggestion over the weekend. Trump didn’t seem to know under what law Newsom should be arrested, and the conservative commentariat wasn’t sure either. Still, it didn’t stop them crying for the California governor to be placed in handcuffs.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, claimed Newsom “should be arrested for obstructing US immigration law”, even as Tom Homan, the border czar, said Newsom hadn’t done anything to warrant detention. Wayne Root, a host on the rightwing channel Real America TV, suggested Newsom should be charged with “treason” and be detained at Guantánamo Bay while he awaits trial. “Be sure he showers with MS-13,” Root added, a take that, even for the rightwing media cesspool, was particularly macabre.But the right wasn’t just calling for the caging of Newsom. Some wanted Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, to be arrested too, including Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist adviser-turned-podcast host.“Right there, LAPD,” Bannon announced on Monday, apparently under the impression that the entire LA police force was listening to his War Room show.“The mayor is involved in this and having the stand down [sic]. She ought to be arrested today. Immediately.”Bannon went on to call for “hard actions,” whatever they are, adding: “Not even question we’re on the side of the righteous.”The bad takes were everywhere. Chris Plante, a host at rightwing TV channel Newsmax, said on air: “The Democrats are just – I mean, at what point are they declared to be a terrorist organization – with all of the affiliations and all the violence and the shootings and the fire-bombings and the targeting Jews and on and on?”Laura Ingraham, who often seems to be trying just a bit too hard to be offensive, went further. On her Fox News show she accused Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas, the former secretary of homeland security, of having “opened the border” and given “benefits to 10 million illegal aliens”.“The goal was to resettle America with new people in order to transform it completely in ways that you really can’t do at the ballot box, at least when you’re that radical,” Ingraham said.She was referring, not very subtly, to the concept of “great replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims there is an ongoing effort by liberals to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. It’s a concept that started on fringe websites before making its way to Fox News.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOthers were upset by more prosaic matters, including the sight of people at the protests flying flags other than the stars and stripes. It really set off Charlie Kirk, with the influential rightwing declaring that the US has “a parasitic relationship with Mexico, and we have for quite some time”.He added: “If you loved the promise of America, you wouldn’t wave a Mexican flag when American police tried to remove criminals. This should be a wake-up call. If you did not realize it before, guess what? Pat Buchanan and President Trump were right. We are a conquered country that has been invaded by a force in certain areas.”Kirk is uniquely placed to comment on such matters. His Turning Point USA organization sent 80 busloads of people to Washington on the day that hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, and Kirk has celebrated Trump’s mass pardon of people who attacked police officers that day.When it came to the treatment of people protesting in LA, however, Kirk was of a different mind, as he called for US troops to be used in policing US civilians.“Los Angeles does not feel like a protest, what’s happening there. It’s an entire city that’s declaring open rebellion to American sovereignty and authority,” he said. “We must be unafraid to declare the Insurrection Act of 1807.” More

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      Why is Maga-land so obsessed with Kai Trump turning 18? Do you really need to ask? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Kai Trump, the president’s granddaughter and the eldest of Donald Trump Jr’s five children, has just turned 18. To be clear, I do not have a list of Trump family birthdays on my fridge. But it has been forced upon my consciousness because an awful lot of people in Trumpworld are being weird about it.Fox News, for example, decided to post both an Instagram message (which got more than 87,000 likes) and a tweet wishing Kai a very happy 18th birthday. Which is a little odd considering that the high school student is not a public figure. Kai, who has a large social media following, did briefly speak at the Republican national convention last year and has posted support for her grandfather, but that doesn’t seem to justify a birthday announcement by a major media network.Especially, by the way, as Fox News doesn’t appear to have been so excited about Barron Trump when he turned 18. (Although it did put up an Instagram post on Barron’s 19th birthday, with a quote from Donald calling him a “a very smart guy”.) It’s almost – and bear with me here – as if they have some sort of weird interest in the fact that a teenage girl has turned 18.Am I accusing the folk at Fox News of being a bunch of creeps? Absolutely not! I’d never do that. Although if you look at the reactions to the Fox News posts or the comments attached to a New York Post Page Six piece about Kai’s birthday, there are plenty of people out there who should be on some sort of watchlist or registry. Particularly the people who have read far too much into the fact that Kai recently posted a TikTok video of her and three friends dancing to Promiscuous by Nelly Furtado and Timbaland with the caption: “last day being 17″.While things have moved on somewhat, there’s also a very depressing history of media figures counting down to young girls turning the age of consent. Look at British singer Charlotte Church, who got a record deal as an opera singer when she was just 12. There was a media frenzy in 2002 when she turned 16 (the age of consent in England). On her birthday, Chris Moyles, a BBC radio DJ who was 28 at the time, publicly announced he wanted to “lead her through the forest of sexuality now she had reached 16”. Making this disgusting comment didn’t ruin Moyles’s career, by the way. Just like 38-year-old Jerry Seinfeld dating a 17-year-old high schooler hasn’t hurt the billionaire comedian’s career at all either.Harry Potter star Emma Watson has also talked about being sexualized by the media when she was a teenager. Watson has said the paparazzi even took photos up her skirt, and published them in an English tabloid, the moment she turned 18 and it was “legal”.It was a similar story with twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who have been on TV since they were tiny. In 2004 numerous websites started counting down to their 18th birthday including the “Olsen Twin Jailbait Countdown Clock” run by radio shock jocks Lex Staley and Terry Jaymes. The New York Post also crowed about the twins being “legal”.More recently, in 2018, a radio host called Patrick Connor called Olympic athlete Chloe Kim, then just 17 years old, a “little hot piece of ass”. Conner then referenced Wooderson, a character in the film Dazed and Confused who pursues high school girls. “Her 18th birthday is 23 April, and the countdown is on baby, ’cause I got my Wooderson going,” said Connor. “‘That’s what I like about them high school girls.’” In a sign that some progress has made when it comes to mainstream misogyny, Connor was forced to apologize for the remark and fired.Since we live in litigious times I would like to reiterate, once again, that while some people (not me!) have accused Fox News of being creepy about Kai, I’m sure they meant nothing sinister by their post. After all, unlike depraved liberals, the Maga crowd are an extremely wholesome bunch who live and die for family values.I will concede, however, that it is sometimes hard to wrap one’s head around the Maga definition of “family values”. The president, for example, is a legally defined sexual predator who has also been accused, by Miles Taylor, a staffer in Trump’s first administration, of sexualizing his oldest daughter Ivanka.In a book published in 2023, Taylor writes: “[Trump] said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led [former chief of staff] John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter.”Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson also seems to have a strange definition of family values. I’m sorry to remind you of this if you’ve wiped it from your memory but last year Carlson made an extraordinary (even by Maga standards) speech at a Trump rally in which he likened the now president to an angry father spanking his daughter.“I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me,” Carlson said. “And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. You’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did. It has to be this way.’” The crowd then erupted into chants of “Daddy Don”!Maga also seems to adopt different values, depending on what sort of family they’re looking at. Conservative influencers were vile about Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, when Harris was running for president. Newsweek senior editor Josh Hammer wrote: “Doug Emhoff’s daughter is like something out of a horror film,” for example. Podcast host Benny Johnson also called Emhoff and her father “creepy” for having their arms around each other in a video. The right seems eager to scrutinize the family of politicians when they don’t agree with their politics. They went on the warpath, however, when a former NBCUniversal executive joked about Barron being “fair game” (meaning that it was OK for the press to criticize him) when he turned 18.Anyway, happy birthday to Kai Trump. At 18 she is still very young – but it would seem like it’s the Maga adults who have the real growing up to do. More

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      Trump’s latest Fox News hire looks even worse than Pete Hegseth | Margaret Sullivan

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      The revolving door between the Trump administration and rightwing Fox News took another wild spin this week, as America’s TV-obsessed president tapped Jeanine Pirro for a prominent legal post: top federal prosecutor for Washington DC.Pirro is unqualified, perhaps even more so than was her former Fox colleague Pete Hegseth when he was named Trump’s defense secretary a few months ago. In that crucial position, Hegseth has been a dangerous embarrassment, as his shockingly inappropriate communications have exposed national security secrets to the world.Pirro, although once a county-level district attorney, hasn’t held a government legal position in decades. But she has been opining on Fox for 14 years, mostly recently as a host on The Five, the network’s popular afternoon talkshow.But no matter. She “is in a class by herself”, Trump wrote on social media in announcing his intention to make her the interim (and perhaps permanent) prosecutor.His description may be accurate, but surely not in the way he intends.Pirro’s record at Fox is startlingly checkered, even for that propaganda outfit. She got in trouble with the network’s brass a few years ago for her eager promotion of Trump’s lies about supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election. (The voting-fraud lies became part of a defamation lawsuit against the network by a voting-systems company; Fox paid nearly $800m to settle the case and had to acknowledge that statements made on air were false.)Fox once suspended her for her ugly commentary on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s wearing a hijab, which Pirro suggested was an adherence to “sharia lawm which in itself is antithetical to the United States constitution”. And she advocated for a “cleansing” of the FBI and the justice department because their ranks were full of people who “need to be taken out in handcuffs”.But none of this causes any real concern for the president, apparently, because Pirro has one huge thing going for her. Over the course of a long friendship and many visits to Mar-a-Lago, she has been relentlessly loyal to Trump.In fact, she has gone well beyond loyalty into straight-up sycophancy.On this score, Pirro has what it takes.“Since Trump returned to office, Pirro has kept busy by showering him with praise and lashing out at anyone who stands in his way,” wrote Matt Gertz, senior fellow at the progressive watchdog group Media Matters, noting that she is the 23rd former Fox employee whom Trump has tapped for his administration.Tom Homan, a former Fox contributor, became Trump’s “border czar”, aggressively carrying out the administration’s anti-immigrant policy, and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and former host of a weekly Fox show, was named ambassador to Israel.Beyond her peerless cheerleading, Pirro would be useful to Trump in practical terms, noted the New York Times in a news story.She supports “Trump’s efforts to exact vengeance on his political enemies, has backed his challenges to federal judges who have questioned the legality of his immigration policies and spent months protesting the legitimacy” of Biden’s 2020 election to the presidency.Although Trump often doesn’t return the favor of loyalty, he has stepped up for Pirro’s family by pardoning her former husband (once Trump’s lawyer), who in 2020 was convicted of conspiracy and tax-evasion charges.All told, this is some serious symbiosis. In stepping away from her high-profile – and high-earning – TV job, Pirro may solve a sticky problem for Trump, whose earlier choice for the DC prosecutor’s position ran into trouble with Senate Republicans.It’s not clear if Pirro’s nomination will succeed, especially in the long term. Although Trump is nominating her on an interim basis, there’s little doubt he’d like it to be permanent. But even the interim appointment may run into a legal fight over just how many acting US attorneys the president can appoint consecutively.You might think that with Hegseth’s rocky and widely criticized start as defense secretary – where he oversees almost three million employees while maintaining a TV star’s firm jawline – the president would hesitate to choose another unqualified TV personality for a key role.But Trump clearly doesn’t see it that way.There’s hardly anything better, it turns out, than Fox News on one’s resume. Even better when it’s paired with a solid record of fealty to the Audience in Chief.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘A new golden age’: how rightwing media stuck by Trump as global markets collapsed

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      While Donald Trump recently instituted and paused hefty tariffs, sparking a trade war and chaos in financial markets, most of the country’s conservative media either applauded the US president or critiqued the policy but not the person behind it, according to journalists and observers of conservative media.Meanwhile, economists, business leaders, Democrats and even some Republicans warned that the tariffs, which prompted the largest American stock market drop since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, could cause a recession.“News is what impacts the greatest number of people,” like tariffs and “the evaporation of wealth and the ripple effect on not just the US economy, but the global economy”, said Howard Polskin, president of The Righting, a newsletter and website that monitors conservative media. “By any stretch of imagination, that should be a lead story.”But the chaos of last week posed a serious challenge to many aspects of rightwing US media, which often acts as a largely unquestioning cheerleader for Trump and his Maga movement. The story was sometimes played down, sometimes cheered but rarely seriously questioned – even amid warnings of price rises, recession and cratering investments, especially precious 401(k) retirement accounts.The most popular conservative news source in the United States is Fox News, which has a much larger audience than CNN and the leftwing MSNBC network. Its hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters, consistently praise Trump and bolster his inaccurate claims.But Fox News has faced new competition from Newsmax and One American News Network (OANN), networks that positioned themselves as even more reliable Trump supporters. The Wall Street Journal, which has the same owner as Fox News, features a right-leaning opinion section, but also has done lengthy investigations into Trump and Joe Biden and is a favorite among people in the financial sector.Rightwing commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro also command a large audience through podcasts and social media.After Trump declared 2 April “liberation day” and announced that the country would on 5 April institute a 10% universal tariff on all imported goods and on 9 April start “reciprocal tariffs” on some of its largest trading partners, including a 34% tariff on imports from China and a 20% tariff on goods from the European Union, Hannity described it as “a day that will be remembered as a turning point and the start, I hope for every American, of a new golden age”.China retaliated with a 34% tariff. Global stock markets fell sharply; the Dow Jones industrial average declined more than 2,000 points over the next two days.Economists and leaders of financial institutions said that the tariffs increased the likelihood of a recession and inflation. Most Republican lawmakers stood behind the president; a minority, like Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, expressed opposition and said the tariffs amounted to a tax increase for Americans.While Fox Business, a sibling network, had guests who criticized the tariffs, Fox News personalities told viewers nervous about their investments that everything would work out well. A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for an interview.“I don’t really care about my 401(k) today,” Jeanine Pirro said on 3 April on the show The Five. “We’ve got to have manufacturing in this country … and Donald Trump is the only one who could do it because he’s got the biggest consumer base in the world. He’s not afraid of anybody.”Despite the market upheaval, the Fox News commentators were “in too deep” to break with Trump, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a leftwing advocacy group.“They have, for nearly a decade now, sold their audience on the sense that Donald Trump would be a good president,” Gertz said 7 April. “Now he is single-handedly causing a worldwide market collapse,” but “they can’t abandon him”.Other conservative news organizations opted to focus on other issues. At one point on 8 April, the only story on tariffs on the OANN frontpage concerned the former speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her comments on tariffs in 1996.The network did interview Arthur Laffer, a conservative economist who Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Laffer said that if Trump kept the tariffs, he didn’t see how the country could avoid a recession, but he still “could not think of one person on Earth that I would prefer more to be president”.On 9 April at Newsmax, the headline of their main story read, “Trump: Tariffs Bring in $2 Billion a Day.”The actual number this month was about $200m, Reuters reported.“A lot of times it feels more like propaganda,” Polskin said of the cable networks’ coverage. “I find it all extremely alarming, the stock market and that consumers of rightwing media could be misled so egregiously.”Newsmax did not respond to the Guardian’s request for an interview.There are exceptions in the conservative media sphere. The Journal has criticized Trump and his tariff policy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump Owns the Economy Now. He can try to blame the Fed, but the tariff blunder is his alone,” was the headline of a recent editorial.Their editorial pages have been “characterized through the years as sort of the bastion of conservatism”, said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute. “They are not at all sympathetic to the tariff actions.”Shapiro, the rightwing pundit and a founder of the Daily Wire, devoted much of his podcasts after “liberation day” to scrutinizing the tariffs and questioned whether they could actually bring manufacturers back to the United States.But Shapiro reassured listeners that he supported the president.“What exactly is this designed to do?” Shapiro said of the tariffs during a 3 April episode of his podcast. “It is predicated on a bad idea of how international trade works. I’ve said this a thousand times: this is not coming from a place of I want Trump to fail.”Shapiro called for Trump to fire Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser who reportedly shaped the tariffs strategy. But, of course, it was Trump who instituted them.“In general, the rightwing media, they are like Republican politicians. They don’t want to cross Trump,” Edmonds said.Still, Aaron Rupar, a journalist who tracks speeches and interviews Trump and his officials give to conservative media, thought their coverage of the tariffs was “a little more honest” than their coverage of events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol or the trials Trump faced when he was out of office.“With financial data, it’s a little harder to gaslight people,” he said.Ultimately, hours after the reciprocal tariffs took effect, Trump announced a 90-day pause on them, except for China, whose tariff he increased to 125%.“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said afterwards, referring to Trump’s book. “You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”A day later, with stocks still down significantly from before “liberation day”, Ainsley Earhardt, a Fox News host, reiterated Leavitt’s point.“This is the art of the deal,” she said. “This shows how strong our president is.” More

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      Trump signs order targeting law firm behind $787.5m Fox defamation suit

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      Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday punishing the law firm that helped Dominion voting systems obtain a $787.5m settlement from Fox for lies about the 2020 election.The order against the firm, Susman Godfrey, marks the latest effort by the president to punish attorneys and firms who have opposed his interests.The order seeks to cripple the firm by limiting the firm’s attorneys from accessing government buildings, revoking security clearances and essentially making it impossible for the firm to represent anyone who has business before the federal government.Trump’s rationale for targeting the firm was not immediately clear.“There were some very bad things that happened with these law firms,” he said in the oval office on Wednesday when he signed the order.Susman Godfrey represented Dominion voting systems in its lawsuit against Fox, which ended in a landmark settlement to avoid a trial. On Wednesday, a Delaware judge ruled in a separate lawsuit that the conservative outlet Newsmax Media defamed Dominion with its false reporting about a rigged 2020 election.Trump has also issued orders punishing five other firms for connections to political rivals: Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale.Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale all have filed suit against Trump and successfully earned preliminary court orders blocking them. Susman Godfrey on Tuesday filed an amicus brief on behalf of several high-ranking government officials supporting Perkins Coie’s legal challenge.“This firm is very involved in the election misconduct,” Stephen Miller, a top White House aide, said on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPaul Weiss negotiated a widely-criticized settlement with Trump to have the order against it rescinded.Experts say the orders are blatantly unconstitutional and violate the constitution’s guarantee of freedom of expression and the right to counsel. They also say they are an obvious anti-democratic effort by the president to intimidate lawyers from challenging his administration in court.Several firms – Skadden, Arps, Meagher, & Flom; Milbank LLP; and Willkie, Farr, & Gallagher – have entered into preemptive settlements with the Trump administration to try and avoid executive orders. Many of the country’s largest and most prominent firms have stayed silent as several firms have been targeted. More

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      JD Vance says US economic interests in Ukraine the best way to guarantee its security

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      US vice-president JD Vance said that the best way to protect Ukraine from another Russian invasion is to guarantee the US has a financial interest in Ukraine’s future.“If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine,” Vance said in the interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity which aired Monday night.“That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years,” he said.The interview aired the same day the White House reportedly announced it was pausing military aid to Ukraine and days after US President Donald Trump clashed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.“What is the actual plan here? You can’t just fund the war forever. The American people won’t stand for that,” Vance said. This interview was recorded in advance, so it is unclear whether Vance was aware that the US would have paused aid by the time it aired.Vance and Hannity spoke about Friday’s contentious meeting, which Vance said he tried to diffuse. He said that the doors were still open for negotiations.“There was a lack of respect. There was a certain sense of entitlement,” Vance said about Zelenskyy. “They showed a clear unwillingness to discuss the peaceful settlement that President Trump has tried to bring to this situation.”Before Friday’s meeting, a minerals deal was meant to establish a joint fund between the US and Ukraine that would receive revenues from the mining of rare earth metals and other precious minerals in Ukraine, as well as some oil and gas revenues.Later in Monday’s interview, Vance doubled down on his criticism on European leaders over
free speech and democracy. The vice-president claimed that the Biden administration promoted censorship.“These ideas are going to destroy western civilization,” Vance said. “They’re going to destroy Europe, and they would destroy the United States of America if we allowed them to fester.”He went on to repeat anti-immigrant rhetoric, claiming mass migration poses a major threat to Europe. By the end of the interview, the conversation had turned to anti-trans topics, just days after Trump signed an executive order barring transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. More

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      Trump administration reportedly orders Pentagon to plan for sweeping defense budget cuts – live

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      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post.Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by 24 February, according to the memo, which includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted. Among them: operations at the southern US border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense and acquisition of one-way attack drones and other munitions. If adopted in full, the proposed cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.According to the Post, the memo calls for continued “support agency” funding for several major regional headquarters, including Indo-Pacific command, northern command and space command. Notably absent from that list is European command, which has had a leading role in executing US strategy during the war in Ukraine; central command, which oversees operations in the Middle East; and Africa command, which manages the several thousand troops the Pentagon has spread across that continent.“President Trump’s charge to DoD is clear: achieve peace through strength,” Hegseth wrote in the memo, dated Tuesday.
      The time for preparation is over – we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and re-establish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.
      The White House has reshared a social media post from Donald Trump, calling the president a king and picturing him in a crown.This afternoon, Donald Trump wrote on the social media platform Truth Social, “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”His post referenced a letter his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, sent to New York governor Kathy Hochul today, ending the Department of Transportation’s agreement with the state over a toll policy for lower Manhattan.Shortly after, the White House shared the quote from Trump on social media, alongside a computer-generated image of a smiling Trump wearing a crown on a stylized version of a Time magazine cover, with the word “Time” replaced with “Trump”.In his address, Pritzker recalled in 1978 when a neo-Nazi group wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb that he said was once home to the largest number of Holocaust survivors in the world. The ensuing legal battle and controversy ultimately led to a supreme court decision in favor of the group’s right to march. The demonstration was ultimately canceled days before and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center was formed in Skokie.Pritzker credited the resistance and resilience of ordinary Illinoians for defusing the Nazis threat.“If we don’t want to repeat history then for god sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it,” he said.Pritzker concluded the thirty-plus minute speech with a call to action.“Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance,” he said. “Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity Illinois and do not let the tragic spirit of despair overcome us when our country needs us most.”Pritzker, who is seen as a possible 2028 presidential contender, has adopted a far more confrontational posture toward the Trump administration than other blue state governors.“We don’t have Kings in America and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one,” Pritzker vowed, as the official White House social media account posted a photo of Trump wearing a crown with the words “Long Live the King”.In his remarks, he defended the approach, arguing: “Going along to get along does not work.”Responding to scattered boos in the audience, the governor warned that Trump’s cuts to federal agencies would affect conservatives and liberals alike. “You can boo all you want until your constituents lose these services,” he said.“If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this,” he continued. “It took the Nazis 1 month, 3 weeks, 2 days, 8 hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. And all I’m saying is when the 5-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”Illinois Governor JB Pritzker on Wednesday delivered a searing state-of-the-state address, likening Donald Trump’s stunning power grabs to the rise of Nazism in 1930’s Germany.“I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly,” Pritzker told a joint session of the Illinois House and Senate in Springfield, the state’s capital. Speaking as “an American and a Jew” who helped build the state’s Holocaust Museum, Pritzker said he was “watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now”.Trump’s attacks on DEI, LGBTQ people and immigrants was part of an “authoritarian playbook,” the Democratic governor said.“They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. I just have one question,” he said. “What comes next?”Good afternoon, thanks for joining our US politics coverage today – nearly one month into the second Trump administration. I’m Cecilia Nowell, taking over our coverage into the evening.Donald Trump’s first and second vice presidents have had markedly different reactions to the president’s comments on the war in Ukraine.In an interview published today by the conservative British tabloid, the Daily Mail, JD Vance warned Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that “badmouthing” Trump is a bad idea.“The idea that Zelenskyy is going to change the president’s mind by bad mouthing him in public media, everyone who knows the President will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration,” Vance said.Meanwhile, former vice president Mike Pence – who notably fell out of favor with the president after the 6 January attack on the US Capitol and declined to endorse Trump in the 2024 election – struck a different tone.“Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth,” Pence wrote on social media today.Both comments follow an escalating exchange between the US and Ukrainian presidents. After Trump implied Ukraine had started the war, which began after Russia invaded Ukraine, during a press conference yesterday, Zelenskyy said Trump was trapped in a Russian “disinformation bubble”. Today, Trump called Zelenskyy “a dictator” and warned that he “better move fast” or he “won’t have a country left”.Here are Pjotr Sauer and Luke Harding with more:Much of the day so far has been dominated by the fallout of Donald Trump’s unprecedented and extraordinary attack on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he called “a dictator without elections” who had “done a terrible job”. In the rant rife with falsehoods about the Ukrainian leader’s popularity among other things, Trump warned Zelenskyy that he “better move fast” or he “won’t have a country left”.Trump accused Zelenskyy (baselessly) of benefiting from continuing US financial and military support, suggesting he had an interest in prolonging the war rather than seeking its end. Trump’s latest comments, which parrot key talking points of Vladimir Putin’s regime, cast serious doubt on future US aid to Ukraine and mark the most explicit threat yet to end the war on terms favourable to Moscow. European leaders are scrambling to contain the crisis (German chancellor Olaf Scholz called Trump’s comments “wrong and dangerous”), while several Republican lawmakers in the US rushed to distance themselves from Trump’s remarks.Earlier in the day, Zelenskyy had said Trump was “living in a disinformation bubble”, in response to the US president last night blaming Ukraine for Russia’s illegal invasion. Trump made the comments in response to Zelenskyy’s concerns that Ukraine had not been invited to the talks between the US and Russia on Tuesday.Elsewhere:

      The Trump administration has ordered the Pentagon to plan for sweeping budget cuts, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years. He has given a deadline of 24 February.

      Senate majority leader John Thune said the upper chamber will still go ahead and begin vote-a-rama on the budget plan tomorrow, according to Fox News. This is despite Trump throwing his support behind the House’s competing version of the budget blueprint earlier on Wednesday.

      The Trump administration said it is not disbursing funds for thousands of foreign aid contracts and grants despite a federal judge’s order last week to lift a widespread freeze on foreign aid funding.

      A federal judge refused on Tuesday to immediately block Elon Musk and Doge from accessing government data systems or participating in worker layoffs. The US district judge Tanya Chutkan found that there were legitimate questions about the billionaire’s authority but said there was not enough evidence of grave legal harm to justify a temporary restraining order.

      Donald Trump signed an executive order making independent regulatory agencies established by Congress now accountable to the White House – a move that some experts said clashes with mainstream interpretations of the constitution. The order forces major regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to report new policy priorities to the executive branch for approval, which will also have a say over their budgets.

      The Trump administration’s planned cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not only threaten essential biomedical research in the US, but the livelihoods of researchers – and some are seriously considering leaving the country.
      Further to the news that Donald Trump has thrown his support behind the House’s budget plan, Fox News reports that Senate majority leader John Thune has said the upper chamber will still go ahead and begin vote-a-rama on the budget plan tomorrow.The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post.Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by 24 February, according to the memo, which includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted. Among them: operations at the southern US border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense and acquisition of one-way attack drones and other munitions. If adopted in full, the proposed cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.According to the Post, the memo calls for continued “support agency” funding for several major regional headquarters, including Indo-Pacific command, northern command and space command. Notably absent from that list is European command, which has had a leading role in executing US strategy during the war in Ukraine; central command, which oversees operations in the Middle East; and Africa command, which manages the several thousand troops the Pentagon has spread across that continent.“President Trump’s charge to DoD is clear: achieve peace through strength,” Hegseth wrote in the memo, dated Tuesday.
      The time for preparation is over – we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and re-establish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.
      All the effort Kyiv had expended in wooing the White House, combining flattery with bribery and a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, imploded in minutes when Volodymyr Zelenskyy broke the fundamental rule of the new global reality: he told the truth about Donald Trump.It is hardly surprising Zelenskyy lost his cool. Part of the reason he has a 57% confidence rating in the latest poll (13% above Trump’s own current standing) is because he has led his country through years of war with his heart vividly on his sleeve. Having been subjected to eight years of Russian aggression, followed by an entirely unprovoked full-on invasion which has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens, and then to be told on the world stage: “You should have never started it”, would be too much for most people.When slighted and sprayed with Trumpian falsehoods, other world leaders, with much less at stake, have resorted to a “smile-and-wave” default strategy, deflecting direct questions and changing the subject to some aspect of relations with Washington that is still functioning normally.Zelenskyy did not do this on Wednesday. Instead, he said out loud the bit that European leaders keep quiet. Trump, he observed, is “trapped in this disinformation bubble”. He was stating the obvious, but not even Zelenskyy could have known how fetid the air inside Trump’s bubble has become. Now we know.Trump’s tirade on his own app, Truth Social, is a distillation of the greatest hits of Russian disinformation from the past three years. He said Zelenskyy was “A Dictator without Elections” (something Trump has never said about Putin) who had hoodwinked the Biden administration into a $350bn war of choice, which only “TRUMP” could fix. The president’s repeated references to himself in the third person and all caps erased any lingering doubts about the single unifying compulsion now driving Trump foreign policy.Read Julian’s full analysis here:This is an extract from my colleague John Crace’s weekly UK politics sketch – and this week he’s focusing on Trump:Even by his recent standards, Tuesday night’s stream of unconsciousness from Donald Trump took some beating. Hot on the tail of excluding Ukraine from the first round of peace talks with Russia and in effect threatening to withdraw the US from Nato, the Donald has now suggested it was Kyiv who started the war with Moscow.More than that, he declared President Zelenskyy’s popularity ratings had slid to just 4% in his own country and that he had assumed the role of dictator by not holding elections. He ended by claiming that the US had given more than three times as much aid to Ukraine than the rest of Europe combined. You could almost hear Vladimir Putin cheering from the sidelines. He couldn’t have written the script any better. It was perfection.It goes without saying that everything the US president had said was complete doggy-bollox. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and seized Crimea. There was then a pause in hostilities before Putin invaded a second time almost exactly three years ago. Claiming Ukraine started the war was like believing that Poland invaded Germany to trigger the second world war.That was just the start. Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy’s approval ratings were 4% were just his delusional, senescent fantasies. The real figure is 57%: about 10% higher than the Donald’s own. And no one in their right mind is suggesting Ukraine holds elections while the war is ongoing. There again, Trump is clearly not in his right mind. His aid figures are also way off. Collectively, Europe has given Ukraine £132bn since the start of the war. America has given £114bn.While a shrink would have a field day trying to untangle the workings of the Trump psyche – is he a narcissist or solipsist? Does he actually believe what he says or do his words have an independent existence to his brain? – it’s left to the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Much as they might like not to, other world leaders have to find a way of engaging with him. The Donald is the most powerful man on the planet and whatever he says counts for something.You can read the full politics sketch here:The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, will visit Washington next week amid other meetings aimed at bringing an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, US national security advisor Mike Waltz said on Wednesday.Asked about the chances of reaching a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, Waltz told Fox News in an interview: “We’re engaging on all sides, and then the next step is we’re going to put technical teams forward to start talking more details.”It comes amid fears of an irreconcilable rift between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the former leader launched a war of false words on the Ukrainian president, whom he called “a dictator” and warned that he “better move fast” or he “won’t have a country left”. (We have factchecked Trump’s rant here).The unprecedented escalation of tensions between Kyiv and Washington came after senior US and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss the war in Ukraine, as well as economic and political cooperation, indicating a fundamental shift in the US approach to Moscow.In the latest edition of This Week in Trumpland, my colleague Adam Gabbatt writes:
      What came of those talks? Well, on Tuesday Trump came out with a curiously Putin-centric view of the war, and of how to end it. Declaring himself ‘disappointed’ that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, had objected to not being part of talks which directly affect the future of his country, Trump blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion, and trotted out Kremlin talking points about Zelenskyy’s approval rating among Ukrainians.
      In a few days Trump has apparently swallowed whole Russia’s revisionist claims about how the war began, and potentially driven a rift between the US and Europe in how it should end. Could it be that the author of Think Big and Kick Ass, and Trump 101: The Way to Success (both books were actually ghostwritten, but you get the idea), doesn’t really know much about kicking ass or the route to success? It’s not for me to say.
      You can sign up for Adam’s weekly newsletter here.Following Donald Trump’s incendiary comments earlier today calling the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator” who had “done a terrible job”, Republicans have moved swiftly to distance themselves from Trump’s attacks.The North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, who has just come from a visit to Ukraine, said Putin does not want peace, he “wants to dictate the world”. “That invasion was the responsibility of one human being on the face of this planet: Vladimir Putin,” Tillis told NBC News. On Trump calling Zelenskyy a dictator: “It’s not a word I would use.”The Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski told CNN: “I would like to see that in context because I would certainly never refer to President Zelenskyy as a dictator.”Speaking to HuffPost, the South Dakota senator Mike Rounds called Zelenskyy “the duly elected” president of Ukraine. “I think he has been a key component in the fact that they’ve been able to withstand the Russian attacks,” Rounds said. He answered “no” when asked if US foreign policy was realigning with Russia.Don Bacon, a Representative for Nebraska, posted on X: “Putin started this war. Putin committed war crimes. Putin is the dictator who murdered his opponents. The EU nations have contributed more to Ukraine. Zelenskyy polls over 50%. Ukraine wants to be part of the West, Putin hates the West. I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”Donald Trump threw his support behind the House’s budget blueprint on Wednesday, throwing a curveball into the Senate’s plan to vote on a competing version this week, Politico reports.In a post on his Truth Social platform, the president said:
      The House and Senate are doing a SPECTACULAR job of working together as one unified, and unbeatable, TEAM, however, unlike the Lindsey Graham version of the very important Legislation currently being discussed, the House Resolution implements my FULL America First Agenda, EVERYTHING, not just parts of it! We need both Chambers to pass the House Budget to “kickstart” the Reconciliation process, and move all of our priorities to the concept of, “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL.” It will, without question, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
      The House Speaker, Mike Johnson, who quickly celebrated Trump’s endorsement on X, plans to bring the plan to the floor for a vote next week.Trump’s announcement comes as the Senate leadership has prepared their own budget plan, which would divide up the president’s policy priorities into two bills, for a floor vote in the coming days.“As they say, did not see that one coming,” said Senate majority leader John Thune, telling reporters that he hoped to gain further clarity on the future of the two-bill plan from a previously scheduled lunch meeting with vice-president JD Vance.“We’ve got a plan that we think makes sense,” Thune told reporters. “We’re planning to proceed. But you know, obviously, we are interested in and hoping to hear with more clarity where the White House is coming from.”Donald Trump’s efforts to influence US cultural institutions received more pushback on Tuesday, as a group of more than 400 artists sent a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) calling on the organization to resist the president’s restrictions on funding for projects promoting diversity or “gender ideology”.The letter, first reported by the New York Times, comes after the NEA declared that federal grant applicants – which include colleges and universities, non-profit groups, individual artists and more – must comply with regulations stipulated by Trump’s executive orders. The new measures bar federal funds from going toward programs focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion” or used to “promote gender ideology”.“While the arts community stands in solidarity with the NEA, we oppose this betrayal of the Endowment’s mission to ‘foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States’,” the letter reads. “We ask that the NEA reverse those changes to the compliance requirements.”Here’s more on that story: More