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    JD Vance exploited a brawl to paint Cincinnati as crime-ridden. The fallout has divided the city

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    It took only a few days for footage of a violent brawl in downtown Cincinnati in July to catch the attention of some of the country’s most high-profile figures.The fight, which saw a white woman punched in the face from behind by an African American man, among other incidents, took place when about 150,000 people were attending events in the city’s urban core.Despite police responding within six minutes of being called and six alleged perpetrators in that brawl being quickly arrested, Vice-President JD Vance, who owns a home in the Ohio city, declared that those involved should be thrown in prison.Soon, the internet was ablaze with racist tropes and commentary about the alleged carnage plaguing Cincinnati and other American cities. Rightwing media from across the country published footage of the brawl, claiming it depicted “a white man and a woman appearing to be relentlessly targeted by a group of largely black assailants.” The woman in question was invited to appear on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News.Elon Musk posted a clip on X of the brawl from Libs of TikTok, a far-right social media account, that was viewed 4.8m times. The former Republican party presidential candidate and a leading contender to become Ohio’s next governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, felt it necessary to hold a town hall to discuss public safety.All the while, the national spotlight has led to Cincinnatians questioning just how safe their home town is or isn’t – and who is responsible for sparking the debate.Divisions are emerging between those who believe the city has become less safe and others who say Cincinnati has become a victim of national politics that also has seen it through a racial lens. That, in turn, has had a major knock-on effect on local businesses struggling for customers.The rightwing rhetoric fits into the Trump administration’s wider and unfounded claims that American cities, many of which are run by Democrats, have become hotbeds of unbridled violence. In recent months, the Trump administration has sent the national guard into Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago and other major US cities, fueling anger and fear among residents, a plurality of whom typically vote for Democratic party candidates at local and national levels.That’s despite violent crime in major cities across the US having fallen in recent years.In Cincinnati, the first nine months of this year saw recorded violent crime fall to 253 from 283 incidents compared with the same period last year.“We need to continue to invest in public safety, but there has been a false inflation of the perception of unsafety in Cincinnati,” said Ryan James, a newly elected member of the Cincinnati city council and resident of Over-the-Rhine.“The impacts on our communities from negative stigmas around safety is really damaging. There’s an economic impact of families being afraid to come downtown and to our more densely populated neighborhoods.”The national coverage of Cincinnati’s perceived crime crisis has put pressure on city leaders to solve an issue that has gained outsized attention.This month, Cincinnati’s police chief, Teresa Theetge, was placed on paid leave pending an investigation into her leadership, which is costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars. Across the city, supporters are putting up yard signs backing her.“When we have a conversation with people around the [downward] trajectory of crime, it’s always a shocker,” said James, “because people with these huge platforms, are perpetuating narratives that Cincinnati is an unsafe city. It is completely untrue.”Crime in Cincinnati became a centerpiece of an election campaign by Vance’s half-brother, Cory Bowman, in this year’s mayoral race. Bowman, a pastor whose only public backing from the vice-president came in the form of a post on X, failed in an attempt to unseat the incumbent mayor, Aftab Pureval, garnering just 21.8% of the vote on 4 November.That two of the people injured in the brawl were white and seven people who were charged by police for having a role in the July fight were Black has fueled anger among the city’s Black communities.“I think there is a lot of political motivation to disparage Democrats and the Democratic leadership in this city,” said James, who is the youngest African American man ever elected to Cincinnati’s city council.Still, while the numbers are down, violence is something that continues to be a significant challenge for Cincinnati and hundreds of other US cities attempting to bounce back after the pandemic.The killing of an FC Cincinnati soccer fan leaving a game in the Over-the-Rhine district in October 2023 shocked the city, while two recent shootings at Fountain Square, a popular public space that holds ice rinks and concerts, has drawn headlines from around the country.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome business owners downtown say they believe the security situation has indeed worsened.James, who has run a family business on Main Street for almost 40 years and asked not to be fully identified so as not to deter customers from visiting the area, says the crime situation has worsened.“We had a customer get mugged right here on Seventh Street, I think in August. We had an employee who got hit on the back of their head. That’s never happened [in the past],” he says.“The number of car break-ins this year has gone up. It’s three heads [who are responsible for the crime] – the city manager, the mayor and the judges. The police have their hands tied; they are doing their best.” Vehicle thefts across the US have been increasing for years.The city’s annual Oktoberfest event, held in September, is thought to have seen a significant drop in attendance this year, something some business owners attribute to people staying away due to the perceived rising crime.Still James, the business owner, said he had not experienced a drop in the number of customers this year compared with previous years. What’s more, Cincinnati has more police officers than similar-sized cities such as Pittsburgh and nearly twice as many as Santa Ana, California.Ahead of city council elections held earlier this month and which officially are non-partisan, many residents thought the perceived crime wave would see longstanding Democrats on the council voted out. Instead, all nine seats up for election this month were won by Democratic-leaning candidates.For Mak Alemaye, who has run a convenience store a short walk from Fountain Square on Main Street for the past 15 years, context is important.“You see these windows – until about three years ago, I’d get a call from the police every two or three weeks, telling me they had been kicked in. I had to get them replaced six times,” he says.“But for the last three years, it’s been good; the last time was almost three years ago.”He believes Cincinnati is no better or worse than any other big city when it comes to crime.“When the economy is bad, there’s always break-ins, like any other city. Things happen anywhere – why is Cincinnati special?” More

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      Trump policies spur economic anxiety in US Republican heartland: ‘Tariffs are affecting everything’

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      For decades, a line of storefronts in Jeffersonville, Ohio, a town of 1,200 people 40 minutes south-west of Columbus, lay empty.But now locals are hard at work renovating the downtown and paving streets in anticipation of a potential economic boom fueled by a huge new electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant.Two miles south of Jeffersonville, Korean and Japanese companies LG Energy Solution and Honda are in the midst of sinking $3.5bn into a facility that is expected to begin production in the coming months.Hundreds of people have been employed in the construction of the plant, and more than 525 people have been hired to work in engineering and other manufacturing roles at the facility. In total, about 2,200 people are expected to be employed on a site that, until several years ago, was open farmland.But some locals are concerned.A host of Trump administration policies – tariff measures and the end of clean vehicle tax credits worth thousands of dollars to car buyers – are causing multinational manufacturing companies to consider pausing hundreds of millions of dollars in future investments, a move that would hit small, majority-Republican towns such as Jeffersonville especially hard.Moreover, a raid by ICE immigration officers on a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Ellabell, a small town in south-east Georgia in September that saw more than 300 South Korean workers detained and sent home has sent shock waves through places like Jeffersonville and the C-suites of international companies alike.View image in fullscreen“The construction process has been slowing down. My fear is that the whole thing is going to stop, and we’re left with just unfinished concrete out there,” says Amy Wright, a Fayette county resident, of the under-construction battery plant.“What’s more, a lot of the people hired to do the construction of the plant are not locals. They are from out-of-state; I’ve met them at the gym.”While in last year’s presidential election, 77% of voters in Fayette county backed Trump, recent polls suggest his popularity in rural America has taken a nosedive.One poll suggests that his approval rating among rural Americans has slipped from 59% in August to 47% in October. Others chart his net approval rating in states he won in last year’s presidential election – Ohio, Michigan and Indiana – in negative territory by as much as 18.9 points.Wright says her son, who works for a local company that supplies Honda with parts, recently received notice that a prior promise of overtime work was being rescinded. She says she believes Honda is reeling in spending due to US government policies.“Tariffs are affecting everything,” says Wright.What’s happening in Jeffersonville is being mirrored across the midwest.In Kentucky, Michigan and elsewhere, global giants Toyota and Stellantis have spent billions of dollars in small communities, much of which came in the form of clean energy tax breaks from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.Toyota’s biggest production facility on the planet is in a small Kentucky town called Georgetown, where the company employs more than 10,000 people and has invested $11bn in the local economy since the late 1980s. These workers churn out nearly half a million vehicles and hundreds of thousands of engines every year.However, in August Toyota warned that it faced a $9.5bn financial hit to it and its suppliers due to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, the largest estimate of any automotive manufacturer. In July, Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, said Trump’s tariffs were undermining investments in the state such as Toyota’s, calling them “chaos”.View image in fullscreenSixty-three per cent of voters in Georgetown’s Scott county backed Trump in last year’s presidential election.Last April, Stellantis laid off 900 workers at locations across the midwest due to Trump’s tariffs.In Indiana, one of the largest employers in the state, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche is reportedly considering pulling out of $50bn worth of investment in the coming years if Trump follows through on his executive order to target companies that don’t reduce drug prices.“No [manufacturer] wanted to alienate customers, but those days are past. So, the bulk of tariff price increases will hit in the coming months. This matters, because factory employment is a major share of rural counties in the midwest – about 30% in Indiana, and similar in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin,” says Michael Hicks, an economist and professor at Ball State University in Indiana.“These things will clearly have a political effect, but my hunch is not fully for several months. Overlaying all this is the risk of a significant [economic] downturn, where tariffs combine with a financial bubble that would surely hit rural – red – communities very hard.”Still, others believe that the tariffs will benefit small American towns in the long run.“Toyota is doing fine and I don’t see [tariffs] as being a big hurt for us here in Georgetown,” says Robert Linder, co-owner of the Porch restaurant that’s situated a mile north of the huge facility, and who worked at the plant for 29 years.In April, Toyota suggested it might move more vehicle production to Georgetown to beat the tariffs, though that move could be years in the making. Sales of Toyota brands in the US have been growing this year, with the company thus far eating the cost of tariffs rather than passing it on to consumers.“They just announced a $10bn investment in the United States for more Toyota plants. If Toyota was worried about [tariffs] they wouldn’t be expanding,” says Linder. Recent reports, however, suggest the $10bn figure referred to previously announced investments.However, large multinationals have a track record of announcing major projects only for reality to play out in a very different way.In Wisconsin, the Taiwanese tech company Foxconn claimed it would spend $10bn on a facility outside the town of Mount Pleasant. Instead, local taxpayers today find themselves on the hook for $1.2bn spent on highways, attorneys and other infrastructure for a facility that has never transpired.In Arizona, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), backed directly by Trump, has been plagued with lawsuits related to safety and other issues, and missed project deadlines following promises to become a major employer of local talent.Despite Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, recently claiming there was no need to worry about the future of the LG-Honda battery plant, on 28 October, Honda announced it was reducing production at plants across Ohio due to a semiconductor chip shortage.While more than two dozen jobs are available at the Jeffersonville site, according to the LG-Honda plant’s hiring website, it’s a far cry from the more than 2,000 positions cited by officials previously.For Amy Wright, policies coming out of the White House are having a clear effect on residents of rural Ohio. As an organizer of four local No Kings protests against Trump’s policies she’s noticed a change in the people who are coming to the rallies.“We’ve had more and more people who have voted for [Trump] show up and say: ‘This is not good, this is not what we voted for,’” she says. More

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      They were teacher and student in exile. Now this Democrat and Republican face off in Ohio

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      Almost 32 years ago, in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal, children sat cross-legged around a small blackboard propped on the dirt, repeating the alphabet in sing-song rhythm. Among them was Bhuwan Pyakurel, a fourth-grader, and his teacher, Kamal Subedi, barely 18.“He was tall, thin and very talkative,” Subedi said, now 52. “We didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. So we went hut to hut, gathering kids to learn.” In the early 1990s, thousands of Bhutanese refugees had arrived across seven camps in the region, each day bringing more families, more children and more uncertainty.Three decades later, the former teacher and student live a few miles apart in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, and on opposite sides of a US political divide. Pyakurel is now a Democratic city councilman and the first Bhutanese refugee elected to public office in the United States. Subedi, his former teacher, is running for another seat on the council as a Republican on 4 November.Their race has split the small but influential Bhutanese community in suburban Columbus. But the debate over Subedi’s candidacy has spread far beyond Reynoldsburg. Across Facebook and WhatsApp groups from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, members of the Bhutanese diaspora are weighing in – posting hundreds of comments, endorsements and rejections.Some see Subedi’s candidacy as a sign of maturity, proof that refugees can belong to and shape either party. Others, including Pyakurel, see it as a betrayal, aligning their story of exile with a party that, in recent years, deported dozens of Bhutanese refugees and cut social programs many families rely on.“When people with refugee backgrounds like Subedi run on the Republican platform, I see it as them standing against me, my children, my community, and my values,” Pyakurel said. “It feels like they’re rejecting the ideals this country was built on. If you support that kind of politics, you should be ashamed.”Subedi argues that change comes from participation. “If we never join the Republican Party, we’ll always be isolated from it,” he said. “If we take part, we can help shape the narrative to include us.”Pyakurel was nine when Bhutan carried out the mass expulsions of its Nepali-speaking minority, forcing his family into the Goldhap refugee camp in eastern Nepal. Life there was defined by restrictions, no legal work, little movement and constant uncertainty. “You feel that otherness every day,” he said. “It plants a question in you: why don’t I get the same chance everyone else does?”That chance came in 2009, when his family resettled in Colorado. There, through the Family Leadership Training Institute at Colorado State University, he learned the mechanics of civic participation.“It was the first course that made me think about running for local office,” he said.Then in 2014, Pyakurel, then 35, and his family moved to Reynoldsburg, joining hundreds of other Bhutanese families. Two years later, he became a US citizen. “When I took the oath, the judge said, ‘You have two duties: vote and consider running for office.’ I walked out in tears.”In 2019, when longtime Republican councilman Marshall Spalding sought re-election, Pyakurel decided to challenge him.View image in fullscreen“When he decided to run for office, I just thought that was great,” said Steve Walker, 80, a longtime colleague and adviser. “To have the potential of a Bhutanese representative on the Reynoldsburg city council – that meant a lot. There’s a significant Bhutanese population here.”Once a predominantly white and Republican suburb, Reynoldsburg’s population of roughly 40,000 people is now far more mixed politically and ethnically. Census data show the Black population rising from 10% in 2000 to 26% in 2020. Approximately 8,000 Bhutanese refugees have made their home there, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the city’s population.On the night Pyakurel announced his candidacy he felt his chest tighten as he climbed the steps to the microphone. “I don’t remember exactly what I said,” he recalled, laughing. “But people started clapping before I’d even finished.”Pyakurel threw himself into the campaign the same way he had rebuilt his life as a refugee, one door at a time. “When I told them I was a refugee and why I wanted to serve, most people listened,” he said. “But sometimes they said things that were cruel or racist.”His story still resonated with neighbors, with local Democratic leaders, and especially within the Bhutanese community.That year, Pyakurel made history as the first Bhutanese refugee in the United States to be elected to public office. He won the ward three seat on the Reynoldsburg city council, defeating Spalding by a comfortable margin – proof, he says, that “refugees don’t just find a home in America, they help shape it for the better.”Among Pyakurel’s earliest supporters was one of his former fourth-grade teachers from the Goldhap refugee camp, the soft-spoken Subedi. “I was so proud of him and everything he’d accomplished.”After Nepal, Subedi’s family had resettled in Dallas, Texas, in 2008. “The first year was very rough,” he said. “We arrived in the middle of the recession. There were no jobs. I had a young son and my parents to take care of.”He worked briefly for Catholic Charities in Dallas, then received a full scholarship to attend graduate school at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where he completed a master’s in computational science in 2014. That same year, Subedi and his family migrated to Reynoldsburg, where he teaches physics as an adjunct professor at Columbus State Community College and runs a few small businesses.Unlike his former student Pyakurel, who found his values aligned with the Democratic party, Subedi says he chose the Republican party because of his refugee background, not despite it.“When I finally had to choose a party, I felt Republican principles matched the values I grew up with, Hindu faith, family, discipline, preserving language and culture,” he said. “We left Bhutan to protect those things.“It’s a mistake to assume refugees and immigrants automatically support Democrats. Many of us don’t,” he added.In 2024, Subedi and a group of Bhutanese residents campaigned for Donald Trump in Ohio – a key swing state that Trump carried with 55% of the vote. Now, Subedi is running for city council as a Republican even as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has led to the deportation of dozens of Bhutanese refugees, including several from Columbus.“I’ve already said deporting Bhutanese refugees is wrong. It’s one part of my party I don’t agree with,” Subedi said. “But when I compare that with open borders – where desperate migrants and even criminals cross without screening – I think both are serious problems.”His candidacy has exposed deep divisions within the Bhutanese community in Reynoldsburg.Charan Chamlagai, 42, who once canvassed for Pyakurel, sees Subedi’s Republican run as a positive step. “Subedi brings a different perspective,” he said. “He wants to change things from within and help our community understand the policies that affect us. Some Republican ideas align with our cultural and religious values. We should give him a chance.”Others, though, see Subedi’s campaign as a betrayal.“He’s supporting the Trump administration that deported our people,” said Harry Adhikari, 45. “By running as a Republican, he’s supporting the same system that would deport his own brothers and sisters. He’s not fixing potholes in our community – he’s creating them.”Subedi acknowledged that the deportation of Bhutanese refugees was fundamentally un-American. At the same time, he argues that deportations are not unique to the Trump administration.“Deportations didn’t start with President Trump,” he said. “President Obama deported more than three million people. This is a federal system.”When pressed on the fact that no known Bhutanese refugees were deported under previous administrations, Subedi hesitated. “Deporting Bhutanese refugees is wrong,” he finally said. “I don’t like it.”Decades after he was his student, Pyakurel has been outspoken about Subedi’s campaign.“He’s a Democrat, and in politics it’s fair to challenge your opposition,” Subedi said. “But I think Bhuwan and others have mischaracterized me. They blame me for deportations I had nothing to do with. They treat me like an enemy. Bhuwan won’t even shake my hand any more.”When asked what might change his view, Pyakurel paused before answering. “If Subedi publicly denounced Trump, I’d support him.”But Subedi hesitated when asked if he would take that stand.“I don’t think it would be wise to denounce him openly,” he said. “He’s our commander-in-chief. And there are things Trump has done that I believe are good for this country – to protect it, to save it.” More

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      JD Vance did nothing as Trump cuts cost his Ohio home town millions. Will it reshape the city council?

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      When the Middletown high school marching band performed at the presidential inauguration in Washington DC in January, they did so having called on parents, relatives and friends to empty their pockets to help pay for the trip.Despite his apparent nous and wealth, built from a former career in venture capital, Middletown native JD Vance declined to help the students and their supporters get to the capital on the day that honored and marked him as one of the most powerful people in the country.And in May, when the community learned that Donald Trump’s Department of Education was taking back a $5.6m grant that Middletown’s schools had been awarded, school representatives and local politicians, many of them Republicans, wrote to Vance, begging him to reinstate the funding.“To a public school district, $5.6m, that’s not just some easy figure to come up with to complete the project,” the Middletown schools superintendent, Deborah Houser, told WVXU.But all they heard back from Number One Observatory Circle, the vice-president’s Washington DC residence, were crickets.It’s for these and other reasons that progressives Scotty Robertson and Larri Silas decided to run for two seats on Middletown’s non-partisan city council in next month’s election.View image in fullscreenWith national midterm elections still a year out, the Middletown city council election could represent one of the first political temperature checks following nine months of upheaval fueled by White House policies that have targeted working-class Americans like many in Middletown.Although the Middletown city council is officially non-partisan, its current makeup leans 3-1 in favor of Republican members, with the fifth member, the mayor, being regarded as a centrist. The two council seats up for election are now occupied by Republicans.If both – or either – Robertson and Silas win, the swing would send shock waves all the way to Washington.“Middletown is a city that has communities with some very vulnerable populations. The [Trump administration] policies are designed to help billionaires, and there are not a lot of his billionaire friends that exist in Middletown,” says Robertson, a West Virginia native and pastor who moved to Middletown eight years ago.“Peter Thiel doesn’t live in Middletown.” Tech billionaire Thiel is thought to have played a major role in financing Vance’s political rise.Despite Vance being Middletown’s most famous son and Ohio broadly safe ground for Republican politicians for at least a decade, tellingly, nearly four in 10 of voters in the city of 50,000 people chose not to back Vance and Trump in last year’s presidential election.As a young Black woman in a city where 27% of the population is non-white, Silas’s candidacy could prompt residents not normally politically motivated to get out and vote in light of the wider political climate in the country.“I think a lot of people in Middletown want change, and that people see youth as change,” says the 22-year-old nursing home staffer and third-generation Middletown resident.“A lot of people say they want to see the youth get involved [in politics]. But when you do, you’re often criticized for not having experience.”Silas was jolted into politics after longtime Democrat Sherrod Brown lost his Ohio Senate seat to Bernie Moreno, a Republican endorsed by Trump, last November.“I thought: ‘What can I do? I can’t change national politics, but I can get involved someway,’ she says.National polls show Vance’s unfavorability rising since becoming vice-president. Those describing themselves as independents, a crucial voting bloc, have recorded their unfavorable view of Vance increasing from 48% around inauguration day in late January to a record 57% in early October. A similar increase has been recorded among African Americans and Hispanic voters, who make up a considerable number of Middletown residents.Vance has been criticized locally for not stepping in to save a Biden-era grant worth hundreds of millions to a local steel plant that would have created hundreds of clean energy jobs. In December, his mother admonished Middletown’s city council for not doing enough to recognize his achievements.Silas and Robertson claim Vance’s policies and lack of support are damaging Middletown’s prospects.“I’m confused [by Vance]. He says he wants to govern for the working person, for the average person, yet the policies that he supports are policies that hurt poor, working people disproportionately,” says Robertson.Last month, Vance posted on X, saying: “Democrats are about to shutdown the government because they demand that we fund healthcare for illegal aliens,” a claim that has no basis in reality.“Middletown has families that are disproportionately in the socioeconomic class that these policies are hurting. That’s why these policies are having a much more disproportionate impact on Middletown.” The US Census Bureau recorded that child poverty in Middletown is 29%, 13% above the national average.Meanwhile, one of Silas and Robertson’s city council opponents, incumbent Paul Lolli, courted controversy last year when receiving a $135,981 payout after retiring from his job as Middletown city manager “due to personal circumstances”. While more than $43,000 of that was attributed to accrued paid time off, the remainder accounted for six months of salary and insurance benefits premiums. Emails and voicemails left by the Guardian with Lolli were not responded to.Lolli and his right-leaning co-runner, a former city council member, have claimed it isn’t Vance’s job to lift up his home town.Past vice-presidents, however, have ensured their own communities were recognized.Kamala Harris helped bring millions of dollars in funding and grants into Oakland, California, her home town, during her vice-presidency.Still, the challenges facing Robertson and Silas are significant, chief among them the gap in experience between them and their opponents, who have collectively worked in city administrative positions for decades.Calling out Vance, a hometown hero for many Middletown residents, could also be costly.Experts say that Vance’s unpopularity – and that of vice-presidents in general – is largely down to how people see the president.“It’s hard to know how seriously to take a rating of JD Vance as an individual, as an office holder, because I think mostly what I think people are doing is transferring their opinion of Donald Trump as a president to JD Vance,” says Christopher Devine, associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton, who has written two books on vice-presidents.He says many people who turn out for a presidential election do not take part in local polls such as city council elections.“The more localized and less visible in terms of the office, the lower the turnout’s going to be,” says Devine.“Those folks who came out in force to vote for Trump and Vance in Middletown in 2024, that’s not going to be the same for people who are voting for city council in the fall of 2025.”Silas, whose family members were part of the Great Migration of job-seeking African Americans who moved from the south to the midwest more than a century ago, says she first heard of Vance when she voted against him in a Senate election he ultimately won in 2022. Vance secured Trump’s endorsement for the race, which was funded by millions of dollars from billionaires such as Thiel.For Robertson, countering the White House-fueled movement against working Americans starts in Middletown.“I think that our country in general is at a pivotal moment,” he says.“If good, decent people with the right motives don’t stand up and run for office and participate in the political process, then that leaves it ripe for picking for the bad actors.” More

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      Haitians helped boost Springfield’s economy – now they’re fleeing in fear of Trump

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      Every morning, Alicia Mercado makes the 50-minute drive from her home in Columbus to Springfield, where she runs the Adasa Latin Market store. She opened the business next to a Haitian restaurant in 2023, having spotted a gap in the market for Caribbean and Latin foods – the neighborhood’s Haitian population was booming at the time.But over the past year, she says her business, which includes an international money transfer kiosk, has taken a major hit.“About 80 to 90% of our customers were Haitians; now that’s down to about 60% over the past six months,” she says. “No more people are moving to Springfield.”Mercado’s experiences are being echoed around the city of 58,000 people that garnered international attention last year when Donald Trump falsely claimed during a presidential debate that immigrants were eating people’s pets.Until the end of last year, Springfield was something of a surprise economic juggernaut.A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that it ranked second among all Ohio cities for job growth since the pandemic.New housing projects, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, are among the biggest investments the city has ever made.That growth was partly fueled by the availability of manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that were eagerly filled by the more than 15,000 Haitian immigrants who had moved to the city over the past eight years, fueling businesses such as Mercado’s.Local companies got cheap, reliable labor, while Haitian workers received stable income, health insurance and a safe place to live. Many bought homes and invested their hard-earned income into improving the city’s housing stock that, in turn, padded the city’s tax coffers. For the most part, it was a win for all involved.But since then, the city’s economic fortunes have spiraled.Springfield businesses, big and small, are struggling in the aftermath of thousands of Haitians fleeing the town after the Trump administration’s termination of the humanitarian parole program for citizens of several countries, including Haiti, in June. On top of that, the government has ended temporary protected status, affecting the immigration status of more than half a million Haitians, which comes into effect on or before 5 February 2026.The Department of Homeland Security says conditions in Haiti have improved to allow US-based Haitians to return. However, violence prompted Haiti’s government in August to issue a state of emergency in parts of the country. The US Department of State currently has a level four “do not travel” advisory for Haiti.The consequences of these moves are being keenly felt in places such as Springfield.Since January, when the Trump administration took office, the percentage of manufacturing jobs in Springfield has been falling by double digits as the civilian labor force also declines, something thought to be partly fueled by Haitians leaving the city due to fear of the administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.At Topre America, an automotive parts manufacturing company north-east of downtown Springfield, dozens of jobs that Haitians had once filled – forklift drivers, supervisors and stackers – have remained unfilled on the company’s employment webpage for months.Unemployment has ticked up slightly in the city – but still at a rate twice the state’s increase – in the 12 months since Trump’s racist comments.In a city where income tax makes up the majority of municipal funding, the loss of thousands of Haitian workers means fewer dollars for public services for all residents.“Our tax revenue, which is the backbone of our general fund, has flattened. After years of strong growth post-pandemic, the rebound is behind us,” Springfield’s city finance director, Katie Eviston, reported at a city commission public meeting in June.Previous estimates had tracked that 2025 would see a 3.5% increase in income tax funds for the city. By June, that anticipated growth, however, had been wiped out in what Eviston said was a “level of decline [that] hasn’t occurred since the early days of the Covid shutdown”.Moreover, the city faces a worrying $4.25m financial hole due to the cancellation of a host of Biden-era programs and grants by the Trump administration.Springfield and its businesses aren’t alone in dealing with the fallout of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.Experts say it has consequences for businesses and companies right across the country. In June, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) said that ending visas for international workers would leave 85,000 jobs unfilled.“Stripping [immigrants’] ability to work and threatening them with removal is not just a human cost; it is an economic one,” an AEM executive wrote in the Washington Examiner.Small communities in Indiana, Pennsylvania and elsewhere in Ohio that enjoyed an economic rebound in the aftermath of the pandemic are also experiencing depressed purchasing power due to White House-fueled job cuts.“Trump’s immigration policy slowed inflows. Suddenly, more firms have seen their immigrant worker supplies decline, forcing them to pay more to attract native workers, thereby placing upward pressure on inflation,” says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Metro thinktank.“This, combined with Trump’s tariffs, has created serious upward price pressure along with the rise in labor costs – not a great combination for many US producers in the heartland.”Without the ability to work, many Haitians are leaving the US.According to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, more than 26,000 Haitians sought asylum there in the first six months of 2025, many of whom are thought to have fled the US. By contrast, just 21,756 claims were made for all of 2024.Many Haitians in Springfield, however, are stuck in place, without jobs and with bills mounting up.“A lot of people have work problems – we have lost half our customers,” says Youdins Solon, who helps out at his family’s Keket Bongou Caribbean restaurant in south-east Springfield. Solon moved to Springfield last March, having lived in Florida for 18 months prior. But by the summer, he lost his job at a local Amazon distribution center when his immigration status was revoked. He says he is one of hundreds who have been laid off.“I’m lucky because I have my family here, but for a lot of people, they moved [out of Springfield] because they were afraid of the situation.”But for those who have staked their businesses on a thriving immigrant community in Springfield, it’s not easy to pack up and leave.“We order Haitian food from companies in Florida and Chicago every two weeks,” says Mercado, “but now, that’s greatly reduced.” More

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      The right wants Charlie Kirk memorials across the US – but is it just an attempt to capitalize on his killing?

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      Republicans and conservatives are campaigning to quickly build statues and other memorials across the United States for the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination at a college event in Utah last month.Political leaders in states such as Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have not only called for construction of memorials but in some cases also threatened to penalize colleges that refuse to publicly honor Kirk, who was killed on 10 September.The heavy-handed push to honor Kirk, who held views that many see as racist and sexist, follows Donald Trump’s moves to restore monuments of Confederate leaders that were removed in recent years, which appear to be part of a broad effort to impose rightwing views on the country.“The way in which you keep the culture war going – or the way that you win it – is to have religious icons like Charlie and use their face and their name and their likeness to further your cause,” said Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia who has studied Christian nationalism.Kirk, who co-founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was killed at Utah State University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.Since then, Trump and others in his administration, such as Stephen Miller, have blamed the shooting – without producing any evidence – on a coordinated violent effort by the “radical left” and threatened to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” the left’s “terrorism and terror networks”.Kirk often criticized gay and transgender rights and made Islamophobic statements and once suggested that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. However, at the state and local level, Republican lawmakers have described Kirk as a “modern civil rights leader” who stood for “allowing everybody to voice their opinion respectfully”.Just a week after Kirk’s murder, Ohio Republican state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto introduced legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to build a “Charlie Kirk memorial plaza” with a statue “that features the conservative leader sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk “and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms”.A few weeks later, in Florida, Kevin Steele, a state house Republican, also proposed legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to rename roads for Kirk.“The Florida State University shall redesignate Chieftain Way as Charlie James Kirk Road,” the bill states. “Pasco-Hernando State College shall redesignate Mrs Prameela Musunuru Health and Wellness Trail as Charlie James Kirk Trail.”In Florida, if the schools do not establish the memorials by stated deadline, the state would withhold funding from the institutions, and in Oklahoma, the state would fine the schools, according to the legislation.Boedy, the University of North Georgia professor, likened the lawmakers’ threats to withhold state money to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding to universities unless they met his list of demands.“State funding for education should be based upon students’ interest in majors, in enrollment and in science, in objective criteria, and honoring a single person is not part of that,” said Boedy, who has been on Turning Point’s watchlist of “professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.Jett, Prieto and Steele did not respond to requests for comment.Kirk was critical of higher education and wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.“I find it really ironic that the state of Oklahoma is demanding that every public university have a Charlie Kirk memorial plaza,” said Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.While the states have not approved the legislation requiring the memorials, at least one Florida county has installed a sign for a Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway, despite some public opposition.And less than a week after the murder, New College of Florida, a liberal arts university that has been the subject of a conservative takeover, also posted on X an AI-generated image of a bronze sculpture of Kirk at a table and stated that it would build the statue on campus “to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life”.That may not be easy. After events like 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, public monuments were often not built for years, sometimes decades.Quickly sharing a fake image of a Kirk memorial “is a lie”, Doss said. “It matters because it doesn’t tell the truth about how complicated and necessarily complicated making public art should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy waiting years to build a memorial, you can see how time really changes the “emotional tenor and the perspective on the event”, said Gabriel Reich, a professor of history and social studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied collective memories of the US civil war and emancipation.“How people feel about [Kirk’s killing] five years from now may be different, and it may depend on what happens between now and then,” said Reich. “Does the political violence escalate and continue? Does it get tamped down?”It’s not a foregone conclusion that the schools will build the monuments.In Michigan, the Mecosta county board of commissioners wanted Ferris State University to build a statue for Kirk and offered to split the funding, but the school president declined, citing a “a longstanding practice that limits statues on campus to individuals who have made significant, direct contributions to Ferris State University itself”, according to the Detroit Free-Press.At New College, alum William Rosenberg sees the proposed statue as an attempt by the administration to distract from problems at the school, which was once a highly ranked institution considered among the most liberal in the country.“New College was a welcoming environment for people who were motivated and wanted to learn and wanted to do it on their own terms,” said Rosenberg, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in medieval studies.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried in recent years to transform the school by appointing political allies such as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to its board of trustees, firing its president and revamping its curriculum.Since then, the school has seen its national ranking and graduation and retention rates plummet, while the state now spends significantly more on each student than those at its other public universities, according to Inside Higher Ed.After posting the AI image of the statue, New College’s president, Richard Corcoran, touted the public response in a weekly email.“In the first 72 hours of the announcement, New College of Florida was mentioned nearly 3 billion times (including traditional media in the graph below, and reposts on social media),” the email stated. “Normally, New College receives about 100 million impressions a month. In 72 hours, New College received about 2 1/2 years of media coverage.”A New College spokesperson, James Miller, declined an interview request.Rosenberg, a semi-retired computer engineer, doubts the school will actually build the statue because of Corcoran’s “history of promising the world and delivering nothing”.“A lot of alumni feel it was a gross PR move to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder,” Rosenberg said. “New College of Florida has now become a political pawn whose real mission is about making political headlines while the on-the-ground education has nosedived.” More

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      US Capitol police investigating flag with swastika in Republican representative’s office – report

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      US Capitol police are reportedly investigating after a US flag bearing a swastika was discovered inside the office of Republican House member Dave Taylor of Ohio.The image, obtained by Politico, shows a modified flag featuring red and white stripes arranged in the form of a swastika – which is virtually synonymous with the Nazis’ genocidal regime. The flag was displayed on what appears to be a cubicle wall behind Angelo Elia, one of Taylor’s staff members, during a virtual meeting.Other items pinned nearby include a pocket constitution and a congressional calendar. It remains unclear whether Elia had any connection to the display.“I am aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office,” Taylor said in a statement to the Cincinnati Enquirer.“The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff, or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms. Upon learning of this matter, I immediately directed a thorough investigation alongside Capitol Police, which remains ongoing. No further comment will be provided until it has been completed.”According to his office, the flag was discovered on Tuesday afternoon inside Taylor’s suite in the Cannon building on Capitol Hill, Politico reported. The congressman suspects the act was “foul play or vandalism”, his spokesperson said.When contacted by the Guardian for comment, an automatic response from the US Capitol police public information office was sent that said the office is “closed for routine business” during the funding-related federal government shutdown that began on 1 October. “The office will reopen when the federal government is funded,” the response said.The discovery follows a report from Politico published on Tuesday detailing a Telegram chat in which Young Republican leaders exchanged racist comments and slurs, mocked the Holocaust, and expressed admiration for Nazi ruler Adolf Hitler.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe exposed chat has since been met with major backlash throughout the US, with some who participated being called to resign and at least one member having a job offer revoked. More

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      Democratic candidates can win Rust Belt voters by … attacking the Democratic party | Jared Abbott and Bhaskar Sunkara

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      If anyone could have broken through as a progressive in red America, it was Sherrod Brown. For decades, the Ohio senator railed against corporations for shipping good-paying jobs overseas and pleaded with Democrats to take the struggles of deindustrialized communities seriously. Yet in 2024, even Brown, a model economic populist, fell to a Republican challenger.Does that prove, as writers such as Jonathan Chait have argued, that the idea of winning back the working class with progressive economic policies has been tried and has failed?We wanted to know why Democrats keep losing working-class support in the Rust belt, and what could turn things around. So, with colleagues at the Center for Working-Class Politics, the Labor Institute and Rutgers University, we surveyed 3,000 voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. The research suggests the story is more complicated – and that Democrats’ problems in the Rust belt are real, but solvable.We found a consistent pattern we call the “Democratic penalty”. In a randomized, controlled trial, respondents were shown hypothetical candidates with identical economic populist platforms. The only difference was that some were labeled Democrats, while others were labeled independents. Across the four states, the Democratic candidates fared eight points worse.In Ohio the gap was nearly 16 points; in Michigan, 13; in Wisconsin, 11. The voters most alienated by the party label were the very groups Democrats most need to win back: Latinos, working-class Americans, and others in rural and small-town communities.This pattern helps explain why figures like Brown can run as tough economic populists and still struggle, while independents like Dan Osborne in Nebraska dramatically overperformed expectations on nearly identical platforms. It’s the Democratic brand that’s unpopular, not the populism.What’s at the root of the mistrust? After the 2024 election, many commentators pointed to “wokeness” as the culprit. But our research tells a different story. When we asked voters to write a sentence about what first came to mind when they thought of Democrats, 70% offered negative views. Yet only a small minority mentioned “wokeness” or ideological extremism – 3% of Democrats, 11% of independents, 19% of Republicans. The dominant complaints weren’t about social liberalism but about competence, honesty and connection. Democrats were seen as out of touch, corrupt or simply ineffective: “falling behind on what’s important” and having not “represented their constituents in a long time”. While some of these critiques bled into broader claims that Democrats are focused on the wrong priorities, the responses suggest cultural issues are not voters’ dominant concern.This should be a wake-up call. Rust belt voters aren’t gullibly distracted by culture wars but, rather, are frustrated that Democrats haven’t delivered. What does resonate with them is a tougher, more credible economic message.Even if the Democratic label is a serious drag in red and purple states, our results show that full-throated economic populism that speaks directly to workers’ sense that the system is rigged can substantially boost candidates’ appeal, particularly in areas that have lost millions of high-quality jobs over the past 40 years. Standard “bread-and-butter” Democratic messaging performed over 11 points better when paired with strong anti-corporate rhetoric (condemning companies for cutting good jobs) than with a “populist-lite” frame that merely knocks a few price-gougers while acknowledging that most businesses play by the rules.When we forced respondents to choose tradeoffs among 25 economic policy proposals, the results were even clearer. Across partisan and class divides, voters consistently prioritized concrete measures framed in terms of fairness and accountability for elites: capping prescription drug prices, eliminating taxes on social security income, and raising taxes on the super-wealthy and large corporations. These policies polled far ahead of flashy ideas such as $1,000 monthly cash payments or trillion-dollar green industrial plans, and well ahead of traditional conservative staples such as corporate tax cuts and deregulation.Even on immigration, Rust belt voters proved more open than expected. Nearly two-thirds supported legalization for long-settled undocumented workers who had played by the rules. Despite years of rightwing fearmongering, a progressive position carried the day.So what’s the path forward? Not every candidate can reinvent themselves as an independent populist. In many districts, doing so would simply split the anti-Republican vote. But Democrats can blunt the “Democratic penalty” by speaking against their own party establishment and making a populist case that neither major party has delivered for working people. Candidates who take this approach appeal more effectively to the very voters Democrats have been losing.The electoral map itself makes the stakes plain. Without states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, Democrats cannot hold national power. Sherrod Brown’s defeat underlined that even the most credible economic populists can only run so far ahead of the party’s damaged brand.If Democrats remain seen as out of touch with working-class concerns, more Browns will fall, and Republicans will keep gaining ground in once-reliable Democratic strongholds. But if Democrats take on corporate elites, level with voters about their own party’s failures, and fight for policies that put working families first, they might finally chart a path back to the working class – and to the future.

      Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics. Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation magazine and the founding editor of Jacobin More

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      Small US college towns reel amid Trump immigration crackdown: ‘They need international students’

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      For a town of 20,000 residents a few miles from the Indiana state line in rural Ohio, the city of Oxford boasts an outsized number of international eateries.On High Street, the Phan Shin Chinese restaurant sits a few doors down from the Happy Kitchen, another Chinese food joint, which is next door to the Krishna Indian restaurant. There’s a French bakery and even a Uyghur restaurant selling central Asian fare.The diversity of international restaurants mirrors the student population attending Miami University, which in 2019 had a student body including more than 3,000 international students.But in recent years, the number of international students coming to study at US colleges has plummeted, a trend that could have devastating consequences for small college towns.It was the large number of Chinese students attending Miami University that prompted Fei Yang to open the MImian Chinese restaurant in Oxford, a full 60 miles from his home, in 2018.“There used to be 2,000 to 3,000 [Chinese] students but now there is like 300, 400 maybe,” says Yang. “Covid-19 stopped a lot of people coming. Before we used to make real Chinese food, now we make the American versions.”In fall 2019, Miami University admitted 2,895 international students, mainly from China, Vietnam, India, and elsewhere – last year, the number plummeted to 750. Since international students at Miami University are not receiving scholarships, they typically pay more than $65,000 in tuition, fees, housing and food, according to 2024-25 estimated cost of attendance figures, which represents a potential loss of about $140m for the university, local businesses and the thousands of workers they collectively employ.Across the US, an estimated 150,000 fewer international students are expected to study at US colleges and universities this fall compared to last year, a 40% drop.While the reasons are varied, the Trump administration’s response to protests on campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza has played a major role in fueling the falloff by driving fear of arrest and deportation into many would-be incoming international students.In June, the state department announced more severe screening and vetting processes for international students intending on studying in the US, including ordering applicants to turn their social media profiles public.Students from Turkey, Palestine, and Iran have been detained, imprisoned and deported or self-deported for expressing their first amendment rights, rights that are protected by the US constitution, regardless of whether they are citizens of the country or not. About 6,000 student visas have been revoked this year with some students seeing their visas revoked for alleged minor wrongdoings such as speeding.International student enrolment, however, has been in decline since before the current administration’s crackdown. The tariffs regime initiated on China during the first Trump administration, as well as Covid-19 pandemic travel restrictions in 2020, prompted a massive fall in students traveling to the US for higher education five years ago. In the years since, Chinese students have increasingly chosen to study in the UK and Australia in place of the US.While mid-sized and large cities and wealthy small towns such as Ithaca, New York, – home to Cornell University – can typically take the financial hit from the loss of thousands of international students due to their diversified economies, less affluent towns, whose economies have never fully recovered from the loss of students on-site during the pandemic, remain imperiled.According to the US Department of Commerce, international students are thought to have contributed around $50bn to the US economy in 2023 in tuition, rent, food, taxes and a host of other ways. In Ohio, Kentucky, and Iowa, which rank among the lowest states for GDP growth in the country, and which are Trump strongholds, their economies are set to lose as much as $200m, $45m and nearly $43m respectively. Florida’s economy could see losses reaching as much as $243m.“We tend to think that foreign students only go to big Ivy League schools in big cities. But if you look at a recent Brookings Institution report, it is clear that every school, small, medium and large, in every town or city – small, medium or large need income from international students,” says Tara Sonenshine, Edward R Murrow professor of practice in public diplomacy at Tufts University.In West Lafayette, Indiana, the 50,000 students who attend Purdue University make up the overwhelming majority of the city’s population. Almost one in four of those at Purdue in 2024 were international students, most paying full tuition and board costs. These students, many who attend to learn cutting-edge agriculture practices, help employ more than 10,000 people, making Purdue University the largest employer in the region.It’s a similar story for rural Illinois, where one-quarter of students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus are from overseas – one of the highest ratios of any private or public college in the country. There, an international student studying for a four-year undergraduate degree can net the college and offshoot businesses about $200,000 in tuition and other fees.In Oxford, Ohio, one of the biggest issues international students help local businesses with is providing custom during the six-week period from mid-December to the end of January when there are no classes at Miami University. At that time, other than permanent residents, the only people in town are international students.“Our business community is very dependent on Miami University students. Oxford’s population is about 20,000, of which 17,000 or more are Miami University students,” says Oxford city manager Doug Elliott.“We have a lot of homes that were converted into student housing. That’s typical for small college towns like us.”Elliott notes that aside from the financial benefit, international students bring energy and diversity in the form of festivals and gatherings to parts of the US that would otherwise never get to experience the wider world.“Cutting off visas for international students, combined with demographic shifts in America and the declining enrolment in college, in addition to the general disdain for immigrant populations coming here,” says Sonenshine, “would all add up to chaos and potential closures of small schools who rely on a broader pool on enrolment.” More