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

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

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

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

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

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      Ron DeSantis’s fall from grace: ‘He’s completely crashed to the ground’

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      These are challenging days for Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who would have been king. Barely two and a half years since his landslide re-election and anointment as “DeFuture” of the Republican party in a fawning New York Post cover, he stands isolated from the national political stage, feuding with his once blindingly loyal Florida legislature, and limping towards the finish line of his second term with an uncertain pathway beyond.It has been, in the view of many analysts, a fall of stunning velocity and magnitude. And while few are willing to completely rule out a comeback for a 46-year-old politician who was the darling of the Republican hard right until he dared to challenge Donald Trump for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, it is also clear that everything has changed.“He’s completely crashed to the ground at this point and is certainly being treated like a more standard, average governor now,” said Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.“He’s lost the ability to push things through. He’s lost that luster he had that at one time seemed like he could do no wrong in Republican conservative circles. He’s definitely come back down to earth and some of it is his own doing because if you govern with an autocratic style, that doesn’t usually make you a lot of allies.”DeSantis’s once vise-like grip on Florida’s lawmakers has weakened, replaced by open dissent, bitter hostility and a hurling of slurs over a number of issues as the two Republican dominated legislative chambers try to reverse six years of passivity and reestablish themselves as a co-equal branch of government.DeSantis, in the words of Florida’s Republican House speaker, Daniel Perez, has begun to tell “lies and stories that never happened”, and has become increasingly prone to “temper tantrums”.The governor, meanwhile, hit back at what he sees as a “pathetic” agenda being pursued by the majority. He has also lashed out at their investigation of a charity scandal enveloping his wife, Casey DeSantis, as she mulls whether to run in next year’s election to succeed him when he is termed out of office in January 2027.Some Republicans, including Perez, want to know how $10m of a $67m legal settlement intended for Florida taxpayers ended up channeled through Hope Florida, a non-profit that Casey DeSantis founded, to political action committees operated by her husband’s allies to help quash ballot amendments last year on abortion and marijuana.“At one point Casey looked like she was going to be the heir apparent to Ron DeSantis and she was going to run, and he certainly seemed like he was trying to position her to do so,” Jewett said.“That would extend his legacy and help keep him around for some more years, he can be the first husband and people would say he’s an equal partner or whatever. That would take away some of his lame-duck status.”It is that drift towards political irrelevance, particularly on the national stage, that stings DeSantis the most, some analysts believe.If events had transpired differently, he could be sitting in the White House. Instead, the influence of the one-time prince of Maga (Trump’s make America great again movement) is limited to regular guest appearances on Fox News, and “press conferences” he hosts around Florida almost on a daily basis to assail judges whose rulings displease him and expound his hardline positions on immigration enforcement, higher education and drag show performers.More galling, Jewett says, is that DeSantis has seen himself eclipsed by rising newcomers in Trump’s firmament, notably vice-president JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator and current secretary of state, both named by the president this month as potential successors.“It’s notable that when Trump was asked who might follow him, he didn’t mention DeSantis at all,” Jewett said. “When DeSantis challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, it ticked Trump off and it ticked off a lot of Trump supporters, who up until then generally liked him.“It came out while he was running that he doesn’t have the great personality that a traditional politician has. He just didn’t seem well suited for shaking hands, eating hot dogs and kissing babies, the kind of typical American political things. It destroyed his air of invincibility.”View image in fullscreenOther observers see the same aloofness and confrontational manner behind DeSantis’s fallings out with Republican erstwhile allies in Florida, and a reason why many are rushing to support Trump-endorsed congressman Byron Donalds for governor even before Casey DeSantis has made a decision to run.“I don’t know that they necessarily think Donalds is the greatest thing since sliced bread – I think it’s, ‘Well, we got to block Casey from getting in’,” said Michael Binder, professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida.“The DeSantis-Trump feud appears to have mellowed but there are absolutely people in both camps, on both sides, that have not forgotten and will not forget. DeSantis’s political style in some ways is similar to Trump in that he makes a lot of enemies. The difference is Trump can make amends with enemies when it benefits him – think of Marco Rubio.“With Ron DeSantis you don’t see that. Once you’re on the outs with DeSantis, you stay on the outs. They burn those bridges.”DeSantis’s office did not respond to a number of questions submitted by the Guardian about the remainder of his term in office, or plans thereafter.His predecessor as governor, Rick Scott, successfully challenged Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson for his US Senate seat in 2018 and remains an influential Republican voice in Washington. Such a pathway appears blocked for DeSantis, a former congressman who in January appointed Florida’s former attorney general Ashley Moody to Rubio’s vacant Senate seat for the duration of his term.DeSantis would need to challenge a close ally who has already filed to defend it in the 2026 election.Still, Jewett said, the final chapters of DeSantis’s political career are yet to be written.“It doesn’t look good and his political prospects are definitely more dim than they were, his road seems that much more difficult right now,” he said.“But you just never know. One big wild card is how people view Trump in another year. It’s a decent assumption the Maga movement will continue and if Trump really falters then maybe DeSantis’s distance from Trump actually ends up being a positive in the longer run.“Even if he doesn’t get too much more accomplished in the next year and a half, he had a five-year run that was unprecedented in pushing through a very conservative agenda and changing Florida from the most competitive battleground to a heavily Republican state. So yeah, he’ll remind everyone of all the things he did that they liked on the Republican side.” More

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      Republicans are attacking childcare funding. Their goal? To push women out of the workforce | Moira Donegan

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      Last month, the White House issued a proposed budget to Congress that completely eliminated funding for Head Start, the six-decade-old early childhood education program for low-income families that serves as a source of childcare for large swaths of the American working class.The funding was restored in the proposed budget after an outcry, but large numbers of employees who oversee the program at the office of Head Start were laid off in a budget-slashing measure under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. On Thursday, Kennedy said funding for the program would not be axed, but more cuts to childcare funding are likely coming: some Republicans have pushed to repeal a five-decade-old tax credit for daycare. The White House is entertaining proposals on how to incentivize and structurally coerce American women into bearing more children, but it seems to be determined to make doing so as costly to those women’s careers as possible.That’s because the Republicans’ childcare policy, like their pro-natalist policy, is based on one goal: undoing the historic gains in women’s rights and status, and pushing American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society – and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.The New York Times reported this week that the White House is now not only looking for ways to make more women have children, but to encourage “parents” to stay home to raise them. “Parents” here is a euphemism. Roughly 80% of stay-at-home parents are mothers: cultural traditions that encourage women, and not men, to sacrifice their careers for caregiving, along with persistent wage inequalities that make women, on the whole, lower earners than their male partners, both incentivize women, and not men, to drop out of the workforce and stay home when they have children.This state of affairs has been worsened by the dramatic rise in the cost of childcare, which is prohibitively expensive for many parents. The average cost of childcare per child per year in the US is now well north of $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, an industry advocacy group. In major cities such as New York, that price is significantly higher: from $16,000 to $19,000 per year. Existing tax credits need to be expanded, not eliminated, to reduce this burden on mothers and their families and to enable women to join the workforce at rates comparable to men and commensurate with their dignity and capacities. Currently, 26% of mothers do not engage in paid work, a figure that has barely budged in 40 years. Largely because of the unequally distributed burdens of childcare, men participate in the paid labor force at a rate that is more than 10% higher than women.One might think that the solution would be to invest more in high-quality childcare, so that providers could open more slots, children could access more resources, and women could go to work and expend their talents in productive ways that earn them money, make use of their gifts and provide more dignity for women and more stability for families. This is not what the American right is proposing: Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who promotes traditional family and gender relations, has called such policy initiatives “work-ist”. Conservatives are proposing, instead, that women go back to the kitchen.The Trump administration, and the American right more broadly, wants the rate of women’s employment to be even lower, because it is advancing a lie that women are naturally, inevitably, uniformly and innately inclined to caregiving, child rearing and homemaking – and not to the positions of intellectual achievement, responsibility, leadership, ingenuity or independence that women may aspire to in the public world. “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hardwired to bond with Mom,” says Janet Erickson, a fellow at the rightwing Institute for Family Studies, who once co-authored an op-ed with JD Vance calling on “parents” to drop out of the workforce to raise children. “I just think, why should we deny that?”This kind of vague, evidence-free gesturing toward evolutionary psychology – the notion that babies are “hardwired” to prefer mothers who are not employed – is a common conservative tick: a recourse to dishonest and debunked science to lend empiricism to bigotry. There is in fact no evolutionary reason, and no biological reason, for mothers, and not fathers, to abandon independence, ambition or life outside the home for the sake of a child. The only reason is a sexist one.Over the past decade, the left launched few vigorous defenses of a feminist politics that seeks to advance and secure women’s access to public life, paid work and fair remuneration. The American left has launched vigorous criticisms of the “girlboss”, a figure of malignant female ambition who seemed to make the exploitations of capitalism more offensive by virtue of her sex, and it has instead offered critiques of women’s ambition and romantic defenses of the labor of “care” that just happens to overlap with women’s traditional – and traditionally unpaid – roles in the home. This leftwing rhetoric has at times mirrored the similar romanticization of the unpaid housewife of yesteryear from the right, which has embraced tradwives, homesteading fantasies and an aestheticized rustic simplicity that aims to contrast feminist gains in the workforce with a fantasy of women’s rest. Together, these strains of rhetorical opposition to women in the workforce have made anti-feminism into a new kind of “socialism of fools” – a misguided misdirection of anger and resentment at the rapaciousness of capitalism towards a social justice movement for the rights of an oppressed class.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut what is on offer from the political right is not about the refashioning of work and life to be less extractive and exploitative for women, and particularly for mothers. It is instead about a sex segregation of human experience, an effort to make much of public life inaccessible to women. Combined with the right wing’s successful attack on the right to abortion, the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to Title X programs that provide contraceptive access, and the rescinding of federal grants aimed at helping working women, what emerges from the rightwing policy agenda is an effort to force women out of education, out of decently paid work and into pregnancy, unemployment and dependence on men.Theirs is an effort to shelter men from women’s economic competition, to revert to the regressive cultural modes of an imagined past, and to impose an artificially narrow vision of the capacities, aspirations, talents and desires of half of the American people.Murray Rothbard, the paleoconservative 20th-century economist whose ideas have had a profound influence on the Trumpist worldview, once vowed: “We shall repeal the 20th century.” As far as the Republican right is concerned, it seems to want to repeal the gains of 20th-century feminism first.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The Guardian view on Britain’s new aid vision: less cash, more spin. The cost will be counted in lives | Editorial

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      Last week, the government justified cutting the UK’s development budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income – the lowest level in more than 25 years – by claiming Britain’s role is now to “share expertise”, not hand out cash. With a straight face, the minister responsible, Jenny Chapman, told MPs on the international development committee that the age of the UK as “a global charity” was over. But this isn’t reinvention – it’s abdication, wrapped in spin. No wonder Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who is chair of the committee, called Lady Chapman’s remarks “naive” and “disrespectful”. Behind the slogans lies a brutal truth: lives will be lost, and Britain no longer cares. Dressing that up as the “new normal” doesn’t make it less callous.Kevin Watkins of the London School of Economics analysed the cuts and found no soft-landing options. He suggests charting a sensible course through this wreckage, noting that harm from the cuts is inevitable but not beyond mitigation. Dr Watkins’ proposals – prioritising multilateralism, funding the global vaccine alliance (Gavi) and replenishing international lending facilities – would prevent some needless deaths. Ministers should adopt such an approach. The decision to raid the aid budget to fund increased defence spending was a shameful attempt to cosy up to Washington. The cuts were announced just before Sir Keir Starmer’s White House meeting with Donald Trump, with no long-term strategy behind them. It’s a deplorable trend: globally, aid levels could fall by $40bn this year.The gutting of USAID, the world’s biggest spender on international development, by Elon Musk, was less fiscal policy than culture-war theatre. Foreign beneficiaries don’t vote, and liberal-leaning aid contractors lack clout, so dismantling USAID shrinks “globalism” while “owning the establishment”. But the real casualties lie elsewhere. Memorably, Bill Gates said the idea of Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, “killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one”. Countries that built health systems around USAID now face a reckoning. It wasn’t just cash – it sustained disease surveillance, logistics and delivery. Ironically, much of it never left American hands, absorbed by US private interests.In the UK, University of Portsmouth researchers say aid increasingly serves foreign policy, not development. It’s not just ineffective – it’s cynical. Aid should change lives, not wave flags. All this as poor nations’ debt crisis deepens. Without global reform, the Institute for Economic Justice warns, African nations face a cycle of distress blocking investment in basic needs. The UK recasts withdrawal as progress – holding up Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as model partners. But Georgetown University’s Ken Opalo makes a cutting point: in diplomacy, when the music stops, those who outsourced ambition get exposed. Aid dependency, he argues, has hollowed out local ownership. With little planning, many governments now face a choice: take over essential services or cling to a vanishing donor model.Politicians should choose their words carefully. The former Tory development secretary Andrew Mitchell rightly criticised Boris Johnson’s “giant cashpoint in the sky” remark for damaging public support for aid. Labour ministers are guilty, too. Britain has replaced moral leadership with metrics, and compassion with calculation. The policy’s defenders call it realism. But without vision, it’s just surrender – leaving the world’s poor to fend for themselves, forced to try to survive without the means to do so. More

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      Could a British Fox News personality fix Republicans’ losing streak in California?

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      California is usually regarded as a political graveyard for ambitious Republicans, but Steve Hilton, the smiling, bald-headed former British political consultant turned Fox News personality, has a few theories of how to turn that around.Theory number one is that the Democrats, who have not lost a statewide election in almost 20 years and enjoy a supermajority in the California legislature, make the argument for change more or less by themselves, because the state has become too expensive for many of its residents and is mired in a steep budgetary crisis.Even the current governor, Gavin Newsom, argues that his party’s brand has become toxic, that Democrats across the country have lost their way, and “people don’t think we make any damn sense”. The leading Democratic candidates to succeed him have been similarly blunt.“Everything costs too much!” the former congresswoman Katie Porter says on her campaign website. “Homes and rent are too expensive,” the former state attorney general Xavier Becerra concurs on his. “Folks can barely cover their grocery bills. Healthcare costs are incredibly high.”To which Hilton responds gleefully: “We know! You did it to us!”Given the depth of the malaise – “Califailure”, the title of his campaign book calls it – Hilton believes that next year’s governor’s race offers Republicans a unique opportunity. If even Democrats think it’s time for change, he argues, wouldn’t it make sense for voters to look elsewhere for a solution?And that leads him to theory number two: that an engaging, energetic, unorthodox-sounding candidate like himself might just be the man for a job.In the four weeks since he announced his run for governor, Hilton and a skeleton staff have crisscrossed the state in a distinctive white pickup truck emblazoned with the Trump-like slogan “Make California Golden Again”. He has spoken at universities and presidential libraries, made common cause with hardcore Trump Republicans, and struck up conversations with voters in some of the most liberal corners of the state.His style has been casual – he dresses most commonly in a T-shirt and sneakers as he sits down in coffee shops or addresses so-called “policy forums” for supporters – and he keeps a video crew close to post updates on social media and underline how little he looks or talks like a regular Republican candidate.Back in Britain, where he was an adviser to the Conservative prime minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012 and, later, a champion of Brexit, Hilton worked largely behind the scenes. He has been much more visible since as a Fox News host and contributor, and has honed a public persona that remains unabashedly rightwing but is also adept at presenting complex political viewpoints in easily relatable terms.So far, at least, Hilton’s British origins have proven more of an asset than a liability. (“He just sounds smarter because of his accent,” the moderator at a Republican gathering in Santa Barbara said. “It’s almost not fair.”) Even his bare scalp has contrasted favorably in some quarters with Newsom’s famously coiffed full head of hair.Hilton’s core message is simple: that Californians want good jobs, good homes and good schools for their kids. And the reason too many feel these goals are eluding them, he says, is because of “one-party rule and really bad ideas” from the Democrats.That diagnosis certainly has the potential to resonate widely, particularly among working-class voters who, according to Hilton, are ‘being completely screwed” by high living costs, high taxes and a public school system whose test scores in English and math consistently lag behind the national average.“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Hilton told the Santa Barbara crowd. “We don’t have to put up with this.”The question, though, is whether Hilton is the alternative voters are craving– and that’s where observers believe he may be on shakier ground, particularly since his strongest political connections are with the Trump end of the Republican party.View image in fullscreenEven Hilton’s more moderate ideas reflect a standard Republican playbook of cuts to taxes, public spending and business regulations – a platform Californians have rejected time and again. Dan Schnur, a former Republican campaign consultant who teaches political communications at Berkeley and the University of Southern California, thinks that behind the moderate facade Hilton is in fact “running pretty hard as a Maga candidate” on a range of issues from immigration to homelessness.Hilton has a slightly different theory of the case. He sees parallels between California in 2025 and Britain in the late 1970s, when it was known as the “sick man of Europe”, and envisions himself as a version of Margaret Thatcher providing a much-needed rightward course correction. He drew laughter and applause in Santa Barbara when he complained about California’s “nanny state bossy bureaucracy” – a Thatcher-inspired turn of phrase – and when he borrowed from a celebrated 1979 Conservative campaign slogan to say “California isn’t working”.Whether that message can work with independents and Democrats – constituencies he has to sway in large numbers to win – is far from clear. However much Hilton talks about “commonsense” solutions, his early champions include Charlie Kirk, who runs the Trump-supporting youth group Turning Point, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur turned politician who is old friends with Vice-President JD Vance and is now running for governor of Ohio – both of whom would suggest he has hitched his wagon to a more radical agenda.Even when forging connections in working-class, heavily Latino East Los Angeles, Hilton has relied on a local Trump activist, now in charge of the White House faith office, who in turn introduced him to Maga-friendly grassroots groups with names like the Conservative Comadres and Lexit (for Latinos Exiting the Democratic Party).The problem is not that Hilton’s new friends in East LA – many of them small business owners – do not reflect broader frustrations when they talk about working hard and having far too little to show for it. They almost certainly do.The problem is that Trump’s brand of working-class populism is toxic in California – vastly more so than the Democrats – and growing only more so as Trump’s chaotic second term in the White House unfolds.An LA Times opinion poll earlier this month showed 68% of Californians disapproved of the president’s job performance and thought the country was on the wrong track – numbers that many political analysts expect to worsen as the effects of Trump’s trade war kick in.Hilton himself makes light of this problem, arguing that if he runs an energetic, attractive enough campaign it will cut across the political spectrum and create its own momentum. “We’ve just learned that California is the fourth biggest economy in the world, and that’s great,” he said in an interview, “but it isn’t an economy that works for the people who live here … We are building a movement and a coalition for change.”Soon, though, he is likely to be pulled in different directions, because the logic of California’s primary system requires him to beat every other Republican before he can even think about the Democrats. And, in the age of Trump, there’s no competition between Republicans that does not require showing obeisance to the president. “The association’s going to be there, whether it results in a formal endorsement or not,” Schnur said. “Trump’s coat-tails are much longer in a primary than in a general election, which is good news for Hilton in the spring but a bigger obstacle in the fall.”Hilton’s stiffest Republican competitor so far, the Riverside county sheriff, Todd Bianco, has already run into trouble with the Trump faithful because he took a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters in the wake of the George Floyd killing in 2020. (Bianco, who generally talks and acts like a Trump-aligned Republican, insists he was tricked into kneeling when he thought he was being asked to pray – a version at variance with video footage from the time.)At the Santa Barbara event, Hilton looked almost bashful when asked what Trump thought of his decision to run and gave only the vaguest of answers. It is unlikely to be the last time he will field such a question, though, or risk alienating some part of his target electorate with his response.Hilton describes the task ahead as “possible, but difficult”. His chances most likely rest on another theory of his – that the rightward swing the country experienced last November was not a one-off, but a trend still gathering momentum. Hilton points to all the ways California was part of that national trend in 2024 – the 10 counties that flipped from blue to red, the rejection of liberal district attorneys and mayors up and down the state, the call for a stiffer approach to law and order in a key statewide ballot initiative – and concludes that “Californians voted Republican without realising it.”The last time Trump was president, though, the midterm elections produced a major swing in the other direction, in California and across the country, and most political analysts expect the same thing next year. If office-holders can justifiably point the finger at Washington – for shortages on the shelves, or higher prices incurred by tariffs, or immigrant laborers vanishing from key industries – voters are likely to be more forgiving of their leaders’ own shortcomings.“It would be much easier to make the case against the Democratic establishment if there weren’t a Republican president,” Schnur said. “An entire generation of Californians has come of voting age automatically dismissing the possibility of supporting a Republican candidate … That doesn’t mean a Republican can’t get elected governor, but it’s a very steep uphill fight.” More

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      US House Republicans propose fees on immigrants to fund Trump’s crackdown

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      Congressional Republicans are proposing an array of new fees on immigrants seeking to remain in the United States in a move that advocates warn will create insurmountable financial barriers.Legislation moving through the GOP-controlled House of Representatives could require immigrants to pay potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars to seek asylum, care for a minor in the government’s custody, or apply for humanitarian parole.Republican lawmakers have described the fees as necessary to offset the costs of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. But experts who work with immigrants say putting more economic pressure on people attempting to navigate US immigration laws could drain what little money they have, force them into exploitative work arrangements, or push them to leave the country altogether.“These are essentially a mask for targeted attacks towards some of the most vulnerable immigrants that we currently have going through our legal system right now: asylum seekers, children, survivors of crimes,” said Victoria Maqueda Feldman, director of legal programs at Ayuda, which assists low-income immigrants in Washington DC, Virginia and Maryland.Trump has made it a priority of his administration to not only rid the country of undocumented immigrants, but also to stop many new immigrants from entering the country. The GOP-controlled Congress is negotiating what he has dubbed “one big, beautiful bill”, a huge spending and taxation package that includes provisions to turn his hardline immigration proposals into reality.Republicans are limited in what they can accomplish in Congress due to the Senate’s filibuster, which the Democratic minority can use to block legislation it does not support. The GOP is seeking to enact Trump’s legislative agenda through the budget reconciliation procedure, under which bills can pass with simple majorities in both chambers but must affect only spending and revenues – like fees.“This system has left these agencies with funding shortfalls paid for by American taxpayers,” said Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House judiciary committee. “The fees included in this bill will … allow us to make the necessary investments in immigration enforcement in a fiscally responsible manner.”Heidi Altman, vice-president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said the new fees appeared targeted at the sorts of immigrants that the Trump administration has prioritized keeping out, such as asylum seekers, who arrived in large numbers during Joe Biden’s term.“It’s part of the administration’s assault on humanitarian protections for immigrant communities,” Altman said. “This is an entire new way of thinking about fees as a penalty, essentially, for an immigrant status.”Under the bill, immigrants would have to pay $1,000 to apply for asylum, $100 to keep an application active each year as it makes it through the overburdened immigration system, and $550 for a work permit. People requesting humanitarian parole to enter the United States would have to pay $1,000, and abused or neglected children who qualify for a program called Special Immigrant Juvenile Status would have to pay $500. Immigration cases can take a long time to resolve in court, but if a defendant asks a judge for a continuance, they would have to pay $100 each time.These fees do not exist under current law, and the bill specifies they cannot be waived in almost all circumstances.The new fees are targeted at people, often relatives, who seek to sponsor children who crossed the border without a parent or guardian and wind up in the government’s care. In order to take custody of an unaccompanied minor, adults would have to pay $3,500 to partially pay back the government for the minor’s care, along with another $5,000 to ensure the child attends their court hearings, though that money can be reimbursed if they do.“In some cases, that would be placing $3,500 between a mother or a father being able to get their child out of government custody and back into their own home,” Altman said.The fees were proposed as the Trump administration looks for novel ways to push immigrants out, including by offering them cash to leave. The bill gives a preview of what more will come, should the president receive the tens of billions of dollars he has requested from Congress.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore than $50bn is allocated in the legislation to construct a wall along the border with Mexico, as well as fortifications elsewhere. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will receive $45bn for detention facilities, $14bn for its deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire 10,000 new agents by 2029.For the low-income clients Ayuda serves, Feldman predicted that the fees “could amount to a complete barrier to forms of relief”.Some might be able to pull together the money, but “through means that could put them in greater danger. So, having to work under the table, putting them at risk for labor trafficking. They might have to take out loans that have very high interest rates, putting them at risk for having to pay off something that is very expensive.”The bill is a top priority of congressional Republicans, but its pathway to enactment is unclear. On Friday, rightwing Republican lawmakers blocked its progress through a key House committee, arguing it did not cut government spending deeply enough.Last month, when the judiciary committee met to approve the portion of the bill that included the fee increases, GOP lawmakers approved it quickly, with little signs of dissent. More

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      House Republicans block Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ in major setback

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      Rightwing lawmakers derailed Donald Trump’s signature legislation in the House of Representatives on Friday, preventing its passage through a key committee and throwing into question whether Republicans can coalesce around the massive bill.The party has spent weeks negotiating a measure dubbed the “one big, beautiful bill” that would extend tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term, fund mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and temporarily make good on his campaign promise to end the taxation of tips and overtime. To offset its costs, Republicans have proposed cuts to the federal safety net, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.At a House budget committee hearing on Friday intended to advance the measure one step closer to a floor vote, four Republican members of the far-right Freedom Caucus joined with the Democratic minority to block it from proceeding, arguing the legislation does not make deep enough cuts to federal spending and to programs they dislike.“This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does, with respect to deficits,” said Chip Roy, a Texas representative who opposed the bill alongside fellow Freedom Caucus members Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. Pennsylvania’s Lloyd Smucker initially voted to advance the bill, then changed his vote to no at the last minute, which he said was a procedural maneuver to allow the bill to be reconsidered in the future.The setback raises the stakes for the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who had set a goal of Memorial Day to get the legislation passed through the House and on to the Senate. Trump has said he would like to have the bill on his desk by the 4 July Independence Day holiday, and earlier on Friday attempted to pressure conservative holdouts.“Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!’” the president wrote on Truth Social. “We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party. STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!”Later on Friday, the budget committee announced it would reconvene on Sunday night to consider the bill, giving Johnson another couple of days to find agreement with the hardliners.Republicans are crafting the bill using the budget reconciliation procedure, which Senate Democrats cannot block with the filibuster. But the GOP is split over what to include and what to cut in the expensive legislation, which Congress’s non-partisan joint committee on taxation estimates will cost $3.7tn through 2034.Rightwing lawmakers want to see big reductions in government spending, which has climbed in recent years as Trump and Joe Biden responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and pursued their own economic policies.“We’re … committed to ensuring the final package is fiscally responsible, rightsizing government and putting our fiscal future back on track. Unfortunately, the current version falls short of these goals and fails to deliver the transformative change that Americans were promised,” Clyde said at the budget committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe called for deeper cuts to Medicaid, but many Republicans in the House and Senate have signaled nervousness with dramatic funding reductions to the program that provides healthcare to lower-income and disabled Americans. Others in the GOP dislike parts of the bill that would cut green tax credits created by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.And a small group of Republicans representing districts in blue states such as New York and New Jersey are demanding an increase in the deduction for state and local taxes, saying it will provide needed relief to their constituents. But including that would drive the cost of the bill even higher, risking the ire of fiscal conservatives.Johnson has little choice but to listen to all of these groups. The GOP can afford to lose no more than three votes in the chamber, a historically small margin that has made passing legislation a tightrope walk. More