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      Trump administration’s budget cuts endanger Meals on Wheels: ‘Life and death implications’

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      The Trump administration’s slashes to the Department of Health and Human Services is threatening Meals on Wheels, the popular program dedicated to combatting senior hunger and isolation. Despite decades of bipartisan support, Meals on Wheels now faces attacks from Republicans whose budget blueprint paves the way for deep cuts to nutrition and other social safety-net programs as a way to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.It’s a move anti-hunger advocates and policy experts warn could have disastrous ramifications for the millions of older Americans who rely on the program to eat each day.“It’s not hyperbolic to say that we’re going to be leaving people hungry and that this literally has life and death implications,” said Nicole Jorwic, the chief of advocacy and campaigns at Caring Across Generations, a non-profit that advocates for ageing Americans, disabled people and their caregivers. “This is not just about a nice-to-have program. These programs are necessities in the lives of seniors all over this country.”While it is still unknown exactly what will be slashed, the blueprint sets the stage for the potential elimination of the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), a key source of funding for local Meals on Wheels programs in 37 states, and serious cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) and Medicaid, which would increase food insecurity and hardship and steeply increase demand for Meals on Wheels services. The entire staff who oversaw SSBG have already been fired, according to reports.If Congress takes away SSBG funding and weakens other programs, seniors who rely on in-home deliveries or meals in community and senior centers to survive would receive less help as Meals on Wheels community providers would be forced to reduce services, add people to waitlists or turn seniors facing hunger away altogether. Some program operators who are already making tough choices about who to serve due to strained budgets and rising need have said it feels as though they are “playing God”.“We’re talking about lives here so it’s worrisome to me,” said Ellie Hollander, the president and CEO of Meals on Wheels America. “Some of our programs are already operating on razor-thin budgets and are pulling from their reserves. [If funding goes away], it could result in some programs having to close their doors.”In the US one in four Americans is over the age of 60 and nearly 13 million seniors are threatened by or experience hunger. Meals on Wheels America, a network of 5,000 community-based programs that feeds more than 2 million older Americans each year, has been a successful public-private partnership for more than 50 years. The Urban Institute estimates that the number of seniors in the US will more than double over the next 40 years.The Older Americans Act (OAA) nutrition program, which supports the health and wellbeing of seniors through nutrition services, is the network’s primary source of federal funding, covering 37% of what it takes to serve more than 250m meals each year. The exact mix of local, state, federal and private funding of Meals on Wheels’ thousands of on-the-ground community programs varies from provider to provider.Under the orders of the Elon Musk-led unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 20,000 people at HHS have lost their jobs in recent weeks, including at least 40% of the staff at the Administration for Community Living, which coordinates federal policy on ageing and disability. Since many of those staffers helped fulfill critical functions to serving older Americans through the OAA, some Meals on Wheels programs are worried about funding disbursements, reporting data and the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise.HHS has said it will reorganize the ACL into other HHS agencies, although how that would happen is unclear. The co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, composed of 62 member organizations that focus in part on ageing and disability, said in a recent statement: “This disruptive change threatens to increase rates of institutionalization, homelessness and long-lasting economic hardships.”Since experiencing multiple strokes that left her cognitively impaired and at risk for falls, Dierdre Mayes has relied on Meals on Wheels Yolo County to deliver meals that are the 64-year-old’s primary source of nutrition. “I’m really thriving off of the meals I get,” said Mayes, a Woodland, California, resident who also receives $20 a month in food stamps, which she uses to purchase cases of water. “The best part about it is I don’t have to go anywhere to get them.” For Mayes and other homebound older Americans, the program is a lifeline.The uncertainty around Meals on Wheels’ future is causing stress for seniors who are worried about how federal cuts, layoffs and tariffs will impact their daily deliveries. The non-profit FeedMore WNY, which serves homebound older adults in New York’s Erie and Niagara counties, said they’ve been hearing from fearful older clients as word of other recent cuts circulated in the news.Catherine Shick, the public relations manager for FeedMore WNY, said they served 4,775 unique Meals on Wheels clients last year and that demand for their feeding programs increased by 16% from 2023 to 2024, a trend they expect to continue. “Any cut to any funding has a direct impact on the individuals who rely on us for food assistance and any cuts are coming at a time when we know that food insecurity is on the rise,” she said. “We need the continued support of all levels of government, as well as the community, to be able to fulfill our mission.”In addition to delivering healthy, nutritious food, Meals on Wheels drivers, who are primarily volunteers, provide a host of other valuable services: they can look for signs of cognitive or other health changes. They can also address safety hazards in the home or provide pet support services, as well as offer crucial social connections since drivers are often the only person a senior may see in a given day or week.Deliveries have been shown to help keep seniors healthy and in their own homes and communities and out of costly institutional settings. Republicans in the House and Senate have said their goal is to reduce federal spending, but experts say cutting programs that help fund organizations such as Meals on Wheels would instead increase federal spending for healthcare and long-term care expenses for older Americans.“If people can’t stay in their own homes, they’re going to be ‘high flyers’ in hospitals and admitted prematurely into nursing homes,” said Hollander, “all of which cost taxpayers billions of dollars annually versus providing Meals on Wheels for one year to a senior for the same cost of being in the hospital for one day or 10 days in a nursing home.”Experts agree that even before the cuts, Meals on Wheels has been underfunded. Advocates and researchers say OAA hasn’t kept up with the rapid growth of the senior population, rising food costs or inflation. One in three local programs already have waiting lists with many programs already feeling stretched to their limits. For more than 60% of Meals on Wheels providers across the country, federal funding represents half or more of their total revenue, underscoring the serious damage that could be done if cuts or policy changes are made in any capacity.“It feels like a continuous slew of attacks on the programs that seniors rely on to be safe, independent and healthy in their own homes,” said Jorwic of Caring Across Generations. “Everything from cuts to Meals on Wheels to cuts to Medicaid, all these things that are being proposed and actively worked on being implemented, are a real threat to the security of aging Americans.” More

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      ‘Maga Catholics’ are gaining ground in the US. Now their sight is set on the Vatican

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      Once the papal conclave starts, the cardinals choosing Pope Francis’s successor will be strictly shut off from the world until a new pope is named. But the coming days before the conclave begins on 7 May will see competing factions of Catholics, including many laypeople, campaigning in the Vatican and the US to influence the church’s future – none with more urgency than those discontented with Francis’s liberal reign.American Catholics will fight to play a central role. Soon after the news of Francis’s death reached faithful the world over, the American counter-revolution mobilized, Vatican watchers say. Red-eyes to Rome were booked. Long-distance phone calls were made. Various cardinals likely received sudden dinner invitations.No one involved calls it “lobbying” – that would be untoward, and it’s “subtler than what you see in DC”, Philip Lawler, a conservative Catholic writer and the author of a book critical of Francis, said. “But representatives of all points of view, from across the spectrum, will be doing their best to ensure that the cardinals understand their concerns.”“I’m going to Rome on Saturday, and I’m late to the game,” Francis X Maier, a Catholic writer and the former adviser to Archbishop Charles Chaput, said last week. “There are all sorts of people already meeting with bishops and cardinals and trying to create the environment that they want.”For conservative, traditionalist or self-described “orthodox” Catholics, fresh from 12 uneasy years under Francis, this interregnum will be the last chance in a long time to try to reset a church that they believe has drifted too far left. To some, that means pushing for a church that clearly affirms polarizing but longtime Catholic teachings on sexuality, marriage and abortion. Others, many of them associated with the priorities of Donald Trump and his supporters, would go further, and press for a church that is explicitly, politically rightwing – or at least less hostile to the Maga movement’s stances on immigration, social welfare and the environment.Steve Bannon, perhaps the most public and inflammatory voice of rightwing Catholic discontent, has said he intends to organize a “show of force of traditionalists” with confrontational “wall-to-wall” media coverage. Most politicking, however, will take the form of quieter wheeling and dealing.Conservative Catholics have their papal draft picks – Raymond Burke, Gerhard Müller, Péter Erdő and Robert Sarah are often mentioned – though observers are skeptical that the next pope will break Francis’s mold, in part because he appointed most of the cardinals who will choose his successor. Yet conservative Catholic Americans are unusually influential and wealthy, and the Vatican needs “American money and American influence”, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of religious studies at Villanova University.And while the conservative faction is a minority, it “shouldn’t be dismissed. For them, this conclave is just one battle in a war that lasts decades.”“Do I have time to talk to the Guardian about the fake pope?” Steve Bannon asked when I reached out for an interview. “Of course I do. Always.”For years, Bannon – Trump’s former adviser and a self-described traditionalist Catholic, though he has been divorced three times – has used his massively popular political podcast, War Room, to wage blistering attacks on the Francis pontificate. He has charged the pope with being a Marxist subversive, a globalist anti-American, even illegitimate.View image in fullscreenMuch of conservatives’ anger centers on Francis’s record of pronouncements that seemed to relax or render ambiguous Catholic social doctrines. In 2013, when a reporter asked Francis if there were gay men in the Vatican, he famously remarked: “Who am I to judge?”“‘Who am I to judge?’” Bannon repeated, incredulous. “Yo, dude, you’re the pope. That’s kind of the gig. You’re supposed to be judgmental. This ‘empathy’ is all phony. He brought the therapeutic 20th century into the church. The church is not supposed to be therapeutic.”Devout Catholics have historically been difficult to place in the American political binary. They were often anti-abortion but in favor of immigration and a social safety net. “I believe all the church teaches,” Leah Libresco Sargeant, the author of two books on her Catholic faith, told me. “I try to live up to it. And obviously that makes me a poor fit for either political party.”Still, working-class Catholics were a traditional base of 20th-century Democratic party support, and activist Catholic clergy marched in protests for Black civil rights and against the Vietnam war. Yet the legalization of abortion drove some prominent Catholics who had previously supported leftwing causes to the conservative movement.While the stereotypical Christian conservative of popular imagination may be a Bible-thumping southern Protestant, Catholics have for years dominated the intellectual leadership of the American right. Five of the US supreme court’s six right-leaning justices are Catholic, despite the fact that Catholics account for only about a fifth of the US population. JD Vance – the vice-president who earlier this year sparked a feud of sorts with the Vatican about immigration and compassion and also met briefly with Francis shortly before his death – converted to Catholicism in 2019.Although borderline sacrilege by normal Catholic standards, Bannon’s fulminations against Francis have found a ready audience among a demographic that the New York Post has coined “Maga Catholics”: Catholic Americans who are militantly conservative, both theologically and politically, and see no tension.Francis did a favor to a resurgent Catholic right, Bannon argues: “His reign of terror has been nothing short of disastrous. And that’s why you’re having a massive reaction, particularly in North America, where he rejuvenated the traditional church here.”View image in fullscreenGregory A Smith, who studies religious demography at Pew Research Center, noted that polling shows that most American Catholics – including most Catholic Republicans – viewed Pope Francis favorably throughout his pontificate. Yet starting around 2018, an ideological gap began to open, with Catholic Republicans reporting less favorable views of Francis than Catholic Democrats.Pointedly referring to Francis mostly by his secular, pre-papal surname, Bergoglio, Bannon outlined numerous grievances.Among his arguments: that the pope was hostile to the old-fashioned Latin mass liturgy beloved by some American Catholics, did not hold alleged abusers in the clergy fully accountable, muddled longstanding doctrines about sexuality and marriage, undermined US sovereignty by celebrating mass immigration, and betrayed persecuted Christians abroad by allowing the Chinese communist government control over the church there.“He’ll burn in hell just for that,” Bannon said of the agreement with China. He admitted that his stance was probably not representative of the average person in the pew.Yet many of these complaints, in more respectful form, are common to the orthodox Catholics who are the church’s most engaged, influential and financially generous constituency.While disagreeing with some of the conservative characterizations of the state of the church, Faggioli said that American detractors of Pope Francis have momentum, to some extent, on their side. American priests starting their vocations today are on average more conservative, not less, than their older peers, he noted.Latin masses are popular where they are offered. And the past couple years have seen a surprise influx of young adults converting or reverting to Catholicism, many of whom seem to want “smells and bells” and moral certitude, rather than the casual Catholicism they associate with their parents’ generation, or the rainbow flag-adorned progressivism of many mainline Protestant churches.“The living and vibrant parts of the US church are not those who were most enthusiastic about the Francis pontificate, but those who have embraced the ‘all-in’ Catholicism of John Paul II and Benedict XVI,” George Weigel, a neoconservative Catholic writer, told me by email as he traveled to Rome. “In the main,” he argued, “Francis’s most vocal supporters were the ageing and shrinking parts of the American church.”He contrasted the Anglican church. “[A] lot of the most engaged Catholics in the United States don’t think of the Church of England as a very impressive model of Christian vitality, and they rightly attribute its decline to its embracing a lot of contemporary culture, rather than working to convert that culture.”His views echo outside the US, as well. Recent data suggests that Catholics may soon outnumber Anglicans in Britain for the first time since the 16th-century Reformation, with the change driven in large part by gen-Z churchgoers, even as British society as a whole continues to become more secular.View image in fullscreenNot all conservative or orthodox Catholics were unhappy with Francis.In the magazine First Things, the conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari, who converted to Catholicism in 2016, argued recently that the substance of Francis’s preaching was often “far more ‘trad’ than critics appreciated”. Yet he was dogged by “the emergence of a veritable anti-Francis cottage industry” that worked to “prime a subset of Catholics against the pope”.In an email, he told me: “I personally loved the late Holy Father, and generally tried to relate to the Vatican as a medieval peasant might: pay, pray and obey.”Catholics For Catholics is one of the political faces of a newly militant Catholic right. In March, the organization hosted a prayer event at Mar-a-Lago for the second year in a row. The organization also worked to mobilize Catholic swing-state voters for the Republican party last fall, with a particular focus on millions of “low-propensity” Catholics who don’t regularly vote.John Yep co-founded Catholics For Catholics two and a half years ago, he told me, to “advocate for Catholics in the public square, and to just reaffirm our beliefs and present them to our politicians so that they are aware of them and respect who we stand for and what we believe”.The organization is well to the right of the average Catholic, by most metrics, and perhaps even to the right of the average conservative Catholic: it published a book by Bishop Joseph Strickland, a Texas clergyman who was removed from office in 2023 after becoming one of Francis’s fiercest critics.Faggioli, the Villanova professor, believes that traditionalists overreacted to Francis. “Conservative Catholics got used to a certain kind of papacy and a sympathy for their causes during the 35 years of John Paul II and Pope Benedict, and some of them thought that history was over,” he said.But Yep’s political instincts about Catholics as a voting bloc may be apt. According to an AP analysis, Trump won 54% of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, a four-point improvement on 2020, when he and Biden received roughly equal shares of the Catholic vote. And although white Catholics support Trump at higher rates than Latino Catholics, Trump also benefited from a swing in the Latino Catholic vote.Bannon believes that a rupture between traditionalist North American Catholics and the larger church is coming – and even welcomes it. Observers are skeptical of that idea, in part because most Catholics, regardless of their ideological stripe, would find the prospect of a 21st-century schism with the mother church in Rome unthinkable. But either way there seems to be a growing gap between a Catholic community in the US that is becoming more conservative and a church leadership in Rome that is open to new ideas.Faggioli believes that “in some sense, this church is already in a situation of soft schism”. But he doesn’t think a full-blown schism is in the cards.“The real goal of [most] neo-traditionalist voices is not to break away and make their own small church,” he said. “Their project is to win back the entire Catholic church, in the long term, to what they think is real Catholicism.” More

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      Hakeem Jeffries and Cory Booker livestream sit-in against GOP funding plan

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      House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and New Jersey senator Cory Booker were holding a sit-in protest and discussion on Sunday on the steps of the US Capitol in opposition to Republicans’ proposed budget plan.Billed as an “Urgent Conversation with the American People”, the livestreamed discussion comes before Congress’s return to session on Monday, where Democrats hope to stall Republicans’ economic legislative agenda. Throughout the day, they were joined by other Democratic lawmakers, including the senator Raphael Warnock, who spoke as the sit-in passed the 10-hour mark.The proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year, the New York Times reported on Friday, includes cuts to programs that support childcare, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly.“Republican leaders have made clear their intention to use the coming weeks to advance a reckless budget scheme to President Trump’s desk that seeks to gut Medicaid, food assistance and basic needs programs that help people, all to give tax breaks to billionaires,” Booker and Jeffries aid in a statement.“Given what’s at stake, these could be some of the most consequential weeks for seniors, kids and families in generations,” they added.Booker wrote separately on X: “This is a moral moment in America. Sitting on the Capitol steps with Leader Hakeem Jeffries this morning to discuss what’s at stake with Trump’s budget and affirm the need for action to protect Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs.”Booker and Jeffries started their sit-in around 6am and were joined by lawmakers including Democratic senators Chris Coons and Angela Alsobrooks and representatives Gil Cisneros and Gabe Amo, among others.Reverend Dr William J Barber II and the National Education Association president, Becky Pringle, also joined. Pringle said the Trump administration was perpetuating “the greatest assault on public education that we’ve ever seen in this country”.Democrats and independents have added a new degree of physicality to their opposition to the Trump agenda. Earlier this month, Booker set a new record for the chamber’s longest speech when he held the floor, without a bathroom break, for more than 25 hours.Booker said he was doing so with the “intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States senate for as long as I am physically able” in order to protest the actions of Trump and his administration.The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an independent, and the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been on a “Fighting Oligarchy” nationwide tour of the US to protest the “oligarchs and corporate interests that have so much power and influence in this country”.On Sunday, Sanders, who has accused Democrats of significantly ignoring working-class priorities, said that the party does not have “a vision for the future”.“You have Democrats appropriately, and I’m working with them, talking about Trump’s movement toward authoritarianism, vigorously opposing the so-called reconciliation bill to give over a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1% and make massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition and housing, opposing what Musk is doing to dismember the Social Security Administration and the Veterans Administration, making it hard for our veterans to get decent healthcare or benefits on time,” Sanders told NBC’s Meet the Press.Throughout Sunday’s livestreamed sit-in, groups of curious passersby also found themselves sitting on the Capitol steps listening and weighing in on the discussion. More

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      Tyrants like Trump always fall – and we can already predict how he will be dethroned | Simon Tisdall

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      Tyrants come to a sticky end, or so history suggests. Richard III and Coriolanus made bloody exits. More recently, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows, Slobodan Milosevic went to jail, Bashar al-Assad went into exile. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was run to ground in a sewer. Tyranny, from the Greek túrannos (“absolute ruler”), is typically fuelled by hubris and leads ineluctably to nemesis. Tyrants are for toppling. Their downfall is a saving grace.Tyranny, in its many forms, is back in vogue, and everyone knows who’s to blame. To be fair, to suggest similarities between the aforementioned abominable individuals and Donald Trump would be utterly wrong. In key respects, he’s worse. Measured by willingness and capacity to harm the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, wreak global economic mayhem and threaten nuclear annihilation, Trump is uniquely dangerous – and ever more so by the day.In any notional league of tyranny, Trump tops the table, with Russia’s Vladimir Putin following closely in his rear. If these two narcissists formed a partnership (a scary but not wholly improbable thought), it could be called Monsters R US. Across a disordered globe, wannabe “strongmen” queue to join their club.Yet like every tyrant, old and new, Trump must fall. How may nemesis be peacefully and swiftly attained? As he marks 100 days back in power next week, such questions gain urgency. Can the 47th president’s premeditated swinging of a wrecking ball at US democracy, laws, values and dreams be halted? How may what remains of the international rules-based system be salvaged? Who or what will dethrone him?Policy failures and personal misconduct do not usually collapse a presidency. The US constitution is inflexible: incompetence is protected; cupidity has a fixed term. Trump is in power until 2029 unless impeached – third time lucky? – for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, or else deemed unfit under section 4 of the 25th amendment. With JD Vance, his yes-man Veep, playing Oval Office bouncer and Congress awash with Maga converts, such procedural defenestration appears unlikely.Public backing is certainly slipping. Last week’s nationwide demonstrations, worries about inflation and savings, and anger over federal funding cuts, cultural war-making and mass firings reflect deepening alarm about threats to an entire way of life. Polls show Trump losing the middle-of-the-roaders whose votes ended the Biden interregnum. Yet despite a royal resemblance to another “tyrant”, King George III, a second American revolution is a long way off.Many look to the courts for rescue. Judges continue to challenge Trump’s diktats on deportations and other issues. It was a New York jury that convicted Trump of 34 felonies last year, but sadly failed to jail him. His businesses are repeatedly accused of fraud. Now it is suggested the supreme court-tested “major questions doctrine” could bring him to heel. This requires the government to demonstrate a “clear congressional authorisation” when it makes decisions of great “economic and political significance”, explained US law professor Aaron Tang. It’s restraint of sorts.In the land of Watergate, will the media bring the tyrant low? It’s a fond hope. Major news organisations, undercut by social media and tsunamis of official lies, are derided from on high as liberal purveyors of “fake news”. They face costly legal challenges and outright bans, as in Trump’s malicious “Gulf of America” vendetta with Associated Press. Basic concepts of objective reporting are torched as the White House favours rightwing, pro-Trump outlets. The free press, perforce, is not so much cowed as cautious.This fight has moral and ethical aspects, too – and, given this is the US, prayer is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who would slay evil-doers. Of the seven deadly sins – vainglory or pride, greed or covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth – Trump is comprehensively, mortally guilty. In Isaiah (13,11), the Lord gives fair warning: “I will put an end to the pride of the arrogant and humiliate the insolence of tyrants.” God knows, maybe he’ll listen. Miracles do happen.Of all the tools in the tyrant-toppling toolbox, none are so potentially decisive as those supplied by Trump’s own stupidity. Most people understand how worthless a surrender monkey “peace deal” is that rewards Putin and betrays Ukraine. Does Trump seriously believe his support for mass murder in Gaza, threats to attack Iran and reckless bombing of Yemen will end the Middle East conflict and win him a Nobel peace prize?By almost every measure, Trump’s chaotic global tariff war is hurting American consumers, damaging businesses and reducing US influence. It’s a boon to China and an attack on longtime allies and trading partners such as Britain. Trump’s big tech boosters know this to be so, as do many Republicans. But they dare not speak truth to power.And then there’s his greed – the blatant, shameless money-grubbing that has already brought accusations of insider trading, oligarchic kleptocracy, and myriad conflicts of interest unpoliced by the 17 government oversight watchdogs Trump capriciously fired. His relatives and businesses are again pursuing foreign sweetheart deals. Corruption on this scale cannot pass unchallenged indefinitely. Avarice alone may be Trump’s undoing.All this points to one conclusion: as a tyrant, let alone as president, Trump is actually pretty useless – and as his failures, frustrations and fantasies multiply, he will grow ever more dangerously unstable. Trump’s biggest enemy is Trump. Those who would save the US and themselves – at home and abroad – must employ all democratic means to contain, deter, defang and depose him. But right now, the best, brightest hope is that, drowning in hubris, Trump will destroy himself.

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump mega-donor’s paper savages his pardon of Las Vegas Republican

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      A Nevada newspaper owned by a Donald Trump mega-donor has savaged the US president’s decision to pardon a Republican councilwoman who was convicted of using donations intended to fund a statue of a police officer to pay for cosmetic surgery.The Las Vegas Review-Journal, owned by the billionaire Miriam Adelson, described the decision as a “debasement of presidential pardon power” in a scathing editorial published after Trump granted clemency to Michele Fiore, a former Las Vegas councilwoman and Nevada state lawmaker.Fiore was convicted of fraud last year. Federal prosecutors said at trial that she had raised more than $70,000 for the statue of a Las Vegas police officer who was fatally shot in 2014 in the line of duty, but had instead spent it on cosmetic surgery, rent and her daughter’s wedding.Adelson, who is worth $35bn, spent $100m on re-electing Trump in 2024, but apparently decided not to intervene when the Review-Journal, Nevada’s largest newspaper, attacked him on Friday.The newspaper’s editorial criticized Trump’s pardon of Fiore, who was due to be sentenced next month, in no uncertain terms.“The pardon, which was brief and contained no explanation, is an affront to the federal jury that heard her case and sends precisely the wrong message to public officials tempted to enrich themselves through their sinecures,” the Review-Journal wrote.“In addition, pardons are typically reserved for those who were wrongly convicted or the victim of some other miscarriage of justice. There is no evidence that either occurred in this case. Instead, it’s difficult to argue that political considerations weren’t the primary motivation for granting relief to Ms Fiore.”Trump quietly pardoned Fiore, a firm supporter of his, on Wednesday, and the move only came to light after Fiore wrote about the clemency in a Facebook post. The White House confirmed the pardon, but did not elaborate further.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn January, Trump was criticized after he issued “full, complete and unconditional” presidential pardons to about 1,500 people who were involved in the January 6 attack on Congress, including some convicted of violent acts. More

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      Americans, including Republicans, losing faith in Trump, new polls reveal

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      Americans, including some Republicans, are losing faith in Donald Trump across a range of key issues, according to polling released this week. One survey found a majority describing the president’s second stint in the White House so far as “scary”.Along with poor ratings on the economy and Trump’s immigration policy, a survey released on Saturday found that only 24% of Americans believe Trump has focussed on the right priorities as president.That poll comes as Trump’s popularity is historically low for a leader this early in a term. More than half of voters disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, and majorities oppose his tariff policies and slashing of the federal workforce.The scathing reviews come as Trump next week marks 100 days of his second stint office, and suggest Americans are already experiencing fatigue after a period that has seen global financial market nosedives and chilling deportations, including of documented people.A poll by the Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research published this weekend, found that even Republicans are not overwhelmingly convinced that Trump’s attention has been in the right place.A narrow majority, 54%, of Republicans surveyed said that Trump is focussed on the “right priorities”, while the president’s numbers with crucial independent voters are much weaker. Just 9% of independents said that the president is focussed on the right priorities – with 42% believing Trump is paying attention to the wrong issues.About four in 10 people in the survey approve of how Trump is handling the presidency overall, and only about 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s approach to foreign policy, trade negotiations and the economy.Meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena College poll of registered voters on Friday found that Trump’s approval rating is 42%, and just 29% among independent voters. More than half of voters said Trump is “exceeding the powers available to him”, and 59% of respondents said the president’s second term has been “scary”.While Republican leaders typically receive strong scores on economic issues, Americans have been underwhelmed by Trump’s performance. The Times survey found that only 43% of voters approve of how Trump is handling the economy – a stark turnaround from a Times poll in April 2024, which found that 64% approved of Trump’s economy in his first term.Half of voters disapproved of Trump’s trade policies with other countries, and 61% said a president should not have the authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval, while the Times reported that 63% – including 40% of Republicans – said “a president should not be able to deport legal immigrants who have protested Israel”.Further on immigration, a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll on Friday found that 53% of Americans now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration matters, while 46% approve. In February the majority was the other way, with half of those surveyed approving of Trump’s approach on that issue.The Post reported that as support has drained away on this topic, at this point 90% of Democrats, 56% of independents and 11% of Republicans dislike the way Trump is dealing with immigration.The poor reviews have dogged Trump all week. An Associated Press poll on Thursday found that about half of US adults say that Trump’s trade policies will increase prices “a lot” and another three in 10 think prices could go up “somewhat”, and half of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility of the US economy going into a recession in the next few months.Polling conducted by the Trump-friendly Fox News has brought little respite. A survey published on Wednesday found that just 38% of Americans approve of Trump on the economy, with 56% disapproving.The Fox News poll found that 58% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s performance, and 59% disapproved on inflation. Just three in 10 Americans said they believed Trump’s policies were helping the economy, and only four in 10 said Trump’s policies will help the country.Among generation Z, generally regarded as those born between 1995 and 2012, a staggering 69% told pollsters for an NBC Stay Tuned survey that they don’t approve of Trump’s handling of the economy and the cost of living. Gen Z participants complained of struggling to even pay the rent in some places, let alone buy a home, and they worry about inflation.A minority of gen Z people polled thought the country would be stronger if more people lived by traditional binary gender roles and more than 90% of those polled said they believed foreign students with visas or green cards should have the same due process protections as US citizens. This comes amid the Trump administration declaring there are only two genders, male and female, and arresting and detaining some pro-Palestinian student activists without due process. More

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      Republican unity to be tested in talks over Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

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      Donald Trump has made a simple request of Congress’s Republican leaders: deliver “one big, beautiful bill” that will turn his campaign promises into reality. By all indications, there will be little beautiful about the negotiations to come when Congress returns to session on Monday.The bill envisioned by the president will extend tax cuts enacted during his first term, fund more border defenses and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and potentially include the president’s vow to end the taxation of tips, overtime and social security payments. To pay for it, the GOP is eyeing dramatic reductions in government spending, and has targeted social safety net programs relied on by tens of millions of Americans.But even with the cuts, experts say this could be one of the steepest increases to the federal deficit in recent US history.That prospect has tested the resolve of Congress’s Republican majorities, which are relatively small – three seats in the Senate and House of Representatives each. While many lawmakers insist that government spending must be reined in to manage the United State’s budget deficit at a time of high borrowing costs, small groups of lawmakers have already registered their opposition to dismantling programs they say help their constituents.Earlier this month Republicans muscled through the budget framework for the bill, an important step that outlines how much they will spend and cut, and allows them to circumvent Democratic opposition in the Senate. But though party leaders described it as a sign of unity, experts say the plan instead illustrated just how divided the GOP is. The resolution gives the House and Senate separate targets for savings and expenditures – differences that would usually be resolved before passage.“The budget resolution that they adopted is unique, I would say, somewhat unprecedented,” said Bill Hoagland, a former top budget adviser to Republican senators who is now a senior vice-president at the Bipartisan Policy Center thinktank.“What they’ve done here is keep the ball moving by kicking the can further down the road and leaving unsettled a number of differences, particularly on the spending side.”Just how riven the party is will become clear in the weeks to come, after Congress returns and Republicans set to work crafting the bill amid an economy made newly precarious by Trump’s on-again, off-again approach to tariff policy. Party leaders have cast the bill as a way to make good on Trump’s promise of a “golden age” in American, fueled by smaller, deregulated government.“Our aim is to deliver on our promises in this big, beautiful bill regarding things like border security, restoring peace through strength, and American energy dominance and regulatory reform, to get the economy really humming again,” House speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this month.The speaker and his Senate counterpart, majority leader John Thune, say they intend for the bill to reduce government spending by at least $1.5tn, and make permanent the tax cuts that analyses found mostly benefited the rich after their enactment in 2017.But the budget framework’s instructions to the Senate target a mere $4bn in spending cuts, while assuming the tax cuts are “current policy” and therefore cost nothing, to the chagrin of many economists. The House plan acknowledges that extending the tax cuts will cost trillions of dollars, and proposes dramatic funding cuts elsewhere.Its instructions indicate that Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor and disabled Americans, could lose around $800b in funding, which would be its largest cut in history. Republicans have additionally signaled a willingness to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Snap, while the climate-change fighting Inflation Reduction Act passed under Joe Biden could be slashed.Both chambers also intend to couple the bill with an increase in the US government’s debt limit. The congressional budget office estimates the limit will be hit in August or September, after which the government will be unable to borrow to pay its obligations, potentially sparking a financial crisis.The resulting bill could cost as much as $5.8tn for the next 10 years, a huge amount that Maya MacGuineas, the president of the spending wary Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, described as “the largest deficit increase in history” and “an absolute disgrace”.So big is the spending plan that Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Republican George W Bush, warned that extending the tax cuts alone would likely crowd out the other policies Trump campaigned on, such as ending the taxation on tips and other income.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a very unambitious piece of tax legislation, from an economic policy point of view. It doesn’t really do much and, and I don’t think there’s any real will collectively to do big spending cuts, and they’ve taken off limits the places where that you really do need to reform,” Holtz-Eakin said, referring to social security and Medicare. Both programs are big drivers of the budget deficit, but Trump and the Republicans say they oppose cutting them.Finding an agreement on the bill is expected to be a major lift for Republican leaders in Congress, particularly since the tiny House majority could empower small groups of lawmakers to hold up the bill.Already, a dozen Republicans have publicly said they will not support legislation that reduces Medicaid coverage “for vulnerable populations” and 21 others have argued against repealing clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, are expected to stand against any bill that does not sufficiently reduce spending.“When you want to cut $1.5tn, you’re going to get to a lot of programs that people rely on. And when that happens, they’re going to start to hear about it,” Joe Morelle, the No 2 Democrat on the spending-focused House appropriations committee, told the Guardian.He predicted that no Democrats would vote for the forthcoming bill, meaning that Johnson and Thune will be left to get it through their chambers with their party’s votes alone.Trump has attempted to corral Congress by threatening to support challengers to Republicans who don’t vote his way. But with the GOP taking aim at safety net programs popular in their own districts, Morelle said many lawmakers will have to weigh facing the president’s wrath against losing re-election.“Who do they fear more? The retribution of an angry president, or do they fear the retribution of voters who are going to say, sorry, without healthcare, I’m not voting for you?” Morelle said. More

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      The Republican anti-tax coalition is beginning to disintegrate | David Sirota, Arjun Singh, Ariella Markowitz and Natalie Bettendorf

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      “I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice – I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” the rightwing impresario Bari Weiss told a Federalist Society gathering in 2023. “And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”The assembled conservatives guffawed at hearing the quiet part out loud: in this case, the admission that tax cuts for the rich have been the glue holding the US conservative movement together.And yet, less than two years after Weiss’s speech, the epoxy seems to be less sticky.In recent weeks, polls have shown Republican voters becoming far more skeptical of across-the-board tax reduction proposals. Reflecting that shift, GOP lawmakers are now trial-ballooning a proposal to increase some taxes on the wealthy. Some Maga voices are attempting to articulate a Republican-leaning, tax-cut version of Democrats’ traditional redistributionist rhetoric, arguing that higher taxes on millionaires should finance bigger tax cuts for the working class.All of this has the Washington swamp’s old-guard Republicans in a panic; one longtime anti-tax leader insisted that “there are traitors inside the Trump White House,” and another declared: “This is a potential crisis in the party – it sounds like Bernie Sanders economics.”So what happened? Why is the anti-tax argument losing its unifying power among Republicans?As the Lever’s new investigative audio series Tax Revolt details, the answer may lie in that movement’s key revelation a half-century ago.The Santa Claus theory of tax cutsIn the mid-1970s, the Republican party was adrift, demoralized and divided amid both the post-Watergate backlash and the Republican president Gerald Ford’s attempt to raise taxes in pursuit of halting inflation and plugging federal budget holes. A young journalist named Jude Wanniski had an epiphany when at a lunch meeting, he watched the economist Arthur Laffer draw a curve on a napkin to argue to the Ford staffers Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld that cutting taxes could raise companies’ revenues.Two years later, Wanniski penned a grand unifying “Santa Claus Theory”, arguing that Republicans had “continued to play Scrooge, carping against increased spending without ever offering the obvious alternative”: tax reduction.He concluded: “Republicans, traditionally the party of income growth, should be the Santa Claus of tax reduction,” offering it as a supposed gift to Americans – and understand that “the first rule of successful politics is Never Shoot Santa Claus.”It was a revelation for a new generation of conservatives seeking to create a sunnier, more optimistic image for the GOP in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s cranky campaign and Richard Nixon’s downfall. Younger, more telegenic Republican leaders such as Representative Jack Kemp passed the essay around to colleagues, urging them to reimagine tax cuts not solely as a means to demonize government, but also as a way to court the working class with promises of life-bettering benefits.The dual message of so-called “supply-side economics” soon found its Santa Claus in the anti-tax governor turned anti-tax president Ronald Reagan.“As government’s hunger for ever more revenues expanded, families saw taxes cut deeper and deeper into their paychecks,” Reagan said before signing federal legislation to cut the top marginal tax rate. “This tax bill is less a reform than a revolution. Millions of working poor will be dropped from the tax rolls altogether, and families will get a long-overdue break with lower rates.”High-income tax cuts became the Republican party’s economic policy priority – and depicting such gifts to the wealthy as a boon to the working class became the GOP’s political strategy. Indeed, Reagan, George W Bush and Donald Trump each championed tax cut legislation that delivered disproportionate benefits to the rich, and fueled an explosion of economic inequality – all while presenting their agenda as fight-for-the-little-guy populism.“I promised we would pass a massive tax cut for the everyday, working American families who are the backbone and the heartbeat of our country,” Trump said on the eve of signing his $1.9tn tax cut bill in 2017. “We’re just days away [from] keeping that promise and delivering a truly amazing victory for American families. We want to give you, the American people, a giant tax cut for Christmas.”This sales pitch became ubiquitous, and most political prognosticators assumed it would always be effective. But survey data suggests that most Americans have come to realize that while Tax Cut Santa Claus has been stashing big gifts under billionaires’ Christmas trees, he’s been leaving everyone else’s stockings empty.Whereas more than half of Americans approved of Reagan’s first major high-income tax cut proposal, only about a third of Americans approved of Bush’s similar tax proposal at the same time in his presidency. By the time Trump assumed office for his first term, less than a third of Americans supported his high-income tax cut initiative, knowing that such policies have failed to benefit them personally and failed to boost the macroeconomy.‘The times are totally different’Fast forward to Trump’s second term. In previous eras, a new Republican president delivering more tax cuts for the wealthy would be a foregone conclusion under Wanniski’s Santa Claus theory. But that political hypothesis is now buckling under the weight of Trump’s new $4.5tn proposal to extend his 2017 tax cuts.In its current form, the White House’s initiative would deliver more than half its benefits to the richest 10% of the country. Coupled with spending cuts and tariffs, Trump’s agenda would deliver a big income boost to the top 1%, while reducing the income of the bottom 80%, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.As Trump’s legislative agenda hits Congress, opposition to more high-income tax cuts is strong not just among Democrats and independents, but also among Republicans. Morning Consult reports that 70% of GOP voters believe “the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes” – a whopping eight-point jump from six years ago. Moreover, “roughly 7 in 10 voters, including 2 in 3 Republicans, support proposals to raise taxes on earners making more than $400,000.”Republican leaders are responding with the previously unthinkable: proposals to raise some taxes on the rich. Indeed, Trump reportedly floated the idea and some GOP lawmakers are considering creating a new top tax bracket.This has touched off an intraparty civil war. On one side are those who came of age in the Reagan and George W Bush epochs – Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, the former vice-president Mike Pence, Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, the hedge-funder-turned-GOP senator Dave McCormick, and the Club for Growth’s Stephen Moore. This old guard believes Republicans can still get away with depicting billionaire giveaways as populism, and vilifying tax hikes on the rich.“It’s vicious and full of envy. It’s a dumb idea. It’s bad for the economy,” said Norquist, who spent the last quarter-century pressing Republicans to sign pledges to oppose all tax increases. “What happened when George Herbert Walker Bush raised the top rate? Let’s see, he lost the next election. We lost House and Senate seats and taxes went up and we had a recession.”On the other side are newfangled Maga voices – the former Mitt Romney staffer Oren Cass, Vice-President JD Vance, the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and reportedly Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought. They sense political peril in Republicans presenting themselves as populists while their party enriches billionaires and corporations.“We have to increase taxes on the wealthy,” Bannon said in December. This month he added that conservatives must prove “Republicans are not the country club Republicans”, which is “why it’s so important to not extend the tax cuts for the wealthy”.Of the old anti-tax crowd, Bannon added: “They’re arrogant and they refuse to look at the reality of the situation we’re in … The times are totally different.”‘Didn’t we already give them a break at the top?’Of course, we’ve been at these junctures before – moments when Republicans seemed to sense political vulnerability on taxes.In 1985, Reagan tried to deflect Democrats’ criticism of his tax policy by insisting: “There is one group of losers in our tax plan – those individuals and corporations who are not paying their fair share or, for that matter, any share. These abuses cannot be tolerated.”Similarly, George W Bush momentarily pushed back against conservative aides pressing him to champion yet another tax cut for the rich. “Didn’t we already give them a break at the top?” he reportedly asked.But the powerful anti-tax movement of those eras convinced both Republican presidents to plow forward. Reagan followed up his first tax cut by further reducing the top tax rate, and Bush’s sequel to his first tax cut was slashing taxes on corporate dividends.Trump could end up doing much the same. After all, ramming more tax cuts for the rich through Congress is the surest way for Trump to enrich himself, his family and the entire front row of his inauguration.But this time around, the long-term politics of taxes are in flux. Running the same tax play would show a Republican president siding with oligarchs against the preferences of his own party’s rank and file that no longer buys the Santa Claus theory.That’s a new and unpredictable dynamic – one that may finally begin weakening the anti-tax movement’s grip on power in the years ahead.

      David Sirota is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Lever, an investigative news outlet. Arjun Singh, Ariella Markowitz and Natalie Bettendorf are producers of the outlet’s weekly podcast Lever Time, which is releasing a new miniseries Tax Revolt, on the 50-year history of the anti-tax movement now culminating in the Trump tax cuts. More