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      Why do Trump voters have no regrets? Because the people they hate are getting hurt more | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The stock market is plunging, prices are rising, federal workers are getting laid off, students are being snatched off the street by immigration agents. The US is many things at the moment, but stable is not one of them. So, amid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in? Are they starting to wonder whether voting in a convicted felon as president – a man who has declared bankruptcy six times – might not have been the wisest move?Not according to the polls. Rather, the US appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien. I’m not saying that disillusioned Republicans don’t exist; do enough digging and you can certainly find a few. And journalists have been doing a lot of digging. During Trump’s first term, there was a steady stream of media pieces profiling the regretful Trump voter. The genre has remained popular through the first few months of Trump 2.0. But, according to a much-discussed segment by CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten this week, polling proves that the idea of “regretful” Trump voters is “more of a media creation than anything else”.“I hear all these stories, all these articles, all the Trump voters, they regret what they did back in 2024. I’m here to tell you, uh-uh. Very few of them regret what they did back in 2024,” Enten said on Wednesday.Enten was referencing a new poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst which found that just 2% of Trump voters agreed with the statement “I regret my [2024] vote and would vote differently if I could”. That’s almost half the number (3.5%) of Trump voters who said the same thing in February 2017. Meanwhile, 74% of Trump voters said they feel very confident that they made the right choice.Of course, polls aren’t always reliable. Indeed, I’m going to be a little cruel and refer you back to an Enten segment from five days before the election, where the data guru looked at three 2024 polling trends that pointed to a potential victory for vice-president Kamala Harris. “If Harris wins the signs were clear as day,” he declared. In short: Mark Twain had the measure of polling when he said “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.Asking people whether they regret an important choice they just made is also a loaded question. It’s akin to asking them “are you a complete idiot?” So I would treat these particular polls with a dose of caution: just because people don’t actively admit to regretting their vote, it doesn’t mean that they’re not worried about the direction the country is headed in, or that they’re thrilled about Trump’s performance as president. On the contrary, Trump’s approval rating is dropping and a lot of people are worried about inflation and higher prices. Everyone is feeling some pain right now.In a hyper-polarised country, however, what seems to really matter to many voters isn’t how much pain they’re feeling themselves, but whether the other side is suffering more. I could cite various academic papers on the politics of resentment; I could surface endless statistics on the subject. But I think the best summation of Trumpism is a quote from a woman called Crystal Minton from back in 2019, which went viral after being included in a New York Times report. Minton lived in a Florida town that had been ravaged by the double whammy of a hurricane and a Trump administration-instigated government shutdown, and was suffering. “I voted for [Trump], and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton complained. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”Right now, however, Trump is hurting the sort of people many of his voters seem to be interested in seeing get hurt. He’s an avenging angel, wreaking vengeance on the elite institutions, scapegoats and bogeymen that the Republican party has spent years blaming for the state of the US. He’s cut funding to all the Ivy League universities he’s called “woke” and declared out of touch with American values. He’s gone after transgender people. And he has rounded up immigrants and protesters, just as he promised he would do.Trump isn’t just doing every vindictive thing he told his supporters he was going to do: he’s trolling his detractors via nasty memes. He’s rubbing salt in their wounds. There has been what Marcus Maloney, a sociology professor at Coventry University in the UK, called a “4Chanification of American politics”. The White House Valentine’s Day post, for example, was a poem: “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you”. Cutesy font appeared above the floating heads of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan. And a video last month posted by the White House showed a man being deported while Semisonic’s famous lyrics played in the background: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” The cruelty is very much the point.While Trump may be hurting all the people he said he’d be hurting, there’s plenty of pain to go around. There has been a lot of anger from some of Trump’s backers in Wall Street over the volatility that the president’s tariff policy has injected into the stock market. Some of his billionaire backers, such as the investor Bill Ackman, have been screaming bloody murder. But for a lot of Trump’s backers, the fluctuations of the stock market have no immediate effect on their lives. The top 10% of Americans hold 93% of all stocks. This is what happens when inequality reaches record levels: you get a group of people with nothing to lose, which means they have little to regret. You get people happy to burn the whole system down.None of this is to say that Trump voters are immune to remorse. With his tariff plan, he is just getting started. The president may be good at bluster, but even his most diehard supporter are going to realise quite quickly that food prices – which Trump promised to lower on the campaign trail – are not, in fact, going down. When the price of basic goods keep rising, there’s only so long you can keep feeding people obvious lies. Perhaps the Trumpers won’t get quite so much of a dopamine rush from “owning the libs” when they can’t afford to own anything else.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      American women and children are in crisis. Republicans are about to make it worse | Karen Dolan

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      Women and children are under threat in America.Jocelyn Smith of Roswell, New Mexico, knows this too well. “I’m disabled, taking care of my disabled daughter. I work, and I volunteer to help feed and house my community,” she told me. “Yet I need assistance affording meals for my family. Something is broken.”Smith knows, but did you know, that in the United States, nearly 43% of women – and almost half of all children – are poor or low-income? And that last year, families with children experienced the largest single-year increase in homelessness, with nearly 40% more people in families with children experiencing homelessness?And what if I told you that Donald Trump’s agenda – expressed through his more than 100 harmful executive actions, Elon Musk’s Doge cuts, and his budget making its way through his Republican-majority Congress – will make things even worse for women and children?I bet you’ll be pretty angry. Smith is.“Is Congress working on any of this?” she asks about the struggles of working families. “Unfortunately, no.” As she wrote in a recent op-ed: “they’re doing the opposite right now.In fact, the GOP budget proposal could slash $880bn from Medicaid and $230bn from food assistance. They’re also cutting government agencies that assist with affordable housing, transportation, safety, veterans, and children with disabilities.”The final amounts of those cuts will vary, but the numbers stand to be huge and devastating. Why? Because the GOP is looking for at least $4.5tn in more tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. “They are reaching into my very shallow pockets, into my daughter’s life-saving medical care to pay for it,” Smith says.A new paper I co-authored for Repairers of the Breach and the Institute for Policy Studies tries to reckon with what these costs would mean for working Americans. For women and children, we found that some of the harshest blows will come in healthcare access and in help putting food on the table.Nearly one in five women and almost half of all children rely on Medicaid or its Children’s Health Insurance Program for healthcare. The House Republican budget resolution calls for potential cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid – as much as $880bn by 2034, as Smith points out.And a shocking 9 million people, disproportionately women and children, could lose all food assistance under the proposed supplemental nutrition assistance (Snap) cuts. Children could also miss out on food at school, since the Republican House budget proposal also calls for a $12bn cut to public schools’ free and reduced meals programs. This would eliminate 24,000 schools – serving 12 million students – from the program.Beyond food and healthcare, these cuts and proposals would also harm women and children in countless other ways.Nationally, women are already paid 18% less than men, which contributes to their higher likelihood of poverty. But now, nearly 3 million pregnant workers are at risk of losing their jobs amid doubts that Trump will properly enforce the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which provides worker protections for pregnant women.That’s especially egregious when you consider that 22 million women and girls of reproductive age live in states where their reproductive rights have been either eliminated or significantly eroded since justices appointed by Trump helped overturn Roe v Wade.Trump’s budget cuts could also lead to 40,000 children losing their childcare – and affect 2.4 million children’s access to childcare and early childhood education. That could have negative effects that follow those kids around the rest of their lives, in addition to imposing greater hardships on their parents.Other cuts target funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research on health disparities, including Black maternal and fetal health, as well as $11.4bn in state and community health department grants. And of course all this comes alongside Trump’s anti-DEI executive actions, which target anti-discrimination protections for transgender children and transgender women.One of the few winners in this budget is the mass deportation system, which is poised to see significant increases. Yet the immigration raids and deportations this will fund will separate families – including up to 4.4 million US citizen children with an undocumented parent and another 850,000 undocumented minors.None of this is popular. By large majorities, Americans across the political spectrum oppose cuts to Medicaid, Snap and other safety net programs, as well as deportations that separate families and target Dreamers who came here as young children. It’s no wonder that countless women and children were among the millions who turned out for 5 April’s “Hands Off” rallies.I agree with Jocelyn Smith, who asks: “I don’t think this is fair. Do you?”

      Karen Dolan is a federal safety net expert and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. More

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      White House may seek legally binding control over Columbia through consent decree – report

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      The Trump administration is considering placing Columbia University under a consent decree, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, a dramatic escalation in the federal government’s crackdown on the Ivy League institution.The university has already accepted a series of changes demanded by the administration as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal grants and contracts that the government suspended last month over allegations that the school failed to protect students from antisemitism on campus.A consent decree – a binding agreement approved by a federal judge – would be an extraordinary move by the Trump administration, which has threatened government funding as a way to force colleges and universities to comply with Donald Trump’s political objectives on a range of issues from campus protests to transgender women in sports and diversity and inclusion initiatives.As a party to the consent decree, Columbia would have to agree to enter it – and the Journal report states that it is unclear whether such a plan has been discussed by the university board.In a statement to the Guardian, the university did not directly address the report. “The University remains in active dialogue with the Federal Government to restore its critical research funding,” a spokesperson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAccording to the Journal, the proposal comes from the administration’s antisemitism taskforce, composed in part of justice department lawyers, who have reportedly expressed skepticism that Columbia was acting in “good faith”. If Columbia resists, the justice department would need to present its case for the agreement in court, a process that could drag on for years with the university risking its federal funding in the interim.Republicans and the Trump administration have sought to make an example of Columbia University, which was at the center of a student protest movement over Israel’s war in Gaza that broke out on campuses across the country. Last month, federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and prominent Palestinian activist who participated in campus protests. He remains in detention.During a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Trump pressed his education secretary, Linda McMahon, to elaborate on the department’s efforts to withhold federal funds from universities that were “not behaving”.“You’re holding back from $400 Columbia?” he asked McMahon. She nodded and named other schools, noting that the administration had frozen nearly $1bn in funding from Cornell.“We’re getting calls from the presidents of universities who really do want to come in and sit down and come in and sit down and have discussions,” she said. “We’re investigating them but in the meantime we’re holding back the grant fund money.” More

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      US stocks fall again after rally following Trump’s shock retreat on tariffs

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      US stocks fell again on Thursday after a historic rally following Donald Trump’s shock retreat on Wednesday on the hefty tariffs he had just imposed on dozens of countries.The falls came as the president blamed “transition problems” for the market reaction and the sell-off deepened after a White House clarification noted that total tariffs on China had been raised by 145% since Trump took office.Speaking at the White House, Trump said: “We think we’re in very good shape. We think we’re doing very well. Again there will be a transition cost, transition problems, but in the end it’s going to be a beautiful thing.”The sell-off comes as Democrats continue to react with anger over the sudden retreat that rattled markets, while Republicans praised Trump’s “art of the deal” in action, referencing Trump’s 1987 book.By the end of Thursday, the Dow was down 2.5% after soaring on Wednesday afternoon. The Nasdaq Composite was down more than 4%, after posting its biggest gain in more than two decades on Wednesday, and the S&P 500 down 3.4%.The market seems to be in a state of fatigue after a rollercoaster week. Stocks were even unresponsive to news on Thursday morning that the European Union announced it will suspend 25% retaliatory tariffs against US imports and new data showed inflation in the US cooled to 2.4% in March – both would typically be cause for optimism on Wall Street.On CNN, former US treasury secretary Janet Yellen called Trump’s economic policies the “worst self-inflicted wound” an administration had ever imposed on a “well-functioning economy”.Trump said in an abrupt announcement on Wednesday that he would be implementing a 90-day pause on his tariff plan, and that goods entering the US from most countries would now face a 10% blanket tariff until July, except for Chinese exports, which he said would face tariffs totaling 145% effective immediately – 125% in “reciprocal” tariffs plus 20% already imposed for China’s alleged role in the fentanyl crisis.Republican lawmakers praised the decision to pause the tariffs, with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, stating on social media: “Behold the ‘Art of the Deal.’ President Trump has created leverage, brought MANY countries to the table, and will deliver for American workers, American manufacturers, and America’s future!”Before the pause was announced, a small but growing number of Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters in the business world expressed concerns about the risks of the president’s tariff policy.By Wednesday afternoon, many were praising Trump for the rollback as part of a purported strategy.Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Trump supporter who advocated for Trump to pause his trade war over the weekend, reacted to the announcement saying that “this was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”The benefit of Trump’s approach, Ackman claimed, “is that we now understand who are our preferred trading partners, and who the problems are. China has shown themselves to be a bad actor. Our counterparties also have a taste of what life is like if they don’t take down their trade barriers. This is the perfect set-up for trade negotiations over the next 90 days.”But some industry leaders criticized the administration’s back-and-forth and tariff decisions.On Thursday, Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, said the company was still waiting to see the impact of the tariffs but warned third-party sellers may “pass that cost on” to consumers.“The effective tariff rate is actually HIGHER with the pause than it was as announced on April 2, due to the tariffs on China,” Diane Swonk, the chief economist of the professional services firm KPMG, wrote on social media. “There will be some diversion through connector countries. However, the effective tariff rate now peaks at 30.5% during the pause. That is worse than our worst case scenarios.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Republicans and White House officials praised Trump’s decisions, Democratic lawmakers such as Senator Chuck Schumer pushed back. Schumer told his supporters that “this chaos is all a game to Donald Trump”.“He thinks he’s playing Red Light, Green Light with the economy,” Schumer said. “But it is very real for American families.”Some Democrats have made accusations of possible market manipulation.“These constant gyrations in policy provide dangerous opportunities for insider trading,” Senator Adam Schiff said. “Who in the administration knew about Trump’s latest tariff flip-flop ahead of time? Did anyone buy or sell stocks, and profit at the public’s expense? I’m writing to the White House – the public has a right to know.”The New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed similar concerns, urging any member of Congress who purchased stocks over the last two days to disclose that.“I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor,” she said. “Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things. It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”The Democratic House whip, Katherine Clark, wrote: “Two hours before announcing his tariff pause, Trump told his paid Truth Social subscribers it was ‘a great time to buy’ on the stock market. Corruption is the name of their game.”The Nevada representative Steven Horsford questioned the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, asking the representative during a committee hearing whether the climbdown was market manipulation.“How is this not market manipulation?” Horsford asked, to which Greer responded: “No.”“If it was always a plan, how is this not market manipulation?” Horsford asked again.“Tariffs are a tool, they can be used in the appropriate way to protect US jobs and small businesses, but that’s not what this does,” Horsford said. “So if it’s not market manipulation, what is it? Who’s benefiting? What billionaire just got richer?” More

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      Republicans trying to change rules to avoid House vote on Trump tariffs

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      Republicans are quietly pushing a procedural rule that would curb the power of the US Congress to override Donald Trump’s chaotic tariff policy.The House of Representatives’ rules committee on Wednesday approved a measure that would forbid the House from voting on legislation to overturn the president’s recently imposed taxes on foreign imports.The sleight of hand was embedded in procedural rule legislation setting up debate on a separate issue: the budget resolution that is central to Trump’s agenda.If adopted, the rule would in effect stall until October a Democratic effort to force a floor vote on a resolution disapproving of the national emergency that Trump declared last week to justify the tariffs. This mirrors a similar tactic used previously to shield Trump’s earlier tariffs.The move came as Trump announced a major reversal on Wednesday, with a 90-day pause on tariffs for most countries while raising them to 125% for China.Despite concerns that Republicans were set to endorse another potential expansion of presidential power, Mike Johnson, the House speaker, asserted the tariffs were an “America First” policy that required space to be effective.He told reporters: “I’ve made it very clear, I think the president has executive authority. It’s an appropriate level of authority to deal with unfair trade practices … That’s part of the role of the president is to negotiate with other countries … and he is doing that, in my estimation, very effectively right now.”Republicans moved against a resolution introduced by Gregory Meeks of New York, along with other House Democrats, seeking to end the national emergency declared on 2 April. This declaration was used by Trump to implement sweeping new tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.Republicans’ blockade specifically targets the expedited process for reviewing national emergencies outlined in the National Emergencies Act. It stipulates that the period between 9 April and 30 September will not count towards the 15-day window that typically allows for fast-tracked floor votes on disapproval measures.Democrats strongly condemned the action, accusing Republicans of obstructing debate and prioritising Trump over the economy and congressional oversight.Teresa Leger Fernandez, a congresswoman from New Mexico, said: “We only need four Republicans, only four Republicans to vote with Democrats to review the tariffs and stop this madness … Do you support tariffs that are throwing our economy into recession? Do you support tariffs that are hurting our families? … Then get up on the floor and debate that. But don’t prevent us from having that debate.”Congresswoman Suzan DelBene of Washington added: “Congress should have a role here. It’s terrible that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle aren’t willing to have a vote, too.”Although the rule change hinders the expedited process under the National Emergencies Act, it does not completely eliminate other avenues for forcing a vote, such as a discharge petition, though these are often difficult to achieve.Meeks said: “They can run but they can’t hide. At some point they’re going to have to vote … We’re not going to stop. The American people have a right to know whether you’re for the tariffs or against them. And if they vote this rule in, that will show that they’re trying to hide.”But Republicans countered that Democrats had used similar procedural tactics to block votes on issues such as ending the Covid-19 national emergency when they held the House majority.The rules committee chair, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, said: “A reminder about those who live in glass houses … This is a tool utilised by both Democrat and Republican majorities.”This is not the first time Republican leadership has employed such a tactic to shield Trump’s tariff decisions. A similar rule was adopted previously to prevent votes on resolutions targeting earlier tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada, as well as levies on Canada specifically. More

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      Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win? | Ben Davis

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      The start of the second Trump administration has been chaotic, to put it mildly. It is difficult for Americans to understand what exactly the administration is trying to do and how it will affect them. It has been simultaneously a colossal remaking of the US state and the entire global order, but also seemingly haphazard, with significant policy decisions such as spending cuts and tariff rates clearly made with little thought or preparation. Analysts and commentators of all stripes have speculated on the motives and strategy behind the Trump administration’s huge overhaul of society. But what is the Trump administration’s plan for the US?The primary moves the administration has made are major cuts to federal government capacity through the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and now an unprecedented tariff regime that has sent financial markets into a free fall. Some view these changes as part of a grand overarching strategy to rebuild some version of an imagined past America: globally hegemonic and able to exercise power nakedly over other countries, economically self-sufficient with a large manufacturing base, and a reassertion of the previous social norms and order around gender, race, and sexuality. But a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s explanation of their policies and vision reveals that rather than a single, coherent ideological project, the Trump administration is sclerotic and being used as a vehicle for more than one competing ideological project.While the first Trump administration had no real ideological project, with Donald Trump’s surprise win being based on a personalist coalition without the backing of an organized movement, and different factions within the administration battling for control over policy and favor from the president, the second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major ideological projects, representing different segments of capital: the oft-discussed “national conservatism” of the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, and tech capital, which has used Trump as a vehicle for its own priorities.These two overarching political projects and visions both see Trump as able to advance their goals, but these projects are competing with each other. Both have accepted that Republicans will lose the midterms in 2026, as the president’s party nearly always does, and are thus trying to radically reshape society in that time in ways that can’t easily be reversed. They have deeply different visions for the future, and whether one wins out or both of their incompatible sets of policies are carried out will have enormous implications for the lives of Americans and people around the globe.On tariffs, the administration has offered multiple, mutually exclusive visions: with some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to rebuild US manufacturing by incentivizing producers to build in the US; some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to raise revenue, cut the deficit, and in the long-term replace the income tax entirely; and some viewing tariffs primarily as a negotiating tool to force countries to make concessions to the US on a variety of issues.Trump personally has suggested that the US become an autarky, with no trade of any kind with the outside world. It’s unclear which of these will be the plan because they each have dramatically different implications for how the tariffs are structured in the long-term, how long they will last, and their effects on US workers.In the first two views, the tariffs are a part of the national conservative project of returning the US to a previous social order. They view the nation-state as the primary actor in a zero-sum anarchic global order of competing nation-states seeking to dominate each other. Tariffs are then a way of reasserting US national power relative to other states. This fits in with Trump’s rhetoric about the US, taking the country back and reasserting American nationhood, and is the primary way analysts and commentators have viewed the administration.The tech capital that oversees Doge, however, has a different project entirely. Elon Musk, who has personally overseen the large-scale slashing of the federal government, rejects tariffs entirely. The Doge project and the tariff project are at odds. The Doge project is cloaked in the rhetoric of retro America First nationalism that would seem on its face (and is understood as by its supporters) to be precisely the opposite of what it is in practice: the outmoding of the nation-state entirely.It’s notable that the first target for Doge’s cuts were not the New Deal programs conservatives have long wanted to cut, but instead the cold war-era nodes of American state power: scientific research, funding for education and the arts, foreign aid, and other programs that were created to allow the US to outcompete the Soviet Union and other countries. Musk does not care about American great power competition, such as with China, as Trump does. Indeed, Musk has close ties with the Chinese state.For Musk and his cohorts, the US must progress past the nation state model – where the state exist to project power against other nation states and part of this bargain is keeping a certain social compact of living standard with citizens – to the vendor state model where international firms are paramount and states exist instead to compete for their favor. The Doge project of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism aims to sublimate the state to capital entirely and to outsource state capacity to transnational tech firms. This is, rather than an end of globalization as the national conservatives want, the final conclusion of globalization, where international capital exists above and beyond the bounds of the nation-state.This is the reason large swathes of tech capital reversed course on Trump during the Biden administration and became his biggest financial backers. For them, Trump exists as a vehicle for their overall project.Both of these projects are disastrous for the American people on their own, but both being partially implemented in opposing ways is even worse and will lead to disaster for US workers and our society’s basic capacity to function.While the tariffs by themselves are devastating to US consumers and could lead to a major economic crisis, the Doge cuts strip state capacity that would be needed to implement the most positive vision of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs. While tariffs drive up prices on things like semiconductors or electric vehicles, the government is simultaneously slashing the programs designed to encourage these goods to be manufactured domestically. And while the Doge cuts have slashed the state and led to the direct capture of swathes of the state by tech capital, their overall project of global tech hegemony cannot progress in a world where international trade has broken down completely.Trump and the national conservative’s dream of a return to a pre-financialization manufacturing-based economy, where the US has security through economic self-reliance, and the tech right’s commitment to creating shareholder value at all costs, and whose entire model is based entirely on the result of financialization, are incompatible and on a collision course. Different sections of capital – tech on the one hand, and the revanchist small capital class who form national conservatism’s base on the other – have different and competing interests and control of different sections of administration policy. The consequences of this intranecine competition are enormous, but either way, the next four years look dire for the American working class. The damage may take generations to fix.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign More