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      Trump wants to rebrand his tax bill as the ‘Working Families Tax Cut’. Don’t be fooled | Steven Greenhouse

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      Just a few months ago, Donald Trump sought to bamboozle the American people into believing that his One Big Beautiful Bill Act – with its trillions in tax cuts for the rich – was a legislative wonder stuffed with one marvel after another. But a Pew opinion poll in August found that millions of Americans have wised up about the measure and now view it as a big, unbeautiful monstrosity.Many Americans have come to realize that Trump’s not-so-beautiful bill – instead of being filled with good things that benefit average Americans – is overflowing with big tax cuts for the wealthy as well as many unfortunate things that will hurt typical working families. As we saw in the town halls held across the US, many Americans are furious about some painful things that Trump and congressional Republicans inserted into the bill: cuts that will make health insurance more expensive, cuts that reduce food assistance, cuts that make it harder for students from working families to afford college. All this is bad news for working families who struggle to make ends meet.President Trump and his administration can’t hide from the fact that many Americans detest the bill — 46% disapprove of it, while just 32% approve (23% say they’re unsure what they think). What’s more, 33% of Americans “strongly disapprove” of the bill.Alarmed that the bill has become a public relations and political disaster, Trump and his allies have embraced a curious strategy to address that problem. Their strategy is not what you might hope – they’re not seeking to amend the bill to make it less painful for average Americans. Rather, their strategy is slick marketing: to simply rebrand the bill, to make it sound better. The White House is telling Republicans to stop calling it the One Big Beautiful Bill and instead call it the nice-sounding Working Families Tax Cut Bill.Unfortunately, that name is another effort to dupe America’s working families. The bill gives 45% of next year’s tax cuts to the highest-earning 5% of US households, while just 1% of the tax cuts go the lowest-earning 20% of households. Under the bill, far more in net tax cuts, $117bn, will go to the wealthiest 1% of households next year than will go to the bottom 60% ($77bn).If the White House and GOP lawmakers want to be accurate, they should call the bill the Billionaires’ and Millionaires’ Tax Cut Act. The bill gives a $13,622 tax cut to households in the top 10% by income, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The top 0.1% of households (those with income of more than $3.3m a year) will receive annual tax cuts of $103,500 on average, according to the Yale Budget Lab.If you’re wealthy enough to have $15m in assets, the bill is very good for you. Under the bill, the first $15m in an individual’s assets are exempt from the estate tax, nearly triple the $5.5m in pre-Trump days. For couples, the first $30m in assets will be exempt. Does anyone think that these sound like working family tax cuts?Frankly, it would be more accurate to call the bill the Working Families Benefits Cut Bill. Containing a painful $1.4tn in Medicaid and other cuts that Republicans insisted on to help finance their tax cuts for the rich, the bill is filled with benefit cuts that hurt working families. Roughly 15 million Americans will lose health coverage and become uninsured because the bill cuts Medicaid funding and reduces subsidies for Obamacare.Other results of the bill: 4 million people will lose some or all of their food aid, while 4.4 million students from working families might lose all or some of their federal aid to go to college.“Who’s getting hit, who’s bearing the cost? It’s people with low and middle incomes, people that the president and many Republican policymakers promised to serve and support in the last election,” said Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.President Trump is correct that the bill contains some tax cuts for working Americans – for instance, it increases the standard income tax deduction by $750 for individuals and $1,500 for couples. The bad news is that for tens of millions of families, the bill’s benefit cuts, especially on health coverage, outweigh the meager tax cuts that the bill gives non-affluent Americans. In many ways, Trump and GOP lawmakers are making this a shell game – they say you’re benefiting from tax cuts, but the fact is that because of the benefit cuts, millions of working families will end up worse off.According to the CBO, Americans in the bottom 10% by income (averaging $23,751) will end up $1,214 worse off on average per year, while the next lowest 10% (averaging $43,092) will end up $392 worse off per year. Those in the third-lowest tenth ($54,453) will receive a mere $23 annual gain. Those in the fourth-lowest decile ($67,637) will see a very modest net gain of $379. Cutting through all these numbers, this shows that for tens of millions of families, the bill is a net loser or a wash.“This really is a big, beautiful bill for billionaires, but for the poor and the working class in this country, you are actually poorer,” said the representative Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House budget committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor those solidly in the middle class, the bill provides modest gains. Middle-class families earning between $86,000 and $108,000 would receive between $800 and $1,200, around 1% of income, the CBO says.Since we’re discussing taxes, we shouldn’t forget Trump’s massive tariffs – they are unarguably a tax, a sales tax on imports that will hit working-class Americans hardest. The reason: the non-wealthy spend a higher share of their income on imports, whether on furniture, electronics or coffee, than the wealthy do. The Yale Budget Lab found that when one combines the effects of Trump’s tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 90% of American families will end up worse off. Seventy per cent of households will face losses ranging from $780 to $2,570 each year.President Trump boasts that two provisions he championed – no tax on tips and no tax on overtime – will be great for working Americans. But those provisions will be far less helpful than people realize. Just 3% of US workers receive tips, and one-third of them earn so little that they don’t pay federal income taxes. So no tax on tips won’t help them.No tax on overtime won’t help workers nearly as much as many think. The deduction applies only to the “half” in “time and a half” overtime pay. So if a worker earns $20 an hour and receives $30 per overtime hour, that worker can deduct only the $10 premium per overtime hour, not the full $30. John Ricco, an analyst at the Yale Budget Lab, says that for the bottom 40% of Americans by income, no tax on overtime will mean “less than a $10 tax cut per year” – “essentially a rounding error”.By seeking to call this bill the Working Families Tax Cut Bill, Trump and the GOP are again seeking to hold themselves out as the best friends of American workers, even though Trump, since returning to office, has taken dozens of anti-worker actions. He halted enforcement of a regulation that protects miners from a debilitating, often fatal lung disease. He has stripped 1 million federal employees of their important right to bargain collectively and has torn up union contracts for hundreds of thousands. He fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving the nation’s top labor watchdog without a quorum to protect workers from companies’ unlawful anti-union actions. Trump is also pushing to end minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers.People who care about working families – whether union leaders, clergy or community leaders – need to make clear to the public that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act hurts many working Americans. It is a bait and switch, telling working families that it’s good for them even as it cuts benefits for millions of working Americans while lavishing big tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      ‘I was reborn’: Cincinnati imam reflects on 10 weeks in Ice custody after release

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      On a recent rain-drenched fall afternoon, the mood at the Clifton Mosque in Cincinnati was one of elation and relief.Last Friday, Ayman Soliman, an Egyptian imam and hospital chaplain who had been detained at a county jail for more than 10 weeks, was released and is expected to have his visa status fully returned.Soliman had been accused by US authorities of a variety of alleged terror-related charges in Egypt and faced deportation having fled the North African country in 2014 after being detained there for his work as a journalist.The legal about-turn marks a major blow to the Trump administration’s aggressive and often illegal deportation campaign that’s seen hundreds of thousands of people forced out of the US, often without due process.Soliman’s ordeal began during a regular check-in with immigration officials in Cincinnati on 9 July, when the 51-year-old from Cairo was subjected to an hours-long interview before being detained by an Ice agent and a representative of the FBI.“Eventually, they said, ‘We’re sorry to tell you that we will detain you.’ I was shocked,” Soliman says.“The Ice officer said that 24 hours ago there was a new order to detain everyone that comes to the Ice offices. He said: ‘I’m so sorry but it’s not my decision.’”Soliman was transported to the Butler county jail and held in freezing conditions for 12 hours in the jail’s waiting room, where he struggled to stay warm wearing just a T-shirt and pants.“The beds were rusted, and the only toilet was in a room with 13 or 14 other people around. It was traumatizing and dehumanizing,” he recalls.Things worsened when Soliman was put in isolation – a cell where he was separated from others and denied nearly all rights granted to other detainees – for five days. He says it followed an argument when Soliman’s request for a quiet space to pray was rejected by a correctional officer who then claimed Soliman failed to comply with a lockdown call, something the imam denies.“There is a multi-purpose room where Christian pastors and Muslim imams come to administer to people, but the officer told me to pray at the gym where people were playing basketball,” he says.“He grabbed my arms, I asked him to take his hands off me, then he pressed an emergency button and in seconds five or six officers rushed in and they handcuffed me.”Correctional officers at Butler county jail have been accused of abusing detainees in the past. In 2020, two men refugees detained by Ice at the jail filed a lawsuit against the jail and an officer, claiming that beatings resulted in serious physical abuse including the loss of teeth.Across the country, 12 people have died while in Ice custody since Trump took office in January.While in isolation, Soliman says he was denied commissary, meaning he could not order paid for food or other items, wasn’t allowed to contact his attorney, or to engage with visitors.“It was one of the most terrible experiences of my life. It was just as brutal as my detention in the torture dungeons in Egypt,” he says.“They treated us like inmates, not detainees.”He says he had one interaction with Richard Jones, the Butler county sheriff known for his long-held anti-immigrant and racist views.“[Jones] said [speaking of Soliman]: ‘I know this guy; he is very famous. You are in the news all the time.’ He didn’t ask me how I was.” According to figures previously provided by Jones, the jail could have expected to net around $5,000 in taxpayer money from Soliman’s detention.He says that nearly everyone he interacted with at the jail had crossed the southern border legally seeking asylum and were awaiting a court appearance to decide their case before being picked up by Ice officers in recent months. Some had been living in the US for decades; one had a son who served in the US Navy.But for Soliman, the threat of being deported was a constant worry.“The jail and its abuse was the least of my worries. My main fear was being put on a plane to Egypt and being tortured until I die. It never left my mind,” he says.“Every day in jail, I felt I was getting closer to that.”He says his experiences over the past several months have taught him that the country has changed, reminding him more of his life in Egypt. The Trump administration’s suing, taking to court and firing of more than a dozen immigration judges in recent months has widened fears that the US is falling deeper into an autocracy.“This government can do whatever they want; if they can take judges to court, if they can fire judges. This government could have sent me home without trial, without immigration court,” he says.“Ayman got his day in court because he could afford good lawyers, thanks to the generosity of the people who know and love him and strangers from around the country,” says Lynn Tramonte, director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.“But there are hundreds of people just like him in immigration jail today, who also don’t deserve to be there. The US government is accusing them of things they aren’t guilty of, and they are facing deportation to countries where they will be harmed.”Soliman’s experience is ultimately a victorious one.“I was reborn. I couldn’t imagine sitting here today, talking freely.” He says he hopes that now his asylum status has been returned that his application for a green card, which would grant him permanent residency, could be completed within several months.“This is a real miracle.”Soliman lost his job as a chaplain at Cincinnati children’s hospital after his asylum status was revoked, but the hospital has since faced a wave of controversy after two chaplains were fired after they spoke out in support of Soliman.“I feel ethically obliged to go back [to work at Cincinnati Children’s hospital] for the families and patients. In the jail, I got 60, 70 letters from families I met [at the hospital]. It was my work as a chaplain that got people to empathize with me. They stood by my side; they fought for me.”Towards the end of a two-hour interview with the Guardian, a man enters the mosque to attend prayers. Seeing Soliman for the first time since before his detention, the worshipper is almost overcome with joy; tears fall down his face.“Alhamdulillah [Thank god], Alhamdulillah, you’re here,” he says. “You’re back.” More

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      Trump hangs autopen photo instead of Biden portrait in new presidential gallery

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      President Donald Trump has added a “Presidential Walk of Fame” to the exterior of the White House, featuring portraits of each of the previous commanders-in-chief – except for one.Instead of a headshot of Joe Biden, the Republican incumbent instead placed a photo of an autopen signing the Democrat’s name – a reference to Trump’s frequent allegation that the former president was addled by the end of his term in office and not really the one making decisions.The snub is the latest attempt by Trump to delegitimise a predecessor he routinely belittles, including in front of more than 100 world leaders on Tuesday at the UN general assembly gathering. Trump has never acknowledged his own defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, instead falsely chalking up the outcome to voter fraud.Trump had previously signalled he would represent Biden with an autopen on the walkway. Trump has alleged without evidence that Biden administration officials may have forged their boss’s signature by using the autopen and taken broad actions he was not aware of.He has also cast doubt on the validity of pardons and other documents that Biden signed with an autopen, even though other presidents before him have also relied on the device to sign key papers. A Republican-led House committee is investigating the Biden administration’s autopen use.White House staff sent out a burst of social media posts on Wednesday afternoon gleefully promoting the finished project. The media may get its first in-person glimpse of the display when Trump hosts a dinner on Wednesday night on the new Rose Garden patio that sits adjacent to the West Wing Colonnade on which the portraits hang.The addition is the latest in a series of design changes he has made at the White House since resuming office. The president also added gold flourishes to the Oval Office walls, installed massive new flagpoles on both lawns, replaced the grass in the Rose Garden with patio stone and started construction on a large new ballroom. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Obama says the US caught between two visions of the future as he criticises the president

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      Barack Obama has said the US is in the middle of a “tug of war” between two visions of the future, criticising progressives for becoming “smug” and “complacent” while populists pushed a conservative vision.The former US president said on one side was the progressive view in which change comes through democracy, while the other, driven by populists including Trump, see a return to an older, more conservative worldview.He told an audience in London on Wednesday: “My successor has not been particularly shy about it. That desire is to go back to a very particular way of thinking about America, where ‘we, the people’, is just some people, not all people. And where there are some pretty clear hierarchies in terms of status and who ranks where.”Obama was also critical of progressives who he said became “complacent” and “smug” in the 90s and 00s, “posturing that we believe in all these values because they were never tested. Now they’re being tested”.Obama says Trump linking paracetamol to autism is ‘violence against the truth’Obama said Donald Trump’s claims linking paracetamol to autism in infants is “violence against the truth” that could harm pregnant women if they were too scared to take pain relief.Obama, who was being interviewed by David Olusoga at the O2 Arena, told the audience that Trump’s claims about paracetamol – branded as Tylenol in the US – had been “continuously disproved” and posed a danger to public health.Read the full storyThree immigration detainees shot as Trump jumps to blame DemocratsOne detainee has been killed and two others injured in a shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas, officials said.Authorities have also confirmed that the shooter – named in reports as 29-year-old Joshua Jahn – died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.Trump wrote on social media that he had been briefed on the shooting, calling it “despicable” and that the shell casings contained anti-Ice messaging. He immediately cast blame for the shooting on “radical left Democrats”, instructing them, in capital letters, to “stop this rhetoric against Ice”. There was no indication the shooter had any connection to any organizations, including antifa.Read the full storyEscalatorgate: Trump alleges ‘triple sabotage’ after technical mishaps at UN Trump alleged “triple sabotage” at the United Nations, after the US president was plagued by a series of unfortunate events surrounding his address to the global body. According to Trump, his smooth arrival at the summit in New York on Tuesday was disrupted when the escalator ferrying him and the first lady to the General Assembly Hall “stopped on a dime”. Then, his teleprompter went “stone cold dark”.Stéphane Dujarric, the UN spokesperson, said an investigation indicated that a videographer from the US delegation who had run ahead of the first couple to document their arrival may have “inadvertently triggered the safety function” on the escalatorRead the full storyTrump energy secretary to return billions set aside for green projectsThe US energy secretary, Chris Wright, on Wednesday announced that his department will return to the treasury billions of dollars set aside for green projects, while dodging questions about affordability and grid reliability and claiming international climate policy had not lowered emissions.Read the full storyRolex faces questions over Trump US Open invitation amid tariffs painRolex is facing scrutiny over its “concerning” decision to host Donald Trump in the Swiss watchmaker’s corporate box at the US Open final earlier this month – weeks after the White House imposed steep tariffs on Switzerland.Read the full storyWorld leaders and UN push climate agenda forward despite Trump’s attacksWorld leaders have unveiled new targets to cut planet-heating pollution at the United Nations, in a bid to spur fresh impetus to the beleaguered climate effort a day after Donald Trump called the crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the world”.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The World Health Organization is pushing back against contested claims by the Trump administration that acetaminophen use during pregnancy heightens the risk of autism, further underscoring that no scientific consensus supports such a connection.

      The state superintendent in Oklahoma announced plans to put Turning Point USA chapters in every high school in the state, saying it would counter “radical leftist teachers unions” and their “woke indoctrination”.

      Nearly 100 doctors who have practised at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) issued a mass letter on Wednesday raising “urgent concerns” about Trump administration policies that they said will “negatively affect the lives of all veterans”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 23 September 2025. More

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      Texas Ice facility shooting: Republicans blame ‘radical left’ as Democrats focus on victims and gun control

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      A deadly shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas has been met with markedly different reactions from the political right and left.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed shortly after the news broke that detainees were the victims of the sniper attack on the facility and that no federal agents had been injured. The president and his allies, however, were quick to frame the shooting as an attack on Ice and place blame on the “radical left”.The department previously said two detainees were killed, but later issued a clarifying statement saying the shooting killed one detainee. It said two other detainees were shot and are in critical condition.Official statements have lacked focus on the victims having been detainees, and at a press conference officials said the identities of the victims would not be released at this time. Figures on the left have centered on the victims’ families, pushed for greater gun control and urged a rejection of anti-immigrant sentiment.Donald Trump rushed to politicize the incident, blaming the violence squarely on “Radical Left Terrorists” and the Democratic party. “This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.JD Vance called the shooting an “obsessive attack on law enforcement” that “must stop”. The vice-president claimed it was carried out by “a violent left-wing extremist” who was “politically motivated to go after law enforcement”.Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem also said: “This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about Ice has consequences. Comparing Ice Day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences.”The FBI said authorities recovered shell casings with “anti-Ice messaging” near the shooter, but officials said the investigation was continuing and have neither confirmed the motive behind the attack, nor corroborated claims about the shooter’s ideological background.The FBI is investigating the incident as an act of targeted violence. The DHS said the shooter “fired indiscriminately” at the Ice facility, “including at a van in the sallyport where the victims were shot”. The attacker died from a self-inflicted gun wound.Greg Abbott, the Republican Texas governor and staunch Trump ally, called the attack an “assassination” and said that “Texas supports Ice”. He wrote on X: “This assassination will NOT slow our arrest, detention, & deportation of illegal immigrants. We will work with ICE & the Dallas Police Dept. to get to the bottom of the assassin’s motive.”Texas senator Ted Cruz also invoked the killing of rightwing commentator Charlie Kirk as he told reporters that political violence “must stop” and rebuked politicians who have been critical of Ice. “Your political opponents are not Nazis,” Cruz raged at Democrats, who he accused of “demonizing” Ice. “This has very real consequences,” he said.Later, after a reporter brought up reports that the victims were detainees, Cruz acknowledged that the motive of the shooter was not known.The attack comes amid fears the Trump administration plans a crackdown on leftwing organizations and amid the censorship of critical or nuanced commentary in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, targeting people from visa holders to late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel.Marc Veasey, a Democratic representative for Texas who represents the area where the shooting took place, told the Notus website that political “gamesmanship” was spiraling out of control, and said he was “sickened” by officials’ focus on law enforcement and lack of acknowledgement that the victims were detainees.He added that he lacked trust in the FBI, which had become “overly political” under Trump, and said smears against Democrats were not helpful, citing that the GOP also routinely call colleagues on the left “Marxists”.“We have to start condemning this rhetoric from both sides,” Veasey said. “I was hoping that after the assassination of Charlie Kirk that we would have learned lessons and that we realize that this is not about gamesmanship. This is not about one-upsmanship … This is about public safety.”Former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who leads the gun violence prevention group Giffords, said her heart broke for the victims’ families and urged leaders to take action against the “gun crime crisis” gripping the country.Congresswoman Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, wrote on X: “Leave it to this administration to use a shooting against immigrant detainees to score political points and further provoke violence. We have to get guns off our streets and reject xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment that makes all of us less safe.”Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta said: “Kristi Noem couldn’t get to Twitter fast enough to use the Dallas Ice shooting for political points. But local news now says it was detainees who were shot – not Ice agents.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel comeback breaks his YouTube monologue views record

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      So much for low viewership: Jimmy Kimmel’s comeback monologue is now his most-viewed one on YouTube.The nearly 30-minute segment, in which Kimmel acknowledged his suspension by ABC owner Disney under pressure from the Trump administration, clarified his remarks on the killing of Charlie Kirk and passionately defended free speech, racked up more than 15m views in 16 hours.Numerous Jimmy Kimmel Live! sketches, interviews and other short clips have attracted tens of millions of views over the year, but Tuesday night’s segment marked record viewership for one of the comedian’s monologues.His previous most-watched monologue was from another emotional occasion in 2017, when Kimmel revealed the birth of his son Billy with a congenital heart condition that required immediate open-heart surgery. Other highly viewed monologues include Kimmel’s reaction to Will Smith’s infamous slap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars (13m views), his response to the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in 2017 (10m views) and his thoughts on Trump’s re-election last November (9m views).The spike in viewership comes after Disney suspended his late-night show under pressure from the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over his comments on the shooting of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. The decision quickly became a cultural flashpoint, prompting national outcry over free speech and condemnation over the bullying tactics of the Trump administration. Disney reversed course on Monday, following “thoughtful conversations with Jimmy” and pressure from Hollywood stars, free speech advocates, consumer boycotts, union protests and even Republicans like Ted Cruz.Kimmel’s show remains pre-empted on the dozens of ABC affiliate stations owned by the companies Sinclair and Nexstar, which is seeking FCC approval for a $6.2bn merger. Jimmy Kimmel Lives! typically averages about 1.6m broadcast viewers per night, but according to the New York Times, experts expect this tally to be much higher for Tuesday’s show – despite the Nexstar and Sinclair eliminating about 20% of its broadcast audience.Shortly before Tuesday’s show aired, Donald Trump lashed out at the host, a longtime needler and critic, and criticized ABC for allowing his return to broadcast.“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there.”“I think we’re going to test ABC out on this,” he added.“Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative,” Trump said, seemingly referring to the settlement he reached with ABC News last year in a defamation lawsuit filed against the network.In his return, Kimmel was neither conciliatory nor fiery. He decried his suspension as “anti-American” – “this show is not important,” he said, “what is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this” – and clarified his stance on Kirk’s death. “It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything funny about it.”“Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what – it was obviously a deeply disturbed individual,” he added. “That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make, but I understand that to some that felt either ill-timed or unclear, or maybe both. And for those who think I did point a finger, I get why you’re upset. If the situation was reversed, there’s a good chance I’d have felt the same way.”Kimmel also praised Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, for offering the accused killer forgiveness in a televised memorial service over the weekend.“Look, I never imagined I would be in a situation like this,” he later said. “I barely paid attention in school. One thing I did learn from from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Howard Stern, is that a government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American … Let’s stop letting these politicians tell us what they want and tell them what we want.”Jimmy Kimmel Live! will air as usual on Wednesday night, except on the 28 affiliates owned by Nexstar and the 38 owned by Sinclair. On Wednesday, Nexstar told Variety that it is “continuing to evaluate the status of ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ on our ABC-affiliated local television stations, and the show will be preempted while we do so. We are engaged in productive discussions with executives at The Walt Disney Company, with a focus on ensuring the program reflects and respects the diverse interests of the communities we serve.” More

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      Murdoch’s TikTok? Trump offers allies another lever of media control

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      Donald Trump revealed last week the US and China are close to inking a deal to let TikTok continue operating in the US. Details are not final, but should the agreement go through as has been reported, the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels may soon also steer the nation’s most influential social network. The arrangement would gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented.Here’s what we know. Under the known terms of the deal, which Trump declared has the tentative buy-in of Chinese president Xi Jinping, TikTok in the US would get a new group of US investors, led by the US software giant Oracle, which would license TikTok’s vaunted recommendation algorithm and take over its security.Among the other investors, Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday, are media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corporation. Trump said Michael Dell, the CEO of the computer maker Dell, would also be involved.TikTok would get a new seven-member board of directors, six of them Americans. It is a distinct possibility that Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance and Larry’s son, will occupy some of those seats.The MurdochsLachlan Murdoch, the 54-year-old son of 94-year-old Rupert, is executive chair and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News. The Murdoch scion took control of the company following a September legal settlement with his siblings, one of whom, James, reportedly no longer wants anything to do with his father’s conservative empire. The deal for TikTok will likely involve Fox’s parent company investing, rather than Rupert or Lachlan individually, CNN reported.“I hate to tell you this – a man named Lachlan is involved. You know who Lachlan is? That’s a very unusual name, Lachlan Murdoch,” Trump said. “Rupert is probably gonna be in the group, I think they’re gonna be in the group, a couple of others. Really great people. Very prominent people. And they’re also American patriots, they love this country, so I think they’re gonna do a really good job.”Asserting supervision of TikTok would offer the elder Murdoch a mulligan for his abortive ambitions in tech. News Corp purchased Myspace in 2005 for a then-whopping $580m. Three years later, it peaked, becoming the most-visited site in the US. However, the insurgent social network Facebook soon dethroned it, and Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth today amounts to 10 times that of Rupert Murdoch’s, per Bloomberg’s billionaires index.The EllisonsTrump seems to have a fondness for father-son pairs. At the other end of TikTok’s American boardroom may sit Larry and David Ellison, 81 and 42, the founders of Oracle and Skydance Media, respectively.The elder Ellison is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, an enterprise software and cloud-computing company worth nearly $900bn. Ellison himself, who holds roughly 40% of Oracle’s shares, briefly dethroned Elon Musk as the richest person in the world after the company reported superlative earnings earlier this month. He’s a longtime Silicon Valley fixture and Trump donor who hosted a fundraiser for the president at his southern California estate in 2020. He’s known for a jet-setting lifestyle of multiple mega-yachts and the deed to almost all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.The younger Ellison’s company has become an entertainment industry vacuum, sucking up Paramount – which operates CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, Paramount+ and the UK’s Channel 5 and which produces the Mission: Impossible franchise – in August. Hot off the heels of its corporate consummation, Paramount Skydance is now reportedly preparing a majority-cash offer to take over Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN, HBO, DC Comics, the Discovery Channel, HGTV and the Food Network, to name a few.In the months leading up to the merger, CBS News made a series of Trump-friendly moves like settling a lawsuit against 60 Minutes, appointing a Trump ally as an ombudsman and courting “anti-woke” former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss as a potential leader of a changed version of the channel. The moves may serve as a roadmap for how David Ellison would helm TikTok.How powerful would they become?The power centralized in the Murdoch and Ellison families would be enormous should the TikTok deal and David Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros Discovery go through. They would command media outlets that reach both young and old audiences, with high degrees of authority and influence. The only age groups perhaps immune to their sway would be gen X, so suspicious of their parents’ viewing habits, and millennials, just too old for TikTok.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWould this type of consolidation be legal? The Federal Communications Commission’s website is blunt in its anti-monopoly rules when it comes to broadcast television: “FCC rules effectively prohibit a merger between any two of the big four broadcast television networks: ABC, CBS, Fox [Broadcasting Company], and NBC.” The regulation does not pertain to Fox News Channel or CNN, as they require paid subscriptions to view.Still, the rule is instructive. What if the owners of the US’s most powerful cable channels also steer the nation’s most important social network? Would that violate monopoly laws?The answer may lie in a rule change the commission made eight years ago when it eliminated a prohibition on owning both a broadcast station and a daily newspaper in the same region. The reason: “the growth in the number and variety of sources of entertainment, news and information in the modern media marketplace”.If a person can have a town’s TV station and its newspaper, why can’t a billionaire take control of a social network used by hundreds of millions and the president’s favorite channel?Parsing the letter of the FCC’s rules likely does not matter as much as the current currency of high-level US government decisions: Trump’s favor. The president’s takeover of the FCC has already been incredibly successful, establishing a fiat over deals that allows him to pressure networks not under his allies’ control. The supreme court ruled earlier this week that Trump’s firing of the lone Democrat on the commission could stand. Though he denies it, head commissioner Brendan Carr seemed to play a leading role in Disney’s brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC’s airwaves with threats against the network.The landscape of American media is looking very red as Trump’s TikTok deal takes shape. The largest owner of local TV stations in the US, Nexstar, declared fealty to Trump with its decision to no longer air Kimmel’s show, as did local TV titan Sinclair. Now two of the nation’s marquee news networks, CBS and CNN, may follow Fox’s rightwing lead. Online, X has turned from a heterogenous feed into a conservative social network. TikTok may go the same way under its Maga-approved board.At the moment, the Murdochs and the Ellisons must be savoring Trump’s favor. More

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      in US Politics

      Texas Ice facility shooting: one dead and two injured, and ‘anti-Ice’ shell casings found

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      One detainee has been killed and two others injured in a shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas, officials said.Authorities have also confirmed that the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. NBC News, citing multiple senior law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation, reported that the suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Joshua Jahn.The Dallas police department said officers responded to a call at approximately 6.40am on Wednesday.“The preliminary investigation determined that a suspect opened fire at a government building from an adjacent building,” the police said in a statement. “Two people were transported to the hospital with gunshot wounds. One victim died at the scene. The suspect is deceased.”Department of Homeland Security officials previously said two detainees were killed, but later issued a corrected statement saying that the shooting killed only one detainee. It adds that two other detainees were shot and are in critical condition.“The shooter fired indiscriminately at the Ice building, including at a van in the sallyport where the victims were shot. Three detainees were shot,” the department said.One of the detainees in critical condition is a Mexican national, Mexico’s foreign ministry confirmed in a statement. The ministry said they had contacted the victim’s family to provide support and legal assistance. “The consulate is in ongoing communication with the authorities in charge of the investigation and is waiting for authorization to visit the hospitalized Mexican citizen,” it reads.At a news conference on Wednesday morning, Joe Rothrock, the head of the FBI field office in Dallas, said that “rounds that were found near the suspected shooter contain messages that are anti-Ice in nature”.One of the unspent shell casings recovered was engraved with the phrase “ANTI ICE”, according to a post from the FBI director, Kash Patel.Authorities said the FBI was investigating this incident as an act of targeted violence. They said they were not releasing the identities of any of the victims at this time, but confirmed that no members of law enforcement were injured during the attack.Trump wrote on social media that had been been briefed on the shooting, calling it “despicable” that the shell casings contained anti-Ice messaging. He immediately cast blame for the shooting on “radical left Democrats”, instructing them, in capital letters, to “stop this rhetoric against Ice”.“The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped,” Trump wrote. “ICE Officers, and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat. We have already declared ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization, and I will be signing an Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks.”There was no indication the shooter had any connection to any organizations, including antifa.At the news conference, the Republican senator Ted Cruz, who represents Texas, said “politically motivated violence is wrong”, adding that “this is the third shooting in Texas directed at Ice” or Customs and Border Protection.Parkland hospital in Dallas confirmed to the Associated Press that it had received two patients from the shooting. The hospital spokesperson did not have any details about their conditions.Earlier on Wednesday, Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, confirmed in a statement that the suspected shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and said details about the incident were “still emerging”, but confirmed that there were “multiple injuries and fatalities” at the Ice field office.“While we don’t know motive yet, we know that our Ice law enforcement is facing unprecedented violence against them,” Noem said. “It must stop.”Law enforcement officials told CNN that at least two of the victims were Ice detainees.Todd Lyons, the acting Ice director, told the network that the “scene is secure” and said three people were shot and taken to the hospital.An Ice spokesperson has also told NBC News that all three people shot were detainees.Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, said the agency was “fully engaged, in conjunction with our state and federal law enforcement partners, at the crime scene in Dallas”.JD Vance called the shooting an “obsessive attack on law enforcement” that “must stop”.“I’m praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families,” the vice-president wrote on X.Vance alleged the suspect was a “left-wing extremist”, which has not been corroborated by law enforcement. A motive was still unknown as of Wednesday afternoon.“There’s some evidence that we have that’s not yet public, but we know this person was politically motivated,” Vance said, without providing or describing the evidence. “They were politically motivated to go after law enforcement.”John Cornyn, another Republican senator who represents Texas, called the shooting “horrific”.“While law enforcement investigates, I am keeping everyone impacted in my prayers,” he said. “My staff have been in touch with federal & local officials in Dallas, and we will make sure all resources are brought to bear in the investigation.”Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, said in a statement that “Texas fully supports Ice”.“This assassination will NOT slow our arrest, detention, & deportation of illegal immigrants,” he said. “We will work with ICE & the Dallas Police Dept. to get to the bottom of the assassin’s motive.”During the news conference, Eric Johnson, the mayor of Dallas, urged residents to “be patient, remain calm, and let our law enforcement partners, and our police department, do their job”. 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