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      Will the public side with the protesters in LA? Here are some lessons from history | Musa al-Gharbi

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      On 6 June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) conducted aggressive raids in Los Angeles, sweeping up gainfully employed workers with no criminal record. This led to demonstrations outside the Los Angeles federal building. During these protests, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, was arrested alongside more than 100 others – leading to even larger demonstrations the next day.Donald Trump responded on 7 June by sending federal troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests without consulting Gavin Newsom, and, in fact, in defiance of the California governor’s wishes. This dramatic federal response, paired with increasingly aggressive tactics by local police, led to the protests growing larger and escalating in their intensity. They’ve begun spreading to other major cities, too.Cue the culture war.On the right, the response was predictable: the federal clampdown was largely praised. Hyperbolic narratives about the protests and the protesters were uncritically amplified and affirmed. On the left, the response was no less predictable. There is a constellation of academic and media personalities who breathlessly root for all protests to escalate into violent revolution while another faction claims to support all the causes in principle but somehow never encounters an actual protest movement that they outright support.For my part, as I watched Waymo cars burning as Mexican flags fluttered behind them, I couldn’t help but be reminded of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the documentary Sociology Is a Martial Art, he emphasized: “I don’t think it’s a problem that young people are burning cars. I want them to be able to burn cars for a purpose.”It is, indeed, possible for burning cars to serve a purpose. However, it matters immensely who is perceived to have lit the fuse.It’s uncomfortable to talk about, but all major successful social movements realized their goals with and through direct conflict. There’s never been a case where people just held hands and sang Kumbaya, provoking those in power to nod and declare, “I never thought of it that way,” and then voluntarily make difficult concessions without any threats or coercion needed. Attempts at persuasion are typically necessary for a movement’s success, but they’re rarely sufficient. Actual or anticipated violence, destruction and chaos also have their role to play.Civil rights leaders in the 1950s, for instance, went out of their way to provoke high-profile, violent and disproportionate responses from those who supported segregation. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr had an intuitive understanding of what empirical social science now affirms: what matters isn’t the presence or absence of violence but, rather, who gets blamed for any escalations that occur.The current anti-Ice protests have included clashes with police and occasional property damage. Melees, looting and destruction are perennially unpopular. Then again, so were civil rights-era bus boycotts, diner sit-ins and marches. In truth, the public rarely supports any form of social protest.Something similar holds for elite opinion-makers. In the civil rights era, as now, many who claimed to support social justice causes also described virtually any disruptive action taken in the service of those causes as counterproductive, whether it was violent or not. As I describe in my book, civil rights leaders across the board described these “supporters” as the primary stumbling block for achieving equality.The simple truth is that most stakeholders in society – elites and normies alike, and across ideological lines – would prefer to stick with a suboptimal status quo than to embrace disruption in the service of an uncertain future state. Due to this widespread impulse, most successful social movements are deeply unpopular until after their victory is apparent. Insofar as they notch successes, it is often in defiance of public opinion.For instance, protests on US campuses against Israel’s campaign of destruction in Gaza were deeply unpopular. However, for all their flaws and limitations, the demonstrations, and the broader cultural discussion around the protests, did get more people paying attention to what was happening in the Middle East. And as more people looked into Israel’s disastrous campaign in Gaza, American support plummeted. Among Democrats, independents and Republicans alike, sympathy for Israelis over Palestinians is significantly lower today than before 7 October 2023. These patterns are not just evident in the US but also across western Europe and beyond.The Palestinian author Omar el-Akkad notes that when atrocities become widely recognized, everyone belatedly claims to have always been against them – even if they actively facilitated or denied the crimes while they were being carried out. Successful social movements function the opposite way: once they succeed, everyone paints themselves as having always been for them, even if the movements in question were deeply unpopular at the time.Martin Luther King Jr, for instance, was widely vilified towards the end of his life. Today, he has a federal holiday named after him. The lesson? Contemporaneous public polls about demonstrations tell us very little about the impact they’ll ultimately have.So, how can we predict the likely impact of social movements?The best picture we have from empirical social science research is that conflict can help shift public opinion in favor of political causes, but it can also lead to blowback against those causes. The rule seems to be that whoever is perceived to have initiated violence loses: if the protesters are seen as sparking violence, citizens sour on the cause and support state crackdowns. If the government is seen as having provoked chaos through inept or overly aggressive action, the public grows more sympathetic to the protesters’ cause (even if they continue to hold negative opinions about the protesters and the protests themselves).The 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles are an instructive example. They arose after King was unjustly beaten by law enforcement and the state failed to hold the perpetrators to account. In public opinion, the government was held liable for these legitimate grievances and outrage. As a result, the subsequent unrest seemed to generate further sympathy for police reform (even though most Americans frowned on the unrest itself).skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStonewall was a literal riot. However, it was also widely understood that the conflict was, itself, a response to law enforcement raids on gay bars. Gay and trans people were being aggressively surveilled and harassed by the state, and began pushing back more forcefully for respect, privacy and autonomy. The government was the perceived aggressor, and this worked to the benefit of the cause. Hence, today, the Stonewall uprising is celebrated as a pivotal moment in civil rights history despite being characterized in a uniformly negative fashion at the time.This is not the way social movements always play out. If the protests come to be seen as being motivated primarily by animus, resentment or revenge (rather than positive or noble ideals), the public tends to grow more supportive of a crackdown against the movement. Likewise, if demonstrators seem pre-committed to violence, destruction and chaos, people who might otherwise be sympathetic to the cause tend to rapidly disassociate with the protesters and their stated objectives.The 6 January 2021 raid on the Capitol building, for instance, led to lower levels of affiliation with the GOP. Politicians who subsequently justified the insurrection performed especially poorly in the 2022 midterms (with negative spillover effects to Republican peers).The protests that followed George Floyd’s murder were a mixed bag: in areas where demonstrations did not spiral into chaos or violence, the protests increased support for many police reforms and, incidentally, the Democratic party. In contexts where violence, looting, crime increases and extremist claims were more prevalent – where protesters seemed more focused on condemning, punishing or razing society rather than fixing it – trends moved in the opposite direction.Yet, although the Floyd-era protests themselves had an ambivalent effect on public support for criminal justice reform, the outcome of Trump’s clampdown on the demonstrations was unambiguous: it led to a rapid erosion in GOP support among white Americans – likely costing Trump the 2020 election. Why? Because the president came off as an aggressor.Trump did not push for a crackdown reluctantly, after all other options were exhausted. He appeared to be hungry for conflict and eager to see the situation escalate. He seemed to relish norm violations and inflicting harm on his opponents. These perceptions were politically disastrous for him in 2020. They appear to be just as disastrous today.Right now, the public is split on whether the ongoing demonstrations in support of immigrants’ rights are peaceful. Yet, broadly, Americans disapprove of these protests, just as they disapprove of most others. Critically, however, most also disapprove of Trump’s decisions to deploy the national guard and the marines to Los Angeles. The federal agency at the heart of these protests, Ice, is not popular either. Americans broadly reject the agency’s tactics of conducting arrests in plain clothes, stuffing people in unmarked vehicles and wearing masks to shield their identities. The public also disagrees with deporting undocumented immigrants who were brought over as children, alongside policies that separate families, or actions that deny due process.Employers, meanwhile, have lobbied the White House to revise its policies, which seem to primarily target longstanding and gainfully employed workers rather than criminals or people free-riding on government benefits – to the detriment of core US industries.Even before the protests began, there were signs that Americans were souring on Trump’s draconian approach to immigration, and public support has declined rapidly since the protests started on 6 June.Whether the demonstrations ultimately lead to still more erosion of public support for Trump or continued declines in public support for immigration will likely depend less on whether the demonstrations continue to escalate than on whom the public ultimately blames for any escalation that occurs.At present, it’s not looking good for the White House.

      Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, is out now with Princeton University Press. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      America had open borders until 1924. Racism and corporate greed changed that | Daniel Mendiola

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      The US immigration system is a scam that dehumanizes people for profit. Communities across the country have had enough.The protests in Los Angeles have invited a long overdue conversation about the true nature of the US immigration system. While the immediate catalysts for the protests were ramped up Ice raids attempting to meet Donald Trump’s arbitrary deportation quotas, the protests spring from a deeper history.In reality, the protests reflect decades-long frustrations with an abusive immigration system designed to dehumanize immigrants, weaken workers and keep wealth flowing upward. Ice’s recent tactics were only the last straw.Excellent articles have shed light on why Los Angeles in particular, with generations of immigrant communities and a history of immigrant rights movements, has emerged as an epicenter of resistance. Whether immigrants themselves, or families, neighbors, coworkers, or friends of immigrants, people in these communities have long experienced the trauma of a system that renders people “illegal” just for doing basic things like getting a job. Similar statements could be made for other major sites of protest such as New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Denver and Houston.While much of the news coverage has turned toward the US president’s mobilization of the military and what that means for his growing authoritarian tendencies, this is only half the story. To fully understand what is at stake in the protests, we can’t lose sight of the thing that drove people to protest in the first place: a violently unfair immigration system that is an affront to us all.It is worth noting that this immigration system is not an original component of US governance. Whereas the first government under the US constitution formed in 1789, there were no federal immigration laws until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and even this law was limited in the sense that it banned a specific class of immigrants. The US did not have closed borders until the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national origins quotas across the board.The primary justifications for these early immigration laws were xenophobia, eugenics, and overt racism. By the 1990s, however, multinational corporations understood that closed borders – especially combined with free trade agreements freeing multinational companies to shop around for “cheap” workers, while at the same time constraining the options of workers to move around and look for better jobs – were a powerful weapon in their arsenal to squeeze ever more profit out of global supply chains. While cleverly hidden behind discourses of “security” and “sovereignty,” our immigration system is actually a scam rigged to guarantee an upward flow of wealth at the cost of human rights.The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) illustrates this dynamic. Signed in 1992, Nafta created a free trade zone among Mexico, Canada and the US, specifically making it easier for goods, capital and corporations to move freely while conspicuously ignoring the movement of workers. Far from an oversight, as the scholar Bill Ong Hing has written, this was the whole point of the agreement.While no US labor unions or other human rights representatives had a seat at the table, the US advisory committee for trade and negotiations – composed almost entirely of representatives of multinational corporations – led the negotiations, ensuring that the agreement followed corporate interests. The drafters wanted easier access to cheaper Mexican labor, but they understood that if Mexicans had the same rights as companies to cross borders in search of better opportunities, then the “invisible hand” of supply and demand might make this labor less cheap. Accordingly, immigration restrictions helped to rig the game. In line with these interests, the Clinton administration, in power when the agreement took effect in 1994, not only went along with the plan to leave immigrants out of the deal, but also doubled down on closed borders with harsh new measures to restrict immigration through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996.Ultimately, Nafta and the IIRIRA worked hand-in-hand to trap Mexican workers and give artificial negotiating advantages to multinational corporations. The mechanism made sure that Mexicans would have to either stay put on their side of the border and tolerate whatever working conditions were available, or live without legal status if they did “vote with their feet” to seek better opportunities in the US. In either case, they were far more vulnerable to exploitation. Unsurprisingly, this harmed workers all around, especially Mexicans, leading to stagnant wages, harsh working conditions, and irregular migration that forced people into an exploitative informal economy, even as productivity and corporate profits soared.Significantly, Nafta was not an isolated case, but rather an embodiment of how the US immigration system enshrines this major power imbalance between labor and capital. In fact, the same Clinton administration and private sector advisory committee that oversaw the implementation Nafta also played a key role in creating the World Trade Organization in 1995 following similar principles. Today, multinational corporations continue to move freely around the world, while people seeking a better life continue to face restrictive borders enforced by state violence.At the same time, we as taxpayers pay increasingly absurd sums of money for the violent border security measures that keep this system in place. The American Immigration Council has calculated that since 1994, the annual budget for the US Border Patrol has risen from $400m dollars to more than $7bn in 2024 – an increase of over 700% even when factoring in inflation. They further estimate that since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent more than $400bn dollars on the various agencies that carry out immigration enforcement.Under the current Trump administration, these numbers are set to soar even further. In the same “big, beautiful” spending bill that is already facing backlash for slashing public programs while offering enormous tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, a massive increase in spending for Trump’s signature deportation plan is included. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that this will add $168bn to the deficit over the next five years – already an extreme amount – though the Cato Institute has noted that the CBO calculation left out key variables. In fact, Cato finds that the number could actually be closer to $1tn.In short, our immigration system is a massive grift. It divides communities, separates families, hurts workers, and subjects people to state violence for doing normal things like working at an Italian restaurant or going to church on Mother’s Day. And we as taxpayers subsidize the companies profiting on this abusive system.As I have previously written, the Trump administration has distinguished itself from previous governments by intentionally targeting legal immigrants. However, as protesters flood the streets with signs saying “No One is Illegal,” the deeper significance of this protest movement becomes clear. The message is that someone’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shouldn’t depend on their immigration status. And it certainly shouldn’t depend on the whims of multinational corporations who have essentially coopted violent border enforcement for their own profits.As a final thought, I think people are also tired of all the gaslighting. Despite the barrage of official rhetoric claiming that tough immigration measures are for our own good – that they make our communities safer, that they protect jobs, that we shouldn’t feel bad because immigrants don’t deserve to be treated as we would want to be treated ourselves – we know from both academic analysis and our lived experiences that these are all vicious lies, and the policies that spring from these lies have deadly consequences for real human beings. For me, the recent protests demonstrate that communities across the country are standing up to reject these lies.As I think about the significance of this movement, I am reminded of a passage from Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s 2020 book The Undocumented Americans. Reflecting on the power of storytelling as a counterweight to the deluge of dehumanizing assaults immigrants face on a daily basis, she concludes: “What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander, we reclaim our dead?”People are protesting because they are fed up. And they are right to be.

      Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More

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      Fired ABC News journalist stands by his post criticizing Trump and adviser

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      A journalist who lost his job at ABC News after describing top White House aide Stephen Miller as someone “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” has said he published that remark on social media because he felt it was “true”.“It was something that was in my heart and mind,” the network’s former senior national correspondent Terry Moran said Monday on The Bulwark political podcast. “And I would say I used very strong language deliberately.”Moran’s comments to Bulwark host Tim Miller about standing by his remarks came a little more than a week after he wrote on X that Stephen Miller – the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies – “eats his hate”.“His hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” Moran’s post read, in part. He added that the president “is a world-class hater. But his hatred [is] only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification”.Moran subsequently deleted the post, which had been published shortly after midnight on 8 June. ABC News initially suspended Moran pending an investigation, citing a policy against “subjective attacks on others”. But then the network announced it would not be renewing his employment contract, effectively dismissing him.Among the polarizing reactions which stemmed from Moran’s deleted post was one from Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, which read: “The most important fact about Terry’s full meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America. For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”But Moran on Monday maintained that he is “a proud centrist” who opposes “the viciousness and the intolerance that you feel when we argue politics”.Tim Miller asked Moran whether he was drunk at the time of the post. Moran replied that it had actually been “a normal family night” that culminated with him putting his children to bed before he wrote out his thoughts about Stephen Miller.“I typed it out and I looked at it and I thought ‘that’s true’,” said Moran, who had been at ABC since 1997. “And I hit send.“I thought that’s a description of the public man that I’m describing.”Some of Trump’s most high-profile allies took verbal aim at Moran before his departure from ABC News was announced. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared on Fox News and said Moran’s post was “unacceptable and unhinged”, and JD Vance said it was a “vile smear”.Nearly six months earlier, ABC News had agreed to pay $15m to a Trump presidential foundation or museum to settle a defamation case that he brought after the network’s anchor George Stephanopoulos incorrectly asserted that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit filed by columnist E Jean Carroll. Trump had actually been found liable for sexually abusing Carroll.Moran by Monday had joined the Substack publishing platform as an independent journalist. He told Tim Miller that he was hoping to interview members of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio.Members of that community were politically villainized after Trump boosted debunked stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets ahead of his victory in November’s presidential election.Moran alluded to how the vast majority of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were there legally through a temporary protected status that had been allocated to them due to violent unrest in their home country.They generally arrived in Springfield to work in local produce packaging and machining factories whose owners were experiencing a labor shortage after the Covid-19 pandemic. And many are facing the prospect of being forced to leave the US by 3 August after the Trump administration decided to end legal visa programs for Haitians such as humanitarian parole and temporary protected status.“The town had come to depend on them,” Moran said. “That town was falling flat and now had risen.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: Axing Russia from G8 was a mistake, says Trump before leaving summit early

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      Donald Trump has told G7 leaders gathered for its summit in Canada that removing Russia from the former G8 was a mistake, and is lobbying for the country to be readmitted. Russia was thrown out of the group after it invaded Crimea in 2014.Trump’s defence of Russian leader Vladimir Putin came a day before he was scheduled to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the fringes of the summit.However, that meeting appears unlikely to go ahead after the White House said in a statement that the US president was leaving the summit early due to ongoing developments in the Middle East.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump repeats call for Russia to be readmitted to G7Donald Trump has displayed his disdain for the collective western values supposedly championed by the G7 group of industrialised countries by again demanding that Russia be readmitted to the group. He also said the war in Ukraine would not have happened if Moscow had been kept in the club. Trump also announced he is leaving the G7 to return to Washington citing the conflict between Israel and Iran.Read the full storyIce agents detain US citizen as LA immigration raids continue: ‘It’s racial profiling’US immigration raids continued to target southern California communities in recent days, including at a popular flea market and in a Los Angeles suburb where US citizens were detained.Read the full storyTrump promises expanded immigration crackdown after protestsDonald Trump has promised an expanded immigration crackdown in several large Democratic-led cities as apparent vengeance for “No Kings” protests against his administration on Saturday that drew millions of people – despite questions over whether the agency in charge of the effort is set to run out of money.Separately, a prominent Spanish-language journalist in metro Atlanta who frequently covers Immigration and customs enforcement raids, will be turned over to Ice detention after being arrested by local police while covering the “No Kings” protests.Read the full storyTrump administration notches first big win in assault on higher educationThe Trump administration scored its most significant legal victory in its sweeping effort to reshape American higher education when a federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by faculty groups over the government’s cuts to Columbia University’s federal funding.Read the full storyDemocratic senator proposes curbing Trump’s war powers amid Israel-Iran conflictAs Iran and Israel exchange missile attacks for a fourth day, Democrats in Washington are moving swiftly to reassert congressional authority over US military engagement in the region amid fears of American involvement in a broader conflict.Read the full storySuspect in lawmaker killing visited other legislators’ homesA man accused of dressing up as a police officer and shooting two Minnesota state lawmakers in their homes – killing one and her husband – also showed up at the houses of two other legislators the same night intending to assassinate them too, authorities revealed on Monday.Read the full storyTrump Organization unveils $499 gold phoneDonald Trump has launched a mobile phone service and $499 gold smartphone, the latest monetization of his presidency by a family business empire now run by his sons. The Trump Organization unveiled Trump Mobile with a $47.45 monthly plan – both the service name and price referencing Trump as the 47th president.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration’s termination of more than $1bn in research grants at the National Institutes of Health was “void and illegal”.

      Jane Goodall chimpanzee conservation project in Tanzania hit by USAID cut
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 15 June 2025. More

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      Trump administration notches first big win in assault on higher education

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      The Trump administration scored its most significant legal victory in its sweeping effort to reshape American higher education when a federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by faculty groups over the government’s cuts to Columbia University’s federal funding.The lawsuit concerned the Trump administration’s cuts to $400m worth of federal funding to Columbia on the grounds it tolerated antisemitism during pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Columbia largely accepted the government’s terms for restoring funding – in an agreement widely panned as a capitulation of its own academic freedom – several days before the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) sued the Trump administration over the cuts.The judge in the case, Mary Kay Vyskocil of the southern district of New York, ruled that the faculty unions had no “standing” to bring the suit and had not clearly indicated how the administration had broken the law.“It is not the role of a district court judge to direct the policies of the Executive Branch first and ask questions later,” the judge, a Trump appointee, wrote in her 30-page ruling. “Plaintiffs have not established their standing to litigate this case, let alone any violation of any law.” She seemed to accept the government’s prerogative to withhold funding and its argument that Columbia had enabled antisemitism to fester on campus. She also noted that Columbia had remained “conspicuously absent” from the case.The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment. That funding has not yet been restored though the education secretary Linda McMahon recently said that Columbia had “made great progress” and that the administration was considering a consent decree with the university.The administration has also cut billions in funding to several other universities, warning dozens more that it is investigating them over alleged antisemitism on campuses. So far, Harvard, which has lost more than $3bn in federal funding, is the only university to sue the administration in two separate lawsuits, one over funding cuts and another against the administration’s ban on Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. On Monday, a federal judge in Massachusetts extended a temporary block on the administration’s order concerning Harvard’s foreign students.The AAUP has filed three other lawsuits against the Trump administration – over its ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the attempted deportation of pro-Palestinian students and funding cuts at Harvard. The group has vowed to fight on.“This is a disappointing ruling, but by no means the end of the fight,” Todd Wolfson, the AAUP president said. “The Trump administration’s threats and coercion at Columbia University are part of an authoritarian agenda that extends far beyond Columbia. Ultimately, lifesaving research, basic civil liberties and higher education in communities across the country are all on the line. Faculty, students, and the American public will not stand for it. We will continue to fight back.”Protect Democracy, the group representing the AAUP and AFT said they would appeal Monday’s ruling and vowed to “continue to fight to stop the administration from using public funding as a cudgel to consolidate power over higher education”, they wrote in a statement.“This is a deeply problematic decision that ignores what this is all about – a government attempt to punish a university over student protests that galvanized a national movement in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” said Radhika Sainath, senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal, a group advocating for pro-Palestinian voices on US campuses which had filed a brief in support of the AAUP’s lawsuit.“The court uncritically takes the government’s line for granted, that speech activity critical of Israel is inherently anti-Jewish – though Jewish students and professors make up a large percentage of those speaking up for Palestinian human rights.” More

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      Trump and other Republicans mock Democrats after Minnesota lawmaker killings

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      Utah senator Mike Lee sounded like a lot of other Republican politicians after the fatal shootings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota this weekend.“These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America. Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families,” he wrote on Twitter/X.That was from his official account. On his personal X account, he posted a series of memes concerning the attacks that left former Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark dead, and state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette seriously injured.“This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee posted, along with a photo of the alleged gunman, who was arrested on Sunday. He followed that up by posting the photo and writing “Nightmare on Waltz Street”, an apparent misspelling of Tim Walz, the state’s Democratic governor who became nationally known last year as Kamala Harris’s running mate.Such was the split screen that played out among Republicans after the Saturday morning shootings, which were the latest in a wave of political violence across the United States that has most recently seen two assassination attempts targeting Donald Trump as he campaigned for president, a flamethrower attack on a rally for Israeli hostages in Colorado and a slew of threats targeting judges who have ruled against the US president.While many in the GOP condemned the attacks in Minnesota, others have used it as an opportunity to poke fun at their Democratic opponents, or suggest that they somehow instigated the violence. Experts warn it may be the latter statements that reach the bigger audience.“I think there’s no question that these messages are representative of the modern GOP more so than any stock thoughts and prayers tweet that a staffer puts up,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.Democrats have been unequivocal in condemning the shootings, as have Congress’s top Republicans. “Such horrific political violence has no place in our society, and every leader must unequivocally condemn it,” said House speaker, Mike Johnson. Senate majority leader, John Thune, said he was “horrified at the events unfolding in Minnesota” and that “political violence has no place in our nation”.Minnesota’s Republican party condemned the shooting, as did the state’s entire congressional delegation.But when it comes to Trump and his most vociferous allies on social media, the message is more mixed. Trump initially condemned the attacks, saying on Saturday: “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. God Bless the great people of Minnesota, a truly great place!”But the following day, he struck a different tone, telling ABC News that the shooting was “a terrible thing” but calling Walz “a terrible governor” and “a grossly incompetent person”. “I may call him, I may call other people too,” he added. On Monday afternoon, Walz’s office said Trump had not called.Meanwhile, on X, prominent rightwing figures were quick to promote conspiracy theories about what happened. Elon Musk, the erstwhile Trump sidekick who runs Tesla, shared a tweet from a pro-Trump account that read, in part: “The left has become a full blown domestic terrorist organization.”“The far left is murderously violent” Musk wrote in his reply, which Lee shared, adding: “Fact check: TRUE”.Laura Loomer, the rightwing extremist who is said to have played a role in encouraging Trump to fire national security officials, alleged the suspect had ties to the “No Kings” protests that took place nationwide on Saturday, and that Walz knew him.The spread of outlandish falsehoods and conspiracy theories on social media has been a hallmark of the atmosphere Trump has brought to US politics over the past decade, and Lewis believes the country is now at a point where such fabrications have more prominence than politicians’ carefully written statements.“The real problem now is that nothing matters, and I think that has been realized by the mainstream right in this country. There are no consequences for peddling disinformation or conspiracies,” he said.Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, said that the United States had entered an era of “violent populism”, and if Democrats and Republicans want to stop it, they need to issue joint statements speaking out against atrocities like what happened in Minnesota.“You’ve got to start having some agreement here on negotiating these rules of the road, so to speak, because if each side continues to simply only accept unconditional surrender by the other, well, then just like in Ukraine, you’re not going to end this thing very, very soon, and things will just escalate,” Pape said. More

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      Trump promises expanded immigration crackdown after ‘No Kings’ protests

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      Donald Trump has promised an expanded immigration crackdown in several large Democratic-led cities as apparent vengeance for “No Kings” protests against his administration on Saturday that drew millions of people – despite questions over whether the agency in charge of the effort is set to run out of money.In new reporting on Monday, Axios claimed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) was $1bn over budget and set to run out of money in the next one to three months.The outlet noted that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” directed tens of billions of dollars to Ice over the next five years and suggested Trump would direct other government funds to the agency if the bill failed to pass Congress.Trump raised the specter of an expanded immigration crackdown in a lengthy Sunday night post to his Truth Social network, alleging without evidence that the cities had become the “core of the Democratic power center” by using “illegal aliens to expand their voter base”.Non-citizens are not permitted to vote in US elections – and there is no widespread evidence of them ever having done so.“ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” he wrote.“We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”The California city has become a flashpoint for protests against Ice raids, with Trump sending in national guard troops and US marines in an unprecedented show of force. On Saturday, it hosted one of the largest No Kings demonstrations in the country, with an estimated 200,000 in attendance, according to organisers.Trump’s stance on immigration has fluctuated wildly in recent days. Last week, his administration ordered Ice to stop workplace immigration enforcement actions unless related to criminal investigations, in the face of growing public backlash to raids perceived to harm industries with a significant proportion of immigrant labor, such as farming and tourism.“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social, promising that “changes are coming”.Sunday’s post, however, appeared to reverse his position again. His choice to identify only Democratic-run cities with large immigrant populations, and omit others controlled by, or leaning Republican, was notable.His use of the far-right buzzword “remigration” to describe his administration’s deportation agenda is also seen as deliberate.“Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States,” he wrote.Trump’s statement followed Saturday’s military parade in Washington DC, which took place ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US army – but which critics said was hijacked by the president on his 79th birthday as a celebration of himself.One spectator summed up the general sentiment of the parade: “just kind of … lame”.The president was already under pressure for politicizing the military, and his role as commander-in-chief, after his appearance last Tuesday at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at an event during which a pop-up shop sold Trump merchandise to active-duty soldiers.He shredded decades of non-partisan traditions at military events by tearing into Democratic political opponents in California, including the governor, Gavin Newsom, and the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, and showing that the situation there was dominating his thoughts.“They’re incompetent, and they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists,” he said.“They’re engaged in this willful attempt to nullify federal law and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders.”Trump’s Sunday order to Ice, and partners including the homeland security department, to step up operations comes as his immigration adviser, White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has called for a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day.Analyst Chuck Todd, former host of NBC’s Meet the Press, said Trump was “openly admitting that he’s politicizing law enforcement”.In a post to X, Todd wrote: “This will not help Ice’s image because he’s asking them to perform a political task. Throw in the decision to shield the red states from law enforcement and he’s clearly hoping to provoke an angry response.” More

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      ‘This is the looting of America’: Trump and Co’s extraordinary conflicts of interest in his second term

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      The South Lawn of the White House had never seen anything like it. The president of the United States was posing for the world’s media against a backdrop of five different models of Tesla, peddling the electric vehicles with the alacrity of a salesman on commission.“I love the product, it’s beautiful,” Donald Trump said as he sank into the driver’s seat of a scarlet Model Y. With the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, beside him, he went on to enlighten the American people that some Tesla models retail for as little as $299 a month, “which is pretty low”.That same day, within hours of the White House’s makeover into a Tesla showroom, the New York Times revealed that Musk had decided to invest $100m in political groups working for Trump. The massive injection of capital would enhance the nearly $300m Musk had already spent getting Trump elected.A week after the commercial on the South Lawn, on 19 March, Trump’s commerce secretary, the billionaire investment banker Howard Lutnick, went on Fox News and exhorted viewers to “buy Tesla”. “Who wouldn’t invest in Elon Musk’s stock?” he gushed. “He is probably the best person to bet on I’ve ever met.”At the time Lutnick made those remarks, he had yet to divest himself from Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm he had led for 35 years. He was talking up stock in which he still had a vested interest – Cantor held $300m in Tesla shares, a stake that has since soared to $555m. And the commerce secretary was also bigging up his friend Musk, whose SpaceX and Starlink businesses are regulated by the commerce department that Lutnick now controlled.Eight days in March, three friendly billionaires, one of them the world’s most powerful person, another the world’s richest person. Doing what friends do: scratching each other’s backs. Even though Musk later fell out with Trump – in a shocking social media spat that roiled US politics – the imagery remains powerful and highly symbolic of Trump’s second term in the White House.View image in fullscreenBetween them they committed in those eight days acts that, had they occurred during any previous presidency – including Trump’s own first administration – would have provoked howls of protest concerning quid pro quo. Yet those eight days represent just a tiny slice of the graft and possible misconduct that is unfolding.The gift by the Qatari government of a $400m luxury jetliner to be repurposed as Air Force One has become the paradigm of the blitz of ethical dilemmas unleashed by Trump. The Pentagon last month accepted possession of the plane, which will be transferred to Trump’s presidential library once he leaves office.That Trump doggedly accepted the Qatari “palace in the sky” despite widespread condemnation speaks volumes about how indomitable he feels at this moment. He has shrugged aside the rebukes even of devoted Trump supporters, including the rightwing commentator Ben Shapiro, who bridled at the transfer’s grubby appearance, calling it “skeezy stuff”.It also shows Trump’s disdain for the US constitution, given the emoluments clause’s clear prohibition. Presidents are not allowed to accept high-value gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent.Yet the luxury jumbo jet is also just the thinnest edge of a very fat wedge. There has been so much more that has flown, if not under the radar, then partially obscured from sight amid the ethical blizzard of corruption and influence.There have been multimillion-dollar TV packages, real estate deals in Arab petrostates, dinners with the president going for $5m a pop, plum job offers for contributors to Trump’s inaugural fund, cryptocurrency ventures attracting lucre from secret foreign investors, “drill, baby, drill” enticements for oil and energy donations – the list goes on, and on … and on.View image in fullscreenTrump and his team of billionaires have led the US on a dizzying journey into the moral twilight that has left public sector watchdogs struggling to keep up. Which is precisely the intention, said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis.“They have mastered the technique of flooding the zone – doing so much so fast that they are overwhelming the ability of ethics groups and institutions to respond.”Chris Murphy, the Democratic US senator from Connecticut, has delivered two long speeches on the floor of his chamber in which he has itemised Trump and Co’s most controversial transactions. The record already stretches to scores of entries, chronicling what Murphy calls Trump’s “efforts to steal from the American people to enrich himself and his friends”.In an interview with the Guardian, the senator said that Trump’s was a “pay-for-play administration. That’s the underlying theme. You pay Donald Trump money, he does favors for you. That’s old-fashioned corruption.”Clark’s analysis is even more pointed. “People talk about ‘guardrails’ and ‘norms’ and ‘conflict of interest’, which is all very relevant,” she said. “But this is theft and destruction. This is the looting of America.”Trump signaled that he would be a president like no other at the start of his first term, when he became the only occupant of the Oval Office in modern times to refuse to divest his assets by putting them into a blind trust. Though presidents are not bound by conflict of interest laws applying to other elected officials, the norm has been for incumbents to set themselves high standards, the archetype being Jimmy Carter’s sale of his peanut farm.Trump, by contrast, put his assets in a trust that remained under the control of his family, with him as its sole beneficiary. He incurred numerous accusations of first-term conflicts of interest, as foreign officials from 20 countries descended on his hotels, while Secret Service agents in Trump’s security detail were made to pay premium rates, pouring at least $10m into his bank account.Such unprecedented disregard for time-honored ethical boundaries was shocking at the time. Now it looks merely quaint.“In the first Trump administration there were ethical lapses,” said Danielle Caputo, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center watchdog organization. “With this new administration, there’s not just a disregard for ethics rules, there’s contempt.”The conversion of political power into cash began even before Trump re-entered the White House. Weeks before the inauguration, Melania Trump sealed a $40m deal with Jeff Bezos for an Amazon Prime “behind-the-scenes” documentary on her life.Trump banked millions of dollars of his own by leveraging his status as president-elect to browbeat tech companies. He settled disputes over the freezing of his then Twitter and Facebook accounts in the wake of the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, prising $10m out of his friend Musk, and $25m from Meta.View image in fullscreenTrump used the months leading up to November’s election to test-run what, as Murphy noted, has become a theme of his second presidency – pay-to-play. He invited oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and, as the Washington Post revealed, offered them a “deal” in which they would donate $1bn to his campaign and in return he would tear up profit-limiting environmental regulations once he was back in the White House.He kept his promise: on day one of his new administration he discharged a barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions.Donors to his record-breaking $239m inaugural fund have also found Trump to be a grateful benefactor. Warren Stephens, an investment banker who gave $4m, was rewarded with the role of US ambassador to the UK; Jared Issacman, a billionaire pilot and close associate of Musk’s, gave $2m to the fund and was tapped to lead Nasa (he was abruptly yanked from the appointment last month after he was reportedly discovered to have been been donating to Democrats).The pattern has continued into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Three months into the administration, Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr, launched an elite private members’ club named Executive Branch which commands a sign-in fee of a cool $500,000.Its attraction? Access to cabinet members and top Trump advisers.Not to be outdone by his own son, Trump himself has followed the same playbook at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In March, he began inviting business leaders to dine with him in group settings at $1m a seat.Prefer something more intimate? No problem. One-on-one meetings are also available, yours for $5m.For a seasoned observer such as Norman Eisen of the Brookings Institution, the sheer mass of problematic transactions puts the administration beyond the pale. “It’s over the line, unlawful, corrupt and unethical. It is un-American.”Eisen has experience dealing with knotty ethical issues. He was special counsel for ethics during Barack Obama’s first year in the White House.Obama notes in his autobiography, A Promised Land, that Eisen earned himself the title of Dr No, so strict was his approach to conflicts of interest. He would tell White House officials hoping to attend outside events that “if it sounds fun, you can’t go”.View image in fullscreenEisen told the Guardian that he prevented Obama from refinancing his family home in Chicago. “He was regulating the banking industry at the time, in the midst of the Great Recession.”The contrast between such almost pedantic strictures and the free-for-all in today’s White House astonishes and dismays Eisen. “If my somewhat tongue in cheek motto for Obama was ‘If it’s fun, you can’t do it,’ then the motto of the Trump White House seems to be ‘If you can make a buck, grab it.’”Exhibit one of such conduct, Eisen suggests, is the Trump family’s dive into the world of crypto. Shortly before the inauguration, they launched personal lines of meme coins, $Trump and $Melania.Then they issued a new cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, known as a stablecoin. Taken together, Eisen believes that the two crypto ventures from the family of a sitting president amount to “one of the worst and most shocking conflicts of interest in our nation’s history”.Trump bragged on the campaign trail that he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet”. He was more circumspect in front of his faithful followers about the big plans his sons were simultaneously developing to cash in on the currency.Since his election victory, Trump has used his presidential status and executive power to boost not only the general standing of crypto but also his personal stake within it. One of his early executive orders created a “strategic bitcoin reserve” designed to bolster the industry.At the same time, he eviscerated basic regulatory controls, halted federal crypto-related lawsuits and disbanded a taskforce trained to hunt down crypto criminals. “We have a president whose net worth now includes very substantial investments in cryptocurrency who at the same time is loosening regulations on the crypto industry,” Eisen said.The unrivalled magnetism of the US presidency helped Trump to blast his nascent meme coin, a currency almost entirely reliant on hype, into the stratosphere. It rocketed from $6.50 on inauguration day to a peak of $73.Then, when it predictably plummeted back down to below $10, he used his presidential allure brazenly once again to boost the coin. This time he announced a “private intimate dinner” for the top 220 $Trump investors, followed by an exclusive White House tour for the top 25.The ensuing scramble for a seat at the presidential dining table reportedly earned the Trump family $148m.The $Trump meme coin is an ethics regulator’s waking nightmare. There is little transparency around who is channelling money into it, and even less around the potentially nefarious motives of investors.The same might be said about the Trumps’ other big crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which was launched last September by Trump’s sons. The president himself is listed by the company as its “chief crypto advocate”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFederal law sets tight rules against foreign parties donating to presidential campaign or inaugural funds. Yet there is nothing to prevent outside interests with connections to foreign governments engaging with World Liberty and its new product, the USD1 stablecoin.One of its biggest backers is the Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun (best known for paying $6.2m at a New York art sale for a banana taped to a wall, then eating it). Before the inauguration, Sun pumped $75m into World Liberty. A few weeks later, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused an investigation into him for alleged securities fraud.View image in fullscreenUSD1 is currently valued at $2.3bn, the lion’s share of which comes from a $2bn transaction by MGX, a firm which happens to be chaired by the intelligence chief of the United Arab Emirates. That a company with ties to the government of an Arab petrostate should be able to make such a giant investment in a crypto venture generating profit for the sitting US president and his family goes against the grain of decades of robust accountability work countering conflicts of interest.“We’ve been pretty successful in this country rooting out corruption, or at least pushing it into the shadows,” Murphy, the US senator, told the Guardian. “Now it happens out in the open.”And it doesn’t stop there. Over the past few months Trump’s second son, Eric, has been frenetically traveling the globe in search of real estate deals, throwing to the winds the pledge Trump made in his first administration to eschew any foreign business transactions.In his second administration, Trump has made no such promise. All he has conceded this time, in a document released by his lawyers in January, is that the Trump Organization will avoid cutting business deals with foreign governments.Even that boundary has been pushed close to breaking point. Eric Trump sealed his first deal since Trump re-entered the White House in April.It involves the construction of the Trump International Golf Club & Villas outside the Qatari capital, Doha, as part of a $5bn luxury beachside resort. The company managing the development, Qatari Diar, is owned by the sovereign wealth fund of the Qatari government.Two weeks after the Trump Organization announced the deal, the president himself arrived in Doha as part of his three-country tour of the Middle East. He declared the trip a huge success, having drummed up trillions of dollars of business and investments for the US.The Guardian invited the White House to comment on complaints that the president has blurred his public duties with his family’s personal profit-making activities to a degree never before seen in the US. A White House spokesperson replied with a statement which they asked us to print in its entirety, so here goes:“There are no conflicts of interest. President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. It is shameful that the Guardian is ignoring the GOOD deals President Trump has secured for the American people, not for himself, to push a false narrative. President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”The argument that there is no conflict of interest because Trump’s business is handled by his children, specifically his sons – Don Jr leading on crypto and his social media empire, Eric on real estate – is an interesting one. Sons seem to be de rigueur, to the extent that members of Trump’s inner circle who lack them might feel the need to borrow one.View image in fullscreenTake other key figures in Trump’s cabinet, which is packed with so many banking and energy billionaires that it ranks as the richest presidential cabinet in modern history. Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who has a personal fortune of about $2.2bn, has been involved in various accusations of conflict of interest since he encouraged Fox News viewers to “buy Tesla”.At the start of this year Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm Lutnick led for almost four decades, increased its investment in Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin in the world. Cantor’s stake rose by several hundred million dollars to $1.3bn, research by the watchdog Accountable.US has found.At the same time, Lutnick was actively helping Trump create his strategic bitcoin reserve, a move that greatly strengthened the cryptocurrency.Last month, Lutnick divested himself of his Cantor stake, but he did so by transferring his ownership to his two sons. Cantor is now controlled by Brandon Lutnick, 27, and Kyle Lutnick, 28.Or take Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine-skeptic health secretary. Under intense pressure from Democratic senators, he agreed to divest his 10% stake in any payout from an ongoing lawsuit in which he is engaged against Merck over its HPV vaccine, Gardasil.Government officials are not allowed under federal law to participate personally in official matters in which they have a financial interest. So what did Kennedy do? He transferred his stake in the case to one of his adult sons.And then there’s Mehmet Oz, the multimillionaire physician better known by his TV name, Dr Oz, whom Trump put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. As the Washington Post has reported, Oz co-founded a health benefits company, ZorroRX, that helps hospitals save on prescription drugs.This would have been an indisputable conflict of interest, because in his job as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Oz wields huge sway over hospital drug policies, and thus ZorroRX profits. Since taking up the position Oz, whose wealth is put at up to $300m, has divested himself of some of his investment portfolio and is no longer mentioned on ZorroRX’s website.View image in fullscreenHis fellow co-founder of ZorroRX, however, is still listed as the firm’s head of medical affairs. That’s his son, Oliver Oz.Under federal conflict of interest law, there is no prohibition on adult children managing the interests of parents who hold public office. Yet the spirit of the law does force us to reflect on why so many Trump administration leaders are so fond of handing sensitive money-making portfolios to their sons.“By giving over to your son, you are immediately raising questions about how separate you are going to be from the success of this business,” said Caputo of the Campaign Legal Center. “Will you be focused on what’s best for the public, or will you be guided in your decision-making by what would most benefit your family?”In the last analysis, what matters most perhaps about the financial dealings of the Trump administration is what impact they are having on the American people. In particular, what is it doing to the 77 million voters who put their trust in Trump and sent him back to the Oval Office?Trump returned to the White House partly on his promise to working-class Americans that he would “drain the swamp”, liberating Washington from the bloodsucking of special interests. Yet a review by the Campaign Legal Center found that Trump nominated at least 21 former lobbyists to top positions in his new administration, many of whom are now regulating the very industries on whose behalf they recently advocated.Eight of them, the Campaign Legal Center concluded, would have been banned or restricted in their roles under all previous modern presidencies, including Trump’s own first administration.They include Pam Bondi, the US attorney general. She approved the gift of the Qatari luxury jetliner as “legally permissible”, having herself worked as a lobbyist for Qatar.Trump’s other great pledge was that he would put the wellbeing of “forgotten” working people before that of the vested elites. His appeal was pitched at the millions of rural and working-class Americans who have languished from mounting income inequality, the decline of manufacturing jobs in the globalised economy, and what he claimed was the negative effects of millions of undocumented immigrants.Evan Feinman has witnessed personally and up close how this promise has fared in Trump 2.0. For the past three years, Feinman was busy leading a $42.5bn program created by Congress to bring affordable high-speed internet to every American home and business that needed it.The project was vast and ambitious, on a par with the rural electrification drive that transformed the heartlands of America in the 1930s. Located within the US commerce department, its success is critical to the future prosperity of millions of Americans, especially those in hard-bitten rural areas of the sort that solidly backed Trump in the last election.Studies have shown that giving families access to the internet improves the grades of school students, increases college enrolment and reduces the likelihood of households falling into debt. It also helps older Americans stay in their own homes and avoid residential care.By the inauguration, the broadband project was well under way, with several states only weeks away from breaking ground and laying the cables. Then Lutnick took over the reins of the commerce department.Within a days of his confirmation, Lutnick met with senior managers and informed them he wanted to scale back on the use of fibre optic and switch to satellite. According to an account of the meeting that was given to Feinman by someone present, Lutnick specifically inquired after his friend Musk, the CEO of Starlink, which provides internet services through low-Earth orbit satellites.View image in fullscreenDays after that, Feinman was told he was being let go. His contract was up for renewal, and it wasn’t being extended.“I was dismayed,” Feinman told the Guardian, insisting that his distress was not so much related to his own dismissal but out of concern for the Americans who would be harmed by the shift. By his reckoning, satellite internet would not only be slower than broadband, it would also be much more expensive – costing users an extra $840 a year in fees.“For Americans in rural locations, that’s going to really hurt. Many of the president’s strongest supporters – up to hundreds of thousands of families who voted for Trump – are going to see slower, more expensive internet services, and all to the benefit of the wealthiest man on earth.”According to some estimates, Musk’s Starlink stands to make $10bn to $20bn should the shift from broadband to satellite internet go ahead.The episode has left Feinman “deeply saddened. I see my nation harming itself in ways that are inexplicable and entirely avoidable.”He fears for rural Americans who will pay the price. “These are communities who put their trust in this administration. They are going to find that their trust has not been honored, and it will be to their significant future detriment.” More