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      Bernie Sanders rally in LA draws thousands to protest Trump: ‘We can’t just let this happen’

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      The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders drew a record-breaking crowd at his rally in Los Angeles on Saturday, which included musical acts from Joan Baez and Neil Young, who encouraged the crowd to “take America back”.Sanders’s Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go from Here tour has been drawing massive crowds. Aided by the progressive New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the team set the record in Tempe, Arizona, for biggest-ever political rally in that state three weeks ago. In Denver, Colorado, more than 34,000 people showed up – a career-high crowd for the 83-year-old Sanders. Saturday in Los Angeles saw another record: at least 36,000 people packed a downtown park.A host of musical acts kicked off the high-energy event, including the indie rock band The Red Pears, Maggie Rogers, Indigo de Souza, and legends Baez and Young.View image in fullscreenOn a perfect LA day with a gentle breeze and blue sky, Young, wearing all black, performed for the crowd before introducing Ocasio-Cortez, who was met with the wild applause usually reserved for a rock star.Ocasio-Cortez, 35, told the crowd at Gloria Molina Grand Park – a space named after the trailblazing Angeleno often credited for paving the way for women and Latinos in LA politics – that “power, greed and corruption are taking over our country like never before”. She named some California lawmakers who have supported recent Trump policies, including Bakersfield representative David Valadao and representative Young Kim of Orange county.The Raise gospel choir sang out “power to the people”, and Sanders took the stage. “We are living in a moment where the Republican party to a large degree has become a cult of the individual, obeying Trump’s every wish,” Sanders told the crowd, adding that the Trump administration is now “plotting how they can give $1.1tn in tax breaks to the rich”.The politician’s critique of the administration – and the corrupting influence of big money and billionaires in US politics – lasted more than 40 minutes. The message has taken on a new resonance in the second Trump administration, as Americans have watched Elon Musk take a chainsaw to the federal government and threatening popular safety-net programs like social security and Medicare.View image in fullscreenThese are the issues that brought out Cindy and Victor Villanuevo. Cindy has battled multiple sclerosis for the past decade. “I’m here because I’m disgusted about what Trump is doing to science. It’s a disgrace. When you cut funding, there’s no hope for any of us,” said the Buena Park mother.Her sister, Rose Matthews, a retired teacher, is concerned about social security, for people who work at veterans’ affairs and for veterans’ benefits. “I know the folks at the Long Beach VA very well because my husband battled ALS for four years,” she said. “The work they do with the vets is incredible and much needed. Now I’m worried that’s going away. We can’t just let this happen.”Ali Wolff and Myylo Lewis took the 94 bus from Silver Lake to attend. They said the bus had been packed with Bernie supporters – and it felt good.“It’s terrifying what’s been happening,” said Wolff. “It’s a relief just being here with so many like-minded people.”Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie are the “closest thing to a version of America you actually want to live in”, said Lewis.View image in fullscreenSanders, an independent who votes with Democrats, launched the tour in late February, offering Democratic voters an outlet for their fury and grief at a moment when most of their leaders in Washington appeared disoriented by the speed of Trump’s second-term power grabs. The Vermont senator has held events in big cities like Denver and Phoenix, while also targeting Republican-held districts that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, as Democrats contemplate a path back to power in 2026.Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders for part of his tour last month, raising questions about her political aspirations and the future of the progressive movement he has been building since before she was born. On the stage in Los Angeles, progressive congressmembers Pramila Jayapal of Washington state and Ro Khanna of California, as well as many union leaders representing teachers, nurses, longshoremen and healthcare workers all addressed the crowd. Eunissess Hernandez, who represents LA’s first city council district, gave a particularly powerful address, saying the Trump administration was trying to divide people and get them to blame each other for their problems instead of blaming the people who are “actually profiting from our pain”.Sanders’s western tour will continue with stops in Utah, Idaho and Montana. The tour will return to California on Tuesday for events in Folsom and Bakersfield, a Republican stronghold, which has one of the highest levels of Medi-Cal enrollments in the state. The agricultural community, which is in Kern county, was also the locale of a January immigration raid that resulted in 78 arrests many contend were a result of shocking and unlawful racial profiling. Sanders railed against the raid, describing it as the US government “disappearing people”. More

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      The case against Mahmoud Khalil is meant to silence American dissent | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      On Friday afternoon, a federal immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, the lawful permanent resident who was arrested last month for his advocacy for Palestinian rights at Columbia University, was removable – that is to say, deportable – under the law.Let’s be absolutely clear about how outrageous this decision is. The judge, Jamee Comans, had given the Trump administration a deadline to produce the evidence required to show that Khalil should be deported. In a functional state, such evidence would rise to a standard of extreme criminality necessitating deportation.But not in this case and certainly not with the Trump administration, which has summarily deported hundreds of Venezuelan men based not on any verifiable criminal activity but simply on the basis of their body art. In response to the judge’s order, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, produced a flimsy one-and-a-half-page memo that admits that Khalil engaged in no criminal conduct. Instead, the memo, citing an arcane law, stated that Khalil’s “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful … compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest”. In other words, the government was saying that Khalil’s views – including even his future views – were sufficient grounds for his deportation.Make no mistake. The government is seeking to deport Khalil solely for his constitutionally protected speech, a protection that applies to everyone in the United States. If the government succeeds, you could well be next. And don’t think that your citizenship will protect you. If the government can deny the basic right of freedom of speech to lawful permanent residents, what’s to stop them from going after citizens next? (The administration already has a plan to denaturalize US citizens.)Do we really want to live in a country where the government can decide which ideas are allowed to be heard and which cannot? I’m surprised that I even have to write these words. In an open society, free debate is encouraged and needed, while in a closed society, lists of proscribed ideas circulate and proliferate, and it’s frighteningly clear which way we’re headed. The Trump administration has already banned the use of words and phrases such as “equity”, “women” and “Native American” from government websites and documents, showing us how the open door of American democracy is slamming shut faster and louder than we could have imagined. And Khalil’s case is the test of what this government can achieve.Rubio alleges that Khalil engaged in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States”. But he provides no evidence whatsoever. Meanwhile, here’s what Khalil told CNN last year: “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other. Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.”It would seem that Rubio believes the phrase “freedom and equality for everyone” undermines US foreign policy interests. He may finally be right about something. But he’s wrong about Khalil, who clearly is not antisemitic. If Rubio wanted to cleanse the country of the noxious hatred of Jewish people, he could start by examining members of his own party. Marjorie Taylor Greene once speculated publicly that California wildfires were started by a beam from “space solar generators” linked to “Rothschild, Inc”, a disgusting nod to bizarre antisemitic conspiracy theories. Robert F Kennedy Jr said that the coronavirus had been manipulated to make “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people” the most immune to Covid-19. Elon Musk can barely keep his arm from extending into a salute, Dr Strangelove-style.It’s not some illusory antisemitism that has brought the wrath of the Trump administration raining down on Khalil. It’s the fact that he was standing up for Palestinian rights and calling out Israel’s actions, labelled genocidal by jurists, experts and international human rights organizations alike. But the US government does not want the American people to even entertain this discussion, which includes American complicity in this human catastrophe that is also US foreign policy, and so it will use every means at its disposal to forestall the possibility, including the bluntest instrument in the political book: mass fear.The attempt to deport Khalil is meant primarily to discipline the people of the United States into silence and conformity. For that reason alone, the government’s actions must be resisted. Healthy societies are based on free thinking and dissent. Unhealthy societies mobilize fear and intimidation to regulate opinion and manufacture consent. Today, that consent is about Israel. Tomorrow, it will be about something else. Either way, it will never be your choice, and it will always be theirs.Many legal observers were anticipating today’s ruling by Comans. Immigration judges are appointed by the Department of Justice. As such, they are employees of the executive branch and not the federal judiciary. The New York Times even noted that, had Comans dissented from the government, she would also have “run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters”. The ACLU speculated that the decision to deport Khalil had been “pre-written”, as it was delivered so fast. And Comans stated that the constitutional questions raised by the case will be heard in federal court in New Jersey and not in immigration court in Louisiana.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat doesn’t mean that Judge Comans couldn’t have ruled otherwise. On the contrary, the decision is another dangerous illustration of how much power the executive branch in the United States always wields, how much more power the Trump administration is willing to assume, and how deferential the institutions that could rein in this administration have become.This structural cowardice on the part of these institutions is doing great harm to the integrity of American democracy, often expressed in some sort of embarrassed whisper. Khalil, on the other hand, speaks loudly and eloquently for his position. At the end of his hearing in Louisiana, Khalil asked to address the court. “You said last time that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” he said. “Neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me are afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”Mahmoud Khalil is clearly a remarkable, principled man. He doesn’t deserve this unjust detention the US government is subjecting him to. The irony is that this United States doesn’t deserve a Mahmoud Khalil.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump administration to exempt smartphones and computers from tariffs

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      Donald Trump’s presidential administration has exempted smartphones and computers from the 125% levies imposed on imports from China as well as other reciprocal tariffs, which experts had cautioned might cause electronic consumer prices to dramatically spike in the US.The announcement was made late on Friday in a US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) notice that said the devices would be excluded from the 10% global tariff that Trump recently imposed on most countries, along with the much heftier import tax on China.The CBP’s notice follows concerns from tech companies that the price of electronics for US consumers might surge with many of them manufactured in China. The notice also contained exemptions for additional electronics and components, such as memory cards, solar cells and semiconductors.The exclusions were applied retroactively to the products under the reciprocal tariffs beginning at 12.01am ET on 5 April, according to the notice.“Importers may request a refund by filing a post summary correction for unliquidated entries, or by filing a protest for entries that have liquidated but where the liquidation is not final because the protest period has not expired,” the CBP said.On Saturday, Trump released a statement of “clarification of exceptions” pertaining to the previous evening’s announcement. Speaking to CNBC, Dan Ives, the global head of technology research at the Los Angeles-based financial services firm Wedbush Securities, said on Saturday: “This is the dream scenario for tech investors … Smartphones, chips being excluded is a game-changer scenario when it comes to China tariffs.”Ives added: “I think ultimately big tech CEOs spoke loudly, and the White House had to understand and listen to the situation that this would have been Armageddon for big tech if it were implemented.”Similarly, Paul Ashworth, Capital Economics’ chief north America economist, said that the tariff exceptions “represent a partial de-escalation of president Trump’s trade war with China”.“There were even bigger winners in Asia, however, since the exemptions apply to all countries – not only China. At a stroke, 64% of US imports from Taiwan are now exempt from the 10% reciprocal tariff, 44% from Malaysia, and almost 30% from both Vietnam and Thailand. Ten to 12% of imports from India, Korea and Mexico will also now be exempt,” Ashworth added.“These exemptions will presumably not be the last either, with the success of Apple’s Tim Cook in getting its smartphones exempted likely to boost the lobbying by firms in other sectors.”Since Trump announced his tariffs, Apple was among the hardest hit tech companies – as 90% of its iPhones are reportedly assembled in China.Invoking imagery associated with the strongest classification for hurricanes, Ives had previously described the Chinese tariffs as a “category 5 price storm for the US consumer”. He added in a note to investors: “The reality is it would take three years and $30bn in our estimation to move even 10% of its supply chain from Asia to the US with major disruption in the process … For US consumers, the reality of a $1,000 iPhone being one of the best made consumer products on the planet would disappear.”According to analysts at the investment bank UBS, costs of iPhones would rise exponentially under Trump’s Chinese tariffs. The price of an iPhone 16 Pro Max (with 256GB of storage) could rise by 79% from $1,199 (£915) to about $2,150 (£1,600), the Guardian reported earlier.In attempts to mitigate the blow of Trump’s tariffs, Apple reportedly chartered cargo flights to transport iPhones from its Indian factories, with Reuters reporting the company having flown 600 tons of iPhones – or approximately 1.5m devices – to the US since March.Meanwhile, China’s Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA) announced that the country’s “retaliatory” tariffs on US imports were limited to chips made in the US. Chips manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea remain unaffected.According to the CSIA, the “country of origin” for integrated circuits would be determined by the location of the manufacturing facility, not the final packaging or design location, CGTN reportsed. In other words, US chipmakers that outsource manufacturing to other parts of the world are exempt from China’s “retaliatory” tariffs.The latest announcement from the CSIA came as China slapped 125% tariffs on US products on Friday as part of the latest trade-war escalation between the two trade giants. More

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      Trump authorizes US military to take control of land at US-Mexico border

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      Donald Trump has authorized the military to take control of land at the US-Mexico border as part of the president’s broader efforts to crack down on undocumented immigration.The authorization came late on Friday in a memorandum from Trump to interior secretary Doug Burgum, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem and agricultural secretary Brooke Rollins, outlining new policies concerning military involvement at the US’s southern border.The memorandum, entitled “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions”, allows the US’s armed forces to “take a more direct role” when it comes to securing the boundary in question.“Our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats,” the order claimed. “The complexity of the current situation requires that our military take a more direct role in securing our southern border than in the recent past.”The memorandum added that the Department of Defense should be given jurisdiction to federal lands, including the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60ft-wide strip that stretches over California, Arizona and New Mexico. Doing that would give troops stationed there the legal right to detain immigrants accused of trespassing on what in effect is an elongated base – and unauthorized immigrants would be held in custody until they could be turned over to immigration agents.Military activities that could be carried out on federal land include “border-barrier construction and emplacement of detection and monitoring equipment”, according to the memorandum.After 45 days, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will assess the “initial phase” of the order. But at any time, Hegseth could extend the amount of federal land included in the memorandum.The ordered military takeover excludes Native American reservations, according to the memorandum.Friday’s order is the latest step from Trump in his administration’s ongoing focus on immigration enforcement, which has involved declaring a national emergency on the southern border.On Thursday, a US federal judge ruled that the Trump administration was allowed to require people who are in the country but not citizens to register with the federal government, a requirement that advocates say hasn’t been universally implemented since it was enacted as a law in the 1940s.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ruling comes after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the new requirement on 25 February, adding that those who failed to report could face fines or possible prison time.The DHS’s announcement was widely seen as a workaround of the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that bars US military troops from participating in most civilian law enforcement actions.One of the purported justifications for militarizing the US border most commonly cited by Trump and his Republican colleagues is that people crossing the border with Mexico without permission carry much of the fentanyl sold in the US. Yet official statistics show 90% of convicted fentanyl peddlers are US citizens. More

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      ‘It’s going to be messy’: Americans on how Trump’s tariffs are shaping their spending

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      A few weeks ago, Dane began stocking up on “paper products”, “cases of paper towels, toilet paper”, “piddle-pads” for their shih-tzu, and his wife upgraded from an iPhone 8 to 14.The 73-year-old in South Carolina said the purchases – which were made to get ahead of Donald Trump’s trade policies – reminded him of the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, when he scrambled to buy masks, gloves and toilet paper.“It’s scary,” Dane said. “Prices are going to go up because of tariffs … It’s going to be messy.”While campaigning last year, Trump constantly touted his love of tariffs. But it was not until his so-called “liberation day” on 2 April – where the president announced sweeping duties on incoming goods, punishing competitors, allies and small and developing countries alike – that he spooked global financial markets and provoked fears of spiralling inflation and stagnant growth.Amid a US government bond sell-off, the president paused his most eye-watering tariffs for 90 days, apart from China, whose goods are set to be hit with a 145% levy.Hundreds of Americans got in touch with the Guardian to share how the uncertainty is affecting their consumption habits.Dane, who is retired, worked as an entrepreneur with his wife most of his career before later becoming an English teacher. He said he was a Republican in the 1980s but is fearful about how the US is “not going the right way” under Trump, and is unhappy with his “dystopian” policies towards global allies, the economy, education, scientific research and more.View image in fullscreenCurrently, Dane is on a trip to Paris and plans to bring home consumer goods potentially hit by 10% tariffs on European Union imports.“We’ll probably be getting tea, bringing back some cheese, some butter,” he said. “I would love to bring back eggs but that would be a disaster. I’d have scrambled eggs in my suitcase.”Amid tariff uncertainty, Heather, a 61-year-old college professor in Texas, said she and her husband can mostly weather food cost fluctuations, but brought forward the purchase of a new car “inanticipation of price hikes”.She said they owned a 14-year-old Mini Cooper, which ran on gas, that they planned to replace with a hybrid vehicle at some point. They decided to replace their car now to avoid potential inflation – and reduce expenditure on gas.“The economic instability of the Trump administration certainly gives one pause,” she said. “It’s just so much instability, chaos and [the] unknown.”It’s a similar story for Stefanie, a 56-year-old educator and former tech worker in Nevada, who bought a Toyota Tacoma to replace her old Jeep as well as converting some investments into cash.Stefanie began strategizing about being more resilient to tariffs as soon as Trump was elected.“The one thing I learned in the first administration is to believe him: he says bizarre things, and then he does bizarre things,” she said.She’s cutting back on subscriptions and future travel plans, while stockpiling kitchen staples such as rice, cooking oils, vinegar and flour and replacing worn-out clothes including shoes and jeans, “before inflation hits”.“The supply chain is so globalized that tariffs really hit everything,” Stefanie said.But for Ishaan*, a 51-year-old engineer in Texas, the economic picture means he is abstaining from major purchases.“Everyone I know has started tightening their belts,” he said. “I am cutting out unnecessary expenses, cancelled my gym membership, focusing on savings.”The focus for Ishaan, who fears higher prices and an economic slowdown, is to build up his savings in cash. He feels “scared to invest in any stocks or bonds right now” amid market volatility.Likewise for Jonathan*, a 70-year-old in New Jersey, the financial fallout from Trump’s trade wars means he has been forced to rule out planned purchases and strip consumption back to the essentials.Jonathan said his individual retirement account (IRA) was initially “decimated” – although it ticked up slightly after Trump paused his tariffs on Wednesday. He said it was currently down about 15%.That means cancelling plans to redo the carpet in his house and replace two old televisions, Jonathan said. “In short, we’ll buy only necessities and pay bills until this stupidity ends.”Russ a 35-year-old physicist in New Mexico, said the Trump administration’s policies were “causing me to think about what kinds of spending behavior I could have done without this whole time”.He has an eight-year-old phone and nine-year-old MacBook computer that still work fine, which he will not be replacing. The prospect of runaway price rises for consumer electronics, often from China, have led him to reconsider: “Do I really need this, or do I just want this?“I see these things as being as much toys as necessities,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just go back to a dumbphone or something like that – I fantasize sometimes about not getting all these notifications all the time, like the phones we had back in 2005. But maybe that’s a Luddite fantasy.”Russ said that he was already boycotting Amazon and Target – companies that many feel have aligned themselves with Trump’s agenda such as rolling back their own DEI schemes. He’s trying to shop more at local, independent shops rather than “everything stores”, which he notes is more expensive and time consuming but ultimately worth it.“As an American citizen and registered voter, nobody really cares what you think until November of every other year, you feel kind of voiceless,” he said. “You think, well, if dollars are the only tools we have any more, then damn it, I’m going to cast those votes and allocate my spending accordingly.”View image in fullscreenLikewise, small business owner Christine* said the disruption could cause a wider re-evaluation of US consumer habits.Amid the uncertainty, Christine, 41, stocked up on supplies for her Miami acupuncture business for two years, and bought her son’s fifth birthday present – a bike – early for July. But she said she had already noticed less demand for her work.More broadly, the prospect of inflationary tariffs is accelerating Christine’s reconsideration of how much “stuff” she needs. She’s recently attended “these lovely parties” where friends bring unwanted clothes and they “switch it all around” rather than buying fast fashion.“I really resent being drafted into this mad trade war,” Christine said, “but if there is a silver lining, maybe it’s that at least some people like me will question their unsustainable capitalistic practices.”*Some names have been changed. More

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      ‘I’m super worried’: fewer UK tourists visiting US amid Trump’s policies and rhetoric

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      After backpacker Rebecca Burke was arrested and locked up for nearly three weeks by US immigration ­officials, she started urging people not to travel to America.Britons seem to have listened: the number of UK residents visiting the US was down 14.3% in March compared with the same month in 2024, official figures show.Analysts believe that Donald Trump’s claims that other countries were “cheating” Americans, and reports of deportations, may have had a chilling effect on travel to the US. But the March dip may be simply an early warning of a bigger fall in the summer, because tourists typically book holidays months in advance.“Once we get into July, August, September, most of those trips will have been booked,” said David Edwards, founder of the Scattered Clouds travel consultancy.“But if there is less global trade, there will be less international business travel. Business travel is booked with a much shorter lead time so if there is uncertainty, business travel could take a swifter hit.”Spring is difficult for travel companies to analyse because Easter moves in the calendar. So could the comparative drop simply be the effect of the Easter school holidays falling in March 2024? It seems unlikely, Edwards said, because the figures from the US National Travel and Tourism Office show an even bigger drop, of 16%, compared with March 2019 when Easter was on 21 April and Trump was nearing the end of his first term.Travellers from other countries also seemed to avoid the US in March – visitors from western Europe who stayed at least one night in the US were down 17% in March, year-on-year. German visitors were down 28.2% and Spanish ones down 24.6% compared with 2024. Overall, global travel to the US was down 11.6%. UK residents make up the largest number of overseas visitors to the US, with 3.9 million a year.View image in fullscreenTTG, the travel industry magazine, published a poll last week showing that two-thirds of travel agents it contacted believed there had been a downturn in bookings, while only 12% of operators said their business had not been affected. Demand for hotel rooms in the US may also be falling. Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality ­analytics at CoStar, which tracks hotel room occupancy, said that the strong dollar had led to an 8% fall in visitors in 2024.“So now with the rhetoric that’s going on, I’m super worried that we’re going to continue to see travel numbers below 2019, maybe even decelerating from 2024,” he said. “Saying ‘you’re cheating us, you have a ­surplus, so we’re going to put a ­tariff on you’ – that rhetoric is not very welcoming.”Research by VisitBritain in 2022 showed that international ­travellers ranked “destination is a ­welcoming place to visit” as the second most important factor in choosing a holiday.View image in fullscreenAfter publicity around deportations of tourists, including Germans and Australians, the UK and German governments have updated their travel advice to warn citizens of the risk. The incidents may also harm the appeal of the 2026 World Cup – currently due to take place in the US, Canada and Mexico, with the later knockout stages entirely in the US – and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, Freitag said.“Next year will be very big … If I’m a German father with two boys and I want to show them the World Cup, am I really going to spend $1,000 a pop on an airfare, plus hotel, plus the ticket, if there’s even a remote chance that I will not be able to make it into the country? I’m not going to take that risk. Not everyone will think that, but probably some people will.”Clare Collins, co-founder and chief operations officer for CT Business Travel, said that she expected there would be a decline in leisure travel to the US in the summer, but had not yet seen an impact on business travel.“We’re not seeing any dramatic effects yet for business travel, but that could change in two weeks,” she said. “I think [in] the long-term leisure market, people will choose to spend their money elsewhere.”If the March dip turns into a major fall in travellers from the UK, some airlines may start cutting routes, Edwards said, and that could have an impact on the British economy.The UK travel industry recovered from the Covid pandemic mostly because American tourists flocked to Europe, buoyed by a strong dollar that made hotels more affordable in London and Paris.“Europeans may be thinking ‘I’m not so sure that the US is a welcoming place to visit’,” Edwards said. “Equally, it might be that Americans are thinking ‘how welcome would I be if I go to Europe this year?’” More

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      ‘A new golden age’: how rightwing media stuck by Trump as global markets collapsed

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      While Donald Trump recently instituted and paused hefty tariffs, sparking a trade war and chaos in financial markets, most of the country’s conservative media either applauded the US president or critiqued the policy but not the person behind it, according to journalists and observers of conservative media.Meanwhile, economists, business leaders, Democrats and even some Republicans warned that the tariffs, which prompted the largest American stock market drop since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, could cause a recession.“News is what impacts the greatest number of people,” like tariffs and “the evaporation of wealth and the ripple effect on not just the US economy, but the global economy”, said Howard Polskin, president of The Righting, a newsletter and website that monitors conservative media. “By any stretch of imagination, that should be a lead story.”But the chaos of last week posed a serious challenge to many aspects of rightwing US media, which often acts as a largely unquestioning cheerleader for Trump and his Maga movement. The story was sometimes played down, sometimes cheered but rarely seriously questioned – even amid warnings of price rises, recession and cratering investments, especially precious 401(k) retirement accounts.The most popular conservative news source in the United States is Fox News, which has a much larger audience than CNN and the leftwing MSNBC network. Its hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters, consistently praise Trump and bolster his inaccurate claims.But Fox News has faced new competition from Newsmax and One American News Network (OANN), networks that positioned themselves as even more reliable Trump supporters. The Wall Street Journal, which has the same owner as Fox News, features a right-leaning opinion section, but also has done lengthy investigations into Trump and Joe Biden and is a favorite among people in the financial sector.Rightwing commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro also command a large audience through podcasts and social media.After Trump declared 2 April “liberation day” and announced that the country would on 5 April institute a 10% universal tariff on all imported goods and on 9 April start “reciprocal tariffs” on some of its largest trading partners, including a 34% tariff on imports from China and a 20% tariff on goods from the European Union, Hannity described it as “a day that will be remembered as a turning point and the start, I hope for every American, of a new golden age”.China retaliated with a 34% tariff. Global stock markets fell sharply; the Dow Jones industrial average declined more than 2,000 points over the next two days.Economists and leaders of financial institutions said that the tariffs increased the likelihood of a recession and inflation. Most Republican lawmakers stood behind the president; a minority, like Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, expressed opposition and said the tariffs amounted to a tax increase for Americans.While Fox Business, a sibling network, had guests who criticized the tariffs, Fox News personalities told viewers nervous about their investments that everything would work out well. A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for an interview.“I don’t really care about my 401(k) today,” Jeanine Pirro said on 3 April on the show The Five. “We’ve got to have manufacturing in this country … and Donald Trump is the only one who could do it because he’s got the biggest consumer base in the world. He’s not afraid of anybody.”Despite the market upheaval, the Fox News commentators were “in too deep” to break with Trump, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a leftwing advocacy group.“They have, for nearly a decade now, sold their audience on the sense that Donald Trump would be a good president,” Gertz said 7 April. “Now he is single-handedly causing a worldwide market collapse,” but “they can’t abandon him”.Other conservative news organizations opted to focus on other issues. At one point on 8 April, the only story on tariffs on the OANN frontpage concerned the former speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her comments on tariffs in 1996.The network did interview Arthur Laffer, a conservative economist who Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Laffer said that if Trump kept the tariffs, he didn’t see how the country could avoid a recession, but he still “could not think of one person on Earth that I would prefer more to be president”.On 9 April at Newsmax, the headline of their main story read, “Trump: Tariffs Bring in $2 Billion a Day.”The actual number this month was about $200m, Reuters reported.“A lot of times it feels more like propaganda,” Polskin said of the cable networks’ coverage. “I find it all extremely alarming, the stock market and that consumers of rightwing media could be misled so egregiously.”Newsmax did not respond to the Guardian’s request for an interview.There are exceptions in the conservative media sphere. The Journal has criticized Trump and his tariff policy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump Owns the Economy Now. He can try to blame the Fed, but the tariff blunder is his alone,” was the headline of a recent editorial.Their editorial pages have been “characterized through the years as sort of the bastion of conservatism”, said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute. “They are not at all sympathetic to the tariff actions.”Shapiro, the rightwing pundit and a founder of the Daily Wire, devoted much of his podcasts after “liberation day” to scrutinizing the tariffs and questioned whether they could actually bring manufacturers back to the United States.But Shapiro reassured listeners that he supported the president.“What exactly is this designed to do?” Shapiro said of the tariffs during a 3 April episode of his podcast. “It is predicated on a bad idea of how international trade works. I’ve said this a thousand times: this is not coming from a place of I want Trump to fail.”Shapiro called for Trump to fire Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser who reportedly shaped the tariffs strategy. But, of course, it was Trump who instituted them.“In general, the rightwing media, they are like Republican politicians. They don’t want to cross Trump,” Edmonds said.Still, Aaron Rupar, a journalist who tracks speeches and interviews Trump and his officials give to conservative media, thought their coverage of the tariffs was “a little more honest” than their coverage of events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol or the trials Trump faced when he was out of office.“With financial data, it’s a little harder to gaslight people,” he said.Ultimately, hours after the reciprocal tariffs took effect, Trump announced a 90-day pause on them, except for China, whose tariff he increased to 125%.“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said afterwards, referring to Trump’s book. “You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”A day later, with stocks still down significantly from before “liberation day”, Ainsley Earhardt, a Fox News host, reiterated Leavitt’s point.“This is the art of the deal,” she said. “This shows how strong our president is.” More

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      These Tennessee lawmakers love the unborn. After birth? Not so much

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      Think of the children? NahYou’ve probably seen this quote from an Alabama pastor called Dave Barnhart. It goes viral all the time. But I’m resurfacing the quote because it is another day that ends with “y” in America, which means it is relevant once again.“The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for,” Barnhart said back in 2018, remarking wryly on the movement’s priorities. “They never make demands of you … They don’t need money, education or childcare … They allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.”Over in Tennessee, there are a lot of lawmakers who are very proud of how much they advocate for unborn children. In 2022, as soon as Roe was overturned, the state passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans – one without explicit exceptions to save the life of a pregnant person. The ban also made performing or attempting to perform an abortion a class C felony – akin to aggravated assault – which means aiding in an abortion can land you prison time and a hefty fine. That ban has been continuously challenged in court but the bottom line is that getting an abortion in Tennessee is almost impossible.Those Tennessee lawmakers who love unborn children? Surprise, surprise, they’re not so keen on the born ones. Particularly if those kids are immigrants. On Thursday, the GOP-dominated state senate approved a bill that lets public schools check the citizenship or legal immigration status of every student. Undocumented children can be denied enrollment at these public schools or forced to pay tuition. In other words: Tennessee wants to make it legal to deny undocumented kids an education. By requiring school systems to check legal immigrant status, they’re also turning what should be safe spaces into immigration enforcement centers.All of which, to be clear, is blatantly unconstitutional. In 1982, the supreme court decision in Plyler v Doe found states cannot deny students a free public education over their immigration status. The Tennessee bill is not law yet, and if the Tennessee governor does sign it, it will almost certainly face legal challenges. But even if it eventually gets struck down, there is a chance it will stay on the books as a “zombie law” – ready to rise again when circumstances allow.Perhaps you are wondering why all these fierce advocates for the rights of unborn children are so keen on denying kids an education? According to lawmakers who voted for the measure, it’s not because they’re hateful racists who want to punish kids, it’s because they are being fiscally responsible. Their argument is that the state simply doesn’t have enough money for education for undocumented kids, particularly since some will require English language learner classes.There’s a small possibility – just throwing it out there – that one of the reasons Tennessee is finding it hard to find money for education is because its regressive tax policies are heavily weighted towards extracting money from the poor rather than making the rich pay their fair share. Tennessee is one of the nine states in the US that doesn’t have an income tax. It also doesn’t have inheritance tax and has very low business tax. Residents (including undocumented immigrants) pay sales tax, property tax and a grocery tax. Undocumented immigrants are putting money into the system and getting very little out of it. Pretending that this attack on undocumented children is about money is disingenuous. Deep down, I’m sure even the people voting for the bill know that investing in children pays dividends to society.Still, while it is disheartening that a bill like this got as far as it did, it’s also important to note that it faced a lot of opposition. Nearly half of the senate’s members spoke on the bill – many of them, including some Republicans, in passionate disagreement. There were tears and a lot of Bible verses quoted about compassion for children. As the US becomes increasingly dystopian, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of just how much opposition there is to the extremist policies and legislation a hate-filled minority are pushing through. Donald Trump likes to say that winning the popular vote gave him and his cronies a mandate to do whatever they like; that all the policies getting passed have the support of the people. This simply isn’t true. Only around 32% of eligible voters actually voted for Trump.While we must not minimize the amount of misogyny and racism there is in the US (and there is a lot!), we should also take heart from the fact that a sizable number of Americans do not want to live in an authoritarian dystopia where women have no rights and undocumented kids get no education. Sixty-three percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases according to Pew research from 2024. Most Americans say undocumented immigrants should have a way to stay in the country legally if certain requirements are met. Increasingly, the actions of the American government don’t reflect the views of the American people.Which, of course, is why the Trump administration is so obsessed with undermining education as a whole. From trying to stop undocumented immigrants from going to school, to tightly controlling how Ivy League universities operate, to attempting to eliminate the US Department of Education, Republicans are waging a war on critical thinking.The US just made it harder for married women to voteOn Thursday the US House approved the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which requires people to prove they are citizens when they vote. If you changed your birth name – as around 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages in the US have – you will have to show a lot more paperwork to vote.Mickey Rourke tells JoJo Siwa he will tie her up and make her straightI had to look up who Rourke is because he hasn’t been relevant for a while. Now, however, he is making headlines for being misogynistic and homophobic on Celebrity Big Brother UK. Rourke, 72, recently told JoJo Siwa (a gay singer and social media personality) that he’d turn her straight. “If I stay [in the Big Brother house] longer than four days, you won’t be gay any more,” Rourke said to Siwa in a clip from Wednesday. “I’ll tie you up,” he added. Rourke got a warning from producers for his language but his comments were not censored. This is in stark contrast to a Big Brother “controversy” last year, when ITV, the broadcaster, edited an episode of the show to remove shots of a T-shirt worn by one of the contestants featuring a watermelon, which is a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhite House says it will ignore reporters with gender pronouns in email signatureThe amount of time these people spend obsessing over pronouns boggles the mind. Get a hobby! Get therapy! Try thinking about literally anything else!Student found guilty of rape goes unpunished because of promising future in gynecologyA criminal court in Leuven, Belgium, recently found a 24-year-old medical student, who was training as a gynaecologist, guilty of rape but suspended his sentence because of his lack of prior offences and his “promising future”. This has sparked a lot of anger in Belgium and many commentators have drawn parallels to the Brock Turner case in the US.Does sitting behind a screen turn you into a woman?Fox News’s Jesse Watters, who sits behind a screen all day, seems to think so. This profundity comes after he declared public soup consumption unmanly and said that real men “don’t wave simultaneously with two hands”.The week in pawtriarchyRemember those tariffs Trump imposed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins? Those penguins now have their own social media account, @PenguinsAgainstTrump. “What are you going to do, deport us?” one post reads. “We’ve been dealing with ICE for centuries.” More