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      Is every memecoin just a scam? Experts on whether Andrew Tate and Trump are fleecing their followers

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      In November last year, I was turned into a memecoin. Several, in fact.Someone alerted me that a memecoin called Dork Nerd Geek ($DNG) had been minted with a picture of my face, and it already had a market cap (the total value of all coins in circulation) of $29,000. Twenty minutes later it was $100,000. An hour later it was $800,000.I had no idea what was going on, but I did know that “Dork Nerd Geek” was the nickname Andrew Tate gave me because I’ve spent much of my journalistic career investigating allegations of human trafficking made against him.I noticed he was currently livestreaming to his followers. I opened up his live stream and, for the first time, bore witness to the insane volatility of the memecoin market.In the space of 10 minutes, dozens of new me-related memecoins were being minted, including “Disgraced News Gatherer”, “Matt Shea is a faggot,” and “Take My Wife Tate (CUCK),” the latter of which included a picture of my fiancee taken from Instagram. Tate was pumping some of these memecoins in value merely by talking about them, with market fluctuations happening in real time on the order of millions, based on his every word.Two seconds after he said the words “Fuck Matt Shea,” a coin called “FUCK MATT SHAE [sic]” soared in value. Twenty minutes later, he uttered the words “Fuck Matt Shea … ” again and it went even higher, only to drop back down to nothing when he finished his sentence with “… is not a generational asset”. He then said he would pump the coin after taking a piss. He walked offscreen to urinate. It rocketed.View image in fullscreenSoon, there were hundreds more Matt Shea memecoins with similar names, as his followers tried to trick people into thinking that their Matt Shea memecoin was the one Tate was pumping. His words became memecoins, those memecoins shot up in value, and then the value disappeared instantaneously.All in all, about $2m was spent by people on memecoins making fun of me in the span of a few hours, and hundreds of millions more on other coins he mentioned during the stream.By the end of his live stream, the value of all the coins he pumped was back to near zero. All the fans who had invested at his behest collectively would have lost hundreds of millions of dollars.His followers may have felt they were in on the joke, but in the end they mostly lost their money. Only a tiny number of wallets actually profited from the coin including one crypto that made a profit of $240,000.A number of online crypto investigators including Coffeezilla, bored2boar, StarPlatinum and others have found that Tate has manipulated memecoin markets using “pump and dump”-like schemes, leading to large profits for those within his inner circle. We put the allegations in these investigations to Tate’s team, who said they had no comment.What happened on Tate’s stream that day felt bizarre but I didn’t completely understand what I was witnessing. I thought I basically understood bitcoin, but how do memecoins differ, and why do they continue to be popular when so many people have lost money on them?Is every memecoin a scam?According to David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: “Basically, literally, yes.”“All of this is like a big game of pretend with made-up financial instruments,” he said. “It’s printing your own made-up money. You print your own Monopoly money and then people buy it from you for real money.”The best thing you could possibly say about memecoins is that they initially felt like a funny, countercultural way to participate in internet culture. They satirised a financial system that increasingly looked like a silly game to those on the outside. They encapsulated a humorous generational nihilism.According to Sander Lutz, the nation’s first crypto-focused White House correspondent: “You could consider a memecoin to be a stock in a cultural phenomenon – like Dogecoin and the Doge meme.”“Another way of defining a memecoin,” Lutz said, “is a cryptocurrency token that has an acknowledged inherent lack of value. The crypto world, outside of memecoins, is full of so many people who are trying to pitch you on tokens that are ‘actually really profound’ or ‘represent a stake’ in some kind of ‘useful network’, but are equally worthless. What makes memecoins different is that there’s none of that noise.”In other words, all crypto is bullshit, but memecoins are consciously bullshit.In their essence, memecoins distill the attention economy into a tradable asset, monetising the ebb and flow of viral internet hype. This has created a system in which the biggest attention-seekers on the planet – Logan Paul, Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, Donald Trump – can bleed their followers for profit. The more controversial they are, the more viral they are; and the more viral they are, the more their memecoins increase in value. Last year, some developers performed attention-seeking stunts on livestreams to pump their tokens, leading to animal abuse and a faked suicide.Chase Herro, the co-founder of Trump’s main crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, said about crypto: “You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.”Most memecoins end up making money for the person who makes them as a “rug pull” or a “pump and dump”. The term “rug pull” was actually invented by the crypto community, and it works like this:First, you mint a memecoin, and make sure that you and your mates own most of the liquidity pool (the total number of coins in circulation). The size of the liquidity pool – the amount of that memecoin that “exists” – is, like everything else in memecoins, a totally made-up number.Second, you generate hype around the coin by convincing people it will “moon” (shoot up in value). This usually involves getting a celebrity, influencer or the president of the US, to promote it. People then buy the coin, thinking it will be a good investment. Law of demand means that as people buy it, the “value” of the coin goes up, and since you and your mates own the lion’s share, you get richer.Then, at a time known only to you, the creator of the coin, and other insiders, you “pull the rug”, selling off all your stock at the newly high price. You make money, and the value of the coins bought by the masses you manipulated shoots back down to zero. It’s basically a way to just trick people into giving you money, dressed up as an “investment”.A “pump and dump” is pretty much the same thing, but with the slight caveat that you’re doing it with a coin that already exists, rather than creating your own. You buy a cheap coin, “pump” its value by hyping it so others invest, then “dump” all your stock, selling it off at a huge profit and causing everyone else to lose their money.“It’s provably negative sum,” Gerard told me. “The only way you get money is by other people losing money.”The only people really getting rich off memecoins are influencers and their crypto enablers (people like Herro, or Hayden Davis, the guy who helped launch Argentinian president Javier Milei’s memecoin and was involved in Melania Trump’s memecoin).View image in fullscreenDespite this, the idea that trading memecoins is a good way to get rich persists on the internet. Is it theoretically possible for someone like you or me to invest at just the right time and get rich off a coin?Just as with traditional gambling, there are a tiny number of success stories, such as people like the “Moo Deng whale”, who turned $800 of Moo Deng coin (a memecoin referencing the viral pygmy hippo of the same name), into $10m.But only 0.4% of Pump.fun (the main memecoin trading platform) traders have made more than $10,000. About 0.002% have made more than $1m.Lutz told me: “There are a select number of people who’ve made quite a lot of money on these tokens, but they tend to be the same people. They tend to be people who are very well-connected, who are in specific group chats, and who have a lot of existing capital.”“You’ll always have more people losing than amounts of winners,” according to Gerard. “And the winners never shut up, so you think it’s a winning environment.”One of the main reasons people keep falling for these coins is that they think they’ve figured out the scam and invested early, before the rug pull or the dump. But this is never really the case.According to Gerard: “Crypto has been an ever-escalating series of get-rich-quick schemes, where a whole bunch of people think that they’re smarter operators than the previous operator, and generally they’re not.”Memecoin traders will often be invited to Discord and Telegram chats that are sold as “insider channels” where, according to Gerard, “they think they’ll hear about these scams before the rug is pulled – but actually they’re the suckers. Crypto is full of people who think they’re the scammer, not the sucker.”Young gullible menDespite all this, many people – especially young men – continue to invest in memecoins.Forty-two percent of men and 17% of women aged 18 to 29 have invested in, traded or used crypto, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, compared to only 11% of men and 5% of women over 50.“It’s no accident that memecoins are such a phenomenon among young people who have grown immensely frustrated with a financial system that, I think it’s fair to say, has failed them,” Lutz explained, “and where supposedly sure investments aren’t likely to give them returns that would give them the quality of life their parents had. Memecoins are nakedly meaningless, but there are many financial products, both in crypto and in the world of traditional finance, that may profess to have meaning, but at their core may be nearly as meaningless to young people.”This, too, is why memecoins have become popular with far-right, manosphere influencers and their fans.“It’s undeniable,” Lutz said, “that the trend in memecoin popularity among younger people – in particular young men – is part of the same trend where you’re seeing a loss of trust in institutions and a loss of confidence that traditional paths to success work out.”“These are the same tenets that have brought young men into the fold of the Maga-verse or to influencers like Andrew Tate. There’s overlap between them because they both stem from the same frustrations affecting so many young people, in particular young men, who feel more anger, bitterness, disillusionment and nihilism than a generation ago.”Some people don’t even seem to care that they’re being scammed, according to Lutz. “It’s remarkable to see the culture in these ecosystems, because someone will rug-pull a project – what you would consider to be a scam in that they’re running you out of the money – but that’s kind of an accepted practice and people are like, ‘Hey, good for them, I got screwed over, on to the next one.’”“There are too many cases to count of people who’ve lost their entire savings gambling on new coins. If you’re a gambler at a casino, there’s Gamblers Anonymous and an existing infrastructure to deal with people who are addicted to gambling. At casinos you have ‘no play’ lists in compliance with existing laws. There’s no existing infrastructure to aid people who lose all of their savings on memecoins.”Some memecoins try to claim that they’re more than just high-stakes gambling, in order to ensnare more willing buyers. These coins are often accompanied by the false promise of some kind of utility, be it “roadmaps”, “airdrops” ( free tokens given out for marketing purposes), off-chain value mechanisms, games where you can “spend” the coins, and various incomprehensible frameworks using the coin to vote or create some sort of ecosystem. The utility almost never materialises. $Batman coin promised to integrate “entertainment, gaming, and real-world utility”. Logan Paul’s $ZooToken supposedly allowed buyers to play a Pokemon-like game which never worked.The exception, the one memecoin to offer a tangible benefit in the real world, is the one sold by the president.President MemeOn 17 January, three days before his second inauguration, Trump launched his own memecoin, $Trump. At the time of writing, the coin’s market cap is over $2.5bn, spurred on by Trump offering a dinner and White House tour to the top owners of the coin, which took place last weekend.Unlike other memecoins, it offered something concrete: access to the president. This made its value soar.View image in fullscreenRight now, only 20% of the token’s total “supply” is currently in circulation. The remaining 80% is supposedly held by Trump and his business partners.Trump and his business partners are supposedly only allowed to sell off their holdings in $Trump when they are “unlocked” in tranches over time, according to their own made-up rules. As Gerard puts it: “They own the fake money, but they can’t sell it until it’s unlocked in tranches. Note that the limits are artificial. I mean, they could just ‘print’ more.”But already, “58 wallets have made over $10m each from President Donald Trump’s meme coin, totaling $1.1bn in profits”, while “764,000 wallets of mostly small holders have lost money on $TRUMP”, according to CNBC.Gerard said: “A lot of his own fans bought the coin. They thought it would be a fabulous success because Trump is a ‘business genius’. He ripped off his own fans.“The coins’ creators and original sponsors get free $Trump coins and they can dump those on the market at will every time a tranche is released. And they do. And are people ever going to make money on those $Trump coins they bought? Probably not. The money goes to the Trump family, and that’s the direction it was created to make it go in. So yeah, it’s a memecoin dump. He’s just dumping the coins on the suckers and it’s a textbook case.”Trump and his business partners also profit in transaction fees every time $Trump is traded, so far earning $100m.Whether this is all legal or not is up for debate, but soon after launching his own memecoin, Trump replaced the head of the regulator responsible for memecoins, the SEC, with a pro-crypto appointee.Lutz said: “In the last few months, the SEC has either dismissed or withdrawn all of its crypto-related lawsuits against every big crypto company in the United States and closed all of its investigations. I mean, the SEC is hosting roundtables almost every week with crypto companies, asking how it can be more helpful to the industry.”Trump has also enthusiastically supported a legal framework for stablecoins. Stablecoins are theoretically stabilised in value by being “pegged” to the value of another asset like the US dollar, but in reality have often become “de-pegged” and therefore unstable.Right now, the Stable Bill and the Genius Bill, which reference Trump calling himself a “stable genius” in 2018, are trying to make their way through Congress. They pave the way for the US government to use stablecoins to pay everything from housing grants to social security payments. And Trump himself just so happens to have a stablecoin of his own – through the World Liberty Financial company – which would shoot up in value if these bills pass, earning his family trust potential billions.The Trump family has a claim on 75% of net revenues from World Liberty’s token sales.“It is absolutely the government’s job to stop mis-selling of investments – that’s why ordinary retail mums and dads cannot buy into binary options,” Gerard said. “It’s absolutely open slather for crypto in the US now. This is really bad. A lot of people are going to get skinned. It’s going to be terrible.”The advice? Stay awayIs there any cause for hope? According to Gerard, while it may appear everyone is investing in memecoins, this is mainly exaggerated by the media. Sure, lots of young people have dabbled, but only the real crypto geeks are actually buying the things.“The good news is most people are not falling for it. And our evidence for this is the retail dollar trading volumes at Coinbase, the largest crypto dollar exchange. Coinbase happens to be a public company so that means they have to give accurate numbers to the SEC. So they disclosed their retail trading volumes. They’re down 17% in the first quarter of 2025 from where they were in December 2024. They’ve gone down with the Trump coin regime. That gives hope.”As far as my own memecoins go, even the Tate fans who invested appear to have become aware of the scam they fell for.Shortly after the stream went dead, I received an email from a Tate follower titled: “MATT SHAE WE NEED YOUR HELP.” He, along with other Tate fans, claimed they were victims of Tate rug-pulling them. They wanted me to help spread awareness of their community’s plight – by publicizing a new memecoin they had minted called $RRT (Real Rugger Tate).I didn’t write back. More

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      in US Politics

      So long, Elon: the cuts didn’t go to plan, but you completely shredded your reputation | Marina Hyde

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      I can’t believe that Elon Musk is leaving Doge, the government department he named after a tired and basic meme that most of the internet had moved on from around a decade ago. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end,” Musk wrote this week (capital letters: model’s own), “I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful government spending.” Oh man. “Thank you for the opportunity”?! At some level you have to salute Donald Trump’s ability to turn even the world’s richest man into an Apprentice candidate who leaves in week four after completely wiping out in the hotdog stand task.Musk arrived in government promising to slash spending by $2tn. He leaves it a mere $1.86tn short of that target, even by his own estimations. Meanwhile, the president’s new tax bill is set to add $2.3tn to the deficit. I imagine Musk thought his government finale would be a spectacular extravaganza – “you’re welcome, Washington!” – involving 2,000 chainsaw-wielding chorus girls. Instead, it’s a tweet. And yes – we DO all still call them tweets.Ironically, the thing that Musk has been most stunningly effective at slashing is his own reputation. Think about it. He arrived in Trump’s orbit as a somewhat mysterious man, widely regarded as a tech genius, and a titan of the age. He leaves it with vast numbers of people woken up to the fact he’s a weird and creepy breeding fetishist, who desperately pretends to be good at video games, and wasn’t remotely as key to SpaceX or Tesla’s engineering prowess as they’d vaguely thought. Also, with a number of them apparently convinced he had a botched penile implant. Rightly or wrongly convinced – sure. I’m just asking questions.But look, it’s good news for Tesla investors, who have managed to end Musk’s practice of WFWH (working from White House), and are now demanding he puts in a 40-hour week to save the company whose stock he has spent the past few months tanking. As the world order dramatically seeks to rearrange itself in the new era of US unreliability, no one should ever be able to unsee the president of the United States’s decision to turn the White House lawn into a car sales lot for his sad friend. Did it work? It seems not. Musk spent a lot of this week airing his hurt feelings about his brrm-brrm cars. “People were burning Teslas,” he whined to Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. “Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”Well, one thing we will no longer have to endure is this guy’s decrees on what is or isn’t cool. The timeworn thing about money and power is that they allow nerds to reinvent themselves as cool. You see it on Wall Street, where sea-beast financiers get manscaped by trophy wives who are no longer out of their league. You see it in Hollywood, where weird little guys become alpha movie producers. You see it in Bezos’s transformation from puffy-chinos-wearing, dress-down-Friday dweeb to Bilderberg Vin Diesel impersonator. What you rarely see is the alchemy of that process in reverse, live and in real time. But we got that with Elon, and we have to take our laughs where we can. In some other businesses, Musk could have convinced himself it wasn’t happening, but politics is a place where pollsters literally ask real people what they think of public figures every single week. Elon’s approval ratings are underwater.No doubt we’re this close to him identifying the real problem: that we simply need new voters. Musk has long been convinced that people don’t know how to handle his genius in all fields. Four years ago, he hosted Saturday Night Live, and sometime afterwards revealed on a podcast how the cast and writers had reacted to the uncontainably hilarious suggestions made by him and his team of bros. “We come in just, like, guns blazing with ideas,” he honked, explaining he’d pitched a … bit, is it? … where he was “going to take my cock out. So I’m going to reach down into my pants … and then I pull out a baby rooster. Like, ‘This is my tiny cock.’” Oh very good, sir. Absolute genius, sir. Presumably terrified that they would lose their jobs for ever to this superlative talent, the SNL team declined to “yes-and” this genius sketch into the final show running order, but Musk managed to get his own back – at least in his account of hosting an episode with a flattering 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “There’s a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. They have these cue cards for what you’re supposed to say, and I just didn’t say it. I just went off the rails.”Mm. Just like you have now. As for where Musk goes next, he’s obviously building a Texan compound for the mothers of his many babies. But, psychologically, Mars would seem to be the answer. After a humiliation this big, only colonising another planet feels like the appropriately sized salve. It doesn’t matter that Mars is an obvious shithole that looks like the least appealing disused quarry on Earth – a place so bleak and empty that if they found one single fossilised flower it would be celebrated like the holy grail, even though the impossible majesty of the Amazon rainforest is right here. But of course, the point of Mars is that it would be the place of Elon, Teslamandias, king of kings. And you know, I feel more confident than ever that we could all look upon his works and despair.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      We’re minimizing the horror of Trump’s military birthday parade | Judith Levine

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      In 2017, watching a two-hour Bastille Day procession, Donald Trump told the French president that we’d have one too, only better. That time, the grown-ups said no. The reasons given were costs – estimates ran to $92m – hellish logistics, and the Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser’s worries that tanks and other armored vehicles would tear up Washington’s streets.Some retired generals objected publicly to the totalitarian-adjacent optics, especially given the US president’s praise for such bad actors as Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin. Several Republican lawmakers also expressed their distaste. “Confidence is silent, and insecurity is loud,” the Louisiana senator John Kennedy told MSNBC. “America is the most powerful country in all of human history … and we don’t need to show it off. We’re not North Korea. We’re not Russia, we’re not China,” he continued, “and I don’t wanna be.”This time, as Washington prepares for a huge military shindig on 14 June, Trump’s 79th – and, oh yes, the US army’s 250th – birthday, the generals are silent. The Republicans have sworn allegiance to the king. And the media are focused on the price tag, the potholes and the impending pomp; on tensions between the blue city of Washington and the red capital; and on the decimation of veterans’ healthcare, housing, and pensions while the administration throws $25m to $45m at a circus of war.All are important parts of the story. Yet commentary is muted and the debate mischaracterized as normal political discourse. The horrific point is missed: the spectacle of a massive show of military might, before a president who behaves like a dictator and views the armed forces as his personal foot soldiers, evinces memories of the worst totalitarian regimes. History may mark 14 June 2025 as the ceremonial birth of a new American fascism.Military Parade in Capital on Trump’s Birthday Could Cost $45 Million, Officials Say, reported the New York Times in mid-May. CBS also led with the cost. The Washingtonian described in detail the street-damage-preventive measures the army is installing: metal plates under the parade route, rubber padding on the tank treads – though transportation experts warn that running, at last count, 28 Abrams tanks, 28 Bradley fighting vehicles, 28 Strykers, and four Paladins, each behemoth weighing as much as 70 tonnes, could buckle the asphalt and smash power, water and telecom lines underneath.Even the New Republic, the president’s daily disparager, put the cost up top, tallied the ordinance, and noted that the man who “signed an executive order creating a program to ‘beautify Washington DC’” was now “plotting to transform his expensive birthday party into a demolition derby that will cause serious damage to the roads that line the nation’s capital”.In late May, three weeks after the Associated Press first revealed the parade plan, the army promised it would pay to fix the streets. It did not commit to picking up the multimillion-dollar tab for policing and cleanup, however, which will come out of a city budget from which the House cut $1.1bn in March and didn’t get around to restoring.Still, the partial resolution of the infrastructure problems liberated the press to get on with the fun stuff: “what to expect” on the festive day: not just planes, tanks and 6,700 soldiers, but also fireworks, football players and fitness competitions. USA Today linked to the free tickets page and published the parade route, plus a map of the military goodies on display, including robots and night-vision goggles. It called the event an “unofficial birthday party”. ABC News ran a feature on Doc Holliday, the dog who will join the parade in a mule-drawn cart.Tucked into some stories was a sentence or two indicating controversy, such as this from Reuters: “Critics have called a parade an authoritarian display of power that is wasteful, especially as Trump slashes costs throughout the federal government.”“The plans have drawn some criticism from Democrats,” said CBS.The Hill wrote: “Democrats and critics have questioned both the cost of the parade and whether it politicizes the military, which has traditionally been nonpartisan. The fact that the parade falls on Trump’s birthday has only fueled criticism from Democrats who view it as a way for the president to celebrate himself.”Over at Fox, they were telling the critics to get over themselves. “The Democratic party, they’ve chosen to be an outrage machine at a time when there is outrage fatigue in this country,” scoffed Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s former press secretary and current Fox News host. “People are fed up with the ‘authoritarianism coup’ language.”It’s true. Only one party is complaining. But what is striking about their complaints is the relative dearth of authoritarian coup language. “The egotist-in-chief wants taxpayers to foot the bill for a military parade on his birthday,” said Steve Cohen, a US representative from Tennessee, in a statement. As if the president were moved by mere narcissism.Reported Forbes on 15 May: “There has been no formal pushback to the proposal.”Trump likes hulking lethal toys, but he hasn’t always been partial to the people who run them. There was the fight he picked with a couple of Muslim Gold Star parents during his first campaign; the comments on a 2018 European trip that fallen soldiers are “losers” and “suckers”; the undisguised queasiness about seeing or being seen with wounded veterans; the Pentagon session where he called his top officers“a bunch of dopes and babies”.But he is warming to the role of commander in chief. In his commencement speech at West Point, between bloviations on Nato, drag shows, golf and trophy wives, he boasted about the unprecedented $1.1tn military budget. “You’ll become officers in the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known,” he said. “And I know because I rebuilt that army, and I rebuilt the military … like nobody has ever rebuilt it before.”Also breaking from script on Memorial Day at Arlington Cemetery, he suggested that the parade, on top of nabbing the World Cup and the Olympics, was divinely ordained. “Look what I have, I have everything,” he cried. “Amazing the way things work out. God did that.”If he is to ease from commander of the armed forces to commander of everything, he will need more than God on his side. He’ll need to own the military. Forty-five million bucks is a good starting bid.Stalin’s 50th birthday celebration, in 1929, is considered the kickoff of his cult of personality. Hitler’s 50th birthday military parade, in April 1939, was organized by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels for maximum grandeur, including a motorcade of 50 white limousines. Five months later, Germany invaded Poland.Kim Jong-un changed Loyalty Oath Day from 1 January to his birthday, 8 January. This February, the Republican US representative Claudia Tenney of New York introduced a bill to designate Trump’s birthday as a national holiday. It hasn’t gone anywhere – yet.The pieces are lining up like a phalanx of soldiers. The website of America250, the non-profit fundraising and marketing arm of the Semiquincentennial Commission, is an advertisement for Trump. Its description of the “grand military parade” refers to him in the second sentence and proclaims that under his “leadership, the U.S. Army has been restored to strength and readiness”.At the parade, the crowd of 200,000 spectators will be dominated by Maga idol worshippers. Trump will watch the extravaganza from a reviewing stand, just like Xi Jinping and Putin did recently at Red Square. The army’s Golden Knights parachute team will land on the Eclipse and hand the president a flag. Officials say there are “no plans” to sing Happy Birthday, but there are rumors the army will also give Trump a birthday gift.Let’s call 14 June what it promises to be: the ceremonial birth of the US’s 21st-century fascist regime.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is at judithlevine.substack.com More

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      in US Politics

      Has RFK Jr misdiagnosed America? – podcast

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      Archive: AP, ABC News, CBS News, Face the Nation, Fox News, PBS Newshour
      Read Alaina Demopoulos’s feature on Maha moms
      Subscribe to the Guardian’s new narrative series Missing in the Amazon
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politcspodus More

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      Woman’s life-saving treatment delayed by Trump cuts to NIH: ‘Cancer shouldn’t be political’

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      A 43-year-old woman and mother of two with advanced cancer says she is experiencing life-or-death delays in treatment because of the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).Natalie Phelps, who has stage 4 colorectal cancer, has spoken publicly, raising the alarm about a setback in care for herself and others who are part of clinical trials run by the agency. Her story has made it into congressional hearings and spurred a spat between a Democratic senator and the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Behind the scenes, she and others are advocating to get her treatment started sooner.So far, Phelps has been told that her treatment, which should have started around mid-June, will not begin until after mid-July.“I’ve done everything I can do,” Phelps, who lives in Washington state, told the Guardian. “There’s nothing else I can do. I’m really just out of options. There’s very limited treatments approved for colorectal cancer.”Phelps is one of many Americans whose lives have been disrupted or altered by the ongoing cuts to government services made by the Trump administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge. Some NIH scientists have lost their jobs, and others have seen their grants ended. Researchers told the Associated Press that cuts to the agency and its programs would end treatment for cancer patients and delay cures and treatment discoveries.View image in fullscreenPhelps was diagnosed in 2020, soon after giving birth to her second child, and after her symptoms were dismissed by doctors for months. Since then, she’s gone through 48 rounds of chemotherapy. She had an 18-hour surgery to remove her primary tumor, plus two follow-up liver surgeries. She’s had radiation therapy to her brain, leg and pelvis.Dr Steven Rosenberg’s cell-based immunotherapy trial at the NIH offered hope. The treatment uses a person’s own cells to fight cancer and has seen some promise for patients with colon, rectal and GI cancers. This was deemed an exciting step by the medical community because the process had previously worked on blood cancers, but not solid cancers, the Washington Post reported.But these promising developments are coming alongside cuts to federal agencies, including ones that have affected these trials, Rosenberg has publicly confirmed. The trial itself was not cut, but it is experiencing delays because of staff reductions, Rosenberg has said.Phelps passed the initial medical steps to enter the trial in March, then flew to Bethesda, Maryland, at the end of April this year. There, they drew her blood to use to engineer T-cells for her treatment, which she previously was told takes about four weeks. Instead, she was told it would now take eight weeks, which the doctors said was because of funding cuts imposed by Doge.“That got me motivated enough to start to really panic, because my cancer between March and April really exploded and progressed to my lymph nodes and my bones,” she said. “My oncologist was very anxious about the difference between four and eight weeks could make, waiting for those treatment products.”One month can make a huge difference in late-stage cancer treatment, but the delay also brought up major decisions for Phelps. She wouldn’t be able to do chemo for a month before the treatment began. With a delay, she could maybe do chemo for a bit, then stop a month before.Then there was the size of her tumors – which would become the subject of the spat in a congressional hearing. She needed a tumor of at least one centimeter in size to start the trial, or an exemption – her disease was spreading in the number of tumors, not in one large tumor. The tumor would help scientists track how the treatment was working.View image in fullscreenIf she underwent chemo before doing a final scan needed to start the trial, tumors could shrink, affecting her eligibility. But if she waited for two months and did nothing, the disease could keep spreading. Her oncologist thought maybe the trial would have to be placed on the back burner, given the extended timeline.Phelps posted on social media, explaining her predicament. After seeing her videos, friends suggested she reach out to her members of Congress, who could intervene with the agency and help her get treated sooner.The office of Patty Murray, a Washington Democratic senator, got involved. On 14 May, Murray questioned Kennedy during a Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee hearing, sharing Phelps’ story and asking how many staff have been cut from the NIH’s clinical center. Kennedy said to reach out to his office for specifics on Phelps and claimed no cuts had been made to clinical trials. “I don’t think that should happen to anybody,” he said.Later in the hearing, though, Kennedy said his office had looked into the case and claimed that Phelps was “medically ineligible” for the trial, so her case had nothing to do with staff reductions. “That was a canard,” he told the committee, and he told Murray: “You don’t care. You don’t care about Natalie.” The exchange became a Fox News headline.It was a “spurious statement” to say she was medically ineligible, Phelps said – she was waiting for one final scan to see if her tumor was one centimeter, but had met all other criteria. She had a scan the day after the hearing, which showed her tumor had now grown large enough to qualify.“It’s been so much extra stress. The night after the hearing, I threw up all night. I barely made it to my scan because I was so stressed out,” she said. “It’s been very intense emotionally and an extreme added stress that nobody needs. Cancer just shouldn’t be political.”In a Senate appropriations hearing the next week, Kennedy again argued with Murray, saying it was “untrue” that Phelps’ care was delayed. In statements after the second exchange, Murray said her staff has been in “constant touch” with career staff at the NIH and the FDA to get help on Phelps’ case.“I still have no answer about how many NIH clinical staff have been fired,” Murray’s 20 May statement says. “I still have no answer why Natalie was told by her NIH doctor that her care was being delayed due to staffing cuts. For weeks, my staff has been demanding answers about agency staffing cuts.”In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said cancer research is a “high priority” for the NIH and HHS.“Ongoing investments reflect our dedication to addressing both urgent and long-term health challenges,” the agency said. “There have been no cuts to clinical trials.”In another statement sent after publication, the agency said the claim that patients were seeing treatment delays because of reductions in force was “false”.“No clinical trials have been cut. No personnel involved in direct patient care were affected by the RIF,” the agency said.“Clinical trials continue to be conducted in accordance with established protocols and patient safety standards. NIH investigators are responsible for ensuring trials are appropriately staffed, that patient enrollment aligns with trial capacity, and that participants are fully informed of timelines and potential risks of experimental treatments. We do not comment on individual patient cases in accordance with the Privacy Act and to protect patient confidentiality.”But Rosenberg, the doctor leading the trial Phelps is in, confirmed to the Washington Post in April that two patients were delayed care because of staff cuts and “purchasing slowdowns”, and these delays were confirmed before big layoffs hit the agency.Rosenberg didn’t respond to requests for comment this week. He previously told the Cancer Letter, an oncology publication, that Phelps was, at the time of the hearing, not eligible because of her tumors’ size, but was scheduled for additional scans to see if they had grown. He confirmed that, if determined eligible, her case would be delayed by a month because of reductions in force.Phelps wasn’t alone, he told the publication – nearly all of the trial patients were seeing a delay of about a month, which he attributed to a “loss of technicians” as part of reductions in force done by the Trump administration. It isn’t just delays, either.“We’ve had to drop the number of pa­tients we treat by about half. We’re just having to turn away more patients,” Rosenberg said.Phelps is still waiting to hear when she can start treatment. As of last Thursday, she was told she had a spot in the queue and the agency was seeing if her treatment could be moved up. On Tuesday, she was told it would now be 21 July. The NIH told her the agency tried to hire back staff, but it hasn’t worked out.“I have nothing to lose at this point. I’m pleading for my life. I’m begging for help,” she said. More

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      Trump news at a glance: tariffs reinstated, for now, after rollercoaster of court decisions

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      President Trump’s tariffs remain in place, at least for now, after an appeals court ruled that his administration can continue to collect import fees.The latest ruling came just a day after a separate court ruled that Trump had overstepped his power, a judgment that his administration has pushed back against.White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday that America cannot function when diplomatic or trade negotiations are “railroaded by activist judges”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump wins breathing space after major blow to tariff policyThe Trump administration is racing to halt a major blow to the president’s sweeping tariffs after a US court ruled they “exceed any authority granted to the president.”A US trade court ruled the US president’s tariffs regime was illegal on Wednesday in a dramatic twist that could block Trump’s controversial global trade policy.On Thursday, an appeals court agreed to a temporary pause in the decision pending an appeal hearing. The Trump administration is expected to take the case to the supreme court if it loses.Read the full storyTrump allies rail against court’s tariff rulingRepublicans and close allies of Donald Trump are railing against a federal judicial panel that blocked a wide swath of the US president’s tariffs Wednesday night, including those against China.Some attempted to frame the decision as part of a broader fight between the Trump administration and US justice system. Trump has frequently complained about legal decisions that don’t go his way, attacking judges on social media in ways that have alarmed civic society experts.Read the full storyTariffs derailed by law firm that received money from Trump backersDonald Trump’s tariff policy was derailed by a libertarian public interest law firm that has received money from some of his richest backers.The Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit against the US president’s “reciprocal” tariffs on behalf of five small businesses, which it said were harmed by the policy.Previous backers of the firm include billionaires Robert Mercer and Richard Uihlein, who were also financial backers of Trump’s presidential campaigns.Read the full storyChina condemns US decision to revoke student visasChina has lodged a formal protest over the US declaration that it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students, with the foreign ministry saying it had objected to the announcement made a day earlier by Marco Rubio.Read the full storyFed asserts independence from Trump over interest ratesThe Federal Reserve issued a rare, strongly worded statement on Thursday after chair Jerome Powell spoke with Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday morning, holding firm on the central bank’s independence amid pressure from Trump to lower interest rates.The three-paragraph statement emphasized the Fed’s independent, non-partisan role in setting monetary policy based on economic data.“Chair Powell did not discuss his expectations for monetary policy, except to stress that the path of policy will depend entirely on incoming economic information and what that means for the outlook,” the statement read.Read the full storyTrump violating right to life with anti-environment orders, youth lawsuit saysTwenty two young Americans have filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration over its anti-environment executive orders. By intentionally boosting oil and gas production and stymying carbon-free energy, federal officials are violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty, alleges the lawsuit, filed on Thursday.Read the full storyImmigration agents get quota to arrest 3,000 people a dayThe Trump administration has set aggressive new goals in its anti-immigration agenda, demanding that federal agents arrest 3,000 people a day – or more than a million in a year.The new target, tripling arrest figures from earlier this year, was delivered to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) leaders by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, in a strained meeting last week.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Robert F Kennedy Jr’s flagship health commission report contains citations to studies that do not exist, according to an investigation by the US publication Notus.

      Top House Democrat Jamie Raskin has demanded Donald Trump reveal a list of who attended his private dinner last week for major investors in his meme coin, as questions swirl about the deep and secretive connections between the Trump administration and the cryptocurrency industry.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 28 May 2025. More

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      The chaos Elon Musk and Doge are leaving behind in Washington

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      Elon Musk formally exited his role in the Trump administration on Wednesday night, ending a contentious and generally unpopular run as a senior adviser to the president and de facto head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Though he promised efficiency and modernization, Musk leaves behind a trail of uncertainty and reduced functionality.The timing of Musk’s departure lines up with the end of his 130-day term limit as a “special government employee” but also plays a part in an effort by the billionaire to signal a wider shift away from Washington as he faces backlash from the public and shareholders. Musk has recently made a show of refocusing his efforts on his tech companies in interviews, saying that he has spent too much time focused on politics and plans to reduce his political spending in the future.As Musk moves on, he consigns a mess of half-realized plans and gutted agencies to his acolytes installed in key positions across the federal government. His departure throws Doge’s already chaotic impact on the government into an even grayer limbo, with questions over how much power the nebulous taskforce will have without him and who, if anyone, might rebuild the programs and services it destroyed.Doge’s debrisMusk’s initial pitch for Doge was to save $2tn from the budget by rooting out rampant waste and fraud, as well as to conduct an overhaul of government software that would modernize how federal agencies operate. Doge so far has claimed to cut about $140bn from the budget – although its “wall of receipts” is notorious for containing errors that overestimate its savings. Donald Trump’s new tax bill, though not part of Doge and opposed by Musk, is also expected to add $2.3tn to the deficit, nullifying any savings Doge may have achieved. Its promises of a new, modernized software have frequently been limited to AI chatbots – some of which were already in the works under the Biden administration.The greater impact of Doge has instead been its dismantling of government services and humanitarian aid. Doge’s cuts have targeted a swath of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, which handles weather and natural disaster forecasting and plunged others such as the Department of Veterans Affairs into crises. Numerous smaller agencies, such as one that coordinates policy on homelessness, have been in effect shut down. Doge has brought several bureaus to their knees, with no clear plan of whether the staff Musk leaves behind will try to update or maintain their services or simply shut them off.In one early example of its cuts and the holes in government they have created, Doge targeted the government tech group that partnered with federal agencies to provide tech solutions, known as 18F.When Doge staffers entered the General Services Administration agency that housed the 18F Office, former employees have said they appeared to fundamentally misunderstand how the government operates and the challenges of creating public services.Former 18F director Lindsay Young, who is now part of a legal appeal that contends the firing of 18F violated legal requirements, is concerned that Doge’s cuts will have long-lasting effects on government functions.“In government, it’s just so much easier to tear things down than it is to build things up,” Young said.The mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services represented a similar loss of institutional knowledge that Doge does not seem intent on replacing.Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has been tracking Doge’s cuts, used the agency’s tobacco unit as an example, which was severely affected by the cuts. “The loss of so much expertise, especially in the healthcare area will mean that more Americans will become sick or die earlier than they might have,” he said. “It also may take many years and great expenditure of resources to restore that experience and expertise.”Musk’s gutting of USAid, formerly the world’s largest single provider of humanitarian aid, is one of the starkest examples of the disarray and harm that Doge’s cuts have caused. The US canceled approximately 83% of USAid programs, imperiling services around the world aimed at humanitarian assistance and disease prevention. One pioneering program under USAid, Pepfar, which coordinates the US HIV/Aids response, has seen its services reduced worldwide and its staff left in confusion over what they can still do for people who relied on their organization. Doge’s cuts to the program have likewise threatened the rollout of a new anti-HIV drug that researchers have hailed as a “miracle” for its effectiveness.As Musk returns to Tesla and SpaceX, the agencies he laid waste to are left to pick up the pieces.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Doge staffers still holding sway in governmentWhile Musk is returning to his tech empire, many of the former employees and inexperienced young engineers whom he hired to work for Doge are set to remain part of the government. One of the largest questions about what Doge’s future looks like is whether these staffers, some of whom gained near unfettered access to the government’s most sensitive data, will retain the same powers they enjoyed under Musk.Doge staffers, such as billionaire investor and Musk ally Antonio Gracias, have embedded themselves at key agencies such as the Social Security Administration and Federal Aviation Administration. They have worked as a sort of parallel government task force, operating with a lack of transparency as their attempts to access databases and migrate data has caused disarray and technical problems. Whether Trump and agency heads allow them to continue on with carte blanche remains unseen.Already at least two prominent Doge staffers have followed Musk to the exit. The billionaire’s longtime top lieutenant Steve Davis, who was running the day-to-day operations of Doge, left his role on Thursday. Spokesperson Katie Miller, wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, also left the White House to work full-time for Musk, according to CNN.Some of Musk’s dictates have already been rolled back since he left Washington earlier this month, including a much-derided mandate that required federal employees to send a list of five things that they accomplished each week. The weekly email, which was initially introduced with the threat of being fired for non-compliance, was largely ignored and viewed by many as pointless busywork. On Wednesday, the Pentagon formally announced that it would halt the practice.Doge is not being left leaderless, however. Taking over for Musk, according to the Wall Street Journal, is Christian nationalist and key figure in the rightwing Project 2025 manifesto Russ Vought. A longtime believer that the president should have sweeping executive powers, Vought has said that he wants federal employees to be left “in trauma” and to slash federal funding.Musk has praised Doge’s work and pledged that it will continue without him, and as recently as this week is still removing veteran officials it disagrees with from federal agencies. Even at reduced numbers, Musk’s allies also still have access to immense amounts of sensitive and confidential data they are reportedly intending to use to surveil immigrants.What seems farther away than ever in the chaos, however, is Musk’s promise to make the government more efficient and better serve the public.“You don’t need that many people to decide to just cut things,” 18F’s Young said. “But if you actually want to build things, that takes thought. It takes effort.” More

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      Trump administration sets quota to arrest 3,000 people a day in anti-immigration agenda

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      The Trump administration has set aggressive new goals in its anti-immigration agenda, demanding that federal agents arrest 3,000 people a day – or more than a million in a year.The new target, tripling arrest figures from earlier this year, was delivered to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) leaders by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, in a strained meeting last week.The intense meeting, first reported by Axios and confirmed by the Guardian, involved Ice officials from enforcement and removal operations (ERO) and homeland security investigations (HSI) – both separate offices within DHS. ERO is in charge of immigration enforcement, including arrests, detention and deportation, while HSI typically focuses on investigating transnational crime, such as drug trafficking, human smuggling and the spread of online child abuse.The 21 May meeting in Washington DC is the latest example of the increasing pressure being placed on officials nationwide to increase the number of arrests of immigrants, as the administration doubles down on its anti-immigration agenda.The latest phase of the crackdown includes new tactics, such as mandating federal law enforcement agents outside Ice to assist in arrests and transports, more deputizing of compliant state and local law enforcement agencies, and arresting people at locations that were once protected, like courthouses.“ This administration came into office with the illusion that they had been given a broad mandate to effectuate an aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, and they are doubling down now on that agenda,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director for the American Immigration Council. “ Public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump’s immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends, masked agents in our communities and people afraid to go to work and show up to school, in ways that undermine our local economies.”Helter-skelter action has led to citizens caught up in the dragnet, Ice skirting due process – to the chagrin of the supreme court and lower courts – over-crowding in detention centers, arrests based on ideology and officials deporting people to third countries.“The sweeping Ice raids and arrests are hitting families, longtime residents, children and communities in a way never seen before,” said Jesse Franzblau, associate director of policy for the National Immigrant Justice Center.As the number of people crossing the border into the US without authorization has plummeted even further than after the final Biden crackdown, operations in the US interior have increased.“Under Secretary Noem, we are delivering on President Trump’s and the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe,” Tricia McLaughlin, the homeland security assistant secretary, said in a statement.But even if the new target is fulfilled, it’s a far cry from Trump’s election campaign pledges to deport 15m to 20m people, which itself is more than the estimated 11m undocumented population.Agents with the FBI, HSI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal law enforcement agencies have been co-opted from normal priorities to carry out immigration enforcement work. Current and former federal officials told the Guardian there is concern that important non-immigration-related investigations are falling by the wayside as a result.There has also been a huge escalation by local police and sheriff’s departments assisting, deputized by Ice to perform federal immigration arrests under a program called 287(g).Ice has also been targeting unusual places.On Tuesday, Ice and several other federal law enforcement agencies arrested roughly 40 people on the Massachusetts islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The US Coast Guard transported those apprehended, Ice said, angering some residents, local media reported.The agency has also been arresting people at courthouses throughout the country – a trend that has troubled advocates and policy analysts.“We’re seeing the Trump administration take the unprecedented step of arresting non-citizens who are following the government’s rules and procedures, and showing up for their court hearings,” said Gupta. “ They are desperate to reach a certain number of arrests per day. And the only way they can find non-citizens easily and quickly is to go to the courthouses, where they [immigrants] are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.”On Wednesday, sources told the Guardian that officials had arrested people at two separate immigration courts in New York City. The outlet the City observed seven people arrested in a lower Manhattan court.Internal documents accessed by the Washington Post show Ice officers in more than 20 states have been instructed to arrest people at courthouses immediately after a judge orders them deported or after their criminal cases are dropped and they try to leave.The number of people held in detention by Ice reached 49,000 by 18 May, an increase of more than 10,000 since Trump took office, with the agency using local jails and federal prisons to hold immigrants, amid overcrowding.Austin Kocher, an assistant research professor at Syracuse University who closely tracks immigration detention data, said of the 3,000 daily arrest quota: “ The big question for me is: where are they going to put people?”Meanwhile, last month, the Trump administration ordered immigration judges to quickly dismiss cases by denying asylum seekers a hearing. The directive “has nothing to do with efficiency – it’s about slamming shut the courthouse door on people who have the right to seek asylum and a fair day in court”, Shayna Kessler, the director of the Advancing Universal Representation initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, said.On Capitol Hill, the major spending bill passed by the House would balloon spending for immigration enforcement, at the US-Mexico border and in the interior, while cutting everyday services.“The administration is on a reckless spending spree, counting on Congress to bail them out for overspending hundreds of millions of dollars in private prison contracts with ties to top-level officials,” Franzblau said.He concluded: “It is beyond cruel to superfund Ice’s rampant violations of constitutional protections and expand the deadly immigration detention and enforcement apparatus.” More