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US budget chief calls fears that cuts to benefits will lead to deaths ‘totally ridiculous’
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 June 2025, 16:00
The White House budget director Russ Vought on Sunday dismissed as “totally ridiculous” fears expressed by voters that cuts to benefits in the huge spending bill passed by the House will lead to premature deaths in America.Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill act, now awaiting debate in the US Senate, will slash two major federal safety net programs, Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps people afford groceries, which will affect millions of people if it becomes law.Vought, director of the office of management and budget (OMB) and a key figure in Project 2025, the rightwing manifesto created to guide a second Trump term, defended the bill in an appearance on CNN on Sunday morning, also defending the lacerations to the federal workforce under Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).Vought was asked about a town hall meeting in Iowa last week hosted by the senator Joni Ernst where, when fielding questions about proposed cuts to Medicaid, a constituent yelled out that as a result people were going to die.Ernst responded, to jeers: “People are not – well, we all are going to die. For heaven’s sakes, folks.”Then, after the exchange went viral online, she posted a sarcastic non-apology video on Saturday, saying: “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth. So I apologize. And I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”When Vought responded on CNN’s State of the Union politics show about such concerns over cuts to health insurance and grocery subsidies leading to premature deaths, he said: “It’s totally ridiculous. This is ‘astroturf’. This bill will preserve and protect the programs, the social safety net, but it will make it much more commonsense.”Astroturfing is slang for pretending criticism is coming from the grassroots when, in fact, it is being orchestrated by interested parties.Some advocacy groups have said loss of Medicaid insurance and food stamps will cause great hardship.“These cuts won’t just hurt – they will kill,” the head of the Ohio Nurses Association said, while the American Academy of Pediatrics said the bill would result in “hungry kids” and impossible choices for many families. The American Hospital Association has warned that rural hospitals could close.On the same CNN show on Sunday, the senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, condemned Vought’s and Ernst’s remarks, saying: “Everyone would rather die in old age than at 40.” Murphy said people losing health insurance in order to continue tax cuts for the richest would lead to more deaths and that the bill is “an absolute disaster” and will add to the US deficit.“It’s just unreal the amount of gaslighting this administration is doing,” he said.Fellow Democrat and Georgia senator Raphael Warnock told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that he is in favor of work but that a work-reporting requirement in the bill, as a condition of Medicaid, “is very good at kicking people off their healthcare coverage, it’s not good at incentivizing people to work”. He added that if passed, the legislation would result in “a workforce that’s sicker and poorer” and damage to the US economy.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, who got the bill through the chamber last month but faces a greater challenge from some fellow Republicans in the Senate, told NBC that the bill does not include cuts to Medicaid but instead would strengthen the system and result in reductions in “fraud, waste and abuse”.The House minority leader and New York Democratic representative Hakeem Jeffries predicted that the bill would not pass the Republican-controlled Senate.“Hospitals will close, nursing homes will shut down and people will literally die,” he warned. More
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I crisscrossed America to talk to people whose views I disagreed with. I now have one certainty
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 June 2025, 13:00
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View image in fullscreenThe residential community was lodged near a national forest on the outskirts of Scottsdale, Arizona. Forbidding gates and sentry posts restricted access to the exclusive development and its elegant homes. But security here went much further.Each cul-de-sac in the colony had its own individual railway gate, and many of the homeowners had installed gates across their own driveways as well. Anyone coming in or out of those houses would have to clear three checkpoints that set them apart from the wider world beyond.I was astonished. But the security director at the gated community saw nothing unusual in such arrangements. “People shouldn’t be able to just walk into where you live. You should be able to defend yourself against the rest of the world.” Immigration officers were doing exactly the same thing along the country’s border, he added: defending us.I couldn’t help but think about what I had seen in the company of migrant aid volunteers earlier that week in southern Arizona, all the tattered clothes and humble belongings caught in the brush of a desert trail, attesting to the desperation of those who had fled through that harsh terrain.How could people be indifferent to such suffering, I asked one of the volunteers. “It’s like talking to a wall,” he replied.Over the last eight years, I have crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, trying to make sense of why the rifts in our national culture run so deep. I have talked with homebuilders in North Dakota and activists for housing justice in north Texas, with diesel truck enthusiasts in Iowa and pedestrian safety planners in Florida, with white nationalist demonstrators in Tennessee and environmental justice organizers in the Hudson River valley. I have logged many thousands of miles on local highways and country roads, striking up conversations with strangers on park benches and in derelict shopping malls.I recount those travels and their lessons in my new book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down. In it I argue that, in the US, we are at crossroads, poised between a politics of suspicion and retreat, and another founded on more expansive relationships of mutual aid and collective solidarity.In the many conversations and encounters that led to this book, I tried to approach people on their own terms, paying heed to their everyday commitments and concerns, often very different from mine. I have come away with a much better understanding of why things are as stuck as they are, and what it would take to truly change them.The challenges are real, as I saw one October in Shelbyville, Tennessee.View image in fullscreen“How are you feeling?” I asked the Nepali woman behind the counter of a gas station. She replied with a single word and a tight-lipped smile. “Scared.”Scheduled that Saturday morning in Shelbyville was a “White Lives Matter” political rally. Businesses downtown were shuttered. Police had cordoned off roads heading into the town. A pervasive thrum was in the air, from helicopters circling overhead. Dozens of officers in riot gear massed on the roofs of low buildings.The October 2017 rally followed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where clashes between demonstrators and counter-protesters left dozens injured and one young woman, Heather Heyer, dead. The Shelbyville rally was organized by a southern separatist group called the League of the South, working with a larger umbrella of white nationalist groups called the Nationalist Front.“Which side are you on?” an officer asked as I approached the site. Long metal barricades divided the white nationalists from the counter-protesters who were also gathering that morning. I followed a handful of journalists into the security clearance area for the white nationalist demonstrators. I was hoping to talk with some of them, to try to understand why they had come to think of their own wellbeing in such starkly racist terms.Everyone was forced to mill around the checkpoint and submit to a pat-down in the name of safety. The process was long and arduous, so much so that it helped break the ice between a brown ethnographer and the white nationalists in his midst. Here was something we could complain about together, as if this was a painfully slow line at an airport terminal.View image in fullscreenI struck up a conversation with a bearded man who worked at a uniform factory in northern Alabama. He was wearing a red Maga cap, with an American flag draped around his shoulders – flagpoles had been banned. He admitted feeling stupid with a flag on his back. “What would look cool is a Swat vest and a gun,” he suggested, eyeing the officers nearby.Some of the demonstrators came down to the checkpoint in quasi-military formation, with helmeted young men in rows marching behind plastic shields as a ruddy-faced man with a thick white beard led them in a chant: “Closed borders! White nation! Now we start the deportation!” When they halted, I could see that some of them had swastikas and the letters “KKK” tattooed on their arms.Styled as foot soldiers, many startlingly young in age, these men were a deliberately provocative spectacle of fascist unity. They were also a minority among those who gathered for the white nationalist rally in Shelbyville. That left me curious about the other demonstrators who had joined in plain clothes. How did these ideas speak to them?I fell into conversation with a tall white man in a black Carhartt jacket. He didn’t want to divulge who he was, and nor, frankly, did I, but it turned out that he was raised in Brooklyn, not far from the Bronx borough where I was born. In his late 40s, with a salt-and-pepper beard, he had gone to the rally in Charlottesville and had come to Shelbyville for this event.“I have an affinity for this side,” he admitted. I introduced myself as a writer, and we wound up getting into a long discussion.“What do you think of this idea of an ethnostate?” I asked the man, bringing up the vision of a Balkanized white nation floated by rally organizers. “What would you do with people like me?”“What’s your heritage?” he asked.“My family is from India,” I said. “I was born and raised in this country, but my parents immigrated here.”“Aren’t you guys Aryans?” Both of us laughed uneasily.He asked when my family had come to the United States, adding that he had ancestors who came here during the revolutionary war era. “Our ancestors built this country for their posterity. We feel this is our inheritance.”“Let me tell you why I’m here,” I told him. “In the 1970s, there was a shortage of doctors in the United States. The government put out a call, and a whole bunch of them came from India. My dad’s a cardiologist. Over the years, he’s taken care of thousands of patients, saved a lot of lives. Does that give us a place here, or not?”“Yeah, that’s a part of our history,” he replied. “We can accept that. We can absorb a certain amount of other cultures.” The way he spoke, he seemed to be thinking of a national organism, its ability to tolerate some degree of foreign bodies in its midst.Still, the man from Brooklyn insisted, “there’s no living with the other.” What seemed to have gone missing here was the faith that one could live alongside others unlike oneself, sharing a collective life with them rather than living at the other’s expense.“You gotta put your own air mask on first,” he said. “You gotta take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else. You can’t help people if you cut your own throat.”View image in fullscreenPlaces of belonging can be conceived in defensive and xenophobic ways, as that white nationalist rally had in Shelbyville. But they can also be imagined and sustained in a more hopeful manner, as shared spaces of cultural resistance and transformation.I think, for example, of the members of the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship in north Texas, who led the effort to desegregate their town in the 1960s. I was privileged to meet some of these courageous women during my research.At the turn of the 20th century, the Black community of Denton was anchored in a prosperous enclave at the heart of the town, known as Quakertown. Like many other Black townships at time, Quakertown had thrived, with a school and many churches and businesses. Then, in the early 1920s, white civic leaders in Denton led a campaign to appropriate the Black township’s land, raze its buildings and place a public park for white families there instead.Many Black families were forced to leave Denton altogether, for other towns and states or farther afield. Those who remained rebuilt their community once again on a tract of land south-east of the town, past flour mills and two sets of railway tracks, a distant periphery that remains the nucleus of Denton’s Black population to this day.I met Alma Clark for the first time at the American Legion Senior Center in south-east Denton in 2017, when she was 89 years old. She scoffed at the ideas of health and sanitation used as rationale for Quakertown’s removal. “We went into the homes of white folk and cooked their food and cleaned their houses. We took care of their children. We were good enough for that,” she told me with a tart smile.However much labor the Black women and men of Denton contributed to the wellbeing of the town’s white residents, they had been cast into a space of public neglect. Under these circumstances, families in the community turned to strategies of collective support and caretaking.Women relied on one another to help with their children, as they juggled work and other responsibilities. Families added rooms to their own homes to house Black students admitted to Denton’s universities but denied a place in their dormitories.In the 1960s, Clark and other Black women in Denton came together with some white women in the town to create what came to be known as the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship. They began by opening their homes to each other, sharing meals for the first time. Eventually, their conversations led to public campaigns that drew dozens of active women in the town. The organization ensured that its membership remained Black and white in equal measure at any given time, and alternated its meetings regularly between Black and white homes.View image in fullscreenWomen in the fellowship made visible the harsh realities of racial segregation. They led a successful campaign to pave south-east Denton’s streets and equip them with streetlights. They organized voting drives to register new Black voters, and took to visiting local restaurants in interracial pairs to support their desegregation. They distributed cards that encouraged Denton city residents to sign a “good neighbor pledge” that affirmed the right of every person to rent, buy or build a home anywhere they wished, even as social and economic forces conspired to keep people mostly where they were.The legacy of the Women’s Interracial Fellowship remains widely visible in Denton today. A vivid mural depicting Clark and several other Black women activists with the organization spans both sides of the railway underpass leading into south-east Denton. An art installation commemorating their work for racial justice adorns a small downtown park, close to the central courthouse square from which a Confederate monument was finally removed in 2020. Contemporary antiracist organizing in the Black Lives Matter era has drawn from historical struggles in the town, on the more inclusive vision of home and community that activists have long summoned.“We had to help each other to survive,” Clark recollected to me in 2022, when I returned to Denton for the Juneteenth celebration that year.She went on to add a striking analogy. “It’s like making cornbread. You need meal, you need flour, you need baking powder, you need eggs. You need to put all those ingredients together to make that cornbread. You can’t do anything if you keep them separate.”View image in fullscreenAll of us have much to lose in the erosion of neighborly concern, the impetus to look out for others we don’t know that well. Neighborliness is a powerful image of collective belonging, especially in a world where relationships span the globe and the consequences of how we live extend to many distant and unseen places.In saying this, I don’t mean to idealize American neighbors and neighborhoods. Contemporary patterns of isolation draw on deep histories of racial segregation and systemic neglect in the United States, lines that have long been drawn between lives that matter and lives that don’t. At the same time, neighborliness has also long been practiced as a more expansive form of conviviality, equipping people to live with the reality of social difference and disagreement.One afternoon a few years ago, passing through a small town in southern Michigan, I went out to a park to catch up on some notes and phone calls. After some time, a white man in his 60s sat down on the bench beside me, and we fell into conversation. He was slightly drunk, a little red in the eye, and keen to talk. He had recently retired from work as a mechanic at a nearby plant. His wife was ailing, mostly bedridden at home, and he was worried about her medical care.I can’t remember how the subject of politics came up, but he told me that he had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He also wanted me to understand that this didn’t change what he owed me as a newcomer to his town. No, he didn’t know me from Adam, but our meeting was the Lord’s blessing, he told me, and I ought to have someone around there to call on in case of trouble.He scribbled down his number and address on a scrap of paper and insisted that I take it. “I don’t care if you’re brown or red or whatever,” he told me, and I believed him.I was heading out the next morning, but I kept thinking about that unexpected gesture of kindness. It was like a flash of some other solidarity that still remained possible. I picked up a pie at a market nearby, meaning to drop it off for that man and his family. When I pulled up at the address he had shared, the shades were drawn, and no one seemed to be home. I left the pie and a note on the concrete landing of that small tract house clad in blue vinyl siding.I felt a bit nervous and exposed, walking back to my car. I was, after all, a stranger. But it felt like the right thing to do. He had treated me like a neighbor, and I wanted to reciprocate.Such aspirations will face serious tests in the years to come. How will people respond to the deportation of families who have lived beside them for decades, or the gutting of hard-won protections for clean water and air, or the removal of books meaningful to the most marginal members of their communities from local school curricula, or the deepening of media foxholes that celebrate masculine aggression and disdain for the struggles of others elsewhere?Xenophobic and authoritarian politics draw their power from a fear of foreigners and strangers, an idea that the dangers they pose are already around us, needing to be identified and rooted out. But as Toni Morrison observed, such ideas often reflect “an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging”. The problem lies less with the strangers among us than the strangeness within, the consequences of a feeling of radical estrangement from the world.In my writing, I try to show how everyday structures of isolation – at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?It may be daunting, the idea of making a common life – in public space, in the pursuit of wellbeing on an imperiled Earth, even in the unpredictable span of a conversation – with others unlike ourselves. But we need to find our way back to the communion we may share with those beyond our bounds.We need to rekindle that open spirit of kinship once again.Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Parts of this essay were adapted from his book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, out now.Spot illustrations by Peter Gamlen. More
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‘Insidious fear’ fills universities as Trump escalates conflict during commencement season
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 June 2025, 12:00
It is graduation season in the United States and with it comes a tradition of commencement speeches to departing college students, usually from high-profile figures who seek to inspire those leaving academia.But, as with many things under Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, commencement season this year has been far from normal, especially as the US president and his allies have waged conflicts against the nation’s universities.Amid concerns about the Trump administration undermining US residents’ free speech rights, some commencement ceremonies have featured speakers who have warned about the president’s abuses of power, while others have hosted pop culture figures who have delivered more innocuous remarks. Trump himself went off script at the nation’s most famous military academy.The politically charged speeches could hold increased significance this year as university leaders grapple with how to respond to Trump’s efforts to exert more control over federal funding to schools; campus protests and curriculum; and which international students are allowed to study in the United States, according to people who study such addresses.“A lot of folks this spring will turn to these commencement speeches, especially now with the advent of social media, which allows us to distribute the clips much more widely, to see what people are saying in this critical moment, where our democracy is so fragile,” said James Peterson, a Philadelphia columnist and radio show host who has written about commencement addresses.US graduation ceremonies have long provided a forum for speakers to not only deliver a message to students but also to shape public opinion.In 1837, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech at Harvard University titled The American Scholar in which he argued that colleges “can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame”.The US supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr described the speech as the country’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence”.More recently, some of the most famous speeches have included those from then president John F Kennedy in 1963 at American University, David Foster Wallace in 2005 at Kenyon College and Apple founder Steve Jobs the same year at Stanford University.While plenty of commencement speakers have sparked a backlash – after delivering another speech in 1838, Emerson was banned from Harvard for 30 years – the stakes could be higher this year for universities that host speakers who criticize Trump, who has withheld federal funding from universities that didn’t agree to his demands.In recent weeks, the administration halted Harvard’s ability to enroll international students and ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with the school because it “continues to engage in race discrimination” and shows a “disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students”.A Harvard spokesperson said the ban on international students was “unlawful” and “undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission”.“This is not a time when colleges and universities are trying to attract a ton of attention,” said David Murray, the executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association. “Nobody wants to put their head above the fray and give anybody any reason to single them out as the next Harvard.”But some speakers have delivered fiery remarks aimed at Trump. Wake Forest University hosted Scott Pelley, a longtime reporter for the famous CBS show 60 Minutes, amid turmoil at the network. The program’s executive producer resigned because he said he no longer had editorial independence. Trump had filed a lawsuit against CBS’s parent company, Paramount, over an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, wants to sell the company and needs approval from federal regulators. She reportedly wants to settle the case.Pelley did not mention Trump by name but said: “Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes and into our private thoughts.”The speech sparked backlash from rightwing media. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host, said Pelley was a “a whiny liberal and still bitter”.At the University of Minnesota, Tim Walz, the state’s governor and a former vice-presidential candidate, described the president as a “tyrant” and called the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo”.The Department of Homeland Security account on X posted that Walz’s remarks were “absolutely sickening” and that Ice officers were facing a “413% increase in assaults”.The department did not respond to the Guardian’s question about how many assaults have occurred and which time periods they were comparing.Ben Krauss, the CEO of the speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and former chief speechwriter for Walz, said he thinks commencement addresses are important because there are not many opportunities where you have “a captive audience, even if it’s for 10 minutes”.For speakers to “break through to society is probably a tall order, but I think the goal of a good commencement should be just to break through to the people in the room”, said Krauss, who shared that his agency worked on more than a dozen commencements this year but did not disclose which ones.Still, Murray isn’t sure the speeches from Pelley and Walz will have a big impact.“Pelley’s speech made a lot of people mad on the right, and I don’t know how much it did on the left or in the center,” Murray said. “It’s really hard to give a speech that really unites everyone, and giving a speech that divides everyone just seems to make the problems worse.”Trump also took political shots during his address to graduating cadets at the United States military academy at West Point. He said past leaders “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars”.He also spoke about postwar housing developer William Levitt, who married “a trophy wife”.“I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out,” Trump said.“It’s great to hear someone speak truth to power,” Peterson said of Pelley’s address. “It’s also sobering to hear a president be, as I think, in many folks’ perspectives, disrespectful of a longstanding American institution.”Earlier this week, Trump ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with Harvard. On Thursday, the school held its commencement ceremony. Meanwhile, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the administration’s efforts to prevent the school from enrolling international students.Many speakers at the school’s events over the last week addressed Trump’s impact on the school and worldwide.Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, a Chinese graduate who studied international development, said she grew up believing that the “world was becoming a small village” and that she found a global community at Harvard, the Associated Press reported.These days, her worldview has changed.“We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently, whether they are across the ocean or sitting right next to us, are not just wrong – we mistakenly see them as evil,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”Other commencement speakers included actor Elizabeth Banks, who at alma mater University of Pennsylvania argued that the main problem affecting the world was not race, religion, ability or gender but the extreme concentration of money, and encouraged graduates to “wrap it up and keep abortion legal”.At Emory University, the artist Usher argued that a college degree still matters “in a world where credentials can feel overshadowed by clicks and followers and algorithms”.“But it’s not the paper that gives the power – it’s you,” Usher said.Then there was Kermit the Frog at the University of Maryland, the alma mater of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson. The frog, voiced by Matt Vogel, told graduates that life is “like a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing. Keep pretending.”He then closed by asking the crowd to join him in singing his classic tune, Rainbow Connection.“Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,” they sang. “The lovers, the dreamers and me.” More
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Stakes are high for US democracy as conservative supreme court hears raft of cases
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 June 2025, 11:00
A year has proved to be a long time on the scales of US justice.Less than 12 months ago, the US supreme court was in serious disrepute among liberals following a series of ethics scandals and a spate of highly contentious, conservative-leaning rulings. It culminated in a ruling last July vastly expanding a president’s immunity from prosecution, virtually guaranteeing that Donald Trump would escape criminal censure for the 6 January 2021 insurrection and retaining classified documents.So far had the court’s stock with Democrats fallen, that Joe Biden called for radical reforms on how the court was run and a constitutional amendment asserting that no president was above the law or immune for crimes committed in office.Now, with a re-elected and vengeful Trump having run rampant over democratic norms by issuing a fusillade of often illegal and unconstitutional executive orders, the same court – with the same nine justices on the bench – is being cast in the unlikely role of potential saviour of American democracy.Critics who once derided the judicial consequences of the court’s six-three conservative majority hope that the justices will show enough fealty to the US constitution to mitigate the effect of Trump’s all-out assault on a range of rights, from birthright citizenship to basic due process appeals against deportation, and preserve the constitutional republic’s defining contours.“The court is certainly a very important institution at this moment since Congress is completely pliant and not asserting its own prerogatives and the executive branch doesn’t seem to be guided by any internal legal constraint,” said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University and a former high-ranking justice department official in the Biden administration.The court has already adjudicated in several high-profile cases since Trump’s return – notably ruling against the administration in ordering it to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador.But it has ruled in Trump’s favour, at least temporarily, in several others.The stakes are about to be raised further still as a spate of cases arising from rulings against the administration by lower-court judges awaits the supreme court’s final say before its current term ends this month.These include: the rights of lower courts to issue injunctions against Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed in the constitution; an attempt by Tennessee to ban or limit transgender care for minors; a complaint by parents in Maryland against allowing LGBTQ+ books in elementary schools; the need for insurers to cover preventive healthcare costs under the Affordable Care Act; and attempts to cut off public funding for Planned Parenthood.Added to that daunting schedule, the justices can expect additional unaccustomed summer workload in the shape of seemingly unending emergency cases generated by Trump’s no-holds-barred attempt to transform government.Most experts believe the court will ultimately rule against Trump’s attempt to undermine birthright citizenship rights, given that they are so clearly defined in the 14th amendment of the constitution. Yet the devil may be in the detail. Some analysts believe the court has already lent the administration’s case unwarranted credibility by agreeing to consider its challenge against lower courts’ powers to issue nationwide injunctions on the subject. Perhaps tellingly, the court has not called for a supplemental briefing on whether Trump’s 20 January executive order was legal.Hopes that the current court can act as a brake on Trump seem forlorn given its conservative majority and the fact that three of its members – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed to the bench by Trump himself. In addition, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito consistently take hardline positions that seem predisposed to favour Trump.Yet speculation that the chief justice, John Roberts, and Coney Barrett have become disenchanted by the brazenness of Trump’s actions has fueled optimism. Some believe they could vote with the court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – who consistently issue dissenting opinions on rightwing rulings – frequently enough on key occasions to form an effective bulwark.But Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of a book on the court entitled Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, is sceptical.A recent ruling upholding the president’s firing of the head of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, which gave Congress the power to limit a president’s ability to remove officials from independent agencies – shows the conservative justices’ reverting to type, she said.“Some people wondered: ‘Was the court going to have second thoughts about, for example, their immunity decision giving Donald Trump such leading powers, including powers to act outside of the law and above it?’” Litman argued. “I think the Wilcox ruling underscored that the answer is definitively no.”Underpinning the conservative justices’ approach is the unitary executive theory, which posits that the president has sole authority over the government’s executive branch, allowing him to fire members of nominally independent agencies without cause.“They have been pushing this theory for over three decades and now they have a chance to make a pretty muscular version of it the law,” Litman said. “Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett understand that the court can’t let Donald Trump get away with everything, including usurping Congress’s power or obviously depriving individuals of due process. But short of that, I don’t think they are having any kind of second thoughts about their own views of executive power or about the law more generally.”The few cases of the court standing up to Trump, argues Litman, have been “overplayed” and pale in importance compared with other rulings that have emboldened the president, including upholding the stripping of temporary protected status from about 300,000 Venezuelans.Greene defined the court’s approach as “formalist” and ill-suited to counter Trump’s lawbreaking. He contrasted it with the much bolder ethos under Chief Justice Earl Warren’s leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, when the court became renowned for creatively enforcing racial desegregation and civil rights orders in the south.“Trump’s modus operandi is to exploit what he perceives as weaknesses in the system of enforcement and accountability,” Greene said. “If he thinks that courts are not going to be able to step in, he will try to exploit that as much as he can, unless and until he’s stopped by some political actor or an actor with more power.“The Trump administration is exploiting the formality and the lack of creativity of courts in general, but the supreme court in particular.”The court’s writ has already been exposed as limited by Trump’s failure to comply with its order to facilitate the return of Ábrego García to the US.According to Greene, the White House’s failure to police its own actions to ensure they are in line with the law and the constitution already amounts to a constitutional crisis, because the courts lack the time and resources to counter unbridled violations.That puts added onus on the supreme court to fulfill its role as ultimate arbiter, argues Litman.“We should continue to demand that they actually do uphold the law,” she said. “I don’t think we should just give up and give in to their inclination to not enforce the law and allow Donald Trump to get away with legal violations. If they don’t, force them to expend the capital and pay a price in their public approval rating.” More
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How to fight back against Trump? Look to poor people’s movements | Rev Dr Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 June 2025, 11:00
For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a grotesque nightmare. The proposed legislative cuts, including historic attacks on Medicaid and Snap, come at a time when 60% of Americans already cannot make ends meet. As justification, Maga Republicans are once again invoking the shibboleth of work requirements to demean and discredit the poor, even as they funnel billions of dollars into the war economy and lavish the wealthy with tax cuts.As anti-poverty organizers, we’ve often used the slogan: “They say cut back, we say fight back.” It’s a catchy turn of phrase, but it reveals that for too long we’ve been on the back foot. In the world’s richest country, in which mass poverty exists beside unprecedented plenty, we’re tired of just fending off the worst attacks. Too much ground is lost when our biggest wins are simply not losing past gains. Amid Trump’s cruelty and avarice, it’s time to fight for a new social contract – one that lifts from the bottom of society so that everybody rises.There are no shortcuts to building the kind of popular power necessary for us to shift from defense to offense. The task is a generational one, requiring even greater discipline, sacrifice, perseverance and patience. But as we consider the best way forward, the past offers clues.In our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty, we document insights from some of this country’s most significant poor people’s movements. As nascent fascism continues to metastasize, these largely untold stories contain some of the very solutions we need to prevent democratic decline and overcome bigotry, political violence, Christian nationalism and economic immiseration. Today, the historic demands of the poor – for safety, belonging, peace, equality, and justice – are rapidly becoming the demands of humanity. The hard-fought wisdom of the organized poor has much to teach all of us.We’re reminded of the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Largely forgotten to history, NWRO was once the biggest poor people’s organization in the country. The organization, led by poor Black women, regularly staged mass marches and demonstrations and held picket lines and sit-ins at welfare offices, at a time when the poor were subject to racist, exclusionary and moralizing policies. At its height, the organization had over 100 local chapters, a sophisticated operation that offered a political and spiritual home to over 20,000 dues-paying members.In 1971 in Nevada, where the governor was cutting the social safety net, the local NWRO chapter organized 1,000 women to storm Caesars Palace, the luxury hotel and casino, and shut down the main drag in Las Vegas. The protest turned into a multi-year campaign of civil disobedience and a federal judge eventually reinstated the benefits. These women were unapologetically militant and willing to take big risks. They were also clear that forging power required the less visible spadework of movement-building – including looking after one another through networks of solidarity and collective care.At the same time as the Black Panthers were feeding tens of thousands of children through the Free Breakfast Program (and provocatively asking why the government couldn’t do the same, even as it spent billions of dollars slaughtering the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), NWRO created its own innovative “projects of survival”. The historian Annelise Orleck writes that in Las Vegas, the “welfare moms applied for and won federal grants to open and run … the first health clinic in the largely Black, and thoroughly poor Westside of Las Vegas. Then came the neighborhood’s first library, public swimming pool, senior citizen housing project, solarization program, crime prevention program, and community newspaper, all organized and staffed by poor mothers and later their young adult children.”As the experience in Las Vegas revealed, the women of NWRO were organizers, caretakers and strategists of the highest order. They were also anti-racists and feminists of an entirely new mold. At a time when many women were fighting for equality within the workplace, NWRO championed “welfare as a right”, challenging the notion that the value of a human is tied to their ability to work within the marketplace and raising fundamental questions about how a society cares for its people. This idea coalesced into their demand for a “guaranteed adequate income”, an early precursor to the expanded child tax credit in 2021. Before this pandemic-era program was abandoned by both reactionary Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats, it lifted four million children above the poverty line, the single largest decrease in official child poverty in American history.In a legendary article for the 1972 spring issue of Ms Magazine, Johnnie Tillmon, the first chairperson of NWRO and later its executive director, wrote: “For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival … As far as I’m concerned, the ladies of NWRO are the frontline troops of women’s freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women–the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.”Veterans of the welfare rights movement named their model of grassroots organizing after Tillmon. In “the Johnnie Tillmon model”, poor women, and poor people more broadly, are not simply an oppressed identity group but a latent social force with potentially vast power. Because they have the least invested in the status quo and the most to gain from big change, they are strategically positioned to rise up and rally not just their own communities, but the millions more who are one paycheck, healthcare crisis, job loss, debt collection or eviction away from poverty.In order to harness this transformational power, the Johnnie Tillmon model proposes four strategic principles, as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s:
The poor must unite across their differences and assume strong leadership within grassroots movements.
These movements must operate as a politically and financially independent force in our public life.
The leaders of these movements must attend to the daily needs and aspirations of their communities by building visionary projects of survival.
These projects of survival must serve as bases of operation for broader organizing, political education, and leadership development.
The women of NWRO believed there was unrecognized ingenuity and untapped brilliance within their communities. Even before the organization existed, the tens of thousands of women who made up its membership were already leaders in countless ways: they knew how to pool their meager resources, feed one another, navigate treacherous government bureaucracy and protect themselves from brutal state-sanctioned violence. When such survival skills were collectivized, networked, and politicized, these women became a force to be reckoned with.The same could be true today. As the Trump administration intensifies its attacks on life-saving programs like Medicaid and Snap, poor and dispossessed people will not passively swallow their suffering. Already, in states as far flung as Vermont and Alaska, Michigan and North Carolina, we’re seeing an upsurge of resistance among Medicaid recipients. But we cannot be satisfied simply with righteous acts of protest and mass mobilization. The question is how to transform our growing indignation into lasting and visionary power. The Johnnie Tillmon model is a good place to start.
The Rev Dr Liz Theoharis is the director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and co-founder of the Freedom Church of the Poor. Noam Sandweiss-Back is the director of partnerships at the Kairos Center. They are co-authors of You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon, 2025) More
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Trump drops Nasa nominee Jared Isaacman, scrapping Elon Musk’s pick
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 June 2025, 03:18
The White House has withdrawn Jared Isaacman as its nominee for Nasa administrator, abruptly yanking a close ally of Elon Musk from consideration to lead the space agency.Donald Trump said he would announce a new candidate soon. “After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head Nasa,” the US president posted online. “I will soon announce a new Nominee who will be mission aligned, and put America first in space.”Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut who had been Musk’s pick to lead Nasa, was due next week for a much-delayed confirmation vote before the US Senate. His removal from consideration caught many in the space industry by surprise.Trump and the White House did not explain what led to the decision.Isaacman, whose removal was earlier reported by Semafor, said he was “incredibly grateful” to Trump “and all those who supported me throughout this journey”.“I have gained a much deeper appreciation for the complexities of government and the weight our political leaders carry,” he posted. “It may not always be obvious through the discourse and turbulence, but there are many competent, dedicated people who love this country and care deeply about the mission.”Isaacman’s removal comes just days after Musk’s official departure from the White House, where the SpaceX CEO’s role as a “special government employee” leading the so-called department of government efficiency (Doge) created turbulence for the administration and frustrated some of Trump’s aides.View image in fullscreenMusk, according to a person familiar with his reaction, was disappointed by Isaacman’s removal.“It is rare to find someone so competent and good-hearted,” Musk wrote of Isaacman on X, responding to the news of the White House’s decision.Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.It was unclear whom the administration might tap to replace Isaacman.One name being floated is the retired US air force Lt Gen Steven Kwast, an early advocate for the creation of the US space force and a Trump supporter, according to three people familiar with the discussions.Isaacman, the former CEO of the payment processor company Shift4, had broad space industry support but drew concerns from lawmakers over his ties to Musk and SpaceX, where he spent hundreds of millions of dollars as an early private spaceflight customer.The former nominee had donated to Democrats in prior elections. In his confirmation hearing in April, he sought to balance Nasa’s existing moon-aligned space exploration strategy with pressure to shift the agency’s focus on Mars, saying the US can plan for travel to both destinations.As a potential leader of Nasa’s 18,000 employees, Isaacman faced a daunting task of implementing that decision to prioritize Mars, given that Nasa has spent years and billions of dollars trying to return its astronauts to the moon.On Friday, the space agency released new details of the Trump administration’s 2026 budget plan that proposed killing dozens of space science programs and laying off thousands of employees, a controversial overhaul that space advocates and lawmakers described as devastating for the agency.The Montana Republican Tim Sheehy, a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee, posted that Isaacman had been “a strong choice by President Trump to lead Nasa”.“I was proud to introduce Jared at his hearing and strongly oppose efforts to derail his nomination,” Sheehy said.Some scientists saw the nominee change as further destabilizing to Nasa as it faces dramatic budget cuts without a confirmed leader in place to navigate political turbulence between Congress, the White House and the space agency’s workforce.“So not having [Isaacman] as boss of Nasa is bad news for the agency,” Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell posted.“Maybe a good thing for Jared himself though, since being Nasa head right now is a bit of a Kobayashi Maru scenario,” McDowell added, referring to an exercise in the science fiction franchise Star Trek where cadets are placed in a no-win scenario.With Reuters More
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Trump news at a glance: Hegseth warns of ‘imminent’ China threat, urging Asia to upgrade militaries
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 June 2025, 02:00
Pete Hegseth has called on Asian countries to increase their military spending to increase regional deterrence against China which was “rehearsing for the real deal” of taking over Taiwan.The US defense secretary, addressing the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday, reiterated pledges to increase the US presence in the Indo-Pacific and outlined a range of new joint projects.“It has to be clear to all that Beijing is credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific,” Hegseth said. “There’s no reason to sugar coat it. The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent.”‘Deterrence doesn’t come on the cheap’Hesgeth said Donald Trump’s administration had pushed European countries to boost their defensive spending, taking on a greater “burden” of responding to conflicts in their region, and it was time for Asian nations to do the same.The defense secretary, who in March was revealed to have told a Signal group chat that Europe was “pathetic” and “freeloading” on US security support in the region, told the Singapore conference it was “hard to believe” he was now saying this but Asian countries should “look to allies in Europe as a newfound example”.“Deterrence doesn’t come on the cheap … time is of the essence.”Read the full storyGeorgia shows the effects of Trump tariffsIf you want a bellwether to measure the broad impact of Donald Trump’s tariffs on the economy, look to the state of Georgia.So far, it’s a mixed bag. The hospitality industry is facing an existential crisis and wine merchants wonder if they will survive the year. But others, like those in industrial manufacturing, carefully argue that well-positioned businesses will profit.Read the full storyAustralia says steel tariffs ‘not the act of a friend’Australia’s trade minister, Don Farrell, has described Donald Trump’s trade tariffs as “unjustified and not the act of a friend” after the US president announced he would double import duties on steel and aluminium to 50%.“They are an act of economic self-harm that will only hurt consumers and businesses who rely on free and fair trade,” Farrell said.Read the full storyImmigration authorities collecting DNA information of childrenUS immigration authorities are collecting and uploading the DNA information of migrants, including children, to a national criminal database, according to government documents released earlier this month.The database includes the DNA of people who were either arrested or convicted of a crime, which law enforcement uses when seeking a match for DNA collected at a crime scene. But most of the people whose DNA has been collected by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the agency that published the documents, were not listed as having been accused of any felonies.Read the full storyUS energy department workers sound alarm over cutsWorkers at the US Department of Energy say cuts and deregulations are undermining the ability for the department to function and will result in significant energy cost hikes for consumers.Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” will raise energy costs for American households by as much as 7% in 2035 due to the repeal of energy tax credits and could put significant investment and energy innovation at risk, according to a report by the Rhodium Group.Read the full storyFour queer business owners on Pride under TrumpAs the first Pride month under Donald Trump’s second presidency approaches, LGBTQ+ businesses are stepping up, evolving quickly to meet the community’s growing concerns.The Guardian spoke with four queer business owners, and one message was clear: queer businesses are here to support the community now more than ever and spread joy as resistance.Read the full storyBruce Springsteen’s anti-Trump comments divide US fansTensions among Bruce Springsteen’s fanbase have spread to his home state of New Jersey because of what the rock icon has said about Donald Trump.Springsteen has long been a balladeer of the state’s blue-collar workers. But last year many of those same workers voted for the president. Now their split loyalties are being put to the test.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
An undocumented man who was accused by the Department of Homeland Security secretary last week of threatening to assassinate Donald Trump may have been framed by someone accused of previously attacking the man, according to news reports.
As the Trump administration continues to exploit antisemitism to arrest protesters and curb academic freedoms, more American Jews are saying “not in my name”.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 30 May 2025. More
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Four queer business owners on Pride under Trump: ‘Our joy is resistance’
by Evelyn Reynolds 31 May 2025, 11:00
As the first Pride month under Donald Trump’s second presidency approaches, LGBTQ+ businesses are stepping up, evolving quickly to meet the community’s growing concerns.Since day one, Trump has signed executive orders targeting the LGBTQ+ community, particularly the trans and gender non-conforming population. He aims to eradicate “gender ideology” by enforcing a two-sex binary determined at conception, reinstating and expanding the military ban on transgender service members, and directing agencies to prevent gender-affirming care for youth.This leaves the LGBTQ+ community feeling apprehensive about losing further rights and protections.The Guardian spoke with four queer business owners, and one message was clear: queer businesses are here to support the community now more than ever and spread joy as resistance.Uptick in weddingsBusiness is surging for New England-based wedding photographer Lindsey “Lensy” Michelle as queer couples decide to take their vows, fearing the Trump administration will go after marriage equality. Michelle says she’s only getting louder and even “more queer”.“I’m not changing anything about my business, no matter what the government says,” Michelle said. “We elected a president who doesn’t support this type of marriage, or at the very least doesn’t care enough to try to protect it.”View image in fullscreenShe is seeing queer couples accelerate their wedding plans in fear of Trump and the supreme court overturning 2015’s ruling on Obergefell v Hodges, which recognized same-sex marriages. Michelle currently offers accessible pricing for queer couples.“[Pride] is a good time to remind wedding vendors to stop advertising to only brides or using very gendered language, or assuming that every couple has a bride and a groom,” she said. “Performative allyship is really dangerous, and for businesses June can be a time of greater reflection on how they can be more clear and inclusive.”According to Michelle, there is an emerging trend for queer couples to distinguish legal marriage from a wedding ceremony. Many of her clients explained that they are registering their marriage now out of an “abundance of caution” because they don’t feel like “their rights will be protected”, she said.“It’s a privilege when you’re able to celebrate instead of protest and queerness is always rebellious,” she said. “You protest when things aren’t welcoming to begin with and you celebrate when you’re able to but I think also you have to do both. Otherwise, it becomes quite sad.”After noticing an uptick in demand, she created an LGBTQ+ wedding directory of more than 130 businesses. She didn’t stop there: Michelle then teamed up with five other vendors to throw a queer mass wedding ball for six lucky couples on 5 January.“We don’t really feel like celebrating. We feel like crying and we feel helpless and all we’re trying to do is get married,” Michelle said. “We just wanted to throw a party. This event is coming out of the time of fear and uncertainty, but that’s always been the queer story.”View image in fullscreenThe team behind the wedding ball are “open to the idea” of hosting a similar event in other states, particularly in Republican-led ones.Nine states are urging the supreme court to reverse Obergefell v Hodges.“We’re scared, and I don’t put that lightly,” Michelle said.We will surviveIn Decatur, Georgia, Charis Books & More aims to alleviate the fears the queer and trans community are experiencing.“My job is to support young people and those with children and to say: ‘Look, we have spent most of our history as queer and trans people as outlaws and we can be outlaws again. But, we will survive, we are very creative and we’ll figure out how to get through this time,’” said Errol Anderson, the executive director of Charis Books & More’s non-profit arm, Charis Circle.View image in fullscreenCharis Circle hosts events like story time and offers support groups, especially for the trans community. They have four support groups for trans and gender non-conforming individuals across ages. Georgians in less welcoming parts of the state see Charis “as a beacon”, according to Anderson.“We’re seeing these particularly aggressive attacks on trans people for the past couple years now being mirrored in national legislation and it’s very scary,” Anderson said. “A lot of people right now feel very hopeless, but we need to remember we do actually have a lot of power to speak up for what we believe in and our voices do matter.”Joy as resistanceNew York’s 34-year-old queer bar Henrietta Hudson is returning to its roots as a political activist space, especially as Pride approaches.View image in fullscreen“Acutely since the inauguration, but really since the election, there’s a different tone to how people come to [the bar]. It feels more necessary,” Hutch Hutchinson said. “People are craving to be around other queer people and to be in a safer space. We have to buckle down for the family we have here.”Hutchinson, who uses he/they pronouns, is the director of operations at Henrietta Hudson. He said Pride is already in the air as the bar has seen a surge in energy and purpose.“[Pride] often does feel like a protest and we call our Pride as occupying Hudson, a very definitive statement on us taking up space in the West Village,” he said. “The general feeling at Henrietta Hudson is that we’ve just become more political. This place has been through so many eras of queer resistance and uprising. We are relighting that fire.”They lend their bar to vetted non-profits and local grassroots organizations for events giving back to the LGBTQ+ community, such as a Pride week fundraiser benefiting the BTFA Collective for Black trans femme artists and the annual NYC Dyke March.Hutchinson explained that the bar will always take explicit stances to protect and support the community. It posted a message on their Instagram, calling out the “immoral”, “dangerous” and “unlawful” attacks by Trump’s administration.“We talk, as a [staff] about, what does resistance look like? Sure, resistance is showing up to rallies and supporting the ACLU, learning your rights, marching and protesting,” he added. “But it’s so important for us to dance and to see each other smile and laugh and sing. Our joy is resistance.”Being visible is more importantDown in St Louis, Missouri, art collective Swan Meadow plans to be a safe third space for the community where members can “simply exist as who they are”. Partners Fern and Mellody Meadow, who both use they/them pronouns, emptied their savings to open the collective last fall after a close presidential election.View image in fullscreen“We are always trying to craft events and spaces for people to come to and to sit with complicated emotions and thoughts and to talk to people about them,” Fern said. “It can be isolating and so frustrating to know that things are wrong that are outside of our control, but when you come together as a community, so much positive change can happen.”They open their workshop multiple times a month for free community-focused events such as “crafternoons”. Some events act as fundraisers for local mutual aid organizations such as the Community Closet, which distributes free household, cleaning and hygiene items. The collective also offers branding, photography and printing services.The Meadows envision Swan Meadow taking on a larger role in political advocacy for the community.“As pushback becomes more prevalent and discrimination becomes more normal, being visible is more important than ever,” Mellody said. “I’m tired of living through history.” More

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