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Judge rejects DoJ call to immediately dismiss Eric Adams corruption case
A New York judge on Friday said he would not immediately dismiss Eric Adams’s corruption case, but ordered the Democratic New York City mayor’s trial delayed indefinitely after the justice department asked for the charges to be dismissed.In a written ruling, the US district judge Dale Ho in Manhattan said he would appoint an outside lawyer, Paul Clement of the law firm Clement & Murphy PLLC, to present arguments against the federal prosecutors’ bid to dismiss, in order to help the judge make his decision.Justice department officials in Washington asked Ho to dismiss the charges against Adams on 14 February. A hearing was held in New York earlier this week.That came about after several prosecutors resigned rather than follow orders from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, an appointee of Donald Trump and the Republican president’s former personal criminal defense lawyer, to seek dismissal of the case brought last year by prosecutors during the Biden administration.The current justice department argued that dismissal was needed so Adams could focus on helping Trump crack down on illegal immigration. The controversy, especially because the city has a strong sanctuary law designed to stop local enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement, has sparked a political crisis in the most populous US city. Senior Democrats have said that dismissing the charges makes Adams beholden to Trump’s administration.Adams, 64, was charged last September with taking bribes and campaign donations from Turkish nationals seeking to influence him. Adams, running for re-election this year, has pleaded not guilty.Many have called on Adams to resign.Four of the mayor’s deputies plan to resign amid loss of confidence in the mayor. The governor of New York state, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said on Thursday she would not use her power to remove Adams, but proposed new oversight of the mayor’s office. More
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Anti-Trump conservative summit charts alternative to CPAC Maga-fest
While Donald Trump and his acolytes take a victory lap at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, some of the president’s staunchest right-leaning critics will convene for their own event just 10 miles away.The Principles First summit, which will be held in Washington from Friday to Sunday, has become a venue for anti-Trump conservatives to voice their deep-seated concerns about the “Make America great again” faction of the Republican party, and the gathering has now grown in size and scope. As its organizers confront another four years of Trump’s leadership, they are stretching beyond party lines with speakers such as the billionaire Mark Cuban and Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, to craft their vision for a new approach to US politics.That vision looks quite different than it did six years ago, when the conservative attorney Heath Mayo founded Principles First. At the time, Mayo, formerly a rank-and-file Republican who supported the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, hoped to present an anti-Trump alternative to fellow conservatives.“It started as disgruntled Republicans and conservatives, but that was back in 2019 when that objective seemed to be perhaps more realistic or people were holding out hope that the party would come to its senses,” Mayo said. “Over the years, it’s grown.”The group’s first summit attracted just a couple of hundred attenders in 2020, but the guest count at this year’s sold-out event has increased to about 1,100.“We’ve been surprised actually with the number of people that have signed up to come,” Mayo said. “I think it’s this hunger for new spaces in our politics – new ideas, new faces.”Those new faces include Cuban, who plans to address the summit on Saturday as his name has been floated as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. A vocal supporter of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the White House last year, Cuban might seem like an unorthodox choice for a presidential candidate, as he has never served in public office, but the same was said of Trump 10 years ago.“Clearly we live in a moment of disruption. Things are changing really fast … Democrats may have learned that lesson the hard way in November,” Mayo said. “That’s what I hope the weekend will be – a time for people to set aside the party labels and really ask where we’re going as a country.”The summit’s list of speakers reflects that mission, ranging from John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, to Polis, the Colorado governor who has occasionally clashed with fellow Democrats over how to navigate the new Trump era. Other speakers include Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who has become a fierce critic of Trump, and four of the police officers who responded to the Capitol on 6 January 2021, as a group of the president’s supporters attempted to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.View image in fullscreen“I feel like character and integrity are two non-negotiable, key components of Principles First,” said Rich Logis, founder of a group called Leaving Maga and a speaker at the summit. “If you look at the attendees, it’s a large, diverse swath of authors, thinkers and former elected officials. It doesn’t skew rightwing. It doesn’t skew leftwing. But what they all share in common is that they’re devoted to truth, democracy, liberal democracy and the rule of law.”Kyle Sweetser, another speaker at the summit and a former Trump supporter who voted for Harris in November, hopes that the event can offer an example of productive political discourse to fellow voters.“I think it’s more crucial than ever to offer some sort of platform, at least to reaffirm our commitment to core democratic values and principles,” Sweetser said. “And I’m really looking forward to some good discussion and hopefully some exchange of ideas that will strengthen our democracy.”Sweetser knows firsthand how difficult it can be to reach Trump supporters who have embraced the Maga movement. He voted for Trump twice before starting to question that loyalty, prompting him to diversify his media diet and seek out more information about the president’s record. He considers himself proof that Trump supporters can change their ways, a message he wants to bring to the Principles First summit.“I want some of the Democrats to understand that there’s a lot of Republicans out there that are good people, and if Democrats work for those people, then they will be able to pull some of those people over to their side,” Swisher said. “But unfortunately, it’s going to be a heavy lift. It’s going to take a lot of work, and it’s going to take patience.”Sweetser and Logis both predicted that Trump’s eventual failure to follow through on key campaign promises, like addressing the high inflation seen in recent years, would chip away at the president’s base and perhaps spur some of his supporters to reconsider their political identity.Some early examples of this trend may already be emerging. In Sweetser’s home state of Alabama, about 250 customers of a public utility company based in Huntsville just learned they would see a $100 surcharge on their energy bills after one of Trump’s executive orders paused a program aimed at lowering heating costs for low-income households.“I am wagering a bet that many in the Maga community right now are going to realize that the president is not going to fix anything for them,” Logis said. “When the scales start to fall a bit from the eyes, I want them to know that there’s an exit ramp.”That exit ramp eventually brought Logis to the Democratic national convention, where he was featured in a video explaining his transformation from a diehard Trump supporter to a Harris voter. Harris may not have been successful in November, but Mayo still sees a potential path to victory for a pro-democracy candidate who can unify the ideologically diverse group represented at Principles First.“There’s still a broad coalition out there that can be assembled, and it has got to be constructive. It’s got to have ideas and solutions for the challenges that Americans face, like the affordability crisis,” Mayo said. “At a time when it feels hopeless, it feels like there is a reason to be hopeful when you see that many people coming together to talk about these things.” More
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Stephen Colbert on Trump: ‘With this guy, every troll is a trial balloon’
The Late Show host delves into New York City’s congestion pricing and Bigfoot maybe becoming California’s official state cryptid.Stephen ColbertOn Thursday evening, Stephen Colbert took on a topic close to his professional home at New York’s Ed Sullivan theater: congestion pricing, a toll on most vehicles entering Manhattan’s central business district between 5am and 9pm to cut traffic and emissions.The new tax was introduced at the beginning of this year, “and it’s working”, Colbert explained, as January saw a 7.9% reduction in traffic, and the governor’s office noted that foot traffic to local businesses spiked. “Or, as the New York Times put it, ‘Ay! People are walking here!’” Colbert joked.“This seems like a good thing,” he continued, “so Donald Trump ruined it.” On Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”“Yes, the classic domain of an all-powerful king, what all kings do: regulate local toll roads,” Colbert laughed. “So the president of these United States has called himself a king. Which is the thing presidents are not supposed to do.” And then the White House social media posted an image of Trump wearing a crown.“You know he’s trolling us and we shouldn’t take the bait, but with this guy, every troll is a trial balloon. So here we go: Mr Trump, America will never bow before any king … not named Burger,” Colbert joked before donning a crown from the fast food chain.Meanwhile, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, did not back down on congestion pricing, tweeting simply: “The cameras will stay on.”The new model seems likely to survive the president’s attack – the federal government already approved it last year, and it cannot unilaterally terminate a program once it’s begun. “To put that in layman’s terms: we are already said yes to the dress!” Colbert explained. “Kleinfeld doesn’t get to have it back. We’re wearing it to the wedding, dancing all night in it and then saving it for our daughter, who will hate it.”In other news, “we live in truly paradigm-shattering times,” said Colbert. “Which is why I was not surprised to be shocked by how startled I was” when this week, California introduced a bill to recognize Bigfoot as the state’s official cryptid, a creature that people believe exists without proof that it does.“Well, that’s strange and unnecessary,” said Colbert. “California already has a mystical furry creature: Randy Quaid.”If the bill passes, it will open the door for other states to officially celebrate their own cryptids, such as New Mexico’s Jackalope, the New Jersey Devil, “and of course the most hideous beast of all: the New York Giuliani”, Colbert joked. More
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Trump is using tariffs as a blunt-force tool. It won’t work | Mike Williams
Last week, Donald Trump revived a trade war from his first term, implementing a 25% tariff on all imported steel. In doing so, he’s using tariffs as a blunt-force tool under the assumption that they’ll be sufficient to jump-start the American steel industry.But that’s not the case.Tariffs are important, but they’re far from enough. Thanks to decades of disinvestment and terrible trade policies, the steel industry has grappled with decline and stagnation for years. It now faces grave threats as China continues to flood the global market with artificially cheap steel, manipulating prices in its favor. Meanwhile, the global market has begun a shift towards “clean” steel produced with electricity and hydrogen, a process the United States has only just started to support.To survive, the steel industry must modernize. To support that effort, the federal government should be implementing targeted tariffs alongside investments and incentives that help the industry grow and transition.Strategic tariffs can help protect steel manufacturing from excessive overcapacity and unfair price manipulation by foreign competitors. They can also be used to account for other effects, such as the impact of high-emissions steel production on health and the environment. For example, a tariff that considers carbon emissions in the production of a given unit of steel would help protect the domestic steel industry from foreign competitors’ cheap, high-emissions steel. The European Union is already implementing this kind of tariff, called a carbon-border adjustment mechanism. Revenue from this tariff – and others – could help our steel industry transition to clean technologies and accelerate the industry’s modernization.When tariffs are used for negotiation without being combined with other government tools, they can backfire. Already, Canada and the EU are preparing reciprocal tariffs on American steel and aluminum, which will make American steel even less desirable in those markets. Steel is a critical material in countless supply chains, from cars and planes to housing and infrastructure, and across-the-board increases in steel prices carry widespread economic risks. Trump’s 2018 tariffs on steel provide a roadmap for what we can expect: while production temporarily ticked up, exports declined almost 25% between 2018 and 2020, and after retaliation from China and Mexico, economists downgraded growth estimates, and business investment slowed.Tariffs are necessary for correcting distortions in global trade but are a poor tool for catalyzing the kind of investment needed for the long-term viability of the American steel industry, which needs to transition to clean technology to remain competitive globally. While tariffs can protect existing production capacity from being undercut, they won’t necessarily yield large infrastructure and modernization investments from domestic steel companies already operating at slim margins.But just as it has started to do for our domestic semiconductor industry, the federal government can combine fortified trade policies with structural support for the steel industry’s transformation. This could include investment tax credits for revamping steel-production facilities to use clean technologies and production tax credits for making domestic clean steel, spurring private investment across the steel industry.The federal government could leverage existing policies as well. For example, expanding the Biden administration’s “Buy America” requirements for federally funded projects, such as highway and bridge construction, to include domestically produced, 100% clean steel would strengthen demand for US-produced steel. Reviving “Buy Clean” standards for steel used in federal projects could also accelerate the industry’s modernization. These structural supports could be funded by the revenue from targeted, well-designed tariffs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has claimed his tariffs will create a “manufacturing boom”, turn America into a manufacturing “powerhouse” and “make America rich again”. But going all in on tariffs alone is an unsteady foundation for industrial policy. Unless Trump expands his strategy to include incentives and investment for the steel industry, his approach will be like a game of Jenga: eventually, it will all come crashing down.
Mike Williams is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former deputy director of the BlueGreen Alliance More
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Mexico’s Sheinbaum wins plaudits for cool head in dealings with Trump
As Donald Trump swings his sights from one region to the next, upturning diplomatic relations and confounding allies, leaders of former US partners have clashed with him and come off much the worse.But so far, one – Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum – has emerged relatively unscathed.With the US-Mexico border and the trade, drugs and migrants that cross it a focus of the Trump administration, Mexico is under intense pressure. Yet while Sheinbaum has made some concessions, she has also charmed Trump and won plaudits at home, with approval ratings that touch 80%.“Sheinbaum has kept a cool head, and the capacity to hold firm and react to Trump,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a political scientist. “But Mexico is in a situation of emergency with the US. And it will have to play this game for four years straight.”Sheinbaum led Morena, a leftwing populist party, to a landslide victory in June last year, and had barely taken power when Trump won re-election in November.Many wondered how Sheinbaum, a climate scientist before she became a politician, would handle the US president. But the two have struck up a relationship, with Trump describing Sheinbaum as a “marvellous woman” even as he claims Mexico is “essentially run by cartels”.Since Trump announced a plan to hit all goods imported from Mexico with a 25% tariff, citing its alleged failure to stop migrants and fentanyl entering the US, Sheinbaum has offered to negotiate, while avoiding gestures of obeisance – such as Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s trip to Mar-a-Lago – or defiance – like Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s tirade against Trump on X.Sheinbaum has also shown a willingness to do more on fentanyl, with Mexican security forces notching a record seizure just days after Trump’s announcement, and underlined that Mexico was already doing a great deal to keep migrants away from the US-Mexico border.View image in fullscreenAt the same time, she picked battles that allowed her to show strength to a domestic audience while avoiding direct confrontation with Trump himself – for example, threatening Google with a lawsuit after it bowed to Trump and renamed international waters in the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America on Google Maps.She has pledged to expand legal action against US gun manufacturers who produce the majority of weapons used in Mexico, and implicitly turned Trump’s rhetoric on its head by warning that her country would not tolerate an “invasion” of its national sovereignty by US forces.“Sheinbaum found the sweet spot between the submission of Trudeau and the bravado of Petro,” said Pérez Ricart.The first real crunch came earlier this month, as the deadline for Trump’s tariff threat loomed.Sheinbaum was poised to announce retaliatory measures when last-minute talks defused the situation, with Trump agreeing to delay the tariffs for a month in exchange for Mexico sending 10,000 more soldiers to the border.It is unclear how those extra soldiers will reduce the flow of fentanyl, a substance so potent that only relatively small volumes are moved, and the great majority of which is trafficked through ports of entry by US citizens.“What I see is a show for the Mexican and American publics,” said Martha Bárcena, a former Mexican ambassador to the US. “It’s clear that Trump is talking to his base and Sheinbaum to hers. But we don’t know what is happening in the conversations between them.”“The president bought time – but the negotiation is not over,” Bárcena added.The next deadline, on 4 March, for Trump’s tariffs will likely bring another round of feverish talks, as Mexico tries to convince the US of results made on fentanyl and migration.“But if we don’t know what they want or how they want to measure it, then Trump can keep threatening us from here to the end of his government,” said Bárcena.The US has also ratcheted up the pressure by adding six Mexican organised crime groups – including the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels, two of the world’s biggest drug trafficking organisations – to its list of foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs).While the designation of cartels as FTOs itself does not authorise US military action in Mexico, some fear it is a first step towards it.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth recently said “all options will be on the table” when it comes to dealing with the cartels. “Ultimately, we will hold nothing back to secure the American people,” he added.Meanwhile, Mexico’s economy edges towards recession. The mere threat of tariffs has already helped dragged growth projections down, with Mexico’s central bank predicting 0.6% GDP growth for 2025.That makes staving off tariffs and holding the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement together only more important for Sheinbaum.“For 30 years, Mexico anchored itself to a policy of trade and development in North America. It bet its growth, its identity, on integration into North America,” said Pérez Ricart. “And now this idea is being challenged. Trump doesn’t believe in it. This is a very delicate situation for Sheinbaum, and for the country.” More
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The ‘Gulf of America’ feud is about something bigger: Trump wants to control the media | Margaret Sullivan
It might seem like a small matter, just a disagreement over whether a body of water should be called one name or another.But it’s really about much bigger things: Trump-style intimidation, a clear violation of the first amendment – and the extent to which news organizations will stick together in each other’s defense, or will comply with the powerful for the sake of their own access.Even more broadly, it is about Donald Trump’s wide-ranging effort to control the media and be able to spread propaganda and interfere with the flow of accurate information.The disagreement started soon after the president decided unilaterally that the Gulf of Mexico was to be called the Gulf of America. The executive order was one more display of Trump’s capricious and imperious way of doing things; his first month has been a relentless exercise in chaos and norm-destruction.After the Associated Press, the global news organization, decided to stick with using the long-established name which makes sense to its international readership, the Trump White House determined that punishment was in order.An AP reporter was barred from a White House press event, and since then, things have only escalated. More AP reporters barred from briefings and from the president’s plane. Access denied.What’s happening is ugly. In the US, the government doesn’t get to dictate the language journalists use in their stories. There’s a little thing called the first amendment to the US constitution that prohibits this. But the Trump administration, as usual, has its own – often unconstitutional and sometimes illegal – ideas.The actions against the AP are “retribution, plain and simple, and a shameful attempt to bully the press into ideological compliance”, said Tim Richardson of PEN America.On Thursday, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sent a letter to the White House signed by 30 news organizations, and the White House Correspondents Association is similarly registering its displeasure.But letters – even signed by many and ever so strongly worded – are easy to ignore. The solution, if there is one, will require more forceful measures: lawsuits and journalistic solidarity that might include a widespread boycotting of White House press briefings.After all, compliance is a slippery slope. What happens, for example, when Trump proclaims that Ukraine is no longer Ukraine, but to be simply called Russia? Do news organizations politely accept the rewriting of history?“What do the media do then,” queried the longtime environmental journalist Andrew Revkin, “agree to those terms so they can stay in the briefing room?”Why stop there? How about declaring by fiat that the Washington monument is now to be called the Trump monument? Why not chisel another presidential face onto Mount Rushmore and call it Mount Donald?The great renaming has begun, and George Orwell would understand exactly what’s going on.A few days ago, a media leader I admire – Jim Friedlich, the CEO of the Lenfest Institute, a non-profit organization that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer – proposed a notion that deserves serious consideration. There should be, he wrote, a “NATO for News,” in which every legitimate news organization formally pledges to defend the others. This happens now, from time to time, but Friedlich has something more deliberate in mind, he wrote in the Inquirer.All of this is happening within a larger and quite alarming anti-press context.Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk recently fantasized about a “long prison sentence” for journalists on CBS’s 60 Minutes, which has been under fire for its (normal and conventional) editing of a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris.Trump has sued the Pulitzer prize board for statements in defense of its awards to the Washington Post and the New York Times for their coverage of Trump’s relationship with Russia; he’s sued the Des Moines Register over a pre-election public opinion poll. And the Pentagon recently tossed eight traditional news organizations from office spaces to make room for pro-Maga outlets.“The Trump administration has decided that it will actively wield access as a tool to reshape the media landscape in its favor,” Oliver Darcy wrote in his media newsletter, Status. It surely will also use more legal threats and actions.Given that we’re only a month into this brave new world, some unity and stiff-spined resolve are very much in order.That won’t be easy. Getting journalists together is like herding pigeons. And no journalist wants to lose access to sources and to being where news is made. But in this era, it couldn’t be more important to push back hard.The free press may be going down, but if so, we should go down swinging.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More
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No matter how distasteful we find Trump and Vance over Europe, they speak a blunt truth | Simon Jenkins
It’s tough being rightwing these days. You have to find something nice to say about Donald Trump. That is hard. He thinks Kyiv started the Ukraine war and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a “dictator”. But what about JD Vance? The US vice-president thinks that Europe’s “threat from within”, which is putting “free speech … in retreat”, is worse than any threat from Russia or China. These men are deranged. What more is there to say?The answer is quite a lot. John Stuart Mill warned that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”. We must try to understand the case they are making, whether we agree with it or not.Yes, these men are mendacious and hypocritical. Trump claims that Zelenskyy “refuses to have elections” and that he is “very low in the polls” despite recent polling showing that he still has a majority of Ukrainian support. As for the threat to free speech “from within”, the Associated Press is banned from White House briefings for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”, and Trump’s friend Elon Musk thinks CBS’s “lying” journalists “deserve a long prison sentence”.Trump/Vance have cut through half a century of consensual waffle about the US’s God-given destiny to lead the world to goodness and freedom. Whether the issue is peace and war, immigration or tariffs, they claim to seek the US’s self-interest and nothing else. Why should Americans fork out billions each year to defend a Europe that fails to defend itself? Why should they arm distant nations to fight their neighbours, or tip staggering amounts of aid into Africa’s basket cases?If the rest of the world has screwed up – while the US has stayed free and rich for two and a half centuries – that is the world’s problem. Americans have spent a fortune these past 50 years trying to improve life on Earth and, frankly, it has failed. To hell with diplomatic etiquette.As for Ukraine, enough is enough. Putin is not going to invade the US, nor has he any intention of invading western Europe. If Europe wants to pretend otherwise, champion Vladimir Putin’s foes, sanction and enrage him, it can do so alone.Nato was a Hitler/Stalin thing. It was just another device to make the US pay for Europe’s defence. Not any more. The US, says the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, “is no longer the primary guarantor of security in Europe”. Bang goes plausible nuclear deterrence.In reality, these talking points are not new, though they have not previously been expressed so brutally by an administration. In various guises, they have lurked beneath the surface of US isolationism for more than a century. To win an election, Woodrow Wilson swore that the first world war was “one with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us”. Franklin Roosevelt promised the same of the second. He promised American mothers “again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”. Neither kept his word.US public opinion can be patriotic when a war is on, as during Vietnam. But otherwise it has been persistently anti-interventionist. Kennedy might have pleaded global sacrifice and to “ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”. But that was largely fine words for foreign consumption.What Trump/Vance are now saying to western Europe is get serious. The cold war is over. You know Russia has no desire to occupy western Europe. This proclaimed threat is a fantasy got up by what a wise president, Dwight Eisenhower, called the US’s military-industrial complex, long practised at extracting profit from fear. If Keir Starmer really wants “to give priority to defence”, he can slash his own health and welfare budgets to pay for it. But is he really that threatened, or does it merely sound good?Joe Biden was meticulous in the degree of help he extended to Kyiv. Now is the inevitable moment of extrication, but it will require a very difficult ceasefire to precede it. Without a substantial guarantee from Washington, it is hard to see anything other than eventual defeat for Kyiv. Ukraine could yet prove a rerun of the US in South Vietnam.With a minimum of delicacy, Trump/Vance have decided to expose the mix of platitude, bluff and profiteering that underpinned much of the cold war. Nato’s victory in 1989 suggested the need for a shift to a more nuanced multipolar world, one that was never properly defined.Trump/Vance are right that a realignment is badly needed. They have chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it. We can be as rude to them as we like, but they will have US democracy on their side.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More
