US news

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      White House inadvertently texted top-secret Yemen war plans to journalist

      by

      Senior members of Donald Trump’s cabinet have been involved in a serious security breach while discussing secret military plans for recent US attacks on the Houthi armed group in Yemen.In an extraordinary blunder, key figures in the Trump administration – including the vice-president, JD Vance, the defence secretary Pete Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard – used the commercial chat app Signal to convene and discuss plans – while also including a prominent journalist in the group.Signal is not approved by the US government for sharing sensitive information.Others in the chat included the Trump adviser Stephen Miller; Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles; and the key Trump envoy Steve Witkoff.The breach was revealed in an article published on Monday by Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic magazine, who discovered that he had been included in a Signal chat called “Houthi PC Small Group” and realising that 18 other members of the group included Trump cabinet members.In his account, Goldberg said that he removed sensitive material from his account, including the identity of a senior CIA officer and current operational details.The report was confirmed by Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the national security council, who told the magazine: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”Hughes added: “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that he was unaware of the incident. “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic,” Trump said.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later released a statement saying: “President Trump continues to have the utmost confidence in his national security team, including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.”The incident is likely to further raise concerns over the Trump administration’s trustworthiness with intelligence shared by erstwhile allies – not least as Hegseth boasts at one stage of guaranteeing “100 percent OPSEC – operations security” while a celebrated journalist is reading his message.The discussions seen by Goldberg include comments from Vance, who appeared unconvinced of the urgency of attacking Yemen, as well as conversations over what price should be expected of Europeans and other countries for the US removing the threat to a key global shipping route.Security and intelligence commentators in the US described the breach of operational security as unprecedented – both for the use of a commercial chat service and for the inclusion of Goldberg.In the US military, the highest political echelon and intelligence services operate under strict rules for communication of classified material and for the discussion of issues concerning operational security where lives and outcomes could be compromised by disclosure.While Signal is regarded as a secure encrypted chat service, its weakness is that phones on which it is installed can themselves be vulnerable.Among those aghast at the breach was the Democratic representative Pat Ryan, an army veteran who sits on the House armed services committee who described it using the second world war-era epithet “Fubar” – meaning “fucked up beyond all recognition”.“If House Republicans won’t hold a hearing on how this happened IMMEDIATELY, I’ll do it my damn self.”Shane Harris, a longtime national security reporter – formerly of the Washington Post and now with the Atlantic – wrote on BlueSky: “In 25 years of covering national security, I’ve never seen a story like this.”Goldberg writes that he was initially dubious about whether the messages might be some kind of foreign disinformation operation, but became convinced they were genuine both because of the language and positions presented and because the plan discussed coincided with an actual attack on Yemen.One striking exchange involved Vance and Hegseth making disparaging remarks about Europe.“The account identified as ‘JD Vance’ addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: ‘if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again,’” Goldberg wrote. (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the US navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)Goldberg continues: “The user identified as Hegseth responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.“Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”In reality, about 20 countries are involved in the mission to protect shipping from Houthi attacks including British warships.As Goldberg became aware of the attack on Yemen taking place, he recorded how he went back to the Signal channel:“‘Michael Waltz’ [US national security adviser] had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an ‘amazing job.’’’A few minutes later, [another individual wrote]: “A good start.”Not long after, Waltz responded with three emojis: a fist, an American flag and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR”, [Marco Rubio]. He wrote: “Good Job Pete and your team!!” and “Susie Wiles”. She texted: “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      US and Russia begin talks in Saudi Arabia on Ukraine ceasefire

      by

      US and Russian officials have begun talks in Saudi Arabia as Donald Trump pushes to broker a limited ceasefire that Washington hopes will mark the first step toward lasting peace in Ukraine.Ukraine and Russia have agreed in principle to a one-month halt on strikes on energy infrastructure after Trump spoke with the countries’ leaders last week. But uncertainty remains over how and when the partial ceasefire would take effect – and whether its scope would extend beyond energy infrastructure to include other critical sites, such as hospitals, bridges, and vital utilities.US officials held initial talks with Ukraine on Sunday evening and negotiated separately with Russia on Monday, with most meetings taking place at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh. Monday’s talks were still going after more than eight hours, according to Russian state media.The US is expected to shuttle between the two countries to finalise details and negotiate separate measures to ensure the safety of shipping in the Black Sea. “The ultimate goal is a 30-day ceasefire, during which time we discuss a permanent ceasefire. We’re not far away from that,” said the US special envoy Steve Witkoff in a podcast with the far-right commentator Tucker Carlson over the weekend.Moscow meanwhile appears to be exploiting the window before any ceasefire takes hold, launching mass drone attacks on Ukraine on Monday. Ukrainian officials said that a Russian missile had also damaged a school and a hospital in Ukraine’s north-eastern city of Sumy, wounding at least 74 people including 13 children.“Moscow speaks of peace while carrying out brutal strikes on densely populated residential areas in major Ukrainian cities,” the country’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said. “Instead of making hollow statements about peace, Russia must stop bombing our cities and end its war on civilians.”The Ukrainian and US delegations on Sunday discussed proposals to protect energy facilities and critical infrastructure, Ukraine’s defence minister said.Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said his country’s delegation to Sunday’s talks was working in “a completely constructive manner”, adding: “The conversation is quite useful, the work of the delegations is continuing.”Zelenskyy earlier said he would hand the US a list of energy infrastructure that would be off-limits for strikes by the Russian military.The Ukrainian delegation could hold additional discussions with US officials on Monday. “We are implementing the president of Ukraine’s directive to bring a just peace closer and to strengthen security,” Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainian defence minister who heads the country’s delegation, said on Facebook.Russia is represented in the talks by Sergey Beseda, a secretive adviser to Russia’s FSB services and Grigory Karasin, a former diplomat who negotiated the 2014 Minsk accords between Russia and Ukraine.As the Russia-US talks began in Riyadh, Trump said he expected Washington and Kyiv to sign a revenue-sharing agreement on Ukrainian critical minerals soon.Trump also told reporters the US was talking to Ukraine about the potential for its firms to own Ukrainian power plants.Ukrainian officials have backed the signing of a minerals deal, but Zelenskyy has publicly rejected the idea of US firms owning Ukrainian power plants.The lead-up to the talks was marked by a series of controversial pro-Russian statements by Witkoff – tapped by Trump as his personal envoy to Putin – in which he appeared to legitimise Russia’s staged referendums in four Ukrainian regions.Speaking with Carlson, Witkoff claimed that in the four regions where Moscow held widely condemned referendums on joining Russia, “the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe referendums in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces were widely rebuked in the west as illegitimate and are viewed as a thinly veiled attempt to justify Russia’s illegal annexation of the regions. Their annexation marked the largest forcible seizure of territory in Europe since the second world war.In the interview with Carlson, Witkoff also claimed Putin had commissioned a portrait of Trump “by a leading Russian painter” that the envoy had brought back with him after a trip to Moscow.Witkoff went on to say that after the assassination attempt on Trump last July, Putin told him that he visited his local church, met his priest and prayed for Trump. “Not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend,” Witkoff said.“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it,” he added.Witkoff’s willingness to echo Kremlin talking points and his praise for Putin are likely to heighten anxiety in Ukraine and across European capitals.In an interview with Time magazine published on Monday but conducted before Witkoff’s remarks, Zelenskyy said some US officials had begun to take Putin at his word even when it contradicted their own intelligence.“I believe Russia has managed to influence some people on the White House team through information,” he said. “Their signal to the Americans was that the Ukrainians do not want to end the war, and something should be done to force them.”Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on what would be acceptable terms for a peace treaty, with no sign that Putin has relinquished any of his maximalist aims in the war against Ukraine.Moscow has set out several maximalist conditions for any long-term settlement – most of which are non-starters for Kyiv and its European allies. These include a halt to all foreign military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, restrictions on the size of its armed forces, and international recognition of the four Ukrainian regions Russia illegally annexed following staged referendums in 2022.The Kremlin has also signalled it would reject any presence of western troops in Ukraine – something Kyiv views as essential to securing lasting security guarantees.Ukraine remains deeply sceptical of any Russian agreement, pointing to past instances where Moscow failed to honour its commitments. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s tariff obsession is a lose-lose proposition | Steven Greenhouse

      by

      I’ve been writing about manufacturing in the US since the 1980s, and it’s been heart-wrenching to report on dozens of factory closings and the devastation they have done to workers and communities. As the nation grasped for ways to slow these plant closings, I also wrote about Washington’s use of carefully employed trade measures, like targeted tariffs, and how they helped save some plants and jobs, especially in the steel industry.Carefully targeted tariffs can be a winning strategy, but Donald Trump’s obsession with tariffs – especially across-the-board ones that are neither careful nor targeted – has already shown itself to be a lose-lose strategy. Perhaps it’s too generous to use the word strategy to describe what the president is doing, because his tariffs seem based on fiat and whim, not on thoughtful planning.Trump is like Elmer Fudd with his shotgun, shooting every which way: Canada today, China tomorrow and perhaps Champagne country the day after, with tariffs imposed one day, suspended the next and then re-imposed a few days later, but, wait, those re-imposed tariffs might be canceled next week. It’s a “strategy” of chaos and capriciousness, with some viciousness thrown in.Obsessed as he is with tariffs, Trump calls tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented”, and “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. He talks as if tariffs will create an economic nirvana, but the opposite is happening. Stock markets are plummeting, corporate confidence is tanking, consumers fear higher prices and economists warn the measures might push the US into recession.Let’s count the ways Trump’s tariffs are a lose-lose proposition.First, at a time when Americans are feeling beaten and bruised from the pandemic-era burst of inflation, the tariffs – which are really a tax on imports – will inevitably push up prices. Trump’s tariffs will hit less affluent Americans hardest because they spend a higher percentage of their income on clothes and other imported goods. Many of those Americans voted for Trump, believing him when he said he’d reduce prices.Second, even though Trump boasts that tariffs will make American industry great again, it’s dubious whether Trump’s tariffs will do much to spur manufacturing. Trump has evidently forgotten that if you want to persuade corporations to build new factories – in this case, to bring back operations from overseas – then you need to reassure business executives that there will be economic and policy stability. But that’s the opposite of what Trump, the emperor of chaos, is all about. If you were a CEO, would you shell out $200m to build a new factory in the US in response to Trump’s tariffs when you know that Trump might lift those tariffs tomorrow or in two weeks or whenever a foreign leader flatters him or promises to let Eric and Don Jr build a Trump hotel at a beautiful seaside resort in their country?Trump is eager for hundreds of companies to build new factories in the US, but with his on-again-off again, here today-gone-tomorrow tariffs, he has made many stability-craving CEOs too scared to build new plants. Moreover, if Trump wants to attract the manufacturing industries and jobs of tomorrow, he’s been shooting himself and the US in the foot with his ideological war against the industries of the future, including electric vehicles, renewable energy and semiconductors. Trump is even threatening to kill Biden’s hugely successful subsidy program to build sophisticated new semiconductor plants in the US.Third, Trump’s tariffs are undermining economic growth; even Trump’s team has acknowledged the threat of recession. His tariffs are sabotaging supply chains, and that will disrupt production at many factories. His scattershot tariffs are so alarming companies that many are hesitating on plans to invest in new plant and equipment. That also undercuts growth. In addition, the widespread fears that tariffs will push inflation skyward have caused consumer sentiment to fall sharply. That could cause consumer spending, the major engine of the US economy, to decline.Fourth, Trump’s tariffs are hitting various U.S. industries hard. Trump’s hefty 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will hurt US auto makers by raising the cost of vital raw materials and making US-made cars less competitive vis-a-vis foreign automakers. Not only that, trade retaliation from Canada, Europe and China is already harming many US industries – including agriculture, motorcycles and Kentucky bourbon—and that, too, will push the economy toward recession. And let’s not forget that Trump’s tariffs are hurting the targeted countries, and that’s slowing their – and worldwide – economic growth.Fifth, another big way we lose is that Trump, by slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and the European Union, has further angered and alienated many of our closest allies, and that comes on top of his disparaging Nato and increasingly allying the US with Russia. In this way, Trump may destroy the Atlantic Alliance, which has been pivotal for maintaining peace and prosperity, though not perfectly, since the second world war.Sixth, any honest, fair-minded cost-benefit analysis will show that Trump’s tariffs will cause far more damage than gain. Although Trump says his tariffs will “create jobs like we have never seen before”, economic studies have found that the tariffs Trump imposed in his first term failed to increase the number of jobs. Those tariffs created a small number of jobs in some industries, but retaliation and supply-chain disruptions caused job losses in other industries. A study by economists at MIT, the World Bank, Harvard and the University of Zurich concluded that Trump’s first-term tariffs “neither raised nor lowered US employment” and didn’t “provide economic help to the US heartland”.With Trump’s tariffs changing day to day, it’s impossible to predict how many jobs those tariffs will create or destroy. Thus far, his tariffs have caused US stock markets to lose $4tn in value, and those losses could grow. If Trump’s tariffs were to create 100,000 jobs, which some economists say is unrealistically optimistic, the cost would be an astronomical $40m per job ($4tn divided by 100,000). If his tariffs created 10,000 jobs, the cost would be $400m per job.With Trump’s tariffs slowing economic growth, if they result in a 1 percentage point drop in annual GDP, that would mean a loss of $300bn a year in economic output. (1% of the nation’s $30tn GDP). If Trump’s tariffs yielded 100,000 jobs, the cost would be $3m per job. Or if Trump’s tariffs raise inflation by 1%, that would cost American consumers roughly $200bn a year – which would mean a cost of $2m per job created.Returning to Elmer Fudd, his goal was always to shoot Bugs Bunny, but his gun often blew up in his face by mistake. With his tariffs, Elmer Trump seems well on his way to shooting the US economy by mistake.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘They chose the billionaire’: Tim Walz returns to Minnesota as part of redemption tour

      by

      Tim Walz is trying to regroup to help Democrats fight the Trump administration, but he’s still trying to figure out why he and his party lost in November.“I knew it was my job to try and pick off those other swing states, and we didn’t,” he said about the 2024 election. “I come back home to lick my wounds and say, goddamn, at least we won here.”Walz was speaking on Saturday in Rochester, Minnesota – in the district he once represented in Congress, as part of his soul-searching tour around the country after the Democrats’ bruising 2024 defeat.Walz’s tour is part brand redemption, part Democratic catharsis, part rally. He hasn’t ruled out a 2028 run for president, though neither have most 2028 hopefuls.“I thought it was a flex that I was the poorest person and the only public school teacher to ever run for vice-president of the United States,” Walz told a crowd of roughly 1,500 people that filled an auditorium and spilled into an overflow room on a Saturday morning. “They chose the billionaire. We gotta do better.”Many in the crowd remembered when Walz represented them in Congress, and asked him how he would fight against the dismantling of the Department of Education, defend the rights of trans people and build a bigger tent for Democrats.Walz’s town hall was one of many large Democratic events in recent days, proving there’s growing energy for a forceful resistance to the US president. Much bigger crowds have turned up to see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a “stop oligarchy” tour. People have also filled town halls around the country to tell their elected officials how they’re affected by government cuts and policy changes. But where the energy goes remains to be seen.It’s clear Walz still captures the attention of a rightwing outrage machine. He chided Fox News and other pundits during an appearance on Gavin Newsom’s podcast, saying they made fun of him for drinking from a straw and don’t think he’s masculine enough, but he could “kick their ass”. Fox host Jesse Watters then railed against the clip and detailed things men shouldn’t do, like eat soup in public.Trump called Walz a “loser” on Friday. “He lost an election. He played a part. You know, usually a vice-president doesn’t play a part … I think he was so bad that he hurt her.”At a prior rally in Wisconsin, Walz mocked Tesla, saying he watches the falling stock to get a “little boost” each day, leading to condemnation on the right. “Sometimes when I need a little boost, I look at the @JDVance portrait in the White House and thank the Lord,” Musk wrote on Twitter/X.At the Saturday town hall, Walz took aim at Musk. “This guy bugs me in a way that’s probably unhealthy,” he said.“They’re all butthurt about the Tesla thing, but they don’t care about the disrespect they have shown to employees at the Minneapolis VA who care for our veterans, and they fire them. They don’t care,” Walz said.Walz held the rally in a region of Minnesota where the congressman, Brad Finstad, is one of many Republicans who haven’t held in-person town halls. Republicans who have hosted events in recent weeks have experienced heated pushback. Signs outside the venue, John Marshall high school, showed Finstad’s face in black and white and said “Missing Congressman”. Finstad told the Rochester Post-Bulletin he wouldn’t commit to hosting an in-person event, but had held tele-town halls.“I find it funny because Governor Walz, in the seven years of being governor, has not held one town hall, and now he’s claiming to be the king of town hall,” Finstad said. “This is a Democrat-hosted political comeback for Governor Walz. Well, let him scream at the bully pulpit.”During the rally, Walz said Finstad should take notice. “If you’re a sitting member of Congress in the biggest city in your district, and you see 1,300 people on a nice Saturday coming out here, it catches your attention, trust me,” he said.Thinking about the path forward for Democrats, Walz acknowledges he doesn’t have a solid answer, but said Democrats need to do better at articulating their values and the ways their policies would improve people’s lives. He likes the idea of a “shadow cabinet”, borrowing a UK tradition where opposition parties have their own versions of cabinet members to speak out against the ones in power.He also said Democrats shouldn’t let Republicans capture the narrative on issues like trans rights.“To be honest with you, there’s a lot of people who are squishy about this and are willing to say, look, it’s a pretty small number of people,” Walz said. “That’s a dangerous road to go down, because pretty soon you’re part of the group that’s a pretty small number of people.”He sees the Trump administration as an “existential threat” that will chip away at programs such as social security, but wonders how Democrats aren’t able to message these popular, middle-class issues against oligarchs. “How did this happen?” he pondered.Once Democrats get back in office, it’s time to shore up the programs they want to protect, he said.“Donald Trump is on his revenge and retribution tour,” he said. “Well, I said I’ll be on one, too. I’m going to bring revenge just raining down on their heads with their neighbors getting healthcare. They’re gonna rue the day when we got re-elected because our kids with special needs are going to get the care that they need.” More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The authoritarian playbook’: Trump targets judges, lawyers … and law itself

      by

      As Donald Trump aggressively seeks revenge against multiple foes in the US, he’s waging a vendetta using executive orders and social media against judges, law firms, prosecutors, the press and other vital American institutions to stifle dissent and exact retribution.Legal scholars say the president’s menacing attacks, some of which Trump’s biggest campaign backer, the billionaire Elon Musk, has echoed, are aimed at silencing critics of his radical agenda and undercut the rule of law in authoritarian ways that expand his own powers.“Trump’s moves are from the authoritarian playbook,” said the Harvard law school lecturer and retired Massachusetts judge Nancy Gertner. “You need to delegitimize institutions that could be critics. Trump is seeking to use the power of the presidency to delegitimize institutions including universities, law firms, judges and others. It’s the opposite of American democracy.”In a stunning move on Tuesday, Trump railed that a top Washington DC judge ought to be impeached for ruling to halt the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans allegedly including gang members, sparking the chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts, hours later to issue a strong statement against calls to impeach judges for their rulings.Legal scholars sharply criticize other attacks by Trump and the Maga world on judges who have issued rulings against executive orders or Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), with the goal of weakening the judicial branch to boost Trump’s powers.Fears about Trump’s war on his critics rose this month as the president issued executive orders penalizing three big law firms including Covington & Burling and Perkins Coie. Critics say Trump’s sanctions against the firms were sparked by their clients, respectively ex-special counsel Jack Smith, who brought charges against Trump for trying to subvert his 2020 election loss, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which hired the firm that helped pay for a dossier alleging collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign.Those executive orders, which included barring some firms from entering federal buildings, interacting with agencies and taking away security clearances from some lawyers, were widely seen as punitive measures to hurt them financially.District Judge Beryl Howell on 12 March blocked the Trump administration from enforcing key parts of its order against Perkins Coie, which she stated “runs head-on into the wall of first amendment protections”.The third law firm Trump targeted with an executive order was Paul Weiss Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, whose former partner Mark Pomerantz later tried to build a criminal case against Trump when he worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. But Trump’s executive order was reversed on 19 March after the firm agreed to provide $40m in pro bono services to support administration priorities.Legal scholars have also denounced justice department firings or demotions of some two dozen lawyers who worked on cases against Trump allies convicted for attacking the Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory.In a stark show of vindictiveness and historical revisionism about his role inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol and baseless claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was rigged, Trump addressed a justice department gathering on 14 March and proclaimed he intended to end the “weaponization” of the law against him.In an angry and rambling talk, Trump singled out among others Jack Smith, to whom Covington provided pro bono help, and the former Perkins lawyer Marc Elias, a key figure in fighting Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.Trump blasted them and others who had investigated him as “bad people, really bad people … They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country, but in the end, the thugs failed and the truth won.”Shortly after Trump spoke, the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who taught constitutional law for two decades, gave a sharp rebuttal at a rally outside the justice department. “No other president in American history has stood in the Department of Justice to proclaim an agenda of criminal prosecution and retaliation against his political foes,” Raskin said.Legal experts say Trump’s attacks on lawyers and judges are dangerous.“The sheer vindictiveness with which Trump and his allies have targeted lawyers – both in government service and in private practice – and judges has disrupted lives, inflicted costs and even raised security concerns,” said Daniel Richman, a Columbia law professor and former federal prosecutor.“I’m sure some are intimidated, and that certainly seems the intent. Others will cozy up to him. But the more this occurs – and I don’t imagine it will stop – the more it will look like Trump’s problem is less with those who practice law and more with law itself. Even allies who cheer his tactics may soon wonder how they would fare in a lawless world.”Other legal scholars express grave concerns with Trump’s widening attacks on law firms, judges and other institutions that have criticized his policies and power grabs.View image in fullscreen“Trump’s sanctions against Covington and Perkins serve two purposes. In the immediate term, he gets revenge against two firms that have offended him,” said NYU law professor Stephen Gillers.Gillers stressed that these orders also “warn other law firms that they face the same punishment if they cross Trump by representing plaintiffs challenging his executive orders. In fact, the executive orders should be called by their rightful name: vendettas.”Gillers added that the “only remaining institutional threat to Trump’s quest for total power is the judiciary … Lawyers are the gatekeepers for access to judicial power. We see a double-barreled strategy: attack the judges who criticize or rule against Trump as a warning to other judges, and attack law firms as a warning to other law firms that might take Trump to court.”The surge in Trump administration attacks on judges has been fueled by multiple court rulings that have delayed or scuttled Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s Doge operation to shrink the federal government with scant regard for congressional and judicial powers.For instance, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, last week wrote on X: “Under the precedents now being established by radical rogue judges, a district court in Hawaii could enjoin troop movements in Iraq. Judges have no authority to administer the executive branch. Or to nullify the results of a national election.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJudges who have ruled against Trump have witnessed an uptick in threats. A bomb threat was even made in March against a sister of the conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett after she joined three liberal justices and Chief Justice Roberts in a ruling that went against Trump.Trump’s rightwing allies in Congress have jumped into the legal fray with calls to impeach certain judges who have ruled against the administration and some of Doge’s radical cost-cutting moves.After the New York district judge Paul Engelmayer blocked Doge on 8 February from gaining access to millions of sensitive and personal treasury records, Musk baselessly accused him of being a “corrupt judge protecting corruption” on X, the social media site he owns where he has about 200 million followers.“He needs to be impeached NOW!” Musk said on 9 February.With Musk nearby in the Oval Office last month, Trump echoed these attacks by the world’s richest man, who donated close to $300m to his campaign:“It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so maybe we have to look at the judges because I think that’s a very serious violation,” Trump said.To bolster those charges, Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican congressman, filed an impeachment resolution against the judge, whose ruling came after more than a dozen Democratic state attorneys general filed a lawsuit arguing Doge could not legally access treasury records with personal details of millions of Americans.Former federal judges and scholars say that Trump and Musk have pushed the legal envelope in ways that are unprecedented in the US.“When you flood the zone with scores of executive orders, many of which were clearly based on questionable legal grounds, no one should be surprised that they’re not withstanding judicial scrutiny,” said John Jones, an ex-federal judge who is now president of Dickinson College.“An additional problem the administration has is that it’s losing credibility with the courts by continually making disingenuous arguments in support of these orders.”Other critics voice similar concerns.“Trump’s actions aimed at the role of lawyers and the courts appear to be part of a battle to reduce the judicial branch to being subordinate to the president,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University. “If Trump is able to punish lawyers who oppose him and ignore the courts, he will be only steps away from becoming the king he seems to want to be.”On another front where Trump is eager to snuff out criticism and dissent, the president escalated his attacks on the media in his recent justice department speech by asserting without evidence that some major reporting outlets are “illegal” and “corrupt”.“These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative,” Trump said, lashing out at CNN and MSNBC as corrupt.Trump added in conspiratorial fashion: “It has to stop, it has to be illegal, it’s influencing judges and it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal.”Trump’s widening attacks on the press, the courts, law firms and other American institutions damage the rule of law in Raskin’s eyes.“Trump is attacking any source of potential institutional opposition,” Raskin said. “Anyone who offers any kind of resistance is a target of Trump’s. We’re seeing an explosion of Trump’s incorrigible lawlessness.” More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Why are other universities silent in condemning Trump’s attacks on Columbia? | Zephyr Teachout

      by

      University presidents need to be working together to speak up against Donald Trump. Across the country, higher education is facing a crisis that threatens the entire vision of independence: a direct federal government effort to destroy academic freedom by controlling ideas and acceptable areas of inquiry. University leaders should be standing in solidarity with those who have been attacked to defend academic freedom and free speech. So far, all but five have been silent.The US president has made no secret of his intent to control what is studied, thought and debated. His administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding sweeping changes, including placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department under “academic receivership” for five years, abolishing the university judicial board, and centralizing all disciplinary processes under the office of the president. Such unprecedented intervention is blatantly illegal and a wholesale attack on academic freedom and free speech. On Friday, Columbia capitulated.It is an embarrassment to Columbia, of course, but the embarrassment is not Columbia’s alone. The use of federal funding threats to control universities should be a five-alarm fire for the thousands of other universities, and yet the response from the majority of academic leadership has been silence.By my count, five university presidents have publicly condemned Trump. The president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth, has been the first and loudest, clearly expressing the unacceptable nature of Trump’s attack. The presidents of Mount Holyoke, Delta College in Michigan, Trinity Community College in Washington DC, and Princeton have also made clear that what Trump is doing is unacceptable.The thousands of others who are keeping totally quiet know what is happening, and how serious it is; in a recent survey, 94% said Trump directly threatened academic freedom.The silence from university presidents is particularly jarring when compared with the swift and seemingly coordinated statements universities have issued on dozens of other issues – from US supreme court decisions to international conflicts to campus protests. Now that it comes to defending their core institutional values against a direct authoritarian attack, their collective voice is crickets.The reasons are understandable. If any one university speaks out, they are scared Trump would pull funding. The president of that university will have to see the place they love and the people they are responsible for gutted by a $50 or $100 or $400 million cut, either to federal grants or scholarships. What if speaking out will change nothing? Why risk the all-critical research of their science faculty, important scholarships for their students, for a statement that might lead to naught?This is the grotesque genius of his attack on Columbia, which operated like putting a dead body on a car for all to see – so long as each university president sees their job in isolation, and their possible defiance in isolation, all arrows point towards silence. He wins without even having to fight.But what if he did have to fight? It is not at all clear that Trump will pull funding. He hasn’t attacked Wesleyan, Princeton, Delta, Liberty. This isn’t an oversight: he wants the ground of the debate to be at Columbia, to be conflated with Gaza-Israel, to be complicated by questions about protests and student discipline and the nature of Ivy League education.If he takes on the Big 10 schools, or a small liberal arts community college, or a Catholic university like the one at which I teach, or any school where there is no pre-existing major conflict, he will be more cleanly revealed as an anti-speech bully. The university presidents can have litigation counsel at the ready to file for a temporary restraining order if Trump pulls funding because of disliked speech, and they will win these lawsuits. Constitutional law is on the side of protecting academic freedom and political speech.I don’t want to sugarcoat it: Trump could cause real chaos, significantly hurt programs while the legal fight is going on, and scare off other alumni donors to a school – who are themselves scared. If they spoke up alone, it’s possible it wouldn’t matter. I understand why university presidents are so trepidatious – he could truly wreck havoc on the people that they have pledged to care for.But it is precisely because of this dilemma that each leader is morally required to speak up – and to be prioritizing identifying others who will speak up as well over all else. It is an existential moment: standing by in silence as other universities get humiliated leads to all being humiliated.While it is far from assured that a single voice will lead to others, courage is courageous, and not only because of its natural infectiousness. The more universities speak up, the more obvious it will become that Trump cannot take on all of them, the weaker he will be, the more he will be revealed as an anti-dissent authoritarian. Trump does care how popular he is, and it matters for his leverage in Congress, too. He ran in part on freeing speech; the more it is clear he is imprisoning it, the worse he’ll do.This red scare will not end with an appeal to decency that is seen around the country on national television. Trump is worse than McCarthy; he is more powerful, more vengeful, and more determined to destroy institutions and bend them into subservience. But it can end with collective bravery. If they can find a way to share methodology for financial aid, they can find a way to share a rebuke to Trump.To be sure, the reputational power of universities is low, and university presidents have little faith that they have any meaningful political power. Their weak reputations came about in part because of illiberalism in the last 10 years, brought on in part by a rhetoric of student safety trumping free discourse, and in part because of the ungodly cost of tuition. The recent price-fixing lawsuits haven’t helped.That leads me to wonder whether there might be other reasons university presidents are so quiet; more mundane, human, contextual ones. They tend to be trained in thinking strategically when virtue ethics is what is called for; game theory has a way of demanding data points that no one has. Or perhaps, after making too many statements on too many topics in the 2018-2022 period, presidents may be exhausted and annoyed when they are told that speaking out is a moral imperative. They have been turning towards institutional neutrality in most policy issues, tired of being told that every crisis demands a university president voice – one last call demanding courage can feel like overload, overwrought and irrelevant.The reason this is different is because the government is attacking free speech and free inquiry itself. The current collective cowardice is self-defeating. Their refusal to stand together now only makes them more vulnerable in the future, and less credible when they say they are privately resisting. How can we trust they aren’t complying in advance, reshaping their curriculum and research dollars to avoid retribution? We can’t.If university leaders, some of the most privileged people in our society, allow themselves to be bullied and blackmailed, and refuse to coordinate with each other on courage, how do we expect any other institutions – law firms, non-profits, businesses – to stand up?

      Zephyr Teachout is an American attorney, author, political candidate, and professor of law specializing in democracy and antitrust at Fordham University More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The goal is to disassemble public health’: experts warn against US turn to vaccine skepticism

      by

      As vaccine hesitancy increases in the US, isolated, tight-knit and religious communities have frequently been at the center of high-profile outbreaks.Such is the case in west Texas, where a rural community is the center of an expanding measles outbreak that has already claimed the lives of two Americans – the first deaths from the disease in nearly a decade.However, as the conspiracy theories of Maga conservatism marry the bugbears of the US health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, the one-time fringe view of vaccines has become increasingly mainstream – with activists in right-leaning population centers taking lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic into the realm of childhood inoculations.One need look no further than Sarasota, Florida, for a full-throated political denunciation.“Generally, people are weak, lazy,” said Vic Mellor, an activist based near Sarasota, and a close ally of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.Mellor owns the We the People Health and Wellness Center in nearby Venice. Mellor, in a shirt that shouts “VIOLENCE MIGHT BE THE ANSWER”, is a self-professed attendee of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.“And that lazy part just makes them ignorant … Covid has proven that obviously this is true. I mean, all the facts are starting to come out on Covid now – that it was a hoax. That is just an extension of where this hoax began decades earlier with the vaccines, OK? This is all a money grab, this is all a power grab.”The pandemic was real, and it started Mellor down the road of questioning vaccines. Where he once opposed only the Covid-19 shots, he now opposes vaccines entirely – arguing they harm children despite experts on vaccines considering them one of mankind’s greatest medical achievements.“This is not an isolated, rural, religious community, which I think is what a lot of people associate with an anti-vaccine mentality,” said Kathryn Olivarius, the author of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, and a historian of disease at Stanford University. “This is in the heart of everything.”Sarasota has become a proving ground for the Maga right. Among nail salons, mom-and-pop Cuban restaurants and roadside motels lining US 41, known locally as the Tamiami Trail, a visitor can find the gates of New College. This was once a public university prized for its progressive liberal arts education. Now it is part of the new conservative experiment in remaking higher education led by activists aligned with Donald Trump and the Republican Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.Along the same road is the Sarasota memorial hospital, an aberration in American healthcare – it is publicly owned with open board elections. The normally sleepy election became contentious when insurgent “health freedom” candidates, supported in part by Mellor, entered the race. Three won seats on the nine-member board in 2022.Even the name of this stretch of sun-bleached asphalt is up for debate. This year, a state Republican lawmaker – who has also introduced bills to limit vaccine requirements – briefly proposed changing its name to the “Gulf of America Trail” – a nod to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.Arguably the most salient artifact of this activism in Sarasota is the least visible: vaccination rates against measles.Measles vaccination rates for kindergarteners have plummeted over the last two decades – from 97% in 2004 to 84% in 2023, according to state health records. Sarasota is roughly on par with the vaccination rates in rural Gaines county, Texas – the center of the ongoing measles outbreak that sickened 279 people in in that state alone. Notably, both Gaines county and Sarasota have large home-schooling communities, meaning vaccination rates could in fact be lower.It is well known in research circles that right-leaning states across the US south and west have worse health metrics – from obesity to violence to diseases such as diabetes. That reality was supercharged during the pandemic; as vaccine mandates became a fixation on the right, Republican-leaning voters became more skeptical of vaccines. In turn, places with politically conservative leaders experienced more Covid-19 deaths and greater stress on hospitals.Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known to medicine. At least 95% of the population needs to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks of the disease. But despite a supremely effective vaccine that eliminated the disease from the US in 2000, vaccine hesitancy has increasingly taken hold.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConservative activism alone can’t be blamed for declining measles vaccination rates. The measles vaccine in particular has been subject to a sustained firehose of misinformation stemming from a fraudulent paper linking the vaccine to autism in 1999. For years, this misinformation was largely nonpartisan. And Florida’s anti-vaccine movement was active even before the pandemic – with a vocal contingent of parents arguing against strengthening school vaccine standards in 2019.What appears new in Sarasota is how local conservative activists have brought opposition to vaccines into the heart of their philosophy. By Mellor’s telling, he and a loosely affiliated group of Maga activists began to adopt anti-vaccine beliefs as the pandemic wore on – helping organize major health protests in the area in recent years, such as mask mandate opt-outs and the “health freedom” campaign for hospital board seats.Mellor said his nearby property, the Hollow, was a gathering place during the pandemic (it is also a part-time gun range). He cites ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that became a fascination of the right, as the reason “we didn’t lose people at all” during the height of the pandemic. Available clinical evidence shows it is not effective against Covid-19.Kennedy has fit neatly into this realignment. He enjoys trust ratings among Republicans nearly as high as Trump, according to polling from the health-focused Kaiser Family Foundation. Kennedy has already spread dubious information about measles vaccines in public statements (notably: from a Steak ’n Shake in Florida) – a response one vaccine expert said “couldn’t be worse”.“While children are in the hospital suffering severe measles pneumonia, struggling to breathe, [Kennedy] stands up in front of the American public and says measles vaccines kill people every year and that it causes blindness and deafness,” said Dr Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Severe side effects from the vaccine are possible, but they are much rarer than disability and death from measles.“This is what happens when you have a virulent anti-vaccine activist, a science denialist, as the head of the most important public health agency in the United States,” said Offit. “He should either be quiet or stand down.”The same poll found trust in public health agencies has fallen precipitously amid Republican attacks. More than a quarter of Republican parents report delaying childhood vaccines, the poll found, a rate that has more than doubled since 2022. There is no analogous trend among Democratic parents. Despite how claims espoused by vaccine skeptics can be easily refuted, their power has not been undercut.“The anti-vaccine business is big business,” said Offit, pointing to the myriad unproven “treatments” offered by promoters of vaccine misinformation, some of which are offered at Mellor’s We the People health center. “We have been taken over by a foreign country, and the goal of that foreign country is to disassemble public health.”The misery of measles did not take long to appear in Texas – measles-induced pneumonia has already led pediatricians to intubate children, including at least one baby, according to the Associated Press. About one to three people out of 1,000 who are infected by measles die from the infection, and one in 1,000 suffer severe brain swelling called encephalitis, which can lead to blindness, deafness and developmental delays.“We actually don’t have the perspective people in the past had on these diseases,” Olivarius. “I have spent many, many, many years reading letters and missives from parents who are petrified of what’s going to happen to their children” if there are outbreaks of yellow fever, polio or measles, Olivarius said about diseases now largely confined to history – thanks to vaccines.“The lesson from history is these are not mild ailments,” she said. “These are diseases that have killed hundreds of millions of people – and quite horribly too.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Anger in Greenland over visits this week by Usha Vance and Mike Waltz

      by

      Greenland’s prime minister has accused Washington of interfering in its political affairs with the visit of an American delegation this week to the Arctic island coveted by the US president, Donald Trump.“It should be said clearly that our integrity and democracy must be respected without foreign interference,” Múte Egede said on Monday, adding that the planned visit by the second lady, Usha Vance, along with the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, “cannot be seen as just a private visit”.Vance, the wife of the US vice-president, JD Vance, will travel to Greenland as Trump clings to the idea of a US annexation of the strategic, semiautonomous Danish territory.Vance will visit Greenland on Thursday with a US delegation to tour historical sites, learn about the territory’s heritage and attend the national dogsled race, the White House said. The delegation will return to the US on 29 March.Waltz and the energy secretary, Chris Wright, will also travel to Greenland to visit a US military base, a US official said. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump has made US annexation of Greenland a significant talking point since taking office for a second time on 20 January and has said it will become part of the US “one way or the other”.Speaking on Sunday to the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq, Egede said: “The only purpose is to show a demonstration of power to us, and the signal is not to be misunderstood. He is Trump’s confidential and closest adviser, and his presence in Greenland alone will certainly make the Americans believe in Trump’s mission, and the pressure will increase after the visit.”Greenland’s strategic location and rich mineral resources could benefit the US. It lies along the shortest route from Europe to North America – vital for the US ballistic missile warning system.The governments of Greenland and Denmark have voiced opposition to such a move.The Greenlandic government, which is in a caretaker period after an 11 March general election won by a party that favours a slow approach to independence from Denmark, did not reply to requests for comments.The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said in a written comment reacting to news of the visit that “this is something we take seriously”. She said Denmark wanted to cooperate with the US but it should be cooperation based on “the fundamental rules of sovereignty”.She added that the dialogue with the US regarding Greenland would take place in close coordination with the Danish government and the future Greenlandic government.Reuters contributed to this report. More