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      ‘It’s very concerning’: conservatives react to Zohran Mamdani’s New York primary showing

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      He is the democratic socialist who has been described as a gift to the Republican party.Zohran Mamdani’s stunning showing in the Democratic primary election for mayor of New York this week was seen by some as perfect fodder to whip up a new “red scare”. Donald Trump called him “a 100% Communist Lunatic”, writing on social media: “We’ve had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous.”But at a gathering of religious conservatives in Washington on Friday, the first attendee interviewed by the Guardian expressed admiration for what Mamdani had pulled off in beating establishment favorite Andrew Cuomo.Kevin Abplanalp, who has worked on political campaigns, said: “He ran a fantastic ground game. I was very impressed with his grassroots work. Cuomo was a terrible candidate so it’s a combination of a repudiation of Cuomo and excitement over a younger guy with energy and different ideas.”Abplanalp, 49, executive director of the group Coalition for Liberty, added: “He’s a bit too socialistic for my taste but it is New York. They’ve had Marxists before. It is what it is.”Mamdani was endorsed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading progressive some believe could now be encouraged to mount a bid for the White House in 2028. But that prospect was met with complacency and ridicule at the Freedom & Faith Coalition’s Road to Majority conference.Abplanalp commented: “That is hilarious. I don’t think she has the requisite experience. We’ve had other presidents who don’t have the requisite experience: Jimmy Carter for one. Do people want to have another train wreck of someone that just talks a good game? There’s nothing on her résumé that screams executive capability.”The annual gathering was addressed by senators from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Oklahoma along with Virginia’a governor, Glenn Youngkin, and Trump’s border “czar”, Tom Homan. In the eyes of many delegates, Mamdani’s surprise victory was evidence of liberal eccentricity in New York that will not fly elsewhere.Andrea Moore, 55, from Virginia, said: “I’m a little surprised but at the same time it is New York.” She told an anecdote about an Uber driver who was upset about New York potentially giving people who illegally crossed the border “$2,000 a month of taxpayer money and the right to vote immediately”.As for Ocasio-Cortez running for president, she remarked: “I don’t think I’d fear it but I’d probably laugh about it.”Steven Perkins, 74, who is retired and from South Dakota, said: “It’s not just that we’re conservatives but we know our communities. You get out of the big core cities and people are pretty conservative and traditional and they aren’t ready for all of this much change to occur. There’s this big reaction. The Democrats better wake up.”Mamdani, 33, combined charisma and social media savvy with a policy agenda focused on New York’s affordability crisis. His plans include freezing rent for many residents, free bus service and universal childcare paid for by new taxes on the wealthy.Some at the Road to Majority conference found this affront to capitalism. Darin Moser, 56, from Mount Airy, North Carolina, said: “It’s very concerning. The United States was built on freedom and free markets and we need to stay on that because that’s what’s made us successful and the most successful nation in the world.”One attendee, who did not wish to be named, blamed the media for making socialism seem like the answer to their problems. He said: “If you repeat anything enough times people are going to believe it but it’s not been proven. Socialism or communism has proven to fail every time it’s been put into play. It comes around newly clothed but it’s the same worn-out policy.”The ascent of Mamdani, who would be New York’s first Muslim mayor, triggered an onslaught of Islamaphobic attacks across social media, including from some Republican members of Congress. Centrist Democrats remained nervous about backing him, fearful that he could damage the party in swing states.But in the view of Ronald Wilcox, 63, from Fairfax county in Virginia, Democrats have already embraced extremism and lost touch with reality. “The left has no limit to what they will vote for,” he said. “I trust no Democrat because there’s no limit to how bad a person can be and they’ll still support him.”Could the US ever elect a socialist president? Wilcox, who works in direct mail, replied: “I won’t say never but the mood of America, the new generation, is embracing Trump. The young generation is moving to conservative, the Asians are moving to conservative, the Latinos are moving to conservative because we share their values.” More

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      Zohran Mamdani has the Palestinian protest movement to thank for his win | Heba Gowayed

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      In a tremendous upset of politics as usual, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old brown, Muslim, Democratic socialist who had little name recognition in February beat the poster boy of the Democratic party establishment, Andrew Cuomo, by a plurality of votes in the first round of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.What makes this win even more remarkable is that Mamdani has refused to back down from his vocal support for Palestinian liberation, a position that has long been a death knell for candidates within a party whose establishment is unabashedly pro-Israel.Mamdani’s victory shows that his support for Palestine is not a liability, nor irrelevant to his mayoral campaign. In fact, Palestine has moved to the heart of domestic politics thanks to an organized, grassroots movement of Palestinians and allies, students and activists, that paved the way for this mayoral win.Over the course of the last two years of genocide, protests and social media activism has shifted the national discourse around Palestine. A Quinnipiac poll has found that sympathy for Israel has reached an all-time low, with Pew showing that over 71% of Democrats aged 18-49 have a negative view.On Tuesday, the day of the Democratic primary (as well as the hottest day New York has seen in over 13 years), I stood on the corner of 146th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, trying to convince New Yorkers to rank Mamdani on their ballot. One of the leaders of our canvass was a student who was doxed for fighting for her university’s divestment from Israel alongside Mahmoud Khalil. Later that evening, after Cuomo’s concession, Mamdani’s campaign manager thanked Jewish Voice for Peace, whose chapters are integral in organizing against Israel’s genocide and apartheid, for its early endorsement of his campaign.While Cuomo was rich in money, receiving $26m in Super Pac funds as opposed to Mamdani’s $1.8m, Mamdani’s wealth was in the people already organized on issues of progressive politics, including Palestine.The Mamdani campaign’s “joyous” ground game, tens of thousands of people who volunteered to knock on over 1.6m doors, is not simply a story of individuals being organically moved to action by progressive politics or a charismatic candidate. It is instead a story of people who have for years been organizing to oppose an electoral system that marginalized them, who saw Mamdani as an alternative to “elected officials [who] endorse or overlook genocide” whether they organized through ethnic organizations like Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum) or the Democratic Socialists of American (DSA).This is not a campaign that can be recreated with any fresh face, or just any economically progressive platform. Bernie Sanders is wrong to say that Kamala Harris would “be president of the United States today” had she simply had a platform geared towards the working class, and focused on knocking on doors.People came out for Mamdani because he rejected a party machinery whose establishment candidate, Cuomo, was literally part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team. It mattered that Mamdani started his college’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. It mattered that Mamdani said he would arrest Netanyahu, that he’d disband the Strategic Response Group of the NYPD, which I’d watched brutalize my Cuny college students as they protested. People came out to campaign for him, rain or shine, because he refused to decry the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” even as he endured vile smears and a death threat for it.If the mayoral race is a referendum on Israel, there was a record turnout for Mamdani. People who had not voted in prior elections showed up to the polls, with Mamdani winning in deeply Hispanic and Asian areas, and doing extraordinarily well among young people of all races. Polling showed him second among Jewish voters.Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary, however, is just one big step in what will continue to be a tough mayoral race. Perhaps the largest threat this campaign will face is the pressure placed on it by the pro-Israel machinery of the Democratic party. The senator Kirsten Gillibrand suggested he may be a threat to Jewish New Yorkers, Laura Gillen, a congressperson, called him “too extreme” and Tom Suozzi, another congressperson, said he had “serious concerns” about his campaign. Mamdani is reportedly scheduled to sit down for meetings with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who have so far declined to endorse him.Mamdani is also being targeted by the right. In a grossly racist action, the Tennessee Republican Andy Ogles called for Mamdani to be denaturalized and deported, posting on X “Zohran ‘little muhammad’ Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York.” And even as she called his campaign “unique” and “smart”, Marjorie Taylor Green retweeted an AI-generated image of the Statue of Liberty covered head-to-toe in a black burqa saying, “This hits hard.”Mamdani’s very identity is a challenge to a two-party system that has normalized anti-Muslim hate, and through its prism anti-Palestinian repression and genocide. Trump began testing his mass deportation policy on the Palestinian students who led the movements that made the Mamdani campaign possible, including by kidnapping and imprisoning Khalil, the negotiator for the Columbia encampment. Trump justified his travel ban, which Mamdani’s home country Uganda may be added to in the coming months, as part of fighting antisemitism.What his pathway to victory in the primary shows is that his continued strength, and that of any other candidate hoping to secure a similar victory, will not rely on political endorsements. Instead, it will rely on him staying true to the authenticity that made this campaign resonate with millions of people in New York and around the world. More

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      ‘You open the fridge – nothing’: renewed threat of US hunger as Trump seeks to cut food aid

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      Jade Johnson has a word to describe the experience of going hungry in one of the world’s richest countries. “Humbling.”The last time she endured the misery of skipping meals was about 18 months ago. She was working two jobs as a home health aide and in childcare, but after paying the rent and bills she still didn’t have enough to feed herself and her young daughter Janai.She would always make sure Janai had all she needed and then, when the money ran out, trim her own eating habits accordingly. Three meals a day became one, solids would be replaced with copious amounts of water to dull the hunger pangs.“It’s like you get humbled,” Johnson, 25, says in the apartment where she is raising Janai, six, in Germantown, Maryland. “You open the fridge, close it, open it again but nothing’s gonna change – there’s nothing in there.”Those lean times were in the days before Johnson was accepted on to Snap, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, that provides low-income families with help to buy nutritious groceries. Johnson had applied several times, but had been knocked back.She was finally approved, with the help of an adviser whom she met at a parents’ evening at Janai’s kindergarten. For more than a year now she has received $520 every month to buy good food – equivalent to $8.50 for her and Janai each day, or under $3 a meal.View image in fullscreenThat may not sound much, but it has been transformative. “Snap has been a blessing for me,” she says. “I can provide for Janai when I come home, cook dinner for myself. It’s improved my relationship with my kid, my friends, my clients.”Now Johnson is bracing herself for a return to those grim days of food insecurity. Donald Trump’s multi-trillion dollar domestic policy legislation, his “big, beautiful bill” which is currently battling through Congress, would slash up to $300bn from the Snap program in order to fund extended tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.The cuts amount to the largest in the program’s history. They come at a time when food insecurity is already on the rise in all 50 states.Voting is meant to begin soon in the US Senate, an attempt to clear the bill through the upper chamber in time to meet Trump’s ambition to sign it into law by 4 July. Senate Republican leaders are mindful that any revisions they write into the bill must avoid causing further acrimony when the legislation moves back for final approval to the House of Representatives, where the package was passed this spring by an agonising single vote.Under the House version of the bill, parents of children seven and above would become liable for stringent work requirements from which they are currently exempted until their child is 18. Johnson would be affected by the new restriction, as Janai turns seven in November.If that seven-year cutoff remains in the final bill (the Senate is proposing that parents must meet work requirements once their child reaches 14), Johnson will have to prove from Janai’s next birthday that she is working at least 20 hours a week. Otherwise she would lose her Snap benefits.That would be a tough burden to meet, given that her hours fluctuate week by week as clients’ needs change. She has very little slack in her calendar to work further hours, because on top of her two jobs she is studying part-time at night to become a dialysis technician.So Johnson is nervously following the passage of the bill, and preparing for the worst. Should her food assistance be pulled, it will be back to “grind mode” and a renewed state of humbling.Johnson is one of millions of struggling Americans who are threatened with losing their Snap benefits under Trump’s bill. Most of the political attention in Congress has focused on Medicaid, the health insurance scheme for low-income families which faces even greater cuts of at least $800bn under the House version of the bill.Anti-hunger advocates fear that the potential devastation of Snap cuts is being overlooked. “I just don’t think it’s getting the sort of press and general public attention it demands,” said Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, executive director of Children’s HealthWatch.She described the proposed cuts as a “catastrophic attack that will change the structure of Snap, damage children’s and parents’ health, and have ripple effects that will devastate local economies”.Since it was founded as a permanent program by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Snap has grown into America’s most effective weapon against hunger. It currently helps put food on the table for over 40 million people, almost half of whom are children.Poverty experts have been stunned by the scale of Trump’s proposed cuts. They say they would deliver a terrible blow to one of the country’s core values – that all Americans should have enough to eat.“It’s like we are throwing in the towel, and saying hunger won,” said Salaam Bhatti, Snap director at the Food Research & Action Center (Frac). “It’s upsetting that one of the wealthiest countries in the world is on the brink of increasing hunger for millions of people.”The proposed cuts fall under several headings. The one that Johnson will feel most immediately is the expanded work requirements that will put about 8 million people at risk of losing some or all of their Snap benefits.In addition to the expanded work requirements for parents of children aged seven to 18, older adults aged 55 to 64 would also now have to meet heavy work stipulations. That cohort includes Johnson’s mother, Jámene, who currently receives Snap but might be thrown off it as she is 55 and would be subject to the expanded demands.Jámene currently receives $52 a month in Snap benefits. Again, that might sound minimal, but without it she would be unable to buy fresh vegetables and meat and she would be hard pressed to offer any help to her daughter and granddaughter when reserves are running low.The bill also transfers some of the costs of benefits, for the first time in the program’s 61-year history, from the federal government to individual states. Under the House bill, states would be liable for up to 15% of the benefit costs, while the portion of administrative costs they already bear would rise from 50% to 75%.A state like Virginia would have to fork out an extra $500m a year. In Bhatti’s estimation, many states are simply going to be unable or unwilling to foot that bill – and will pass on the pain to their poorer citizens.“States don’t have that type of money, and so they would either reduce costs by removing families from the program, or by pulling out of the program entirely.”Were Virginia to bail out of Snap, that would put over 800,000 people at immediate risk of food insecurity, including over 300,000 children.Paradoxically, many of the states that would be most impacted, and by extension a large proportion of the families that could be left struggling to feed themselves, are in the rural Republican heartlands that voted heavily for Trump. One of the hardest hit would be Louisiana, which has 44% of its population on Snap or Medicaid or both.The stakes are almost as high in deep red Arkansas (38%) and Mississippi (37%). “I don’t understand why policymakers are pursuing this bill when this will obviously hurt a large majority of their own constituents for whom Snap is a lifeline,” said Lelaine Bigelow of the Georgetown Center for Poverty and Inequality.West Virginia, with 38% of its population in receipt of Snap or Medicaid, is an especially poignant example. This was the state where the food assistance program was born: John F Kennedy opened a pilot program there following his tour of the economically stricken Appalachian coal country.“I don’t know whether the cuts will give rise to what Kennedy saw – hungry children with bloated bellies,” said Tracy Roof, a political scientist at the University of Richmond who is writing a book on the history of food stamps. “But I do know that in a country as wealthy as the US, it’s unforgivable that you should have people going hungry to bed.”Trump’s hydra-headed cuts would also make it harder for low-income families to claim benefits in areas with high unemployment rates. The basket of food against which Snap is calculated would also be frozen, so that over the next 10 years the value of the benefit would decline in real terms from the current average of $6 a day, which many experts already consider inadequate.As a further threat, food assistance will be removed from up to 250,000 refugees and other people granted humanitarian protections in the US.In some ways, the Senate iteration of the bill is even more extreme than the House one. It targets millions of people in special groups, forcing them to meet tough work requirements to which they had been exempted. That includes military veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young people in foster care.Research by the Georgetown Center exposes the staggering disparity that underpins Trump’s plan. Under the House bill, over $1tn would be withdrawn in Snap and Medicaid cuts from 31% of the American people who earn on average $30,000 a year.The money would then be handed over, in the form of tax cuts, to the top 2% of the population, with average incomes of $1.5m a year.The transfer of resources would not only exacerbate America’s gaping inequality, it would also have a calamitous effect on the local economies in poorer parts of the country. Disrupting the flow of Snap food deliveries could send shock waves through the entire food supply chain, from farmer to truck driver to grocery store.Numerous studies have also revealed the damage done to the health and prospects of children when they endure food insecurity at a young age. A child’s developmental arc for language, hearing, vision and other critical faculties all peak by four, which means that if they receive insufficient nourishment in the early years it can have crushing long-term consequences.View image in fullscreen“Small deprivations have outsized impacts,” Ettinger de Cuba said. “Kids who are food insecure are more likely to be at risk of poor health, hospitalizations, and developmental delays.”In Johnson’s case, she knows Janai will be protected from such a disaster because as a parent she will do everything she can to provide for her daughter. Even if that means giving up her dream of getting on in life, or going hungry herself.What puzzles Johnson about the difficult future she is now facing, courtesy of the “big, beautiful bill”, is that it feels like she is being punished for doing everything she can to be a good American. She’s raised her daughter right, works two jobs to pay the bills, studies at night at her own cost to improve herself and find more stable work.“I’m just trying to be a decent, functioning human being,” she says. “Can’t they let me get my life together first, before they start snatching stuff away from me?” More

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      Wall Street shivers over ‘hot commie summer’ after Mamdani’s success

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      When Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old self-described socialist, won New York’s mayoral Democratic nomination last week over a seasoned but scandal-scarred veteran, the city’s financial elite had a meltdown.This was the start of “hot commie summer” in the city, New York hedgevfund billionaire Daniel Loeb posted to X. John Catsimatidis, billionaire CEO of grocery chain Gristedes and friend of Donald Trump, warned on Fox Business: “If the city of New York is going socialist, I will definitely close, or sell, or move.”CNBC financial news channel anchor Joe Kernen compared New York to Batman’s crime-riddled Gotham. “ They’re taking Wall Streeters and making them walk out onto the ice in the East River, And, and then they fall through. I mean there is a class warfare that’s going on.”With five months until the mayoral election proper, the 1% are revolting, led by loquacious billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman, who said he and others in the finance industry are ready to commit “hundreds of millions of dollars” into an opposing campaign. “The risk/reward of running for mayor over the next 132 days is extremely compelling as the cost in time and energy is small and the upside is enormous.”Ackman said he was “gravely concerned” because he believed the leftwing candidate’s policies would trigger an exodus of the wealth that would destroy the tax base and undermine New York’s public services. The city under Mamdani, he posted on Wedneday, “is about to become much more dangerous and economically unviable.”In 2021, the top 1% of New York City taxpayers paid 48% of taxes – up from 40% in 2019, according to a report from the city’s finance department. But at the same time, New York has become an increasingly unaffordable city for those outside the 1% – especially for people of color.In a post a day later, Ackman said: “The ability for New York City to offer services for the poor and needy, let alone the average New Yorker, is entirely dependent on New York City being a business-friendly environment and a place where wealthy residents are willing to spend 183 days and assume the associated tax burden. Unfortunately, both have already started making arrangements for the exits.”“Terror is the feeling,” Kathryn Wylde, the chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, which represents top business leaders, told CNBC on Tuesday.Gerard Filitti, senior legal counsel at the Lawfare Project, a pro-Israel thinktank, non-profit and litigation fund, and a New Yorker with strong ties to the finance industry, said Mamdani’s nomination “marked a dangerous turning point for the city”.“There’s big concern that businesses and the economy will be hurt. There’s already a move by business leaders and entrepreneurs to consider a move outside of the city, taking jobs and tax dollars with them, at time when the front-running candidate promises to make even more change that could destroy the economy,” Filitti said.The anger was not necessarily purely economic. Wall Street’s decision makers have been shaken after seeing their preferred candidate, Andrew Cuomo, pushed aside despite the millions they poured into his campaign.Fix the City, Cuomo’s political action committee (Pac), raised a record $25m to help see off Mamdani. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg alone gave $8.3m to the Pac.“These are billionaires who are giving hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to Andrew Cuomo precisely because they know we are going to tax them to make life a little bit more affordable here, in the most expensive city in the United States,” Mamdani told the New York Times before the election. “They know they can count on Cuomo because Cuomo has a track record of rewarding the political donors.”View image in fullscreenNew York’s moneyed class argues it’s not about them but the future of the city. “When you look at what New York City is and has been historically – a bastion of trading and the center of world capitalism, the engine of economic growth and prosperity, the stock market, an the inspiration for other world economies to develop their markets and economies in line with New York – and now what were seeing is an economy and quality of life that is slowly deteriorating,” said Filitti.“Now we have a front-running Democrat candidate who is promising even more radical change and that change is a threat to the structure of New York and the way people identify with New York City,” Filitti added.It’s an argument the rich have made many times before. Many of the 1% threatened to leave after former mayor Bill de Blasio called for raising their taxes to pay for the losses the city experienced after the Covid pandemic. Wall Street poured millions into mayor Eric Adam’s 2021 campaign for office to see off more progressive candidates. They won those fights; this time, they lost.A former Wall Street CEO told Politico: “These titans of Wall Street and titans of finance are used to getting their way. They didn’t get their way. They got the opposite of their way. They got a guy who couldn’t be more disliked by them – and vice versa.”Wall Street’s vision for the city is probably far from that shared by many other residents of a sprawling metropolis that traditionally has played host to vibrant immigrant communities from all over the world, many of them poor. It is of course, host to the Statue of Liberty on whose base is written the famous lines: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”Manhattan was also the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street protests in the US back in 2011, which occupied the downtown Zucotti Square – blocks from Wall Street – and eventually saw protests spread across the rest of the country and the world.Democratic progressives were quick to celebrate Mamdani’s victory. “Your dedication to an affordable, welcoming, and safe New York City where working families can have a shot has inspired people across the city. Billionaires and lobbyists poured millions against you and our public finance system. And you won,” wrote representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another progressive who won out against a more establishment candidate.Another longtime critic of Wall Street and the billionaire class also saw a change in politics as usual. “The American people are beginning to stand up and fight back. We have seen that in the many Fighting Oligarchy events that we’ve done around the country that have drawn huge turnouts. We have seen that in the millions of people who came out for the No Kings rallies that took place this month in almost every state. And yesterday, we saw that in the Democratic primary in New York City,” senator Bernie Sanders wrote in The Guardian.Millions will now be spent attacking Mamdani. But he has seen off one well-funded attempt to derail his campaign. Whether or not his campaign has the momentum to last until November, remains to be seen. But Wall Streeters have been put on notice that New York, and the changing nature of the Democratic party, may no longer be as amenable to their interests, or their vision for New York. More

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      Struggling in politics? Consider a war – the media will help | Margaret Sullivan

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      “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war,” was the storied response of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to Frederic Remington after the illustrator was sent to Cuba to cover an insurrection and cabled back to the boss that there was little going on.Much has changed since that famous (if true) exchange of the late 19th century, in the heyday of sensationalism known as yellow journalism.But one thing that hasn’t changed is that there’s nothing like military conflict to capture the attention of the public, with plenty of help from the media. And the media – whether a tabloid newspaper or a cable news network – benefits, too.These days, Donald Trump’s recent strike on Iran has proved the point once again, with the media’s attention intensely focused on Operation Midnight Hammer, as it was dramatically dubbed.First the emphasis was on the threat of attacks to Iran’s budding nuclear arsenal, then on the possibility of all-out global war, then on the strikes themselves and then the announcement of a supposed ceasefire.All to the greater glory of Trump, at least as he tells it.For those who are trying to bring public attention to other important matters – even matters of life and death – that’s a frustrating reality.Jennifer Mascia knows this all too well.She is a founding reporter for the Trace, a non-profit news site dedicated to tracking the epidemic of gun violence in America and trying to do something about it, through exploring solutions.When elected officials in Minnesota were shot earlier this month – the former state House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, and the state legislator John Hoffman and his wife were wounded – it was a huge story.Huge, but fleeting.“Pitted against a global conflict, domestic news doesn’t really stand a chance,” said Mascia, who previously contributed to the now-defunct Gun Report at the New York Times, begun by the then columnist Joe Nocera.That’s true for domestic news that, in an earlier era, would have commanded the media’s attention for many days, if not weeks. The Minnesota violence was even more newsworthy because of an early manhunt and disinformation swirling around the apparent assassin’s political leanings.Still, coverage seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye.“The Trump era has all but ensured that important news will get smacked out of the news cycle in favor of the latest development in Trumpworld,” Mascia wrote to me in an email, after we had talked by phone.Mascia is quick to clarify that she’s not suggesting that the media ignore what the chaotic president is doing.“It’s important that we cover Trump’s constitutional breaches. We shouldn’t become numb or complacent in the face of eroding democracy,” she said.But it was remarkable to see how quickly the Minnesota shootings faded from media attention. A CNN contributor herself, Mascia is often called in to provide perspective for “Day Two” of coverage after the initial reporting of gun-related news. But often these days, she notes, there is no Day Two.By then, the media has moved on.“Maybe if the Israel-Iran war wasn’t going on, we’d still be talking about it,” she said. “Anderson Cooper would be broadcasting from Melissa Hortman’s funeral. But instead, he’s in Tel Aviv.”And, of course, this extends to all sorts of other subjects, not just gun violence.Those who try to focus attention on voting rights, the rule of law, crucial supreme court decisions, widespread citizen action such as the vast “No Kings” protests – to mention just a few – may get a modicum of attention.But nothing compares to a show of military force. And Trump, always attuned to how he’s being perceived, is well aware of that.“A spectacular military success,” he crowed after the strikes. “A historic success,” echoed his defense secretary. Pete Hegseth couldn’t countenance being asked actual questions and claimed the press was trying to distort the story “for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country”.Was the administration’s bragging accurate? Perhaps not, said intelligence reports that indicated the strikes may have only added months to the time Iran needs to produce the material for a nuclear weapon.But no matter.The strikes – from the lead-up to the aftermath – sucked up all the oxygen in the media universe for many days.Even by Thursday early afternoon, the top four news articles (plus one photo) on the Washington Post mobile app, for example, were Iran-related.And Fox News, of course, remained largely a cheering section.Whatever the effect on world peace, military conflict sure is good for ratings, as William Randolph Hearst knew in his bones.“Historians point to the Spanish-American war as the first press-driven war,” noted a PBS article accompanying the film Crucible of Empire.It wouldn’t be the last.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Home discomforts send Trump rushing to project image of global patriarch

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      “Daddy’s home.” So said a social media post from the White House, accompanied by a video featuring the song Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home) by Usher and images of Donald Trump at the Nato summit in The Hague.The US president’s fundraising allies were quick to market $35 T-shirts with his image and the word after Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, referred to Trump’s criticism of Israel and Iran over violations of a ceasefire by quipping: “And then Daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get [them to] stop.”Yet even as Trump seeks to project an image of global patriarch, there are signs of trouble on the home front. His polling numbers are down. His party is struggling to pass his signature legislation. Millions of people have marched in the streets to protest against him. Critics say the president who claims to put America First is in fact putting America Last.Trump is not the first president to find the foreign policy domain, where as commander-in-chief he recently ordered strikes on nuclear sites in Iran, less restrictive than the domestic sphere, where a rambunctious Congress, robust judiciary and sceptical media are constant irritants. But rarely has the gap between symbolic posturing abroad and messy politicking at home been so pronounced.“There’s two presidencies,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The one on the domestic front is gruesome and involves long-drawn-out and disappointing negotiations with Congress and that’s exactly what Donald Trump is engaged in now. What emerges from Congress is not going to be as ‘big’ or ‘beautiful’ as he promised.“Meanwhile you’ve got staggering photographs of bombs falling from the sky, Donald Trump’s flamboyant description of what he’s achieved in Iran and Europe. That’s the kind of Hollywood performance that Donald Trump wants.”The president stunned the world last Saturday by announcing, on his Truth Social platform, that he had ordered more than 125 aircraft and 75 weapons – including 14 bunker-busting bombs – to hit three targets in Iran to prevent the country obtaining a nuclear weapon.He followed up with a White House speech, choreographed to project an image of power, in which he declared: “Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”View image in fullscreenThat narrative has since been cast into doubt by a leaked intelligence report suggesting that the operation set back Iran’s nuclear programme by only a few months. Still, Trump pivoted to the role of peacemaker, again using Truth Social to announce a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, prompting Republicans to gush that he should win the Nobel peace prize.Trump’s barrage of speeches, interactions with reporters and social media posts about the Middle East were likened by some to a daily soap opera, dominating Americans’ attention and distracting them from his one big beautiful bill, a budget plan that threatens to slash the social safety net that many of his own supporters depend on.Jacobs observed: “This is a classic deception. He’s like the carnival barker who’s waving his hands to keep the attention of the audience even as he’s hiding the part for the next trick.“What’s coming out of Congress is going to absolutely harm many of his voters. Politicians like to cover their tracks; there’s no covering the tracks here. There will be known cuts to widely used popular programmes like the healthcare for Medicaid and there will be no doubt as to who’s responsible. These are traceable, highly visible consequences of Donald Trump.”Now in the sixth month of his second presidency, Trump’s domestic honeymoon is over. A poll of 1,006 likely voters nationwide by John Zogby Strategies on 24 and 25 June found the president’s approval rating down three points to 45%. About 49% of voters approve of his handling of immigration while 47% disapprove but on the economy 43% approve and 54% disapprove.Asked if they expect Trump’s presidency will make them financially better off or worse off, 40% said better and 50% said worse. Zogby commented: “There is a lot of anxiety domestically, first and foremost on the economy. People are confused and insecure. The numbers are plunging.”View image in fullscreenConsumer confidence unexpectedly deteriorated in June, a sign of economic uncertainty because of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. The anxiety reported by the Conference Board was across the political spectrum, with the steepest decline among Republicans. And the share of consumers viewing jobs as plentiful was the smallest since March 2021.Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator, argued in a floor speech this week that Trump had broken him promise to lower costs “on day one”. She said: “American families don’t need another war – they need good jobs and lower prices, and that is what we should be focused on.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWarren listed 10 ways in which the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would raise costs for families, from rent to groceries to prescription drug prices, and warned that it will take healthcare away from more than 16 million people. Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate continue to haggle over the contents of the bill as a 4 July deadline looms.Neera Tanden, president and chief executive of the Center for American Progress and a former domestic policy adviser to President Joe Biden, told an audience on Thursday: “This legislation is the greatest Robin Hood-in-reverse legislation that I have ever seen in my lifetime. It is cutting healthcare for working-class people and using those dollars to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”View image in fullscreenMeanwhile discontent is simmering over Trump’s signature issue of immigration, even among some of his own voters. Videos of people being snatched off the streets or beaten by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have provoked widespread revulsion.There have also been cases such as that of Ming Li Hui, a popular member of staff at a restaurant in rural Missouri who was arrested and jailed to await deportation. Her friend Vanessa Cowart told the New York Times: “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here. But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”Meanwhile aggressive workplace raids are hurting hotels, restaurants, farms, construction firms and meatpacking companies, including in conservative states. The alarm recently got through to Trump, who admitted that some undocumented immigrants were actually “very good, longtime workers” and ordered a temporary pause, only to then yield back to hardliners in his administration.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “In a restaurant, if you lose your cooks, you can’t serve people and you lose money. If you are in a factory where people have been swooped up by Ice, you have to do more work.“It puts more of the burden on the same people who might have voted for Donald Trump – lower-income or middle-income factory workers or meat-processing people. They’re feeling the effects of this immigration sweep in ways that the administration did not anticipate.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s second term has been further marred by the tech billionaire Elon Musk leading a “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, that fired thousands of federal workers but fell far short of its cost-saving target before Musk left amid acrimony. The president’s authoritarian attacks on cultural institutions, law firms, media organisations and universities fuelled “No Kings” protests involving more than 5 million people in more than 2,100 cities and towns across the country on 14 June.In that context, it is perhaps not surprising that Trump should relish the global stage, where any world leader is just a phone call away and where he is now being feted as statesman and father figure. It has proven easier to drop bombs on Iran or pressure Nato to agree to a big increase in military spending than to tame Thomas Massie, a rebellious Kentucky Republican defying him over both Iran and the spending bill.Schiller added: “It is true for every president, Republican or Democrat, that when things are going south domestically they turn to foreign affairs. Trump feels in some ways more powerful on the global stage than he does trying to get Congress to do what he wants. The House Republicans are giving him a hard time. The Senate Republicans are giving him a hard time. He’s annoyed by this so then he goes, well, we’re a global military power.” More

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      Trump dropped an F-bomb this week – and just for a moment, I warmed to him | Gary Nunn

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      I did not get out of bed this morning expecting to praise the public use of an expletive, but such is 2025. If any president was going to break this presidential norm, as NPR put it, it was always going to be Donald Trump.“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” the president told a group of reporters this week. “Do you understand that?” he asked, before storming off.It appears to be the first time a president has deliberately used the F-word live on camera to a press scrum or in a public forum, instead of being “caught” using the term accidentally on a hot mic (even that has only happened a handful of times). Cue plenty of puns from journalists about the “dropping of the F-bomb”.For the record, Trump actually used the F-word about Iran in 2020, but the slightly delayed radio broadcast bleeped it out. Plus, as this 2016 video compilation shows, it’s not unusual for him to swear.But what was different about this time – coming as it did at a moment of heightened global anxiety about military escalation – is that it came across as … authentic. Many people watching will have felt, heard and even shared that frustration about Israel and Iran’s alleged breaking of the ceasefire. Trump’s swearing made the point more forcefully than any diplomatic “disappointment” could have done. It wasn’t eloquent, but I believed it.We know other presidents – such as Lyndon Johnson, and especially Richard Nixon – swore in private. They wouldn’t have dreamed of risking the reputational damage to do so in public, and would have had to apologise if they did. No British prime minister has ever said “fuck” publicly to my knowledge. Few world leaders ever have.Which is potentially part of the problem. The most common complaint about the political elite is that they’re out of touch; that we can’t trust a word that comes out of their mouths because it’s all untrustworthy scripted spin. Yet at the same time we believe they’re swearing like sailors – and saying what they really think – behind closed doors (a perception bolstered by iconic roles such as Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick of It, or the blue-mouthed Roger Furlong from Veep.)Of course, swearing doesn’t equate to honesty. And, in Trump’s case, the obscenity only masked his own complicity in creating the situation that frustrated him – from pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 to his “monumental” airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. But my point is that the public clearly doesn’t trust the polished and sanitised scripts that characterise so much political speech.I’m not suggesting world leaders all suddenly disrespect the gravitas of their office. Can you imagine Keir Starmer being encouraged to swear? He’d sound like a headteacher attempting to rap. What I am saying is there’s power in judicious swearing.You want to appear more human to voters? Act more like one. YouGov polling reported in April revealed that just 8% of Britons never swear. Perhaps an occasional curse or two would allow politicians to ally themselves with the 92% of us who do.Linguistic norms are always changing. For six years, I wrote a regular column for the Guardian’s Mind your language section. During that time, I saw changes that would incense any purist. For instance, the BBC made even less use of those with received pronunciation accents and started broadcasting more voices that really sound like people across the country. Such “real” accents are supposed to make the institution seem less remote and more trustworthy. The same is true of the institution of politics. Sounding more like real people does nobody any real harm.If the stakes are literally life and death, and people aren’t listening, a well-placed, truly meant expletive will wake everyone up. At time of writing, the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran is holding. Maybe the F-bomb did the job after all.

      Gary Nunn is a freelance journalist and author More

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      US Senate votes down resolution to restrict Trump from escalating Iran war

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      Senate Democrats failed on Friday to get a war-powers resolution passed to limit Donald Trump’s ability to single-handedly escalate the war with Iran. The resolution, “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran”, was voted down 53-47.The vote on the resolution, introduced by the Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, split along mainly partisan lines. One Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted for it; one Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against it.“Congress declares war,” Kaine said in a speech on the Senate floor. He stressed that the framers of the US constitution in 1787 were so wary of giving the power to start wars to one person that they did not even entrust it to George Washington, the first commander-in-chief.“They decided that war was too big a decision for one person,” Kaine said. “And so they wrote a constitution that said the United States should not be at war without a vote of Congress.”The measure would have compelled Trump to seek authorization from Congress before taking any further military action.Trump ordered airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on 22 June. This directly followed Israel launching attacks on Iran, and Iran retaliating. Trump said that the US bombardment “totally obliterated” key nuclear enrichment facilities and deemed the mission a success, although some initial reports said the damage was minimal. Iran condemned the attacks.Trump claimed on Friday that Iran had halted its nuclear ambitions after the bombings. But, he said, he would “absolutely” continue to attack the country’s nuclear sites if he believed it was once again enriching uranium.“Time will tell,” Trump said at the White House. “But I don’t believe that they’re going to go back into nuclear anytime soon.”Later on Friday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, rebuked Trump on social media. “If President Trump is genuine about wanting a deal, he should put aside the disrespectful and unacceptable tone towards Iran’s Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, and stop hurting his millions of heartfelt followers”, Araghchi wrote on X.“The Great and Powerful Iranian People, who showed the world that the Israeli regime had NO CHOICE but to RUN to ‘Daddy’ to avoid being flattened by our Missiles, do not take kindly to Threats and Insults”, Iran’s top diplomat added, in something approximating Trump’s own social media style. “If Illusions lead to worse mistakes, Iran will not hesitate to unveil its Real Capabilities, which will certainly END any Delusion about the Power of Iran.” More