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      Talkshow host Dr Phil joined Ice agents for Los Angeles immigration raids

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      The television personality Dr Phil was embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers as they carried out controversial raids in Los Angeles that led to days of protests in California, his TV network said.Phil, whose full name is Phil McGraw, was with Ice before and after its agents conducted a series of raids on multiple locations across LA on Friday. Immigration advocates said at least 45 people were arrested, and the action was condemned by California’s governor and LA’s mayor.It was the second time McGraw, a former practising psychologist who hosted a TV talkshow for two decades, has been embedded with Ice this year. In January, he joined the US border czar, Tom Homan, in a choreographed immigration raid in Chicago, in a stunt that was criticized at the time.CNN was the first to report on McGraw’s presence at the Los Angeles raids. McGraw was there “to get a first-hand look at the targeted operations”, his conservative TV channel, MeritTV, told CNN. McGraw had “exclusive” access to Homan before and after the raids, CNN reported.During the Chicago raids, McGraw was on the ground with Ice officers and even spoke to some of the people the agency had detained. His experience in LA was less immersive, MeritTV said.“In order to not escalate any situation, Dr Phil McGraw did not join and was not embedded” during Friday’s raids, a MeritTV spokesperson told CNN.On Sunday, he appeared with Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, at a synagogue, as Adams signed an executive order which ordered city agencies to adopt a controversial definition of antisemitism.McGraw, who is not Jewish but has said it was his “duty” to support Israel, has increasingly immersed himself in political issues in recent months, particularly regarding immigration.In April, he McGraw backed Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and in May he described Trump as “a man of deep faith, a man of deep conviction”. More

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      Los Angeles protests: a visual guide to what happened on the streets

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      After a series of immigration raids across the city of Los Angeles on Friday inspired mostly peaceful protests involving a few hundred people, the situation escalated on Saturday when the US president, Donald Trump, took the unprecedented step of mobilizing the national guard – the country’s military reserve units – claiming the demonstrations amounted to “rebellion” against the authority of the US government. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, called the decision “purposefully inflammatory”. Here’s a look at what actually happened on the streets.Most of the events took place in downtown Los Angeles, in a fairly localized area. The vast majority of the gigantic metropolis was not affected.Friday 6 June, morning. Federal immigration officers raid multiple locations across Los Angeles, including a Home Depot in Westlake; centers where day laborers gather looking for work; and the Ambiance clothing store in the fashion district. The Coalition of Humane Immigrant Rights (Chirla) says there are raids at seven sites.Friday 6 June, afternoon. David Huerta, the president of California’s biggest union, is arrested while apparently doing little more than standing and observing one of the immigration raids. Footage shows the 58-year-old head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) being knocked down by a masked agent. He was taken to a hospital, then transferred to the Metropolitan detention center in downtown LA. “What happened to me is not about me; this is about something much bigger,” he says in a statement from the hospital. “This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening.” In a statement the US attorney Bill Essayli claims Huerta “deliberately obstructed their access by blocking their vehicle” and says he was arrested on suspicion of interfering with federal officers.Friday 6 June, afternoon. Demonstrators gather outside the federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles where Huerta and others are being held. There is a tense but largely non-violent standoff with police.7pm: The LAPD declares unlawful assembly in the area and deploys teargas to break up the crowd.8.20pm: The police force declares a city-wide tactical alert.Saturday 7 June, morning. As border patrol agents are seen gathering opposite another Home Depot location, this time in the largely Latino, working-class neighborhood of Paramount, news spreads on social media of another raid. A couple of hundred protesters gather outside the Paramount Business Center. Sheriff’s deputies block off a perimeter near the 710 Freeway and Hunsaker Ave.12pm. Border patrol vehicles leave the center, with officers firing teargas and flash grenades at protesters. Some follow the convoy of federal vehicles up Alondra Blvd, throwing rocks and other objects; a few others set up a roadblock near the Home Depot.Saturday 7 June, 4pm. The area near the Home Depot confrontation is declared an unlawful assembly and protesters are warned to leave. Approximately 100 people gather further west in the neighborhood of Compton, at the intersection of Atlantic Ave and Alondra Blvd, where three fires are set, including a vehicle in the middle of intersection. Rocks are thrown at LA county sheriff’s deputies, and officers retreat to the bottom of bridge to the east.7pm. The Trump administration announces it will deploy the national guard, claiming the limited protests were a “rebellion” against the US government. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, immediately denounces the move, the first time a US president has mobilized US military forces in a domestic political situation without the request of the state’s governor since 1965.The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, also announces that 500 marines at Camp Pendleton in California have been placed on high alert.Saturday 7 June, evening. Federal agents emerge in a phalanx from inside the Metropolitan detention center to confront approximately 100 protesters, firing teargas and “less lethal” weapons at them.9.30pm. Officers and vehicles force the crowd on Alondra Blvd back west, and by midnight most protesters have dispersed.Sunday 8 June, morning. After curfews are declared across LA county overnight from 6pm-6am, by Sunday morning about 300 national guard troops are deployed to the city. Two dozen appear to news crews outside the federal complex, as though intent only on posing for photographs.10.30am. Protesters begin congregating near the Metropolitan detention center, where national guard troops have arrived to support immigration officials – though they do not appear to be engaging in active policing.1pm. Thousands of protesters gather in downtown LA.Sunday 8 June, afternoon. The LAPD again declares the protest an unlawful assembly, ordering everyone to leave, but still the protests continue. Police patrol on horseback and report several arrests. Journalists and protesters are reportedly struck by projectiles, while LA police say two officers are injured after being struck by motorcyclists attempting to “breach a skirmish line”. Ice officers and other federal agents use teargas and pepper balls in an attempt to disperse the crowds. Throughout the afternoon, there are isolated episodes of vandalism – graffiti sprayed on buildings and vehicles, and a protester who damages the side mirror of a parked car. A line of spray-painted Waymo driverless cars, one with a smashed windshield, are later set on fire.Downtown Los AngelesSunday 8 June, afternoon. Hundreds of protesters block the 101 Freeway. They take over two lanes.Evening. Tensions have risen, with demonstrators throwing garbage and rocks at police. Newsom and the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, double down on their plea to protesters to stay peaceful. “Protest is appropriate to do, but it is just not appropriate for there to be violence,” Bass says, while the LAPD chief, Jim McDonnell, calls the violence “disgusting” and says officers have been pelted with rocks, and shot at with commercial grade fireworks. Crucially, he notes that those engaging in violence were not among the people demonstrating against the immigration raids, but are “people who do this all the time”. More

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      Trump has unleashed something terrifying in the US – that even he may be powerless to control | Gaby Hinsliff

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      She was live on air to viewers back home, her TV microphone clearly in hand, when the rubber bullet hit her. The Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi was the second journalist after the British photographer Nick Stern to be shot with non-lethal rounds while covering protests in Los Angeles sparked by immigration raids. But she was the first to be caught on camera and beamed around the world. There’s no excuse for not knowing what the US is becoming, now that anyone can watch that clip online. Not when you can hear her scream and see the cameraman quickly swing away to film a panicking crowd.It was the scenario everyone feared when Donald Trump took office. Deportation hit squads descending on the kind of Democrat-voting communities who would feel morally bound to resist them, triggering the kind of violent confrontation that creates an excuse to send in national guard troops – and ultimately a showdown between federal and state power that could take US democracy to the brink. Now something like this may be unfolding in California, where the state governor, Gavin Newsom, has accused the president of trying to “manufacture a crisis” for his own ends and warned that any protester responding with violence is only playing into his hands. Suddenly, the idea that this presidency could ultimately end in civil conflict no longer seems quite so wildly overblown as it once did.Or to put it another way, Trump has got what he wanted, which is for everyone to switch channels: to stop gawping at his embarrassing fallout with Elon Musk over unfunded tax cuts, and flick over to the rival spectacle he has hastily created. After a brief interruption to scheduled programming, the great showman is back in control. But in the meantime, the world has learned something useful about who wins in a standoff between two giant egos, one of whom has all the money and the other of whom has all the executive power. In US oligarchies just as in Russian ones, it turns out, it’s presidents who still get to set the agenda.You can’t ride the tiger. That’s the lesson here: once populism has grasped the levers of power, even the richest man in the world cannot be sure of exploiting it for his own ends, or imposing his own agenda on the chaos. Not when a vengeful White House still has the power to destroy even the most powerful business empire, anyway. At the weekend, Musk meekly deleted explosive tweets about the president’s alleged relationship with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and by Monday he was loyally sharing Trumpian messages about the LA protests. His father, meanwhile, tactfully blamed the outburst on Musk Junior being “tired” after five months working round the clock for the White House.That ought to ring some bells on this side of the Atlantic. For oddly enough, it’s the same excuse offered up by Zia Yusuf, the millionaire businessman brought in to professionalise Reform UK’s perennially chaotic operation, who last week quit as chair in exasperation. Trying to get the party into power was no longer a “good use of his time”, he tweeted, after publicly clashing with its newest MP, Sarah Pochin, over her decision to ask a question in parliament about banning burqas (which isn’t officially Reform policy, or at least not yet). Yusuf, a British Muslim, has long been seen as Farage’s trusted bulwark against those inside Reform desperate to pick up where the jailed thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon left off, and to become a full-blown, far-right anti-Islam movement.But this time, it seems, Yusuf may have bitten off more than the boss was ready to chew. A whole two days after storming out, Yusuf ended up storming awkwardly back in, telling the BBC that actually, having thought about it, he probably would ban burqas and other face coverings. He had just been exhausted, he suggested, after barely having a day off in 11 months. (If nothing else, it seems Reform really means what it says about fighting back against modern HR practices.)To be fair to him, even Farage seems to find the process of trying to control his parties exhausting at times, judging by the regularity with which he has taken breaks from them over the years. While Yusuf won’t return as chair, he will now join Reform’s so-called British Doge, supposedly taking a Musk-style chainsaw to council spending – which sounds like a breeze compared with managing Reform MPs. Until, that is, you reflect on how exactly Doge has turned out across the Atlantic.The reason parts of Silicon Valley were quietly enthusiastic about their fellow tech tycoon’s slash and burn approach to US bureaucracy was that they saw profitable method in the madness: a plan to hack the state back to the bare minimum, opening up new markets for digital services and unleashing (or so they hoped) a new wave of economic growth by slashing national debt.Five months on, however, it’s clear that any Doge savings will be utterly dwarfed by Trump’s forecast to send national debt soaring to uncharted and potentially unsustainable highs. Any tech titan hoping for the US equivalent of Margaret Thatcher on steroids, in other words, has ended up with Liz Truss after one too many espressos instead – plus troops on the streets of California and the slowly dawning realisation that, as the billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz put it, they have “no sway” over what they unleashed.There will be plenty of people back in Britain who couldn’t care less about obscure comings and goings in the Reform party, even as its poll lead means it’s starting to make the political weather. Others simply don’t expect it to affect their lives much either way if Reform permanently supplants a Conservative party from which it already seems hard to distinguish, and a few may already be calculating that they can turn its rise to their own advantage.Yet what the last few frightening days in the US have demonstrated is that once populism has its feet firmly enough under the table, chaos wins. There’s no ability to belatedly impose order, no house-training it either. All you can do is deny it a room in the house in the first place. In Britain, at least, it’s not too late for that.

      Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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      How can US cities resist Trump’s mass deportation agenda? Look to Chicago

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      “Know Your Rights” posters, with critical information for interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, are all over the city of Chicago. Plastered across subways or advertised along local bus routes, the Know Your Rights campaign is a coordinated effort on the part of city officials and local immigration advocacy groups to alert individuals of their rights during interactions with Ice. The posters are evidence of Chicago’s activism, long history of protecting its immigrant communities and resistance to attempts by previous administrations to weaken their protections.Now, as Donald Trump continues to roll out unprecedented attacks on immigrants – notably increased detentions and deportations without due process – organizers in the city are stretched thin and scrambling to expand traditional tools used in the fight for immigrant rights to accommodate ballooning needs.“I’ve been around since the beginning [in 2012], when we pivoted into doing multi-generational, anti-deportation work,” said Antonio Gutierrez, a co-founder of the immigrant advocacy group Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD). “We have never felt as stressed out or at capacity, even during the first Trump administration.”Communities in California are also feeling that stress as they rally against Trump’s anti-immigration tactics. On Saturday, hundreds of protesters demonstrated in Los Angeles against Ice raids across the city. Trump dispatched about 300 national guard troops to the area, a move which Gavin Newsom, the California governor, has called an “unconstitutional” deployment.Since he took office in January, Trump has worked to fulfill campaign pledges to carry out mass deportations after promising to remove “millions and millions of criminal aliens”. The latest figures show sharp increases in detentions and deportations after Trump expressed anger at plateauing levels earlier this year. On 3 June, Ice officers arrested more than 2,200 people, a record high. As of 23 May, nearly 49,000 people are in Ice detention, NBC News reported. In April, more than 17,200 people were deported, a 24% increase compared with last year. These figures represent the first time in Trump’s tenure that deportations have outpaced those during the Biden administration.The Trump administration has also rolled out unprecedented attacks on immigrant rights. More than 200 people have been removed from the US and transported to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), many without any form of due process. Kilmar Ábrego García, 29, was removed from the US on 15 March and was returned to the US last Friday. He now faces human trafficking charges. Garcia’s attorneys maintain that Garcia is innocent and called the charges an “abuse of power”.View image in fullscreen“Our perspective is that there is no law and order,” said Gutierrez of OCAD’s view on the state of US immigration. They added: “We continue to see that this current administration is going unchecked by many different things.”Compared with other cities, Chicago is better situated than most to navigate Trump’s assault on immigration – a fact that Trump officials have pointed out. Following Trump’s election win in November, his so-called “border czar”, Tom Homan, announced that mass deportations would begin in Chicago. Homan warned Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, and other Democratic officials to “get the hell out of the way”. But in January, Homan complained that Chicago was “very well educated” in its ability to resist Ice agents. Johnson defended Chicago’s protections for undocumented immigrants before a Republican-majority Congress.Chicago organizers have implemented a swath of strategies to resist efforts from Ice, responses rooted in collaboration between organizations that have been in place dating back to the first Trump administration. OCAD holds regular community meetings with its clients to educate on the near-daily changes in Trump’s anti-immigration tactics, with meetings now occurring bimonthly. OCAD and other collaborators also oversee rapid-response groups that monitor Ice activity.As demand for services increases, volunteer interest has also surged, another product of Chicago’s activism culture. Volunteer interest in anti-deportation efforts has increased by 300% since 2024, Gutierrez noted: there are now more than 400 volunteers working in 27 neighborhood response groups. But there was still “definitely a strong sense of fear” among immigrants in Chicago as Trump threatens to ramp up deportations, said Gutierrez. OCAD’s hotline, which handles calls for Ice sightings and other immigrant-related questions, has seen an increase from five calls a month last year to more than 100 each day in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration. Now, the hotline averages about 50 calls a week. Beyond deportation, immigrants across ethnicities have expressed concern about Trump’s attacks on green-card holders, birthright citizenship or overall delays in visas, several advocacy groups said.Even with its robust organization efforts, Chicago immigrant advocacy groups have still faced considerable challenges. Conservative city council members attempted to change Chicago’s sanctuary city status in January, allowing police to collaborate with Ice in certain circumstances; Illinois Republican state legislators have tried to implement similar laws. Such attempts have failed.Chicago has remained “pro-immigrant for decades”, said Gutierrez, a stance that is evident through the city’s extensive policies protecting immigrants of all statuses and its resistance to conservative attempts to roll back progress. Back in 1985, then mayor Harold Washington signed an executive order making Chicago a sanctuary city, and neighborhoods such as Uptown, Albany Park and Little Village served as hubs for arriving immigrants of all backgrounds. Social services providers such as World Relief and Refuge One set up offices in those communities, collaborating with local landlords to secure housing for refugees.View image in fullscreenImmigrant advocates have worked for decades to limit the power of Ice in Chicago communities. In 2012, Chicago’s city council passed the Welcoming City ordinance, which restricts city agencies from providing information on undocumented immigrants to Ice or inquiring about an individual’s immigration status. Ice is also not allowed in Chicago public schools and school officials are not allowed to share student information, as written in the 2019 Chicago Teachers Union contract. These safeguards were reaffirmed in CTU’s latest contract, which passed in April.At the state level, officials have passed laws to protect immigrant rights, said Brandon Lee, communications director at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Members of the ICIRR have previously lobbied the Illinois state legislature to enact the Trust Act, a 2017 bill which prohibits local Illinois law enforcement from carrying out immigration enforcement.Getting the Trust Act passed and subsequent additions to the law was a “years-long campaign” with a coalition of organizations, said Grace Pai, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Chicago. “There were a lot of pieces of follow-up legislation to add on additional protections that weren’t passed in that first piece of legislation, but that’s legislation that we’re obviously really proud to have,” she said. Such laws have limited the ability for Ice to gain access to sensitive information from police collaboration, a critical tool for resistance as the Trump administration attempts to use police for immigrant detention efforts.That strategic organizing is only possible due to a statewide network of organizations that has existed for decades, said Lee. Every year, the ICIRR organizes advocacy days during the legislative session during which member organizations and their constituents lobby Illinois lawmakers.Educating constituents has remained critical for immigrant groups. A coalition of groups share resources, including translations of educational material, said Grace Chan McKibben, executive director of the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC). Beyond the citywide Know Your Rights campaign, groups are often working to combat misinformation through sessions and information blasts, said McKibben, or working with non-immigration groups to make sure immigrants sign up for benefits they are eligible for, such as food assistance and healthcare services.On the policy side, groups still collaborate to lobby representatives to support pro-immigrant initiatives. Every May on Asian American Action Day, the CBCAC, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and other Chicago groups travel to Springfield, Illinois’s capital, to advocate for laws including funding for immigrant-specific programming. More than 500 people joined the lobbying efforts this year, an increase from the 300 to 400 people who have attended in previous years.The ability for Chicago organizers to respond to Trump’s anti-immigration rollout comes down to “building relationships so that there’s trust and care for each other”, said McKibben. “That’s what’s remarkable about the Chicago model of organizing. [It’s about] how connected the organizations are. It takes coordination, communication and a common commitment to what is good for the group.”Still, the fight to protect immigrant rights continues, especially as Ice arrests people at record levels. Just Wednesday, Ice agents in Chicago detained at least 10 people at a routine check-in for a monitoring program, including an OCAD member.Chicago police department officers were also onsite, generating concern about the possibility of potential collaboration between the two agencies. ICIRR has asked the Illinois attorney general to investigate whether or not there were violations of the state’s Trust Act.“Yesterday was an escalation on the part of Ice, all in the name of meeting the cruelty quotas set by Trump and Stephen Miller,” said Lee. “Everyday neighbors from across Chicagoland were apprehended, lured into a trap. This tactic Ice deployed … is now forcing families into impossible situations with no good outcomes and incredible risk.”As Chicago organizations continue to fight against Trump’s immigration crackdown, activists are encouraging other cities to create their own networks of advocacy. Due process, judicial accountability and other rights are being eroded, but the strength of solidarity is not. More

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      Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ bill is built on falsehoods about low-income families | Brigid Schulte and Haley Swenson

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      As they race to deliver Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill, Republicans in Congress are using familiar tropes to justify massive cuts to the safety net that will leave millions of low-income children and families without healthcare or sufficient food. The programs, they argue, are rife with waste, fraud and abuse, and the people who use them just aren’t working hard enough. So work requirements are necessary to force the obviously lazy “able-bodied” people to get to work.Here’s the reality check: a majority of those receiving this aid who can work are already working. More than 70% of working-age people who receive nutrition benefits or Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income children and adults that covers one in five Americans, are already working, according to the Government Accountability Office. Those who aren’t working, research shows, are mostly ill, disabled, caring for a family member, or in school.Take the story of Ruaa Sabek. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, she and her husband worked at a fast-food restaurant in Philadelphia. Both their hours were cut, but they didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits because they remained employed. With two young children at home, their carefully managed budget began to crumble under rising prices and reduced incomes.What saved them wasn’t extraordinary luck or family wealth. It was the streamlined and expanded government support programs that turned what economists predicted would be a financial apocalypse into a springboard toward financial stability for some families.One analysis of Medicaid work requirements by KKF, a health policy research organization, found that most working people with low enough incomes to qualify for Medicaid typically work for small companies or in sectors, like agriculture, that don’t offer employer-sponsored health insurance, or the rates are unaffordable. In other words, their jobs don’t pay them enough to afford basics, don’t offer benefits, and they have no other choice but Medicaid.There’s no doubt that safety net programs like Medicaid could be improved. They’re rife not so much with waste, fraud and abuse, as conservative lawmakers say – though there is some – but confusing red tape; disincentives to upward mobility, because benefits cut off sharply as soon as incomes start to rise; and cumbersome, punitive rules designed to dissuade people from applying for benefits in the first place.Fueling the Republican drive to slash public benefits is a long-held belief among many conservatives that the reason most people live in poverty is because they don’t work, or don’t work hard enough, and are instead lazing about, dependent on government largesse, and robbing Americans of their hard-earned tax dollars.That view features prominently in Project 2025, the playbook for the Trump administration authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The foreword reads: “Low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence.”And it was clearly on display in recent House congressional hearings on how to slash $1.5 trillion from the federal budget in order to pay for extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. “That little gravy train is getting ready to run out,” one Republican lawmaker said of federal safety net programs like Medicaid and food and nutrition aid for people living in poverty. “The spigot is getting ready to be turned off.” The billionaire Elon Musk, charged with cutting federal spending, has even posted a meme calling people who rely on federal spending the “Parasite Class”.Here’s another reality check: Three in 10 Americans, more than 99 million people, rely on some form of federal aid to live. That includes nearly half of all children in the United States. Another 52 million households, 41% of all US households, make too much to qualify for public safety net benefits but still not enough to survive. Nearly 40% of Americans would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense.There is a problem with making policy decisions based on the unfounded belief that poverty is about people with bad moral character making bad choices, or on debunked racial tropes of undeserving “welfare queens.” (In fact, white people make up the largest group receiving public food and healthcare aid.) Shaping policy around false stereotypes, rather than the complex reality, prevents policymakers from working together on real solutions.In fact, if you talk to people living in poverty, what they say they want tracks nearly exactly with what Project 2025 aims to foster: “empowering individuals to achieve economic independence.”“If I earn good money, I’m not going to be looking for benefits. I’ll take care of my bills,” said Blessing Aghayedo, a licensed practical nurse in Minnesota. Instead, she earns barely more than the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.Breathing roomIn the Sabeks’ case during the pandemic, expanded Medicaid and enhanced nutrition benefits helped weather health emergencies and soaring grocery prices. Rental assistance prevented them from losing their housing when they fell behind on payments. Stimulus checks and the expanded monthly child tax credit provided crucial cash that covered essential expenses like milk, diapers, children’s clothing, utility bills, and car repairs when they needed a new transmission.Perhaps most significantly, public subsidies for childcare and the Head Start program reduced their childcare expenses from an overwhelming $1,300 per month to $120, enabling Ruaa Sabek to continue working part time and enroll in a banking training program. “I feel like, ‘Oh my God, peace of mind,’” she said of the breathing room the public benefits gave her and her family. As a result, she landed a full-time position in 2023 as a personal banker that pays $45,000 annually with benefits – a dramatic improvement from her previous part-time $12-an-hour cashier job with irregular hours and no benefits.The family is now thriving without public assistance, aligning with decades of research. “You can’t actually figure out how to get to flourishing until you’re in a stable and secure situation,” said Megan Curran, director of policy at the Center on Poverty and Society Policy at Columbia.Research shows that when families have a stable foundation, they are healthier and live longer. Adults are more likely to keep working, and children are more likely to stay in school, graduate, get better jobs, and pay taxes as adults. Even babies’ brain development is improved.And the stability pays for itself: the Child Tax Credit, for instance, returns $10 for every $1 spent every year. The United States remains the only wealthy country with no national paid maternity leave, yet the return on investment for paid family leave is 20:1. For childcare, it’s 8:1.Meanwhile, rather than saving taxpayers a ton of money, as Musk promised, slashing safety-net support ignores the real problem that keeps families from economic independence: 44% of the workforce in the United States, the wealthiest country on earth as measured by GDP, is low-wage, a share far higher than in many economic peer countries.Squeezing families already struggling financially could increase the share of those already waking up hungry, homeless, or worried they soon might be. The United States already has one of the highest rates of child poverty among wealthy countries. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine estimates that high poverty rate costs as much as $1tn a year in lost adult productivity, increased crime and poor health.Childcare is keyIf lawmakers are serious about adding work requirements for safety net programs, then ensuring families have access to affordable childcare is critical. Compared with other advanced economies, the United States invests the least in childcare. That means childcare costs are second only to mortgage or rent for most families who have to pay out of pocket. And federal childcare subsidies for low-income parents come nowhere close to covering those eligible.The lack of affordable childcare sent Kiarica Schields, a college-educated hospice nurse and single parent in Georgia, spiraling into a cycle of joblessness, eviction, instability, and poverty. “Childcare. That’s my issue,” she said.Trump has said he wants families to have more children. Yet surveys show that young people aren’t having children, or having as many as they’d like, because they can’t afford childcare.Kel, a divorced parent of four, wants lawmakers to think of public benefits for families like hers as a short-term investment with long-term benefits. Kel, who asked not to use her last name, fled an abusive marriage, struggles to pay bills, though she works as much as she can, and relies on Medicaid for life-saving physical and mental health treatments for her and her children. “Lifting me and people like me up will have a cascading effect on so many lives in a positive way,” she said. “We will give back to our communities tenfold, a hundredfold. It’s worth that investment in us. We’re a really good investment.”

      Brigid Schulte is the director of New America’s work-family justice program, Better Life Lab, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and the author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life and the New York Times bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play when No One has the Time. Haley Swenson is a research and writing fellow for the Better Life Lab More

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      They hoped their children’s deaths would bring change. Then a Colorado bill to protect kids online failed

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      Bereaved parents saw their hopes for change dashed after a bill meant to protect children from sexual predators and drug dealers online died in the Colorado state legislature last month.Several of those parents had helped shape the bill, including Lori Schott, whose 18-year-old daughter Annalee died by suicide in 2020 after consuming content on TikTok and Instagram about depression, anxiety and suicide.“When the legislators failed to vote and pushed it off onto some fake calendar date where they’re not even in session, to not even have accountability for where they stand – as a parent, it’s a slap in the face,” said Schott, who identifies as a pro-second amendment Republican. “It’s a slap in the face of my daughter, and to other kids that we’ve lost.”Had the legislation passed, it would have required social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to investigate and take down accounts engaged in gun or drug sales or in the sexual exploitation or trafficking of minors. It also mandated the creation of direct hotlines to tech company personnel for law enforcement and a 72-hour response window for police requests, a higher burden than under current law.Additionally, platforms would have had to report on how many minors used their services, how often they did so, for how long and how much those young users engaged with content that violated company policies. Several big tech firms registered official positions on the bill. According to Colorado lobbying disclosures, Meta’s longtime in-state lobby firm, Headwater Strategies, is registered as a proponent for changing the bill. Google and TikTok also hired lobbyists to oppose it.View image in fullscreen“We’re just extremely disappointed,” said Kim Osterman, whose 18-year-old son Max died in 2021 after purchasing drugs spiked with fentanyl from a dealer he met on Snapchat. “[Legislators] chose big tech over protecting children and families.”Colorado legislators agree to hold social media companies responsible for protecting childrenProtections for users of social media (SB 25-086) passed both chambers before being vetoed on 24 April by governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, who cited the bill’s potential to “erode privacy, freedom and innovation” as reasons for his veto. Colorado’s senate voted to override the veto on 25 April, yet those efforts fell apart on 28 April when the state house opted to delay the vote until after the legislative session ended, effectively blocking an override and keeping the bill alive.The bill originally passed the senate by a 29-6 vote and the house by a 46-18 margin. On 25 April, the senate voted 29-6 to override Polis’s veto. Lawmakers anticipated that the house would take up the override later that day. At the time, according to those interviewed, there appeared to be enough bipartisan support to successfully overturn his veto.“It was an easy vote for folks because of what we were voting on: protecting kids from social media companies,” said the senator Lindsey Daugherty, a Democrat and a co-sponsor of the bill. She said she urged house leadership to hold the vote Friday, but they declined: “The speaker knew the governor didn’t want us to do it on Friday, because they knew we would win.”The parents who advocated for the bill attribute its failure to an unexpected, 11th-hour lobbying campaign by a far-right gun owners’ association in Colorado. Two state legislators as well as seven people involved in the legislative process echoed the parents’ claims.An abnormal, last-minute campaign disrupts bipartisan consensusRocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO) cast the bill as an instrument of government censorship in texts and emails over the legislation’s provisions against “ghost guns”, untraceable weapons assembled from kits purchased online, which would have been prohibited.RMGO launched massive social media and email campaigns urging its 200,000 members to contact their legislators to demand they vote against the bill. A source with knowledge of the workings of the Colorado state house described the gun group’s social media and text campaigns, encouraging Republicans voters to contact their legislators to demand opposition to the bill, as incessant.“[Legislators] were getting countless calls and emails and being yelled at by activists. It was a full-fledged attack. There was a whole campaign saying: ‘This is a government censorship bill,’” they said.The group’s actions were instrumental in a campaign to deter house Republicans from voting against the veto, resulting in the quashing of the bill, and unexpected from an organization that had been facing funding shortfalls, according to 10 people interviewed who were involved in the design of the bill and legislative process. Sources in the Colorado state house spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from RMGO.The house had delayed the vote until 28 April, which allowed RMGO time to launch a campaign against the bill over the weekend. When lawmakers reconvened Monday, the house voted 51-13 to postpone the override until after the legislative session ended – effectively killing the effort.View image in fullscreenThe gun activists’ mass text message campaign to registered Republican voters asserted the social media bill would constitute an attempt to “compel social media companies to conduct mass surveillance of content posted on their platforms” to search for violations of Colorado’s gun laws, describing the bill as an attack on first and second amendment rights, according to texts seen by the Guardian.A familiar, aggressive foeFounded in 1996, RMGO claims to have a membership of more than 200,000 activists. It is recognized as a far-right group that takes a “no-compromise” stance on gun rights. Dudley Brown, its founder and leader, also serves as the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, which positions itself further to the right than the National Rifle Association (NRA). RMGO has mounted criticism against the NRA for being too moderate and politically compromising. Critics have described RMGO as “bullies” and “extremists” because of its combative tactics, which include targeting and smearing Democrats and moderate Republicans. The group did not respond to requests for comment on its legislative efforts.RMGO is a well-known presence at the Colorado capitol, typically opposing gun-control legislation. Daugherty described its typical campaign tactics as “scary”. She got rid of her X account after being singled out by the group over her work on a bill to ban assault weapons earlier this year.“When we were running any of the gun bills at the capitol, they put my and some other legislators’ faces on their websites,” she said. A screenshot of a tweet from RMGO showed Daugherty with a red “traitor” stamp on her forehead.The group’s campaign resulted in the spread of misinformation about the bill’s impact on gun ownership rights, sources involved in the legislative process said.“The reason I was in support of the bill, and in support of the override, was it has to do with child trafficking and protecting the kids,” said the senator Rod Pelton, a Republican, who voted in favor of the veto override in the senate. “I just didn’t really buy into the whole second amendment argument.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe bill had enjoyed the backing of all 23 of Colorado’s district attorneys as well as bipartisan state house support.RMGO’s late-stage opposition to the social media bill marked a break from its usual playbook. The group generally weighs in on legislation earlier in the process, according to eight sources, including two of the bill’s co-sponsors, Daugherty and the representative Andy Boesenecker.“They really ramped up their efforts,” Boesenecker said. “It was curious to me that their opposition came in very late and appeared to be very well funded at the end.”In recent years, RMGO group had been less active due to well-documented money problems that limited its ability to campaign on legislative issues. In a 2024 interview, the group’s leaders stated plainly that it struggled with funding. Daugherty believes RMGO would not have been able to embark on such an apparently costly outreach campaign without a major infusion of cash. A major text campaign like the one launched for SB-86 was beyond their financial capacity, she said. Others in Colorado politics agreed.“Rocky Mountain Gun Owners have not been important or effective in probably at least four years in the legislature. They’ve had no money, and then all of a sudden they had tons of money, funding their rise back into power,” said Dawn Reinfeld, executive director of Blue Rising Together, a Colorado-based non-profit focused on youth rights.The campaign made legislators feel threatened, with primary elections in their districts over the weekend, Daugherty said, particularly after accounts on X, formerly Twitter, bombarded the bill’s supporters.View image in fullscreen“Folks were worried about being primaried, mostly the Republicans, and that’s kind of what it came down to,” Daugherty said.Aaron Ping’s 16-year-old son Avery died of an overdose in December after buying what he thought was ecstasy over Snapchat and receiving instead a substance laced with fentanyl. Ping saw the campaign against the bill as an intentional misconstrual of its intent.“It was looking like the bill was going to pass, until all this misinformation about it taking away people’s gun rights because it addresses people buying illegal shadow guns off the internet,” he said.Ping gave testimony in support of the bill in February before the first senate vote, alongside other bereaved parents, teens in recovery and a district attorney.“The bill gave me hope that Avery’s legacy would be to help. So when it didn’t pass, it was pretty soul-crushing,” said Ping.States take up online child-safety bills as federal lawmakers falterSeveral states, including California, Maryland, Vermont, Minnesota, Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, South Carolina and Nevada, have introduced legislation aimed at improving online safety for children in the past two years. These efforts have faced strong resistance from the tech industry, including heavy lobbying and lawsuits.Maryland became the first state to successfully pass a Kids Code bill, signing it into law in May 2024. But the victory may be short-lived: NetChoice, a tech industry coalition representing companies including Meta, Google and Amazon, quickly launched a legal challenge against the measure, which is ongoing.Meanwhile, in the US federal government, the kids online safety act (Kosa), which had wound its way through the legislature for years, died in February when it failed to pass in the House after years of markups and votes. A revamped version of the bill was reintroduced to Congress on 14 May.In California, a similar bill known as the age-appropriate design code act, modeled after UK legislation, was blocked in late 2023. A federal judge granted NetChoice a preliminary injunction, citing potential violations of the first amendment, which stopped the law from going into effect. 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      ‘History will judge us as cowards or heroes’: Ras Baraka, the mayor arrested by Ice, won’t be intimidated

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      It took about two minutes for Ras Baraka to be propelled from being a relatively obscure New Jersey politician into a nationwide avatar. The transformation happened on 9 May when he was trying to inspect Delaney Hall, a privately run federal immigration detention center that he accuses of violating safety protocols, when he was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Video footage of those fateful minutes show burly Ice agents dressed in militarised fatigues dragging the mayor into the compound. Baraka, who was accompanying three congressmembers, has his hands yanked behind his back and is handcuffed.He vainly urges his captors to go easy on him with a plea that, in hindsight, now sounds deeply ironic. “I’m not resisting,” he says, over and over.Since the arrest Baraka, 55, has rapidly emerged on the national stage as someone who resists, a lot. The son of a revolutionary poet, and a poet in his own right, he was a high school principal before becoming councilmember then mayor of one of America’s less glamorous cities: Newark.He has articulated an opposition to Donald Trump’s march towards “authoritarianism” with a potency that, apart from sporadic actions, has been lacking from Democratic party leaders.“History will judge us in this moral moment,” he says. “These people are wrong. And it’s moments like this that will judge us all – as cowards or, you know, as heroes.”Following his arrest, Baraka was charged with trespassing, had his mugshot taken and was fingerprinted, twice. That second time really irked him. “That was a little much. Marshals came into the courtroom to carry me out to the basement, for charges that were a class C misdemeanor.”A few days later, Trump officials abruptly dropped the charges, earning themselves a sharp rebuke from the court. Judge André Espinosa slammed the Trump administration for having made a “worrisome misstep” in rushing to prosecute an elected representative.All of that took place in three weeks, at the same time as Baraka has been running in the Democratic primary to become New Jersey’s next governor. “It’s been a little crazy,” Baraka concedes, with understatement.The volatility has not ended with his court case, it has just moved onto the streets. Baraka says he is now frequently stopped by people on the Newark sidewalk, praising him for his stand.When he travels outside Newark, the obverse is true. “I’ve had every crazy person calling me all kinds of things. People jumping out of their car, yelling and screaming because you’re protecting immigrants.”View image in fullscreenFor Baraka, the praise and anger has underlined the perilousness of these times. “The country is really, really divided. And, in my mind, really uninformed. And we’re seeing how dangerous these people have become.”Now that he’s had time to reflect on this surreal episode, what does he think it was all about? Why did Trump’s America – “these people”, as he calls them – pick on him?“I’m the mayor of the city. That’s it. They’re coming after the governor, the US attorney, the judges. It’s all trying to prove that they’re in charge, like regular bullies do.”We meet 3 miles and a world away from Delaney Hall. The metal fences and khaki Ice uniforms that confronted Baraka on 9 May make way for a rather grander setting: the golden domed beaux-arts wonder that is Newark city hall.Baraka’s office is up a sweeping marble staircase. There are officers guarding his door, also uniformed, but instead of batons they greet visitors with smiles.The mayor sounds a bit flat when we start talking, as though his mind is elsewhere. But then, he has got a lot on his plate.A day after our interview he lodges a lawsuit against New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor for false arrest and malicious prosecution. The suit also accuses Alina Habba, Trump’s appointee as the state’s acting US attorney, of defaming him.On top of that, there are next Tuesday’s primary elections in the race to replace the term-limited Democratic incumbent, Phil Murphy, as New Jersey governor. Baraka is competing in a field of six Democratic candidates in what is turning out to be a tight contest: many polls suggest he is running in second place to the former navy helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill, though the outcome remains unpredictable.Then there’s the fact that Trump has come at him with the entire might of the US government. It’s not just Baraka in the line of fire, it’s Newark.Trump has long shown disdain for Democratic-controlled cities, especially those that happen to be majority Black and brown. During his first term Trump called Baltimore, Maryland, which is 60% Black, a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess”.Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, is 47% Black and 37% Hispanic, so it’s fair to surmise where much of Trump’s animus towards it comes from. The president’s racist antagonism is targeted at Newark because of its status as a “sanctuary city” – meaning that it offers protections for undocumented immigrants, and limits the cooperation of its police with federal enforcement operations unless crime is involved.There’s no better manifestation of this collision of values than Delaney Hall. It’s 1,000 beds are only currently accommodating 120 detainees, but its presence on the edge of downtown makes its own looming statement.“It’s menacing, a threat,” Baraka says of the detention facility. “They said they were arresting criminals, but people know that’s not true. You can’t find 1,000 immigrant gang members and rapists and murderers, not in Newark. So who else are they going to put in there?”Baraka says that the fear is palpable across the city. Since Ice carried out a high-profile raid at Newark fish market just three days after the inauguration, there has been a steep decline in people leaving their homes for health or social service appointments, or trips to shops and restaurants.“People are afraid. It’s regular everyday anxiety. These people are running around, grabbing people off the street,” Baraka says.In the latest salvo, the Trump administration is suing Newark and three other New Jersey cities for “standing in the way” of federal immigration officers. That’s quite something, to have one of the world’s most powerful governments bearing down on you like a gigantic bird of prey.Is he scared? Baraka is surprisingly honest in admitting his own fears. “You got the apparatus of government, of law, of the police and military – all this stuff to make your life miserable.”He’s warming to his subject now, that early flatness giving way to an intensity of rhetoric clearly honed at campaign rallies. He comforts himself, he says, with the thought that people who came before him must also have been afraid, yet they were unbowed.“When we were fighting to dismantle Jim Crow in America, people were afraid. When the women’s suffrage movement was going, in the fight for labor rights, there was fear, but people still did what they thought was right.”He hopes he will make the same decision, though he candidly admits it’s not easy.“Of course, this is scary,” he says. “I just pray that it doesn’t turn me into a coward.”There are plenty of, if not cowards, then collaborators in this “moral moment”. Universities like Columbia or multibillion-dollar law firms like Paul Weiss, that have capitulated in the face of Trump’s assault without so much as a squeak of protest.Then there’s that other mayor ensconced just 15 miles away across the Hudson River. Eric Adams’s deal with Trump, in which the New York mayor had his federal corruption charges dropped in return for cooperation over immigration deportations, is perhaps the most shocking of all apparent quid pro quos in this second Trump era.Baraka is open about his ties to Adams, and though he stressed he didn’t agree with what had happened his take on events is slightly ambiguous. It sits somewhere between condemning the man and empathising with his plight.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Mayor Adams, I know him, he’s my friend,” he says.For Baraka, the Adams story is another sign of present dangers – not just in the Trump attack, but also in the Democratic response.“This is what this moment does to people, does to us – it puts us in these precarious situations where we have to choose ourselves over our people, over the things we believe or care about the most. That’s why these are very, very dangerous times.”He has a message for those who think they can save themselves by making a pact with the devil, such as Adams or Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic Michigan governor, whom he also namechecked. Whitmer has cozied up to Trump since his return to the White House, only to find the president now considering a pardon for the men who plotted to kidnap her.“That’s an insane proposition,” Baraka says. “You think you’re protecting yourself, but you’re just releasing your rights, your abilities, your values, and making yourself more vulnerable.”Baraka describes himself as an unabashed but pragmatic Democrat, a progressive who gets things done. “I’m a pragmatist at heart,” he says. “As mayor, I don’t have the luxury of debating ideology in the egg line at the supermarket. I’ve got to get people jobs and opportunity.”His record since he became mayor in 2014, succeeding Cory Booker who left city hall for the US Senate, has earned him the plaudits of such Democratic luminaries as Barack Obama. The former president praised Baraka in the New Yorker as being “both idealistic and practical”.Under Baraka, Newark homicides have fallen to lows not seen since the 1940s. He is proud of his record on attracting new businesses to the city, improving water quality and increasing childhood vaccinations.Yet in the gubernatorial race, he still faces the old put-down leveled at progressives: unelectability. He complains that during the campaign he has been labeled “too progressive, too Newark, and too Black”.“It’s hogwash,” he says animatedly. “The moderates, they want to keep the status quo and are maintaining these lies to make people do what’s safe, as opposed to what’s right.”Trump lost New Jersey last November by six percentage points. That was a 10-point improvement for him on 2020 – the second largest swing in his favour of any state.Baraka blames that startling result not on Trump’s appeal, but on the Democrats’ failings, especially in their pitch to working Americans. “The Democrats lost touch with people, that’s the real issue: the Democratic party’s ability to connect to its voter base and to attract new voters. Ultimately, they did not inspire.”He criticizes the party for being afraid of powerful interests. “People can’t pay their healthcare costs, but we’re afraid to challenge the healthcare industry; childcare costs are too high, but we’re afraid to lean into child tax credits that would end child poverty; rents and mortgages are unaffordable, but we’re afraid of developers and big banks.”His critique does not end there. Democratic leaders are also proving incapable of rising to the challenge of this perilous moment.“We’ve seen a bunch of disparate, spur-of-the-moment acts by individuals and smaller groups, but there’s no collective offensive strategy. And we’ve underestimated Donald Trump.”So why does he stick with it? Why stay in a Democratic party that he believes is abjectly failing?“It’s all we have right now. This is what we got. We got to fight with the weapons we have until there’s others. I mean, pragmatically.”Poetry is not the most conventional tactic in a bid for statewide office. One of Baraka’s closing political ads in the primaries has him reciting American Poem, his best-known work which is featured by Beyoncé in her current Cowboy Carter tour.Baraka argues that poetry can be a powerful tool in reaching out to voters. “There’s a lot of folks who respond to art, poetry, music. And I’m a poet. My dad said: ‘Never lose your poetry license.’ So I’m not.”View image in fullscreenHis dad was the prominent Black poet, playwright and jazz aficionado, Amiri Baraka (AKA Everett Leroy Jones AKA LeRoi Jones). Newark born and raised, Baraka Sr was a founding member of the 1960s Black Arts movement; he helped both to chronicle and shape the Black liberation struggle.Though a radical and at times a revolutionary, Amiri Baraka also worked within the system to promote Black politicians. He was seminal in having Kenneth Gibson elected in 1970 as the first Black mayor of Newark.It must have been a profound sadness for Baraka, then, that his father died in January 2014, four months before he himself won the mayoral election.“It was worse than that, I guess,” Baraka reflected. “My father didn’t want me to run for mayor at first – he knew how ugly this thing is. But in the last week or so of his life, he was passing out flyers in his hospital room, encouraging doctors, patients to vote for me. ‘My son’s running for mayor! My son’s running for mayor!’ Yeah, that was amazing.”American Poem is a call for an inclusive definition of America and what it is to be an American. “It’s me saying, I want to hear an American poem that talks about all the things – good or bad – that people refuse to talk about: our communities, our struggles, our lives, our culture, our history – all of which is as American as the KKK.”The poem was written in the 1990s, when Baraka was straight out of college. That’s uncanny, because it reads today with a burning contemporary urgency, as though it was composed as a direct riposte to Trump’s ideology of “America first”:
      I want to hear an American poem
      You know, something made in the USA
      Something American and Afro-Cuban
      Nuyorican Latin tinge, beaten bone by plena,
      Sprawling out of wide open tenement windows
      In the middle of winter
      Which just goes to show, Baraka says, that the current fight is nothing new. It’s as old as the country itself.“People keep trying to define what this country is. Now Trump is telling us what it is to be an American. But he can’t. It belongs to all of us. Yeah, it belongs to all of us.” More

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      Will the Trump-Musk rift really change anything? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Thinking about the constant stream of news about Elon Musk, one is tempted to adapt two of the most famous sentences from American literature. William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What comes to mind about Musk is: “He is not gone forever. He has not even left.”It is profoundly misleading to frame Musk’s departure this past week as “disappointed reformer quits after finding it impossible to make bureaucracy efficient”, just as it is wrong to think of this week’s rift as “Trump regime changes direction”. After all, Musk’s people are still there; and Musk-ism – understood as the wanton destruction of state capacity and cruel attacks on the poorest – will continue on … what’s the drug appropriate to mention here? Steroids? Not least, Trump’s and Musk’s fates remain entwined.Plenty of personnel beholden to Musk are still around and doubling down on their chainsaw massacre. Continuing deregulation is still very much to Musk’s and other oligarchs’ liking. There is no dearth of bizarre Musk pronouncements about the universe, but his claim that the Doge ethos is like Buddhism must be somewhere near the top. Yet it reveals a truth: the mentality of blissfully destroying state capacity will persist, except that the practice is likely to become more systematic and less prone to PR statements about “savings” that can easily be debunked. Russell Vought, who directs the office of management and budget, knows what he is doing and has long been preparing to use “executive tools” creatively – read: illegally, according to plenty of constitutional lawyers. The level of cruelty is not much different from Musk’s “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”, but the process may well become smoother and less visible.After all, Musk’s own criticism of the budget is that it did not cut enough. The most sycophantic members of the Trump cult – such as the representative Andy Ogles – say the same: the bill is “not beautiful yet”; only senators making further cuts can make it so. As one of the world’s most influential political scientists, Adam Przeworski, has pointed out, budgets like this do not get passed under democratic conditions unless there is a major crisis (juntas in Chile and Argentina could make cuts of a similar magnitude with impunity). The potential damage to low-income families – not to speak of science – is so enormous that Reagan and Thatcher look like democratic socialists by comparison.The Trump-Musk rift will reveal much about what kind of regime the Trumpists are really creating, and how far governing as a form of personal revenge might be pushed. In principle, mutual vulnerability remains. Trump still has reasons to welcome help from Musk’s platform – and his money. The US is relying on SpaceX and Starlink in ways that give Musk leverage. Conversely, though, no matter how big the platform, a state can always pull the plug through regulation. Most important, Musk and Trump might know things about one another that should not become public.This, after all, is the underlying logic of what the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar has theorized as a “mafia state”. In such a state, benefits go to what Magyar calls a “political family” (in Trump’s case, it of course includes the biological family); but in return there has to be absolute loyalty and omertà. A mafia state resembles Hotel California: you can officially check out, but you can never leave.This does not mean that nobody ever tries. Yet in conflicts between autocrats and a defecting oligarch, the latter tends to lose. Putin subjugated oligarchs who showed streaks of independence; Orbán defeated his former ally Lajos Simicska. When the latter broke with the Hungarian prime minister in 2015, opposition figures were giddy with excitement about juicy revelations and regime infighting. But financing big PR campaigns about corruption and an anti-Orbán party, as well as a large media empire, were not enough; today, the former oligarch concentrates on farming in western Hungary.Many commentators have called for inflicting reputational damage on Musk. It clearly has been an advantage for those willing to protest the Trump regime that Tesla provided a focal point for concrete action; it is much more difficult to rally against cabinet members who do not happen to have a dealership down the road, but rather abstract things like hedge funds.More important still are investigations, starting with the simple – but still unanswered – questions about who actually runs Doge, how it is structured and on what legal basis its actions proceed (the fact that the chair of the Doge caucus in the House keeps touting the entity’s commitment to “turning transparency into action” only adds insult to injury). If Congress ever rediscovers Article 1 of the constitution, and its duties of oversight in particular, it should not just hold hearings, but produce an analytical record of how an individual – unelected and supposedly without holding any office – could simply be handed a chainsaw and a key to all our data (a golden key was indeed a fitting gift from Trump). It will be difficult – in some cases, impossible – to undo the damage Musk and allies have caused; it will take less effort to dismantle the myth of “if only a business genius ran government, all would be well”. After all, evidence of how things turned out will be there.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More