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      How would recent events in America appear if they happened elsewhere? | Moira Donegan

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      At times the gesture can seem like a cliche, but I like to imagine, for the sake of perspective, how political developments in the United States would be covered by the media if they were happening in any other country. I imagine that Thursday’s events in Los Angeles might be spoken of like this:A prominent opposition leader was attacked by regime security forces on Thursday in the presence of the national security tsar, as he voiced opposition to the federal military occupation of the US’s second-largest city following street demonstrations against the regime’s mass deportation efforts.Alex Padilla, a senator from California, was pushed against a wall, removed from the room, and then tackled to the ground and handcuffed, reportedly by Secret Service and FBI agents, at a press conference in LA by Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. He was trying to ask a question about the deployment of marines and national guard forces to LA in his capacity as Angelenos’ elected representative. Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, was later released; Noem, speaking to reporters after the incident, said both that she knew the senator and that agents tackled and detained him because neither she nor they knew who he was. In a video of the attack, Padilla can be heard identifying himself as a senator as Noem’s security forces begin to grab and shove him.Seconds later, after he has been pushed out of the room, Padilla can be heard yelling to the men attacking him: “Hands off!” The video cuts out after a man steps in front of the camera to block the shot, and tells the person filming, “there is no recording allowed here, per FBI rights,” something of an odd statement to make at a press conference. Several federal court decisions have upheld the right to record law enforcement.The violence toward a sitting senator is yet another escalation of the administration’s dramatic assertions of extra-constitutional authority, and another item in their ongoing assertion of the illegitimacy of dissent, even from elected leaders. In responding with violence toward the senator’s question, Noem, her security forces and by extension the Trump administration more broadly, are signaling that they will treat opposition, even from elected officials, as insubordination.They do not see senators as equals to be negotiated with or spoken to in good faith, because they do not believe that any of the people’s representatives – and certainly not a Democrat – has any authority that they need to respect. Padilla, like the people of Los Angeles and the people of the United States, was not treated by the Trump administration as a citizen, but as a subject.The attack on Padilla by security forces, and the viral video of him being tackled to the ground and handcuffed by armed men, has threatened to overshadow the content of Noem’s press conference, which underscored in rhetoric this same sense of absolute authority and contempt for dissent that the attack on the senator demonstrated with action.Noem was in Los Angeles to tout the administration’s military escalation against citizens there, who have taken to the streets as part of a growing protest movement against Trump’s mass deportation scheme, which has led to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) kidnapping of many Angelenos and left families, colleagues, neighbors and friends bereft of their beloved community members.The protests have been largely peaceful – Ice and police have initiated violence against some demonstrators – but the Trump administration has taken them as an opportunity to crush dissent with force. The deployment of the California national guard – in violation of a law that requires the administration to secure cooperation from the governor – and the transfer of 700 marines to the city has marked a new willingness of the Trump administration to use military force against citizens who oppose its policies.But to the Trump administration, the Americans who have taken to the streets to voice their opposition to Trump policies are no Americans at all. “We are not going away,” Noem said of the military occupation of Los Angeles. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists.” By this, she meant the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, and California governor, Gavin Newsom, who are not socialists but Democrats.The term – “liberate” – evokes the US’s imperialist adventures abroad, in which such rhetoric was used to provide rhetorical cover for the toppling of foreign regimes, many of them democratically elected. The people’s elected representatives – be it Newsom or Bass or Padilla – are not figures they need to be “liberated” from. That is, not unless you consider the only legitimate “people” to be Trump supporters, and the only legitimate governance to be Republican governance.Trump, as he expands his authoritarian ambitions and uses more and more violence to pursue them, has made his own will into the sum total of “the will of the people”. All those other people – the ones marching in the streets, and trying to stop the kidnappings of their neighbors – don’t count.A few hours after Noem’s goons attacked Padilla, a federal district court judge ordered the Trump administration to relinquish control over the California national guard, agreeing with California that the guard had been illegally seized when Trump assumed control of the armed units without Newsom’s consent. “That’s the difference between a constitutional government and King George,” said district judge Charles Breyer in a hearing on the case earlier that day. “It’s not that the leader can simply say something and then it becomes it.”The judge was pointing to the constitutional order, to the rule of law, to the guarantees, once taken for granted, that the president has limits on his power. He gave the Trump administration about 18 hours to hand control of the national guard back to the state of California. It was not immediately clear whether they would comply. Hours later, an appeals court placed a temporary block on Breyer’s order, returning control of the California national guard to Trump. So much for us having a “law and order” president.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The mainstream media has enabled Trump’s war on universities | Jason Stanley

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      US universities are facing the Trump regime’s fury. The justification given by the regime is that universities are run by leftist ideologues, who have indoctrinated students to adopt supposedly leftist ideological orientations, as well as hostility to Israel, anti-whiteness and trans inclusivity. Donald Trump and his allies believe the election gave them the mandate to crush America’s system of higher education. But what may be less clear is that it is the mainstream media’s obsession with leftists on campus that has led to the current moment.The US mainstream media has waged a decade-long propaganda campaign against American universities, culminating in the systematic misrepresentation of last year’s campus anti-war protests. This campaign has been the normalizing force behind the Trump administration’s attack on universities, as well as a primary cause of his multiple electoral successes. Unless the media recognizes the central role it has played, we cannot expect the attack to relent.It is easy to pinpoint the time that US confidence in higher education started to drastically plummet – the year was 2015. For those of us who have followed this attack throughout the last decade, there is no surprise about this date. It was the year that a spate of political attacks against universities started to emerge, resurrecting the 1980s and 90s conservative panic about “political correctness on campus”, except this time in mainstream media outlets.In 2016, the media scholar Moira Weigel, in an article in the Guardian entitled “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy”, laid out in detail how this attack, suddenly legitimized by mainstream media outlets, led to Trump’s 2016 victory. Weigel singles out an enormously influential piece in the Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “The coddling of the American mind”. In it, Haidt and Lukianoff decried the supposed trend of shielding students from “words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort”. Haidt and Lukianoff’s goal was to suggest that younger generations were “coddled” and protected from emotional harm by college campuses, beginning a trend of infantilizing college students.From 2015 on, much of the mainstream media went on a crusade to vilify universities for political correctness. The Trump regime’s vicious targeting of US universities was justified and normalized by a decade of panicked op-eds about leftists on campus in the New York Times, which included laying the basis for the administration’s cynical attack on DEI (to understand the staggering number of concern-trolling op-eds about leftists on campus the New York Times has published over the last decade, consider this article in Slate, by Ben Mathis-Lilly, about this exact topic; it was published in 2018.)There have always been excesses of what was called “political correctness” and now is called “wokeness”. During times of moral panic, excesses are held up as paradigms. One might single out attempts to de-platform speakers as one such excess. To judge by the mainstream media, there have been a wave of such attempts. The organization that counts them, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), has recorded 1,740 attempts to de-platform speakers at colleges and universities over the last two decades or so. That sounds like a lot. However, the methodology for counting a “de-platforming attempt” includes petitions calling for the speaker’s invitation to be canceled or withdrawn – so if a dozen people sign a petition to revoke a speaker’s invitation, it counts as an “de-platforming attempt”, even when (as is often the case) nothing comes of it. Even in the case of successful de-platforming attempts, a speaker whose talk is postponed or who is reinvited counts as a case, as is when a venue has to be switched from one on-campus auditorium to another (say, for safety concerns). This methodology blatantly inflates the prevalence of problematic cancellations of speakers (given that de-platforming attempts count towards evaluating a university’s position on Fire’s influential “Campus Free Speech Rankings”, this methodology also distorts public conversation about the topic). Fire unquestionably does good things. But its very existence depends on fanning the flames of moral panic about universities.More generally, in many cases of university actions that can legitimately be regarded as problematic, the fault was not “political correctness” or “wokeness”, but a corporate and legalistic environment at universities that requires the investigation of every complaint, no matter how overblown. We college professors are fairly uniformly opposed to this culture. But it is hardly the fault of leftists.Finally, no one should mistake an epidemic of faculty members performatively quitting their jobs with an epidemic of firings. When a university fires an academic for their speech, that is a crisis. When a faculty member chooses to resign rather than face student opprobrium, that is just life.It may surprise the reader to learn that during the last decade, the main “chill” at universities has not been “leftists on campus”. It has instead been a relentless attack on college professors and students by rightwing outlets. In 2016, Turning Point USA introduced its “Professor Watchlist”, targeting supposedly radical professors on campus. Campus Reform is an outlet devoted to reporting on liberal professors for their speech – for example, by student reports, social media usage or academic publications. For around a decade, Rod Dreher used his position as a senior editor at the American Conservative to target leftist academics, often to devastating effect. And Canary Mission has steadily and for many years targeted professors for their advocacy for the Palestinian cause. These are hardly the only, or even the most powerful, outlets involved in this long assault (I have not even mentioned Fox News). University professors are terrified of being targeted by these organizations.Major mainstream media outlets have consistently failed to report on the rightwing media assault on college professors over the last two decades. This exacerbated the effects of these attacks. In 2016, when Dreher targeted me in several posts for an offhand comment I made on a private Facebook post, I was inundated by hate mail and phone calls to my office. This was my first experience with such an attack; it deeply destabilized me. In the meantime, my colleagues assured me that Dreher was simply a worried liberal with the sorts of concerns about free speech on campus they had been reading about in the liberal media they consumed (Dreher has since moved to Budapest, Hungary, where he is a fellow at the Danube Institute, a thinktank funded by Viktor Orbán autocratic government).Finally, last year, the media committed its worst error yet, for months erasing the participation of sizable numbers of Jewish students in the protests on college campuses in support of divesting from US military support for Israel, including as movement leaders. In truth, there is a generational conflict about Israel among American Jews. As many American Jews under 40 believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as believe this claim to be antisemitic (about one-third). The media’s complete erasure of the large group of American Jews, especially younger American Jews, critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, has allowed the Trump regime to conduct its dismantling of the US higher education system under the pretext of fighting antisemitism.None of this is to deny the obvious fact that college professors skew heavily Democratic. In some disciplines, there are clear reasons for this. Sociology has few Republican voters, because rightwing ideology since the 1980s has generally rejected its metaphysical presuppositions – such as the existence and importance of societies. Women and gender studies, Middle Eastern studies, and African American studies are disciplines whose very existence is directly and regularly attacked by Republican politicians. But the fact is that the partisan tilt of universities has basically nothing to do with these departments.A study of my university by a conservative campus group found that out of 23 professors in the chemistry department whose political affiliation could be identified, 19 were Democrats and one was a Republican. Astronomy, Earth and planetary sciences, economics, molecular biophysics and biochemistry were all departments with zero professors with Republican affiliations. According to this study, biology and biomedical sciences at Yale had 229 professors with Democratic party affiliations, and eight with Republican party affiliations. None of these are areas in which it makes sense to speak of political bias. As the “asymmetric polarization” of the Republican party has accelerated over the last decade, is it any wonder that there are fewer and fewer professors who vote for Trump’s Republican party? Why would academics vote for a party that is now bent on dismantling the US system of higher education?Unfortunately, instead of debunking the media-driven moral panic about leftists on campus, universities have largely accepted the premises of the drivers of this panic – that there is a problem on campus exemplified by the fact that few professors support Trump (“intellectual diversity”), and that protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza (with large representations of Jewish students) were antisemitic. Even universities that are challenging the Trump regime’s assault seem to accept its nonsensical premises that college students have been overly protected from controversial speech, and, simultaneously, that Jewish students must be shielded to the maximum extent of the law from criticism of Israel’s actions.In the meantime, the media has elevated some of the very academics most responsible for the moral panic, such as Steven Pinker, who has described universities as having a “suffocating leftwing monoculture”, into spokespersons for universities, and continues to trumpet the propaganda that led to this moment. For example, the New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, who has long promoted the moral panic about “wokeness” that fuels the Maga movement, still simply pre-supposes that “ideological conformity and past failures to restrain antisemitism” are “vulnerabilities” of the current US higher education system.According to the agents of the moral panic, the blame for Trump’s all-out assault on the American system of higher education falls squarely on supposed “leftists on campus” whose actions supposedly undermined trust in these institutions. But the fault, instead, lies squarely with those responsible for driving this moral panic. The mainstream media has delivered the Republicans a win in a multidecade long propaganda war against academia, one that began with William F Buckley in the 1950s. Within the university, powerful actors are superficially standing against the Trump regime’s attack, while implementing its agenda themselves (giving the lie to the absurd pre-supposition that universities are run by gender studies departments).The “war on woke” is the calling card of the global fascist right. Orbán’s attack on Central European University for “gender ideology” began his destruction of Hungarian democracy. Putin justified his full-scale invasion of Ukraine by appealing to the supposed dangers Ukraine’s liberal democracy poses for traditional gender roles. Americans should hold mainstream media’s Trump enablers responsible for Trump and his actions, and not let them pretend otherwise. As we witness the entire research apparatus of the US being taken down in the name of attacking DEI, trans rights and antisemitism, the mainstream media must halt its absurd fantasy that leftists control universities, and focus instead on the problem it has spent the last decade enabling – namely, fascism.

      Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Who are the eight new vaccine advisers appointed by Robert F Kennedy?

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, named eight new vaccine advisers this week to a critical Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel after firing all 17 experts who had held the roles.New members of the panel include experts who complained about being sidelined, a high-profile figure who has spread misinformation and medical professionals who appear to have little vaccine expertise. Kennedy made the announcement on social media.“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense,” Kennedy said in his announcement. “They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”Formally called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the panel advises the CDC on how vaccines should be distributed. Those recommendations in effect determine the vaccines Americans can access. This week, Kennedy also removed the career officials typically tasked with vetting ACIP members and overseeing the advisory group, according to CBS News.Kennedy is a widely known vaccine skeptic who profited from suing vaccine manufacturers, has taken increasingly dramatic steps to upend US vaccine policy.“ACIP is widely regarded as the international gold standard for vaccine decision-making,” said Helen Chu, one of the fired advisers, at a press conference with Patty Murray, a Democratic US senator.“We cannot replace it with a process driven by one person’s beliefs. In the absence of an independent, unbiased ACIP, we can no longer trust that safe and effective vaccines will be available to us and the people around us.”Robert W MaloneArguably the most high-profile new member, Robert W Malone catapulted to stardom during the Covid-19 pandemic, appearing across rightwing media to criticize the Biden administration while describing himself as the inventor of mRNA technology.Messenger RNA technology powers the most widely used Covid-19 vaccines. While Malone was involved in very early experiments on the technology, researchers have said his role was limited.Malone’s star rose quickly after appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2022, where he and Rogan were criticized for spreading misinformation. On the show, Malone promoted the idea that both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could be possible treatments for Covid-19, but said research on the drugs was being suppressed. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have not been shown to improve outcomes from Covid-19.“Malone has a well-documented history of promoting conspiracy theories,” said Dr Jeffrey D Klausner, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the University of Southern California, who recently told the New York Times he was in touch with Kennedy about his appointments.Martin KulldorffKulldorff is a former Harvard professor of biostatistics and an infectious disease epidemiologist originally from Sweden. He said in an essay for the rightwing publication City Journal that he was fired because he refused to be vaccinated in line with the school policy.Like Malone, he rose to prominence during the pandemic as a “Covid contrarian” who criticized the scientific consensus – views he said alienated him from his peers in the scientific community. He voiced his opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates and, in his essay, complained of being ignored by media and shadow-banned from Twitter.Kulldorff co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for limited closures instead of pandemic lockdowns before vaccines were available. The document became a touchstone for the American political right.Before the pandemic, Kulldorff studied vaccine safety and infectious disease, including co-authoring papers with members of CDC staff, such as on the Vaccine Safety Datalink. He was a member of the CDC’s Covid Vaccine Safety Working Group in 2020, but said later he was fired because he disagreed with the agency’s decision to pause Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine and with Covid-19 vaccine mandates. He served on the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) drug safety and risk management advisory committee around the same time.He has since enjoyed support from people already within the administration, including the Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr Jay Bhattacharya, current head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dr Vinay Prasad, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which handles vaccines.Cody MeissnerMeissner is a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He previously held advisory roles at the FDA and CDC, including ACIP from 2008-2012.In 2021, Meissner co-wrote an editorial with Dr Marty Makary, now the head of the FDA, which criticized mask mandates for children. In April, he was listed as an external adviser to ACIP on the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) committee.Notably, Meissner is listed in a new conflicts of interest tool launched by the health department in March. Kennedy had criticized the fired ACIP members as “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest”.“He’s a card-carrying infectious disease person who knows the burden of these diseases, and he knows the risk and the benefit,” Dr Kathryn Edwards told CBS News. Edwards previously served as chair of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel.Vicky PebsworthPebsworth is a nurse and the former consumer representative on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. She is also the Pacific regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses, according to Kennedy’s announcement.In 2020, Pebsworth spoke at the public comment portion of an FDA advisory panel meeting on Covid-19 vaccines. There, she identified herself as the volunteer research director for the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), “and the mother of a child injured by his 15-month well-baby shots in 1998”.The NVIC is widely viewed as an anti-vaccine advocacy organization “whose founder Barbara Lou Fisher must be considered a key figure of the anti-vaccine movement”, according to an article from 2023 on how to counter anti-vaccine misinformation.Retsef LeviLevi is a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management who Kennedy described as an “expert in healthcare analytics, risk management and vaccine safety”.In 2021, he opposed Covid-19 booster shot approval during the public comment portion of an FDA advisory committee hearing. In 2022, he wrote an article calling for EMS calls to be incorporated into vaccine safety data, arguing that cardiovascular side-effects could be undercounted – an article that later required correction. The potential effects of Covid-19 vaccines on heart health have been a focal point of right-leaning criticism.Last month, Levi was criticized for publishing a pre-print paper – a paper without peer review – that he co-authored with Dr Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, a vaccine skeptic. The paper alleged that people who took the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine were more likely to die than those who received the Moderna vaccine.Michael A RossKennedy described Ross as “a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a career spanning clinical medicine, research, and public health policy”.However, as first reported by CBS News, Ross’s name does not appear in faculty directories for either school. A spokesperson for George Washington University told the outlet that Ross did work as a clinical professor, but “has not held a faculty appointment … since 2017”.A spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University described Ross as “an affiliate faculty member” at a regional hospital system in the Capitol region.He is also listed as a partner at Havencrest Capital Management, as a board member of “multiple private healthcare companies”.Joseph R HibbelnHibbeln is a California-based psychiatrist who previously served as acting chief for the section of nutritional neurosciences at the NIH. He describes himself as an expert on omega-3, a fatty acid found in seafood.He also serves on the advisory council of a non-profit that advocates for Americans to eat more seafood. He practices at Barton Health, a hospital system in Lake Tahoe, California. His work influenced US public health guidelines on fish consumption during pregnancy.Dr James PaganoPagano is an emergency medicine physician from Los Angeles “with over 40 years of clinical experience”, and a “strong advocate for evidence-based medicine”, according to Kennedy. More

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      Trump’s insurrection routine: fuel violence, spawn chaos, shrug off the law | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump’s stages of insurrection have passed from trying to suppress one that didn’t exist, to creating one himself, to generating a local incident he falsely depicts as a national emergency. In every case, whether he inflates himself into the strongman putting down an insurrection or acts as the instigator-in-chief, his routine has been to foster violence, spawn chaos and show contempt for the law.In his first term, Trump reportedly asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump was agitated about protesters in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. On 1 June, Trump ordered the US Park police to clear the park. Some charged on horses into the crowd. Trump emerged after the teargas wafted away to walk through the park, ordering Milley to accompany him, and stood in front of St John’s Church on the other side to display a Bible upside down.Milley felt he had been badly used and exercised poor judgment in marching with Trump. “I should not have been there,” he said. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” A day later, the secretary of defense, Mark Esper, held a news conference to oppose publicly the use of the military for law enforcement and any invocation of the Insurrection Act. Trump was furious with Milley and Esper. He was determined to have a pliable military, generals and a secretary of defense to do his bidding, whatever it might be.Then, Trump staged an insurrection in a vain last attempt to prevent the ballots of the electoral college from being counted that would make Joe Biden the elected president. While Trump’s mob on 6 January chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” the vice-president hunkered down in the basement garage of the besieged Capitol, where he made the call for the national guard that Trump refused to give as he gleefully watched for hours on TV the followers he had organized and incited batter police and threaten the lives of members of the Congress.On the day of his inauguration to his second term, Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 insurrectionists convicted or charged in the 6 January attack. At least 600 were charged with assaulting or obstructing the police, at least 170 were charged with using a deadly weapon, and about 150 were charged with theft or destruction of government property. Trump granted commutations to 14 members of extremist militia groups convicted of or charged with seditious conspiracy to overthrow the US government.Now, Trump is toying with invoking the Insurrection Act to put down a supposed rebellion in Los Angeles. But his application of the act would be a belated attempt to cover his unlawful nationalization of the California national guard and deployment of marines to Los Angeles in response to a conflict that his administration has itself provoked.In late May, Stephen Miller, Trump’s fanatical deputy chief of staff in charge of his immigration policy, called a meeting of leaders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to berate them for failing to pile up the statistics he demanded of deported immigrants. Restraint and the law were to be cast aside in their new wave of raids, which hit a flashpoint in LA.“Federal agents make warrantless arrests,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “Masked agents take people into custody without identifying themselves. Plainclothes agents in at least a dozen cities have arrested migrants who showed up to their court hearings. And across the US, people suspected of being in the country illegally are disappearing into the federal detention system without notice to families or lawyers, according to attorneys, witnesses and officials.”Miller ordered Ice agents to target Home Depot, where construction workers, many of them immigrants, go to purchase materials. On 6 June, masked Ice agents swooped down on a store in LA, arresting more than 40 people. Meanwhile, Ice agents raided a garment factory of a company called Ambience Apparel and placed at least a dozen people in vans.Soon, there was a demonstration at the downtown federal building where they were detained. Several Waymo robotaxis were burned within a four-block area near the relatively sparsely populated downtown. But the LAPD appeared to have the situation quickly under control, until Trump unilaterally federalized the national guard, whose presence prompted further demonstrations. One contingent of soldiers was sent to guard the federal building miles away in Westwood, an upscale neighborhood by the UCLA campus, where they were nuisances to people going shopping and to restaurants. Trump declared he would send in 700 marines.On 10 June, the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, filed a complaint on behalf of the state seeking a restraining order in federal court against Trump and the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. “To put it bluntly,” it stated, “there is no invasion or rebellion in Los Angeles; there is civil unrest that is no different from episodes that regularly occur in communities throughout the country, and that is capable of being contained by state and local authorities working together.”“All of this was unlawful,” wrote Bonta of the administration’s actions. Trump’s use of the guard was in violation of the law that requires an order to be issued through the governor. Trump’s deployment of marines was “likewise unlawful”, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the US armed forces for civilian law enforcement. “These unlawful deployments have already proven to be a deeply inflammatory and unnecessary provocation, anathema to our laws limiting the use federal forces for law enforcement, rather than a means of restoring calm.”Ironically, the Posse Comitatus Act was instrumental in the demise of Reconstruction. US troops stationed in the south after the civil war were forbidden from enforcing the law to protect Black civil rights. The Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations seized control of state governments, disenfranchised Black people and imposed Jim Crow segregation. In 1957, Dwight Eisenhower, then president, circumvented the Posse Comitatus Act by invoking the Insurrection Act; he used federal forces to implement the supreme court’s desegregation ruling in Brown v Board of Education to integrate Little Rock Central high school.As a further irony, Trump had been indicted by the special prosecutor Jack Smith under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 for his actions leading to the January 6 insurrection. Count four read: “From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States – that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”Trump evaded justice through a series of delaying actions by the conservative majority of the supreme court that culminated in its ruling for “absolute” presidential immunity for “official acts”. He was allowed to run out the clock and never held to account. If Trump’s trial had proceeded on the original charges as scheduled on 6 March 2024, he would have undoubtedly found guilty and eliminated as a presidential candidate.On 10 June, Trump appeared before soldiers at Fort Liberty in North Carolina in anticipation of the Washington military parade he ordered for 14 June, opportunistically using the 250th anniversary of the US army (really the continental army) to celebrate his 79th birthday, “a big day,” he said. “We want to show off a bit.”Soldiers of the 82nd airborne division were screened for attendance at Trump’s rally based on their political support and physical appearance. “If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” read a note sent by the command, according to Military.com. “No fat soldiers,” said one message.A pop-up store for 365 Campaign of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which sells Trump merchandise, was set up on the base for the Trump visit. Aside from the usual Maga gear, it sells T-shirts reading: “When I Die Don’t Let Me Vote Democrat”, “I’m Voting for the Convicted Felon”, and a false credit card that reads, “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything”. Send in the marines, but first send them to the Maga merch store.In violation of longstanding military policy on discipline, the selected troops cheered Trump’s sneers and jeers. He announced he had renamed the fort to Fort Bragg, in honor of Braxton Bragg, a confederate general and large slaveowner notable for his defeats and bad temper and disliked by his officers. “Can you believe they changed that name in the last administration for a little bit?” he said.He told the troops that they were to fight a war within the US against “a foreign enemy”, “defending our republic itself”, in California, where there was “a full-blown assault on peace, on public order and on national sovereignty carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion of our country”.Trump spontaneously invented a conspiracy theory on the spot. “The best money can buy, somebody is financing it,” he claimed, “and we’re going to find out through Pam Bondi and Department of Justice, who it is.”He complained to the soldiers that the election of 2020 was “rigged and stolen”. Then, he swiveled to talk about George Washington: “Has anybody heard of him?” Then, he attacked Biden, “never the sharpest bulb”, or perhaps the brightest knife. Twice, Trump said he would “liberate” Los Angeles, and promised that after that the Republican Congress would pass his “big, beautiful bill”, his budget stalled in the Senate. “They call it one big, beautiful bill. So, that’s good and that’s what it is.” And then he rambled about the JD Vance-Tim Walz vice-presidential debate, and how some “ladies”, “beautiful, wonderful women”, followed him to “138 rallies”, and on. Along the way, he praised his new chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Daniel Caine, who Trump insists on calling “Razin Caine”.The next day, 11 June, Caine appeared before the Senate appropriations committee, and was questioned by Hawaii’s Democratic senator, Brian Schatz, whether the events in LA show the US is “being invaded by a foreign nation”. “At this point in time,” replied the general, “I don’t see any foreign, state-sponsored folks invading.”As Caine was testifying, the Department of Homeland Security posted a cartoon of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign: “Help Your Country…And Yourself…” Then, in capital letters: “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” Which was followed by the telephone number for Ice.

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of The Court of History podcast More

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      Has Trump turned the US into a police state? – podcast

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      Trump keeps national guards in LA for now as appeals court puts brakes on ban

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      An appeals court has temporarily returned control of California’s national guard to Donald Trump, just hours after a federal judge ruled the president’s use of the guards to suppress protests in Los Angeles was illegal and banned it.The 9th US Circuit court of appeals order means Trump retains command of the guards for now and can continue to use them to respond to protests against his immigration crackdown. The court could later decide against his control.It’s a temporary victory for Trump in back-and-forth court decisions on who should control the security force, an issue that has pitted California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the president and angered Democrats, who see the deployment as an abuse of power.The three-judge panel that paused the ruling included two judges appointed by Trump in his first term. The other is a judge appointed by Joe Biden. The panel said it would hold a hearing on Tuesday to consider the merits of the order from District Judge Charles Breyer from earlier in the day.Breyer ruled the Guard deployment was illegal and both violated the 10th amendment and exceeded Trump’s statutory authority. The order applied only to the National Guard troops and not Marines who were also deployed to the LA protests. The judge said he would not rule on the Marines because they were not out on the streets yet.In issuing a temporary restraining order against Trump, Breyer found the president had failed to show there was a “rebellion” in Los Angeles that required him to federalize the guard and failed to comply with the procedural steps to notify the governor.“His actions were illegal – both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States constitution. He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor,” Breyer wrote.The request for the injunction is part of a lawsuit filed by the state of California challenging Trump’s move to call up more than 4,000 national guard troops and about 700 active-duty marines based in Twentynine Palms, California, over Newsom’s objections.Beryer’s decision came after a hearing in federal district court in San Francisco where the justice department argued Trump had the sole and unreviewable power to decide whether there was a “rebellion” that needed federal intervention.Breyer rejected both arguments in his sweeping 36-page opinion, effectively rebuking the justice department for trying to suggest the conditions to take control of the guard had been met as long as Trump had decided himself that was the case.“The president’s discretion in what to do next does not mean that the president can unilaterally and without judicial review declare that a vacancy exists in order to fill it. That is classic ipse dixit,” Breyer wrote, adding that the definition of rebellion had clearly not been met.The temporary restraining order did not touch on Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, moving to deploy the marines, in large part because the justice department told the judge they were only being used to protect federal buildings and personnel.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUsing the military for protective purposes, Breyer suggested at the hearing, would not be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th-century law prohibiting the use of troops to engage in law enforcement activities on domestic soil.Trump has been suggesting the idea of deploying troops against Americans since his first term, when some Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 turned violent. He opted against doing so at the time, but has since expressed regret to advisers that he did not punish them more aggressively.Notably, during a campaign rally in 2023, Trump vowed to respond more forcefully if elected to a second term. “You’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in,” he said of the president’s usual role in deciding whether to send in the military. “The next time, I’m not waiting.”The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Democrats rage after Secret Service, FBI shove and handcuff senator

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      Democrats have criticized the forcible removal of a senator who posed a question on Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown at a news conference as “violent”, “horrifying” and “a stunning abuse of power”.Secret Service and FBI officers grabbed, shoved and pushed to the ground Democratic senator Alex Padilla before handcuffing him after he showed up and asked a question at the conference held by the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem.Tensions have flared for days between Democrats and the Trump administration over the president’s use of the national guard and marines to quell protests against the administration’s anti-immigration program in Los Angeles. A court decision temporarily banned Trump’s control of California’s national guard, only for an appeals court to pause the ban and restore his power – for now.“If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question … you can only imagine what they’re doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers, throughout the LA community and throughout California and throughout the country,” Padilla said after the incident.Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic national committee, said the incident “sent a violent message to all of America: If you dissent against Donald Trump and openly disagree with the government, then you are not safe in our country”, adding the incident was “straight out of an authoritarian playbook”.Kamala Harris, who formerly held Padilla’s seat, called it “a shameful and stunning abuse of power”, while senator Cory Booker said it was “a violent act”, adding “there can be no justification of seeing a senator forced to their knees, lay flat on the ground, their hands twisted behind their back and being put into restraints”.Homeland security accuses Padilla of ‘political theater’In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the senator “chose disrespectful political theater” and disrupted a live news conference. They falsely claimed that Padilla had failed to identify himself and believed he was an attacker when he “lunged toward” Noem as she delivered remarks.In video taken of the incident that has since gone viral on social media, Padilla is seen being restrained and removed from the room by the agents, saying, “I’m Senator Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary.” He shouts, as he struggles to move past against the men pushing him back toward the exit.Read the full story9th US Circuit court of appeal pauses earlier ban on Trump’s control of California’a national guardThe 9th US Circuit court of appeals temporarily returned control of California’s national guard to Trump, just hours after a federal judge ruled the president’s use of the guards to suppress protests in Los Angeles was illegal and banned it. The decision is not final and the court could later decide against his control.It’s a temporary victory for Trump, nonetheless, in back-and-forth court decisions on who should control the security force, an issue that has pitted California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the president and angered Democrats, who see the deployment as an abuse of power.Read the full storyTroops sent to LA by Trump deeply troubled by deployment California national guards and Marines deployed to Los Angeles to help restore order after days of protest against the Trump administration have told friends and family members they are deeply unhappy about the assignment and worry their only meaningful role will be as pawns in a political battle they do not want to join.“The sentiment across the board right now is that deploying military force against our own communities isn’t the kind of national security we signed up for,” said Sarah Streyder of the Secure Families Initiative, which represents the interests of military spouses, children and veterans.Read the full storyTrump’s a ‘stone cold liar’, says Newsom as protests continue Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, has called Trump a “stone cold liar”, condemned the federal deployment of troops in Los Angeles as “theater” and “madness”, and even questioned the president’s mental fitness, as protests over immigration raids in the city continue.Read the full storyUS rights groups warn of Republican effort to undercut LA advocacy workImmigration and civil rights organizations across the US are warning of a growing effort to undermine their advocacy work as rightwing lawmakers accuse them of fueling the demonstrations against federal raids in California.Advocacy groups voiced alarm on Thursday after Josh Hawley, a Republican US senator from Missouri, threatened multiple immigration and civil rights groups with investigations over claims that they are “bankrolling civil unrest” in Los Angeles.Read the full storyHouse votes to claw back $9.4bn in spending including from NPR and PBSThe House narrowly voted on Thursday to cut about $9.4bn in spending already approved by Congress as the Trump administration looks to follow through on work by the so-called “department of government efficiency” when it was overseen by Elon Musk.Read the full storyHegseth suggests Pentagon has prepared plans to invade Greenland and PanamaUS defense secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to acknowledge that the Pentagon had contingency plans to take Greenland and Panama by force if necessary during a congressional hearing on Thursday. When repeatedly asked by representative Adam Smith if invading the two countries was a policy of the defence department, Hegseth replied: “Our job at the defense department is to have plans for any contingency”Watch the full videoWhat else happened today:

      A judge released a Russian-born scientist and Harvard University researcher charged with smuggling frog embryos into the US on Thursday, freeing her on bail after a brief hearing.

      Donald Trump has blocked California’s first-in-the-nation rule banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035, signing a resolution on Thursday to stymie the state’s ambitious attempt to tackle the climate crisis by pivoting to greener vehicles.

      The US justice department said on Thursday that it had filed a lawsuit against New York state, challenging state policies that blocked immigration officials from arresting individuals at or near New York courthouses.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 11 June More

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      Democrats vying for mayor of New York City clash in second and final debate

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      Seven Democratic candidates vying to become New York City’s next mayor clashed on Thursday night in the second and final debate before the June primary.The two-hour debate quickly turned combative with the frontrunners, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and democratic socialist assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, sparring over their records and qualifications.Cuomo, 67, who is attempting a political comeback after resigning from his role as governor in 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations, dismissed 33-year-old Mamdani as unprepared and too inexperienced for the role of New York City mayor.“I think inexperience is dangerous,” Cuomo said, before running through a list of political institutions that he claimed Mamdani had never dealt with.“He’s never built anything,” Cuomo continued. “He’s never dealt with a natural emergency. He’s never dealt with a hurricane, with a flood, etc. He’s never done any of the essentials. And now you have Donald Trump on top of all of that.”Mamdani fired back: “To Mr Cuomo, I have never had to resign in disgrace, I have never cut Medicaid, I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA, I have never hounded the 13 women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment, I have never sued for their gynecological records, and I have never done those things because I am not you, Mr Cuomo.”Mamdani also criticized Cuomo for repeatedly mispronouncing his name: “The name is Mamdani. You should learn how to say it.”Cuomo continued his attacks, calling Mamdani “a man who has done nothing”.Mamdani defended his record as an assemblymember, citing work and organizing he did to help New York City taxi drivers. Mamdani, who said it was “time for a new generation of leadership”, urged New Yorkers to judge him by the campaign he’s running, where he manages 36,000 volunteers.He promised to bring “innovation and competence” to city hall and hire “the best and the brightest”.In addition to Cuomo and Mamdani, five other candidates were on the stage: the city comptroller, Brad Lander; the council speaker, Adrienne Adams; the state senator Zellnor Myrie; the former comptroller Scott Stringer; and the former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson.The debate opened with moderators asking the candidates about the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles and the administration’s response to the protests against the immigration crackdown.“If you were mayor of New York right now, how would you handle this situation, if something like that happened here?” the moderators asked.“We are going to protect our immigrants,” Cuomo said. “This is a sanctuary city, and we are going to defend the laws of the sanctuary city.”“Donald Trump only picks fights that he can win. He cannot win a fight with me as mayor of New York,” Cuomo added.Mamdani pledged to block any New York City police department cooperation with federal immigration agents if elected, and vowed to provide and fund legal support for immigrants facing deportation cases.Other candidates, such as Adrienne Adams, said they would sue the federal government.Cuomo faced sustained criticism throughout the night. Lander, the city comptroller, repeatedly challenged Cuomo’s record.Early in the debate, Lander pressed Cuomo on his use of the term “illegal immigrants”, prompting Cuomo to switch to “undocumented”. Throughout the debate, Lander accused Cuomo of failing to take accountability for things that had occurred while he was governor.“I lead by building the best teams, not through sexual harassment, corruption and disgrace,” Lander said.Cuomo was asked about the sexual harassment allegations against him that led to his 2021 resignation. Cuomo called them “political” and urged voters to “look at the facts”.Lander responded by saying that if Cuomo were elected mayor, he would not tell college students to work in city government, and that he would have to tell them: “Don’t go work at city hall because the mayor is a sexual harasser.”Cuomo hit back, saying that Lander was telling lies.On housing, all of the candidates said that they would want to build more housing in New York City. Cuomo and Tilson were the only candidates on the stage who did not support a rent freeze for rent-stabilized units for this year.On public safety, Myrie said the issue called for subway teams made up of both police and mental health experts, and said that he would institute 50,000 more summer youth jobs and after-school programs.Tilson attacked Mamdani, arguing that he had “demonized” the police.In response, Mamdani said that if elected he would “not defund the police” and said that he would “work with the police because I believe the police have a critical role to play in creating public safety”. He also called for mental health and social workers to help the police respond to emergency calls.Moderators pressed Cuomo on why, during “10-plus years as governor”, he had not made a “public visit to a mosque” and asked him what he would say “to more than 760,000 Muslims here in the city about whether or not you would reach out to them, make them feel welcome, make them feel protected?”In response, Cuomo said that he believed he had visited a mosque and added: “I would say, we are a city of immigrants, I welcome them, I love them.”Mamdani was also asked to address concerns from Jewish New Yorkers supportive of Israel who “fear for their safety in this current political climate”.Mamdani responded: “I hear them and that I have heard them over the course of this campaign and before that”, adding: “I will protect Jewish New Yorkers and deliver them that safety.”Mamdani received criticism from Cuomo and Tilson over his criticisms of Israel.Tensions also escalated when Mamdani, who is Muslim, accused Cuomo’s Super Pac of altering a photo on a leaked draft campaign flyer to make his beard look darker, longer and thicker. Mamdani first made the accusation earlier on Thursday on Instagram, calling it “blatant Islamophobia”.Unlike the previous week’s debate, which was held without an audience, Thursday’s event had a live crowd that reacted audibly throughout with clapping, cheering, booing and laughter.The final debate on Thursday came after several major recent endorsements. The New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threw her support behind Mamdani after last week’s debate, while the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Cuomo this week.New polling released this week underscores just how tight the race has become.The Democratic primary election will be held on 24 June, with early voting beginning 10 days earlier, on 14 June. The election will use ranked-choice voting, allowing New Yorkers to rank up to five candidates in order of preference.The current New York mayor, Eric Adams, who ran as a Democrat in 2021, is seeking re-election as an independent candidate.The general mayoral election is set for 4 November. More