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      How Trump and corporations have hobbled US labor watchdog

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      Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the Biden administration, was one of the first officials to be fired by Donald Trump once he took office in January. She wasn’t the last.Since then, Trump has fired a slew of government officials, including the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chair, Gwynne Wilcox, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, and most recently, he has attempted to fire the Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.Abruzzo served at the agency for nearly 30 years before Trump fired her in January 2025, a move recommended in Project 2025. Now she is warning that the attacks on the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to return workers’ rights to levels unseen since 1935 and empower corporations to run roughshod over the agency.“My fear is that if this continues, where corporations and corporate billionaire donors have an outsized voice and directly influence our democracy, we’re going to find ourselves living in an environment such as what we lived in before 1935 when the National Labor Relations Act was enacted,” said Abruzzo. “Working families will be dealing with lower wages, substandard working conditions, and no real channels for them to fight back.”In May, the supreme court declined to reinstate Wilcox while she challenges Trump’s decision to terminate her without cause. A lower court will now have to rule on the issue, with the supreme court likely to follow on appeal. In the meantime, the agency’s powers have been effectively blocked and, Abruzzo worries, worse may be to come.The move was seen by opponents as a challenge to a landmark 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v United States, that ruled Congress can limit the president’s power to remove officials from independent administrative agencies.Abruzzo worries that Wilcox’s firing could pave the way for the National Labor Relations Act, enacted in 1935 to federally protect workers’ rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining, to be repealed entirely.“If the supreme court majority eliminates or limits the reach of Humphrey’s Executor and allows the president to fire decision-making officials in the executive branch, including at the NLRB, at his whim, then I anticipate the next step will be figuring out whether or not, if they are found unconstitutional, those provisions should be severed, or the whole [NLRA] act could conceivably be repealed,” Abruzzo said.In the meantime, Abruzzo argues, the NLRB has been rendered toothless.“It’s going to take years to sort out, the agency’s going to be completely ineffective in enforcing the statute, and working families are going to continue to suffer and not be able to get any redress for the violations of their rights. It’s why I think states need to step in and protect their citizenry.”Major corporations are already making ground against the agency after the ruling. On 19 August, the US court of appeals fifth circuit ruled preliminary injunctions halting unfair labor practice cases against Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two other employers can remain in place as the employers’ challenge the constitutionality of the NLRB.The NLRB declined to comment. SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment.“I think we’re going to see a flood of employers forum shopping and flocking into district courts in the fifth circuit area seeking to get preliminary injunctions preventing the NLRB cases that frankly are seeking to hold corporations accountable for their law breaking from moving forward, and that’s going to put an end to the NLRB being able to enforce the act in any meaningful way,” said Abruzzo. “This is all about elevating corporate interests above workers’ rights.”The firings have also left the NLRB without a quorum throughout most of the Trump administration, rendering it unable to issue decisions on cases.In January 2025, after Trump fired Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as chair of the NLRB board. Trump nominated two members to the board. They are awaiting a vote in the Senate for confirmation, while the term of one of two remaining board members, Marvin Kaplan, expired on 27 August.The agency has also proposed a 4.7% budget cut of $14m for fiscal year 2026, after noting the agency expects to lose nearly 10% of its staff to voluntary resignation and early retirements.The acting general counsel of the NLRB argued earlier this month that the board “has largely been unaffected” by the lack of quorum. But since Trump took office, the NLRB has only issued six decisions compared with fiscal year 2024, when the board issued 259 decisions.“Unless an employer is willing to go along with what the board says, the employer can stall a case indefinitely right now,” said Lauren McFerran, who served as chair of the NLRB during the Biden administration and as a board member from December 2014 to December 2019 and again in July 2020 to January 2021.“So whether it’s a [union] election case, whether it’s an unfair labor practice case, the minute the employer says that they’re not willing to go along and that they want to raise an objection to the board, you’re stuck for the foreseeable future at this point,” added McFerran.Abruzzo argues the firing of Wilcox by Trump, if allowed to stand by the courts, would eliminate the independence of the NLRB in favor of corporations. It’s up to the public to push back on these trends of stripping away protections for workers at the behest of wealthy, powerful corporations and billionaires like Musk, she said.“There is strength in numbers, and we all need to remember we matter. We make an impact on each other’s lives each and every day, and we can’t let the voice of corporate billionaires drown out our voices or squelch our actions and our spirit,” said Abruzzo.“We’re not powerless, and we have the power to demand changes to the way we’re governed, to the way we live our lives. That includes taking to the streets, frankly, and protesting over inadequate wages and working conditions and over economic, social and racial injustice. We need to do more in amplifying our voices, to make sure we’re heard and that actions are taken that are going to benefit us, because that’s, in my opinion, how the tactic of divide and conquer is going to be vanquished.” More

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      ‘He’s trying to rig the midterms’: Trump intervenes to protect his allies in Congress

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      They are more than a year away – a lifetime in today’s fast and furious political cycle. But one man is already paying attention, pulling the levers of power and trying to tip the scales of the 2026 midterm elections.Donald Trump has made clear that he is willing to bring the full weight of the White House to bear to prevent his Republican party losing control of the US Congress in the midterm elections next year, orchestrating a more direct and legally dubious intervention than any of his predecessors.The US president’s multipronged approach includes redrawing congressional district maps, seeking to purge voter rolls, taking aim at mail-in voting and voting machines, and ordering the justice department to investigate Democrats’ prime fundraising tool.“Nobody’s ever tried to do this,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “Most American presidents, Democratic or Republican, have basically played by the same rules and been careful of the constitution. But in his business career Trump never cared about whether he was doing something legal or not; he just went to court and same thing here.”Campaigning, not governing, has often been Trump’s comfort zone. He is constitutionally barred from running for president again but already has an eye on the November 2026 elections that will determine control of the House of Representatives and Senate.He senses that law and order, a populist cause long exploited by Republicans, could play to his advantage. Earlier this month Trump deployed the national guard to reduce crime in Washington DC and threatened similar federal interventions in other big cities. Fifty-three per cent of the public approve of how he is handling crime, according to an AP-NORC poll, higher than other issues.Trump told a cabinet meeting this week: “I think crime will be the big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election. I think it’s going to be a big, big subject for the midterms and I think the Republicans are going to do really well.”But this is no ordinary campaign. Trump said at the same marathon meeting: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”Taking a familiar political manoeuvre to new extremes, he has pushed Republican state legislators in Texas to redraw their congressional map because he claims “we are entitled to five more seats”, and he is lobbying other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to take similar steps to pad the margin even more.Other steps involve the direct use of official presidential power in ways that have no modern precedent. He ordered his justice department to investigate ActBlue, an online portal that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in small-dollar donations for Democratic candidates over two decades.The site has been so successful that Republicans launched a similar venture, called WinRed. But Trump did not order a federal investigation into WinRed.Trump’s appointees at the justice department have also demanded voting data from at least 19 states in an apparent attempt to look for ineligible voters. Earlier this year he signed an executive order seeking documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other changes, though much of it has been blocked by courts.Last week the president announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to end mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly one in three Americans, and threatened to do away with voting machines. He claimed that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told him mail-in voting was responsible for his 2020 election loss.There is nothing remarkable about a sitting president campaigning for his party in the midterms and trying to bolster incumbents by steering projects and support to their districts. But Trump’s actions constitute a unique attempt to interfere in a critical election before it is even held, raising alarms about the future of democracy.Allan Lichtman, a distinguished history professor at American University in Washington, said: “We’re seeing a new concerted assault on free and fair elections, harkening back to the discredited efforts of the white supremacists in the Jim Crow south. He’s trying to rig the midterms and then of course beyond that the next presidential election in his political favour.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump previously attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in an insurrection by his supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. On that occasion, he was constrained by elected Republicans such as his then vice-president, Mike Pence, and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. This time he has locked down near-total loyalty from the party and assembled a cabinet that again this week offered an ostentatious display of fealty.His power grab will not go entirely unchallenged. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, signed legislation that will allow voters to decide in November on a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more House seats next year, neutralising Republicans’ gerrymandering in Texas.But Democrats, activists and lawyers will have to find others ways to “fight fire with fire” when it comes to Trump’s more extreme meddling.Lichtman, author of a new book, Conservative at the Core, added: “Republicans have no principles; Democrats have no spine. Democrats need to grow a spine. They need to stop playing not to lose – that’s a sure way to lose. They need to respond to these outrages powerfully and aggressively by whatever means are possible or we’re going to lose our democracy.”Yet while Trump’s gambit is a flex of executive power, it could also be seen as an admission of potential weakness. The incumbent president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections. In 2018, Democrats won enough to take back the House, stymieing Trump’s agenda and leading to his impeachment.Only 37% of voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on Wednesday, while 55% disapprove. House Republicans, who currently have just a three-seat margin, have faced a series of raucous town halls that bode ill for their fortunes.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “President Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to stack the deck if they didn’t think they were going to lose the hand. They are looking at poll numbers and they know midterms are bad to incumbent presidents over the last 60 years and it’s a very slim margin in the House.“In order for Trump to sustain the loyalty of the House – he’s already gotten everything he pretty much wants – he needs them to think he’s on their side so he’s going to go out and be very public about rigging the voting system to keep them in power.”But Schiller added: “Will that be enough to overcome general unhappiness at the moment that the voters seem to have with the economy, inflation, even Trump’s border policies? It’s not enough to keep the Republicans in line. You have to get independent voters to vote for you again and that’s at risk for the Republicans right now.” More

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      Florida crosswalk wars take DeSantis’s ‘war on woke’ to street level

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      A battalion of transportation workers armed with cans of black paint has been deployed to open a new front in Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”, while young students trying to make their schools safer have joined the LGBTQ+ community as targets of Florida’s Republican governor.The saga began with the state moving in the dead of night to paint over a rainbow-colored crosswalk outside Orlando’s former Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed in a 2016 shooting. The city’s mayor, Buddy Dyer, called the erasure of the memorial to the mostly LGBTQ+ victims “a cruel political act”.Since then, DeSantis’s crosswalk wars have spread across Florida. The governor has ordered the removal of about 400 “non-standard” pieces of street art, even though they all received state approval as a condition of installation. A growing number of municipalities has pledged to fight him.The state’s declared intent, acquiescent to a national directive by the Trump administration last month, is to “keep our transportation facilities free and clear of political ideologies”, Florida’s transport secretary, Jared Perdue, wrote in a post to X.Perdue has also said painted roadways are a safety hazard, despite research showing improved driver behavior and a “significantly improved safety performance” at sites that have art installations.The purge, which has targeted more than just rainbow crosswalks and other street symbols of LGBTQ+ pride street decorations, has reverberated in cities from Tallahassee to Key West.Several municipalities, under threat of losing state funding, have complied. Those include Port St Lucie, which removed hearts painted on a roadway as a memorial to a teenager who died of a heart condition, and Daytona Beach, which painted over checkered flag crosswalks at the city’s famous international speedway.More than a dozen schools in Tampa were also snared, and will lose vibrant asphalt artwork designed by students installed as part of the city’s award-winning Crosswalks to Classrooms program. Florida’s department of transportation (FDOT) recognized it as a gold standard of road safety only four years ago.“The innovative and collaborative efforts to combine public art and engineering treatments to improve school safety was truly inspiring,” a department official said at the time.In Orlando, bicycle lanes painted in May at an elementary school, designed by fourth-graders who won a FDOT art contest, must also go.DeSantis, at a press conference in Tampa, was unrepentant. He suggested students use his street art directive outlawing “social, political or ideological messages” as a civics lesson.“What I would tell kids is we have a representative system of government. People elect their representatives. They’re able to enact the legislation with the governor’s signature and then when that happens, obviously people will conform their conduct accordingly,” he said.Other cities are digging in their heels, setting up a likely legal fight with the DeSantis administration. A special meeting of the Fort Lauderdale commission on Wednesday voted to file an administrative appeal against a removal order on four pieces of pride-themed street art in the city, including a large rainbow flag.“Tonight, we must stand our ground. We cannot allow ourselves to be bullied into submission and to allow others to dictate what we should do in our own communities,” Dean Trantalis, the mayor of Fort Lauderdale, said. Trantalis has previously called the governor’s crosswalk directive an act of “irrational vengeance” on the LGBTQ+ community.Commissioners also voted to hire the same firm of outside attorneys contracted by officials in Key West and Miami Beach, two other cities known for inclusivity, to help in the legal fight. Delray Beach commissioners voted earlier this month to defy the state and retain its giant pride streetscape. An administrative hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.View image in fullscreenAnna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative for Orlando, noted DeSantis’s long history of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation – including the “don’t say gay” bill and efforts to ban or restrict gender-affirming healthcare – and saw deeper menace in the crosswalk orders.“It’s not just, ‘I despise queer people,’ which is clearly a part of the MO here, it’s bigger than that,” she said.“It’s trying to control what local governments can and can’t do and an effort to essentially target, harass, bully and potentially even eliminate them. Overwhelmingly, cities that have these crosswalks do not support DeSantis and didn’t vote for him. These are the same municipalities that are now getting Doge, the same municipalities where DeSantis is trying to take away property taxes, which means no revenue and the consolidation and elimination of local governments.“It’s worth connecting the dots. It’s not as simplistic as another culture war on LGBTQ+ people.”Charlie Crist, the former Republican Florida governor who switched parties to become a Democratic congressman, and challenged DeSantis for governor in 2022, said it was an “absurd and embarrassing” effort to silence residents.“It’s hard to understand. We have a right to free speech in this country, and these murals in our cities and our communities reflect the values of those communities and cities,” he said.“The notion that the state government would want to suppress that right of free speech is bizarre.”Crist said he also saw the move as an extension of DeSantis’s targeting of minority groups: “It’s hard to draw a different conclusion, frankly, and I don’t understand it. I believe in the golden rule to do unto others as you would have done unto you, and I don’t think DeSantis knows what that is. It’s disappointing.”Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, predicted the push to remove pride street art would backfire.“DeSantis may paint over rainbows and art, but people are answering with defiance, chalking sidewalks, raising flags, covering cars with stickers, and businesses painting their parking lots with rainbows. These acts declare we are not intimidated and we will not be erased,” she said in a statement.“This isn’t about safety. It’s a cowardly abuse of power and the latest in his campaign to ban books, whitewash history, and attack LGBTQ people. Cities must push back to protect the values that make them welcoming places to live, work, and visit.” More

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      Has Trump succeeded in normalising American autocracy?

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      When it comes to the rise of autocracy in America, Justice Potter Stewart’s famous pronouncement on pornography might be particularly appropriate at the moment: “I know it when I see it.”The cult of personality was apparent as Donald Trump’s cabinet convened on Wednesday in a marathon session that could have embarrassed even a seasoned strongman, providing for three hours and 17 minutes of fawning television coverage.There was Steve Witkoff, the president’s top envoy and negotiator, standing up in the increasingly gilded Cabinet Room, offering praise that could have made even Vladimir Putin blush. “There’s only one thing I wish for – that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about,” he said to applause from secretaries of state, defense and other top cabinet officials.Or was it Stephen Miller on Fox News in effect criminalising the opposition to Trump and calling Chicago a “killing field” despite controverting facts. “The Democrat party is not a political party, it is a domestic extremist organisation,” he said in a strident tone, claiming that the party was devoted “exclusively to the defence of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists”.Was it the president calling, on social media, for the arrest of a wealthy financier and his son for their support for civil society? “George Soros, and his wonderful Radical Left son, should be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America,” he wrote on Truth Social.Or perhaps it was the revocation of Secret Service protection for his electoral rival Kamala Harris, or the FBI raid on the home of John Bolton, his former national security adviser, who has become an outspoken critic of the president’s national security agenda. Or was it in the commonplace nature of a raid outside an elementary school in Mt Pleasant in Washington DC, where police staked out a school with a large Spanish-speaking population in what became just another immigration raid in America.Some activists and observers have sounded the alarm: authoritarianism of the kind that Americans are used to condemning abroad has become increasingly normal in the United States.Don Moynihan, a political scientist and professor at the University of Michigan, wrote this week that “today, America is a competitive authoritarian system, with a rapidly increasing emphasis on the authoritarian part.”The checklist to consolidate power, he wrote, includes efforts to control the government bureaucracy, the military, internal security, the legal system, civil society, higher education, the media and elections. The pursuit of those aims had been “systematic”, he wrote.Abdelrahman ElGendy has watched this process with a feeling of grim recognition. ElGendy spent six years in prison in his native Egypt on political charges, but fled to the US in order to work on a memoir he is set to release next year.In April, however, he packed his things and left the US following the detention of the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. ElGendy’s lawyers warned him that he could face a similar fate after his personal details were posted on a website used to target opponents of Israel’s war in Gaza.Since then, he has watched from abroad as the situation has worsened.“I haven’t second-guessed leaving the US. In fact I feel very grateful that I made the choice that I did before things got even worse,” he said. “I left Egypt to escape political persecution … The reason I left the US is because I started to recognize those same patterns forming around me. And since leaving it’s only gone downhill.”View image in fullscreenWhen Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) began carrying out large-scale raids and he was identified online as a potential target, he said he found himself once again waiting to be taken away at any moment.“I don’t think political incarceration is the most important characteristic of authoritarianism, it’s more the constant threat of it that matters most,” he said. “What really sustains authoritarianism is that quiet knowledge that the prison door is always within reach … that shadow is what shapes behavior.”From Russia to Turkey, and Hungary to El Salvador, activists, observers and political scientists have watched the quick consolidation of power by the Trump administration as it has followed a familiar pattern of autocratic rollout.Washington has found common cause with some of the world’s harshest authoritarian regimes such Russia and El Salvador. This week, the US deported nearly 50 Russians, according to activists, including some who probably requested political asylum in the United States. Hundreds of migrants and even citizens have been deported to prisons in El Salvador.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Sometimes I almost feel it’s like ‘I told you so,’” said Noah Bullock, the chief executive of Cristosal, a leading human rights group in El Salvador which was forced to leave the country last month after 25 years of documenting abuses of power.“With the Ice crackdown and the creation of this massive law enforcement agency that only obeys the president – there are no good historical references where that works out well.”“One of the things that I see happening that hits me really close is when these security or police forces begin to look at the whole population as enemies,” he added, comparing it to El Salvador where they had been “trained to see the population as a threat”.The winner-take-all dynamics of the Trump administration, which has claimed a historic mandate despite winning among the thinnest majorities in a generation, have made this a particularly fraught moment. Along with the federal takeover of police forces, the other commonly cited danger is the Republican gerrymandering effort in Texas and resulting fightback in California, as well as other efforts to diminish voter turnout ahead of the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections.Some activists insist it is not too late to turn back. Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, and Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, wrote this week that “We Can Stop the Rise of American Autocracy”.Citing Hungary and Venezuela as examples, they wrote that “we cannot be lulled into believing that this is like anything we’ve seen before and can therefore be solved by simply waiting for the midterm elections. The antidote to Trump’s American breed of autocracy is understanding the severity of the threat at hand.”But others see the trend toward authoritarianism as merely an acceleration of the direction of US politics even before Trump.“That assumes that the United States was a functioning healthy democracy that slipped … and that’s just not the case in my opinion,” said ElGendy.“When a democracy is designed with this capacity for authoritarianism you’re never more than one election away from its reappearance. That’s not an accident, that’s a design flaw.” More

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      Trump’s anti-press tactics are bad enough in the US. Now Reform is importing them to the Midlands | Jon Allsop

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      On the day that he returned to office in January, Donald Trump signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. A few days later, the Associated Press, a leading global news agency that is also a linguistic bible for newsrooms across the US, said that while it would acknowledge Trump’s order, it would mostly continue to use the original name. In response, the White House banned AP journalists from certain media availabilities. Trump accused the agency of failing to follow the law. The AP said the government was trying to dictate what words it can and cannot use.This week, Nottinghamshire’s Reform-led county council said that it would impose a sweeping ban on the Nottingham Post, its affiliated website and BBC-funded reporters who work there. At issue, apparently, was a story that the paper had written about a proposed reorganisation of local government. The leader of the council insisted that he welcomes scrutiny, but has a “duty” to combat “misinformation”. The Post’s editor called the decision “a massive attack on local democracy” – and it’s hard to disagree.The ban has clear echoes of Trump’s tactics, and some critics said as much explicitly. In the US, there is a clear longer-term trend of Republican officials imposing poorly justified restrictions on the press. But one doesn’t need to look as far as that to understand the Nottinghamshire ban. Indeed, Reform has been accused before of shutting out reporters, or otherwise treating them with disrespect: last year, the party reportedly excluded certain adversarial outlets and journalists from its conference; earlier this summer, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage accused local reporters in Scotland of helping to coordinate protests against him. It all seems to add up, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, to a moment in which hard-right politicians, in particular, feel that they don’t need to engage with traditional news outlets to get their message out, and that they won’t suffer electoral consequences for shutting them out. They might even benefit from doing so, turning the media into a foil as part of a broader war against the establishment.And yet, there are also reasons to doubt these conclusions, or at least to texture them. It’s true that Trump, for example, has shut out journalists whose stories displease him. (In addition to the AP imbroglio, his White House recently barred a reporter from the Wall Street Journal from a trip to the UK, after that paper reported unflatteringly on Trump’s alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein.) At the same time, though, Trump will routinely talk to pretty much anyone who will listen, the mainstream media very much included. (Earlier this year, he called the editor of the Atlantic a “sleazebag” – then granted him an interview not long after.) Indeed, Trump has long used media coverage successfully to set the political agenda.In the UK, Farage seems to be using the same playbook. Sure, he has leaned, in particular, on the rightwing press. But such papers aren’t necessarily natural allies for Reform given their deep cultural ties to the Conservatives. And Farage has sucked up oxygen in more hostile quarters, too. This week, just as Nottinghamshire council was banning journalists, Farage was being praised, by Politico, for answering questions about his mass deportation plans with a directness that other parties should seek to emulate.Trump has clearly proven that there aren’t hard electoral consequences for press-bashing. But there are still important differences between UK and US political culture. Trust in the media is at a low ebb here, too. But in the recent past, rightwing political figures who have used Trumpian rhetoric to deflect blame for their own failures on to the media haven’t always been successful. Dominic Cummings goaded the press after his Covid-era drive to Barnard Castle, but could not escape massive public anger. Boris Johnson dodging tough questions – from the Today programme, for example, which his government boycotted – didn’t spare him from the glare of scandal in the long run.This doesn’t guarantee that the leaders of Nottinghamshire council will suffer from banning their local paper. Indeed, it might very well be to Reform’s advantage to let Farage suck up attention nationally while dodging scrutiny for the actions of the party’s councillors across the country; the party surely wants the media talking about immigration, not the reorganisation of local government. And local outlets might seem an easy target, diminished in power and reach in an age of cuts to local news and unchained online discourse.View image in fullscreenAnd yet Reform’s leadership of councils is an important test for the party in a country where voters still, to some extent, value competent governance. “If Reform can’t even face questions from the Nottingham Post,” the Conservative party chair Kevin Hollinrake wondered this week, “what hope is there that they could ever face the serious responsibilities of government?” He’s surely not the only one asking that question. Even in the US, where the culture of political press-bashing is more entrenched, local Republican legislators in some states are cooperating with proposals to steer more resources to their dwindling local news outlets. This isn’t some act of altruism, advocates say, but one born of the realisation that they need voters to know what they’ve been doing when elections roll around.The Reform ban might hold. But at some point, local Reform councillors will want to trumpet an achievement, and when they do, it would not be a massive surprise if they go running to the Nottingham Post. Politicians can, of course, reach voters on social media these days. But established local news brands can still confer prestige. And good publicity is good publicity. For now, Trump hasn’t let up on the AP. But he hasn’t been shy about showcasing its journalism when it suits him. An artwork based on the iconic image of Trump pumping his fist after his attempted assassination last year now adorns a White House wall. It was taken by an AP photographer.

      Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter The Media Today

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      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ audiences face discrimination from advertisers, editors warn

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      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ and other diverse audiences are facing “good old-fashioned discrimination” as advertisers avoid them after political attacks on diversity and inclusion campaigns, editors have said.Senior figures at publications aimed at the gay community and other minority groups said a previous “gold rush” to work with such titles was over.There has been a backlash in the US over corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the past 18 months, which has led to some big names rolling back their plans.Tag Warner, the chief executive of Gay Times, said his publication, which had been growing digitally in the US, had lost 80% of its advertisers in the past year. It has also lost in excess of £5m in expected advertiser revenue.Warner, who has led the outlet since 2019, said his title’s growth had been accompanied by an enthusiasm from brands to embrace LGBTQ+ audiences. He blames an anti-DEI drive in the US for the dramatic shift.“I know that media and marketing is also going through a challenging year anyway, but when we’re thinking about other organisations that don’t talk to diverse themes, they’re not nearly as impacted as we are,” he said. “This is just good old-fashioned discrimination. Because discrimination doesn’t have to make business sense. Discrimination doesn’t have to be logical. Discrimination is discrimination.“We’re really experiencing the impact of what happens when voices that are pressuring organisations to give in to less inclusive perspectives start winning. Then it creates this massive behavioural shift in brands and organisations.”Nafisa Bakkar, the co-founder of Amaliah, a publication aimed at “amplifying the voices of Muslim women”, said there had been a “change in mood” among brands and advertisers. “There was this DNI [diversity and inclusion] gold rush,” she said. “It is, I would say, well and truly over.“We work with a lot of UK advertisers, but I would say that the US has a lot more emphasis on what they would call ‘brand safety’, which I think is a code word for ‘we don’t want to rock the boat’. I would say there is a lot more focus on this element.”Ibrahim Kamara, the founder of the youth platform GUAP, which has a large black and ethnically diverse audience, said he had detected a “relative difference” from 2020 in approaches from brands.He and others cited the economic pressures on advertisers generally in recent years. However, he said the “hype and the PR around wanting to support and connect with diverse audiences” had also subsided.“The thing that most people within these kind of spaces can probably agree on is that the energy and the PR is very different now,” he said. “It was almost a badge of honour to be able to say that you’re supporting certain communities. Now, I’ve seen that lots of the diversity and inclusion people that were hired around that period have probably lost their jobs. It doesn’t have the same PR effect any more.”Warner said the anti-DEI impact pre-dated the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Figures such as the conservative pundit Robby Starbuck have been engaged in a long-running anti-DEI campaign, pressuring firms to drop their diversity efforts. However, Warner said Trump’s arrival “gave everyone, I think, permission to be honest about it”.Not all publications in the sector have been hit in the same way as Gay Times. Companies with business models less reliant on US advertising, as well as some big players with long-established relationships, said they had managed to negotiate the changing political environment.“Brands are nervous, that’s for sure, or careful – or a combination of both,” said Darren Styles, the managing director of Stream Publishing, which publishes Attitude magazine. “They’re aware it can be a lightning rod for a vocal minority. But our experience is that most people are holding their ground, if not doubling down.”Styles also said he was not complacent, however, given the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK and its lack of historical support for the LGBTQ+ community.“I’m not incautious about the future,” he said. “Who knows what next year will bring, because that narrative is not going away. Obviously, there’s the rise of Reform in the polls.“[Farage] is quite clearly not an ally to our community and he’s expressed disdain in the past at the awards we’ve given out to people in the trans community. So it is a worry as political momentum gains around there. But I think broadly, consumers in the UK are a bit more capable of thinking for themselves.”Mark Berryhill, the chief executive of equalpride, which publishes prominent US titles like Out and The Advocate, said some brands and agencies “may have been a little bit more cautious than they have been in the past”. However, he said it had so far meant deals had taken longer to be completed, in a tough economic climate.He said the political headwinds made it more important to highlight that working with such titles was simply a sound business decision. “We’ve tried to do a better job in this political climate of just selling the importance of our buying power,” he said. “Everybody’s cautious and I don’t think it’s just LGBTQ. I think they’re cautious in general right now with their work with minority owned companies.“The one thing that maybe this whole controversy has helped us with a little bit is to really make brands realise it’s a business decision. It’s not just a charity or something you should do because you feel guilty.“You should do it because it’s the right thing to support LGBTQ journalism. We’re small. We need to get the word out. We have important stories to tell. But it’s also a good business decision. The more we show that side, certain brands will come along.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: Backlash in Chicago as mayor defies president’s immigration crackdown

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      Resistance is growing to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, with the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, signing an executive order to counter the president’s move.The order prevents the Chicago police department from collaborating with federal authorities on patrols, immigration enforcement, or conducting traffic stops and checkpoints. It also restricts officers from wearing face coverings to hide their identities.Johnson has accused the president of “behaving outside the bounds of the constitution” and of being “reckless and out of control”, while the White House insists the potential flood of federal agents is about “cracking down on crime”.“If these Democrats focused on fixing crime in their own cities instead of doing publicity stunts to criticize the president, their communities would be much safer,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.Here are the key stories.Chicago mayor signs executive order directing city to resist Trump’s immigration raidsThe mayor of Chicago has signed an executive order outlining how the city will attempt to resist Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.Brandon Johnson pushed back on Saturday against what he called the “out-of-control” Trump administration’s plan to deploy large numbers of federal officers into the country’s third-largest city, which could take place within days.The Chicago police department will be barred from helping federal authorities with civil immigration enforcement or any related patrols, traffic stops and checkpoints during the surge, according to the executive order Johnson signed.Read the full storyMore than 500 workers at Voice of America and other broadcasters to be laid offThe agency that oversees Voice of America and other government-funded international broadcasters is eliminating jobs for more than 500 employees, a Trump administration official said. The move could ratchet up a months-long legal challenge over the news outlets’ fate.Kari Lake, the acting CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, announced the latest round of job cuts late on Friday, one day after a federal judge blocked her from removing Michael Abramowitz as VOA director.Read the full storyBernie Sanders demands RFK Jr step down as health secretaryBernie Sanders has joined in on growing public calls for Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to resign after recent chaos across US health agencies.In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Saturday, the Vermont senator accused Kennedy of “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future”, adding: “He must resign.”Read the full storySenior Pentagon official had affair with ‘notorious’ astrologer who stalked him, lawsuit saysA senior Pentagon official in the Trump administration had a months-long extramarital affair with a woman claiming to be “the internet’s most notorious astrologer” – and claims in a defamation lawsuit filed in Florida that she cyberstalked him and his wife after they split up.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Still getting up to speed on the latest with Trump’s tariffs? This handy explainer has everything you need to know.

      The Guardian’s Washington correspondent David Smith examines diversity in the Trump administration in this feature entitled: ‘Racist as hell’: Trump’s cabinet is almost all white, and he keeps firing Black officials

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      Vineyards assess damage as wildfire rips through California wine country.
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      in UK Politics

      Musk appears to compare UK police to Nazi war criminals after five masked men were arrested trying to get into refugee hotel

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      Elon Musk appeared to compare the U.K. police to Nazi war criminals in a post on X as he ratcheted up his anti-immigration crusade across the pond. Since being ousted from the U.S. government following a very public fallout with President Donald Trump, Musk has turned his attention back to stoking the flames in the U.K., which is currently engulfed in an immigration row. Anti-immigration protesters and anti-racism demonstrators have clashed in heated rallies across the country in recent weeks, after the U.K. government won a court challenge allowing asylum seekers to continue to be housed at a hotel in Epping, Essex, in Southeast England. Musk shared a post on his social media platform from a user that referenced the post-WWII Nuremberg trials, where the defense of “just following orders” was used by Nazi officials who committed crimes against humanity in the Holocaust. After the trials, one of the seven Nuremberg Principles makes clear that a person who “acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.” Elon Musk has been fanning the flames of protests in the U.K. More