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      Usha Vance: husband’s pick as Trump running mate came ‘like a bolt of lightning’

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      Usha Vance learned her husband, JD, had been selected to be Donald Trump’s running mate “maybe five minutes” before the news was made public – and just about an hour before he was formally nominated.“It really was like a bolt of lightning,” Vance said during an interview on Meghan McCain’s podcast, Citizen McCain. Nearly a year later, seated in the vice-president’s residence on the grounds of the US naval observatory, Vance reflected on how significantly her life has changed in ways big and small. “People call you ma’am,” she said. “No one’s ever called me ma’am before this.”Until last summer, Vance, the daughter of immigrants and a one-time Democrat, worked as a lawyer at a progressive law firm, raising her three young children in Ohio. Now, as second lady, she is escorted by Secret Service and can’t leave a gym class without being recognized in Washington.During the nearly hour-long interview, Vance was not asked to weigh in on the political or policy agenda of the Trump administration – the president’s decision to strike Iran, the immigration raids that have roiled her native California or the crackdown on colleges and law firms.Instead, Vance spoke about how the second couple is working to create a sense of normalcy for their three young children, and how she hopes to use her role to “make things just a little bit better for other people”. She talked about missing Ohio, trying to keep her kids off screens, her husband’s love for baking, and losing “that sense of being anonymous in public”.Asked about being a first – Vance is the nation’s first south Asian and Hindu second lady – she said it has “not been something that people are hyper-focused on”.“Maybe we’ve just sort of moved beyond trying to count firsts of everything,” she said, while also noting that many people have told her “how proud they are and how excited they are for this”.“That does give me a little bit of a sense of purpose,” she said.At the end of the interview, McCain, a former host of The View and daughter of the late Republican senator John McCain, raised what she called the “elephant in the room” and asked whether Vance had considered the prospect “that you could be our first lady in a few years”.“I’m not plotting out next steps or really trying for anything after this,” Vance said. “In a dream world, eventually, I’ll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career and all those sorts of things. And if that happens in four years, I understand. If that happens at some other point in the future, I understand. [I’m] just sort of along for the ride and enjoying it while I can.”Vance so far refrained from choosing a single social cause or project to champion, as her predecessors have done, worried that the response would be to “attribute some kind of political motive or start to polarize around it”. Still, she offered a glimpse of the issues that she may want to focus on in her role. Her office is hosting the “Second Lady’s 2025 Summer Reading Challenge”, which she described as “the first of many small attempts” to encourage reading and help draw “children into the world of things and not of devices”.At one point in the conversation, McCain revealed that she was expecting a third child – a boy – and asked Vance to “share with me and women in America why having three kids is good”. Vance congratulated McCain warmly, and described how her children operated as a “pack”, playing together and taking care of each other. She assured McCain that the transition from two to three children was “shockingly, the easiest of all”. More

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      Union leaders’ exit from DNC exposes ‘mind-boggling’ tensions inside Democratic party

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      As the Democratic party fights to rebuild from a devastating election defeat, the abrupt exit of the presidents of two of the nation’s largest labor unions from its top leadership board has exposed simmering tensions over the party’s direction.Randi Weingarten and Lee Saunders quit the Democratic National Committee, saying it isn’t doing enough to “open the gates” and win back the support of working-class voters. Ken Martin, the new DNC chair, and his allies told the Guardian that the party was focused on doing exactly that.Weingarten, president of the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers, resigned after Martin did not renominate her to serve on the DNC’s important rules committee. In her resignation letter, Weingarten wrote that education, healthcare and public service workers were in “an existential battle” due to Donald Trump’s attacks and that she did not “want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent”.Saunders, the long-time president of the 1.3-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also issued a critical statement. “These are new times. They deserve new strategies,” he said. “We must evolve to meet the urgency of the moment. This is not a time to close ranks or turn inward … It is our responsibility to open the gates [and] welcome others.”View image in fullscreenSeveral DNC officials asserted that the two departures were a “tempest in a teapot”, insisting that Martin is working to have the DNC welcome more people and battle against Trump. Weingarten and Saunders evidently felt sore that their candidate for DNC chair, Ben Wikler, the head of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, lost to Martin, the officials suggested.Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation, said the resignations were an inarguable blow to the DNC.“When something like this becomes public, there’s clearly a spotlight on it,” he said. “Giving the longstanding leadership role that Randi and Lee have played in the Democratic party, and at a time when the party is trying to desperately improve its image with working-class voters and remake itself in a lot of ways, this is really unacceptable.”In an interview, Weingarten said she wished the DNC was conducting an all-out nationwide mobilization to defeat the Trump/GOP budget bill, which would throw an estimated 11 million Americans off health insurance, cut food stamps to millions of families and cause the federal debt to soar by over $3tn.DNC chair Martin told the Guardian that, under his leadership, the DNC was already doing what Weingarten and Saunders were calling for. “I’ve always called myself a pro-labor progressive,” Martin said, noting that he had been a union member and labor organizer. “My family grew up on programs that would be cut if Trump’s tax scam passes. Winning back the working class and stopping Trump from harming families is exactly where our focus is.”Martin added that in his nearly five months as DNC chair, the committee has held 130 town halls and launched an “aggressive war room” to take on Trump. “My first action as DNC chair was pledging to have strong labor voices at the table,” Martin said. “Our job is to win in 2025, 2026 and beyond.”But their resignation statements signal that Weingarten and Saunders have a very different view from Martin of what the DNC is doing on his watch. Several DNC officials said the pair might not be up to date with the DNC’s activities across the 50 states.Weingarten told the Guardian that Martin and the DNC are not showing nearly enough urgency in opposing the Trump/GOP budget bill. “The number one issue in the next two weeks is: how do we help fight the GOP budget bill that faces almost two-to-one public opposition,” she said, adding that the DNC should be going all out to help House and Senate Democrats torpedo the bill.“We can be the voice and be out there with stories about how the budget bill will hurt, and the DNC is a perfect place for doing that,” Weingarten said. “You got to win hearts and minds now, not in October 2026. That’s the kind of thing that we’ve been looking for since January. We have to be a party that wins on the ground.”Artie Blanco, a union activist and DNC vice-chair, said that under Martin, the DNC had been fighting hard against the budget bill.“There are over 16,000 Democratic volunteers making phone calls across the country in targeted congressional districts about the GOP budget, and how it will be devastating to working people,” Blanco said.Weingarten voiced dismay about not being renominated for the rules committee. “It was definitely a sign that my input was not sought any more and [not] appreciated,” she said, stressing that the AFT “will continue to be a leader in electing pro-public education, pro-working family candidates” and planned to be “especially engaged” in the 2025-26 elections.Jane Kleeb, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, said that Weingarten’s and Saunders’s “claims that Ken and the DNC are not standing up for working people and not standing on the side of unions and union members is laughable”.“Ken has been on the front line to bring unions back to our party,” added Kleeb, who is also chair of the Nebraska Democratic party. “He has appointed more union leaders than any other [DNC] chair” – and put unions at the forefront while chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, before he assumed the DNC’s helm, she said.Stuart Appelbaum, the DNC’s labor chair, and president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, took issue with the statements Weingarten and Saunders made about Martin.“I am thrilled that Ken Martin is prioritizing the importance of having labor at the table and has ensured that there is strong labor representation in every part of the DNC,” Appelbaum said. He added that Martin “understands that working people are the backbone of the party”.Michael Podhorzer, a political strategist and former AFL-CIO political director, said the Democratic party has for decades not focused enough on working-class voters. He said Democrats would have a tough battle winning back blue-collar voters. “The experience of many American working people is they feel left off the radar,” Podhorzer said.Democrats, Podhorzer noted, have suffered the greatest loss of support in communities that were “gutted” after the 2008-09 recession; from the signing of Nafta, a trade deal with Canada and Mexico; and from normalized trade relations with China. Nafta and normalized trade with China were ratified under President Clinton, a Democrat.Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist who has studied Trump’s success in wooing working-class voters, said the decline of US labor unions over the past 50 years has necessarily meant that unions have less sway in the Democratic party.Rosenthal, the former AFL-CIO official and also a former DNC deputy political director, called on the DNC and Democrats to work far more closely with unions.“Among working-class voters, support for unions is through the roof, and the Democratic party and the Republican party have no credibility with working-class voters,” he said. “They don’t trust the parties, but they trust the labor movement. It’s incumbent on the party to build bridges and put the labor movement front and center in everything it does.”“From that standpoint,” he continued, the tension that led to Weingarten and Sauders quitting “is mind-boggling”. Several labor leaders said Martin should have done more to keep prominent and powerful union leaders like Weingarten and Saunders satisfied and on the DNC, even if they backed one of his opponents for DNC chair.Responding to Weingarten and Saunders’ concerns, Martin said: “The DNC and our partners are leading the fight against Trump’s budget bill, investing unprecedented dollars into states so Democrats can win elections from the ground up, and reaching out to voters in working-class districts.”Martin told the Guardian that he’s trying hard to build bridges with the broader labor movement, and increase its role in the DNC and in the Democrats’ efforts. “Winning back the working class and stopping Trump’s budget bill isn’t a political goal, it’s personal,” he said. “Labor runs through my family’s veins.” More

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      Zohran Mamdani offered New Yorkers a political revolution – and won | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York City’s Democratic primary represents more than just an electoral upset. It’s a confirmation that progressive politics, when pursued with discipline, vision, and vigor, can resonate broadly – even in a city known for its entrenched power structures.This was no ordinary primary. Andrew Cuomo, a former governor whose political fall from grace seemed irreparable only a few years ago, had positioned himself as the overwhelming favorite. Backed by millions from corporate interests, super PACs, and billionaire donors such as Michael Bloomberg and Bill Ackman, Cuomo relied heavily on institutional inertia and top-down endorsements. Yet Tuesday night, it became clear that this alone couldn’t carry him across the finish line.Mamdani, a 33-year-old legislator from Queens, ran a relentlessly disciplined campaign built around cost-of-living issues, zeroing in on essentials such as housing, transport, childcare and groceries. Repeated attempts to define Mamdani as merely a “Muslim socialist” with radical ideas, to force divisive identity politics to the fore, or to make the election a referendum on Israel, failed.But it wasn’t simply messaging discipline that made Mamdani successful. Mamdani has a political talent rooted in genuine charisma. His fluency with language, clarity of purpose, and authenticity allowed him to speak convincingly to voters from many different backgrounds. He wasn’t just another activist-politician; he proved himself to be a natural leader – someone capable of communicating moral truths without sounding moralistic.Meanwhile, Cuomo’s attempt to reinvent himself in New York City politics was flawed from the outset. His candidacy was perceived by many voters as an arrogant power grab, a rehabilitation project rather than a serious commitment to addressing the city’s challenges. He neglected to engage seriously with New York’s relatively new ranked-choice voting system, stubbornly isolating himself rather than building coalitions, even among centrist figures.The difference in campaign styles was stark and instructive. Mamdani’s campaign was fundamentally grassroots, driven by committed volunteers, including young activists from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). It was also modern and intelligent, recognizing that an ever-growing share of the electorate forms its opinions through social media and finding innovative ways to communicate policy proposals. Remarkably, almost one quarter of the early vote in this primary came from first-time voters in New York elections.Yet the results make clear that his voting base wasn’t limited to young, college-educated voters most engaged by his campaign. Notably, Mamdani succeeded in neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, Sunset Park, and Brighton Beach — all areas that swung rightward in the 2024 presidential election.This was a reward for his consistent efforts to reach out to young, working-class voters who felt alienated by the Democratic party; Mamdani’s first viral video of this campaign came in November, when he interviewed New Yorkers who had voted for Trump about their cost-of-living frustrations. In the face of a skeptical public, Mamdani was even able to communicate democratic socialism as a universal politics rather than a niche identity or a dangerous ideology.Yet coalition-building factored in just as much as political resolve. Crucial to Mamdani’s broad success was the principled support of progressive figures like Comptroller Brad Lander. Lander advocated for himself as the person best suited to be mayor but accepted the nature of rank-choice voting and the imperative of defeating Cuomo by cross-endorsing Mamdani. Lander’s approach helped forge a coherent, united front — something increasingly rare in fractious progressive circles — and it proved decisive.Voters, for their part, proved that they were ready for change. They refused to succumb to cynical fearmongering about a supposed tide of crime and antisemitism that would come from a Mamdani victory. Instead, they took a clear-eyed look at their lives, assessed the failings of the Democratic party, and chose something fresh, new, and fundamentally different over a failed political establishment.Still, Tuesday’s results carry deeper questions about the future. Mamdani’s victory in this primary, significant as it is, must now be tested against Eric Adams and likely Cuomo again in the November election. Beyond that lies a far more challenging test: governing. Progressives across America have watched closely as Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, another promising left-wing mayor, has stumbled against entrenched opposition and due to his own administrative failings. Mamdani will need to navigate obstacles better if elected.Historical precedent may offer some reassurance for those who wish New York’s mayoral frontrunner well. The tradition of successful municipal socialism in America, including in cities like Milwaukee under the “sewer socialists” and, more recently, in Burlington under Bernie Sanders serve as real examples of socialist governance marked by competence, effectiveness and popularity. Sanders’s legacy in Burlington, especially, stands as a template Mamdani could follow: pragmatic yet deeply principled governance that steadily builds broader legitimacy among skeptics and opponents.New York mayors have traditionally been considered men who come from nowhere and go nowhere, politically speaking. But Mamdani could break that mold, following Sanders’s trajectory from effective municipal leadership to becoming a durable voice in national politics.However, to succeed, Mamdani must trust his own judgment — one that has already proved incisive and strategically sound. He must maintain independence from two city establishments: the corporate one, which opposed him at every turn, and the NGO-driven progressive establishment, whose political instincts failed them in recent election cycles.Mamdani’s platform, which couples a supply-side focused “abundance agenda” with demands for equitable redistribution and expansive public-sector investment, offers precisely the kind of social-democratic governance model New York desperately needs. There’s nothing fundamentally radical about these demands; rather, what’s genuinely radical is the excitement they have inspired among voters, including many who previously disengaged from local politics altogether.Tonight, Mamdani has undoubtedly delivered a major victory in America’s largest city. But we must be sober about the challenges ahead. Electoral wins are meaningful only if they translate into tangible improvements in people’s lives, and political momentum can dissipate quickly if governance falls short. Mamdani faces an enormous responsibility – not only to his immediate constituency but also to a broader progressive movement watching closely from across the country and the world.

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of The Nation, the founding editor Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in An Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      Trump is angry with a world that won’t give him easy deals | Rafael Behr

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      It was as close as Donald Trump might get to a lucid statement of his governing doctrine. “I may do it. I may not do it,” the president said to reporters on the White House lawn. “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”The question was about joining Israeli air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Days later, US bombers were on their way. Some expected it to happen. Others, including Keir Starmer, had gone on record to say they didn’t. No one had known. The unpredictability doctrine wouldn’t have been violated either way.It applies also in economic and domestic policy. Trump’s boast of inscrutability could have been made about tariff rates, or a decision to deploy marines against US citizens who defy his immigration agency.Volatile inconsistency is a trait of the presidential personality, but also a learned management technique. Keeping everyone around you guessing, lurching from charm to menaces, swapping and dropping favourites on a whim – these are methods of coercive control. They generate disorientation and vulnerability. People who are braced for sudden mood swings must hang on the leader’s every word, looking for cues, awaiting instruction. Individual agency is lost, dependency is induced. It is something cult leaders do.A method that works with a quasi-monarchical entourage is poorly suited to international affairs. Foreign leaders are not White House courtiers. They might seek the US president’s favour in trade or fear his military wrath, but always with competing national interests in the background. On the world stage, Trump will never feel the unalloyed devotion he gets from worshippers at a Maga rally, which is one reason why he hates to travel.That tension is palpable at this week’s Nato summit in The Hague. Trump makes no secret of his disdain for European democracies. He resents their reliance on the Pentagon for security. He is unconvinced that defending their continent, especially the corner of it under violent assault from Russia, is the US’s problem. The threat he briefly made in his first term to pull out of Nato if other members didn’t start paying their way still hangs over the alliance. European leaders must strive to keep Trump onside while contingency planning for the day he decides to abandon them.Matthew Whitaker, the US’s permanent representative at Nato, tried to be reassuring on that point at the summit, declaring that it “has never been more engaged”. But he also conceded ignorance of what Trump might actually do. “I don’t want … to claim to be able to read his mind and know what he’s going to say.”That is the doctrine: nobody knows. This forces Nato members into an awkward dance, performing for Trump’s benefit while also working around him. They want to impress him with their financial ambition, pledging to spend 5% of their national GDP on defence by 2035. But they know also not to expect any reciprocal commitment, or none that can be trusted.War in the Middle East ramps the uncertainty up to new heights. European leaders need to stay focused on Ukraine and the prospect of Russia turning its territorial aggression on some other portion of Nato’s eastern flank. Vladimir Putin sees no legitimacy in borders that were drawn by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has also geared Russia’s economy, political apparatus and propaganda machinery to assume perpetual war with the west. One lesson from Ukraine’s plight is to assume that when Putin says he is going to fight, he means it. Another is that, while deterrence is expensive, it is cheaper than the war that comes when the Kremlin feels confidently undeterred.These calculations keep Europeans up at night, but not Trump. He doesn’t recognise Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and would happily see the war end on terms that leave Nato humiliated and Putin emboldened, and signal an epoch-defining shift in the balance of global power away from democracy.But framing the choice in grand geostrategic terms obscures pettier motives, which are often the salient ones with Trump. He doesn’t want to take Kyiv’s side because that is what Joe Biden did. It isn’t his cause and so he thinks it is dumb.This is not the case with Iran. US allies are required, in public at least, to judge Trump’s military intervention as though it were made according to a conventional diplomatic and strategic calculus: the prospect of Tehran wielding powers of nuclear apocalypse is truly abhorrent; negotiation was not bearing fruit. Maybe there was reason to dispute US intelligence assessments that said the threshold of weapons-readiness was not imminent. Maybe the time to act really was at hand.But those are rationalising arguments, retrofitted to a choice that Trump made as much from vanity as any more sophisticated motive. He was bounced into war by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister appears to have gamed the US president’s aversion to looking weak and his limitless appetite for glory. Early Israeli success – an extraordinary feat of military intelligence that took out senior Iranian commanders and assets – offered Trump the prospect of climbing aboard a winning operation and grabbing credit for victory.Hints that regime change was on the agenda may have prodded Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, towards a ceasefire on the basis that early capitulation with some power retained, while unpalatable, is preferable to assassination. Senior White House officials insisted the war aims were limited to containment of the nuclear threat, but since they hadn’t even known a war was coming their authority on the matter is questionable.Trump’s supporters say this is proof that his volatile style works. In strategic studies it is known as the “madman theory”. Discarding guardrails, looking ready to do something irrational, forces an enemy to choose caution. The obvious risk is that it also teaches the rest of the world the merit of madness. Iran’s rulers will be more convinced than ever that only nuclear weapons can guarantee their sovereignty. (That view would persist through regime change, since none of the viable scenarios result in a flowering of pro-western democracy in the region. Tehran’s atomic ambitions may be set back by years, but the cause of negotiated, multilateral non-proliferation is also in tatters.)That doesn’t interest Trump. He thinks in terms of easy wins, not complex consequences. Hence his palpable irritation with Israel and Iran for violating the ceasefire and generally not knowing “what the fuck they’re doing”. He is aware that he looks played by Netanyahu, much as he once showed a flicker of frustration with Putin for “tapping” him along in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. He promised US voters deals. He gets cross when the world withholds them from him.This is a natural function of the unpredictability doctrine. Telling other countries they can never know what you’ll do makes them less responsive to diplomacy; less biddable to the whim of a US president. A vicious cycle then begins. Trump relies on his volatile persona to assert control in situations that he doesn’t understand, generating chaos that exposes his impotence, which in turn provokes him to tug in more arbitrary fury at his levers of power.For European democracies this is debilitating. It is hard to coordinate defence against external threats when the paramount power in your alliance is the origin of so much instability. But Nato leaders will get no respite from the uncertainty as long as Trump sits in the White House. The thing they most need from him – reliability – is the one thing he is destined by personality and doctrine never to provide.

      Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More

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      Judge blocks Trump from withholding EV charger funds awarded to 14 states

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      A US district judge has blocked the Trump administration from withholding funds previously awarded to 14 states for electric vehicle charger infrastructure.Seattle-based judge Tana Lin, who was appointed to the bench by Joe Biden in 2021, granted a partial injunction to the states that filed suit against Trump’s Department of Transportation.She ruled that the states’ lawsuit – led by attorneys general in California, Colorado and Washington – would likely succeed. Her ruling did not apply to the District of Columbia, Minnesota and Vermont, which she found did not provide evidence that they would suffer immediate harm. The injunction will go into effect on 1 July, unless the Trump administration files an appeal blocking it.In February, the Trump administration ordered states not to spend $5bn in funds allocated under the Biden administration as part of the national electric vehicle infrastructure (Nevi) program.The program provided up to 80% of eligible project costs to deploy electric vehicle charges. Currently, 16 states have at least one operational EV station, according to EV States Clearinghouse.“The new leadership of the Department of Transportation … has decided to review the policies underlying the implementation of the Nevi formula program,” Emily Biondi, associate administrator for planning, environment and realty at the transportation department’s Federal Highway Administration, wrote in a memo.“As result of the rescission of the Nevi formula program guidance, the FHWA is also immediately suspending the approval of all state electric vehicle infrastructure deployment plans for all fiscal years. Therefore, effective immediately, no new obligations may occur under the Nevi formula program until the updated final Nevi formula program guidance is issued and new state plans are submitted and approved,” she added.In May, the Government Accountability Office found that the Trump administration violated the law when it withheld the funding. The administration “must continue to carry out the statutory requirements of the program”, it said.The White House challenged those findings, which it called “wrong and legally indefensible”, and ordered the transportation department to ignore them. The department is expected to release a draft of its updated electric vehicle guidance this month.During a hearing before the Seattle judge earlier this month, Leah Brown, of Washington’s attorney general’s office said, “This passing reference to revised guidance and to changed priorities is simply insufficient to override congressional intent.” She added that the states aren’t “challenging the ability to revise guidance, but we are arguing that doing so simply is not a sufficient explanation for the actions that they’ve taken,” the Washington State Standard reported.“The agency has no intent to withhold funds from the states,” justice department attorney Heidy Gonzalez said. “It just wants the opportunity to review past guidance and to promulgate guidance that comports with the current administration’s policies and priorities.”During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump voiced a hatred for electric vehicles that ran counter to his growing friendship with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.At one point in the campaign, Trump said supporters of the vehicles should “rot in hell” and that Biden’s support of EVs would bring a “bloodbath” to the US’s automotive industry.Although he later appointed Musk to serve as head of the “department of government efficiency”, Musk and Trump have since parted ways. More

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      US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites only set back program by months, Pentagon report says

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      An initial classified US assessment of Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend says they did not destroy two of the sites and likely only set back the nuclear program by a few months, according to two people familiar with the report.The report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – concluded key components of the nuclear program, including centrifuges, were capable of being restarted within months.The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.The findings by the DIA, which were based on a preliminary battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, suggests Trump’s declaration about the sites being “obliterated” may have been overstated.Trump said in his televised address on Saturday night immediately after the operation that the US had completely destroyed Iran’s enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, the facility buried deep underground, and at Isfahan, where enrichment was being stored.“The strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” Trump said in his address from the White House.While the DIA report was only an initial assessment, one of the people said if the intelligence on the ground was already finding within days that Fordow in particular was not destroyed, later assessments could suggest even less damage might have been inflicted.Long regarded as the most well-protected of Iran’s nuclear sites, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Fordow are buried beneath the Zagros mountains. Reports have suggested that the site was constructed beneath 45-90 metres (145-300ft) of bedrock, largely limestone and dolomite.The White House disputed the intelligence assessment, which was first reported by CNN. “The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.The US vice-president, JD Vance, admitted on Sunday that Washington did not know where Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranian was, saying: “we are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel”.Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Monday that the IAEA could no longer account for Iran’s stockpile of 400kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity.The Guardian revealed last Wednesday that top political appointees at the Pentagon had been briefed at the start of Trump’s second term that the 30,000lb “bunker buster” GBU-57 bombs meant to be used on Fordow would not completely destroy the facility.In that briefing, in January, officials were told by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon that developed the GBU-57 that the bombs would not penetrate deep enough underground and only a tactical nuclear weapon would wipe out Fordow.The US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities involved B2 bombers dropping 12 GBU-57s on Fordow and two GBU-57s on Natanz. A US navy submarine then launched roughly 30 Tomahawk missiles on Isfahan, US defense officials said at a news conference Sunday.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth repeated Trump’s claim at the news conference that the sites had been “obliterated”, but the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Dan Caine, who helped oversee the operation, was more measured in his remarks.Caine said that all three of the nuclear sites had “sustained severe damage and destruction” but cautioned that the final battle-damage assessment for the military operation was still to come. More

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      Trump is not interested in listening to US experts on Iran’s nuclear program

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      When Donald Trump ordered the US military to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend, the debate among intelligence officials, outside experts and policymakers over the status of Tehran’s nuclear program had largely been frozen in place for nearly 20 years.That prolonged debate has repeatedly placed the relatively dovish US intelligence community at odds with Israel and neoconservative Iran hawks ever since the height of the global war on terror.For nearly two decades, the US intelligence agencies have concluded that while Iran has a program to enrich uranium, it has never actually built any atomic bombs. It is an assessment that has been at the core of its intelligence reporting on Iran since at least 2007. This has led to constant debates over the years over the significance of Iran’s uranium enrichment program versus “weaponization” or bomb-building.Israel and the Iran hawks have repeatedly said that the debate over enrichment versus weaponization is not significant, because Iran could build a bomb relatively quickly. But Iran suspended its weaponization program in 2003 and hasn’t tried to build a bomb since; it’s been clear for decades that the Iranian regime has seen that its own interests are better served by maintaining the threat of having a nuclear weapon rather than actually having one.Iran’s reluctance to build a bomb while still maintaining the threat of a nuclear program has clear parallels with the way that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein handled his supposed weapons of mass destruction program. Hussein got rid of his programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s, following the first Gulf War, but never divulged that to the United States or the United Nations.He wanted other countries, particularly his regional enemy Iran, to think that he still had the weapons. US officials couldn’t understand that kind of thinking, and so badly miscalculated by assuming that Hussein still had a WMD program. That mindset led to the intelligence community’s greatest debacle – its false pre-war reporting that Hussen still had a WMD program, flawed intelligence which helped the George W Bush administration justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.In the past, the US intelligence community’s assessments on the state of the Iranian nuclear program – developed in the aftermath of its failures on the Iraqi WMD issue – acted as a restraint on the actions of successive presidents, from Bush through Obama and Biden. All of them faced pressure from Israel to take action against Iran, or at least to let Israel bomb the country.The difference today is not that the intelligence reporting has significantly changed.It is that Trump is now more willing to listen to Israel than his predecessors and is also deeply suspicious of the Central Intelligence Agency. And by firing so many staffers at the National Security Council and conducting an ideological purge throughout the rest of the national security community since he returned to office, Trump has made it clear that he is not interested in listening to the experts on Iran and the Middle East. Trump underscored his skepticism of the experts when he recently told reporters that “I don’t care” about the US intelligence community’s latest assessment that Iran still wasn’t building a bomb.Without any evidence that Iran has actually been “weaponizing”, the arguments over Iran’s nuclear program have descended over the last two decades into a series of almost theological disputes over the significance of each change in the Iranian uranium enrichment program.This debate first flared into the headlines in 2007, at a time when the Bush administration – already mired in wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan – was considering bombing Iran to halt its nuclear program. In the midst of this debate, the key findings of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program were made public. The NIE – a report designed to provide the consensus view of the US’s 18 spy agencies on a major subject – found that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and had never built a bomb. While it found that Iran could still develop a bomb by 2010, it determined that its commercial nuclear fuel cycle – its enrichment program – was not part of an ongoing nuclear weapons program.In 2011, the findings of another NIE were made public, which slightly altered the intelligence community’s assessment. It said that Iran’s uranium enrichment program was probably being upgraded and could eventually be used to create weapons grade uranium. But the NIE also found that Iran had still not tried to build a bomb. The 2011 NIE broke with the 2007 NIE by not making a distinction between Iran’s uranium enrichment for commercial purposes and potential nuclear weapons work. Still, the new NIE found that there was not enough evidence to show that Iran had made a decision to restart its nuclear weaponization program and build a bomb.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionToday, the US intelligence community is still basically in the same place: Iran has an enrichment program but has not built a bomb. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, testified to Congress in March that while Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was at its highest levels, the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and [Iran’s] supreme leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003”.(After Trump ordered the Iran bombing, Gabbard rushed to defend his actions, even though there had still been no change in the intelligence agencies’ assessments.)And while Israel and the hawks continue today to insist that Iran could build a bomb quickly, the US intelligence community has long maintained that it could detect the effort in its earliest stages, long before it succeeded.After the weekend strike, Congressional Democrats focused on the fact that there was no new intelligence to justify Trump’s action, and no new intelligence showing an imminent threat to the United States.Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said Trump had bombed Iran “without regard to the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community”. 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      US judge blocks Trump plan to bar international students from Harvard

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      A federal judge on Monday blocked Donald Trump’s administration from implementing his plan to bar foreign nationals from entering the United States to study at Harvard University.US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston issued an injunction barring Trump’s administration from carrying out its latest bid to curtail Harvard’s ability to host international students amid an escalating fight pitting the Republican president against the prestigious Ivy League school.The preliminary injunction extends a temporary order the judge issued on 5 June that prevented the administration from enforcing a proclamation Trump signed a day earlier that cited national security concerns to justify why Harvard could no longer be trusted to host international students.The proclamation prohibited foreign nationals from entering the US to study at Harvard or participate in exchange visitor programs for an initial period of six months, and directed Marco Rubio to consider whether to revoke visas of international students already enrolled at Harvard.Almost 6,800 international students attended Harvard in its most recent school year, making up about 27% of the student population of the university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Trump signed the proclamation after his administration had already frozen billions of dollars in funding to the oldest and wealthiest US university, threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status and launched several investigations into the school.Trump on Friday said his administration could announce a deal with Harvard “over the next week or so” to resolve the White House’s campaign against the university, which has waged a legal battle against the administration’s action.Harvard alleges that Trump is retaliating against it in violation of its free speech rights under the US constitution’s first amendment for refusing to accede to the administration’s demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.The university has filed two separate lawsuits before Burroughs seeking to unfreeze around $2.5bn in funding and to prevent the administration from blocking the ability of international students to attend the university.The latter lawsuit was filed after Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, on 22 May announced that her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s student and exchange visitor program certification, which allows it to enroll foreign students.Noem, without providing evidence, accused the university of “fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party”.Her action was temporarily blocked by Burroughs almost immediately. While the Department of Homeland Security has since shifted to challenging Harvard’s certification through a months-long administrative process, Burroughs at a 29 May hearing said she planned to issue an injunction to maintain the status quo, which she did officially on Friday.A week after the hearing, Trump signed his proclamation, which cited concerns about Harvard’s acceptance of foreign money including from China and what it said was an inadequate response by the school to his administration’s demand for information on foreign students.His administration has accused Harvard of creating an unsafe environment for Jewish students and allowing antisemitism to fester on its campus. Protests over US ally Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during its war in Gaza have roiled numerous universities’ campuses, including Harvard’s.Rights advocates have noted rising antisemitism and Islamophobia in the US due to the war. The Trump administration has thus far announced no action over anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate.Harvard’s own antisemitism and Islamophobia task forces found widespread fear and bigotry at the university in reports released in late April. More