Trump signs tax and spending cut bill at White House July 4 picnic
Against odds that at times seemed improbable, Mr Trump achieved his goal of celebrating a historic and divisive legislative victory in time for the nation's birthday.
America's winning, winning, winning like never before... Promises made, promises kept and we've kept them Donald Trump
Fighter jets and a stealth bomber streaked through the sky over the annual White House Fourth of July picnic as Mr Trump and first lady Melania Trump stepped out onto the White House balcony.
'America's winning, winning, winning like never before,' Mr Trump said, noting last month's bombing campaign against Iran's nuclear programme, which he said the flyover was meant to honour.
'Promises made, promises kept and we've kept them.'
The White House was hung with red, white and blue bunting for the regular Fourth of July festivities.
The United States Marine Band played patriotic marches — and, in a typical Trumpian touch, tunes by 1980s pop icons Chaka Khan and Huey Lewis.
The two separate flyovers bookended Mr Trump's appearance and the band playing the national anthem.
Democrats assailed the package as a giveaway to the rich that will rob millions more lower-income people of their health insurance, food assistance and financial stability.
'I never thought that I'd be on the House floor saying that this is a crime scene,' Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said during a record-breaking speech that delayed the bill's passage by eight-plus hours.
'It's a crime scene, going after the health, and the safety, and the well-being of the American people.'
A B-2 bomber and two F-22 fighters conduct a flyover during a Fourth of July celebration at the White House (Evan Vucci/AP)
The legislation extends Mr Trump's 2017 multitrillion-dollar tax cuts and cuts Medicaid and food stamps by 1.2 trillion dollars. It provides for a massive increase in immigration enforcement.
Congress' non-partisan scorekeeper projects that nearly 12 million more people will lose health insurance under the law.
The legislation passed the House on a largely party-line vote on Thursday.
It passed by a single vote in the Senate, where North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis announced he would not run for re-election after incurring Mr Trump's wrath in opposing it.
Vice president JD Vance had to cast the tie-breaking vote.
The legislation amounts to a repudiation of the agendas of the past two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, in rolling back Mr Obama's Medicaid expansion under his signature health law and Mr Biden's tax credits for renewable energy.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the package will add 3.3 trillion dollars to the deficit over the decade and 11.8 million more people will go without health coverage.
Mr Trump exulted in his political victory on Thursday night in Iowa, where he attended a kick-off of events celebrating the country's 250th birthday next year.
'I want to thank Republican congressmen and women, because what they did is incredible,' he said.
The president complained that Democrats voted against the bill because 'they hate Trump — but I hate them, too'.
The package is certain to be a flashpoint in next year's mid-term elections, and Democrats are making ambitious plans for rallies, voter registration drives, attack ads, bus tours and even a multi-day vigil, all intended to highlight the most controversial elements.
Upon his return to Washington early Friday, Mr Trump described the package as 'very popular' though polling suggests that public opinion is mixed at best.
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The Guardian
18 minutes ago
- The Guardian
If the US president threatens to take away freedoms, are we no longer free?
Threats of retribution from Donald Trump are hardly a novelty, but even by his standards, the US president's warnings of wrathful vengeance in recent days have represented a dramatic escalation. In the past week, Trump has threatened deportation, loss of US citizenship or arrest against, respectively, the world's richest person, the prospective future mayor of New York and Joe Biden's former homeland security secretary. The head-spinning catalogue of warnings may have been aimed at distracting from the increasing unpopularity, according to opinion surveys, of Trump's agenda, some analysts say. But they also served as further alarm bells for the state of US democracy five-and-a-half months into a presidency that has seen a relentless assault on constitutional norms, institutions and freedom of speech. On Tuesday, Trump turned his sights on none other than Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who, before a recent spectacular fallout, had been his closest ally in ramming through a radical agenda of upending and remaking the US government. But when the Tesla and SpaceX founder vowed to form a new party if Congress passed Trump's signature 'one big beautiful bill' into law, Trump swung into the retribution mode that is now familiar to his Democratic opponents. 'Without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,' Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, menacing both the billions of dollars in federal subsidies received by Musk's companies, and – it seemed – his US citizenship, which the entrepreneur received in 2002 but which supporters like Steve Bannon have questioned. 'No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE.' Trump twisted the knife further the following morning talking to reporters before boarding a flight to Florida. 'We might have to put Doge on Elon,' he said, referring to the unofficial 'department of government efficiency' that has gutted several government agencies and which Musk spearheaded before stepping back from his ad hoc role in late May. 'Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn't that be terrible.' Musk's many critics may have found sympathy hard to come by given his earlier job-slashing endeavors on Trump's behalf and the $275m he spent last year in helping to elect him. But the wider political implications are worrying, say US democracy campaigners. 'Trump is making clear that if he can do that to the world's richest man, he could certainly do it to you,' said Ian Bassin, co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy. 'It's important, if we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in it whether it is being weaponized against someone that we have sympathy for or someone that we have lost sympathy for.' Musk was not the only target of Trump's capricious vengeance. He also threatened to investigate the US citizenship of Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats' prospective candidate for mayor of New York who triumphed in a multicandidate primary election, and publicly called on officials to explore the possibility of arresting Alejandro Mayorkas, the former head of homeland security in the Biden administration. Both scenarios were raised during a highly stage-managed visit to 'Alligator Alcatraz', a forbidding new facility built to house undocumented people rounded up as part of Trump's flagship mass-deportation policy. After gleefully conjuring images of imprisoned immigrants being forced to flee from alligators and snakes presumed to reside in the neighbouring marshlands, Trump seized on obliging questions from friendly journalists working for rightwing fringe outlets that have been accredited by the administration for White House news events, often at the expense of established media. 'Why hasn't he been arrested yet?' asked Julio Rosas from Blaze Media, referring to Mayorkas, who was widely vilified – and subsequently impeached – by Republicans who blamed him for a record number of immigrant crossings at the southern US border. 'Was he given a pardon, Mayorkas?' Trump replied. On being told no, he continued: 'I'll take a look at that one because what he did is beyond incompetence … Somebody told Mayorkas to do that and he followed orders, but that doesn't necessarily hold him harmless.' Asked by Benny Johnson, a rightwing social media influencer, for his message to 'communist' Mamdani – a self-proclaimed democratic socialist – over his pledge not to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) roundups of undocumented people if he is elected mayor, Trump said: 'Then we will have to arrest him. We don't need a communist in this country. I'm going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation.' He also falsely suggested that Mamdani, 33 – who became a naturalized US citizen in 2018 after emigrating from Uganda with his ethnic Indian parents when he was a child – was in the country 'illegally', an assertion stemming from a demand by a Republican representative for a justice department investigation into his citizenship application. The representative, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, alleged that Mamdani, who has vocally campaigned for Palestinian rights, gained it through 'willful misrepresentation or concealment of material support for terrorism'. The threat to Mamdani echoed a threat Trump's border 'czar' Tom Homan made to arrest Gavin Newsom, the California governor, last month amid a row over Trump's deployment of national guard forces in Los Angeles to confront demonstrators protesting against Ice's arrests of immigrants. Omar Noureldin, senior vice-president with Common Cause, a pro-democracy watchdog, said the animus against Mamdani, who is Muslim, was partly fueled by Islamophobia and racism. 'Part of the rhetoric we've heard around Mamdani, whether from the president or other political leaders, goes toward his religion, his national origin, race, ethnicity,' he said. 'Mamdani has called himself a democratic socialist. There are others, including Bernie Sanders, who call themselves that, but folks aren't questioning whether or not Bernie Sanders should be a citizen.' Retribution promised to be a theme of Trump's second presidency even before he returned to the Oval Office in January. On the campaign trail last year, he branded some political opponents – including Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives – as 'the enemy within'. Since his inauguration in January, he has made petty acts of revenge against both Democrats and Republicans who have crossed him. Biden; Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and last year's defeated Democratic presidential nominee; and Hillary Clinton, Trump's 2016 opponent, have all had their security clearances revoked. Secret Service protection details have been removed from Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who served in Trump's first administration, despite both being the subject of death threats from Iran because of the 2020 assassination of Qassem Suleimani, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander. Similar fates have befallen Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases specialist who angered Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as Biden's adult children, Hunter and Ashley. Trump has also targeted law firms whose lawyers previously acted against him, prompting some to strike deals that will see them perform pro bono services for the administration. For now, widely anticipated acts of retribution against figures like Gen Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff of the armed forces – whom Trump previously suggested deserved to be executed for 'treason' and who expressed fears of being recalled to active duty and then court-martialed – have not materialised. 'I [and] people in my world expected that Trump would come up with investigations of any number of people, whether they were involved in the Russia investigation way back when, or the election investigation, or the January 6 insurrection, but by and large he hasn't done that,' said one veteran Washington insider, who requested anonymity, citing his proximity to people previously identified as potential Trump targets. 'There are all kinds of lists floating around … with names of people that might be under investigation, but you'll never know you're under investigation until police turn up on your doorstep – and these people are just getting on with their lives.' Yet pro-democracy campaigners say Trump's latest threats should be taken seriously – especially after several recent detentions of several elected Democratic officials at protests near immigration jails or courts. 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'When the president of the United States says something, we have to take it as serious and literal. I wouldn't be surprised if at the justice department, there is a group of folks who are trying to figure out a way to [open prosecutions].' But the bigger danger was to the time-honored American notion of freedom, Bassin warned. 'One definition of freedom is that you are able to speak your mind, associate with who you want, lead the life that you choose to lead, and that so long as you conduct yourself in accordance with the law, the government will not retaliate against you or punish you for doing those things,' he said. 'When the president of the United States makes clear that actually that is not the case, that if you say things he doesn't like, you will be singled out, and the full force of the state could be brought down on your head, then you're no longer free. 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Spectator
an hour ago
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History does not favour Musk's new America party
The world's richest man, Elon Musk, has announced that he intends to create a new third party in the US called the America party. After his own poll on X showed that two out of three favoured the venture, the outspoken billionaire has now put his money where his mouth is and taken the plunge to found and finance his new party. Although the 54-year-old owner of X, Tesla, SpaceX and other hi-tech enterprises has been a US citizen since 2002, because he was born in South Africa he cannot run for president himself. But he says he will fund the new party after spectacularly falling out with President Trump in May following Musk's short stint as Trump's Doge tsar with a brief to cut government waste, largely by sacking federal employees. Musk hates Trump's recently passed 'big, beautiful bill' to cut taxes and spending, saying it will ruin business. And so the billionaire, with an ego almost as big as his wallet, now believes that Americans frustrated with both the Democrats and Trump's Republicans are ready to support an entirely new party. History, however, does not favour his plan. There have been many third party launches since the Democrat versus Republican duopoly emerged in the 1850s just before the American civil war, but all have failed. The Republicans themselves were born then, originally as a progressive anti-slavery movement. They challenged the Democrats, then an agricultural party strong in the south, and after the north won the civil war, the Republican 'Grand Old Party' ( GOP) dominated both the presidency and wider US politics until the 20th century. A feud between conservative and liberal Republicans saw former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt launch his Progressive or 'Bull Moose' party in 1912, which split the Republican vote and handed the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. On the other side of the aisle, increasing industrialisation and class conflict between the world wars led to socialist Norman Thomas running for the White House six times – and failing every time. Instead, left-wing urban voters and ethnic minorities backed the statist high spending New Deal policies of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt – and sent him to the White House an unprecedented four times. By then, the Republicans had evolved into a right-wing party backing big business and free enterprise. An attempt by radicals to launch a left-wing Progressive party after the second world war failed, as did right-wing efforts to form an Independent party led by the racist southern Governor George Wallace in the 1960s. Like Norman Thomas, left-wing ecologist Ralph Nader repeatedly ran for the presidency on a 'Green' ticket – and just as often failed. In the 1990s businessman Ross Perot tried to break the two-party system with a right-wing Libertarian party, but failed yet again. Trump did break the mould in 2016 when he captured the GOP with his own unique brand of patriotic nationalist rhetoric, but he was still working from within the two-party system. Partly in reaction to Trumpism, the Democrats have now moved sharply to the left. The party is predominantly woke and identifies with sexual and racial minorities (who don't always return the favour). It also is mainly internationalist and anti-Israeli. Musk is hoping that with his own brand of radical right-wing politics, he will achieve the same kind of breakthrough that Trump managed, aided by his own command of social media, his large public profile and his almost limitless wealth. There is, though, precious little evidence that the attention-seeking tycoon commands the same levels of uncritical personal popularity and mass support that Trump can count on with his MAGA base, and history offers him little encouragement either.
