How Elon Musk and Donald Trump could inflict pain on each other
The spectacular blow-up on Thursday
between US president
Donald Trump
and
Elon Musk
has ripped apart a shaky alliance between two of the world's most powerful men. Their feud could have far-reaching consequences if it drags on or even escalates.
Here are eight ways they could inflict pain on each other.
Musk Against Trump
Wield his billions against Trump, his allies and his agenda:
After spending more than $250 million to help elect the president, Musk could just as easily fund campaigns against Republicans. He has called Trump's domestic policy bill a 'disgusting abomination,' and on Thursday attacked Republican congressional leaders on X, his social media platform. (Musk could also withhold the final $100 million of his pledge to support Trump.)
Use social media as an irritant:
On Thursday afternoon, Musk posted a poll on X asking whether it was time 'to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle.' More than 80 per cent of the nearly two million respondents so far have voted 'yes'. And responding to a post suggesting that 'Trump should be impeached,' Musk said, 'Yes.' (It was not entirely clear whether he was agreeing with impeachment or with another part of the post.)
READ MORE
Drag Trump into controversy:
After enjoying a close relationship with the president for months, Musk could now cause trouble for Trump by claiming to have inside information. On Thursday, without offering evidence, he claimed Trump's administration had slow-walked the release of files on Jeffrey Epstein because Trump's name appeared in them. 'Mark this post for the future,' he wrote. 'The truth will come out.' House Democrats quickly jumped on the post.
Use his companies to inconvenience the administration:
Musk wrote that he would 'immediately' decommission SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which transports Nasa astronauts and supplies to and from the International Space Station. The threat prompted Steve Bannon, a Trump ally and one of Musk's foremost critics, to suggest that Trump 'seize SpaceX tonight before midnight' via executive order.
Trump Against Musk
Cut contracts with Musk's companies:
On his own social media platform, Truth Social, Trump suggested that ending the government contracts with Musk's various companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, would be 'the easiest way to save money in our Budget.' Last year, Musk's companies were promised $3 billion in nearly 100 contracts with 17 government agencies.
Investigate Musk's immigration status and drug use:
Bannon called on Thursday for a 'formal investigation of his immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.' Musk is a naturalised US citizen who was born in South Africa. Bannon also called for an investigation into Musk's drug use and his efforts to be briefed on classified information about military plans involving China.
Revoke Musk's security clearance:
Bannon suggested that Musk's top-secret clearance should be suspended during investigations into the tech billionaire. But Trump could also fully revoke Musk's clearance, which Musk has as part of the government contracts involving SpaceX's work with Nasa. That would make it very difficult for Musk to continue to work with the government.
Wield the power of the presidency against him
:
Trump has a tremendous array of powers at his disposal, with the ability to sign executive orders punishing political adversaries and to direct agencies such as the justice department to initiate investigations. He could end some of Musk's pet projects, such as the so-called department of government efficiency, as well as his embrace of white South Africans, a priority of Musk's.
– This article originally appeared in
The New York Times
.
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The Journal
23 minutes ago
- The Journal
A new organisation has taken over Gaza food distribution with disastrous results - who's behind it?
WHILE THE ENTIRE population of the Gaza Strip in Palestine remains on the brink of famine, and Israel refuses to allow in thousands of truckloads of humanitarian aid, an organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has taken over food distribution, with already disastrous results. The introduction of this new US and Israeli-backed entity into the besieged Palestinian territory has been part of Israel's plan to circumvent UN agencies and NGOs that already work in Gaza and have done so for decades. Those UN agencies and officials repeatedly condemned the establishment of the organisation, warning that it would allow Israel to weaponise the provision of food. NGOs said it would only serve to allow Israel to carry out a plan proposed by US President Donald Trump, and endorsed by Israeli government officials, which is to remove the Palestinian population from the area. At Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, people mourn those killed while gathering near a GHF centre on 3 June Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo Trump's proposal to 'clean out' Gaza has been widely condemned as a plan for ethnic cleansing. The man who was initially heading up the organisation, US military veteran Jake Wood, resigned the day before it began operating in Gaza, citing similar concerns to those expressed by the UN. Israel has said the GHF is a means of preventing food and other supplies from falling into the hands of Hamas. In mid-May, Tom Fletcher of the UN's humanitarian affairs office called the Israeli-US plan to take over aid distribution 'a cynical sideshow'. 'Please stay away' Israeli forces have on a number of occasions now opened fire on crowds of hungry people who were making their way to distribution points operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The term Orwellian may be overused in modern discourse but, in this case, it seems to be the most appropriate description for an ostensibly humanitarian organisation whose distribution centre almost immediately became the site of massacres. One witness to the latest Israeli attack told AFP: 'It's a trap.' Since Wednesday, the GHF has suspended all aid distribution until further notice after Israel declared roads leading to its hubs 'combat zones'. 'Please stay away from distribution sites for your safety,' the GHF said in a Facebook post on Friday. All of the Israeli attacks have taken place at a centre in the Tal al-Sultan area outside Rafah City in the far south of the territory. Advertisement Palestinians carry boxes and bags containing food and humanitarian aid packages delivered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo The first deadly incident happened on the morning of Sunday, 25 May, when 31 Palestinians were killed by Israeli gunfire , according to the Gaza Civil Defence agency. The following morning, Israeli forces shot dead three people, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). And last Tuesday, 27 people were killed by Israeli fire near the site, according to health officials. Israel has denied firing on civilians, saying it fired 'warning shots ' and calling early reports 'false' while the GHF initially did likewise. The Israeli military did admit firing at 'suspects' who they said had moved in their soldiers' direction on Tuesday. Who funds and runs the GHF? The short answer to the question of who funds the GHF is, we don't know. The organisation is registered in the United States and while it has a website , all it says is: 'Delivering critical aid and support to the people of Gaza. More information coming soon'. The New York Times reported that the idea for an organisation like the GHF first came from Israel and opposition politician Yair Lapid has suggested it is funded by the Israeli government. People carry away supplies from a GHF centre in Gaza Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo The GHF said last month that a Western European country had donated more than $100 million but did not name the country. As for who runs the GHF, a little more is known. A former USAID contractor, John Acree, took over as John Wood's interim replacement and an evangelical preacher and former Trump campaign advisor named Reverend Johnnie Moore was named the new chairman on Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, US consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, whose participation had not previously been disclosed, terminated its contract with the GHF. With reporting from AFP Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... Our Explainer articles bring context and explanations in plain language to help make sense of complex issues. We're asking readers like you to support us so we can continue to provide helpful context to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Learn More Support The Journal
RTÉ News
41 minutes ago
- RTÉ News
It's been one big beautiful bust-up for Trump and Musk
There were many tensions in the relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Some had been clearly visible; others were well concealed. Their relationship was widely considered the most consequential in current US politics. The proximate cause of its end was the bill that will probably be Donald Trump's most consequential piece of legislation. The one big beautiful bill has caused one big beautiful bust-up. The United States has a budget problem, and a big one. Simply put, the US government spends more than it takes in taxes and uses borrowings to cover the gap. The borrowings have mounted up over the decades and now stand just north of $36 trillion. Elon Musk was touted (mostly by himself) as the man who was going to fix it. During the election campaign last year it was Musk who first raised the idea of a "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) in a podcast he did with candidate Trump in the middle of August. Musk said he would be willing to serve in the administration, leading DOGE. Because he was - and remains - very worried about the Federal debt and is convinced of the urgent need to reduce it. The DOGE plan was to use the techniques of Silicon Valley start-ups on the fusty world of government accounting and slash and burn its way quickly to big savings that would help to close out the tax and spend gap. Cutting the deficit was the strategic goal, and Trump campaigned on the idea. As long as lenders - foreign and domestic - are happy to lend money to the US government for an interest rate it can afford, and the economy is growing fast enough, borrowing to make up a shortfall for a few years shouldn't be a problem. And the US market for government bonds is the world's deepest and most liquid, so lenders don't look for high interest rates because they can get their money out any time they want, and make a reasonable return lending to Uncle Sam. Right up until the moment they don't - and then $36 trillion becomes a very big problem. We have seen this up close and personal in Ireland during the financial crisis. And although the US is a long way from Ireland's financial woes, when interest rates start to rise (the famous 'yield' on government bonds goes up) governments get worried. This is exactly what happened in the US recently over the president's tariff policy. Such was the disruption to trade and commerce, investors rethought their strategy and demanded higher interest rates for lending money to the government. The so called "bond market vigilantes" didn't like the Trump tariffs, and put pressure on the government in ways ordinary voters cannot. They did for former UK prime minister Liz Truss three years ago, and wreaked havoc among the PIIGS 15 years ago (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain - all doing a lot better than the Euro area average these days, thank you for asking). So Trump already has the vigilantes on his back over trade. But he promised the voters tariffs, and said the money raised from them would help balance the government books. Trump slammed Biden for his deficit spending (6.5% of GDP last year - the Maastricht Treaty limit in Europe is 3%, and an "excessive deficit" ruling requires governments to set up a plan to get the deficit back in range - ideally balanced over a number of years). In America they have a debt limit - an effort by Congress to rein in the constant deficit spending. Every so often - these days with increasing frequency - the Congress has to raise the debt limit, so the government can borrow more to fund day-to-day activities. If not, the government starts to shut down. This has actually happened in the past. There have been three last minute raises in the debt limit in the past year, as the anti-borrowing members of Congress engaged in brinkmanship to try and bring a runaway budget under control. Enter the man with a chainsaw and baseball cap. I watched from the back of the hall in a convention centre hotel in National Harbour, Maryland, as Musk took to the stage at the C-PAC annual DC gathering of Conservative political activists. The chainsaw was a gift from Argentina's President Javier Milei, who presented it to him on stage. During that August podcast with Trump, Musk cited Milei as an example the US should follow, as did Trump himself - "the new head of a place called Argentina, he's a big MAGA fan: he ran on MAGA and he took it to extremes, and I hear he's doing really a terrific really cut and I'm hearing they are starting to do really well". Musk concurred, saying Milei was cutting government spending, simplifying regulations and doing things "that make sense". He said Argentina was a lesson for the US in what can go bad - a country that used to be very wealthy but which had gone way off course by poor policy choices. Musk tried earnestly to tell Trump his belief that government over-spending causes inflation, that "if the government spends far more than it brings in, that increases the money supply, and if the money supply increases faster than the rate of goods and services - that's inflation", he told a clearly bored Trump, who started talking about how he had rebuilt the US military in his first term in office, before getting the message at the third time of asking: "I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayers' money is spent in a good way. And I'd be happy to help out on such a commission," said Elon Musk. "I'd love it", said Donald Trump, finally. "You're the greatest cutter", he said laying on the praise for Musk's record in business. "You walk into a company, they want to go on strike, you say that's OK - you're all gone. You're all gone. So every one of you is gone. So you are the greatest." It was the beginning of the bromance, as Musk invested his hopes in the candidate, and Trump strapped on the booster rocket of Elon's fame and prestige. That, and the hundreds of millions of dollars Musk threw at the Trump election campaign, including paying voters to register to vote, with the chance of winning a million-dollar jackpot in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And there was the undeniable star power of Musk himself - tech zillionaire, car maker, rocketship maker, owner of a social media platform, paymaster to Neuralink (a genuinely useful company) and Starlink, the satellite internet company. Truly Musk was and remains a rockstar of the digital age. He brought new, hard to reach voters into the Trump rallies and their more important TV audiences, adding even more energy to the already high-wattage Trump himself brought to bear. He was particularly important in cementing the coalition of 'tech and crypto bros', and the 'manosphere' of podcasters that brought a significant lump of younger male voters over to Trump. In a tight election, it made a difference - possibly the difference. He had the mission, he had the means, he had a sort of a mandate from the voters, and most of all he had permission from Trump - permission to try and cut government spending, abolish departments, fire civil servants - engage in all the fast, simple, direct action many of the MAGA faithful wanted to see: if it inflicted pain on the hated Washington DC and its Deep State denizens, even better. So Musk moved fast and broke things and predictably ran into trouble with the actual cabinet members - the ones who actually are in charge of government departments, the ones who actually had to appear before Congress and do hearings to see if they were suitable for the job and would adhere to the constitution and all that. The first report of a screaming match at a cabinet gathering was not long in coming. More followed as February progressed. Still the cult of Elon Musk grew in the outside world, even as the reality of DOGE was slowly revealed as it attempted to smash the granite edifice of the federal government and its two and a half centuries of political deal-making and legal fortifications. A revolution was afoot in Washington, I wrote in early February, in a piece casting Musk as the Robespierre of this revolt. It was a not so subtle nod to the widely held view in DC that Musk would not last long in government, that his way of cutting just wasn't sustainable. Nor would it result in enough savings. It would just annoy people. And so it did, not just cabinet secretaries, but more importantly, Trump himself. "Elon was wearing thin", he posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday. "I asked him to leave, I took away his EV (electric vehicle) Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!" He followed it up with another post, touching on the big conflict of interest that always dogged Musk's government work: "The easiest way to save in our budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised Biden didn't do it." In his meeting with the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (who skillfully said almost nothing, apart from a well aimed dart on Ukraine), Trump rose to a reporter's bait and spoke out against Musk over his attack on the One Big Beautiful Bill: "I'm very disappointed, because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people. "He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it. All of a sudden he had a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate, because that's billions and billions of dollars, and it really is unfair. "We want to have cars of all types, electric. We want to have electric, but we want to have a gasoline combustion. We want to have hybrids. We want to be able to sell everything. "And when that was cut, and Congress wanted to cut it, he became a little bit different, and I can understand that, but he knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody, and he never had a problem until right after he left. "And if you saw the statements he made about me, which I'm sure you can get very easily, it's very fresh on tape, he said the most beautiful things about me, and he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next. But I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot." Asked by a reporter in the Oval Office if Musk had raised his concerns about the tax and spend bill privately, and if Trump's own comments were just sour grapes, the President replied: "No, he worked hard and he did a good job, and I'll be honest, I think he misses the place. I think he got out there and all of a sudden he wasn't in this beautiful Oval Office, and he's got nice offices too - but there's something about this, it's just a special place. "World War One, it started and it ended here, and World War Two and so many other things. Everything big comes right from this, this beautiful space. It's now much more beautiful than it was six months ago. A lot of good things are happening in this room. "And I'll tell you, he's not the first: people leave my administration, and they love us. And then at some point they miss it so badly, and some of them embrace it, and some of them actually become hostile. I don't know what it is. It's sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it, but we have it with others too. "They leave, and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour is gone. The whole world is different, and they become hostile. I don't know what it is. Someday you'll write a book about it, and you'll let us know." Musk's responses to his monstering on live TV - about 80 posts on his X social media platform in which he exhibited the full range of political skills of the average moody 16-year-old - veered from threatening to immediately decommission SpaceX's fleet of Dragon spaceships, used by NASA to ferry supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station, to claiming that the reason the Trump administration hasn't fulfilled its promise to publish the Epstein files is that Trump features in them. It is a matter of public record - i.e. newspaper articles, videos, photographs - that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein knew each other and attended social events together, including parties at Epstein's Manhattan mansion. These were mostly in the 1980s and 90s, when Trump would attend the opening of an envelope if it would get him a mention in the New York Post. They are not the smoking gun Mr Musk thinks they are. They are barely the smoke. The row that had been coming for months was now on full public display. The gloves were off, and what used to be called a Twitter fight was under way, the richest man in the world and the president of the United States behaving in an undignified manner for the entertainment of the masses. Rarely has the popcorn emoji on mobile phones been so thoroughly overused. But Trump is the winner here. Musk is simply the latest meal for the apex predator of American politics. Like the nature films where the young buck tries to take on the old alpha and is seen off, so Musk is away with his tail between his legs. His excursion into the swamp of DC politics ended in pain, humiliation and considerable financial loss. The share price of Tesla, Musk's main source of wealth, are down 30% since the start of the year, as enough consumers reacted with a boycott of the electric carmakers products that it caused a crisis at the company that required his full-time attention to fix. And his full-time keeping quiet on the national political stage. His personal loss of fortune since joining the Trump administration was estimated at $27bn dollars. The Irish banking crisis cost €31bn. Once Tesla reported its first quarter results, the clock was ticking very fast for Elon Musk's tenure in the US government. That's when it became generally known that he was on a 130-day contract that would finish at the end of May. Then he was said to be in wind-down mode, withdrawing from government having established the core DOGE team (featuring a precocious 19-year-old known as "big balls"). Both sides tried to handle the departure with grace and formality. But then once he had his US equivalent of a P45 in his hand, Musk launched a blistering attack on Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), calling it "disgusting" and "pork-filled" earlier this week. "I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it," Musk wrote on X on Tuesday night. Was the whole DOGE thing just a distraction, something to create the kind of instability that Trump thrives in so that he could get his real priorities through the system - a system he knew far more about than Musk? Was Musk just used by Trump? Will Musk seek revenge by funding primary challengers to vulnerable Republicans in next year's mid-term elections? California Democrat Ro Khanna says the party should embrace Elon Musk. Musk himself is now musing on starting a third party "that actually represents the 80% of Americans in the middle". Will any of this come to pass? Who knows. All that is sure is that the OBBB is still facing the fundamental arithmetic problem we started off with. The bill as it stands would make the tax cuts that Trump introduced in 2017 permanent. They are currently due to expire next year. Trump likes to call them the biggest tax cut ever: if they do expire, Americans will accordingly face the biggest tax hike ever. Obviously no sitting politicians wants that on their record. So Trump must have those tax cuts made permanent. And that will cost money. Which this bill does not prove for. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill as approved by the House of Representatives and now before the Senate contains $3.7bn in tax cuts. Offsetting this is $1.3 trillion in proposed spending cuts. That leaves a $2.4 trillion dollar hole in the accounts, to be filled by more borrowing. Trump disputes the CBO figures, saying they don't take sufficient account of the economic growth he says will come from extending the tax cuts and the investment flowing from his 'America First' trade and tariff policy. There will also be some additional revenue from tariffs, he argues - but nowhere near enough to close the gap. But $2.4 trillion is a lot of hope value. Musk said at the outset he hoped to cut a trillion off government spending through DOGE. The current estimates say DOGE has at best achieved about a fifth of that, probably less. And now Elon is gone. Maybe "Big Balls" and his chums can do it - but again there is a lot of hope value in the proposition. Meanwhile the bond market vigilantes are poised, and the balanced budget fundamentalists in the Senate are talking up a last stand. There are two of them - Rand Paul and Ron Johnson. Trump could lose these two and still carry the day in the Senate, where the Republicans have a 53-47 majority. Four other Republican senators talk a good game on the Federal debt, but are swayable, and will probably be swayed by Trump - especially now he has dispatched the richest man in the world with brutality and cunning. In this he was aided by Steve Bannon, the godfather of MAGA, who despises Musk and the entire Silicon Valley set, regarding them as tech plutocrats intent on robbing Americans of their money and their liberty - especially the latter. He has also called for an investigation into Musk's immigration status, dubbing him an illegal immigrant from Africa. And he urged Trump to seize control of Starlink. Musk called Bannon "a Communist retard". MAGA probably won't miss Musk. But don't rule out a reconciliation, especially if it suits Trump. Plenty of Trump supporters have been calling for a healing of the rift. Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev jokingly offered Russian mediation to end the hostilities between Trump and Musk - for a fee. In the meantime, all of Trump's domestic energy will be focused on getting the OBBB across the line in the Senate. He wants it ready to sign by 4 July, of course.
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Encampments director Kei Pritsker: ‘The students risked a lot to stand with the people of Gaza. That's tremendous'
The Palestine solidarity encampments at Columbia University , in uptown Manhattan, were not the first such US student protests during the continuing Gaza conflict. But they came to be the most impactful. Beginning in April 2024, the occupation saw tents spreading across the Morningside Heights campus of the Ivy League institution. Flags and banners were unfurled. Chants went up. That first protest, seeking Columbia's financial divestment from Israel, was broken up when Minouche Shafik, the university's president, authorised the New York Police Department to enter the campus and conduct mass arrests. Nothing like this had happened since the 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War. 'Columbia wasn't actually the first campus to set up an encampment,' Kei Pritsker, director of a fine new documentary on the protests, confirms. 'Stanford University, Vanderbilt University – they also had encampments going. But the whole world saw how Columbia had called the police on their own students – students who paid tuition to study at that school, only to be arrested by their own faculty, by their own school administration.' Pritsker's The Encampments stands as a lucid, sober examination of a still-developing story. The director, unapologetically on the side of the protesters, reflects that mood in his own conversation. He lays out the case calmly. The anger is implied, not explicit. READ MORE 'People saw this happening in broad daylight,' he says. 'These videos were circulated around the world. There was so much outrage over the treatment of students who weren't bothering anyone, who were protesting peacefully. The hypocrisy of it all. The fact that the students were saying, 'Hey, we're doing this in the spirit of education.'' The protests spread across the United States' universities and then across the world. The students in Manhattan returned and tensions continued to mount. There were disputes about anti-Semitic incidents happening in the vicinity of the encampments. The university ended up cancelling its graduation ceremony in May of 2024. Shafik resigned that August. Future histories will position all the testimonies in proper context, but The Encampments is an invaluable first draft. There is a lot to unpick here about the general condition of American education and, more specifically, about its relationship with the almighty dollar. 'The schools have this false reputation – it's almost a caricature – that's been built up by conservatives, that they are run by Marxists, by leftists,' Pritsker says of the top US universities. 'The reality is the schools are really run like businesses, especially the private institutions. In the United States the average American pays more for education than any person in the world, but we have very low outcomes for education. 'That's because the schools are run like a business. The money is not just being invested in big sports stadiums and huge monuments but also just in inflating the endowment of the school. Inflating the investment portfolio. Buying real-estate investments.' [ Protesting students will not be shamed, badgered or bribed into silence Opens in new window ] The film puts the case that Columbia's vigorous response to the protests was driven more by financial concerns than by any ideological unease. 'It's clear to us that Columbia's main consideration was how their donors would feel about their reaction to the protests, not whether the school was on the moral side of history or if they were actually invested in genocide,' Pritsker says. 'They were concerned with pleasing their donors – who happened to support Israel.' The Encampments further argues that members of Columbia's board of trustees may have direct interest in organisations that would suffer if the university divested as demanded by the students. 'They're titans of industry. They are wealthy. They are influential in politics and in culture,' he says, moving on to discuss a former secretary of homeland security. 'We talk about a few like Jeh Johnson, who is someone who sits on the Columbia board of trustees and also sits on the board of Lockheed Martin, which is a weapons manufacturer that builds weapons that are sold to Israel.' Pritsker, a journalist with BreakThrough News , did not initially set out to make a film about the phenomenon. He went to Columbia first to report on the early protests. Some of his footage from that visit made it into the final project. 'I had been in contact with the Columbia students since then,' he says. 'So when they were setting up the encampment they reached out to me and said, 'Hey, do you want to cover this? You know the administration isn't listening to our demands. They're ignoring us completely. They are banning our student groups. They're looking the other way. So we're setting up this encampment.'' Pritsker went back to the university and began filming. He felt it would be just a straightforward news package, but when rumours emerged of imminent arrests he realised that he might have a larger story to tell. He hung around, and the next morning the first police actions took place. Then information came in that other colleges across the nation were setting up their own encampments. Pritsker found himself monitoring the progress of a mighty wave. 'I asked the students, 'Hey, can I live with you guys?'' he says. 'So I lived in the encampment for the next 12 days – all really as a journalist. I had no intention of making a film out of any of this.' News reports suggest that the encampments temporarily transformed the whole atmosphere in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Cops were everywhere. The press was hovering. Chants and cheers were audible. Did Pritsker get that sense of the protests bleeding out into the wider community? 'That was a big part of it that we didn't quite get to address in the film,' he says. 'This was a citywide, and a countrywide, and a globalwide encampment at Columbia. Every single night and every single day people were going to the gates of Columbia to chant very loudly – loudly enough that the students in the camp could hear them chanting in support.' He goes on to argue that the issue of the genocide in Gaza is not something 'that stops at the university gates'. This was a concern that, one way or another, energised the whole community. 'It should come as no surprise that people in New York City wanted to express their support for the students,' he says. 'Without that support the encampment wouldn't have survived, but the students inside were receiving tons and tons of food.' [ Irish J1 visa students urged to be informed of potential risks of 'activism' in US Opens in new window ] All well and good. But student protests have, to put it delicately, never been universally popular with the wider public. There was, in the blue-collar US, at least as much outrage at student militancy of the late 1960s as there was support. And Columbia is not just some community college. These are elite students at the most prestigious of universities. 'To a degree, there is an aspect of that,' he says. 'The movement hasn't quite reached blue-collar America. There is a perception that the movement is solely for people who consider themselves progressive or left-wing. When it's really not. I think that is kind of where the movement needs to go. It needs to broaden and approach people who might consider themselves conservative or right-wing.' The Encampments does, at least, push aside the notion that there is nothing at stake for the protesters. Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist at Columbia and one of the lead negotiators during the protest, is interviewed at length. In March this year Khalil was arrested by immigration officials in his university accommodation. 'Mahmoud is still in prison in Jena, Louisiana,' Pritsker says. 'He's still facing potential deportation. Some judges have issued orders slowing down the process, and obviously he has tremendous public support. 'So anything the Trump administration tries to do to Mahmoud will be heavily watched and criticised. They're trying to be really careful, and it's not clear that the administration has a solid case to do this.' Few of the protesters are facing anything like that sort of challenge. But there are risks for even those from more comfortable backgrounds. 'They have all these shiny little objects waved in front of them: lucrative careers, fancy job titles, all this,' Pritsker says, wryly. 'And the fact is they rejected that entirely. They said, 'We don't care about any of these bribes, these little trinkets that you're offering us. We want to stand with the people of Gaza at great detriment to our own safety and our own reputation.' That's tremendous.' The Encampments is in cinemas from Friday, June 6th
