Trump news at a glance: fate of president's ‘big, beautiful bill' in doubt amid Senate vote
US senators on Saturday were scrambling to open debate on Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful' budget bill, which is key to the president's second-term agenda.
The bill cannot advance to the House until a debate is held and a final vote on the legislation passes the Senate. But Republicans have been divided by the controversial bill, with some rejecting the proposal to cut welfare programmes in order to cover tax breaks, and others demanding deeper cuts.
After the procedural vote to move to a floor debate on the measure opened on Saturday evening, several Republican had voted against it, putting pressure on the remaining holdouts to toe the party line.
Meanwhile, the tech billionaire Elon Musk has again voiced criticism of bill, describing it as 'utterly insane and destructive'.
Here are the key stories at a glance:
A vote in the US Senate, on whether or not to open debate on Donald Trump's package of tax breaks, spending cuts and bolstered deportation funds, formally titled 'the One Big Beautiful Bill Act', stalled for hours on Saturday, as Republicans inclined to vote against the measure were pressured to support it.
Soon after the vote opened at 7.30pm local time in Washington, three Republican senators joined all 47 Democrats to vote against the bill, meaning the remaining 50 Republican senators all needed to vote in favor to give vice-president JD Vance the chance to cast the tie-breaking vote and clear the procedural hurdle.
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The billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Saturday criticized the latest version of Donald Trump's sprawling tax and spending bill, calling it 'utterly insane and destructive'.
'The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!' Musk wrote on Saturday.
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The Democratic former Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman was honored for her legislative accomplishments and her humanity during a funeral on Saturday that was attended by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The former president and vice-president were joined by more than 1,000 other mourners.
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Eric Trump has hinted that he or another of the Trump family could run for president when his father's second term in the White House comes to an end.
Eric, who is co-executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, said, the road to the White House 'would be an easy one' if he decided to follow in his father's footsteps.
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Police in southern California arrested a man suspected of posing as a federal immigration officer this week, the latest in a series of such arrests, as masked, plainclothes immigration agents are deployed nationwide to meet the Trump administration's mass deportation targets.
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The son of an American citizen and military veteran – but who has no citizenship to any country – was deported from the US to Jamaica in late May.
Jermaine Thomas's deportation, recently reported on by the Austin Chronicle, is one of a growing number of immigration cases involving military service members' relatives or even veterans themselves who have been ensnared in the Trump administration's mass deportation program.
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Two men face spending their lives in prison after a federal judge sentenced them for their roles in the deaths of 53 people found dead in an abandoned tractor-trailer in Texas in 2022.
The sudden loss of key US satellite data could send hurricane forecasting back 'decades', scientists say.
Mark Zuckerberg's secret list of top AI talent to poach has the tech world atwitter.
Catching up? Here's what happened on 27 June 2025.
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
The Beatles and Kinks would be howling about tax in Labour's Britain
'If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat / If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet / Cause I'm the taxman / Yeah, I'm the taxman.' Those lyrics by George Harrison are from Taxman, the first song on the Beatles' Revolver album, released in 1966. That same year, the Kinks released Sunny Afternoon, with Ray Davies' blunt first line: 'The taxman's taken all my dough.' Artists and songwriters are often ahead of the curve – quite literally in this case. For it wasn't until 1974 that US economist Arthur Laffer drew a line on a napkin capturing what Harrison and Davies were saying: as tax rates rise beyond a certain point, entrepreneurs and wealth creators get cheesed off. They then do less – or move overseas – and the broader economy suffers. What become known as the Laffer curve, sketched at a smart Washington restaurant during a dinner with Republican Party bigwigs, had a profound impact on policymaking in America and elsewhere. Its core idea – that there's an optimal tax rate that maximises revenue, beyond which higher rates lower total revenues by stifling economic activity – was adopted by Ronald Reagan, a showbiz-star-turned-policymaker, as he entered the White House in 1981. Laffer's insight fed into 'supply-side economics' – the school of thought that finally countered post-war 'big state' ideology. It's no good just borrowing and spending more government money in a bid to boost growth if the tax burden crushes genuine commerce. Reagan's Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 sparked much howling from vested interests grown fat on state largesse. But it cut income tax significantly – and the US averaged 3.5pc annual growth for the rest of the decade, rescuing the world's biggest economy from 1970s stagnation. Approaching the first anniversary of this Labour Government, UK tax revenues are heading for 38pc of GDP, the highest tax burden since the early 1960s – above levels which riled the Beatles and the Kinks. Yet the public finances are extremely precarious. The Government borrowed £148bn during the fiscal year that ended in April, £61bn more than the Office for Budget Responsibility estimated when that same fiscal year started. It's important to remember the vast scale of that 12-month forecasting error during current rows over whether Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, has a single-digit-billion buffer in the national accounts in four years' time – the 'fiscal headroom' that dominates political discussion. Arguing obsessively about contingencies of less than 1pc of public spending which may or may not exist in 2029 is pure displacement activity. Our political and media class meanwhile all but ignores today's stark realities – an annual debt interest bill that's twice yearly defence spending and gilt yields consistently way above those seen during Liz Truss's mini-Budget crisis of October 2022. Yes, it's important to rein-in our runaway benefits bill. Even before the Government's latest cave-in, spending on sickness and disability benefits was set to rise sharply by the end of this decade, from under £50bn to well over £70bn a year, albeit by a few billion less after Labour announced its welfare reforms. Now that Sir Keir Starmer has folded, even that minor slowdown in the rate of increase of benefit spending won't happen. The only way to fix the public finances is to get growth going, so tax revenues rise and our vast 100pc-of-GDP-plus debt burden, and near-crisis-level debt service costs, fall as a share of national income. But Labour's tax rises since last July have crushed economic activity, curtailing tax revenues and weakening the public finances further – a sure sign we're beyond the peak of the Laffer curve, with yet higher tax rates set to prove even more counter-productive. The disastrous rise in employers' National Insurance contributions (NICs) has hammered hiring, undermining NIC revenues overall. Employment has fallen every month since the policy was unveiled in last October's budget, by an astonishing 109,000 in May alone, the month after this tax on jobs was introduced. During that same autumn Budget, Reeves raised capital gains tax from 10pc to 18pc for basic-rate taxpayers and 20pc to 24pc for those paying the higher rate. The Office for Budget Responsibility has since sharply downgraded capital gains tax (CGT) revenue forecasts, wiping £23bn off the projected tax take by 2030. Labour indulged its ideological fantasies by loading more taxes on non-dom international financiers based in the UK. Now multiple billionaires have fled and foreign direct investment projects have fallen to a two-decade low – imagine the jobs and tax revenues we've lost. Building on Tory mistakes, Labour increased taxes even more on North Sea drilling, killing off countless energy extraction projects, again destroying valuable revenue streams. Then there's the spiteful imposition of VAT on school fees which has seen four times more pupils withdrawn by cash-strapped households than ministers predicted and countless school closures – another case of more taxation destroying ambition and enterprise, hitting revenues overall. Back in the early 1980s, inspired by Laffer and Reagan, Margaret Thatcher's Tories lowered tax rates, setting Britain on a path to recovery. David Cameron and Theresa May's governments gradually cut corporation tax (CT) from 28pc in 2010 to 19pc by 2017, with CT revenues hitting 2.7pc of GDP by 2019, up from 2.1pc a decade earlier when the tax rate was much higher. Taxation is complicated – the historical and contemporary examples above are subject to other factors, too. But evidence of many decades shows that countries where the state is relatively small grow faster and are more prosperous, with those consistently spending beyond their means collapsing into crisis. The Beatles and the Kinks didn't leave the UK for tax purposes, unlike the Rolling Stones. But their songs captured the national mood, speaking for the silent majority, a mood that prevails today. Taxation is far too high – and raising tax rates even more will only compound Britain's fiscal and commercial weakness.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Trump FINALLY gets a question he respects as president grins from ear-to-ear after big week on Wall Street
Donald Trump gushed over a reporter's question about whether he 'outsmarted' the financial markets with his industry-shaking tariffs. The president grinned from ear-to-ear as a reporter asked him for his reaction to Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk saying Trump may have 'outsmarted everyone' with his tariffs. 'Mr. President, a leading global economist just did a one-eighty and says your tariff plan, you may have outsmarted everybody with it. What is your message?' the reporter asked. Trump smiled as he responded: 'I love this. I love this question. This is the favorite. This is the best question I've ever been asked because I've been going through abuse for years on this. 'Because, as you know, we're taking in hundreds of billions of dollars, no inflation whatsoever.' The reporter added in a follow-up question for Trump's 'message to critics who think your tariff plan caused a recession?' 'I think they should go back to business school,' Trump responded. 'It's so obvious. It's so obvious. I mean, we're taking in billions and billions of dollars from China and a lot of other countries.' It came as Wall Street continued its recent rally this week, with the S&P500 and Nasdaq hitting all-time closing highs on Friday. In Sløk's report that Trump appeared to enjoy, the economist speculated that Trump would keep tariffs below his most aggressive rates to ease market uncertainty while using them as leverage to get better trade deals. 'Maybe the strategy is to maintain 30% tariffs on China and 10% tariffs on all other countries and then give all countries 12 months to lower nontariff barriers and open up their economies to trade,' he wrote. The report came as Trump's 90-day pause on 'reciprocal tariffs' is set to come to an end early next month. Sløk said that Trump should consider extending the deadline to a whole year, which he said would give the global markets time to adjust to a 'new world with permanently higher tariffs.' 'This would seem like a victory for the world and yet would produce $400 billion of annual revenue for US taxpayers,' he said. 'Trade partners will be happy with only 10% tariffs and U.S. tax revenue will go up. 'Maybe the administration has outsmarted all of us.' Trump shocked the global markets in April as he introduced a raft of 'Liberation Day' tariffs, but the gamble may have paid off as markets soared in recent weeks and the US signed a number of trade deals with foreign nations The soaring stock market numbers came as trade deal hopes fueled investor risk appetite and economic data helped solidify expectations for rate cuts from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The rise came even after Trump terminated trade negotiations with Canada in response to its digital tax on technology companies. 'This market's been pretty resilient,' said Chuck Carlson, chief executive officer at Horizon Investment Services in Hammond, Indiana. 'Investors are riding momentum and looking for breakouts.' 'They don't want to get caught on the wrong side of this thing,' Carlson added. 'Many investors already have missed out. And now you have the S&P flirting with an all-time high.' While tariffs have yet to affect price growth, inflation continues to hover above the Fed's 2% annual inflation target. A separate report from the University of Michigan confirmed consumer sentiment has improved this month, but remains well below December's post-election bounce. Financial markets have priced in a 72% likelihood that the Fed will implement its first rate cut of the year in September, with a smaller, 21% probability of a rate cut coming as soon as July, according to CME's FedWatch tool. Washington and Beijing reached an agreement to expedite rare-earth shipments to the U.S., a White House official said, well ahead of the July 9 expiration of the 90-day postponement of U.S. President Donald Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs. Additionally, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration's trade deals with 18 of the main U.S. trading partners could be done by the September 1 Labor Day holiday.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
US sees spate of arrests of civilians impersonating Ice officers
Police in southern California arrested a man suspected of posing as a federal immigration officer this week, the latest in a series of such arrests, as masked, plainclothes immigration agents are deployed nationwide to meet the Trump administration's mass deportation targets. The man, Fernando Diaz, was arrested by Huntington Park police after officers said they found a loaded gun and official-looking documents with Department of Homeland Security headings in his SUV, according to NBC Los Angeles. Officers were impounding his vehicle for parking in a handicapped zone when Diaz asked to retrieve items inside, the police said. Among the items seen by officers in the car were 'multiple copies of passports not registered under the individual's name', NBC reports. Diaz was arrested for possession of the allegedly unregistered firearm and released on bail. The Huntington Park police chief and mayor accused Diaz of impersonating an immigration agent at a news conference, a move Diaz later told the NBC News affiliate he was surprised by. Diaz also denied to the outlet that he had posed as an officer with border patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). At the news conference, police showed reporters paper they found inside his car with an official-looking US Customs and Border Protection header. The arrest is one of several cases involving people allegedly impersonating immigration officials, as the nationwide crackdown on undocumented immigrants intensifies. Experts have warned that federal agents' increased practice of masking while carrying out immigration raids and arrests makes it easier for imposters to pose as federal officers. Around the country, the sight of Ice officers emerging from unmarked cars in plainclothes to make arrests has become increasingly common. In March, for instance, a Tufts University student was seen on video being arrested by masked Ice officials outside her apartment, after her visa had been revoked for writing an opinion article in her university newspaper advocating for Palestinian rights. And many federal agents operating in the Los Angeles region in recent weeks have been masked. In late January, a week after Trump took office, a man in South Carolina was arrested and charged with kidnapping and impersonating an officer, after allegedly presenting himself as an Ice officer and detaining a group of Latino men. In February, two people impersonating Ice officers attempted to enter a Temple University residence hall. CNN reported that Philadelphia police later arrested one of them, a 22-year-old student, who was charged with impersonating an officer. In North Carolina the same week, another man, Carl Thomas Bennett, was arrested after allegedly impersonating an Ice officer and sexually assaulting a woman. Bennett reportedly threatened to deport the woman if she did not comply. In April, a man in Indiantown, Florida, was arrested for impersonating an Ice officer and targeting immigrants. Two men reported to the police that the man had performed a fake traffic stop, and then asked for their documents and immigration status. Mike German, a former FBI agent and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Guardian last week that the shootings of two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, by a suspect who allegedly impersonated a police officer, highlights the danger of police not looking like police. 'Federal agents wearing masks and casual clothing significantly increases this risk of any citizen dressing up in a way that fools the public into believing they are law enforcement so they can engage in illegal activity. It is a public safety threat, and it's also a threat to the agents and officers themselves, because people will not immediately be able to distinguish between who is engaged in legitimate activity or illegitimate activity when violence is occurring in public,' he said.
