Germany reels as Friedrich Merz fails to win chancellery
In a post-war first, Germany's round of parliamentary voting for a chancellor did not produce one. We ask why members of Friedrich Merz's coalition turned on him, and what happens next. Daring raids on scam compounds in Myanmar freed many slave-labour scammers —but thousands remain trapped there (9:42). And diving into the data that show young Americans are getting (slightly) happier (16:23). Runtime: 22 min
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NBC News
6 hours ago
- NBC News
Sen. Cory Booker says he won't accept campaign donations from Elon Musk
Sen. Cory Booker on Sunday said that he would not accept campaign donations from tech mogul Elon Musk but urged the former Trump advisor to "get involved right now in a more substantive way" in Democrats' push against the sweeping GOP-backed spending bill. "This bill is disastrous for our long-term economy," Booker told NBC News' "Meet the Press." "This is an American issue, and I welcome Elon Musk not to my campaign. I welcome him right now, not to sit back and just fire off tweets, get involved right now in a more substantive way, in putting pressure on Congress people and senators to not do this." Asked directly whether he would ever accept campaign funding from Musk, Booker said, "I would not accept money from Elon Musk for my campaign, but I would be supportive of anybody, including Elon Musk, putting resources forward right now to let more Americans know," about the bill. Booker's remarks come as other Democrats, like California Rep. Ro Khanna, have floated welcoming Musk into the Democratic party after a feud between President Donald Trump and the Tesla and SpaceX CEO exploded into public view last week. "We should ultimately be trying to convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with,' Khanna told Politico last week after Musk and Trump fired off a series of social media posts online criticizing each other. The falling out started after Musk called the budget bill a "disgusting abomniation" in a post on X. In subsequent posts on Truth Social, the president accused Musk of "wearing thin" and said "he just went crazy." Musk later accused Trump of " ingratitude" in another post on X after he spent $250 million boosting Trump's campaign in 2024 and accused Trump of links to deceased sex offender Jeff Epstein in a now-deleted post. On Saturday, in a phone call with NBC News, Trump said he has no desire to repair his relationship with Musk after their public spat. The president also responded to a direct question about what might happen if Musk decided to financially support Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections, days after Musk wrote in a post on X,"In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people," appearing to refer to Republicans who voted for the GOP-backed spending bill in the House. 'If he does, he'll have to pay the consequences for that,' Trump told NBC News, adding that there could be "serious consequences." In May, House Republicans passed a sweeping domestic policy bill called the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that extends tax cuts passed in the first Trump administration, increases funding for border security and eliminates federal taxes on tips and overtime pay. The bill has also drawn scrutiny from Democrats for slashing funding for Medicaid and some food stamps while implementing work requirements for Medicaid, which provides healthcare for low income Americans. Musk and some Senate Republicans have blasted the bill for estimated effects it could have on the federal debt and deficit, though Trump and House Republicans have downplayed those concerns. "More Americans have to understand that if this bill passes, average Americans are going to see their costs skyrocket as this president again pushes legislation that is indicative of his chaos, corruption and cruelty towards Americans," Booker said on Sunday.
The Herald Scotland
13 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Justice Jackson warns Supreme Court is sending a 'troubling message'
"It is particularly startling to think that grants of relief in these circumstances might be (unintentionally) conveying not only preferential treatment for the Government but also a willingness to undercut both our lower court colleagues' well-reasoned interim judgments and the well-established constraints of law that they are in the process of enforcing," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote. Jackson was dissenting from the conservative majority's decision to give Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency complete access to the data of millions of Americans kept by the U.S. Social Security Administration. Once again, she wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, "this Court dons its emergency responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them." A district judge had blocked DOGE's access to "personally identifiable information" while assessing if that access is legal. Jackson said a majority of the court didn't require the administration to show it would be "irreparably harmed" by not getting immediate access, one of the legal standards for intervention. "It says, in essence, that although other stay applicants must point to more than the annoyance of compliance with lower court orders they don't like," she wrote, "the Government can approach the courtroom bar with nothing more than that and obtain relief from this Court nevertheless." A clock, a mural, a petition: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's chambers tell her story In a brief and unsigned decision, the majority said it weighed the "irreparable harm" factor along with the other required considerations of what's in the public interest and whether the courts are likely to ultimately decide that DOGE can get at the data. But the majority did not explain how they did so. Jackson said the court `plainly botched' its evaluation of a Trump appeal Jackson raised a similar complaint when the court on May 30 said the administration can revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans living in the United States. Jackson wrote that the court "plainly botched" its assessment of whether the government or the approximately 530,000 migrants would suffer the greater harm if their legal status ends while the administration's mass termination of that status is being litigated. Jackson said the majority undervalued "the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending." The majority did not offer an explanation for its decision. More Supreme Court wins for Trump In addition to those interventions, the Supreme Court recently blocked a judge's order requiring DOGE to disclose information about its operations, declined to reinstate independent agency board members fired by Trump, allowed Trump to strip legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans and said the president can enforce his ban on transgender people serving in the military. Jackson disagreed with all of those decisions. The court's two other liberal justices - Sotomayor and Elena Kagan - disagreed with most of them. More: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson can throw a punch. Literally. The court did hand Trump a setback in May when it barred the administration from quickly resuming deportations of Venezuelans under a 1798 wartime law. Two of the court's six conservative justices - Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito - dissented. Decisions are expected in the coming weeks on other Trump emergency requests, including whether the president can dismantle the Education Department and can enforce his changes to birthright citizenship.
NBC News
a day ago
- NBC News
Breaking down 20 years of election data that shows how the two parties have evolved in the Trump era
President Donald Trump's second election win was different from his first in one big, important way: He won the popular vote, just the second time in the last two decades that Republicans had done so. And in the time between those two victories, from 2004 to 2024, there have been dramatic shifts in the nation's politics along geographic, racial, educational and economic lines. Trump is operating in a very different Republican Party than George W. Bush was 20 years earlier. A look at where the vote has shifted most in that time tells an eye-catching story. Over the last 20 years, the counties where Republicans have improved their presidential vote share by the largest margins are predominately centered in Appalachia and the surrounding areas. The 100 counties that saw the largest shifts include: 11 of West Virginia's 55 counties, 27 of Tennessee's 95 counties, 18 of Arkansas' 75 counties and 17 of Kentucky's 120 counties. These counties, on the whole, are much more heavily white than average, according to census data, with white residents making up at least 90% of the total population in about two-thirds of these counties. All but 12 of those counties are at least 75% white. The unemployment rate across these counties is about twice the national average. Residents are more likely to be reliant on food stamps and less likely to have moved in the last year. Residents of these counties, on average, also are significantly less likely to have a bachelor's degree or higher. While the national average in the American Community Survey's most recent five-year estimate is that 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, the average in these counties is just 14%. In short, the shifts show how Trump has brought more white working-class voters into the GOP, causing spectacular changes in some localities. Elliott County, Kentucky, with about 7,300 people, shifted the most over this time period. While Democrat John Kerry carried the county over Bush 70%-29%, the county shifted significantly to the right by Democrat Barack Obama's 2012 re-election, when Obama narrowly outran Republican Mitt Romney 49%-47%. The county continued to shift with Trump on the ballot, ultimately with Trump winning a higher vote share in 2024 (80%) than Kerry did in 2004. It's a similar story in many of these other counties — particularly those in states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, where rural voters that once voted Democratic have been leaving the party, especially at the presidential level. In the Trump era, heavily Hispanic counties shifted right A different look — at the counties with the largest pro-Republican shifts between Trump's three elections, from 2016 to 2024 — shows some major differences in the types of places that have moved to the right specifically within the Trump era. On average, the 100 counties that shifted most toward Republicans in the Trump era are significantly more Hispanic than the national average. These counties are also wealthier and more educated compared to the counties that moved most from 2004 to 2024, although they are still below the national average. While the biggest Republican-shifting counties from 2004 to 2024 are largely concentrated around Appalachia, the counties that shifted the most to the right in the Trump era are more spread out and predominantly in the South and West. Twenty-nine Texas counties show up in the list of 100 counties that saw the greatest gain in GOP presidential vote margin between 2016 and 2024, and 12 of those are among the 20 that saw the biggest shifts. All of these Texas counties are majority-Hispanic, and some are more than 90% Hispanic, emblematic of Trump's dramatic improvement among Hispanic voters in 2024 as well as his success in heavily Hispanic areas along the border in 2020. Another heavily Hispanic county, Miami-Dade County, saw the 15th-largest shift in margin toward Republicans between 2016 and 2024 out of more than 3,000 counties nationwide. Other major population centers in New York City — including the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — are in the top 100 too. And the 14 counties in Utah are typical of another trend: Many Republicans initially skeptical of Trump in 2016 (including Mormons, who make up a significant part of the electorate in Utah) largely fell in line eight years later. Where Democrats have made their biggest gains Democrats have seen their own shifts — the flip side of those GOP gains in a country that has remained tightly divided even as the two party coalitions have shifted significantly from 20 years ago. While the counties that saw the largest GOP gains over the last two decades were predominantly rural and small, the counties where Democrats improved the most are much larger, primarily in suburban and urban areas. The 100 counties where the GOP presidential vote margin grew most over the last two decades cast just 782,000 votes in 2024. The 100 counties that saw the most improvement in the Democratic presidential vote margin cast almost 20 million votes all together in 2024. Those Democratic-trending counties include key constituencies that have become more important to the party's coalition in recent years. On average, they are more heavily Black, more wealthy, more educated and more urban, an unsurprising mix of voters mobilized in the Obama era and those who have fled the Republican Party in the Trump era. They're also broadly more likely to have more newer residents — according to census data, those Democratic-trending counties have higher-than-average shares of residents who have recently moved to the county. Many of those major trends intersect in exurban and suburban Georgia, particularly in the Atlanta metro area. Seven Georgia counties are among the top eight that saw the most movement toward Democrats the two decades since 2004: Rockdale, Henry, Douglas, Gwinnett, Newton, Cobb and Fayette counties. All but Newton are in metro Atlanta, all are at least one-quarter Black, and most have higher incomes and education rates than the national average. Extremely wealthy and highly educated areas in northern Virginia, as well as counties like Teton County, Wyoming — home to the ritzy Jackson Hole ski resorts as well as major national parks — and Los Alamos County, New Mexico — home to the Department of Energy laboratory that helped develop the atomic bomb — are also among the counties that swung most toward Democrats over this period. Los Alamos County is particularly symbolic: It has the highest share of Ph.D.s among residents of any county in the country. Two more notable counties included in this list are Sarpy and Douglas counties in Nebraska, which make up the vast majority of the state's 2nd Congressional District — the 'blue dot' that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris carried in the last two presidential elections, securing one electoral vote even as Trump carried the state. Democrats have gained in wealthier, whiter and more educated counties in the Trump era The counties that shifted most toward Democrats between 2016 and 2024, the Trump era, are significantly whiter and slightly older than those that moved most over the last two decades. Twenty are in Colorado and nine are in Utah, but there are a handful of important counties in the Midwest too. The two counties that saw the biggest Democratic shifts in the last eight years are both in Utah: Utah and Davis counties, around Provo and Salt Lake City, respectively. There's an important caveat here: In 2016, independent candidate Evan McMullin won 21% of the vote, deflating both parties' vote shares. Looking at more competitive states, almost one-third of Colorado's counties were among the 100 with the largest Democratic shifts in the Trump era, as were 11 in Georgia. Grand Traverse County, Michigan, and Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, have also seen more recent shifts, emblematic of how some educated, suburban Republican strongholds have been moving toward Democrats with Trump on the ballot. But those gains have been more moderate, an increase of 7 percentage points in the Democratic margin between 2016 and 2024 in Ozaukee, and 8 percentage points in Grand Traverse.
