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Politico
4 days ago
- Business
- Politico
JD Vance's tricky sales tour
BIRTH OF A SALESMAN — Vice President JD Vance is testing out a new career path: traveling salesman. Earlier today, the VP ventured to his home state of Ohio to deliver a speech boosting Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act — or the 'megabill,' as the law has come to be known around Washington. It's the second appearance Vance has made in recent weeks to sell the bill in the Rust Belt, with his first sales trip having taken him to the small manufacturing town of West Pittston, Pa., earlier this month. It is, to say the least, a challenging assignment for the vice president. Vance has pitched himself to voters as the face of a more populist GOP, one that champions the interests of blue-collar Americans, stands up to powerful corporations and questions Republican economic orthodoxy on tax cuts and welfare reform. Yet the megabill — which delivered a massive tax cut to high earners, curtailed Medicaid and food stamps programs for low-income Americans and handed out a slew of business-friendly tax perks to large corporations — is a minimally adulterated expression of the old conservative orthodoxy that he and his allies claim to oppose. Now, it's Vance's job as VP to defend the bill to the hilt in front of the increasingly working-class, big-corporation-suspicious Republican base. The knotty nature of the assignment reflects the subtly difficult political position that Vance finds himself in six months into President Donald Trump's second term. Vance, who is the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president in 2028, rose to prominence as the leader of the GOP's populist 'New Right,' espousing an anti-interventionist foreign policy, a protectionist economic policy, a hardline anti-immigration agenda and a no-holds-barred approach to the culture war. Trump's selection of Vance as his running mate in 2024 was widely interpreted — including by yours truly — as a sign that Trump 2.0 was siding with New Right in the ongoing ideological skirmish within the GOP. Yet it's safe to say that that assumption has not stood the test of time. Though Trump has occasionally sided with conservative populists on issues like tariffs and immigration, he has hardly governed like a New Right ideologue. At prominent moments, he has even broken publicly with the populist right's position, most notably with his decision to bomb Iran, his move to ease certain elements of his immigration crackdown and his now-infamous about-face on releasing the Epstein files. Though less salacious and sensational than Epstein or Iran, the megabill stands as another sign of the ideological distance between the Trump administration — which Vance is a senior member of — and the populist New Right, which Vance nominally leads. Stuck in the middle, Vance has mostly managed to lay low, opting to serve as the mediator rather than as a partisan in various intra-administration factional fights. With that in mind, Trump's decision to tap Vance as the face of the administration's megabill stands out. In some respects, the decision recalls the self-effacing tests that Trump occasionally pushes on his subordinates to prove their loyalty: forcing then-press secretary Sean Spicer to lie about the size of the inauguration crowd in 2017, for instance, or more recently making FBI director Kash Patel, once a leading Epstein truther, go on TV to defend the administration's decision not to release the Epstein files. In this case, Trump has tasked the aspiring figurehead of the populist GOP with selling arguably the least populist bit of legislation to pass the president's desk so far this term. Vance, in dutiful vice-presidential fashion, has obliged, doing his best to put a populist spin on the bill. In his speech in Ohio today — delivered in front of a crowd of hard-hat-wearing workers at a steel plant in the small industrial city of Canton — he drew attention to the megabill's provisions limiting federal taxes on tips and overtime pay, while arguing that the tax cuts will increase workers' take home pay and ensure that a larger portion of each paycheck ends up in workers' pockets. In his speech in Pennsylvania earlier this month, he highlighted the bill's creation of the so-called Trump accounts, an automatic one-time deposit of $1,000 into a tax-preferred savings account for newborn babies. On the whole, he has cast the bill as part of the administration's broader effort — supported by tariff increases, tax incentives to manufacturers and a crackdown on illegal immigration — to reverse the 'stupid logic' of globalization, as Vance put it in Canton, which incentivized American companies to invest in ventures abroad rather than at home. Yet it's clear that Vance's populist talking points won't on their own overcome doubts about the bill's more plutocratic provisions. In Canton, Vance fielded two questions from reporters about the Medicaid cuts, the scope of which he suggested had been overhyped by the media. 'What I'd say to those Ohioans [worried about losing coverage] is don't believe every false media report that you hear,' Vance said. The cuts, he argued, are designed to prevent illegal immigrants and people not actively looking for work from receiving benefits but will not affect low-income Americans who are either working or actively looking for work. (Independent estimates have found that approximately 320,000 Ohioans will lose Medicaid coverage over the next decade under the new legislation.) There's reason to believe that Vance's feelings on the bill are more mixed. In Jan. 2024, Vance told POLITICO Magazine that he thought the 2017 tax bill — which created the tax cuts that new bill made permanent — was a 'good not great bill,' citing the inclusion of 'some more standard GOP tax fare,' some of which he approved of and some of which he didn't. Among the provisions in the 2017 bill that he did approve of was the cap on state and local tax deductions — which the megabill substantially raised. He also noted that cutting the top marginal rate — as the new bill does, in line with the rates from the 2017 bill — was not 'a high priority for him,' though he said that he would have voted for the bill, despite his reservations, if he had been in the Senate at the time. Now that the situation is less hypothetical — Vance cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the legislation through the Senate — these quibbles seem to have fallen by the wayside. In this respect, Vance's megabill sales tour serves as a tidy symbol of his polysemous political position: divided between his self-professed role as the torchbearer of conservative populism on the one hand, and his current role as the dogged defender of a decidedly un-populist administration on the other. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@ Or contact tonight's author at iward@ or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ianwardreports. What'd I Miss? — Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges 'real starvation' in Gaza: President Donald Trump said today he will work with European allies to 'set up food centers' in Gaza, disagreeing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's assessment that there is 'no starvation' in the war-torn strip. 'Based on television, … those children look very hungry,' Trump said. 'But we're giving a lot of money and a lot of food, and other nations are now stepping up.' The president's remarks, which came during a bilateral meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer at Trump's golf resort in Turnberry, were far more critical of the Netanyahu strategy than he was just a few days ago when he left for his trip to Scotland. — Trump gives Putin new '10 or 12 days' deadline to end war in Ukraine: Donald Trump said today that Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin has less than two weeks to bring an end to his war in Ukraine before the U.S. president hits Russia and its trading partners with up to 100 percent tariffs. 'A new deadline of about 10 or 12 days from today,' Trump said. 'There's no reason waiting […] I want to be generous, but we just don't see any progress being made,' he added during remarks to the media after a bilateral meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer at Turnberry in Scotland. 'I'm disappointed in President Putin, very disappointed at him, so we're gonna have to look, and I'm gonna reduce that 50 days that I gave him to a lesser number, because I think I already know the answer,' Trump told reporters prior to the Starmer meeting. Trump said he would announce the change 'probably tonight or tomorrow.' — Project 2025 architect Paul Dans to challenge Lindsey Graham: Project 2025 architect Paul Dans is launching a bid to primary Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina today, joining an increasingly crowded field. 'What we've done with Project 2025 is really change the game in terms of closing the door on the progressive era,' Dans told the Associated Press. 'If you look at where the chokepoint is, it's the United States Senate. That's the headwaters of the swamp.' Dans this morning also reposted the Associated Press' story announcing his South Carolina senate primary challenge, saying 'Have some news this morning.' — Alina Habba's authority as New Jersey's top prosecutor questioned in new legal filing: The clash between the Trump administration and the courts over who is leading the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey is already spilling into criminal cases. A defense attorney is trying to get charges against his client thrown out by arguing the Trump administration illegally maneuvered to keep Alina Habba as the state's top federal prosecutor, despite the expiration of her 120-day tenure. The defense filing, made on Sunday, comes after days of confusion over who is leading the office because of complex and contested rules over filling vacancies. — 'Shooting themselves in the foot': Pentagon officials outraged by DOD think tank ban: A wide swath of Defense Department officials fear that new rules banning employees from participating at think tank and research events — a key way the Pentagon delivers its message and solicits feedback — will leave the military muzzled and further isolated from allies. The move, according to more than a dozen officials and think tank leaders, hampers the department's ability to make its case both in Washington policy circles and to allies struggling to understand how they fit into President Donald Trump's worldview. That's particularly important now as the Pentagon assesses whether to end decades of U.S. policy and remove thousands of troops stationed abroad. AROUND THE WORLD NO GUARANTEE — The European Union has admitted it doesn't have the power to deliver on a promise to invest $600 billion in the United States economy, only hours after making the pledge at landmark trade talks in Scotland. That's because the cash would come entirely from private sector investment over which Brussels has no authority, two EU officials said. On Sunday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen struck a deal with U.S. President Donald Trump to avoid an all-out EU-U.S. trade war. The deal included a pledge to invest an extra $600 billion of EU money into the U.S. over the coming years. CYBERATTACK IN RUSSIA — A cyberattack on Russian state-owned flagship carrier Aeroflot caused a mass outage to the company's computer systems today, Russia's prosecutor's office said, forcing the airline to cancel more than 100 flights and delay others. Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow and Belarusian hacker activist group the Belarus Cyber-Partisans, which opposes the rule of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, claimed responsibility for the cyberattack. Images shared on social media showed hundreds of delayed passengers crowding Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, where Aeroflot is based. The outage also disrupted flights operated by Aeroflot's subsidiaries, Rossiya and Pobeda. Nightly Number RADAR SWEEP THE FUTURE OF CLIMATE MIGRATION — Tuvalu, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean that is projected to be submerged in the next 25 years, has begun a first-of-its-kind migration program to Australia. On Friday, the country of 11,000 selected the first 280 people to take part in their planned migration with Australia. Tuvalu reached a climate visa agreement with Australia in 2023 that gives immigrated Tuvaluans the same education, employment, health and housing rights as Australians. Fernanda González reports on how this system could be the model from future climate migration efforts for WIRED. Parting Image Jacqueline Munis contributed to this newsletter. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.
LeMonde
22-07-2025
- Business
- LeMonde
'The passage of Trump's budget bill highlights persistent political tensions within the American right'
On Independence Day, July 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a massive new tax and spending bill into law. Officially called the One, Big, Beautiful, Bill (OBBB), the law was a major victory for his second administration, and signaled Trump's considerable consolidation of power. That said, the passage of the bill highlighted persistent political tensions within the American right. Major cleavages persist within the Trump coalition, as highlighted by the controversy surrounding the White House's refusal to release the Epstein files, reignited by the explosive recent story published in the conservative Wall Street Journal about Trump's unsavory connections to the late, disgraced mogul, who died in 2019. Understanding these rifts is essential to assessing the future of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. Trump's hold on the Grand Old Party (GOP)'s elites is also more complicated than the passing of the OBBB would indicate. Since Trump's political rise in 2016, the world of American conservative elites has undergone a dramatic reconfiguration. His first victory led to a dramatic ideological shift in the upper echelons of the American conservative movement, and the rise of a new coalition of intellectuals known as the "New Right." Whereas the old conservative establishment stood for the "fusionist" trifecta of free-market economics, social traditionalism and anti-communism, and internationalism in foreign affairs, the New Right stands for nationalist economics, social traditionalism, isolationism and a crackdown on immigration. Obvious tensions Today, the old legacy of fusionism continues to influence American conservatism, fueling schisms in the GOP and within the New Right coalition. Many tech industry figures on the New Right, for example, were frustrated with Trump and JD Vance's new tariff regime. Elon Musk was a ferocious opponent of the OBBB, and at one point threatened to back alternative candidates in the Republican primaries against any member of the party who voted in favor of the bill.
Ammon
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Ammon
Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett calls for Netanyahu's resignation
Ammon News - Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has called on current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign, arguing that his political management is 'disastrous' and that he is responsible for the deep divisions within Israeli society. 'He has been in power for 20 years, that is too much and it is not healthy,' Bennett stated in a television interview with Channel 12. 'He needs to go home,' he added. Bennett, leader of the New Right, contributed to Netanyahu's ouster from power in 2021 by forming a short-lived coalition government with centrist Yair Lapid, which lasted for one year. In his interview, Bennett supported the recent military attack against Iran, calling it a 'very good and necessary' decision. He emphasized, however, that this operation would not have been possible without the foundations that, as he claimed, he laid when he was prime minister from June 2021 to June 2022. Regarding the war in Gaza, he praised the operational performance of the Israeli army, but strongly criticized the political management, calling it a 'disaster.' He even proposed reaching a comprehensive agreement that would lead to the release of all hostages, leaving the elimination of Hamas to a future government. Bennett did not reveal whether he plans to return to politics, although polls show him as the strongest candidate to defeat Netanyahu in the next elections. He remained enigmatic, only stating that he is 'not making lists' of candidates for now. The current term of the Knesset formally ends in 2026, however, early elections are not ruled out.
New York Post
11-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
‘Woke right' influencer bullies aren't just fringe — they're a true political danger
In 2018, some activists, appalled by woke nonsense being published by academic journals, submitted nonsensical research. One paper claimed researchers 'closely and respectfully examined the genitals of . . . ten thousand dogs' to learn about 'rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks.' Some journals published it. Advertisement But one of the hoaxers, James Lindsay, claims this 'woke virus' now has spread to the right. 'There is a radical segment embedded within MAGA . . . that acts the same way, uses the same tactics, acts like the woke left,' he told me. I was skeptical. But to make his point, Lindsay pulled off a new hoax. Advertisement He rewrote parts of 'The Communist Manifesto' and, using the pseudonym Marcus Carlson (a play on Karl Marx), submitted it to the conservative magazine American Reformer. His article criticized classical liberal ideas like free markets, global trade and individual freedom, like Marx did. Yet the conservative magazine published it. Even after a reader pointed out that it was 'The Communist Manifesto,' the magazine kept its article up, writing, 'It is still a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas.' Advertisement The New Right, says Lindsay, acts like the woke left: 'There's the victimhood mentality, the cancel culture, struggle sessions. They bully people online with swarms; they rewrite history.' The New York Times' 1619 Project rewrote history, claiming America was founded to protect slavery. Today's woke right says Hitler 'was trying to encourage community . . . family values' (social media influencer Dan Bilzerian). 'I want total Aryan victory . . . the only way we are going to make America great again is if we make this country Christian again,' says white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Advertisement Fuentes' videos have received more than 30 million views. On his show, he says, 'Jews better start being nice to people like us because what comes out of this is going to be a lot uglier and a lot worse for them.' Influencer Andrew Tate won 10 million followers largely by attacking feminism: 'I am absolutely sexist.' ''Men should be in charge, knock the women down,'' sighs Lindsay. 'The woke right literally becomes all the caricatures that the woke left said conservatives are: 'racist, sexist, homophobes.'' Keep up with today's most important news Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters 'They're fringe,' I say to Lindsay. 'No real threat.' 'That's what everybody said about woke kids on campuses,' he replies. Advertisement That shut me up. I admit I thought brainwashed college progressives would drop 'safe spaces,' trigger warnings, speech codes and other silly ideas once they had to earn a living. But I was wrong. Most didn't. Those kids brought about lots of change. Advertisement Their preferences got many companies to mandate DEI training and led many employees to fear speaking honestly at work. But today, says Lindsay, the energy is on the right: 'It's great that we're having a conservative revival . . . but there's also [something] called 'falling off the cliff.'' Elected officials now say things like, 'We should be Christian nationalists!' (Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) and, 'I'm tired of this separation-of-church-and-state junk' (Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert). Advertisement 'Your ability to believe as you will,' says Lindsay, 'worship as you will without state interference, is a bedrock idea of the American experiment. Woke right, like the woke left, is this litany of bad ideas.' He fears that next election, the woke right will elect the woke left. 'The left is going to say, Hillary Clinton was right to call [people on the right] 'deplorable,'' he says. 'Then the left will sweep back in and dominate.' John Stossel is the author of 'Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.'
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Put the Libertarians Back in Charge
A common gripe in American politics is that for too long, libertarians have been in charge, wielding too much power. Sometimes this complaint comes from progressives in the mold of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who argue that hands-off economic policy—often derisively cast as "neoliberalism"—has fueled the growth and concentration of corporate power at the expense of small business and labor, resulting in an economy that's rigged against the little guy. Sometimes this complaint comes from conservatives, particularly New Right voices who insist that libertarians and classical liberals have ignored the consequences of unfettered free markets for American industrial capacity and rural downscale workers while allowing the left to control major cultural institutions. In this view, libertarianism fails to prioritize the interests of America, American values, and ordinary Americans. The charge has always carried a whiff of desperation, given how little power actual self-identified libertarians have in the corridors of government. But after four years of Joe Biden running a White House that was a hotbed of Warrenite progressivism, and the early months of Donald Trump's presidency marked by all manner of New Right paranoia and kookiness, maybe it's time to revise the complaint: Libertarians don't have enough power. The biggest takeaway from the Trump and Biden years has been this: The libertarians were right. They were especially right about markets, international trade, and the American economy. As a libertarian writer at a libertarian magazine, I am biased. It's my job to say that libertarians are right. But consider recent developments on both sides of the political spectrum. On the left, the loudest and most salient self-critique of Democrats and progressive governance has come from a band of mostly younger writers and thinkers who have organized around a label they call the Abundance Agenda. The Abundance Agenda grew out of the YIMBY ("yes in my backyard") movement, whose fundamental insight was that urban housing prices, especially in hot markets with strong economies such as San Francisco and New York, were too high, largely because building new housing was too hamstrung by bureaucracy, politics, and mandates. Projects took years to permit, if they were permitted at all, and were saddled with regulations that made them far more expensive to build. Meanwhile, Democratic governance—from President Barack Obama's stimulus to Biden's American Rescue Plan—has thrown trillions of dollars at projects with little to show for it. The Abundance Agenda takes this insight and applies it more broadly to the economy, and to energy in particular. Some proponents argue that agenda is at heart a progressive project, about making government more efficient and capable of pulling off public infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail. But this abundance movement's core insights are libertarian—that material progress has been hampered by bureaucratic kludginess, government overreach, and activists using the courts to strangle projects with red tape. Notably, the Warrenite left despises this Abundance Agenda, grousing that it's too unwilling to use antitrust to crack down on concentrated corporate power—essentially the same critique leveled at libertarians. Under Trump, meanwhile, New Right champions of the president have struggled to defend the on-again, off-again, tumultuous imposition of tariffs. In the first months of Trump's second term, markets have repeatedly crashed, and sometimes rebounded, after Trump's tariff announcements. Trump's top advisers have offered wildly differing and often contradictory justifications for his trade policies, but few appear to agree with them, especially among nonaligned voters. By mid-April, two-thirds of independent voters disapproved of the tariffs, and Trump's net economic approval among unaligned voters was at negative 29, a record low. Critics might argue that libertarians are to blame for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has set out to reduce government spending and improve government operations. After initially touting $2 trillion in cuts, that figure was backed down to $1 trillion, and then just $150 billion by late 2026. And DOGE may not even achieve that, given its tendency to make basic, obvious errors in its savings claims. But even beyond its math errors and mistakes, one of the most head-scratching features of DOGE has been its reluctance to coordinate or share information with experts and organizations that have spent years putting together specific, actionable plans to cut spending and reduce the size of government. The libertarians aren't in charge. But the lesson of the last decade of politics is: They should be. The post Put the Libertarians Back in Charge appeared first on
