As Musk rallies voters to ‘kill the bill’, Trump aide says president is committed to passing it
Donald Trump remains committed to passing his spending and tax bill through the US Senate, despite increasingly vocal opposition from his billionaire donor, and former aide, Elon Musk, a White House official told Reuters on Wednesday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also told the news agency that the White House will not consult Musk on every policy decision.
The report comes as Musk has ramped up his opposition to the bill, arguing against it in two dozen posts on his social media platform TwitterX in the past 24 hours.
In one post to his 220 million followers on the platform, Musk rallied voters to contact lawmakers, writing: “Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL.”
He followed that with a meme image of Uma Thurman adapted from the movie “Kill Bill”.
Musk also endorsed a proposal from another opponent of the bill, Senator Rand Paul, who argued that he would vote for an alternative bill that simply maintained the tax cuts signed by Trump in 2017.
However, as Donald Schneider, the former chief economist of the House Republican Ways and Means Committee, points out, Musk’s endorsement of a bill to just extend the 2017 tax cuts, which would massively benefit him personally, instead of the spending bill that adds $2.4tn to the deficit seems to betray a “basic misunderstanding” – since a bill like that “adds $4 trillion to the deficit”.
Key events
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Musk’s rift with Trump partly triggered by decision to withdraw his pick to lead Nasa — report
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As Musk rallies voters to ‘kill the bill’, Trump aide says president is committed to passing it
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Confronted with Musk’s criticism, Marjorie Taylor Greene now says she’s ‘proud’ she voted for spending bill
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US vetoes UN security council call for immediate ceasefire in Gaza
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Florida weatherperson warns federal cuts to weather service could make hurricane season more deadly
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Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s former press secretary, leaves Democratic party
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Columbia failed to meet accreditation standards by violating federal anti-discrimination laws, US government says
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Trump administration considering $1,000 fee to fast-track tourist visas – Reuters
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State department shifts $250m from refugee aid to ‘self-deportations’
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Elon Musk further criticizes Trump’s spending bill, saying a new one should be drafted
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Trump says he agrees with Elizabeth Warren that debt limit should be eliminated
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Trump says Putin told him Russia ‘will have to respond’ to Ukraine drone attacks
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Analysis: Germany on tenterhooks for Merz’s first official meeting with Trump
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NOAA ‘fully staffed’ with forecasters and scientists, US commerce secretary says
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Congress budget office sees economic output falling from Trump tariffs
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Trump pushes Congress to cut $9.4bn in funding for NPR, PBS and foreign aid
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Trump tax bill would increase number of uninsured by 11 million, CBO says
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Mexico will respond if there is no agreement with US on ‘unfair’ metals tariffs, says president
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Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ will add $2.4tn to national debt, according to nonpartisan analysis
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UAE seeks US trade deal to roll back Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs – Reuters
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Deadline arrives for ‘best offers’ from US trading partners to avoid tariffs
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Trump officials delayed – and redacted part of – farm trade report over deficit forecast – Politico
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Trump calls again on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates
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White House restores legal status of child with life-threatening illness
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US immigration officials push for increased detentions, including ‘collateral’ arrests
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Higher US metals tariffs kick in as deadline for ‘best offers’ arrives
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Elon Musk calls Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ tax bill a ‘disgusting abomination’
Maya Yang
A Guatemalan man who said he was deported to Mexico despite fearing he would be persecuted there for being gay was flown back to the US on Wednesday after a judge ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return, his lawyer said.
Brian Murphy, a US district judge in Boston, Massachusetts, had ordered the man’s return after the US Department of Justice notified him that its claim that the man had expressly stated he was not afraid of being sent to Mexico was based on erroneous information.
In a court order last month, Murphy found that the deportation of the man, identified in legal filings only as OCG, likely “lacked any semblance of due process”.
Read more:
Musk’s rift with Trump partly triggered by decision to withdraw his pick to lead Nasa — report
As Elon Musk’s posting spree against the massive spending and tax bill continues to rage on, The Wall Street Journal reports that the billionaire Republican donor’s criticism was prompted, in part, by his anger over the White House decision to withdrawn the nomination of his ally to run the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).
According to The Journal’s reporting:
A senior White House official said Trump wasn’t happy about Musk’s decision to lambaste his signature legislation, describing the president as confused as to why the Tesla chief executive decided to ratchet up his criticism after working so closely with the president for four months. The official said senior Trump advisers were caught off guard by Musk’s latest offensive.
The uneasy alliance between the two men was also strained by a recent move by the White House to nix Trump’s nominee to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk, a close ally of Isaacman, had advocated for him to get the job.
The decision infuriated Musk, who complained to associates over the weekend that he had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to help get Trump elected in last year’s campaign, only to see Isaacman’s nomination pulled, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said. Musk’s frustration over the NASA episode made him more willing to aggressively criticize the tax bill, people close to him said.
Jared Isaacman, the billionaire private astronaut who had been Musk’s pick to lead Nasa, suggested in a podcast interview on Wednesday that his abrupt withdrawal as Trump’s nominee to be Nasa administrator, as he was about to be confirmed by the Senate, was an act of retribution against Musk by White House advisers.
Speaking to the All-In podcast, Isaacman said that he got a call last Friday infomring him that Trump had decided to pull his nomination. “I don’t think the timing was much of a coincidence”, Isaacman said, referring to Musk’s departure from his White House role the same day.
“There were some people that had some axes to grind, I guess, and I was a good, visible target.” he added.
Isaacman also dismissed news reports, based on anonymous White House sources, that his past donations to Democrats had been the cause of his sudden defenestration.
He suggested that it was more likely “an influential adviser coming in” and suggesting to Trump that the nomination should be killed. “I think that was exactly how it went.”
Léonie Chao-Fong
A federal judge in Colorado on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting the family of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the man charged in the firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, on Sunday.
US district court judge Gordon Gallagher granted a request to halt deportation proceedings of Soliman’s wife and five children, after they were taken into federal custody on Tuesday by US immigration authorities.
“The court finds that deportation without process could work irreparable harm and an order must issue without notice due to the urgency this situation presents,” Gallagher wrote in the order.
Soliman, an Egyptian national, is facing federal and state charges over the attack on a crowd of people who were demonstrating in support of Israeli hostages who remain captive in Gaza. His family members have not been charged.
Read more:
As Musk rallies voters to ‘kill the bill’, Trump aide says president is committed to passing it
Donald Trump remains committed to passing his spending and tax bill through the US Senate, despite increasingly vocal opposition from his billionaire donor, and former aide, Elon Musk, a White House official told Reuters on Wednesday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also told the news agency that the White House will not consult Musk on every policy decision.
The report comes as Musk has ramped up his opposition to the bill, arguing against it in two dozen posts on his social media platform TwitterX in the past 24 hours.
In one post to his 220 million followers on the platform, Musk rallied voters to contact lawmakers, writing: “Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL.”
He followed that with a meme image of Uma Thurman adapted from the movie “Kill Bill”.
Musk also endorsed a proposal from another opponent of the bill, Senator Rand Paul, who argued that he would vote for an alternative bill that simply maintained the tax cuts signed by Trump in 2017.
However, as Donald Schneider, the former chief economist of the House Republican Ways and Means Committee, points out, Musk’s endorsement of a bill to just extend the 2017 tax cuts, which would massively benefit him personally, instead of the spending bill that adds $2.4tn to the deficit seems to betray a “basic misunderstanding” – since a bill like that “adds $4 trillion to the deficit”.
Confronted with Musk’s criticism, Marjorie Taylor Greene now says she’s ‘proud’ she voted for spending bill
One day after she admitted that she did not read the full text of the massive Republican spending bill she voted for, and would have voted against it if she had done so, far-right Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was confronted with her change of heart by a Democratic colleague on the House oversight committee.
During a hearing, Representative Robert Garcia displayed a placard with a blown-up image of a post from Elon Musk criticizing the spending bill and mentioned that Greene now said she regretted voting for it. But when he asked Greene to confirm that she was now against the bill, she refused to acknowledge what she said just yesterday and seemed to reverse her reversal. “I’m proud to have voted for that bill”, Greene said.
US vetoes UN security council call for immediate ceasefire in Gaza
The United States on Wednesday vetoed a UN security council resolution demanding an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” in Gaza, the release of all hostages and the resumption of humanitarian aid deliveries.
Before the vote the deputy US representative to the United Nations, Dorothy Shea, called the resolution “unacceptable” because it failed to include language blaming Hamas for the conflict and demanding that the Palestinian militant group disarm and leave the besieged Gaza Strip.
The 14 other members of the 15-nation council voted in favor of the resolution, which described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as “catastrophic” and called on Israel to lift all restrictions on the delivery of aid to the 2.1 million Palestinians in the territory.
Shea urged the UN to accept the sidelining of its own humanitarian aid agencies and support the work of the Israeli-backed, US-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has led to the killings of scores of Palestinians seeking aid in its first week.
Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, thanked the US for vetoing what he called “a gift to Hamas” and a “surrender to terror”.
Florida weatherperson warns federal cuts to weather service could make hurricane season more deadly
“Hurricane season just started and we’re actively seeing the consequences of Trump’s cuts to NOAA and NWS right before our eyes”, Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a Florida Democrat, wrote in a social media post on Wednesday.
To support his point, Frost shared a video of John Morales, a veteran weatherperson with NBC’s South Florida affiliate NBC6, who argued during a broadcast this week that federal cuts to the National Weather Service would make it harder for him to provide accurate forecasts of the path of hurricanes this year, potentially putting the lives of some viewers at risk.
In an article on the broadcaster’s website, Morales explained what prompted his warning:
2025’s hurricane season is already unprecedented. Never have we faced the combustible mix of a lack of meteorological data and the less accurate forecasts that follow, with an elevated propensity for the rapidly intensifying hurricanes of the manmade climate change era.
Am I worried? You bet I am! And so are hundreds of other scientists, including all living former U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) directors, who fear a “needless loss of life” as a result of the loss of staff and resources at NWS brought on since January.
Central and southern Florida’s NWS offices are currently 19 to 39 percent understaffed. While that might be barely enough on a sunny day, long stretches of impending severe weather—like a hurricane—could lead to mistakes by tired skeleton crews can only work so many back-to-back shifts. Across the country, less data is being collected by fewer weather balloon launches as a result of the staff shortages.
Morales posted the video of his on-air warning on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, with the comment: “Cuts have consequences.”
In response to a viewer who scolded him for his warning, by writing: “Please don’t inject politics into your weather newscasts,” Morales wrote: “Let me think about it. Okay I’m done thinking. No.”
David Smith
I’m at a Democratic conference in Washington where party divisions were exposed when pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the stage.
Congressman Ritchie Torres, a staunch supporter of Israel who has publicly rejected claims of genocide in Gaza, was being interviewed by journalist Josh Barro at WelcomeFest, billed as the biggest public gathering of centrist Democrats.
About a dozen demonstrators marched forward and gathered around Torres with signs that included “Fire Ritchie” and “Gays against Genocide”. The New York congressman indicated that he welcomed the protesters’ right to free speech, responding: “Freedom is a beautiful thing. Thank God for freedom!”
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Organisers of the event including Liam Kerr – wearing a football jersey customised with former senator Joe Manchin’s name on the back – joined security staff in removing the protesters, who offered token resistance.
As they did so, Carly Simon’s 1972 hit “You’re So Vain“ boomed from loudspeakers with an accompanying video. Once the demonstrators were gone, some audience members rose to give a standing ovation.
Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s former press secretary, leaves Democratic party
Lauren Gambino
Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as White House press secretary for Joe Biden, has left the Democratic party to become an independent, according to the publisher of her forthcoming book.
Jean-Pierre, who served two Democratic White Houses, is expected to detail the weeks that preceded Biden’s monumental decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, per a preview of the book, which is set to be published this fall.
The book, titled Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, promises a detailed recounting of “the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic party that led to his decision”.
Jean-Pierre did not arrive “lightly” at her decision to leave the Democratic party, according to the publisher. The book, billed as a “hard-hitting yet hopeful critique”, will make the case for “why Americans must step beyond party lines to embrace life as Independents”.
Jean-Pierre’s announcement comes as the party has been forced to reckon with its decision to staunchly support Biden’s decision to seek a second term as the oldest serving president in American history and despite voter concerns about his age and mental acuity. Tensions between Jean-Pierre and the White House press corps grew tense last year, as reporters pressed for more access and transparency around the president’s health.
Richard Luscombe
Conservatives on a state college board reversed a decision to hire the experienced academic Santa Ono to lead the University of Florida, despite his efforts to distance himself from previous support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and past criticism of Donald Trump.
The 10-6 vote followed a contentious meeting of the Florida board of governors on Tuesday when members argued over Ono’s record, including accusations he failed to protect Jewish students during pro-Palestinian protests last year while he was president of the University of Michigan.
The rejection came a week after UF trustees voted unanimously to appoint him as the 14th president of the state’s third-largest university at a salary of $1.5m. It also followed what some critics saw as an attempt by Ono to “clean up” his record.
His name was quietly removed last month from a letter signed by more than 600 university presidents accusing the Trump administration of unprecedented interference in academic institutions. Ono wrote an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed in May explaining why he no longer believed DEI on campus represented equal opportunities for students.
“Over time, I saw how DEI became something else – more about ideology, division and bureaucracy, not student success,” Ono wrote, taking credit for eliminating university DEI offices in Michigan.
“Combating antisemitism has [also] been a priority throughout my career. I’ve worked closely with Jewish students, faculty and community leaders to ensure that campuses are places of respect, safety and inclusion for all.”
At least one governor in Tuesday’s board meeting in Tallahassee was skeptical of Ono’s shifting views. And a number of conservative figures in Florida, where the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has led an assault on what he sees as “woke ideology” on campuses, were previously critical of Ono’s nomination.
They pointed to, among other issues, Ono’s previous support for DEI efforts, and a claim he was slow to respond to pro-Palestinian protests at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus in April and May last year. The university has since taken a particularly harsh approach to cracking down on the protests.
Fox News has some more detail about the notice the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights sent to the accrediting body that audits Columbia University, notifying it that the Ivy League school is currently failing to meet its standards for accreditation. Accreditors determine which institutions are eligible for federal student loans and Pell grants.
Per Fox News’s story:
The Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), which is a recognized accrediting body for degree-granting higher education institutions across the mid-Atlantic, ensures that its member schools – such as Columbia – meet established standards of academic quality, integrity, institutional effectiveness and more. MSCHE is one of several accrediting institutions across the country that the Department of Education deems reliable.
Only institutions accredited by Department of Education-recognized accreditors are eligible to participate in Title IV federal financial aid programs, such as Pell Grants and federal work-study or student loan programs.
Education secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement:
Accreditors have an enormous public responsibility as gatekeepers of federal student aid. They determine which institutions are eligible for federal student loans and Pell Grants. Just as the Department of Education has an obligation to uphold federal antidiscrimination law, university accreditors have an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards.
We look forward to the Commission keeping the Department fully informed of actions taken to ensure Columbia’s compliance with accreditation standards, including compliance with federal civil rights laws.
The notice marks the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s bid to beat Columbia into line because of what it alleges is the college’s failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment.
It follows the cancellation of $400m in federal grants and contracts, after which the university yielded to a series of changes demanded by the administration, including setting up a new disciplinary committee, initiating investigations into students critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, and reassigning control of its Middle East Studies department.
Columbia has been the epicenter of a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel student protest movement that roiled US campuses over the last year and a half.
The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services said last month that an investigation found that the university had acted with “deliberate indifference” towards the harassment of Jewish students during campus protests.
Columbia failed to meet accreditation standards by violating federal anti-discrimination laws, US government says
The Department of Education said it has notified Columbia University’s accreditor of a violation of federal anti-discrimination laws by the Ivy League school.
This violation, the department said, means that Columbia has failed to meet the standards of accreditation set by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
The university did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
I’ll bring you more on this as we get it.
Trump administration considering $1,000 fee to fast-track tourist visas – Reuters
The Trump administration is considering a $1,000 fee for tourists and other non-immigrant visa applicants seeking an expedited interview appointment though government lawyers have raised legal red flags over the plan, according to an official and an internal state department memo.
Individuals entering the US on tourist and other non-immigrant visas already pay a $185 processing fee. The new $1,000 option the US is considering would be a premium service that allows some people to jump to the front of the line for visa interviews.
The program could arrive in pilot form as soon as December, the memo reviewed by Reuters said.
The proposed fee for visa appointments, which has not been previously reported, comes alongside Donald Trump’s vision of a “gold card” that would sell US citizenship for $5m, granting faster access to those willing to pay.
But the state department’s legal team said there was a “high risk” it would be rejected by the White House budget office or struck down in US courts, the memo said. Setting a fee above the cost to provide the service “is contrary to settled supreme court precedent”, the memo said.
A state department spokesperson said the department does not comment on internal documents and communications.
“The department’s scheduling of non-immigrant visa interview appointments is dynamic and we are continually working to improve our operations worldwide,” the spokesperson said.
