Justices’ 5-4 ruling permits Trump administration appeal to block lower court order halting above-ground work
A divided US supreme court has permitted Donald Trump to continue building his controversial $400m White House ballroom despite legal challenges, raising the likelihood it will be completed.
In a 5-4 ruling, the justices permitted the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court order which had halted above-ground construction of the project while a lawsuit by a historic preservation group seeks to block it.
Three-quarters of Americans said in a recent poll that they oppose datacenters being built next to their homes
Donald Trump has criticized communities pushing back against datacenter projects across the US amid a growing backlash, warning those that reject them risk becoming “backwards and poor”.
As controversy surrounding local datacenter plans continues to swirl around election campaigns nationwide ahead of November’s midterm elections, the US president declared Americans “will only have yourselves to blame” if they are canceled.
Washington says it acted after observing Iran was planning to deploy fresh mines in strait of Hormuz
The US and Iran have exchanged fire for the first time in a month, with missiles and drones fired at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, and Iran targeting US military bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in response.
The US president, Donald Trump, on Monday threatened further action. The US is to trying to prise open Tehran’s grip on shipping going through the strait, which before the war accounted for a fifth of the world’s seaborne energy supply. Washington claimed that Iranian control over the waterway had been loosened by repeated US attacks on Iranian missile launchers and radars.
Washington says it acted after observing Iran was planning to deploy fresh mines in strait of Hormuz
The US and Iran have exchanged fire for the first time in a month, with missiles and drones fired at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, and Iran targeting US military bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in response.
The US president, Donald Trump, on Monday threatened further action. The US is trying to prise open Tehran’s grip on shipping going through the strait, which before the war accounted for a fifth of the world’s seaborne energy supply. Washington claimed that Iranian control over the waterway had been loosened by repeated US attacks on Iranian missile launchers and radars.
The president’s deportation machine is creating a class of people inside the US who have fewer protections against the power of the state
Is the Trump administration creating a group in the US with fewer protections against executive power owing to their immigration status? Its often openly racist actions suggest so. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims to target “the worst of the worst” – undocumented migrants who commit violent crimes. Yet the Guardian reported that over half of those arrested in July had no criminal convictions or pending charges. That month, ICE made record arrests and deportations, apprehending 1,500 people and removing 1,100 daily.
When campaigning, Donald Trump falsely claimed that Haitians were “eating the pets”. In office, his administration moved to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians. In June, the supreme court let the protection expire, leaving about 350,000 people at risk of deportation to a country gripped by violence and instability. The court’s decision means more than 1 million TPS holders from 13 nations previously considered too unsafe to return to are now at risk of deportation. Many have lived and worked legally in the US for years.
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Trump’s Operation Economic Outcast is expected to push many Iranians into deeper poverty as food inflation soars
For many Iranians, the new US sanctions campaign, called Operation Economic Outcast, seems superfluous given the grim economic situation in their country.
Iranians are facing runaway food inflation, closed petrol stations and a seemingly never-ending depreciation of the nation’s currency caused by a lack of foreign exchange reserves.
Trump’s Operation Economic Outcast is expected to push many Iranians into deeper poverty as food inflation soars
For many Iranians, the new US sanctions campaign, called Operation Economic Outcast, seems superfluous given the grim economic situation in their country.
Iranians are facing runaway food inflation, closed petrol stations and a seemingly never-ending depreciation of the nation’s currency caused by a lack of foreign exchange reserves.
Though the preoccupations of the right’s new social thinkers may have arisen alongside Donald Trump, they themselves are not necessarily Trumpy. | Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images
Aaron Renn was in a good mood. And that was fair: It’s not every day that you get labeled the No. 1 “intellectual super influencer” for a major swath of the Trump-era right.
“It’s always good to have some independent validation of your work,” he told me.
A former partner at the consulting firm Accenture, he’s now best known for his writing on urban policy and the role of evangelical Christians (like himself) in American culture. His concept of the “negative world” — the idea that contemporary mainstream culture is inherently hostile to anyone taking evangelical principles seriously — has become influential enough to receive feature treatment in the New York Times.
Yet for anyone familiar with American politics, the idea that someone like Aaron Renn is in any way the No. 1 “super influencer” on the right might seem implausible. He’s not a social media warrior with the White House’s ear, like Laura Loomer or Chris Rufo. He’s not a household name like Tucker Carlson. He doesn’t run a big media outfit like Ben Shapiro. So where does Renn’s achievement come from, and what does it mean?
The source is a new report from the boutique risk analysis firm Baron Public Affairs LLC. Baron makes its money, in part, by advising corporate clients on how best to navigate the DC political environment to advance their interests. Its new report is an attempt to guide them through a specific subset of the right: the national-populist corner of the right-wing policy world that’s achieved greater prominence since 2016.
Baron’s report paints a fascinating picture of today’s conservatism, shining a light on some of its most thoughtful, relevant, and interesting quarters. Yet in doing so, the report also skates over divisions inside the group under consideration — splits that matter immensely for the American right’s future.
The “super influencers,” explained
In its report, Baron compiled papers published by six right-wing think tanks and one right-leaning intellectual journal. They then used a proprietary research platform to comb through 29,181 citations to individual people in those papers, and assembled a list of the top 20 most cited names in their sample. These, in Baron’s estimation, are the “super influencers” who “most inform the policy leaders of the nationalist-populist movement,” the conservatives building intellectual scaffolding to support the GOP’s turn toward both economic and political nationalism.
Baron did not publish the full list of 20 names (and did not respond to my repeated requests for comment). But alongside Renn, the most cited name in its sample, it revealed two other “super influencers” in an accompanying podcast: Brad Wilcox and Michael Lind. Both are revealing.
Wilcox is a sociologist at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank known for taking an unusually empirical approach to social conservatism. If you’ve followed Wilcox, whose work has often been relevant to ourcoverageat Vox, you’ve probably seen him offering charts, graphs, and regression analyses to defend his view that marriage is one of society’s most important and valuable institutions. His most recent book is titled, simply enough, Get Married.
Lind, by contrast, arguably isn’t a conservative at all. A longtime commentator on American politics, he began his career as a kind of left labor populist — hostile to mass immigration due to the same (empirically doubtful) fears about the harmful effects on native-born workers that once shaped Bernie Sanders’s views on the issue.
Long critical of the cultural elitism of American liberals, Lind has drifted more and more toward writing for conservative outlets: becoming in effect, if not in self-identification, a real influence on the populist right. (He is not the only liberal on the list, which per Baron includes “two Biden-era White House officials and a writer who leads one of the more prominent tribes of the Left.”)
These three men — Renn, Wilcox, and Lind — reflect what Baron sees as the defining preoccupations of the “super influencers” more broadly.
Unlike previous generations of conservatives, the right’s new intellectuals aren’t especially interested in maximizing economic growth or projecting American power abroad (in fact, none of Baron’s top 20 were foreign policy experts at all). Instead, they’re overwhelmingly focused on different questions: how to reverse declining fertility rates, or the effect of trade competition with China on American cities and families.
Unlike previous generations of conservatives, the right’s new intellectuals aren’t especially interested in maximizing economic growth or projecting American power abroad.
In our conversation, Renn suggested a uniting concept for the issues these writers cared about: “the social health of the nation.” By this, he meant things that couldn’t be fully captured by traditional economic metrics: whether Americans feel happy, whether they feel like they live meaningful lives, whether they feel like their families and communities are secure and stable.
“There are these trends that don’t seem super healthy even if the GDP line continues to go up,” Renn says. “Those have been issues that weren’t part of Donald Trump’s initial set of issues, but are ones that have become widely talked about — even on the left.”
Though the preoccupations of the right’s new social thinkers may have arisen alongside Trump to challenge Reagan-era free-market conservatives, they themselves are not necessarily Trumpy. Befitting the fact that many have backgrounds in quantitative social science, and that some see themselves as liberals, they tend to be looking for answers beyond MAGA demagoguery. That’s true even though their research topics have some obvious appeal within MAGA spaces.
Super influencers against themselves
Baron’s report paints an appealing portrait of the modern right. Renn’s oeuvre is indeed fascinating, and Wilcox’s empiricism fosters a more serious conversation around social policy than the traditional culture war hysterics. More broadly, I think Baron is right that the sorts of issues that preoccupy these thinkers will indeed remain important for the right for quite some time.
But I think there’s a danger in treating this group as homogenous, or as representative of the right as a whole.
To see why, it’s helpful to go back to the report’s basic methodology — tracking citations in right-wing publications. Those publications were drawn from the following seven sources:
American Affairs
American Compass
The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI)
The Claremont Institute
The America First Policy Institute (AFPI)
The Center for Renewing America (CRA)
The Heritage Foundation
These are extremely different outfits. Three of them — American Affairs, American Compass, and FAI — indeed overlap with the kinds of questions that Baron’s “super influencers” are interested in. The other four, by contrast, are MAGA more than anything else: Their mission, at least as currently constituted, is to mount an intellectual defense of the president’s worldview and/or develop policy ideas that might flesh out Trump’s inchoate impulses.
This isn’t necessarily relevant for Baron’s mission in advising clients on which influential voices deserve their attention. But for those of us interested in mapping the intellectual right, these distinctions are vital.
Indeed, by Baron’s own estimation, there is a significant difference between the kinds of people cited in reports by these two sub-groupings in its sample. The first grouping, Baron found, will regularly cite “heterodox liberals” like Lind who share some of their priorities; the second did not cite a single such liberal in any of the reports it surveyed.
Thus, there actually isn’t one unified cadre of intellectual “super influencers” shaping the national-populist right. There are two distinctive groupings: one which influences the sorts of New Right outfits committed to their own ideological project, the other which influences reports released by MAGA appendages. While there is some overlap between those two groups, Baron’s own analysis suggests they are meaningfully distinct blocs.
This matters for the right’s future. In fact, it matters a lot.
Publications from the first three of Baron’s sources tend to be less hard-edged about partisan conflict; they engage with liberals quite a bit because they prioritize their long-term policy goals and are looking for coalition members who can help advance them. In their work, you can see some of the virtues the Baron report documents amongst the cited “super influencers” — empiricism, “genteel temperament,” a focus on distinctively 21st century social problems.
Work by the other four, by contrast, tends to paint American political divisions in apocalyptic terms. Claremont writers, for example, have famously described the 2016 election as “Flight 93” and declared that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They do not cite liberals approvingly because they see them as worse than political rivals: as villains, the authors of America’s ills, whose power must be crushed for the country to survive.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” as Heritage president Kevin Roberts put it in an interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast.
One of the principal questions of the right’s looming post-Trump era will be whether it can move past this kind of zero-sum partisanship. The Baron report might lead one to be optimistic on that front: if Aaron Renn truly is the leading influence among the American right’s national-populist intellectuals, that portends a future where America’s warring political tribes can finally start to find common ground.
But I wouldn’t bet on it, at least not for some time now.
There are deep reasons why Trump, a human embodiment of rage and division, leads the Republican Party — and why some of the right’s top thought leaders are so loyal to him. So long as those reasons persist, the influence of more thoughtful “super influencers” on practical politics may be more limited than one might hope.
We’re watching today as Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, and Kevin Warsh, the chair of the Federal Reserve, deliver their opening remarks at the G20 meetings in Asheville, North Carolina.
US trade representative Jamieson Greer has a level-headed reputation but commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and White House adviser Peter Navarro also have key roles
Having reportedly read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in French, during a military tour of duty in Iraq, Jamieson Greer considered himself an unlikely target for accusations of francophobia.
But Donald Trump’s US trade representative, hitherto one of the president’s less high-profile cabinet members, found himself in that uncomfortable position amid the acrimonious collapse of bilateral trade talks with Canada that now threatens to degenerate into an all-out trade war between the two close trading partners whose economies are tightly intertwined.
We’re watching today as Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, and Kevin Warsh, the chair of the Federal Reserve, deliver their opening remarks at the G20 meetings in Asheville, North Carolina.
Richer countries might have more resources to deal with catastrophe, but this problem grips the entire planet, however much leaders may want to deny it
Climate breakdown is happening on one Earth, but two different worlds. In one, its impacts increasingly encroach on everyday life; longer periods of discomfort and shorter periods of sharp pain. Endless, hotter summers, and within them sudden wildfires, evacuations, homes burned to cinders in a matter of hours. In another, catastrophe. This summer has been a snapshot of that split-screen. The hottest day on record in parts of Europe, and a wave of water, mud and ice in Nepal that so far has claimed more than 750 lives. Thousands of people are still missing.
The difference is also one of resources. The climate crisis has an economic cost, but some places can absorb it better than others. Responses to this summer of wildfires in Europe included a rapid scrambling by the French government to provide everything from tax breaks for businesses affected by the fires to relocation costs and aid to rebuild homes. The UK government had deployed almost £100m before the summer to strengthen wildfire resilience.
Trump’s threat comes after host described success record of candidates whom president had endorsed as ‘mixed’
Donald Trump on Sunday said NBC’s Kristen Welker – host of Meet the Press – should face “rebuke or punishment” from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Welker, during a live segment for a local Washington, DC, affiliate, described the success record of political candidates whom the president had endorsed as “mixed”. The segment aired prior to Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press.
Outsourcing the industry to China cannot continue, but Europe knows it can no longer count on the US for a solution
The alarm sounded 16 years ago. In 2010, China blocked exports of key rare earths to Japan in a row over disputed islands in the East China Sea. The critical minerals are essential to everything from advanced weaponry and iPhones to electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, so the rest of the world took note. But it didn’t take much action. China still accounts for about 70% of rare-earth mining globally and 90% of separation and processing.
Then, last year, Beijing forced Donald Trump to back away from his trade war – not with its retaliatory tariffs, but the curbing of rare-earth exports. A scramble for new supplies began in earnest. The year-long trade truce is due to expire in November. The price of erbium, an element essential to communications infrastructure, has already jumped because of fears that export controls will soon be renewed.
Deal that will reportedly see US take control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil has provoked outrage in her country
Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has defended her government’s highly controversial energy deal with Donald Trump, insisting the South American country will maintain ownership and sovereignty over its massive oil reserves.
Rodríguez, who assumed power in January after Trump ordered the abduction of the president, Nicolás Maduro, took to the airwaves on Saturday to push back against criticism of what the US president has called “the biggest oil deal in world history”.
Deal that will reportedly see US take control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil has provoked outrage in her country
Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has defended her government’s highly controversial energy deal with Donald Trump, insisting the South American country will maintain ownership and sovereignty over its massive oil reserves.
Rodríguez, who assumed power in January after Trump ordered the abduction of the president, Nicolás Maduro, took to the airwaves on Saturday to push back against criticism of what the US president has called “the biggest oil deal in world history”.
Meanwhile, Trump posts video of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and replacing it with Lake America sign
Donald Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the Ontario premier erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA.
Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa.
Meanwhile, Trump posts video of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and replacing it with Lake America sign
Donald Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the Ontario premier erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA.
Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa.
The Jeffrey Epstein associate’s apparent last hope would be a Hail Mary from Donald Trump – a presidential pardon
Ghislaine Maxwell seems to be all but guaranteed to have run out of legal avenues to challenge her conviction for her involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of girls and young women with perhaps her lingering hopes of freedom resting on a pardon from the Trump administration.
Paul Engelmayer, a Manhattan federal court judge, last week rejected Maxwell’s contention that her constitutional rights were violated at trial and sentencing for her crimes. “Maxwell’s claims are all meritless and all or almost all are frivolous,” Engelmayer wrote in his ruling on the former British socialite’s legal gambit.
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