A bipartisan group of Congressional representatives are calling on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to streamline the government’s visa processing system to ensure visitors from abroad will be able to attend next year’s FIFA World Cup as well as the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
The World Cup, which kicks off in less than 400 days, is expected to generate $3.75 billion in economic activity in the U.S. With SoFi Stadium in Inglewood hosting eight games, the economic impact on Southern California is estimated at nearly $600 million.
But cost-cutting measures proposed by Rubio could threaten that by reducing staff and closing some embassies and consulates, increasing visa wait times and making an already cumbersome system more complicated and costly. That could keep tens of thousands of fans at home.
Even without the changes, six countries have at least one U.S. diplomatic post with visa wait times that extend beyond the start of the World Cup.
Rubio is scheduled to appear Wednesday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee where he will be asked about the visa process, said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles). Kamlager-Dove, a member of that committee and a proponent of sports diplomacy, laid out her concerns and those of her colleagues in two-page letter addressed to Rubio and signed by 52 representatives, including Rep. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills), the first Republican to sign on; Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee; and Ted Lieu (D-Manhattan Beach), a member of Democratic House leadership.
“I’m hoping to get some answers and some solutions,” said Kamlager-Dove, whose sprawling districts ranges from the border with Beverly Hills to South Los Angeles. “This is a real problem because it impacts attendance and it impacts economic activity.”
The 2026 World Cup will be the largest in history, with a record 48 countries participating. It will also be the first World Cup played in three countries, with Mexico and Canada sharing host duties with the U.S. However the vast majority of the games — 78 of 104 — will be played in 11 U.S. cities between June 11 and July 19, 2026.
“The economic stakes of these games and significant for red and blue districts nationwide, as is the diplomatic and soft-power opportunity of being at the center of the international sports universe,” Kamlager-Dove wrote in her letter. “However the success of these games hinges on the State Department’s ability to efficiently process the visa applications of spectators, athletes and media.”
Kamlager-Dove believes the opportunity is too important to be sacrificed to politics.
“The United States has an obligation to put its best foot forward as the host of these games,” she said. “Sports diplomacy is an important tool for us as we continue to talk about peace and cooperation. It’s also so important as we recognize all of the different ethnic communities that help make up the United States and want to root for their home team.
“And so you want restaurants to be full, clubs and bars to be full, hotels to be full.”
Earlier this month President Trump held the first meeting of a White House task force charged with overseeing what the president called “the biggest, safest and most extraordinary soccer tournament in history.” But the administration has sent mixed signals over exactly how welcoming it intends to be.
At that meeting attended by FIFA president Gianni Infantino, Vice President JD Vance — co-chair of the task force — said the U.S. wants foreign visitors “to come, we want them to celebrate, we want them to watch the games. But when the time is up we want them to go home, otherwise they will have to talk to Secretary Noem.” He referred to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency has detained and interrogated visa holders at U.S. points of entry.
“It is up to [Rubio] to square that circle for us when he comes to our committee,” Kamlager-Dove said. “The good news is you have Republicans and Democrats asking these questions. These games are non-partisan. And I believe that these are practical, logistical, solvable log jams that deserve a solution.
“Staff the State Department to focus on them. Accelerate and streamline these processes and prioritize diplomacy. Because the games are diplomatic.”
Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. That can be accomplished by coercion (“sticks”), payment (“carrots”) or attraction (“honey”). The first two methods are forms of hard power; attraction is soft power. Soft power grows out of a country’s culture, its political values and its foreign policies. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power. But over the long term, soft power often prevails. Joseph Stalin once mockingly asked, “How many divisions does the pope have?” But the papacy continues today, while Stalin’s Soviet Union is long gone.
When a nation is attractive, it can economize on carrots and sticks. If allies see the United States as benign and trustworthy, they are more likely to be open to persuasion and to following our lead. If they see us as an unreliable bully, they are more likely to drag their feet and reduce their interdependence when they can. Cold War Europe is a good example. A Norwegian historian described Europe as divided into a Soviet and an American empire. But there was a crucial difference: The American side was “an empire by invitation” rather than coercion. The Soviets had to deploy troops to Budapest in 1956, and to Prague in 1968. In contrast, NATO has voluntarily increased its membership.
Nations need both hard and soft power. Machiavelli said it was better for a prince to be feared than to be loved. But it is best to be both.
Because soft power is rarely sufficient by itself, and because its effects take longer to realize, political leaders are often tempted to resort to the hard power of coercion or payment. When wielded alone, however, hard power is an unnecessarily high-cost proposition. The Berlin Wall did not succumb to an artillery barrage; it was felled by hammers and bulldozers wielded by people who had lost faith in communism and were drawn to Western values.
After World War II, the United States was by far the most powerful country because of its hard and soft power. It attempted to enshrine its values in what became known as the liberal international order — a soft power framework made up of the United Nations, economic and trade institutions, and other multilateral bodies. Of course, the U.S. did not always live up to its liberal values, and Cold War bipolarity limited the order it led to only half the world’s people.
Donald Trump is the first American president to reject the idea that soft power has any value in foreign policy. Among his first actions upon returning to office were withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, despite the obvious threats that global warming and pandemics pose.
The effects of the Trump administration’s surrendering soft power are all too predictable. Trying to coerce democratic allies such as Denmark or Canada weakens trust in the U.S. among all our alliances. Threatening Panama reawakens fears of imperialism throughout Latin America. Crippling the U.S. Agency for International Development — created by President Kennedy in 1961 — undercuts our reputation for benevolence. Silencing Voice of America is a gift to authoritarian rivals. Slapping tariffs on friends makes us appear unreliable. Trying to chill free speech at home undermines our credibility. This list could go on.
China, which Trump defines as America’s great challenge, itself has been investing in soft power since 2007, when then-Chinese President Hu Jintao told the Chinese Communist Party that the country needed to make itself more attractive to others. But China has long faced two major obstacles in this respect. First, it maintains territorial disputes with multiple neighbors. Second, the communists insist on maintaining tight control over civil society. When public opinion polls ask people around the world which countries they find attractive, China doesn’t shine. But one can only wonder what these surveys will show in future years if Trump keeps undercutting American soft power.
Of course American soft power has had its ups and downs. The U.S. was unpopular in many countries during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. But soft power derives from a country’s society and culture as well as from government actions. When crowds marched through streets around the world in freedom protests, they sang the American civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” An open society that allows protest can be a soft-power asset.
But will America’s cultural soft power survive a downturn in the government’s soft power over the next four years?
American democracy is likely to survive the next four years of Trump. The country has a resilient political culture and the Constitution encourages checks and balances, whatever their weaknesses. In 2026, there is a reasonable chance that Democrats will regain control of the House of Representatives. Moreover, American civil society remains strong, and the courts independent. Many organizations have launched lawsuits to challenge Trump’s actions, and markets have signaled dissatisfaction with his economic policies.
American soft power recovered after low points during the Vietnam and Iraq wars, as well as during Trump’s first term. But once trust is lost, it is not easily restored. After the invasion of Ukraine, Russia lost most of what soft power it had. Right now, China is striving to fill any soft power gaps that Trump creates. The way Chinese President Xi Jinping tells it, the East is rising over the West.
If Trump thinks he can compete with China while weakening trust among American allies, asserting imperial aspirations, destroying USAID, silencing Voice of America, challenging laws at home and withdrawing from U.N. agencies, he is likely to fail. Restoring what he has destroyed will not be impossible, but it will be costly.
Joseph S. Nye Jr. was dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and a U.S. assistant secretary of Defense. His memoir “A Life in the American Century”was published last year. Nye died earlier this month.
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Democratic senators sparred Tuesday over the Trump administration’s foreign policies, including on Ukraine and Russia, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as the slashing of the U.S. foreign assistance budget and refugee admissions.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, his first since being confirmed on the first day of President Trump’s inauguration, former Florida Sen. Rubio defended the administration’s decisions to his onetime colleagues.
He said “America is back” and claimed four months of foreign policy achievements, even as many of them remain frustratingly inconclusive. Among them are the resumption of nuclear talks with Iran, efforts to bring Russia and Ukraine into peace talks, and efforts to end the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
He praised agreements with El Salvador and other Latin American countries to accept migrant deportees, saying “secure borders, safe communities and zero tolerance for criminal cartels are once again the guiding principles of our foreign policy.” He also rejected assertions that massive cuts to his department’s budget would hurt America’s standing abroad. Instead, he said the cuts would actually improve American status and the United States’ reputation internationally.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the committee’s chair, opened the hearing with praise for Trump’s changes and spending cuts and welcomed what he called the administration’s promising nuclear talks with Iran. Risch also noted what he jokingly called “modest disagreement” with Democratic lawmakers, who used Tuesday’s hearing to confront Rubio about Trump administration moves that they say are weakening the United States’ influence globally.
Yet Democrats on the Senate committee, including ranking member Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, took sharp issue with Rubio’s presentation.
Shaheen argued that the Trump administration has “eviscerated six decades of foreign policy investments” and given China openings around the world.
“I urge you to stand up to the extremists of the administration,” Shaheen said. Other Democrats excoriated the administration for its suspension of the refugee admissions program, particularly while allowing white Afrikaners from South Africa to enter the country.
In two particularly contentious exchanges, Kaine and Van Hollen demanded answers on the decision to suspend overall refugee admissions but to exempt Afrikaners based on what they called “specious” claims that they have been subjected to massive discrimination by the South African government. Rubio gave no ground.
“The United States has a right to pick and choose who we allow into the United States,” he said. “If there is a subset of people that are easier to vet, who we have a better understanding of who they are and what they’re going to do when they come here, they’re going to receive preference.”
He added: “There are a lot of sad stories around the world, millions and millions of people around the world. It’s heartbreaking, but we cannot assume millions and millions of people around the world. No country can.”
On the Middle East, Rubio said the administration has continued to push ahead with attempts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza and to promote stability in Syria.
He stressed the importance of U.S. engagement with Syria, saying that otherwise, he fears the interim government there could be weeks or months away from a “potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions.”
Rubio’s comments addressed Trump’s pledge to lift sanctions on Syria’s new transitional government, which is led by a former militant chief who led the overthrow of the country’s longtime oppressive leader, Bashar Assad, late last year.
Lee and Knickmeyer write for the Associated Press.
The UK is now in a better place on trade “than any other country in the world”, the chancellor has claimed.
Rachel Reeves said Britain’s economic growth was on course to be upgraded as a result of the country’s recent three trade deals agreed with the US, India and the EU.
Reeves suggested the government wanted to go further on its new agreement with the EU but told the BBC a trade pact with countries in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, would be the “next deal”.
On Monday, the UK and the EU struck a deal across several areas including fishing, trade, defence and energy, which marked the biggest agreement between the parties since the UK left the trading bloc in 2020 following the Brexit vote.
The summit in London came after the government reached a trade deal with India to make it easier for UK firms to export whisky, cars and other products to the country, and cut taxes on India’s clothing and footwear exports.
Reeves described the recent trade deals as having “come along like buses” and hinted at expectations of an upgrade to UK economic growth forecasts as a result.
“Britain is in a better place than any other country in the world in terms of deals with those countries,” she said.
“The first deal and the best deal so far with the US, we’ve got the best deal with the EU for any country outside the EU, and we’ve got the best trade agreement with India,” Reeves added.
“Not only are these important in their own right, but it also shows that Britain now is the place for investment and business, because we’ve got preferential deals with the biggest economies around the world.”
The chancellor told the BBC another deal with Gulf nations was the “next deal”, with the government closing in on a pact with the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.
It appears the government had the EU, the UK’s largest trading partner, in mind during its talks with the US and India.
As part of the deal with the EU, in return for extending current fishing rules, checks have been reduced on UK food exports.
Reeves said UK officials had made it clear to the Trump administration and India that food standards were not up for negotiation in their deals.
“We increased the quota for the import of beef from the US, it was all still on the high standards that we pride ourselves in, and in part because standards matter to us, but also because we wanted to secure this agreement with the EU, which is by far the biggest market for UK agriculture and fishing,” the chancellor said.
But while the government has hailed recent trade agreements as triumphs, some opposition parties have criticised Reeves and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer for some of the concessions offered in return.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the latest EU deal took the UK “backwards” and previously said the country had been “shafted” in the America tariff pact.
The chancellor received a boost last week when the latest official figures revealed the UK economy had grown by 0.7% in the first three months of the year.
The growth was bigger than expected but is not forecast to last.
The government has made growing the economy its main priority in order to boost living standards. A higher growth rate usually means people are getting paid a little bit more, can spend more and more jobs are created by businesses investing.
Reeves suggested UK growth forecasts could be boosted because of the better figures, but economists have warned US tariffs and the chancellor’s decision to raise National Insurance for employers could hit the economy.
“We are forecasting growth of 1% this year, and we had 0.7% in Q1 and they’ll take into account the new trade deals that have been secured,” she said.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Trump administration may seek to deport nearly 350,000 Venezuelans who were granted “temporary protected status” under the Biden administration to live and work in the United States.
In a brief order, the justices granted a fast-track appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside the decision of a federal judge in San Francisco who had blocked the repeal announced by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson voted to deny the appeal.
Trump’s lawyers said the law gave the Biden administration the discretion to grant temporary protection to Venezuelans, but also gave the new administration the same discretion to end it.
The court’s decision does not involve the several hundred Venezuelans who were held in Texas and targeted for speedy deportation to El Salvador because they were alleged to be gang members. The justices blocked their deportation until they were offered a hearing.
But it will strip away the legal protection for an estimated 350,000 Venezuelans who arrived by 2023 and could not return home because of the “severe humanitarian” crisis created by the regime of Nicolas Maduro. An additional 250,000 Venezuelans who arrived by 2021 remain protected until September.
“This is an abuse of the emergency docket,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a UCLA law professor who is representing the Venezuelan beneficiaries of the temporary protected status, or TPS.
He added: “It would be preposterous to suggest there’s something urgent about the need to strip immigration status of several hundred thousand people who have lived here for years.”
It was one of two special authorities used by the Biden administration that face possible repeal now.
Last week, Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to also revoke the special “grant of parole” that allowed 532,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to legally enter the United States on personally financed flights.
A judge in Boston blocked Noem’s repeal of the parole authority.
The Biden administration granted the TPS under a 1990 law. It said the U.S. government may extend relief to immigrants who cannot return home because of an armed conflict, natural disaster or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
Shortly before leaving office, Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, extended the TPS for the Venezuelans for 18 months.
While nationals from 17 countries qualify for TPS, the largest number from any country are Venezuelans.
The Trump administration moved quickly to reverse course.
“As its name suggests,” TPS provides “temporary — not permanent — relief to aliens who cannot safely return to their homes,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote in his appeal last week.
Shortly after she was confirmed, Noem said the special protection for the Venezuelans was “contrary to the national interest.”
She referred to them as “dirtbags.” In a TV interview, she also claimed that “Venezuela purposely emptied out their prisons, emptied out their mental health facilities and sent them to the United States of America.”
The ACLU Foundations of Northern and Southern California and the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law filed suit in San Francisco. Their lawyers argued the conditions in Venezuela remain extremely dangerous.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen agreed and blocked Noem’s repeal order from taking effect nationwide. He said the “unprecedented action of vacating existing TPS” was a “step never taken by any administration.”
He ruled Noem’s order was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because it did not offer a reasoned explanation for the change in regulations. It was also “motivated by unconstitutional animus,” he said.
The judge also found that tens of thousands of American children could be separated from their parents if the adults’ temporary protected status were repealed.
When the 9th Circuit Court refused to lift the judge’s temporary order, the solicitor general appealed to the Supreme Court on May 1.
Last week, the State Department reissued an “extreme danger” travel advisory for Venezuela, urging Americans to leave the country immediately or to “prepare a will and designate appropriate insurance beneficiaries and/or power of attorney.”
“Do not travel to or remain in Venezuela due to the high risk of wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure,” the advisory states.
Trump’s lawyers downplayed the impact of a ruling lifting TPS. They told the justices that none of the plaintiffs is facing immediate deportation.
Each of them “will have the ability to challenge on an individual basis whether removal is proper — or seek to stay, withhold or otherwise obtain relief from any order of removal — through ordinary” immigration courts, he said.
Arulanantham said the effect will be substantial. Many of the beneficiaries have no other protection from deportation. Some have pending applications, such as for asylum. But immigration authorities have begun detaining those with pending asylum claims. Others, who entered within the last two years, could be subject to expedited deportation.
Economic harm would be felt even more immediately, Arulanantham said. Once work permits provided through TPS are invalidated, employers would be forced to let workers go. That means families would be unable to pay rent or feed their children, as well as result in economic losses felt in communities across the country.
In May 1939, a ship called the St. Louis departed from Hamburg, Germany, with 937 passengers, most of them Jews fleeing the Holocaust. They had been promised disembarkation rights in Cuba, but when the ship reached Havana, the government refused to let it dock. The passengers made desperate pleas to the U.S., including directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to allow them entry. Roosevelt never responded. The State Department wired back that they should “wait their turn” and enter legally.
As if that were a realistic option available to them.
After lingering off the coast of Florida hoping for a merciful decision from Washington, the St. Louis and its passengers returned to Europe, where the Nazis were on the march. Ultimately, 254 of the ship’s passengers died in the Holocaust.
In response to this shameful failure to provide protection, the nations of the world came together and drafted an international treaty to protect those fleeing persecution. The treaty, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and its 1967 Protocol, has been ratified by more than 75% of nations, including the United States.
Because the tragedy of the St. Louis was fresh in the minds of the treaty drafters, they included an unequivocal prohibition on returning fleeing refugees to countries where their “life or freedom would be threatened.” This is understood to prohibit sending them to a country where they would face these threats, as well as sending them to a country that would then send them on to a third country where they would be at such risk.
All countries that are parties to the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees are bound by this prohibition on return (commonly referred to by its French translation, “nonrefoulement”). In the U.S., Congress enacted the 1980 Refugee Act, expressly adopting the treaty language. The U.S. is also a party to the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits the return of individuals to places where they would be in danger of “being subjected to torture.”
In both Trump administrations, there have been multiple ways in which the president has attempted to eviscerate and undermine the protections guaranteed by treaty obligation and U.S. law. The most drastic among these measures have been the near-total closure of the border to asylum seekers and the suspension of entry of already approved and vetted refugees.
However, none of these measures has appeared so clearly designed to make a mockery of the post-World War II refugee protection framework as the administration’s proposals and attempts to send migrants from the U.S. to Libya and Rwanda.
Although there are situations in which the U.S. could lawfully send a migrant to a third country, it would still be bound by the obligation not to return the person to a place where their “life or freedom would be threatened.” The choices of Libya and Rwanda — rather than, for example, Canada or France — can only be read as an intentional and open flouting of that prohibition.
Libya is notorious for its abuse of migrants, with widespread infliction of torture, sexual violence, forced labor, starvation and slavery. Leading advocacy groups such as Amnesty International call it a “hellscape.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has stated in no uncertain terms that Libya is not to be considered a safe third country for migrants. The U.S. is clearly aware of conditions there; the State Department issued its highest warning level for Libya, advising against travel to Libya because of crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping and armed conflict.
Although conditions in Rwanda are not as extreme, the supreme courts of both Israel and the United Kingdom have ruled that agreements to send migrants to Rwanda are unlawful. The two countries had attempted to outsource their refugee obligations by calling Rwanda a “safe third country” to which asylum seekers could be sent to apply for protection.
Israel and the U.K.’s highest courts found that Rwanda — contrary to its stated commitment when entering these agreements — had in fact refused to consider the migrants’ asylum claims, and instead, routinely expelled them, resulting in their return to countries of persecution, in direct violation of the prohibition on refoulement. The U.K. court also cited Rwanda’s poor human rights record, including “extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture.”
If the Trump administration had even a minimal commitment to abide by its international and domestic legal obligations, plans to send migrants to Libya or Rwanda would be a nonstarter. But the plans are very much alive, and it is not far-fetched to assume that their intent is to further undermine internationally agreed upon norms of refugee protection dating to World War II. Why else choose the two countries that have repeatedly been singled out for violating the rights of refugees?
As in Israel and the U.K., there will be court challenges should the U.S. move forward with its proposed plan of sending migrants to Libya and Rwanda. It is hard to imagine a court that could rule that the U.S. would not be in breach of its legal obligation of nonrefoulement by delivering migrants to these two countries.
Having said that, and despite the clear language of the treaty and statute, it has become increasingly difficult to predict how the courts will rule when the Supreme Court has issued decisions overturning long-accepted precedent, and lower courts have arrived at diametricallyopposed positions on some of the most contentious immigration issues.
In times like these, we should not depend solely on the courts. There are many of us here in the U.S. who believe that the world’s refugee framework — developed in response to the profound moral failure of turning back the St. Louis — is worth fighting for. We need to take a vocal stand. The clear message must be that those fleeing persecution should never be returned to persecution.
Karen Musalo is a law professor and the founding director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Law, San Francisco. She is also lead co-author of “Refugee Law and Policy: A Comparative and International Approach.”
CANNES, France — “The sun is my mortal enemy,” Ari Aster says, squinting as he sits on the sixth-floor rooftop terrace of Cannes’ Palais des Festivals, where most of the screenings happen. It’s an especially bright afternoon and we take refuge in the shade.
Aster, the 38-year-old filmmaker of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” wears a olive-colored suit and baseball cap. He’s already a household name among horror fans and A24’s discerning audiences, but the director is competing at Cannes for the first time with “Eddington,” a paranoid thriller set in a New Mexican town riven by pandemic anxieties. Like a modern-day western, the sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) spars with the mayor (Pedro Pascal) in tense showdowns while protests over the murder of George Floyd flare on street corners. Too many people cough without their masks on. Conspiracy nuts, mysterious drones and jurisdictional tensions shift the film into something more Pynchonesque and surreal.
In advance of the movie’s July 18 release, “Eddington” has become a proper flash point at Cannes, dividing opinion starkly. Like Aster’s prior feature, 2023’s “Beau Is Afraid,” it continues his expansion into wider psychological territory, signaling a heretofore unexpressed political dimension spurred by recent events, as well as an impulse to explore a different kind of American fear. We sat down with him on Sunday to discuss the movie and its reception.
I remember what it was like in 2018 at Sundance with “Hereditary” and being a part of that first midnight audience where it felt like something special was happening. How does this time feel compared to that?
It feels the same. It’s just nerve-wracking and you feel totally vulnerable and exposed. But it’s exciting. It’s always been a dream to premiere a film in Cannes.
Have you ever been to Cannes before?
No.
So this must feel like living out that dream. How do you think it went on Friday?
I don’t know. How do you feel it went? [Laughs]
I knew you were going to turn it around.
That’s what everybody asks me. Everybody comes up saying [makes a pity face], “How are you feeling? How do you think it went?” And it’s like, I am the least objective person here. I made the film.
I know you’ve heard about those legendary Cannes premieres where audiences have extreme reactions and it feels like the debut of “The Rite of Spring.” Some people are loving it, some people are hating it. Those are the best ones, aren’t they?
Oh, yeah. But again, I don’t really have a picture of what the response is.
Do you read your reviews?
I’ve been staying away while I do press and talk to people. So I can speak to the film.
Makes sense. I felt great love in the room for Joaquin Phoenix, who was rubbing your shoulder during the ovation. Have you talked to the cast and how they think it went, or were they just having a good time?
I think that they’re all really proud of the film. That’s what I know and it’s been nice to be here with them.
Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”
(A24)
In the context of your four features, “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” and now “Eddington,” how easy was “Eddington” to make?
They’re all hard. We’re always trying to stretch our resources as far as they can go, and so they’ve all been just about equally difficult, in different ways.
Is it fair to say that your films have changed since “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” and now they’re more accommodating of a larger swath of sociopolitical material?
I am just following my impulses so I’m not thinking in that way. There’s very little strategy going on. It’s just: What am I interested in? And when I started writing, because I was in a real state of fear and anxiety about what was happening in the country and what was happening in the world, and I wanted to make a film about what it was feeling like.
This was circa what, 2020?
It was in June 2020 that I started writing it. I wanted to make a film about what it feels like to live in a world where nobody agrees about what is happening.
You mean no one agrees what is happening in the sense that we can’t even agree on the facts?
Yes. There’s this social force that has been at the center of mass liberal democracies for a very long time, which is this agreed-upon version of what is real. And of course, we could all argue and have our own opinions, but we all fundamentally agreed about what we were arguing about. And that is something that has been going away. It’s been happening for the last 20 something years. But COVID, for me, felt like when the last link was cut, this old idea of democracy, that it could be sort of a countervailing force against power, tech, finance. That’s gone now completely.
And at that moment it felt like I was kind of in a panic about it. I’m sure that I am probably not alone. And so I wanted to make a film about the environment, not about me. The film is very much about the gulf between politics and policy. Politics is public relations. Policy is things that are actually happening. Real things are happening very quickly, moving very quickly.
I think of “Eddington” as very much a horror film. It’s the horror of free-floating political anxiety. That’s what’s scaring you right now. And we don’t have any kind of control over it.
We have no control and we feel totally powerless and we’re being led by people who do not believe in the future. So we’re living in an atmosphere of total despair.
During the lockdown, I was just sitting on my phone doom-scrolling. Is that what you were doing?
Of course. There was a lot of great energy behind the internet, this idea of: It’s going to bring people together, it’s going to connect them. But of course then finance got involved, as it always does, and whatever that was curdled and was put on another track. It used to be something we went to. You went to your computer at home, you would maybe go to your email. Everything took forever to load. And then with these phones, we began living in cyberspace, so we are living in the internet.
It’s owned us, it’s consumed us and we don’t see it. The really insidious thing about our culture and about this moment is that it’s scary and it’s dangerous and it’s catastrophic and it’s absurd and ridiculous and stupid and impossible to take seriously.
Did that “ridiculous and stupid” part lead you aesthetically to make something that was an extremely dark comedy? I think “Eddington” sometimes plays like a comedy.
Well, I mean there’s something farcical going on. I wanted to make a good western too, and westerns are about the country and the mythology of America and the romance of America. They’re very sentimental. I’m interested in the tension between the idealism of America and the reality of it.
You have your western elements in there, your Gunther’s Pistol Palace and a heavily armed endgame that often recalls “No Country for Old Men.”
You’ve got Joe, who’s a sheriff, who loves his wife and cares about his community. And he’s 50 years old, so he grew up with those ’90s action movies and, at the end, he gets to live through one.
Let’s step backward for a second about where you were and what you were doing around the time you started writing this. You were finishing up “Beau Is Afraid,” right? What was your life like then? You were freaking out and watching the news and starting to write a script. What was that process like for you?
I was New Mexico at the time. I was living in New York in a tiny apartment, but then I had to come back to New Mexico. There was a COVID scare in my family and I wanted to be near family. I was there for a couple months and just wanted to make a film about what the world felt like, what the country felt like.
Were you worried about your own health and safety during that time?
Of course. I’m a hyper-neurotic Jew. I’m always worried about my health.
And also the breakdown of truth. What were the reactions when you first started sharing your script with the people who ended up in your cast? What was Joaquin’s reaction like?
I just remember that he really took to the character and loved Joe and wanted to play him, and that was exciting to me. I loved working with him on “Beau” and I gave him the script hoping that he would want to do it. They all responded really quickly and jumped on. There was just a general excitement and a feeling for the project. I had a friendship with Emily [Emma Stone, whom Aster calls by her birth name] already and now we’re all friends. I really love them as actors and as people. It was a pretty fluid, nice process.
I haven’t seen many significant movies expressly about the pandemic yet. Did it feel like you were breaking new ground?
I don’t think that way, but I was wanting to see some reflection on what was happening.
Even in the seven years since “Hereditary,” do you feel like the business has changed?
Yeah, it is changing. I mean, everything feels like it’s changing. I think about [Marshall] McLuhan and how we’re in a stage right now where we’re moving from one medium to another. The internet has been the prominent, prevailing, dominant medium, and that’s changed the landscape of everything, and we’re moving towards something new. We don’t know what’s coming with AI. It’s also why we’re so nostalgic now about film and 70mm presentations.
Do you ever feel like you got into this business at the last-possible minute?
Definitely. I feel very fortunate that I’m able to make the films I want to make and I feel lucky to have been able to make this film.
There’s a lot of room in “Eddington” for any kind of a viewer to find a mirror of themselves and also be challenged. It doesn’t preach to the converted. Was that an intent of yours?
[Long pause] Sorry, I’m just thinking. I’m just starting to talk about the film. I guess I’m trying to make a film about how we’re all actually in the same situation and how similar we are. Which may be hard to see and I’m not a sociologist. But it was important to me to make a film about the environment.
I was asked recently, Do you have any hope? And I think the answer to that is that I do have hope, but I don’t have confidence.
It’s easy to be cynical.
But I do see that if there is any hope, we have to reengage with each other. And for me, it was important to not judge any of these characters. I’m not judging them. I’m not trying to judge them.
Ari Aster, left, and Pedro Pascal on the set of “Eddington.”
(Richard Foreman)
I love that you have a partner in A24 that is basically letting you go where you need to go as an artist.
They’ve been very supportive. It’s great because I’ve been able to make these films without compromise.
Do you have an idea for your next one?
I’ve got a few ideas. I’m deciding between three.
You can’t give me a taste of anything?
Not yet, no. They’re all different genres and I’m trying to decide what’s right.
Let’s hope we survive to that point. How are you personally, apart from movies?
I’m very worried. I’m very worried and I am really sad about where things are. And otherwise there needs to be another idea. Something new has to happen.
You mean like a new political paradigm or something?
Yeah. The system we’re in is a response to the last system that failed. And the only answer, the only alternative I’m hearing is to go back to that old system. I’ll just say even just the idea of a collective is just a harder thing to imagine. How can that happen? How do we ever come together? Can there be any sort of countervailing force to power? I feel increasingly powerless and impotent. And despairing.
Ari, it’s a beautiful day. It’s hard to be completely cynical about the world when you’re at Cannes and it’s sunny. Even in just 24 hours, “Eddington” has become a conversation film, debated and discussed. Doesn’t it thrill you that you have one of those kind of movies?
That’s what this is supposed to be. And you want people to be talking about it and arguing about it. And I hope it is something that you have to wrestle with and think about.
The beef is building between Bruce Springsteen and President Trump.
The Boss did not back down on his fiery rhetoric against Trump on the third night of his “Land of Hopes and Dreams” tour in Manchester, England, on Saturday — a day after Trump lashed out against the legendary singer on Truth Social, calling him an “obnoxious jerk,” a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker,” and writing that he should “keep his mouth shut.”
Springsteen didn’t oblige. In a resolute three-minute speech from the Co-op Live venue, Springsteen thanked his cheering audience for indulging him in a speech about the state of America: “Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore.”
He then repeated many of the lines that he used during a previous Manchester show — the same words that upset Trump to begin with, including the administration defunding American universities, the rolling back of civil rights legislation and siding with dictators, “against those who are struggling for their freedoms.”
Trump’s Truth Social post contained what appeared to be a threat, writing of Springsteen, “We’ll see how it goes for him,” when he gets back to the country. This did not dissuade the “Born in the USA” singer.
Share via
“In my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. That’s happening now,” Springsteen said. “In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. That’s happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.”
In a steady voice, he listed the many concerns of those who oppose Trump, his enablers and his policies.
“They are removing residents off American streets without due process of law and deploying them to foreign detention centers as prisoners. That’s happening now. The majority of our elected representatives have utterly failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government,” Springsteen said as the crowd applauded and yelled its support. “They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”
He finished on a positive note.
“The America I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real, and regardless of its many faults, it’s a great country with a great people, and we will survive this moment. Well, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ ”
Springsteen has long been a vocal critic of Trump, and campaigned for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Trump is known for his angry diatribes against celebrities who criticize him, including Taylor Swift and Robert DeNiro.
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson Penguin Press: 352 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s superbly reported “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids. During his latter years as No. 46, Biden is portrayed as a lion in winter — shockingly frail and forgetful with a ferocious pride that blinds him to the fact that it’s time to exit the stage. He was assisted in that delusion, the authors claim, by the mythology his family erected around him — that he was indestructible — and by his zealously protective inner circle, dubbed “the Politburo.”
Though Tapper and Thompson’s mostly anonymous sources (it’s jarring that so few went on the record) suggest that the first disturbing signs of Biden’s diminished capacities emerged as early as 2015, many around him chalked them up to the “Bidenness” of it all: “He was known on the Hill for being congenitally prone to long stories, gaffes, and inappropriate comments,” the authors observe. “Even in tightly choreographed Zoom calls with friendly audiences, Biden could step on a rake.”
That propensity appeared to morph into something more worrisome even before Biden was elected president. An unnamed Democrat who witnessed candidate Biden being prepped for a taping prior to the 2020 convention in Milwaukee was startled by his incoherence, commenting that it “was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.” Once in office, the White House staff “treated him as very delicate,” and the pandemic gave aides an excuse to build “barriers” around him so few could gain access. The news media and public were kept at arm’s length, as were many members of the Cabinet and Congress, which led to a “uniquely small and loyal inner circle.” “I’ve never seen a situation like this before, with so few people having so much power,” said one unidentified top official.
That elite quintet consisted of domestic policy advisor Bruce Reed, chief strategist Mike Donilon, legislative affairs guru Steve Ricchetti and chief of staff Ron Klain, each of whom had deep ties to Biden. “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” offered one person familiar with the dynamic. As time went on and more grew concerned about Biden’s behavior, those who inquired were routinely told that everything was okay. One staffer who didn’t have regular access to Biden during this period said that when they did see him in person, they were “shocked, but the other people around him didn’t seem to be, so I didn’t say anything.”
It wasn’t until around the time Biden broke his one-term pledge to be a “bridge” president and made clear he intended to run again that some began to feel a sense of alarm. For example, in 2023, Congressman Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) was with Biden when he visited Ireland. Biden seemed to gain strength from the crowds that greeted him, but then appeared “sapped and not quite there.” The authors write that Quigley “realized why this all felt so familiar to him … This was how his father, Bill, had been before he died.” Similarly, Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips was so disturbed by Biden’s reduced “speaking and walking skills” that he pressed Democratic officials as to whether the president was up to the job. Even those who admitted to having concerns offered the “yes, but,” as in, “Yes, Biden is in decline but can you imagine Trump winning?” Phillips could imagine such a scenario, “especially if Biden were the Democratic nominee.” Failing to get anyone to take his worries seriously, he declared his own candidacy. But “the whale who spouts gets harpooned,” Phillips later noted after the “Democratic machine” set out to quash his chances. He reluctantly pulled out of the race and “watched his party sleepwalk toward disaster.”
Alex Thompson, left, and Jake Tapper argue that there was a conspiracy to conceal President Biden’s “cognitive diminishment” from the press, public and top Democrats.
(Elliott O’Donovan)
Though some top Democratic supporters such as Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel refused to support Biden’s bid for reelection — even shouting at Klain during a “power-player retreat” that, “Joe Biden cannot run for reelection! He needs to drop out!” — most remained in the president’s corner until his disastrous debate performance in late June 2024. Following that, the slow drip of Biden allies calling for him to withdraw became a downpour, with even loyalists like George Clooney remarking publicly in an op-ed that while he “loved” Joe Biden, “the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.”
Was there a conspiracy to conceal Biden’s symptoms from the press, public and top Democrats? The authors conclude there was. “The original sin of Election 2024,” they write, “was Biden’s decision to run for reelection — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.” The course Biden’s family and inner circle chose was tantamount to “gaslighting the American people.” Many other key Democratic officials and donors simply felt that even a weakened Biden was the best bet against the “existential threat” posed by Trump, until the debate shattered that rationalization. In any case, Biden allies “who voiced fears were flicked away like lint.”
In the end, I’m not convinced there was a coordinated campaign to hide the truth about Biden’s “condition,” but maybe that doesn’t matter. In the book’s final chapter, the authors quote former Watergate special prosecutor and law professor Archibald Cox on what lessons Americans should take away from the Watergate scandal. He observes that “we should be reminded of the corrupt influence of great power. … Perhaps it is inescapable that modern government vests extraordinary power in the President and puts around him a large circle of men and women whose personal status and satisfaction depends entirely on pleasing one man.”
But Biden isn’t Nixon. He is a man who generated intense love and loyalty, whose life has been filled with tragedy as well as opportunity; who adeptly and passionately served his country for decades. “Original Sin” is not a compassionate account of Biden’s last campaign — at times it’s even a painful, if necessary, piece of journalism. A great takeaway from 2024, according to political strategist David Plouffe, is that “never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they’re seeing is not true.” We don’t know if Trump could have been defeated had Biden opted not to run. But in the future, we can’t afford to be in denial.
Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
They arrive at the U.S. border from around the world: Eritrea, Guatemala, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ghana, Uzbekistan and so many other countries.
They come for asylum, insisting they face persecution for their religion, or sexuality or for supporting the wrong politicians.
For generations, they had been given the chance to make their case to U.S. authorities.
Not anymore.
“They didn’t give us an ICE officer to talk to. They didn’t give us an interview. No one asked me what happened,” said a Russian election worker who sought asylum in the U.S. after he said he was caught with video recordings he made of vote rigging. On Feb. 26, he was deported to Costa Rica with his wife and young son.
On Jan. 20, just after being sworn in for a second term, President Trump suspended the asylum system as part of his wide-ranging crackdown on illegal immigration, issuing a series of executive orders designed to stop what he called the “invasion” of the United States.
What asylum seekers now find, according to lawyers, activists and immigrants, is a murky, ever-changing situation with few obvious rules, where people can be deported to countries they know nothing about after fleeting conversations with immigration officials while others languish in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
Attorneys who work frequently with asylum seekers at the border say their phones have gone quiet since Trump took office. They suspect many who cross are immediately expelled without a chance at asylum or are detained to wait for screening under the U.N.’s convention against torture, which is harder to qualify for than asylum.
“I don’t think it’s completely clear to anyone what happens when people show up and ask for asylum,” said Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council.
Restrictions face challenges in court
A thicket of lawsuits, appeals and countersuits have filled the courts as the Trump administration faces off against activists who argue the sweeping restrictions illegally put people fleeing persecution in harm’s way.
In a key legal battle, a federal judge is expected to rule on whether courts can review the administration’s use of invasion claims to justify suspending asylum. There is no date set for that ruling.
The government says its declaration of an invasion is not subject to judicial oversight, at one point calling it “an unreviewable political question.”
But rights groups fighting the asylum proclamation, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, called it “as unlawful as it is unprecedented” in the complaint filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court.
Illegal border crossings, which soared in the first years of President Biden’s administration, reaching nearly 10,000 arrests per day in late 2024, dropped significantly during his last year in office and plunged further after Trump returned to the White House.
Yet more than 200 people are still arrested daily for illegally crossing the southern U.S. border.
Some of those people are seeking asylum, though it’s unclear if anyone knows how many.
Paulina Reyes-Perrariz, managing attorney for the San Diego office of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her office sometimes received 10 to 15 calls a day about asylum after Biden implemented asylum restrictions in 2024.
That number has dropped to almost nothing, with only a handful of total calls since Jan. 20.
Plus, she added, lawyers are unsure how to handle asylum cases.
“It’s really difficult to consult and advise with individuals when we don’t know what the process is,” she said.
Doing ‘everything right’
None of this was expected by the Russian man, who asked not to be identified for fear of persecution if he returns to Russia.
“We felt betrayed,” the 36-year-old told the Associated Press. “We did everything right.”
The family had scrupulously followed the rules. They traveled to Mexico in May 2024, found a cheap place to rent near the border with California and waited nearly nine months for the chance to schedule an asylum interview.
On Jan. 14, they got word that their interview would be on Feb 2. On Jan. 20, the interview was canceled.
Moments after Trump took office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it had scrubbed the system used to schedule asylum interviews and canceled tens of thousands of existing appointments.
There was no way to appeal.
The Russian family went to a San Diego border crossing to ask for asylum, where they were taken into custody, he said.
A few weeks later, they were among the immigrants who were handcuffed, shackled and flown to Costa Rica. Only the children were left unchained.
Turning to other countries to hold deportees
The Trump administration has tried to accelerate deportations by turning countries like Costa Rica and Panama into “bridges,” temporarily detaining deportees while they await return to their countries of origin or third countries.
Earlier this year, some 200 migrants were deported from the U.S. to Costa Rica and roughly 300 were sent to Panama.
To supporters of tighter immigration controls, the asylum system has always been rife with exaggerated claims by people not facing real dangers. In recent years, roughly one-third to half of asylum applications were approved by judges.
Even some politicians who see themselves as pro-immigration say the system faces too much abuse.
“People around the world have learned they can claim asylum and remain in the U.S. indefinitely to pursue their claims,” retired U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, a longtime Democratic stalwart in Congress, wrote last year in the Wall Street Journal, defending Biden’s tightening of asylum policies amid a flood of illegal immigration.
An uncertain future
Many of the immigrants they arrived with have left the Costa Rican facility where they were first detained, but the Russian family has stayed. The man cannot imagine going back to Russia and has nowhere else to go.
He and his wife spend their days teaching Russian and a little English to their son. He organizes volleyball games to keep people busy.
He is not angry at the U.S. He understands the administration wanting to crack down on illegal immigration. But, he adds, he is in real danger. He followed the rules and can’t understand why he didn’t get a chance to plead his case.
He fights despair almost constantly, knowing that what he did in Russia brought his family to this place.
“I failed them,” he said. “I think that every day: I failed them.”
SEOUL — In South Korea, the Trump administration’s 25% tariff on imported cars has sent local automakers Hyundai and Kia scrambling to protect one of the country’s most valuable exports. But General Motors, which last year shipped 418,782 units from its factories here to American consumers — or 88.5% of its total sales — may be facing a much larger predicament.
Unlike Hyundai and Kia, which control over 90% of the domestic market here, the Detroit-based automaker produces budget SUVs like the Chevrolet Trax or Chevrolet Trailblazer almost exclusively for the U.S. market. The Trax has been South Korea’s most-exported car since 2023.
That business model has made GM, which operates three factories and employs some 11,000 workers in the country, uniquely exposed to Trump’s auto tariffs, resurfacing long-running concerns in the local automobile industry that the company may ultimately pack up and leave.
Until last month’s tariffs, cars sold between the U.S. and South Korea were untaxed under a bilateral free trade agreement. That helped South Korea become the third-largest automobile exporter to the U.S. last year to the tune of $34.7 billion — or around half of its total automobile exports. In contrast, South Korea bought just $2.1 billion worth of cars from the U.S.
Earlier this month, GM executives estimated that the tariffs would cost the company up to $5 billion this year, adding that the company would boost production in its U.S. plants to offset the hit. With additional factories in Mexico and Canada, GM currently imports around half of the cars that it sells in the U.S.
“If the U.S. tariffs remain in place, GM will no longer have any reason to stay in South Korea,” said Lee Ho-guen, an automotive engineering professor at Daeduk University.
“The tariffs may add up to $10,000 to the sticker price on cars shipped to the U.S., while GM sells less than 50,000 units a year in South Korea. There is very little room for them to adjust their strategy.”
Kim Woong-heon, an official in GM Korea’s labor union, said that the union is approaching current rumors of the company’s potential exit with a dose of caution, but added that broader concerns about the company’s long-term commitment remain.
“The cars we’re manufacturing here are on the lowest end of GM’s price range so labor costs will make it impossible to immediately shift production to the U.S.,” he said.
“But we have painful memories of GM shutting down one of its factories in 2018, so we get nervous every time these rumors surface.”
GM Chevrolet automobiles bound for export sit parked at the Port of Incheon in South Korea.
(SeongJoon Cho / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This isn’t the first time that GM’s prospects in the country have come under question. The company first established itself in South Korea in 2002 by acquiring the bankrupt Daewoo Motor Co. in a government-backed deal that some at the time criticized as “GM taking the cream off Daewoo for almost nothing.”
Struggling to compete with the likes of Hyundai, GM briefly positioned itself as a production base for European and Asian markets until its bankruptcy in 2009.
Amid the global restructuring efforts that followed, concerns that it would close its South Korean operations led the government to once again intervene. In the end, GM stayed after receiving $750 million in financing from the country’s development bank on the condition that it would remain open for at least 10 more years.
But in 2018, the company closed its factory in the city of Gunsan, which had employed around 1,800 workers, and spun off its research and development unit from its manufacturing base — a move that many saw as the company strategically placing one foot out the door.
In February, shortly after President Trump announced the 25% tariffs on foreign-made cars, Paul Jacobson, GM’s chief financial officer, hinted that the company may once again be facing similarly tough decisions:
“If they become permanent, then there’s a whole bunch of different things that you have to think about in terms of, where do you allocate plants, and do you move plants.”
In recent weeks, executives from GM Korea have sought to assuage the rumors that the company’s South Korean operations would be affected.
“We do not intend to respond to rumors about the company’s exit from Korea,” said Gustavo Colossi, GM Korea’s vice president of sales, at a news conference last month. “We plan to move forward with our sales strategies in Korea and continue launching new models in the coming weeks and months, introducing fresh GM offerings to the market.”
The union says the company’s two finished car plants have been running at full capacity, with an additional 21,000 units recently allocated to the factory in Incheon, a city off the country’s western coast — a sign that business will go on as usual for now.
But with GM’s 10-year guarantee set to expire in 2027, Kim, the union official, said that their demands for measures that prove the company’s commitment beyond that have gone unanswered.
These include manufacturing GM’s electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in South Korean factories, as well as making a greater range of its products available for sale in South Korea and other Asian markets.
”If the company intends to continue its operations here, it needs to make its business model more sustainable and not as reliant on imports to the U.S.,” Kim said.
“That will be our core demand at this year’s wage and collective bargaining negotiations.”
GM’s immediate prospects in the country will depend on the ongoing tariff talks between U.S. and South Korean officials that began last month with the goal of producing a deal by July 8.
Although South Korean trade minister Ahn Duk-geun has stressed that cars are “the most important part of the U.S.-South Korea trade relationship,” few expect that Seoul will be able to finesse the sort of deal given to the U.K., which last week secured a 10% rate on the first 100,000 vehicles shipped to the U.S. each year.
Unlike South Korea, which posted a $66-billion trade surplus with the U.S. last year, the U.K. buys more from the U.S. than it sells. And many of the cars that it does sell to the U.S. are luxury vehicles such as the Rolls-Royce, which Trump has differentiated from the “monster car companies” that make “millions of cars.”
“At some point after the next two years, I believe it’s highly likely GM will leave and keep only their research and development unit here, or at least significantly cut back on their production,” Lee, the automotive professor, said.
In the southeastern port city of Changwon, home to the smaller of GM’s two finished car plants, local officials have been reluctant to give air to what they describe as premature fearmongering.
But Woo Choon-ae, a 62-year-old real estate agent whose clients also include GM workers and their families, can’t help but worry.
She says that the company’s exit would be devastating to the city, which, like many rural areas, has already been under strain from population decline.
GM employs 2,800 workers in the region, but accounts for thousands more jobs at its suppliers. The Changwon factory, which manufactures the Trax, represented around 15% of the city’s total exports last year.
“People work for GM because it offers stable employment until retirement age. If they close the factory here, all of these workers will leave to find work in other cities, which will be a critical blow to the housing market,” she said.
“Homes are how people save money in South Korea. But if people’s savings are suddenly halved, who’s going to be spending money on things like dining out?”
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Trump met Wednesday with Syria’s new leader, praising him as a “young, attractive guy” and urging him to rid his country of “Palestinian terrorists.”
Trump also urged Syrian interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa to sign onto the historic Abraham Accords brokered during Trump’s first term.
The meeting in Riyadh came as Trump concluded the Saudi Arabian leg of his Middle Eastern trip and headed to Qatar, the second destination of what has so far been an opulence-heavy tour of the region.
The meeting with Al-Sharaa, which lasted roughly half an hour and was the first time in a quarter of a century that the leaders of the two nations have met, marks a significant victory for Al-Sharaa’s fledgling government, coming one day after Trump’s decision to lift long-standing sanctions from the war-ravaged country.
It also lends legitimacy to a leader whose past as an Al Qaeda-affiliated jihadi leader — Al-Sharaa severed ties with the group in 2016 — had made Western nations keep him at arm’s length.
The sanctions were imposed on Syria in 2011, when the now-deposed President Bashar Assad began a brutal crackdown to quell anti-government uprisings.
Al-Sharaa headed an Islamist rebel coalition that toppled Assad in December, but the Trump administration and other Western governments conditioned the lifting of sanctions on his government fulfilling certain conditions.
Yet as is his custom, Trump cut through protocol and relied on personal relations, lifting the sanctions at the urging of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a long-time supporter of Syria’s rebellion, who joined the meeting via phone.
Speaking on Air Force One en route to Qatar, Trump described Al-Sharaa as a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”
“He’s got a real shot at holding it together,” Trump added. “I spoke with President Erdogan, who is very friendly with him. He feels he’s got a shot of doing a good job. It’s a torn-up country.”
According to a readout shared by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on X, Trump urged Al-Sharaa to sign onto the Abraham Accords, tell “foreign terrorists” to leave Syria and deport “Palestinian terrorists,” help the U.S. in preventing Islamic State’s resurgence and assume responsibility for detention centers in northeast Syria housing thousands of people affiliated with Islamic State.
The Abraham Accords were the centerpiece of Trump’s foreign policy achievements in his first term. Brokered in 2020, they established diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — without conditioning them on Palestinian statehood or Israeli concessions to the Palestinians.
Under Assad, Syria maintained a decades-old truce with Israel, despite hosting several Palestinian factions and allowing Iran and affiliated groups to operate in the country.
Bob Worsley has solid conservative credentials. He’s anti abortion. A fiscal hawk and lifelong member of the Mormon Church. As an Arizona state senator, he won high marks from the National Rifle Assn.
These days, however, Worsley is an oddity, an exception, a Republican pushing back against the animating impulses of today’s MAGA-fied Republican Party.
Here’s how he speaks of immigrants — some of whom entered the United States illegally — and those who seek to demonize them.
“We have people that are aristocratically living in another world,” Worsley said. “Maybe they work for you, but you haven’t really lived with them and understand they’re not criminals. They are good people. They’re family people. They’re religious people. They are great Americans…. So I think that’s a problem if you don’t live with them and you’re making policy.”
If that line of reasoning is too mawkish and bleeding-heart for your taste, Worsley makes a more pragmatic argument for a generous, welcoming immigration policy, one unsentimentally rooted in cold dollars and cents.
“The Trump Organization needs workers, hospitality workers, construction workers,” Worsley said. “The horse-breeding industry, the horse-racing industry, they need these people. The pig farmers, the chicken farmers.”
Worsley owns a Phoenix-based modular housing firm and is chairman of the American Business Immigration Coalition, an organization representing more than 1,700 chief executives and business owners nationwide. Their exceedingly ambitious goal: to find compromise and a middle ground on one of the most contentious and insoluble issues of recent decades — and to bring some balance to a Trump policy that is almost wholly punitive in its nature and intent.
“We are employers … and we don’t have a workforce. We need this workforce,” Worsley said. “And building a wall and stopping all immigration is not going to work, because the water will rise until it comes over.”
A serial entrepreneur before he entered politics, Worsley doesn’t favor throwing the U.S.-Mexico border open to all comers. The “lines between countries” should mean something, he said. But now that America’s borders have been practically sealed shut, fulfilling one of President Trump’s major campaign promises, Worsley suggests it’s past time to address another part of the immigration equation.
“What we need is bigger portals, bigger legal openings to come through the border,” Worsley said, likening it to the way a spillway releases pressure behind a dam. “We need a secure workforce as much as we need a secure border.”
The immigration issue was Worsley’s impetus to enter politics. Or, more specifically, the scapegoating and vilification of immigrants that prefigured Trump and his “poisoning the blood of our country” Sturm und Drang.
Worsley, speaking at a 2017 legislative meeting in Phoenix, entered electoral politics to fight anti-immigrant policies
(Bob Christie / Associated Press)
Worsley, whose ventures included founding the SkyMall catalog — a pre-Amazon everything store — was coaxed into running to thwart the return of former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, who was recalled by voters in part for his fiercely anti-immigrant lawmaking. (Worsley beat him in the 2012 GOP primary, then won the general election.)
As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Worsley did his youth missionary work in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. “I developed a certain level of comfort and love for the people down there,” Worsley said.
Moreover, the experience colored his perspective on those impoverished souls who traverse borders in search of a better life. A person can’t empathize “unless you’ve actually walked in their shoes, lived in their homes, eaten their food and socialized with them,” Worsley said via Zoom from his home office in Salt Lake City. “And I think that’s a problem.”
He left the Arizona Senate — and electoral politics — in 2019, vexed and frustrated by the rise of Trump and the anti-immigrant wave he rode to his first, improbable election to the White House.
“It was really irritating because I had fought this in Arizona a decade before,” Worsley said. “And so to have this kind of comeback on a national stage was incredibly frustrating.”
He moved part time to Utah, to be closer to his extended family. He wrote a book, “The Horseshoe Virus,” about the immigration issue; the title suggested the convergence of the far left and far right in the country’s long history of anti-immigrant movements.
He became involved with the American Business Immigration Coalition, recruited by Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee, whom Worsley knew through politics and a mutual friendship with Arizona’s late senator, John McCain. Worsley became the board’s chairman in January.
He’s still no fan of Trump, though Worsley emphasized, “I am still a Republican and would vote for a Mitt Romney or John McCain kind of Republican.”
That said, now that the border is under much tighter control, Worsley hopes Trump will not just seek to round up and punish those in the country illegally but also focus on a larger fix to the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system — something no president, Democrat or Republican, has accomplished in nearly 40 years.
It was 1986 when Ronald Reagan signed sweeping legislation that offered amnesty to millions of long-term residents, expanded certain visa programs, cracked down on employers who hired illegal workers and promised to harden the border once and for all through stiffer enforcement — a pledge that, obviously, came to naught.
“Once you’ve secured the border and you don’t have caravans of people coming toward us, then you can address [the question of] what’s the pragmatic solution so that this doesn’t happen again?” Worsley asked. “We’re hopeful that’s where we’re going next.”
