France’s financial crisis is serious, according to Prime Minister François Bayrou, who is facing a confidence vote that he is likely to lose. He pointed out that France’s deficit is nearly double the EU’s allowed limit of 3% and that public debt has reached 113.9% of GDP.
Bayrou emphasized that despite the government’s challenges, simply changing the government won’t solve the underlying financial issues. He warned lawmakers that spending will continue to rise and debt will become heavier.
Opposition parties disagree with Bayrou’s approach to addressing the debt and plan to vote against his minority government. Bayrou described controlling spending as a matter of survival for the country and stressed that the government is in a precarious position at a time when unity is crucial due to external pressures from Russia, China, and the U. S. trade tensions.
He acknowledged that calling the confidence vote was a risky move, urging for clarity and unity to combat the divisions that threaten France’s reputation. The vote’s outcome is expected later in the day.
WHAT’S NEXT?
If Bayrou loses his position, President Macron will need to find another government leader to manage the budget in parliament, following the earlier removal of Michel Barnier. Social tensions are rising as various groups online have urged the French people to “block everything” this Wednesday, alongside labor unions planning protests on September 18 against budget cuts.
The potential departure of a fourth premier in under two years highlights France’s political troubles. Macron has faced challenges in a divided parliament, a departure from the stable governance expected under the Fifth Republic’s constitution.
TILT TO THE LEFT?
Macron has ruled out dissolving parliament, following a divided outcome in the recent snap election. Observers suggest he may seek a candidate from the centre-left Socialists to replace the fallen prime ministers. However, this candidate will face challenges in forming a coalition with Macron’s liberal bloc, which opposes many leftist ideas.
Last month, the White House issued a news release titled “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian,” flagging a grab bag of museum exhibits as offensive — basically anything that highlights racism or is sympathetic toward LGBTQ+ people and undocumented immigrants.
Buried in this trash heap of whines is a complaint that reflects how hell-bent Trump is on bending California to his will.
Describing a “Californio” family as losing their land to Anglo “squatters,” which the yet-to-be-built National Museum of the American Latino does on its website, is apparently a DEI thought crime, according to the news release.
My query to the White House, asking what exactly is so offensive about this characterization of the Mexicans who stayed in California after it became part of the U.S., was acknowledged yet not answered.
But the focus on “Californio” and “squatter” — and putting those words in quotes, as the news release did — suggests the underlying issue, said UC Santa Barbara history professor Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, who specializes in 19th century California.
“They’re trying to question the legitimacy” of the Californios, she said. “Who matters as an American? [To Trump], it’s not people who come from Mexico. It’s people who came from the East.”
“The level of minutiae on this — it’s not him,” she added of Trump. “He’s not a reader. It must be a vast team doing this.”
Worrying about scare quotes around two words in a White House news release might seem like distracting piffle compared with Trump’s other anti-California volleys.
But how the U.S. government frames our yesteryear is one of this administration’s main battlefronts and something I’ve repeatedly warned about in my columna. History is written by the victors, goes the cliche, allowing them to shape a people’s sense of self and decide who’s important and who isn’t.
That’s why Trump and his goons have tried to remake our nation’s past as a triumphalist, so-called Heritage American story, in which people of Western European heritage are always the main actors and the heroes. They’ve done it with the obsession of a pharaoh chipping away all mentions of his predecessors from obelisks.
In Trump’s mind, the United States has never done any wrong, and anyone who thinks so hates this country. It’s not surprising that casting Californios as victims of rapacious gringos might offend him or his lackeys. But this isn’t wokoso propaganda — it’s well-documented history.
Pio Pico State Historic Park in Whittier was home to its namesake, the last governor of California when it was part of Mexico.
(Ringo Chiu / For The Times)
In 1850, Sacramento’s sheriff and mayor died while attempting to remove white squatters, in what was quickly deemed the Squatter Riot. The following year, the U.S. government forced Californios to prove they owned the land they lived on, even though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, had ensured their property rights. In the meantime, white settlers could largely claim rancho land as they pleased.
California’s most famous historians — Hubert Howe Bancroft, Kevin Starr and Robert Glass Cleland, to name a few — wrote extensively about so-called squatterism, with Bancroft describing what happened to the Californios as “oppressive and ruinous.”
A new generation of scholars has focused on the writings of Californios, including “The Squatter and the Don,” an 1885 novel by María Ruiz de Burton based on her family’s fight to keep their rancho in what’s now San Diego County.
This was the book described on the National Museum of the American Latino website, prompting the ignominious “Californio” mention in the White House news release.
Until now, “there’s never been much opposition, really” to the narrative of the Californios’ decline, Chavez-Garcia said, calling it “foundational” to the state’s mythology. She cited festivals in mission towns, such as Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days Fiesta, where people dress up like the Californios of yore to remember a romanticized era that was destined to end badly.
“The thinking was that the state’s prosperity was never meant to happen” to Californios, she said. “They were meant to die off.”
As a high school student in San José, Chavez-Garcia knew none of this history — “we learned more about the Homestead Act in the Midwest,” she joked. At UCLA, when she finally learned about the Californios, she was “outraged” and questioned why her beloved high school history teacher “didn’t teach us this basic thing.”
“Many people … don’t know our history, so whatever the government tells them to read, they’re going to accept,” she said. “You can’t just let someone take an eraser and erase these histories willy-nilly lo que no le gusta [what someone doesn’t like] and then put in whatever the hell you want because it makes you feel good.”
It can’t fall only on scholars such as Chavez-Garcia and nerds such as me to push back against Trump’s ahistorical assault. All Californians need to stand up to people who not only want to remain willfully ignorant about the bad parts of our history but also want to stop others from learning about them. Speaking only about the good prevents us from doing better and leads to a juvenile worldview that’s sadly taken hold in the White House and beyond.
We must take the stance expressed by Doña Josefa Alamar, a protagonist of “The Squatter and the Don.”
At the end of the novel, she is living in exile in San Francisco. Her husband has died from the stress of trying to keep their rancho, her sons live in hardship and her daughter is married to a white man. A friend urges her to stay silent and not malign the “rich people” who caused her so much grief. But Doña Josefa refuses.
“Let the guilty rejoice and go unpunished, and the innocent suffer ruin and desolation,” she replies. “I slander no one, but shall speak the truth.”
NEW YORK — As President Trump focuses on global trade deals and dispatching troops to aid his immigration crackdown, his lawyers are fighting to erase the hush money criminal conviction that punctuated his reelection campaign last year and made him the first former — and now current — U.S. president found guilty of a crime.
On Wednesday, that fight landed in a federal appeals court in Manhattan, where a three-judge panel heard arguments in Trump’s long-running bid to get the New York case moved from state court to federal court so he can then seek to have it thrown out on presidential immunity grounds.
It’s one way he’s trying to get the historic verdict overturned.
The judges in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals spent more than an hour grilling Trump’s lawyer and the appellate chief for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case and wants it to remain in state court.
At turns skeptical and receptive to both sides’ arguments on the weighty and seldom-tested legal issues underlying the president’s request, the judges said they would take the matter under advisement and issue a ruling at a later date.
But there was at least one thing all parties agreed on: It is a highly unusual case.
Trump lawyer Jeffrey Wall called the president “a class of one” and Judge Susan L. Carney noted that it was “anomalous” for a defendant to seek to transfer a case to federal court after it has been decided in state court.
Carney was nominated to the 2nd Circuit by Democratic President Obama. The other judges who heard arguments, Raymond J. Lohier Jr. and Myrna Pérez, were nominated by Obama and Democratic President Biden, respectively.
The Republican president is asking the federal appeals court to intervene after a lower-court judge twice rejected the move. As part of the request, Trump wants the court to seize control of the criminal case and then ultimately decide his appeal of the verdict, which is now pending in a state appellate court.
Trump’s Justice Department — now partly run by his former criminal defense lawyers — backs his bid to move the case to federal court. If he loses, he could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Everything about this cries out for federal court,” Wall argued.
Wall, a former acting U.S. solicitor general, argued that Trump’s historic prosecution violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, which was decided last July, about a month after the hush money verdict. The ruling reined in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricted prosecutors from pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.
Trump’s lawyers argue that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, and that they erred by showing jurors evidence that should not have been allowed under the ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how Trump reacted to news coverage of the hush money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.
“The district attorney holds the keys in his hand,” Wall argued. “He doesn’t have to introduce this evidence.”
Steven Wu, the appellate chief for the district attorney’s office, countered that Trump was too late in seeking to move the case to federal court. Normally, such a request must be made within 30 days of an arraignment, but a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., recently ruled that exceptions can be made if “good cause” is shown. Trump hasn’t done that, Wu argued.
While “this defendant is an unusual defendant,” Wu said, there is nothing unusual about a defendant raising subsequent court decisions, such as the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling for Trump, when they appeal their convictions. That appeal, he argued, should stay in state court.
Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of his four criminal cases to go to trial.
Trump’s lawyers first sought to move the case to federal court following his March 2023 indictment, arguing that federal officers including former presidents have the right to be tried in federal court for charges arising from “conduct performed while in office.” Part of the criminal case involved checks he wrote while he was president.
They tried again after his conviction, about two months after the Supreme Court issued its immunity ruling.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who was nominated by Democratic President Clinton, denied both requests, ruling in part that Trump’s conviction involved his personal life, not his work as president.
Wu argued Wednesday that Trump and his lawyers should’ve acted more immediately after the Supreme Court ruled, and that by waiting they waived their right to seek a transfer. Wall responded that they delayed seeking to move the case to federal court because they were trying to resolve the matter by raising the immunity argument with the trial judge, Juan Merchan.
Merchan ultimately rejected Trump’s request to throw out the conviction on immunity grounds and sentenced him on Jan. 10 to an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction intact but sparing him any punishment.
