President Trump

To hear our national leaders tell it, Los Angeles is in chaos and our governor and mayor are out to lunch with the police, blissfully ignoring reality as the city burns.

“These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED,” President Trump wrote on social media, shortly after ordering the National Guard onto our streets.

“To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” he wrote in a memo Saturday, authorizing 2,000 National Guard troops to be deployed in L.A. for at least 60 days.

Put down your matcha lattes and trade in your Birkenstocks for boots, folks. We are the revolution, apparently, so dangerous only a seasoned military can stop us. The only problem, of course, is that Los Angeles is not in chaos on this particular sunny Sunday and the vast majority of Angelenos are just trying to enjoy the weekend without becoming a federal prisoner.

Trump’s memo will go into the history books as a moment when presidential power expanded to put under his control a military force aimed at U.S. civilians. Although not unprecedented, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, said it was “stunning.”

All the more so because the deployment is based on a lie. Yes, there has been some violence in the last few days as federal immigration authorities round up criminals and regular folks alike in deportation sweeps. If you keep the camera angle tight on those protests, as many media outlets have done, it does look dire.

Rocks being thrown, even Molotov cocktails. Masked protesters hammering at concrete pillars outside a downtown federal building. Cars on fire.

All of this is terrible and those responsible should be arrested — by our local police and sheriffs, who are more than up to the job of handling a few hundred protesters.

But 99% of this city is business as usual, with brunches and beach walks and church and yoga classes. And even in those few pockets where the protests are happening, such as a march downtown Sunday, this is Los Angeles — I’ve seen more chaos after a Lakers game.

Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School, told my colleague Seema Mehta that although it’s extremely unusual for a president to take federal control of troops, it’s not unprecedented and maybe not illegal. It happened in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict.

“One of the exceptions is when there is violence and the inability of the federal government to enforce federal laws,” Levinson said. “And that is exactly what the president is arguing is happening.”

My intrepid colleagues at this paper have been on the ground since the first protests began, and, as their reporting shows, the majority of what is happening is peaceful and isolated.

Even the cops agree. And seriously, when the cops are agreeing there’s no riot — there is no riot.

“Demonstrations across the City of Los Angeles remained peaceful and we commend all those who exercised their First Amendment rights responsibly,” the LAPD wrote in a statement Saturday night.

Still, by Sunday morning, those troops, in full military gear with guns in hand (presumably with less lethal ammo, I hope), were arriving. The U.S. Northern Command tweeted that the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team has some members on the ground in Los Angeles, with more to come.

“These operations are essential to halting and reversing the invasion of illegal criminals into the United States. In the wake of this violence, California’s feckless Democrat leaders have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, further explained before they arrived.

Also, as you plan your week, there is now a dress code — at least for civilians, not the authorities intent on hiding their identities.

“(F)rom now on, MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests. What do these people have to hide, and why???” Trump wrote.

All this, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, is “not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis.”

He’s right — Los Angeles has landed a starring role in Trump’s war on brown people. It makes sense. We are a city of immigrants, of all colors, and a Democratic — and democratic — one at that. What’s not to hate?

Mayor Karen Bass told my colleague Rachel Uranga that her office had tried to talk to the White House to tell them “there was absolutely no need to have troops on the ground,” but got nowhere.

“This is posturing,” Bass said.

“They want violence,” Newsom added in a Sunday email. “Don’t give them the spectacle they want.”

I’m not sure that’s possible. There will always be the bad actors, the violent ones, at any protest. And again — they should be arrested.

But Trump is going to laser-focus on those few to make an example of this city, and to increase his own power.

Because although this “insurrection” is a fantasy, his dream of more power seems all too real.

WASHINGTON — After the raucous rainbow-hued festivities of Saturday’s parade, the final day of World Pride 2025 in the nation’s capital kicked off on a more downbeat note.

More than 1,000 people gathered under gray skies Sunday morning at the Lincoln Memorial for a rally that will lead into a protest march, as the community gathers its strength for a looming fight under President Trump’s second administration.

“This is not just a party,” Ashley Smith, board president of Capital Pride Alliance. “This is a rally for our lives.”

Smith acknowledged that international attendance numbers for the biannual World Pride were measurably down, with many potential attendees avoiding travel to the U.S. because of either fear of harassment or in protest of Trump’s policies.

“That should disturb us and mobilize us,” Smith said.

More than 1,000 people cheered on LGBTQ+ activists taking the stage while waving traditional Pride flags and flags representing transgender, bisexual, intersex and other communities. Many had rainbow glitter and rhinestones adorning their faces. They held signs declaring, “Fight back,” “Gay is good,” “Ban bombs not bathrooms” and “We will not be erased.”

Trump’s campaign against transgender protections and oft-stated antipathy for drag shows have set the community on edge, with some hoping to see a renewed wave of street politics in response.

“Trans people just want to be loved. Everybody wants to live their own lives and I don’t understand the problem with it all,” said Tyler Cargill, who came wearing an elaborate costume with a hat topped by a replica of the U.S. Capitol building.

Wes Kincaid drove roughly six hours from Charlotte, N.C., to attend this year. Sitting on a park bench near the reflecting pond, Kincaid said he made a point of attending this year, “because it’s more important than ever to show up for our community.”

Drag dancer Violeta puts on a show for visitors to Beaches Pride Paradise at the WeHo Pride Street Fair along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood on May 31.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Reminders of the cuts to federal government programs were on full display Sunday. One attendee waved a massive rainbow flag affixed on the same staff as a large USAID flag; another held a “Proud gay federal worker” sign; and a third held an umbrella with the logos of various federal programs facing cuts — including the PBS logo.

Trump’s anti-trans rhetoric had fueled fears of violence or protests targeting World Pride participants; at one point earlier this spring, rumors circulated that the Proud Boys were planning to disrupt this weekend’s celebrations. Those concerns prompted organizers to install security fencing around the entire two-day street party on a multi-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue.

But so far, the only clear act of aggression has been the vandalizing of a queer bar last week. Late Saturday night, there was a pair of violent incidents near Dupont Circle — one of the epicenters of the World Pride celebrations. Two juveniles were stabbed and a man was shot in the foot in separate incidents. The Metropolitan Police Department says it is not clear if either incident was directly related to World Pride.

Fernando, Hussein, Martin and Pesoli write for the Associated Press.

Veteran ABC News correspondent Terry Moran was suspended Sunday after he posted a harsh criticism of the Trump White House on X.

Moran, 65, took aim Saturday at President Trump and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has been outspoken in his desire to see a step up in the deportation of undocumented migrants.

“Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater,” Moran wrote his post, which has been deleted. “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.” He also described Miller as “vile.”

Moran went on to call Trump “a world class hater” adding, “but his hatred only a means to an end and that end is his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”

Moran, whose title is senior national correspondent, has been an ABC News journalist since 1999 and is not a commentator. He conducted an Oval Office interview with Trump in April to discuss the first 100 days of the president’s second term.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks to reporters Friday outside the White House.

(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)

In a statement, an ABC News representative said Moran’s statements violated the division’s policy.

“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” the representative said. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt ripped Moran and called for action by ABC when the journalist’s post was raised during an interview Sunday on Fox News.

“This is unacceptable and unhinged rhetoric coming from someone who works at a major television network,” Leavitt said. “We have reached out to ABC, they have said they will be taking action, so we will see what they do. But I think this speaks to the distrust the American public have in the legacy media.”

The rapid suspension by ABC News demonstrates how networks are on edge over their news organizations antagonizing the Trump White House, which has shown a willingness to extract revenge on its critics.

Trump has asked Congress to cut off federal funding from public media outlets PBS and NPR, calling their programming “left wing propaganda.”

Trump is suing CBS News over a “60 Minutes” interview last October that he claims was deceptively edited to help his 2024 election opponent Vice President Kamala Harris. The suit — an obstacle to CBS parent Paramount Global’s deal to merge with Skydance Media — has gone to a mediator.

ABC News paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed over statements by “Good Morning America” co-host George Stephanopoulos, who incorrectly said on air that the president had been liable of rape, when it was sexual abuse. Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger has asked that ABC’s “The View” spend less time talking about Trump, who typically leads the daytime talk show’s hot topics segment.

WASHINGTON — When racial justice protests roiled cities across America at the depths of the pandemic, President Trump, then in his first term, demonstrated restraint. Threats to invoke the Insurrection Act and to federalize the National Guard never materialized.

This time, it took less than 24 hours of isolated protests in Los Angeles County before Trump, more aggressive than ever in his use of executive power, to issue a historic order. “The federal government will step in and solve the problem,” he said on social media Saturday night, issuing executive action not seen since civil unrest gripped the nation in the 1960s.

It was the latest expression of a president unleashed from conventional parameters on his power, unconcerned with states’ rights or the proportionality of his actions. And the targeting of a Democratic city in a Democratic state was, according to the vice president, an intentional ploy to make a political lesson out of Los Angeles.

The pace of the escalation, and the federal government’s unwillingness to defer to cooperative local law enforcement authorities, raise questions about the administration’s intentions as it responds to protesters. The administration skipped several steps in an established ladder of response options, such as enhancing U.S. Marshals Service and Federal Protective Service personnel to protect federal prisons and property, before asking the state whether a National Guard deployment might be warranted.

Local officials were clear that they did not want, or need, federal assistance. And they are concerned that Trump’s heavy-handed response risks escalating what was a series of isolated, heated clashes consisting of a few hundred people into a larger law enforcement challenge that could roil the city.

The president’s historic deployment prompted fury among local Democratic officials who warned of an infringement on states’ rights. Trump’s takeover of the California National Guard, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, was prompted “not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.”

“Don’t give them one,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance, calling the anti-ICE protesters “insurrectionists,” welcomed the political pushback, stating on X that “one half of America’s political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil.”

Protests against ICE agents on Friday and Saturday were limited in scale and location. Several dozen people protested the flash raids on Friday afternoon outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, with some clashing with agents and vandalizing the building. The LAPD authorized so-called less-lethal munitions against a small group of “violent protesters” after concrete was thrown at an officer. The protest disbursed by midnight.

On Saturday, outside a Home Depot, demonstrators chanted “ICE go home” and “No justice, no peace.” Some protesters yelled at deputies, and a series of flash-bang grenades was deployed.

“What are you doing!” one man screamed out.

Times reporters witnessed federal agents lobbing multiple rounds of flash-bangs and pepper balls at protesters.

Despite the limited scale of the violence, by Saturday evening, the Trump administration embraced the visuals of a city in chaos compelling federal enforcement of law and order.

“The Trump Administration has a zero tolerance policy for criminal behavior and violence, especially when that violence is aimed at law enforcement officers trying to do their jobs,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday night. “These criminals will be arrested and swiftly brought to justice. The commander-in-chief will ensure the laws of the United States are executed fully and completely.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a statement Saturday, said the administration is prepared to go further, deploying active-duty U.S. Marines to the nation’s second-largest city. “This is deranged behavior,” responded California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.

Trump’s decision Saturday to call in the National Guard, using a rarely used authority called Title 10, has no clear historic precedent. President Lyndon Johnson cited Title 10 in 1965 to protect civil rights marchers during protests in Selma, Ala., but did so out of concern that local law enforcement would decline to do so themselves.

By contrast, this weekend, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department said it was fully cooperating with federal law enforcement. “We are planning for long-term civil unrest and collaborating with our law enforcement partners,” the department said in a statement.

The 2,000 Guardsmen called up for duty is double the number that were assigned by local authorities to respond to much wider protests that erupted throughout Los Angeles in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Tom Homan, the president’s so-called border czar, told Fox News on Saturday evening that the administration was “already ahead of the game” in its planning for a National Guard deployment.

“This is about enforcing the law, and again, we’re not going to apologize for doing it,” he said. “We’re stepping up.”

National Guard troops began arriving in Los Angeles on Sunday morning, deploying around federal buildings in L.A. County.

“If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs,” Trump wrote on Truth, his social media platform, “then the federal government will step in and solve the problem.”

There’s a line in Eric Coomer’s defamation lawsuit against Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, that strikes me as the perfect description of what happens when influential partisans belch lies about innocent people in these insanely charged political times:

“The real world consequences for the subjects of those lies,” says the lawsuit, “have been devastating.”

Indeed.

Think of Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, whose lives were destroyed when Rudy Giuliani, once President Trump’s top campaign lawyer, claimed the pair had rigged the 2020 election outcome in their state. Giuliani even invented a blatantly racist story about the women passing drugs to each other at their Fulton County polling place. Trump amplified the claims. The two women received death threats, were loath to leave home even for groceries and had to go into hiding. I will never forget how sad and broken they seemed during their testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Happily, Freeman and Moss won a $148-million settlement from Giuliani, leading the former New York mayor to unsuccessfully sue for bankruptcy in an effort to dodge his obligation. Now stripped of his license to practice law in New York, Giuliani has fallen so far he’s not even a punchline on late night TV anymore.

Just like Freeman and Moss, Coomer, the former director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, was subjected to a torrent of false claims about election rigging by Lindell and other right-wing conspiracy theorists and media outlets. Like Freeman and Moss, he was terrorized and driven into hiding.

He left his job, moved to a new location, placed guns around the house he borrowed from a friend, experienced depression and panic attacks, and believes he will not be able to return to his profession.

“People were essentially taking bets on how my brother’s corpse would be found and which nefarious shadow group would be behind his death,” Coomer’s brother told the New York Times in 2021. “He would be executed by the state or he would be found with a falsified suicide note and two gunshots in the back of his head.”

Coomer, like others, became collateral damage in the misbegotten MAGA campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Fox News hosts, including Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs, completely lost their minds, and the company allowed its highest-profile stars to spew lie after lie about the election in general and Dominion Voting Systems in particular, knowing full well (as News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted under oath) that Dominion was blameless and that Joe Biden had won fair and square.

That unsavory chapter ended up costing Fox $787.5 million in a settlement to Dominion, which allowed the right-wing network to avert a trial.

Coomer, who has filed lawsuits against Giuliani and several others who spread lies about him, now gets his day in court against Lindell. The defamation trial, which began Monday, is expected to last through the end of this week. (Coomer settled suits against conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell; Newsmax; One America News Network, or OAN; and an OAN correspondent. His suit against Guiliani is pending.)

The false claims against Coomer were dreamed up by a conservative Colorado podcaster, Joseph Oltmann, who told listeners that he had infiltrated an “Antifa conference call” in which “Eric, the Dominion guy” claimed to have rigged the election against Trump. (Coomer’s defamation suit against Oltmann is also pending.)

“Oltmann,” says Coomer’s lawsuit, “claimed this supposed call happened on some unspecified date months before the election, but that he did not think to take action until after the election was called for President Biden …. Oltmann’s story is inherently implausible.”

Not to mention, outlandish and preposterous.

In his campaign against Coomer, Oltmann posted a photo of the Dominion executive’s home on his social media and urged his followers to “blow this sh— up. Share, put his name everywhere. No rest for this sh—bag … Eric we are watching you.”

Lindell, who seems never to have come across a right-wing conspiracy theory he couldn’t embrace, picked up on Oltmann’s fantasies about Coomer and began spreading them far and wide — in interviews, on his website, in social media, etc.

On his FrankSpeech media platform, Lindell addressed Coomer directly: “You are disgusting and you are treasonous. You are a traitor to the United States of America.” (Classic case of projection, imho.)

Lindell could have settled as so many others have done. Instead, he has chosen to fight on, hawking pillows, sheets and slippers to pay his legal bills as he goes. His attorney said that because he believed what he was saying was true, it’s not defamation. “It’s just words. All Mike Lindell did was talk,” Lindell’s attorney told the jury. “Mike believed that he was telling the truth.”

Before the trial, Lindell stood on the federal courthouse steps in Denver and proclaimed that his only goal in all this was to ban electronic voting machines and replace them with paper ballots.

“If we can get there,” he said, “I would sacrifice everything.”

If Coomer wins his defamation case against Lindell — and I really hope he does — Lindell will have lost a lot and gained very little. First, the case has nothing to do with the validity of voting machines. Second, an estimated 98% of American voters already cast ballots that leave a paper trail because that’s one way voting machines record votes.

But Lindell, like so many of his MAGA compatriots, still won’t let reality stand in the way of Trump’s Big Lie.

@rabcarian.bsky.social Threads: @rabcarian

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to pause a court order to reinstate Education Department employees who were fired in mass layoffs as part of his plan to dismantle the agency.

The Justice Department’s emergency appeal to the high court said U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston exceeded his authority last month when he issued a preliminary injunction reversing the layoffs of nearly 1,400 people and putting the broader plan on hold.

Joun’s order has blocked one of the Republican president’s biggest campaign promises and effectively stalled the effort to wind down the department. A federal appeals court refused to put the order on hold while the administration appealed.

The judge wrote that the layoffs “will likely cripple the department.”

But Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote Friday that Joun was substituting his policy preferences for those of the Trump administration.

The layoffs help put in the place the “policy of streamlining the department and eliminating discretionary functions that, in the administration’s view, are better left to the states,” Sauer wrote.

He also pointed out that the Supreme Court in April voted 5-4 to block Joun’s earlier order seeking to keep in place Education Department teacher-training grants.

The current case involves two consolidated lawsuits that said Trump’s plan amounted to an illegal closure of the Education Department.

One suit was filed by the Somerville and Easthampton school districts in Massachusetts along with the American Federation of Teachers and other education groups. The other suit was filed by a coalition of 21 Democratic attorneys general.

The suits argued that layoffs left the department unable to carry out responsibilities required by Congress, including duties to support special education, distribute financial aid and enforce civil rights laws.

Education Department employees who were targeted by the layoffs have been on paid leave since March, according to a union that represents some of the agency’s staff. Joun’s order prevents the department from fully terminating them, but none have been allowed to return to work, according to the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252. Without Joun’s order, the workers were scheduled to be terminated Monday.

Trump has made it a priority to shut down the Education Department, though he has acknowledged that only Congress has the authority to do that. In the meantime, Trump issued a March order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to wind it down “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”

Trump later said the department’s functions will be parceled to other agencies, suggesting that federal student loans should be managed by the Small Business Administration and programs involving students with disabilities would be absorbed by the Department of Health and Human Services. Those changes have not yet happened.

The president argues that the Education Department has been overtaken by liberals and has failed to spur improvements to the nation’s lagging academic scores. He has promised to “return education to the states.”

Opponents note that K-12 education is already mostly overseen by states and cities.

Democrats have blasted the Trump administration’s Education Department budget, which seeks a 15% budget cut including a $4.5 billion cut in K-12 funding as part of the agency’s downsizing.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Collin Binkley contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — In a largely courteous gathering of half a dozen of California’s top gubernatorial candidates, four Democrats and two Republicans agreed that despite the state boasting one of the world’s largest economies, too many of its residents are suffering because of the affordability crisis in the state.

Their strategies on how to improve the state’s economy, however, largely embraced the divergent views of their respective political parties as they discussed housing costs, high-speed rail, tariffs, climate change and homelessness on Wednesday evening at the first bipartisan event in the 2026 race to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“Californians are innovators. They are builders, they are designers, they are creators, and that is the reason that we have the fourth largest economy in the world,” said former Rep. Katie Porter, a Democrat from Irvine. “But businesses and workers are being held back by the same thing. It is too expensive to do things here. It is too expensive to raise a family. It is too expensive to run a business.”

Conservative commentator Steve Hilton, a Republican, argued that state leaders need to end the “stranglehold” of unions, lawyers and climate change activists on California policy.

“I’ve been traveling this state. Everywhere I go, it’s the same story, this heartbreaking word that I get from every business I meet, every family is in such a struggle in California,” he said, with a raspy voice that he explained immediately upon taking the stage was caused by a sore throat.

At the forum were former Rep. Katie Porter, top row from left, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former legislative leader Toni Atkins; former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, bottom row from left, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and conservative commentator Steve Hilton.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The candidates spoke to about 800 people at a California Chamber of Commerce dinner during the 80-minute panel at the convention center in Sacramento. The chamber’s decision on whom to invite to the forum was based on which ones were leaders in public opinion surveys and fundraising. Making the cut were former Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, Hilton, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Porter and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra was also invited to participate in the forum but had a scheduling conflict.

The sharpest exchange of the evening was between Kounalakis, a Democrat, and Bianco, a Republican.

After the candidates were asked about President Trump’s erratic tariff policies, Kounalakis cited her experience working for her father’s real estate company as she criticized Bianco for arguing for a wait-and-see approach toward the president’s undulating plans.

“You’re not a businessman, you’re a government employee,” she said to Bianco. “You’ve got a pension, you’re going to do just fine. Small businesses are suffering from this, and it’s only going to get worse, and it’s driven, by the way, it is driven by Donald Trump’s vindictiveness toward countries he doesn’t like, countries he wants to annex, or states he doesn’t like, people he doesn’t like. This is hurting California, hurting our people, and it’s only going to make things worse, until we can get him out of the White House.”

Bianco countered that Kounalakis and the other Democratic gubernatorial candidates are directly responsible for the economic woes facing Californians because they have an “unquenchable thirst” for money to fund their liberal agenda.

“I just feel like I’m in ‘The Twilight Zone.’ I have a billionaire telling me that my 32 years of public service is OK for my retirement,” he said. “It’s taxes and regulations that are driving every single thing in California up. We pay the highest taxes, we pay the highest gas, we pay the highest housing, we pay the highest energy.”

The Democrats onstage, though largely agreeing about policy, sought to differentiate themselves. The sharpest divide was about whether to raise the minimum wage. On Monday, labor advocates in Los Angeles proposed raising it in Los Angeles County.

Atkins reflected most of her fellow Democrats’ views, saying that while she wanted to see higher wages for workers, “now is not the time.” Villaraigosa said that while he believes in a higher minimum wage, “we can’t just keep raising the minimum wage.”

Kounalakis, though, said not increasing the minimum wage would be inhumane.

“I think we should be working for that number, yes, I do,” she said. “You want to throw poor people under the bus.”

California’s high cost of living is a pressing concern among the state’s voters, and the issue is expected to play a major role in the 2026 governor’s race.

Nearly half feel worse off now compared with last year, and more than half felt less hopeful about their economic well-being, according to a poll released in May by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies that was co-sponsored by The Times.

Nearly exactly a year before the gubernatorial primary next year, the event was the first time Democratic and Republican candidates have shared a stage. It was also the first time GOP candidates Bianco and Hilton have appeared together.

Although the state’s leftward electoral tilt makes it challenging for a Republican to win the race — Californians last elected GOP politicians to statewide office in 2006 — Bianco and Hilton are battling to win one of the top two spots in next year’s primary election.

The pair expressed similar views about broadly ending liberal policies, such as stopping the state’s high-speed rail project and reducing environmental restrictions such as the state’s climate-change efforts that they argue have increased costs while having no meaningful effect on the consumption of fossil fuels.

A crucial question is whether Trump, whom both Bianco and Hilton fully support, will eventually endorse one of the Republican candidates.

The gubernatorial candidates, some of whom have been running more than a year, have largely focused on fundraising since entering the race. But the contest to replace Newsom is growing more public and heated, as seen at last weekend’s California Democratic Party convention. Several of the party’s candidates scurried around the Anaheim convention center, trying to curry favor with the state’s most liberal activists while also drawing contrasts with their rivals.

But the Democratic field is partially frozen as former Vice President Kamala Harris weighs entering the race, a decision she is expected to make by the end of the summer. Harris’ name did not come up during the forum.

There were a handful of light moments.

Porter expressed a common concern among the state’s residents when they talk about the cost of living in the state.

“What really keeps me up at night, why I’m running for governor, is whether my children are going to be able to afford to live here, whether they’re going to ever get off my couch and have their own home,” she said.

Paramount Global’s efforts to appease President Trump could carry a steep price, and not just financially. As Paramount executives struggle to win government approval for its planned sale, the legal risks and political headaches are spreading — from Washington to Sacramento.

Three U.S. senators have warned Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone and other decision-makers that paying Trump to drop his $20-billion lawsuit over an October “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris could be considered a bribe.

Scrutiny widened late last week when two California Democrats proposed a state Senate hearing to probe details of the drama that has roiled the media company for months. The senators invited two former CBS News executives — who both left, in large part, because of the controversy — to testify before a joint committee hearing in Sacramento to help lawmakers examine problems with a possible Trump settlement.

“I haven’t seen a president act in this brazen of a manner,” state Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) said in an interview. “We’re concerned about a possible chilling effect any settlement might have on investigative and political journalism. It would also send a message that politically motivated lawsuits can succeed, especially when paired with regulatory threats.”

Settling the Trump lawsuit is widely seen as a prerequisite for regulators to finally clear Paramount’s $8-billion sale to Skydance Media, which Redstone has been desperately counting on to save her family’s fortunes.

Trump contends CBS edited the “60 Minutes” interview to enhance Harris’ appeal in the 2024 presidential election, which she lost. He reportedly rebuffed Paramount’s recent $15-million offer to settle his lawsuit, which 1st Amendment experts have dismissed as frivolous.

“This is a really important case,” said Scott L. Cummings, a legal ethics professor at UCLA’s School of Law. “Legislators are starting to raise alarms.”

But whether federal or state politicians could foil a Trump settlement is murky. Experts caution, for example, that it may be difficult, if a settlement is reached, to prove that Paramount’s leaders paid a bribe.

Congress has grappled with such distinctions before, Cummings said. The U.S. Senate acquitted Trump in February 2020 after the House voted to impeach him for allegedly holding up nearly $400 million in security aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate former President Biden and his son Hunter. Major universities and law firms offered significant concessions to the administration this year to try to carve out breathing room.

“We would have to have a lot more facts,” Cummings said. “Bribery requires a quid pro quo … and [Trump and his lieutenants] are always very careful not to explicitly couple the two things together. But, clearly, they are related, right? This is the challenge, legally speaking.”

Even if a Paramount payoff could be proved to be a bribe, it’s unclear who would prosecute such a case.

No one expects the Trump-controlled FBI or others within the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate allegations of bribery. Trump also has a grip on congressional Republicans and the Federal Communications Commission is run by a Trump appointee, Brendan Carr, who in one of his first acts as chairman, opened a public inquiry into whether the “60 Minutes” edits rose to the level of news distortion.

It may fall to state prosecutors to dig into the issue, Cummings said.

Vice President Kamala Harris talks to “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker.

(CBS News)

That hasn’t stopped nationally prominent progressive lawmakers from sounding alarms.

U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have demanded Paramount provide information about the company’s deliberations or concessions to facilitate a deal with Trump, including whether newscasts were toned down.

“It is illegal to corruptly give anything of value to public officials to influence an official act,” the lawmakers wrote in their May 19 letter to Redstone. “If Paramount officials make these concessions … to influence President Trump … they may be breaking the law.”

Redstone and Paramount failed to respond to the senators’ questions by this week’s deadline, according to Warren’s office.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has suggested that Paramount executives could be liable for unlawfully paying a bribe if it settles President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS to secure approval of Paramount’s sale to Skydance Media.

(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)

Paramount and a Redstone spokesperson declined to comment.

Lawmakers often express interest in big media takeovers, and Skydance’s proposed purchase of an original Hollywood movie studio and pioneering broadcaster CBS could be an industry game changer. But this time, interest is less focused on vetting the Ellison family or the deal’s particulars and more about determining whether Trump inappropriately wields his power.

Trump has demanded Paramount pay “a lot” of money to settle his lawsuit. The president also has called for CBS to lose its station licenses, which are governed by the FCC.

For more than a month, attorneys for Paramount and Trump have participated in mediation sessions without resolution.

Paramount offered $15 million but Trump said no, according to the Wall Street Journal. Instead, the president reportedly demanded at least $25 million in cash, plus an additional $25 million in free commercials to pump his favorite causes. He also wants an apology.

The latter is a red line for CBS News executives who say they have done nothing wrong, according to insiders who were not authorized to discuss the sensitive deliberations.

Paramount’s leaders have clashed over settlement efforts, according to the sources.

The two California state senators — Becker and Tom Umberg (D-Orange) — hope such fractures provide an opening.

Late last week, the pair invited former CBS News and Stations President Wendy McMahon and former “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens to testify at a yet-unscheduled oversight hearing in Sacramento.

McMahon exited CBS last month under pressure for her management decisions, including resistance to the Trump settlement, sources said.

Owens resigned in April, citing a loss of editorial independence.

“You are being approached as friendly witnesses who may help our committees assess whether improper influence is being exerted in ways that threaten public trust and competition in the media sector,” Becker and Umberg wrote to the former executives. Becker is chairman of the Senate Energy, Utilities & Communications Committee; Umberg heads the Senate Judiciary Committee.

California has an interest, in part, because Paramount operates in the state, including a large presence in Los Angeles, Becker told The Times.

The controversy over the edits began in October after CBS aired different parts of Harris’ response to a question during a “60 Minutes” interview a month before the election. Producers of the public affairs show “Face the Nation” used a clip of Harris giving a convoluted response. The following day, “60 Minutes” aired the most forceful part of her answer, prompting conservatives to cry foul.

Trump filed his federal lawsuit in Texas days before the election, alleging CBS had deceptively edited the Harris interview to boost her election chances, an allegation CBS denies. After returning to the White House, Trump doubled the damages he was seeking to $20 billion. His team claims he suffered “mental anguish” as a result of the interview.

CBS has asked the Texas judge, a Trump appointee, to dismiss the lawsuit, saying the edits were routine.

Since then, the FCC’s review of Paramount’s Skydance deal has become bogged down. Paramount needs Carr’s approval to transfer CBS television station licenses to the Ellison family.

Paramount has said it is treating the proposed settlement and FCC review on the Skydance merger as separate matters.

Experts doubt Trump sees such a distinction.

Trump and his team “essentially are using government processes to set up negotiations that end up benefiting Trump personally in ways that raise corruption concerns,” Cummings said.

Paramount’s decision could open the company to shareholder complaints.

The reason Trump’s CBS “60 Minutes” lawsuit has become such a lightning rod is “because the lawsuit is so ridiculously frivolous,” said Seth Stern, advocacy director for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which owns Paramount shares and has vowed a lawsuit if the company capitulates.

“This is so transparently an abuse of power — a shakedown,” Stern said.

Media analyst Richard Greenfield of LightShed Partners suggested that Trump’s goal may be about more than his reported demand of nearly $50 million.

“The far bigger question is whether there is any number that Trump would want to settle the CBS/60 Minutes lawsuit,” Greenfield wrote in a blog post this week. “If Trump’s goal is to weaken the press and cause persistent fear of lawsuits that could negatively impact business combinations, keeping the CBS/60 Minutes lawsuit ongoing could be in the President’s best interests.”

UCLA’s Cummings sees another deleterious outcome.

A settlement could “legitimize the narrative that Trump puts out that there’s some sort of corruption within these media entities,” Cummings said. “He could point to a settlement and say: ‘I told you they did something wrong, and they now agreed because they paid me this amount of money.’ ”

“Even though they would be paying to get this deal through,” Cummings said.

Paramount Global chairwoman and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone is battling cancer as she tries to steer the media company through a turbulent sales process.

“Shari Redstone was diagnosed with thyroid cancer earlier this spring,” her spokeswoman Molly Morse said late Thursday. “While it has been a challenging period, she is maintaining all professional and philanthropic activities throughout her treatment, which is ongoing.

“She and her family are grateful that her prognosis is excellent,” Morse said.

The news comes nearly 11 months after Redstone agreed to sell Paramount to David Ellison’s Skydance Media in a deal that would end the family’s tenure as major Hollywood moguls after four decades.

However, the government’s review of the sale to Skydance hit a snag amid President Trump’s $20-billion lawsuit against Paramount and its subsidiary CBS over edits to an October “60 Minutes” broadcast.

Redstone, 71, told the New York Times that she underwent surgery last month after receiving the diagnosis about two months ago. Surgeons removed her thyroid gland but did not fully eradicate the cancer, which had spread to her vocal cords, the paper said.

She continues to be treated with radiation, the paper reported.

The Redstone family controls 77% of the voting shares of Paramount. Since Bob Bakish was ousted as chief executive last year, the company has been managed by a trio of executives who share the title of co-chief executive.

Her father, the late Sumner Redstone, built the company into a juggernaut but it has seen its standing slip in recent years. There have been management missteps and pressures brought on by consumers’ shift to streaming. The trend has crimped revenue to companies that own cable channels, including Paramount.

The COVID-19 pandemic followed by the 2023 writers and actors strikes also took a toll on Paramount and the Redstone family’s private firm, National Amusements Inc., which owns movie theaters.

Paramount cut its dividend to shareholders two years ago, leaving the family in a financial bind.

Financial pressures contributed to Redstone’s decision to entertain offers for Paramount and National Amusements, which holds the Paramount shares.

Nearly two years ago, Ellison and Redstone began talks that culminated last July with an agreement on a multi-phased $8-billion deal that would pass the torch to Ellison.

Redstone wants to close the deal. National Amusements would receive $2.4 billion, which would pay its debts and leave the family with more than $1.7 billion.

She has urged the company to settle the lawsuit Trump filed in October, weeks after “60 Minutes” interviewed then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump accused CBS of deceptively editing the interview to make Harris look smarter and improve her election chances, a charge that CBS has denied.

The dispute over the edits has sparked unrest within the company, prompted high-level departures and triggered a Federal Communications Commission examination of alleged news distortion.

The FCC’s review of the Skydance deal has become bogged down. If the agency does not approve the transfer of CBS television station licenses to the Ellison family, the deal could collapse.

The two companies must complete the merger by early October. If not, Paramount will owe a $400-million breakup fee to Skydance.

Redstone, through National Amusements, also owes nearly $400 million to a Chicago banker who loaned the family money in 2023 and tech titan Larry Ellison, who is helping bankroll the buyout of Paramount and National Amusements.

Last week, Paramount nominated three new directors to serve on the company’s board following its July 2 investor meeting.

In a proxy filing, Paramount asked shareholders to expand the board to seven directors, including Redstone and three recruits: attorney Mary Boies (a member of the firm led by her husband David Boies); Silicon Valley venture capital executive Charles E. Ryan; and former Massachusetts trial court judge Roanne Sragow Licht.

They would join longtime board members Linda M. Griego, Susan Schuman and Barbara M. Byrne.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s friendship and political alliance with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who fueled Trump’s campaign with record amounts of cash before working at the White House by his side until last week, appears to be over, with both men leveling searing criticism against one another in a sharp public feud.

Musk had been criticizing the Trump administration over its signature legislation, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” for its projected impact on the national debt throughout last week. But his calls to “kill the bill” on Wednesday prompted Trump, speaking to media from the Oval Office, to respond in kind.

“Elon and I had a great relationship, I don’t know if we will anymore,” Trump said Thursday. “And he hasn’t said bad things about me personally, but I’m sure that’ll be next. But I’m very disappointed in Elon.”

Musk, responding on his social media platform, X, took credit for Trump’s election victory. The billionaire entrepreneur, whose companies also include SpaceX and Tesla, contributed over $280 million to Trump and other Republicans during the 2024 presidential campaign.

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote. “Such ingratitude.”

The exchange broke open a feud that had been simmering for weeks out of public view. In private, Musk had relayed concerns over the bill to the president, while expressing disagreement with several other policies, including the establishment of an artificial intelligence campus in the Middle East and Trump’s announcement of global tariffs.

“I agree with much of what the administration does, but we have differences of opinion,” Musk said in a more muted tone last week, speaking in an interview with CBS.

“You know, there are things that I don’t entirely agree with. But it’s difficult for me to bring that up in an interview because then it creates a bone of contention,” he added. “So then, I’m a little stuck in a bind, where I’m like, well, I don’t wanna, you know, speak up against the administration, but I also don’t wanna take responsibility for everything this administration’s doing.”

In the Oval Office, Trump said he believed that Musk had turned on him after he rejected Musk’s recommendation for the head of NASA, a position that could benefit SpaceX, Musk’s spaceship company. He also said that Musk opposed provisions of Trump’s megabill that would phase out tax credits for electric vehicles.

“Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here. Better than you people. He knew everything about it — he had no problem with it. All of a sudden he had a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the EV mandate, because that’s billions and billions of dollars,” Trump said.

“People leave my administration and they love us, and at some point, they miss it so badly, and some of them embrace it, and some of them actually become hostile,” Trump added. “I don’t know what it is.”

But Musk denied he had been shown the bill, responding on X that he wouldn’t mind if the EV provisions remain in the text so long as others, which he said would balloon annual deficits, are cut.

“This bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!” Musk wrote. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released an assessment on Wednesday estimating that the “big, beautiful bill,” which has passed the House and is under consideration in the Senate, would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, and result in 10.9 million Americans losing health insurance coverage over the same period.

At the beginning of the administration, Trump put Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a White House program that intended on cutting federal spending and reducing the deficit. Musk’s tenure in the role, designated as a special government employee, ended last week.

On X, Musk posted a collection of past remarks from Trump warning against growing deficits and congressional actions increasing the debt ceiling, adding, “where is this guy today?”

“Either you get a big and ugly bill or a slim and beautiful bill,” Musk added. “Slim and beautiful is the way.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered his administration on Wednesday to investigate then-President Biden’s use of an autopen to sign pardons and other documents, increasing the pressure on his predecessor as House Republicans also requested interviews with members of Biden’s inner circle.

An autopen is a mechanical device that is used to replicate a person’s authentic signature, and presidents have used them for decades. However, Trump has frequently suggested that some of Biden’s actions are invalid because his aides were usurping presidential authority to cover up what Trump claims is Biden’s cognitive decline.

“This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history,” Trump wrote in a memo. “The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.”

Trump directed Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and White House Counsel David Warrington to handle the investigation.

Meanwhile, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, a Republican, requested transcribed interviews with five Biden aides, alleging they had participated in a “cover-up” that amounted to “one of the greatest scandals in our nation’s history.”

“These five former senior advisors were eyewitnesses to President Biden’s condition and operations within the Biden White House,” Comer said in a statement. “They must appear before the House Oversight Committee and provide truthful answers about President Biden’s cognitive state and who was calling the shots.”

Interviews were requested with White House senior advisors Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, former Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed and Steve Ricchetti, a former counselor to the president.

Comer reiterated his call for Biden’s physician, Kevin O’Connor, and former senior White House aides Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal, Ashley Williams and Neera Tanden to appear before the committee. He warned subpoenas would be issued this week if they refuse to schedule voluntary interviews.

“I think that people will start coming in the next two weeks,” Comer told reporters. He added that the committee would release a report with its findings, “and we’ll release the transcribed interviews, so it’ll be very transparent.”

Democrats have dismissed the effort as a distraction.

“Chairman Comer had his big shot in the last Congress to impeach Joe Biden and it was, of course, a spectacular flop,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who served as the ranking member on the Oversight Committee in the previous Congress. “And now he’s just living off of a spent dream. It’s over. And he should give up the whole thing.”

Republicans on the committee are eager to pursue the investigation.

“The American people didn’t elect a bureaucracy to run the country,” said Rep. Brandon Gill, a freshman Republican from Texas. “I think that the American people deserve to know the truth and they want to know the truth of what happened.”

The Republican inquiry so far has focused on the final executive actions of Biden’s administration, which included the issuing of new federal rules and presidential pardons that they claim may be invalid.

Comer cited the book “Original Sin” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, which details concerns and debates inside the White House and Democratic Party over Biden’s mental state and age.

In the book, Tapper and Thompson wrote, “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

Biden and members of his family have vigorously denied the book’s claims.

“This book is political fairy smut for the permanent, professional chattering class,” said Naomi Biden, the former president’s granddaughter.

Biden withdrew from the presidential race last summer after a debate against Trump in which he appeared to lose his train of thought multiple times, muttered inaudible answers and misnamed different government programs.

The disastrous debate performance pushed questions about his age and mental acuity to the forefront, ultimately leading Biden to withdraw from the presidential race. He was replaced on the ticket by Kamala Harris, who lost the election to Trump.

Brown and Megerian write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was already at the briefing room lectern Tuesday when Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a special advisor to President Trump until just last week, launched into a scathing rebuke targeting his signature legislation.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote on his social media platform, X. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.”

“Shame on those who voted for it,” he added. “You know you did wrong. You know it.”

It was the latest, sharpest critique of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” making its way through Congress from Musk, who ended his tenure as a special government employee last week despite his efforts to stay on, according to an Axios report.

In a CBS interview aired last week, Musk also called the bill a disappointment. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” he said, “but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”

The Trump administration had already been on defense over the future of the bill, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates would result in a $3.8-trillion increase to the national debt over 10 years.

House Republicans approved the measure in late May. But multiple Republicans in the Senate, where the party holds a slim majority, have balked at its effects on the deficit, as well as several major proposals in the legislation that would result in millions of Americans losing access to Medicaid coverage.

One GOP senator, Joni Ernst of Iowa, drew national criticism over the weekend after responding to constituent concerns regarding Medicaid cuts at a town hall last week by saying, “well, we are all going to die.” The exchange put threats to Medicaid in the legislation back in the headlines, forcing the White House to put out a press release on Monday with the subject line: “MYTHBUSTER: No, People Will Not ‘Literally Die’ with the One Big Beautiful Bill.”

“The president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” Leavitt said at the briefing, asked to respond to Musk’s X post. “It doesn’t change the president’s opinion.”

The bill would also cut clean energy tax credits passed during the Biden administration, which have benefited Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla.

Trump has also bucked Musk on other matters in recent days. Despite Musk’s opposition, Trump brokered an agreement with the United Arab Emirates to build the largest artificial intelligence campus outside of the United States with the backing of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, a Musk rival.

The president also withdrew Jared Isaacman, reportedly an ally of Musk, as his nominee for NASA administrator. Musk’s rocket ship company, SpaceX, relies heavily on government contracts.

WASHINGTON — President Trump wants his “big, beautiful” bill of tax breaks and spending cuts on his desk to be signed into law by the Fourth of July, and he’s pushing the slow-rolling Senate to make it happen sooner rather than later.

Trump met with Senate Majority Leader John Thune at the White House early this week and has been dialing senators for one-on-one chats, using both the carrot and stick to nudge, badger and encourage them to act. But it’s still a long road ahead for the 1,000-page-plus package.

“His question to me was, How do you think the bill’s going to go in the Senate?” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said about his call with Trump. “Do you think there’s going to be problems?”

It’s a potentially tumultuous three-week sprint for senators preparing to put their own imprint on the massive Republican package that cleared the House late last month by a single vote. The senators have been meeting for weeks behind closed doors, including as they returned to Washington late Monday, to revise the package ahead of what is expected to be a similarly narrow vote in the Senate.

“Passing THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL is a Historic Opportunity to turn our Country around,” Trump posted on social media. He urged them Monday “to work as fast as they can to get this Bill to MY DESK before the Fourth of JULY.”

Thune, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, has few votes to spare from the Senate’s slim, 53-seat GOP majority. Democrats are waging an all-out political assault on GOP proposals to cut Medicaid, food stamps and green energy investments to help pay for more than $4.5 trillion in tax cuts — with many lawmakers being hammered at boisterous town halls back home.

“It’d be nice if we could have everybody on board to do it, but, you know, individual members are going to stake out their positions,” Thune said Tuesday.

“But in the end, we have to succeed. Failure’s not an option. We’ve got to get to 51. So we’ll figure out the path forward to do that over the next couple of weeks.”

At its core, the package seeks to extend the tax cuts approved in 2017, during Trump’s first term at the White House, and add new ones the president campaigned on, including no taxes on tips and others. It also includes a massive build-up of $350 billion for border security, deportations and national security.

To defray the lost tax revenue to the government and avoid piling onto the nation’s $36-trillion debt load, Republicans want to reduce federal spending by imposing work requirements for some Americans who rely on government safety net services. Estimates are 8.6 million people would no longer have healthcare and nearly 4 million would lose Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits.

The package also would raise the nation’s debt limit by $4 trillion to allow more borrowing to pay the bills.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump’s bill “is ugly to its very core.”

Schumer said Tuesday it’s a “lie” that the cuts won’t hurt Americans. “Behind the smoke and mirrors lies a cruel and draconian truth: tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy paid for by gutting healthcare for millions of Americans,” said the New York senator.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is expected to soon provide an overall analysis of the package’s impacts on the government balance sheets, particular its rising annual deficits. But Republicans are ready to blast those findings from the congressional scorekeeper as flawed.

Trump on Tuesday switched to tougher tactics, deriding the holdout Republican senators to get on board.

The president laid into Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning deficit hawk who has made a career of arguing against government spending. Paul wants the package’s $4-trillion increase to the debt ceiling out of the bill.

“Rand votes NO on everything, but never has any practical or constructive ideas. His ideas are actually crazy (losers!).” Trump posted.

The July 4 deadline is not only aspirational for the president, it’s all but mandatory for his Treasury Department. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned Congress that the nation will run out of money to pay its bills if the debt ceiling, now at $36 trillion, is not lifted by mid-July or early August to allow more borrowing. Bessent has also been meeting behind closed doors with senators and GOP leadership.

Thune acknowledged Tuesday that lifting the debt ceiling is not up for debate.

“It’s got to be done,” the South Dakota senator said.

The road ahead is also a test for Thune, who, like Johnson, is a newer leader in Congress and among the many Republicans adjusting their own priorities with Trump’s return to the White House.

While Johnson has warned against massive changes to the package, Thune faces demands from his senators for adjustments.

To make most of the tax cuts permanent — particularly the business tax breaks that are the Senate priorities — senators may shave some of Trump’s proposed new tax breaks on automobile loans or overtime pay, which are policies less prized by some senators.

There are also discussions about altering the $40,000 cap that the House proposed for state and local deductions, known as SALT, which are important to lawmakers in high-tax New York, California and other states, but less so among GOP senators.

“We’re having all those discussions,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), another key voice in the debate.

Hawley is among a group of senators, including Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who have raised concerns about the Medicaid changes that could boot people from health insurance.

A potential copay of up to $35 for Medicaid services that was part of the House package, as well as a termination of a provider tax that many states rely on to help fund rural hospitals, have also raised concerns.

“The best way to not be accused of cutting Medicaid is to not cut Medicaid,” Hawley said.

Collins said she is reviewing the details.

There’s also a House provision that would allow the auction of spectrum bandwidth that some senators oppose.

Mascaro and Jalonick write for the Associated Press. AP writer Matt Brown contributed to this report.

NEWARK, N.J. — Newark Mayor Ras Baraka sued New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor on Tuesday over his arrest on a trespassing charge at a federal immigration detention facility, saying the Trump-appointed attorney had pursued the case out of political spite.

Baraka, who leads New Jersey’s biggest city, is a candidate in a crowded primary field for the Democratic nomination for governor next Tuesday. The lawsuit against interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba coincided with the day early in-person voting began.

The lawsuit seeks damages for “false arrest and malicious prosecution,” and also accuses Habba of defamation for comments she made about his case, which was later dropped.

Citing a post on X in which Habba said Baraka “committed trespass,” the lawsuit says Habba issued a “defamatory statement” and authorized his “false arrest” despite “clear evidence that Mayor Baraka had not committed the petty offense of ‘defiant trespass.’” The suit also names Ricky Patel, the Homeland Security Investigations agent in charge in Newark. Baraka’s attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, said they also expect to sue President Trump’s administration but are required to wait six months.

“This is not about revenge,” Baraka said during a news conference. “Ultimately, I think this is about them taking accountability for what has happened to me.”

Emails seeking comment were left Tuesday with Habba’s office and the Homeland Security Department, where Patel works.

Videos capture chaos outside the detention center

The episode outside the Delaney Hall federal immigration detention center has had dramatic fallout. It began on May 9 when Baraka tried to join three Democratic members of Congress — Rob Menendez, LaMonica McIver and Bonnie Watson Coleman — who went to the facility for an oversight tour, something authorized under federal law. Baraka, an outspoken critic of Trump’s immigration crackdown and the detention center, was denied entry.

Video from the event showed him walking from the facility side of the fence to the street side, where other people had been protesting. Uniformed officials then came to arrest him. As they did, people could be heard urging the group to protect the mayor. The video shows a crowd forming and pushing as officials led off a handcuffed Baraka.

He was initially charged with trespass, but Habba dropped that charge last month and charged McIver with two counts of assaulting officers stemming from her role in the skirmish at the facility’s gate.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Andre Espinosa rebuked Habba’s office after moving to dismiss the charges. “The hasty arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, followed swiftly by the dismissal of these trespassing charges a mere 13 days later, suggests a worrisome misstep by your Office,” he wrote.

McIver decried the charges and signaled she plans to fight them. A preliminary hearing is scheduled later this month.

Baraka said the aftermath of the withdrawn charge meant he had to explain it in the media and argue his case when he had done nothing wrong.

“I want somebody to apologize, write a letter, say this was wrong, come out and say, ‘We shouldn’t have done this,’” he said.

New Jersey targeted over its so-called sanctuary policies

Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed facility, opened earlier this year as a federal immigration detention facility. Florida-based Geo Group Inc., which owns and operates the property, was awarded a 15-year contract valued at $1 billion in February. The announcement was part of the president’s plans to sharply increase detention beds nationwide from a budget of about 41,000 beds this year.

Baraka sued Geo soon after that deal was announced.

Then, on May 23, the Trump Justice Department filed a suit against Newark and three other New Jersey cities over their so-called sanctuary policies. There is no legal definition for sanctuary city policies, but they generally limit cooperation by local law enforcement with federal immigration officers.

New Jersey’s attorney general has a statewide directive in place prohibiting local police from collaborating in federal civil immigration matters. The policies are aimed at barring cooperation on civil enforcement matters, not at blocking cooperation on criminal matters. They specifically carve out exceptions for when Immigration and Customs Enforcement supplies police with a judicial criminal warrant. The Justice Department said, though, the cities won’t notify ICE when they’ve made criminal arrests, according to the suit.

It’s unclear whether Baraka’s role in these fights with the White House is affecting his campaign for governor. He’s one of six candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in the June 10 election to succeed term-limited Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

On Tuesday, Baraka explained the timing of the suit as an effort to get the case before the court before it was too late. He described the arrest and fallout as a distraction during the campaign.

“But I also think that us not responding is consent,” he said.

In a video ad in the election’s final weeks, Baraka has embraced a theme his rivals are also pushing: affordability. He says he’ll cut taxes. While some of the images show him standing in front of what appears to be Delaney Hall, he doesn’t mention immigration or the arrest specifically, saying: “I’ll keep Trump out of your homes and out of your lives.”

Trump has endorsed Jack Ciattarelli, one of several Republicans running in the gubernatorial primary. Ciattarelli has said if he’s elected, his first executive order would be to end any sanctuary policies for immigrants in the country illegally.

Catalini writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.

With its sale to Skydance Media still beyond its reach, Paramount Global has nominated three new directors to bolster its small board, which has been racked with drama and churn since early last year.

The debt-laden New York-based company currently has only five board members, including controlling shareholder Shari Redstone, who serves as chairwoman. The Redstone family holds nearly 77% of Paramount’s voting shares, giving the heiress tremendous sway.

In a proxy filing Monday, Paramount asked shareholders to elect seven directors at its July 2 annual meeting. The slate includes Redstone and three recruits: attorney Mary Boies (a member of the firm led by her husband David Boies); Silicon Valley venture capital executive Charles E. Ryan ; and former Massachusetts trial court judge Roanne Sragow Licht.

In addition to Redstone, three longtime board members — Linda M. Griego, Susan Schuman and Barbara M. Byrne — will stand for reelection.

Board member Judith A. McHale has decided to step down.

The company has grappled with a series of setbacks since it announced its sale to tech scion David Ellison’s Skydance Media last July.

The company took a $6-billion write-down on its cable television networks business, in yet another sign that Hollywood is reckoning with the ongoing deterioration of the traditional television business.

Leading independent director Charles Phillips left the board in October. His exit came six months after three other directors — Rob Klieger, Nicole Seligman and Dawn Ostroff — abruptly departed as the panel was struggling over terms of Redstone’s planned Paramount sale.

In late October, President Trump filed a lawsuit in Texas over his dismay with edits of a “60 Minutes” interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the closing weeks of the election. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, opened an inquiry to determine whether the edits rose to the level of news distortion.

Trump doubled the amount of damages he was seeking to $20 billion.

Paramount has been defending against the lawsuit. In a court filing last week, Trump’s lawyers asserted the president suffered “mental anguish” due to the “60 Minutes” broadcast.

Redstone’s desire to settle Trump’s suit over the “60 Minutes” edits has carved deep divides within the company.

1st Amendment experts have called Trump’s lawsuit frivolous; CBS News executives and other journalists believe it is a shakedown to exploit the vulnerable company that is desperate to have the FCC approve the sale to Skydance.

The ruckus over the edits contributed to the departure of two top CBS News executives. Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News and Stations, stepped down under pressure last month. In April, “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens departed.

Redstone has expressed her dissatisfaction with CBS News’ coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

Last month, three Democrat U.S. senators warned Redstone that the company could face allegations of bribery if they write a big check to mollify Trump in an effort to facilitate the FCC’s review of the Skydance takeover. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Paramount offered Trump $15 million to make the lawsuit go away, but he declined.

It’s been nearly 11 months since Paramount agreed to be sold to Skydance in an $8-billion deal that would inject $1.5 billion in capital into Paramount’s battered balance sheet.

Paramount has not revised its guidance on when it expects the deal to close — but the contractual deadline is early October.

As part of its proxy statement, the company again detailed the compensation packages — totaling $148 million to the top three executives and ousted Chief Executive Bob Bakish, who received compensation valued at $87 million. Co-CEO George Cheeks was paid $22.2 million. His counterparts Brian Robbins and Chris McCarthy were paid $19.6 million and $19.5 million, respectively, according to the filing.

It’s not easy being a Democrat in these Trumpian times, as each day brings fresh tales of conquest and pillage.

Still, despite all that, 4,000 stiff-upper-lipped partisans showed up in Anaheim over the weekend, seeking solace, inspiration and a winning way forward.

As mouse-eared pilgrims plied the sidewalks outside, the party faithful — meeting several long blocks from Disneyland — engaged in their own bit of escapism and magical thinking.

“Joy is an act of resistance,” state party Chairman Rusty Hicks gamely suggested at a beer-and-wine reception, which opened the party’s annual three-day convention with as much conviviality as the downtrodden could muster.

That’s certainly one way to cope.

But the weekend gathering wasn’t all hand-wringing and liquid refreshment.

There were workshops on top of workshops, caucus meetings on top of caucus meetings, and speaker after speaker, wielding various iterations of the words “fight” and “resist” and dropping enough f-bombs to blow decorum and restraint clear to kingdom come.

President Trump — the devil himself, to those roiling inside the hall — was derided as a “punk,” “the orange oligarch,” a small-fisted bully, the “thing that sits in the White House” and assorted unprintable epithets.

“My fellow Golden State Democrats, we are the party of FDR and JFK, of Pat Brown and the incomparable Nancy Pelosi,” said a not-so-mild-mannered Sen. Adam Schiff. “We do not capitulate. We do not concede. California does not cower. Not now, not ever. We say to bullies, you can go f— yourself.”

The road from political exile, many Democrats seemed to feel, is richly paved with four-letter words.

Two of the party’s 2028 presidential prospects were on hand. (Another of those — Gov. Gavin Newsom — has fallen out of favor with many of his fellow California Democrats and found it best to stay away.)

A highly caffeinated New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, of 25-hour filibuster fame, summoned past glories and urged Democrats to find their way back to the party’s grounding principles, then fight from there.

“We are here because of people who stood up when they were told to sit down. We’re here because of people who spoke up when they were told to be silent. We’re here because of people who marched in front of fire hoses and dogs,” Booker hollered in his best preacherly cadence. “We are here because of people who faced outrageous obstacles and still banded together and said we shall overcome.”

Tim Walz, the party’s 2024 vice presidential nominee and the weekend’s keynote speaker, was on hand after jetting from a morning appearance in South Carolina. He delivered the most thorough and substantive remarks.

He began with a brief acknowledgment and thanks to his 2024 running mate, Kamala Harris. (She, too, stayed away from the convention while pondering her political future. The former vice president’s sole presence was a three-minute video most noteworthy for its drab production and Harris’ passion-free delivery.)

By contrast, Walz gleefully tore into Trump, saying his only animating impulses were corruption and greed. He noted the callous hard-heartedness the president and his allies displayed during California’s horrific January firestorm.

“They played a game, a blame game, and they put out misinformation about an incredibly tragic situation,” Minnesota’s governor said. “They didn’t have the backs of the firefighters. They didn’t hustle to get you the help you needed. They hung you out to dry.”

Keeping with the weekend’s expletive-laden spirit, Walz blasted Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bull—” legislation and mocked congressional Republicans as the “merry band of dips—” who lend him their undying support.

But much of his 30-minute speech was devoted to flaying his own party — “like a deer … in goddamned headlights” — saying Democrats can blame only themselves for being so feckless and off-putting they made the odious Trump seem preferable by comparison.

“There is an appetite out there across this country to govern with courage and competency, to call crap where it is, to not be afraid, to make a mistake about things, but to show people who you truly are and that they don’t have to wonder who the Democratic Party is,” Walz said to a roaring ovation.

“Are you going to go to a cocktail party with somebody who’s super rich and then pass a law that benefits them?” he demanded. “[Or] are you going to work your ass off and make sure our kids get a good education?”

And yet for all the cursing and swagger and bluster, there was an unmistakable air of anxiety pervading the glassy convention center. This is a party in need of repair and many, from the convention floor to the hospitality suites, acknowledged as much.

Alex Dersh, a 27-year-old first-time delegate from San Jose, said his young peers — “shocked by Trump’s election” — were especially eager for change. They just can’t agree, he said, on what that should be.

Indeed, there were seemingly as many prescriptions on offer in Anaheim as there were delegates. (More than 3,500 by official count.)

Anita Scuri, 75, a retired Sacramento attorney attending her third or fourth convention, suggested the party needs to get back to basics by speaking plainly — she said nothing about profanity — and focusing on people’s pocketbooks.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” she said, recycling the message of Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 campaign. “It’s focusing on the lives people are living.”

Gary Borsos said Democrats need to stop dumbing-down their message and also quit harping on the president.

“There’s a lot of ‘Trump is bad,’ ” said the 74-year-old retired software engineer, who rode eight hours by train from Arroyo Grande to attend his first convention.

“What we’re doing is coming up with a lot of Band-Aid solutions to problems of the day,” Borsos said. “We’re not thinking long-term enough.”

Neither, however, expressed great confidence in their party going forward.

“I’m hopeful,” Scuri said. “Not optimistic.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. “is never going to default” as the deadline for increasing the federal debt ceiling gets closer.

“That is never going to happen,” Bessent said in an interview for CBS’ “Face the Nation” scheduled to air Sunday. “We are on the warning track and we will never hit the wall.”

Republican congressional leaders have attached an increase in the debt limit to President Trump’s tax and spending bill, which potentially puts avoiding a default at the mercy of complex negotiations over the legislation. The U.S. Senate returns this week to take up the bill.

Bessent declined to specify an “X date” — the point at which the Treasury runs out of cash and special accounting measures that allow it to stay within the debt ceiling and still make good on federal obligations on time.

“We don’t give out the ‘X date’ because we use that to move the bill forward,” Bessent said. Last month, Bessent told lawmakers that the U.S. was likely to exhaust its borrowing authority by August if the debt ceiling isn’t raised or suspended by then.

Wall Street analysts and private forecasters see the deadline falling sometime between late August and mid-October.

Bessent also pushed back against a warning by JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon that a crack in the bond market “is going to happen.”

“I’ve known Jamie for a long time, and for his entire career he’s made predictions like this,” he said. “Fortunately none of them have come true.”

“We are going to bring the deficit down slowly,” Bessent said. “This has been a long process, so the goal is to bring it down over the next four years.”

Czuczka writes for Bloomberg News.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration invited travel industry executives to the White House in May for a meeting on federal plans for the 2026 World Cup, a landmark event that under normal circumstances would draw massive international tourism to the United States. It was a welcome gathering by President Trump and his team for an industry eager to capitalize on a rare opportunity and capture tourism dollars.

Welcome, at least, until Vice President JD Vance cracked a joke.

“We’ll have visitors from close to 100 countries — we want them to come, we want them to celebrate, we want them to watch the games. But when the time is up, they’ll have to go home. Otherwise, they’ll have to talk to Secretary Noem,” Vance said, referring to the Homeland Security secretary and head of border enforcement.

Vance’s remarks, while taken in jest, fell flat in a room filled with experts more keenly aware than most of the challenges facing travel in the Trump era.

“It’s one of those moments where you’re almost, like, stop helping us,” one participant in the meeting told The Times, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Stories are flooding media overseas of capricious denials and detentions at U.S. border crossings, raising concern among international tourists over spending top dollar on vacations to America that may end up disrupted, or never materialize. Erratic tariff policies out of the White House have shaken consumer confidence that experts say reliably tracks with discretionary spending on travel. And a series of scares in U.S. aviation, coupled with cuts to the National Park Service and the National Weather Service, have made planning trips to some of the country’s top destinations less reliable.

In California, the nation’s No. 1 tourist destination, international visits are expected to drop by 9.2% through the year, with international spending anticipated to drop 4.2%, according to a forecast published last month by Visit California and Tourism Economics.

Around Yosemite National Park, one of the nation’s most popular attractions, reported bookings were down “as much as 50% going into Memorial Day weekend,” Caroline Beteta, president and chief executive of Visit California, told The Times.

Narratives of travel disruptions under the Trump administration have given pause to U.S. officials and industry experts concerned not only with the immediate economic consequences of a slower summer season, but with the prospects of anemic attendance at World Cup games next year and, beyond, for the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.

“Consumer confidence certainly matters,” said Geoff Freeman, president and chief executive of the U.S. Travel Assn. “It creates a degree of uncertainty.”

‘People should plan ahead’

Unlike much of the rest of the country, California is particularly susceptible to shifting trends among tourists from Asia, where tourism has yet to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic as robustly as it has in the Americas and Europe. Commercial flight restrictions over Russian airspace and the strength of the U.S. dollar haven’t helped, Freeman said.

On the other hand, California benefits from a tourism industry that relies more heavily on domestic travelers, the source of 80% of tourism dollars spent in the state, Beteta noted.

“There’s no question that there are widespread misperceptions about impacts to the travel experience, from reports about staff cuts to detentions at the border,” Beteta said. “Cuts at the National Park Service, for example, don’t affect the park concessionaires — and those companies run most of the visitor-facing services, such as lodging, dining, shuttle services and much more. The misperception of chaos at the parks is a PR issue that can have real consequences.”

Visitors board buses in Yosemite National Park on May 20. Reported bookings around Yosemite National Park were down 50% leading into Memorial Day weekend.

(Carlos Avila Gonzalez / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

But Cassidy Jones, senior visitation program manager at the National Parks Conservation Assn., said that cuts to the parks are tangible and will directly affect visitors’ experience over the coming months, despite efforts by leadership at the Department of the Interior to paper over the cracks.

“There may be fewer entrance gates open,” Jones said. “People should plan ahead and remember to be helpful park visitors. Take the optional shuttle. Come with supplies with you, as some facilities may be closed at hours you’re not expecting, because they don’t have the staff to keep them open. Toilets may not be unwinterized yet if they’re in cold places.”

In April, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order directing that national parks be “open and accessible” through the summer season, as fears grew that staffing cuts implemented by the administration could become apparent. Still, the White House cuts and hiring freezes severely disrupted a seasonal hiring and training cadence for park rangers that usually begins around Christmas, Jones said.

“Some parks may not feel like a lot of changes are evident, but there’s a lot of work that is not being done in the background,” Jones added. “The order basically demanded that even though parks have experienced devastating staffing cuts, they are to put on a sort of public appearance that everything is business as usual. That means pulling superintendents to work in visitor centers, science and research management staff to make sure facilities are clean — biologists cleaning toilets, that sort of thing.”

Flight disruptions expected

Twenty years ago, roughly half of flight delays were caused by uncertainty over the weather — a number that has dropped to 33% in recent years thanks to improved forecast quality. That progress is starting to reverse due to widespread cuts in talent, and will be felt by travelers sooner rather than later, said Rick Spinrad, who served as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Biden.

Trump’s government efficiency program, known as DOGE, has eliminated hundreds of positions at NOAA, including at the National Weather Service, and is proposing a 25% cut in the agency’s budget.

“In the short term, this summer, when people are doing longer traveling, we may see a degradation of services. You may see more delayed flights, more weather-impacted flights,” Spinrad said.

But Spinrad’s concern is that the cuts to NOAA will soon be felt much more deeply, at the local level, among the emergency managers, local transportation departments and public health centers that count on reliable forecasts to map out their work.

“What we’re going to start to see, I think, is the erosion of the capability of NOAA to provide services to the degree that people had become accustomed to,” he said.

Spinrad visited Southern California in late May and was taken aback by the number of people raising concern over the agency’s ability to continue predicting atmospheric river events, with all of their implications on public safety, reservoir operations and hydro power. Those forecasts rely heavily on the work of a satellite operations facility that was gutted by the Trump administration.

And the capabilities of the National Weather Service to predict phenomena like Santa Ana winds, which fueled devastating fires in Los Angeles in January, are at risk, with 30 of the agency’s 122 weather forecast offices operating without meteorologists and with technicians cut throughout, he said.

“I know it will degrade, just by definition. Everything’s going to degrade,” Spinrad added. “All of NOAA’s predictive capabilities will degrade as a result of these cuts.”

Mark Spalding, president of the Ocean Foundation, warned the aviation industry would soon face disruptions as NOAA’s capabilities continue to diminish.

“We will see effects this summer, because they’ve fired so many people and shut down so much activity,” Spalding said.

“There are a lot of services that a lot of people rely on that NOAA provides — weather prediction, ocean observing, tsunami early warning, hurricane center monitoring,” he added. “There’s a lot this summer that could be affected in ways that are akin to what we’re seeing in air traffic control due to the sudden loss of personnel there.”

Still, Freeman, of the U.S. Travel Assn., expressed optimism for the U.S. tourism sector going forward, noting he and his counterparts are in “regular communication” with the Trump administration over headwinds facing the multitrillion-dollar industry.

“We have no shortage of challenges in the travel industry,” he said. “I think the picture right now for travel is uncertain, at worst.”

“For every challenge you see, there is an opportunity on the other side,” he added.

She rides three buses from her Panorama City home to her job as a caregiver for an 83-year-old Sherman Oaks woman with dementia, and lately she’s been worrying about getting nabbed by federal agents.

When I asked what she’ll do if she gets deported, B., who’s 60 and asked me to withhold her name, paused to compose herself.

“I don’t want to cry,” she said, but losing her $19 hourly job would be devastating, because she sends money to the Philippines to support her family.

Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.

The world is getting grayer each day thanks to an epic demographic wave. In California, 22% of the state’s residents will be 65 and older by 2040, up by 14% from 2020.

“At a time where it seems fewer and fewer of us want to work in long-term care, the need has never been greater,” Harvard healthcare policy analyst David C. Grabowski told The Times’ Emily Alpert Reyes in January.

So how will millions of aging Americans be able to afford care for physical and cognitive decline, especially given President Trump’s big beautiful proposed cuts to Medicaid, which covers about two-thirds of nursing home residents? And who will take care of those who don’t have family members who can step up?

A building where multiple caregivers live in a cramped studio apartment in Panorama City.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

There are no good answers at the moment. Deporting care providers might make sense if there were a plan to make the jobs more attractive to homegrown replacements, but none of us would bet a day-old doughnut on that happening.

Nationally and in California, the vast majority of workers in care facilities and private settings are citizens. But employers were already having trouble recruiting and keeping staff to do jobs that are low-paying and difficult, and now Trump administration policies could further shrink the workforce.

Earlier this year, the administration ordered an end to programs offering temporary protected status and work authorization, and the latest goal in Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration is to make 3,000 arrests daily.

“People are worried about the threat of deportation … but also about losing whatever job they have and being unable to secure other work,” said Aquilina Soriano Versoza, director of the Pilipino Workers Center, who estimated that roughly half of her advocacy group’s members are undocumented.

In the past, she said, employers didn’t necessarily ask for work authorization documents, but that’s changing. And she fears that given the political climate, some employers will “feel like they have impunity to exploit workers,” many of whom are women from Southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America.

That may already be happening.

“We’ve seen a lot of fear, and we’ve seen workers who no longer want to pursue their cases” when it comes to fighting wage theft, said Yvonne Medrano, an employment rights lawyer with Bet Tzedek, a legal services nonprofit.

A gathering at the Pilipino Workers Center in Los Angeles in Historic Filipinotown. Aquilina Soriano Versoza, director of the center, says, “People are worried about the threat of deportation … but also about losing whatever job they have and being unable to secure other work.”

(Ringo Chiu / For The Times)

Medrano said the workers are worried that pursuing justice in the courts will expose them to greater risk of getting booted out of the country. In one case, she said, a worker was owed a final paycheck for a discontinued job, but the employer made a veiled threat, warning that showing up to retrieve it could be costly.

Given the hostile environment, some workers are giving up and going home.

“We’ve seen an increase in workers self-deporting,” Medrano said.

Conditions for elder care workers were bleak enough before Trump took office. Two years ago, I met with documented and undocumented caregivers and although they’re in the healthcare business, some of them didn’t have health insurance for themselves.

I met with a cancer survivor and caregiver who was renting a converted garage without a kitchen. And I visited an apartment in Panorama City where Josephine Biclar, in her early 70s, was struggling with knee and shoulder injuries while still working as a caregiver.

Biclar was sharing a cramped studio with two other caregivers. They used room dividers to carve their space into sleeping quarters. When I checked with Biclar this week, she said four women now share the same space. All of them have legal status, but because of low wages and the high cost of housing, along with the burden of supporting families abroad, they can’t afford better living arrangements.

B. and another care provider share a single room, at a cost of $400 apiece, from a homeowner in Panorama City. B. said her commute takes more than an hour each way, and during her nine-hour shift, her duties for her 83-year-old client include cooking, feeding and bathing.

She’s only working three days a week at the moment and said additional jobs are hard to come by given her status and the immigration crackdown. She was upset that for the last two months, she couldn’t afford to send any money home.

“People are worried about the threat of deportation, but also about losing whatever job they have and being unable to secure other work, said Aquilina Soriano Versoza, executive director of the Pilipino Workers Center.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Retired UCLA scholar Fernando Torres-Gil, who served as President Clinton’s assistant secretary on aging, said “fear and chaos” in the elder care industry are not likely to end during this presidential administration. And given budget constraints, California will be hard-pressed to do more for caregivers and those who need care.

But he thinks the growing crisis could eventually lead to an awakening.

“We’re going to see more and more older folks without long-term care,” Torres-Gil said. “Hopefully, Democrats and Republicans will get away from talking about open borders and talk about selective immigration” that serves the country’s economic and social needs.

The U.S. is not aging alone, Torres-Gil pointed out. The same demographic shifts and healthcare needs are hitting the rest of the world, and other countries may open their doors to workers the U.S. sends packing.

“As more baby boomers” join the ranks of those who need help, he said, “we might finally understand we need some kind of leadership.”

It’s hard not to be cynical these days, but I’d like to think he’s onto something.

Meanwhile, I’m following leads and working different angles on this topic. If you’re having trouble finding or paying for care, or if you’re on the front lines as a provider, I’m hoping you will drop me a line.

[email protected]

WASHINGTON — Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who has led an effort in the Trump administration to cut jobs and programs across the federal government, stood by President Trump’s side on Friday in the Oval Office, officially for the last time as a government employee. But neither man was clear whether Musk’s active hand in government is truly over.

Their display of unity comes after Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, issued a series of criticisms of Trump’s policies, both directly and through his companies, and as reports emerge that the billionaire fought fierce battles with the president’s aides and has relied on potent drugs while serving as Trump’s confidante.

“Nobody like him,” Trump said of Musk at the White House event. “He had to go through the slings and the arrows, which is a shame, because he’s an incredible patriot.”

“Many of the DOGE people, Elon, are staying behind. So they’re not leaving. And Elon’s really not leaving,” Trump added. “He’s going to be back and forth, I think, I have a feeling. It’s his baby.”

Musk praised the team of DOGE, an acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency program, for saving what he said was $175 billion in government spending. The program had initially set a more lofty goal of cutting $2 trillion, and it is unclear if Musk’s team has even met its revised figure, with the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service documenting an increase in federal spending over this time last year.

“The DOGE team is doing an incredible job,” Musk said. “I’ll continue to be visiting here, and be a friend and advisor to the president.”

Whether Musk continues in his role will have legal consequences. As a special government employee, Musk is obligated to end his service, now that the maximum work period allowed of 130 days has passed.

A group of 14 states has sued, arguing that Musk’s employee status was a ruse for the Trump administration to bring him into a powerful government role without having to go through a Senate confirmation process.

A federal judge in Washington on Wednesday ruled that Musk’s initial appointment was questionable, stating he “occupies a continuing position” and “exercises significant authority,” opening up a broader legal challenge over the constitutionality of his work for DOGE.

In a series of interviews leading up to his official departure from government, Musk has said that he plans to lessen his political spending going forward, and has criticized the Trump administration and congressional Republicans for pursuing legislation that would balloon the national deficit, a move he said was contrary to DOGE’s mission.

His departure this week comes after the New York Times reported on Musk’s heavy use of ketamine, a potent anesthetic drug, and after a Wall Street Journal article detailed Musk’s attempts to thwart Trump from pursuing partnerships on artificial intelligence in the Middle East that would benefit Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI and a personal nemesis of Musk’s.

Musk’s time in government has been marked by multiple setbacks for his companies. SpaceX has failed to meet essential engineering milestones for Starship, a critical super-heavy rocket ship that is critical to the U.S. effort to return humans to the moon and his own personal goal of reaching Mars. And Tesla, his electric vehicle company, saw a 71% plunge in profits in the first quarter of 2025 and a 50% drop in stock value from its highs in December.

“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” Musk told Ars Technica, a science and technology publication, in an interview on Tuesday.

“It’s not like I left the companies,” he added. “It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”