Closing summary
Donald Trump’s rally speech in Iowa, officially to launch a year-long celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, has just concluded. The president left the stage to the strains of YMCA, after a recitation of mostly the same boasts and exaggerations and lies that pepper all his campaign speeches, including the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. With that, we will wrap up our live coverage of the secnd Trump administration for the day.
Here are some of the day’s major developments:
House Republicans passed Trump’s massive tax-and-spending bill in a 218-214 vote. Trump told reporters he plans to sign the bill on Friday at 5pm EST, as US air force jets fly over the White House.
The Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, prolonged the vote with a record-setting speech in which he decried provisions in the bill that would slash social safety net programs in order to offset the cost of making Trump’s tax cuts permanent.
During a speech to supporters at the Iowa Fair Grounds, Trump used an antisemitic slur, referring to bankers who exploit their clients as “shylocks”.
The Environmental Protection Agency suspended 144 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent” this week “opposing this administration’s policies, including those that undermine the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment”.
Homeland security says it is investigating an incident in which up to 10 Ice agents were caught on video urinating in public at a school in Los Angeles, close to student and within view of staff.
The US military’s Northern Command announced that it is moving 200 active-duty marines to Florida “to augment US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) interior immigration enforcement mission”.
After the US supreme court cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport eight men to South Sudan who are not from there, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent: “Today’s order clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.”
At Iowa rally, Trump uses antisemitic slur about bankers
During a speech to supporters at the Iowa Fair Grounds, Donald Trump just used an antisemitic slur to refer to bankers who exploit their clients.
Early in his remarks, which are ongoing, Trump railed against estate taxes, which he said sometimes force people who inherit farms to have to borrow money from banks to pay the tax. The tax-and-spending bill passed by the House on Thursday slightly raises the estate tax exemption.
The president then envisioned what he called a brighter future for Americans in which there would be no such tax and so “no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases a fine banker, and in some cases shylocks and bad people”.
In 2014, after then vice-president Joe Biden described those who take financial advantage of American service members as “shylocks”, he called the Anti-Defamation League’s national director to apologize for his “poor choice of words” by making reference to a stereotypical Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
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