WASHINGTON—The last full weekend in July was not good for Donald Trump, and that outcome cheered the nation’s teachers.
That’s because Trump’s Education Department, or what’s left of it, threw in the towel and released the rest of the $7 billion in after-school and other grants it had held up, in time for local schools to plan their spending for the coming academic year.
Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten’s announcement got a big roar from the 1,000 attendees at its TEACH conference in D.C. They later split into smaller seminars dealing with various issues.
The right-wing Republican president lost in court on two of his favorite causes—eliminating “sanctuary cities” and ending birthright citizenship. And immigration judges, union members who were deciding asylum cases until he summarily fired them, spoke out.
Trump’s foes, led by the Service Employees, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Planned Parenthood hit the streets again on July 26, in more than 209 demonstrations from coast to coast against both his “big beautiful”—they called it ugly—bill and his ICE roundups, imprisonments and deportations of anyone with a brown skin.
House Democratic pressure forced Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., a Trump toady, to send all 535 lawmakers home for their August recess two days early, lest he lose a vote on making public the connections between Trump and convicted multiple womanizer and child rapist Brian Epstein.
There, the lawmakers are going to face a lot of flak from angry constituents, even in red states.
And to top it all off, Trump’s effort to shove the Israelis and the Palestinians into some sort of peace deal to end the murderous Israeli war on Gaza civilians fell apart, again. Trump blamed Hamas. The UN blamed Israel, which has killed more than 55,000 Gazans since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023, and turned the territory into a smoking ruin.
Thousands of the two million remaining Palestinians who have been forced to flee their bombed and wrecked homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools face starvation as well. There’s a three-day “pause” in the war on Gaza, and some aid got through, including air-dropped shipments, but the Israelis blocked some aid and turned back an international rescue ship off the Gaza coast, with humanitarian personnel and provisions.
Meanwhile, before the so-called truce, Israeli forces bombed refugees who were awaiting, or scrambling for, food at designated checkpoints. The bombs were mostly U.S.-made, bought with U.S. foreign aid, and those dollars went to Israeli and U.S. military contractors.
About the only thing that went “right,” from Trump’s point of view—but not that of the Palestinians—was that Columbia University further knuckled under to Trump and suspended or expelled 80 pro-Palestinian students who led massive pro-peace protests there last year.
All in all, not a good weekend for the White House denizen. Trump’s reaction was to fly to his golf club in Scotland to play rounds with and meet with European leaders about the tariffs he planned to impose on them. He ended up with a 15 percent tariff rather than the 30 percent he had been insisting he would get. At a press conference after the deal was agreed to, the press failed to ask him any questions about the specifics of how the plan would work or about its effect on price increases working-class people in the U.S. will pay as a result.
Protesters waved anti-Trump flags and chanted outside Trump’s Turnberry golf club, where the meeting was held. And one uninvited leader, French President Emmanuel Macron, formally recognized Palestine.
But let’s unpack Trump’s domestic losses, minus the Epstein case, even if it is the one Trump mess that may turn MAGA legions against him.
- The Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals panel in San Francisco, working under the restrictions the Supreme Court’s Republican majority decreed the month before, accepted a class-action suit against his ban on birthright citizenship—then upheld a lower court ruling saying multiple states won the national injunction they sought against Trump’s ban.
Did not abuse its discretion
“The district court” in Washington state, the leader of the group, “did not abuse its discretion in issuing a universal injunction in order to give the States complete relief,” Judges Michael Hawkins and Ronald Gould said in the 2-1 ruling.
“The district court correctly concluded” Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship “denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree.”
- U.S. District Court Judge Lindsay Jenkins in Chicago threw out Trump’s challenge to its “sanctuary cities law.”
“This ruling affirms what we have long known: That Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance is lawful and supports public safety,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement. “The city cannot be compelled to cooperate with the Trump administration’s reckless and inhumane immigration agenda.” Johnson had strongly made that same “public safety” point under hostile questioning from a GOP-run House committee earlier this year.
Johnson’s also obeying a state “sanctuary” law, the Associated Press noted. Bruce Rauner, then the state’s right-wing GOP governor, signed that law seven years ago, during Trump’s first term.
Chicago was one of four cities that challenged Trump on a related issue, contending he’s withholding money previously pledged and owed to them to care for the migrants. That case hasn’t been decided yet.
- A federal judge in Manhattan issued a nationwide injunction against Trump, cutting off grants to writers and scholars by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Artists Guild sought it in a class action suit. One cancelled grant was for a book on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Trumpites who canceled the grant claimed the book discussed “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
- Just days after Trump Education Secretary Linda McMahon, a GOP donor who hates public schools and their unionized teachers, released $1.5 billion in grants for after-school programs, English as a second language teaching, teacher training and the like, she threw in the towel and let the other $5.5 billion flow. AFT President Weingarten gave credit where credit is due: Teachers lobbied lawmakers, leading at least 10 Republican senators to rebel in a letter to Trump.
Weingarten made that announcement “20 minutes after” the ruling, interrupting another speaker at the TEACH conference in D.C.
More than 100 of those teachers had spent the day before the conference lobbying lawmakers to get them to turn the funds loose, despite Trump and McMahon. An angry Weingarten banged the witness table at an informal Senate hearing about the impact of the dollar cutoff.
Despite that win against Trump and McMahon, Weingarten, in her later keynote address, warned teachers to “stay alert for more bad actions guided by false narratives to trash public education. We must protect our kids.
“It is clear we cannot be silent. This is the moment to stand up, to speak up, and to show up.”
- U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan issued a nationwide injunction against Trump cutting off grants to writers and scholars by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Artists Guild sought it in a class action suit. One cancelled grant was for a book on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Trumpites who canceled the grant claimed the book discussed “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Terminated the grants
Trump, via the endowment, “terminated the grants based on the recipients’ perceived viewpoint, in an effort to drive such views out of the marketplace of ideas. This is most evident by the citation in the termination notices to executive orders purporting to combat ‘Radical Indoctrination’ and ‘Radical…DEI Programs,’ and to further ‘Biological Truth,’” Judge McMahon wrote.
- The Service Employees (SEIU), the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Planned Parenthood and their allies assembled more than 200 marches nationally on Saturday, July 28, against all the provisions of the “big bad bill,” as they called it, and especially its $715 billion-$800 billion 10-year Medicaid cuts. They demand Congress reverse its slashes.
“This budget is a moral failure and we will let the country know about it,” one speaker from the D.C. podium said.
That wasn’t the sole cause the marchers protested. Demonstrators in Detroit concentrated on Trump’s detentions and deportations of people in the U.S. who, at the moment of their arrest, lacked legal documentation. Trump issued another pronouncement on that, as his Defense and Homeland Security Departments announced $232 million contract to a private prison company to build a 5000-person “tent city” complex outside El Paso.
Speaking through a translator, Sandra Aleasa, a member of SEIU1199NE, told People’s World her son, Jonathan Guzman, 23, has a low-paying job and now receives Medicaid while also attending school, despite his “multiple medical conditions,” including extreme nearsightedness and “mental anxiety.”
If her son is kicked off Medicaid, they both lose. Aleasa might have to quit her job at the Kaiser Permanente clinic near downtown D.C. to become his full-time caregiver. “I will sacrifice myself, taking more care of him,” she said.
Communications Workers Local 2336 President Melissa Smith-Kupihea, who brought at least half a dozen of her local’s members with her, said the bad sections of the big bad bill will be key to the message she takes back to her members—and everybody else.
“A lot of people are not aware about the need for Medicaid and food stamps,” she explained in an interview. One of her members said “I’m on the Maryland health exchange” under the Affordable Care Act “and I expect my premiums will go up next year” as a result of the big bad bill, officially called a “reconciliation” bill.
“As they find out, they’ll do more about this,” Smith-Kupihea said of her members and everyone else.
Also that its Medicaid cuts will affect everyone else, too. One reliable estimate is private health insurance premiums will rise by $485 per person per year for decade to pay for “uncompensated care.” That’s the care hospital emergency rooms must provide to sick people without Medicaid. The hospitals then pass that cost on to the insurers, who pass it on to their policyholders, including unionists. It’ll be a big issue in contract talks next year for Smith-Kupihea’s local and much of the rest of CWA.
Ai-jen Poo, founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, one of the top march sponsors, agreed in a pre-march statement.
“At a time when too many families are already struggling to afford what they need, these cuts will take away families’ healthcare coverage, food, and essential care, and some families have already had loved ones disappeared by ICE,” she said.
“Our families come first, and we’ll continue showing up for one another.”
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