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<title>‘Free America’: Anti-Trump Administration Protests Planned Across U.S. on July 4</title>
<link>https://time.com/7299015/anti-trump-administration-protests-united-states-july-4-independence-day/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7299015/anti-trump-administration-protests-united-states-july-4-independence-day/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Callum Sutherland]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:34:54 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Donald Trump]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[News Desk]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=7299015</guid>
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This July 4, some Americans are planning to retire their Independence Day barbecues and instead head to the streets in protest against <a href="https://time.com/7280106/trump-interview-100-days-2025/" >President Donald Trump</a> and his Administration.
The collective demonstrations will be the latest in a long line of protests that have taken place since Trump returned to the White House for a second term. On June 14, as Trump held a national military parade in Washington, D.C.,–the largest the capital city has seen in decades—people across the U.S. gathered for counter-action, attending <a href="https://time.com/7293347/trump-military-parade-no-kings-photos/" >“No Kings” protests</a> to publicly “<a href="https://www.nokings.org/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template#map" target="_blank">reject authoritarianism</a>.” Ahead of the big day, Trump had warned that “people that want to protest will be met with big force,” saying participants are “people that hate our country.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Amid the “No Kings” activism, states across the U.S. also encountered <a href="https://time.com/7292495/ice-immigration-protests-la-national/" >immigration protests</a> as people demonstrated against the Trump Administration’s ICE raids. The protests notably started in Los Angeles and garnered national and international attention, especially after <a href="https://time.com/7291978/los-angeles-immigration-protests-trump-national-guard-deployed-newsom-backlash/" >Trump deployed the National Guard</a>, and later the Marines, to quell the demonstrations, without the request of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The decision resulted in much criticism and a legal battle, with an appeals court ultimately ruling that Trump was allowed to keep control of the National Guard in L.A.
In April, <a href="https://time.com/7275249/protesters-across-us-global-rally-against-trump-musk/" >people gathered across the U.S. and international cities</a> such as London, Paris, and Stockholm to protest against the actions of Trump and his then-ally, former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lead Elon Musk. (The former allies have since had a <a href="https://time.com/7291898/elon-musk-donald-trump-epstein-files-allegation-deleted-post/" >very public falling out</a>.)
Now, a fresh round of protests are set to take place on July 4, America’s Independence Day. Here’s what we know about the planned action.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Women’s March organizes “Free America Weekend”</h2>
Women’s March, which coordinates protests across the U.S. <a href="https://www.womensmarch.com/about-us" target="_blank">against sexism and oppression</a>, has published a list of over 140 events set to take place on July 4. The displays of protest range from rallies and marches to block parties. Women’s March has invited communities across the country to create even more events.
Per the organization, the Free America Weekend <a href="https://action.womensmarch.com/calendars/free-america-weekend?page=15" target="_blank">aims to highlight</a> key issues being faced by people across the U.S., such as poverty, unlawful orders, and “the grip of hate and the politics of fear.”
“This July 4th, while the U.S. marks Independence Day, we’ll gather across the country—on porches, in town squares, backyards, and streets—to stand for real freedom and build a vision of a Free America, brick-by-brick,” reads a statement within Women March’s call for action. 
“They want us scared, divided, and alone. They don’t want us to dream about freedom. But that’s exactly what we have to do,” said the organization.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">“No Kings 2.0” demonstrations</h2>
After widespread “No Kings” protests took place throughout the U.S. on June 14, another round of demonstrations are set to take place on July 4.
“No Kings 2.0” events have been scheduled in <a href="https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/806059/" target="_blank">Wisconsin</a>, <a href="https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/806048/" target="_blank">Louisiana</a> and <a href="https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/806104/" target="_blank">Wyoming</a>, along with at least <a href="https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/?q=no%20kings%202.0" target="_blank">ten other locations</a> across the U.S. While the “No Kings” protests in June were notably rallying against “authoritarianism,” the event page for Wisconsin’s July 4 rally in Green Bay says that the focus this time is on ICE raids and activity amid Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.
The protest event page encourages those attending to stand up for “community, justice [in] solidarity with our immigrant neighbors.” In June, ICE arrests conducted in Trump’s second term reportedly reached <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-arrests-under-trump-100k/" target="_blank">over 100,000</a>. 
Organizers of “No Kings 2.0” events in Louisiana and Wyoming have stressed non-violent demonstrations as a core principle of the gatherings.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What other protests are being held on July 4?</h2>
Locals are <a href="https://eu.palmbeachdailynews.com/story/news/trump/2025/07/01/twilight-march-and-candlelight-vigil-near-trumps-mar-a-lago-on-july-4/84414709007/" target="_blank">planning a demonstration</a> outside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Protesters are scheduled to gather near the estate on the evening of July 4, equipped with a large balloon depicting the President as a baby.
A similar balloon was hoisted above Trump’s Florida residence on Juneteenth in 2020, <a href="https://eu.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/local/2020/06/20/protest-on-bridge-rsquobaby-trumprsquo-balloon-mark-juneteenth-event/41742505/" target="_blank">in protest</a> against the treatment of Black Americans, in the weeks after the killing of George Floyd.
“We’re supposed to be celebrating America’s independence, and I felt a moral responsibility to stand up and declare our independence from Trump-ism,” Mark Offerman, a local activist, told Palm Beach Daily News.
Meanwhile, The People’s Union USA is <a href="https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/06/27/why-independence-day-boycott-2025-why-its-called-the-most-important-boycott-of-the-yeits-called-the/84367782007/" target="_blank">encouraging</a> Americans to stay at home on July 4, boycotting large corporations and avoiding parades and firework displays in a show of solidarity against wealth inequality and ICE raids.
Instead, The People’s Union USA, who <a href="https://time.com/7262796/the-people-union-usa-movement-behind-economic-blackout-consumers/" >organized the “Economic Blackout” in February</a>, wants people to focus on supporting their communities and buying locally. Founder John Schwarz has <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DLVaDFXpauz/" target="_blank">called</a> it the “most important boycott of the year.”
“Do not wave a flag for a country that no longer waves it for you,” Schwarz said <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DLVaDFXpauz/" target="_blank">in a video</a>. “The 4th of July is supposed to be a celebration of freedom, but what freedom are we actually talking about?” 
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<title>In the Loop: Is AI Making the Next Pandemic More Likely?</title>
<link>https://time.com/7298731/in-the-loop-pandemic-ai-study/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7298731/in-the-loop-pandemic-ai-study/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Billy Perrigo]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Artificial Intelligence]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=7298731</guid>
<description><![CDATA[At top AI labs, the future looks either fantastically bright—or terrifyingly dark. More in today’s TIME tech newsletter. ]]></description>
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Welcome back to In the Loop, TIME’s new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. Starting today, we’ll be publishing these editions both as stories on Time.com and as emails. If you’re reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox?
<a href="https://timeintheloop.beehiiv.com/subscribe" target="_blank">Subscribe to In the Loop</a>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What to Know</h2>
If you talk to staff at the top AI labs, you’ll hear a lot of stories about how the future could go fantastically well—or terribly badly. And of all the ways that AI might cause harm to the human race, there’s one that scientists in the industry are particularly worried about today. That’s the possibility of AI helping bad actors to start a new pandemic. “You could try to synthesize something like COVID or a more dangerous version of the flu—and basically, our modeling suggests that this might be possible,” Anthropic’s chief scientist, Jared Kaplan, <a href="https://time.com/7287806/anthropic-claude-4-opus-safety-bio-risk/" >told me</a> in May.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Measuring the risk — In a new study published this morning, and shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its release, we got the first hard numbers on how experts think the risk of a new pandemic might have increased thanks to AI. The Forecasting Research Institute polled experts earlier this year, asking them how likely a human-caused pandemic might be—and how likely it might become if humans had access to AI that could reliably give advice on how to build a bioweapon.
What they found — Experts, who were polled between December and February, put the risk of a human-caused pandemic at 0.3% per year. But, they said, that risk would jump fivefold, to 1.5% per year, if AI were able to provide human-level virology advice.
You can guess where this is going — Then, in April, the researchers tested today’s AI tools on a new virology troubleshooting benchmark. They <a href="https://time.com/7279010/ai-virus-lab-biohazard-study/" >found</a> that today’s AI tools outperform PhD-level virologists at complex troubleshooting tasks in the lab. In other words, AI can now do the very thing that forecasters warned would increase the risk of a human-caused pandemic fivefold.
We just published the full story on Time.com—you can read it <a href="https://time.com/7298645/ai-pandemic-5-times-more-likely/" >here</a>.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Who to Know</h2>
<figure class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/cloudflare-ceo.jpg" alt="Day Two Of Semafor World Economy Summit 2025" alignment="center"/></figure>
Person in the news – Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. 
Since its founding in 2009, Cloudflare has been protecting sites on the internet from being knocked offline by large influxes of traffic, or indeed coordinated attacks. Now, some 20% of the internet is covered by its network. And today, Cloudflare announced that this network would begin to block AI crawlers by default — essentially putting a fifth of the internet behind a paywall for the bots that harvest info to train AIs like ChatGPT and Claude.
Step back — Today’s AI is so powerful because it has essentially inhaled the whole of the internet — from my articles to your profile photos. By running neural networks over that data using immense quantities of computing power, AI companies have taught these systems the texture of the world at such an enormous scale that it has given rise to new AI capabilities, like the ability to answer questions on almost any topic, or to generate photorealistic images. But this scraping has sparked a huge backlash from publishers, artists and writers, who complain that it has been done without any consent or compensation.
A new model — Cloudflare says the move will “fundamentally change how AI companies access web content going forward.” Major publishers, including TIME, have expressed their support for the shift toward an “opt-in” rather than an “opt-out” system, the company says. Cloudflare also says it is working on a new initiative, called Pay Per Crawl, in which creators will have the option of setting a price on their data in return for making it available to train AI.
Fighting words — Prince was not available for an interview this week. But at a recent conference, he disclosed that traffic to news sites had dropped precipitously across the board thanks to AI, in a shift that many worry will imperil the existence of the free press. “I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis — all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites,” Prince said. “And you’re telling me I can’t stop some nerd with a C-corporation in Palo Alto?”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">AI in Action</h2>
61% percent of U.S. adults have used AI in the last six months, and 19% interact with it daily, according to a new <a href="https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-consumer-ai/" target="_blank">survey</a> of AI adoption by the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. 
But just 3% percent of those users pay for access to the software, Menlo estimated based on the survey’s results—suggesting 97% of users only use the free tier of AI tools. 
AI usage figures are higher for Americans in the workforce than other groups. Some 75% of employed adults have used AI in the last six months, including 26% who report using it daily, according to the survey. Students also report high AI usage: 85% have used it in the last six months, and 22% say they use it daily.
The statistics seem to suggest that some students and workers are growing dependent on free AI tools—a usage pattern that might become lucrative if AI companies were to begin restricting access or raising prices. However, the proliferation of open-source AI models has created intense price competition that may limit any single company’s ability to dramatically increase their costs.
As always, if you have an interesting story of AI in Action, we’d love to hear it. Email us at: <a href="mailto:intheloop@time.com">intheloop@time.com</a>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What we’re reading</h2>
<a href="https://time.com/7298290/ai-death-grief-memory/" >‘The Dead Have Never Been This Talkative’: The Rise of AI Resurrection</a> by Tharin Pillay in TIME
With the rise of image-to-video tools like the newest version of Midjourney, the world recently crossed a threshold: it’s now possible, in just a few clicks, to reanimate a photo of your dead relative. You can train a chatbot on snippets of their writing to replicate their patterns of speech; if you have a long enough clip of them speaking, you can also replicate their voice. Will these tools make it easier to process the heart-rending pain of bereavement? Or might their allure in fact make it harder to move forward? My colleague Tharin published a deeply insightful piece last week about the rise of this new technology. It’s certainly a weird time to be alive. Or, indeed, to be dead.
<a href="https://timeintheloop.beehiiv.com/subscribe" target="_blank">Subscribe to In the Loop</a>
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<title>Today’s AI Could Make Pandemics 5 Times More Likely, Experts Predict</title>
<link>https://time.com/7298645/ai-pandemic-5-times-more-likely/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7298645/ai-pandemic-5-times-more-likely/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Billy Perrigo]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=7298645</guid>
<description><![CDATA[AI advances may make human-caused pandemics 5× more likely than last year, top experts warn in a study shared exclusively with TIME.]]></description>
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Recent developments in AI could mean that human-caused pandemics are five times more likely than they were just a year ago, according to a <a href="https://forecastingresearch.org/ai-enabled-biorisk" target="_blank">study</a> of top experts’ predictions shared exclusively with TIME.
The data echoes concerns raised by AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic in recent months, both of which have warned that today’s AI tools are reaching the ability to meaningfully assist bad actors attempting to create bioweapons.
Read More: <a href="https://time.com/7287806/anthropic-claude-4-opus-safety-bio-risk/" >Exclusive: New Claude Model Triggers Bio-Risk Safeguards at Anthropic</a>
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
It has long been possible for biologists to modify viruses using laboratory technology. The new development is the ability for chatbots—like ChatGPT or Claude—to give accurate troubleshooting advice to amateur biologists trying to create a deadly bioweapon in a lab. Safety experts have long viewed the difficulty of this troubleshooting process as a significant bottleneck on the ability of terrorist groups to create a bioweapon, says Seth Donoughe, a co-author of the study. Now, he says, thanks to AI, the expertise necessary to intentionally cause a new pandemic “could become accessible to many, many more people.”
Between December 2024 and February 2025, the Forecasting Research Institute asked 46 biosecurity experts and 22 “superforecasters” (individuals with a high success rate at predicting future events) to estimate the risk of a human-caused pandemic. The average survey respondent predicted the risk of that happening in any given year was 0.3%. 
Crucially, the surveyors then asked another question: how much would that risk increase if AI tools could match the performance of a team of experts on a difficult virology troubleshooting test? If AI could do that, the average expert said, then the annual risk would jump to 1.5%—a fivefold increase. 
What the forecasters didn’t know was that Donoughe, a research scientist at the pandemic prevention nonprofit SecureBio, was testing AI systems for that very capability. In April, Donoughe’s team revealed the results of those tests: today’s top AI systems can outperform PhD-level virologists at a difficult troubleshooting test.
Read More: <a href="https://time.com/7279010/ai-virus-lab-biohazard-study/" >Exclusive: AI Outsmarts Virus Experts in the Lab, Raising Biohazard Fears</a>
In other words, AI can now do the very thing that forecasters warned would increase the risk of a human-caused pandemic fivefold. (The Forecasting Research Institute plans to re-survey the same experts in future to track whether their view of the risks has increased as they said it would, but said this research would take months to complete.)
To be sure, there are a couple of reasons to be skeptical of the results. Forecasting is an inexact science, and it is especially difficult to accurately predict the likelihood of very rare events. Forecasters in the study also revealed a lack of understanding of the rate of AI progress. (For example, when asked, most said they did not expect AI to surpass human performance at the virology test until after 2030, while Donoughe’s test showed that bar had already been met.) But even if the numbers themselves are taken with a pinch of salt, the authors of the paper argue, the results as a whole still point in an ominous direction. “It does seem that near-term AI capabilities could meaningfully increase the risk of a human-caused epidemic,” says Josh Rosenberg, CEO of the Forecasting Research Institute.
The study also identified ways of reducing the bioweapon risks posed by AI. Those mitigations broadly fell into two categories.
The first category is safeguards at the model level. In interviews, researchers welcomed efforts by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to prevent their AIs from responding to prompts aimed at building a bioweapon. The paper also identifies restricting the proliferation of “<a href="https://time.com/7171962/open-closed-ai-models-epoch/" >open-weights</a>” models, and adding protections against models being <a href="https://time.com/6328851/scientists-training-ai-safety/" >jailbroken</a>, as likely to reduce the risk of AI being used to start a pandemic.
The second category of safeguards involves imposing restrictions on companies that synthesize nucleic acids. Currently, it is possible to send one of these companies a genetic code, and be delivered biological materials corresponding to that code. Today, these companies are not obliged by law to screen the genetic codes they receive before synthesizing them. That’s potentially dangerous because these synthesized genetic materials could be used to create mail-order pathogens. The authors of the paper recommend labs screen their genetic sequences to check them for harmfulness, and for labs to implement “know your customer” procedures.
Taken together, all these safeguards—if implemented—could bring the risk of an AI-enabled pandemic back down to 0.4%, the average forecaster said. (Only slightly higher than the 0.3% baseline of where they believed the world was before they knew today’s AI could help create a bioweapon.)
“Generally, it seems like this is a new risk area worth paying attention to,” Rosenberg says. “But there are good policy responses to it.”
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<title>Trump Administration Lowers Expectations for Trade Deals as Tariff Deadline Approaches</title>
<link>https://time.com/7299006/trump-trade-deals-negotiations-expectations-tariffs-deadline-china-japan-canada/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7299006/trump-trade-deals-negotiations-expectations-tariffs-deadline-china-japan-canada/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Miranda Jeyaretnam]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Donald Trump]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[News Desk]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[overnight]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=7299006</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Administration has already lowered expectations as dealmaking proves challenging.]]></description>
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Less than 10 days till President Donald Trump’s higher “reciprocal” tariffs kick back in for most of the world, the U.S. looks like it may emerge with just a handful of trade deals.
The President <a href="https://time.com/7274195/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-world-responses-china-eu-countries-leaders-countermeasures/" >shocked the world</a> and <a href="https://time.com/7275987/trump-tariffs-global-economy-recession-trade-war-asia-world-impacts/" >roiled markets</a> on April 2, which he dubbed “Liberation Day,” when he imposed tariffs of as high as 50% on nearly every country, before announcing a 90-day reduction in a <a href="https://time.com/7276293/trump-tariffs-reversal-world-leaders-countries-responses-uncertainty-trade-war/" >stunning reversal</a> just a week later. That pause, however, is ending July 9, and Trump <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtjcSPBp-YE" target="_blank">said</a> in a Sunday interview on Fox News, taped Friday, that he doesn’t intend to extend the deadline—although, he added, “I could, no big deal.”
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On Friday, Trump said he could do “whatever we want” with the deadline. “I’d like to make it shorter. I’d like to just send letters out to everybody, ‘Congratulations, you’re paying 25%,’” he <a href="https://x.com/Acyn/status/1938640659155689879" target="_blank">told</a> reporters. 
Trump’s unpredictable style has earned him the descriptor “TACO” for “<a href="https://time.com/7289404/trump-taco-acronyms-meaning-dei-doge-maha-fafo-tds/" >Trump Always Chickens Out</a>,” while businesses, economists, and investors have criticized him for creating a <a href="https://time.com/7286933/trump-trade-war-us-china-tariff-pause-businesses-costs-uncertainty/" >volatile business environment</a>. The President and his officials have <a href="https://x.com/StephenM/status/1910052531742421475?lang=en" target="_blank">countered</a> that the uncertainty is all part of a master strategy to achieve <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF-y5KZ2lwY" target="_blank">better deals</a>.
But the level of trade success Trump will have achieved by next week looks to fall short of his goals. Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/trump-trade-team-chases-90-deals-90-days-experts-say-good-luck-with-that-2025-04-12/" target="_blank">touted</a> “90 deals in 90 days” in April. As the deadline approaches though, others in the Administration are <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e268d462-593c-45b1-8cf1-c3d382219dd2" target="_blank">lowering expectations</a>.
“We’re going to do top 10 deals, put them in the right category, and then these other countries will fit behind,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sworNYcxGBg" target="_blank">said</a> on Bloomberg Television last week.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/video/6374941242112" target="_blank">echoed</a> Lutnick on Fox Business on Friday: “If we can ink 10 or 12 of the important 18—there are another important 20 relationships—then I think we could have trade wrapped up by Labor Day [Sept. 1].” For other “smaller trading partners, we will just send them letters,” Bessent <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/06/27/watch-cnbcs-full-interview-with-treasury-secretary-scott-bessent.html" target="_blank">said</a> on CNBC.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Trade talks run into issues</h2>
Japan was one of the first countries to begin trade negotiations with the U.S. after the pause was announced, but talks have been troubled by <a href="https://time.com/7283809/japan-us-trade-talks-rice-agriculture-protectionism-reform-trump-tariffs/" >disagreements over Japan’s policies protecting domestic rice</a>.
“To show people how spoiled Countries have become with respect to the United States of America, and I have great respect for Japan, they won’t take our RICE, and yet they have a massive rice shortage,” Trump <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114773601644828833" target="_blank">posted</a> on Truth Social on Monday. (Japan imports 770,000 metric tons of rice every year without any tariffs, around half of which comes from the U.S.) “In other words, we’ll just be sending them a letter, and we love having them as a Trading Partner for many years to come.”
The “letters” that Trump likes to reference will notify countries of what rate their goods will be tariffed at, which Trump said on Fox News would mark “the end of the trade deal.”
With some trading partners, Trump’s strong-arm style has won him immediate concessions. Trump railed against Canada on Friday, <a href="https://time.com/7298566/united-states-canada-trade-negotiations-trump-carney/" >announcing</a> that he was ending trade talks over its proposed digital services tax, which he <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114756567645919781" target="_blank">called</a> “a direct and blatant attack on our Country.” On Sunday, Ottawa said it was <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-rescinds-digital-services-tax-bid-advance-trade-talks-with-us-2025-06-30/" target="_blank">abandoning</a> the tax policy to resume negotiations with Washington in the hopes that it can reach a deal with the U.S. by July 21. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Canada “caved.”
Similarly, the European Union on Monday <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-30/eu-to-accept-trump-s-universal-tariff-but-seeks-key-exemptions" target="_blank">reportedly yielded</a> to a 10% levy on many of its exports, as it pushes for lower rates on specific key sectors and exemptions to higher tariffs on automobiles as well as steel and aluminum.
But Trump’s hardball tactics could also sour important U.S. trade relationships, and in the long term push countries to seek alternative trading partners. The E.U., alongside its negotiations with the U.S., is preparing countermeasures to tariff U.S. goods and has <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade/EU-pushes-for-China-trade-rebalancing-as-Trump-factor-looms" target="_blank">stepped up</a> discussions with China around <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-26/chinese-eu-trade-heads-to-meet-as-trump-tariff-tensions-rise" target="_blank">their trade relationship</a> in recent months.
Jayant Menon, a research fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, previously told TIME that countries will look to diversify their trade and engage with “more reliable” trading partners. And many have already begun, said Kristina Fong, an economic affairs researcher at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, especially in terms of increasing trade with China. “It’s a very slow burn kind of momentum, but that’s always been, I think, the underlying case,” Fong told TIME.
Moreover, “smaller trading partners” that haven’t even gotten a seat at the negotiating table are likely to be hit hardest. Trump’s apparent dismissal of these countries, similar to his decision to <a href="https://time.com/7298994/usaid-deaths-studies-estimates-foreign-aid-hiv-aids-malaria-sudan/" >shutter USAID</a>, suggests that he doesn’t see the benefits of having positive relations with them.
Many of them were already hit with some of the <a href="https://time.com/7274194/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-highest-country-rates-calculation-math-imports-exports/" >highest “reciprocal” tariffs</a> when they were initially announced, and many aren’t in a position to simply purchase more American goods. Lesotho, which was hit with the highest 50% rate, was pessimistic at the outset of the pause, with the country’s trade and industry minister <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITHvXavr-w" target="_blank">saying</a>, “I don’t have a good experience with trying to get meetings with [the Trump Administration].”
“We’ll look at how a country treats us—are they good, are they not so good? Some countries we don’t care, we’ll just send a high number out,” Trump said on Fox News. “Congratulations, we’re allowing you to shop in the United States of America. You’re going to pay a 25% tariff or 35% or 50% or 10%.”
“What does this do long term to trust and confidence [in the U.S.]?” says Mark Cogan, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Japan’s Kansai Gaidai University, tells TIME. “You’re bullying your way to get what you want, and that reduces trust. To a certain extent, parties will assume eventually that they cannot negotiate with the United States because perhaps the United States is not negotiating in good faith.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">China says its interests must be safeguarded</h2>
Countries seeking quick and favorable deals with the U.S. also face a balancing act with China. 
China has attempted to <a href="https://time.com/7298254/china-us-diplomacy-military-intervention-taiwan-israel-iran-war-ceasefire/" >position itself</a> as a reliable and stable partner, in <a href="https://time.com/7296139/china-iran-israel-us-weapons-mediate-war-peace-oil-diplomacy/" >contrast</a> with Trump’s erratic style, and to strengthen its relations with other countries. Trump’s tariffs “were accelerating a trend of Chinese businesses looking more and more overseas,” William Figueroa, an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Groningen, previously told TIME.
China, which signed an agreement with the U.S. in May that temporarily lowered both nations’ levies on each other after an <a href="https://time.com/7292207/us-china-trade-war-trump-tariffs-timeline/" >escalating tariff war</a>, has <a href="https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3316261/china-warns-countries-not-sign-us-trade-deals-its-expense?module=feature_package&pgtype=homepage" target="_blank">warned</a> that countries should not reach deals with the U.S. at the expense of China’s interests.
China is on a separate timeline for negotiating with the U.S., with its 90-day pause beginning May 14, though the two countries have already reached a limited deal.
“China firmly opposes any party reaching a deal for so-called tariff reductions at the expense of China’s interests. If that happens, China would never accept it and would take resolute countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests,” China’s Ministry of Commerce <a href="https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/xwfb/xwfyrth/art/2025/art_056642b767ba403faf85368dd5f710ae.html" target="_blank">said</a> in a statement on Saturday.
“China is happy to see all parties resolve trade disputes with the US through equal consultations,” the statement added. “At the same time, we call on them to stand on the side of fairness and justice and firmly defend international and multilateral trade rules.”
Xu Weijun, a researcher with the Institute of Public Policy at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, <a href="https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3316261/china-warns-countries-not-sign-us-trade-deals-its-expense?module=feature_package&pgtype=homepage" target="_blank">told</a> SCMP that Beijing, which has repeatedly called Trump’s tariffs “unilateral bullying,” is watching Trump’s trade talks with caution.
“Trump is an emotionally driven leader with a history of flip-flopping. Beijing knows too well it must prepare for him reneging on commitments or using deals with other countries to extract concessions [from China],” Xu told SCMP.
But, Xu cautioned: “If Trump believes the U.S. is losing in a deal or thinks attacking China and stoking nationalist sentiment serves his domestic political agenda, he could easily overturn existing consensus and even scrap signed agreements.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Deals may still fall short of expectations</h2>
Trump has boasted about his deals <a href="https://time.com/7283842/united-states-united-kingdom-trade-deal-trump-starmer-tariffs-agreement/" >with the U.K.</a> and China, but critics say these agreements are not substantive or fail to address some of Trump’s key concerns.
Trade experts suggest that other deals may end up similarly appearing more like broad frameworks with many details left to be worked out later.
Tim Meyer, a professor at Duke University law school who specializes in international trade, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-29/trump-deals-poised-to-fall-short-of-sweeping-global-trade-reform" target="_blank">told</a> Bloomberg: “I would expect the White House will announce some number of frameworks that it’s going to call trade deals, but do not meet anyone’s ordinary understanding of that term.”
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<title>How I Learned to Love My Body—Especially in the Summer</title>
<link>https://time.com/7296170/summer-body-mari-andrew-essay/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7296170/summer-body-mari-andrew-essay/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mari Andrew]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[freelance]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[Learning to love the existence of all life on earth helped Mari Andrew let go of the blame she put on herself and her body.]]></description>
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There is a day we New Yorkers quietly celebrate, that we don’t have a name for. It’s the morning when I can feel the earth peel back her blanket and stretch out for the first time in months. For once, she doesn’t have to reach for a sweater to throw over her nightgown; she might even step outside to greet the day. I do the same, stepping outside to bask in the symphony of new sounds: the silly flap of sandals against the pavement, the no‑nonsense buzz of a bee hard at work, the crunch of a bunny snacking on wildflowers. No, that’s me getting carried away; there are no bunnies in my industrial part of Brooklyn. But it is the first kiss of <a href="https://time.com/6993520/summer-dating-season-essay/" >summer</a>. If you live in bear country and not Brooklyn, the warm months are signaled not with sundress debuts and iced coffee orders, but with the grumbles and growls of furry beasts who have emerged from hibernation. Hibernation isn’t sleep. It’s a mastery of evolution, a collection of advanced adaptations and seemingly miraculous physiological strategies that allow so many critters to burrow underground for months without food or water and still look like their fuzzy, glorious selves as they totter out of their dens. After a hearty shake, the animals are rested and ready for action, with healthy, shiny fur coats at that. But, however wondrous and exotic the ritual seems, hibernation is a challenging concept when you really get to thinking about it: What if humans were just as in tune with our bodies? Would it work out for us? What if we followed our <a href="https://time.com/archive/6934792/proven-bears-hibernate-and-soon-you-could-too/" >bodily cues as attentively as bears</a> and other animals do? It took me a long time to learn I am a body. In a society that splits the <a href="https://time.com/7204311/your-body-can-make-you-happier-essay/" >mind as separate from the body</a>, I question my own desires and needs as they arise. I even distrust them, commanding them to keep quiet so I can function normally in this culture that has so many ways to hide bodily requirements.
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In most of contemporary society, we are practically forced to disembody if we want to have any chance at fitting in, keeping a job, getting accepted, even being seen as fully human. It is so outrageous (yet somehow normal) that grocery stores sell “hunger-reducing” gum and <a href="https://time.com/6263689/ozempic-cracks-body-positivity/" >Ozempic</a> is easily accessible so that our bodies can’t tell us when to eat, and absurd that we follow a labor schedule that was created for machines, and so upsetting that things like periods and panic attacks are seen as pesky hindrances to be hidden and worked through rather than honored with rest and support. Read More:<a href="https://time.com/7204311/your-body-can-make-you-happier-essay/" > How To Use Your Body To Make Yourself Happier</a>
Something I love about animals is that you never have to tell an animal “Be yourself.” They know no other way to be. Animals go to the bathroom, reject unwanted affection, gobble food, sleep for hours, and bite their toenails without a moment of hesitation or a shameful glance around to see if anyone’s looking.
The messages between their fuzzy bodies and their brains don’t go through any filtering system. Thought and action are practically one and the same: Hungry! Eat; Tired! Rest; Curious! Explore. Animals have mastered embodiment, the experience of being a body rather than having a body. They don’t separate their physical self as an unruly object to control, argue with, be proud of, or disdain. And for a long time, we humans were the same way. That is, until Plato came along and decided that body and mind were two different entities. His coping mechanism to escape the grind of Ancient Greece was to call the mind the “true self,” whereas a body was just a sloppy vessel to carry it around. While bodies were used and hurt by others, and, let’s face it, were kind of embarrassing, the mind was pure and could attain enlightenment. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s gotten us into all kinds of trouble throughout history. Disembodiment, which denies any inherent preciousness of the body, has been used in service to humanity’s most egregious sins, from slavery to eugenics. If you can separate a body from a person, you’re more likely to accept the use of that body as an object. It now means that we endure the legacy of disembodiment as an accepted concept.
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 Take <a href="https://time.com/3744459/a-feminist-answer-to-swimsuit-season-raid-grandmas-closet/" >swimsuit season</a>. As far as we’ve come from the SlimFast lunches and cabbage soup diet of the early 2000s, a lot of us still have diet culture leftovers lingering around in our minds when it comes to public displays of body appearance—especially their annual debuts in the summer.
I used to feel nothing but dread when I’d realize while packing my beach bag that I’d forgotten to get those abs I meant to get over the winter, or that last night’s dinner party with friends was showing up in some extra tummy bloat. I treated my rolls and squishy parts like they were evidence of my failures—a visible symbol that I lacked the saintly discipline that I’ve envied in other girls since middle school.
But bodies are living things who are entitled to change, strengthen, soften, expand, and spill out as evidence of a life lived—not a life restricted. A dinner party with friends is one of my greatest pleasures, and I didn’t get around to those abs in winter because I was too busy enjoying time for needed and delicious rest. If I’m a little flabbier for naturally responding to my joys and environment, so be it. Plunging into a swimming pool is another one of my greatest pleasures, and we all deserve to feel the unselfconscious glory of being a body in water on a hot day.
I quit blaming myself for my body’s naturalness when I learned to love life—not just my life, but the existence of any life on earth. The more I appreciated living things and their living-thing-ness, the more merciful I was toward myself. Subsequently, I learned to love signs of life: eye wrinkles, rolls of fat, chubby cheeks, jiggly arms, laugh lines, stretch marks, cellulite dimples, and colorful veins…all signs of vitality, age, changes, growth, and aliveness. I smile when I think about bears who never have to learn any of this. They eat when they’re hungry, wander when they’re restless, and sleep when they’re tired. Somehow, after months in a comfy cave, they witness summer as the rest of us do: with energy and renewal. And it’s because they never questioned what their bodies needed.
When I catch myself questioning my needs, or scrutinizing my physical appearance, I remember what my soul experiences as a body: smelling the clothes of people I love, hearing cumbia music, applying blush, swimming in a cold lake, trying to stifle a laugh when it’s not appropriate to laugh, carrying an ice cream cone, twirling. The first time I realized all that was the first time I really felt at home here, in my body. I know what it’s like to hate this home, and I know what it’s like to love being in it. I know what it’s like to feel my body as a brutalist office building made of concrete walls and right angles, restrictions and doors where I didn’t know the entrance code. And I know what it’s like to be in my body as a cozy cabin on a lake. When I splash around a pool, more attentive to my soul’s elation than to the shape of my being in a bathing suit, I feel in touch with my human animal self, who experiences all the joys on earth through this natural, ever-changing body.
From <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/750381/how-to-be-a-living-thing-by-mari-andrew/" target="_blank">HOW TO BE A LIVING THING</a> by Mari Andrew, published by Penguin Life, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Mari Andrew.
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<title>History Shows us Why a Non-Partisan U.S. Military is Essential</title>
<link>https://time.com/7296041/non-partisan-military-is-essential/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7296041/non-partisan-military-is-essential/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan LaRochelle & Kate Flynn / Made by History]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Made by History]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[When partisanship threatened to politicize the military in the Clinton years, a moderate Republican helped maintain the military’s legitimacy.]]></description>
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<img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bill-Clinton-William-Cohen.jpg" alt="Bill Clinton and William Cohen"/>
Many of the Trump Administration’s recent actions, from its <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-u-s-law-says-about-trumps-deployment-of-active-duty-troops-to-los-angeles" target="_blank">deployment</a> of the <a href="https://time.com/7292305/la-protests-national-guard-crackdown-essay/" >National Guard</a> and the <a href="https://time.com/7293271/veterans-condemn-trump-military-power-national-guard-los-angeles-protests/" >Marines</a> to Los Angeles to its <a href="https://time.com/7294215/trump-military-parade-veterans-speak-out/" >military parade</a> on June 14—which <a href="https://time.com/7293698/trumps-parade-made-america-weaker/" >ostensibly</a> commemorated the U.S. Army’s 250th year, but also happened to fall on the president’s birthday—threaten to politicize America’s military and erode civil-military relations.
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In a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/silence-generals/683106/" target="_blank">speech at Fort Bragg</a>, President Donald Trump attacked several Democratic politicians, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and former President Joe Biden, at times urging the crowd to boo his opponents. Such actions can create the impression that the military is currently serving partisan, not national, interests.
Such perceptions are dangerous. As Stephen Saideman, an expert on civil-military relations and democratic backsliding <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-fort-bragg-military-republican-civil-war-rcna212215" target="_blank">notes</a>, “Impartial militaries are a key ingredient for stable democracy…Turning the U.S. military into an ally of one politician against his opponents is more than just another instance of democratic backsliding. It is a serious step toward ending American democracy.”
Protecting the legitimacy of the U.S. military is especially important during periods of partisan acrimony such as our current moment. History shows that American political leaders have tried to avoid dragging the military into partisan conflicts, because they understood the dangers. One episode from the 1990s reveals the importance of this practice, not only for safeguarding American democracy, but also for enabling the U.S. to take military action to protect American security in turbulent political times. It exposes why Trump might want to think twice about politicizing the military, despite the temptation.
Read More: <a href="https://time.com/7293535/trump-military-parade-schedule-protests/" >What To Know About Trump’s Military Parade</a>
On Dec. 16, 1998, President Bill Clinton launched <a href="https://swampland.time.com/2013/08/28/attacking-syria-updating-the-desert-fox-blueprint/" >Operation Desert Fox</a>, an air attack against Iraq, which had failed to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions and prevented U.N. weapons inspectors from accessing certain sites. The operation began the same day the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote to impeach the president over his scandal involving Monica Lewinsky.
Republicans, under the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, decried the administration’s campaign against Iraq, charging that Clinton was using Desert Fox to distract the nation from his pending impeachment. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott denounced the administration’s plan, <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/politics/121898impeach-iraq-lott.html" target="_blank">stating</a>, “Both the timing and the policy are subject to question.” House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas echoed Lott’s comments, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/12/17/us-strikes-at-iraqi-targets/c770e4e3-23e0-4f0e-84dc-fd0dc6c33365/" target="_blank">arguing</a>, “After months of lies, the President has given millions of people around the world reason to doubt that he has sent Americans into battle for the right reasons.”
Recognizing that he needed congressional support for the operation and to counter perceptions that he was using the military for his own political benefit, Clinton dispatched his Defense Secretary, William S. Cohen, to address these charges and win support from congressional Republicans.
Cohen was ideally positioned to provide credibility for the administration’s operation. He had spent 23 years in the House and Senate, accumulating a record marked by independent action, bipartisanship, and a commitment to truth. Perhaps most importantly, he was a Republican.
By the time he entered the Clinton Administration, Cohen had established a reputation in Washington as a straight shooter, and a serious, thoughtful, and diligent policymaker. He had been in the public eye since his earliest days in the House of Representatives, when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, he broke with most Republicans to advance articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis. In a speech on the House floor in 1974, he emphasized the value he placed on honesty, diligence, and fealty to the law. Amid charges that impeachment could rip the country apart, Cohen <a href="https://archive.org/details/CSPAN3_20140726_170700_Representative_William_Cohen_Opening_Statement/start/30/end/90?q=pat" target="_blank">remarked</a>, “I think what would tear the country apart would be to turn our backs on the facts and our responsibilities to ascertain them.” He emphasized that leaders needed to fulfill their commitment to the rule of law, proclaiming that “Our laws and our Constitution are and they must be more than a pious wish.”
In 1996, Cohen announced his retirement from the Senate after three terms, and Clinton made him Defense Secretary. As a member of the president’s foreign policy team, Cohen helped maintain the legitimacy of America’s military amid the partisan fireworks that defined the Clinton era.
As Clinton faced a decision about what to do over Iraq’s defiance of U.N. inspectors, he recognized that he would face questions about his motivations given that the House was moving toward impeaching him. According to <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Innocent-Abroad/Martin-Indyk/9781416594307" target="_blank">Martin Indyk</a>, who was serving as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, despite reassurance from senior foreign policy staff and cabinet members, Clinton worried, “There won’t be a single living soul in America who won’t believe I did this because of the impeachment.”
Read More: <a href="https://time.com/6213310/ken-starr-political-legacy/" >We Are Still Living in the Political Arena Ken Starr Helped Birth</a>
But Cohen helped sway the president. In a Dec. 16 meeting between Clinton and his foreign policy team, the defense secretary pointed out that Clinton had initiated the plan to bomb Iraq more than a month in advance. “Four weeks ago you outlined to the world five things that Saddam Hussein had to do to avoid a military strike. He didn’t measure up in any category.” Cohen urged the president to move ahead, despite the inevitable criticism from Republicans.
According to Indyk, Cohen’s background as a Republican <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Innocent-Abroad/Martin-Indyk/9781416594307" target="_blank">ensured</a> that “his voice carried weight with the president.” When Cohen <a href="https://www.amazon.com/War-Time-Peace-Clinton-Generals/dp/0743223233" target="_blank">argued</a> to the president that “If you don’t act here, the next argument will be that you’re paralyzed.” It proved persuasive, especially because Cohen was among the more dovish members of Clinton’s foreign policy team.
After Clinton announced the plan, Cohen and other foreign policy advisors convened a meeting with congressional leaders to demonstrate that the administration’s actions in Iraq had nothing to do with politics. 
Gingrich called on members to assemble in the well of the House of Representatives in an executive session. “The atmosphere,” according to <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/love-in-black-and-white-9780742558212/" target="_blank">Cohen</a>, “was sulfurous. A seething anger was visible on the faces of the members.”
But Cohen addressed the resentment and skepticism of his fellow Republicans head on. He <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-dec-17-mn-54990-story.html" target="_blank">stated</a> “I am prepared to place 30 years of public service on the line to say the only factor that was important in this decision is what is in the American people’s interest. There were no other factors.” Cohen reassured the Republican House members, and by the time the session ended, “most members were on their feet and signaling their approval with applause.”
Following Cohen’s meeting with Gingrich and members of the House, they delayed the impeachment vote, holding off until the final day of the bombing campaign on Dec. 19.
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The military respected Cohen’s willingness to protect the institution’s nonpartisan standing. Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre tells us that this moment was critical for “Insulating the [Defense] Department so that we were not put into awkward political things. It was making sure that we stayed really just a professional, nonpartisan organization. And it worked.”
This safeguarded the military’s credibility and enabled Clinton to protect American national security at a moment of partisan warfare.
The episode speaks to why Trump may not want to turn the military into a partisan player: doing so threatens the ability of a president to protect American national security. The bombing campaign against Iraq was only politically possible because Cohen had the credibility to assure his fellow Republicans and the nation that the military wasn’t acting to protect the president’s political interests.
Politicizing the military also endangers our <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-fort-bragg-military-republican-civil-war-rcna212215" target="_blank">democratic institutions</a>. If officers are promoted based on loyalty instead of merit, then our fighting forces will be less effective. Using the military to quash peaceful protestors endangers the legitimacy of our armed forces in the eyes of the American public. If the Pentagon loses the ability to credibly claim that it is serving national, not partisan, interests, it puts us all—<a href="https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/News/Display/Article/4129407/civil-military-relations-and-democratic-backsliding/#end4" target="_blank">and our democracy</a>—at risk.
Ryan LaRochelle is senior lecturer at the Cohen Institute for Leadership and Public Service at the University of Maine.
Kate Flynn graduated from the University of Maine with a B.A. in Political Science in 2024.
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<title>America’s Founders Valued Higher Education</title>
<link>https://time.com/7297240/higher-education-1776/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7297240/higher-education-1776/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bradford Vivian / Made by History]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Made by History]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=7297240</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Political attacks are undermining the system of higher education that the Founders cherished.]]></description>
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<a href="https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/political-attacks-higher-education" target="_blank">Political attacks on higher education</a> are escalating as we approach next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Members of the Trump Administration, state legislatures, and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation call universities “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/06/maga-republicans-us-universities" target="_blank">the enemy</a>” to justify <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/05/18/how-trumps-policies-could-affect-higher-ed-finances-more-than-covid/" target="_blank">severe funding cuts</a>, <a href="https://pen.org/report/educational-gag-orders/" target="_blank">censorship</a>, and <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/here-are-the-states-where-lawmakers-are-seeking-to-ban-colleges-dei-efforts" target="_blank">restrictions on academic freedom</a>.
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Yet, higher education has shaped the American experiment from the beginning. Enlightenment ideas studied in 18th-century universities provided the rationale for independence from Great Britain in 1776. Founders of the republic viewed higher learning as essential to its success. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson used ideas learned during his own college education to write the Declaration of Independence and establish one of the most consequential political doctrines in modern history: all people are created equal and possess inherent rights to a government based on their consent.
Jefferson studied <a href="https://www.wm.edu/about/history/tj/" target="_blank">at the College of William and Mary</a> in Williamsburg, Virginia, from 1760 to 1762 under his primary mentor, <a href="https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/william-small/" target="_blank">Dr. William Small</a>, professor of natural philosophy. Small introduced students from the privileged social classes who attended William and Mary to Enlightenment thought. He taught students like Jefferson intellectually revolutionary theories of empirical science, natural rights, and popular government.
Small’s influence over Jefferson was extensive. His teachings, <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-17-02-0324-0002" target="_blank">Jefferson said</a>, “probably fixed the destinies of my life” and provided “my first views of the expansion of science and of the system of things in which we are placed.”
References to “the system of things” as Jefferson understood it dominate early passages of <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript" target="_blank">the Declaration</a>. Jefferson rooted the Declaration in natural philosophy, or the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe without consideration of supernatural causes. This was Small’s specialty and the language of this academic orientation—such as “course of human events,” “powers of the earth,” and “Laws of Nature”—suffuses the document.
Read More: <a href="https://time.com/7212572/college-presidents-defy-trumps-war-on-higher-education/" >College Presidents Are Right to Defy Trump’s War on Higher Education</a>
Members of the Continental Congress of 1776 substantially revised Jefferson’s original draft. Some of these revisions indicate that members of congress, not only Jefferson, wanted the Declaration to reflect advanced education of the time. Benjamin Franklin made <a href="https://www.amrevmuseum.org/read-the-revolution/these-truths" target="_blank">a momentous revision</a> in this respect: he changed Jefferson’s original statement “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The word “sacred,” Franklin observed, suggested that those truths were matters of religious faith. The term “self-evident” invoked Isaac Newton.
In the language of Newtonian science, a “self-evident” truth needs no supernatural explanation. It is purely rational, empirically observable. Like Newton’s laws of the physical world, the final version of the Declaration posits a natural law of the political world: people will always seek new forms of government to protect their rights.
This decision to ground authority in reason, science, and secular humanism was profound at a time when European monarchs claimed that God had appointed them to the throne. In 1610, James I of England had <a href="https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Speech.pdf" target="_blank">declared</a> that kings were “God’s lieutenants upon earth” and “even by God himself, they are called gods.” By the 18th century, French monarchs professed to be deities on earth with “absolute” power.
Although the Declaration mentioned that people “are endowed by their Creator” with “unalienable Rights,” such statements vastly diminished the role of God as a source of rights and government compared to standard proclamations from European monarchs of the day. Jefferson’s words implied that people are free to believe that a “Creator” of their chosen faith is the source of their rights. The Declaration thus subtly rejected any official state religion as an element of American independence.
The phrase “Nature’s God” was even more pointed in the Declaration. It classified “God” as a passive possession of “Nature.” The true agent of political events, in this formulation, is nature. The sole reference to God in the Declaration emphasizes empiricism over religiosity. Notably, Small was the only non-clergy member of the William and Mary faculty when he mentored Jefferson.
The Declaration’s references to John Locke’s political treatises, which Small <a href="https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/william-small/" target="_blank">also taught</a> to Jefferson and other students at William and Mary, further underscored its rejection of supernatural authority. Jefferson declared rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” by imitating Locke’s argument that all men possess a right to “life, liberty, and estate [or property].”
In 1689, Locke examined natural rights in the second treatise of <a href="https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf" target="_blank">Two Treatises on Government</a>, but his first treatise established the full meaning of those rights. Throughout that first treatise, Locke excoriated the divine right of kings. For him, rights of “life, liberty, and property” were incompatible with a divine right to rule.
When Jefferson extended those rights beyond property-holders, replacing “estate” with the “pursuit of Happiness,” he invited a much larger portion of humanity to reject supernatural justifications for government. That invitation reflected the philosophy that inspired him in college.
In other words, the meaning of the Declaration of Independence depends on Enlightenment ideas that university-educated classes in general, and Jefferson in particular, enthusiastically studied.
After the country’s founding, many framers of the new republic advocated for institutions of higher learning to educate citizens in their rights and responsibilities. Doing so, they argued, would promote equality over aristocracy, knowledge over religious superstition, and self-determination over servitude.
Read More: <a href="https://time.com/7280839/history-government-influence-universities/" >The Complicated History of Government Influence Over Universities</a>
Jefferson was immensely proud of <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-01-02-0289" target="_blank">his role in founding</a> the University of Virginia—a publicly funded institution established to educate “the mass of citizens” in everything they needed for their individual wellbeing and responsible civic participation. Franklin did not attend college formally but <a href="https://www.upenn.edu/about/history" target="_blank">he was instrumental</a> in founding the College of Philadelphia, which later became the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout his life, Franklin advocated educational opportunities for working classes as well as the upper class. As president, Washington <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-address-congress-0" target="_blank">proposed</a> a publicly funded “national university” for the general diffusion of knowledge to promote unity in the new republic. These are only a few examples of the deep ties between higher education and the founding generation; <a href="https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/constitution/bio.htm" target="_blank">approximately half of them</a> attained some form of it—an impressively high level of advanced learning for the time.
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Like the political ideals of Jefferson and other founders, however, the ideal of higher education remained out of reach for many Americans. He and many signers of the Declaration <a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html" target="_blank">deemed</a> Black people especially incapable of advanced study. For much of its existence, U.S. higher education has been badly segregated by race, class, sex and gender, religion, and more.  
The personal prejudices of founders like Jefferson, however, do not diminish the power of the ideals that they forged from university study. Free Black people and enslaved Africans in the late 18th century recognized that the revolution was unfinished without equal access to civic institutions, particularly those of higher education. From the Jim Crow era to modern struggles for civil rights, historically disenfranchised communities (people of color, women, LGBTQ Americans, and more) have cited the Declaration in their petitions for desegregated higher education.
Universities have always been integral to American independence, from Jefferson’s words to later generations of Americans who pursued the full implications of those words. Defending institutions of higher education from increasingly authoritarian measures is an important way to safeguard not only academic freedom, but the legacy of 1776 as well.
Bradford Vivian is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State and author of <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/campus-misinformation-9780197531273?cc=us&lang=en&" target="_blank">Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education</a> (Oxford University Press).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. <a href="https://time.com/6317798/introducing-made-by-history-for-time/" >Learn more about Made by History at TIME here</a>. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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<title>The Making of an American Pope</title>
<link>https://time.com/7298083/pope-leo-xiv-robert-prevost-american/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7298083/pope-leo-xiv-robert-prevost-american/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Belinda Luscombe]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[How a kid from the Midwest became the leader of the Catholic Church]]></description>
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“I’m ticked,” says John Prevost, the retired Midwestern high school principal who is now, abruptly and without warning, globally famous and in demand. “I didn’t want to be, but I’m so angry.” He’s sitting at the table of Denise and Rob Utter, who have invited a bunch of people from their local Catholic parish, about 45 minutes south of Chicago, to talk about their friend and John’s kid brother Bob, whom they have known for decades, over pizza. Sometimes they call him Father Bob. Occasionally they remember to call him by his new name, <a href="https://time.com/7283865/pope-leo-robert-prevost/" >Pope Leo XIV</a>, but it’s unfamiliar to their tongue. One of the guests accidentally calls him Pope Pius.
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It’s probably not all fun and games to be the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people from very different cultures at a time when the Catholic Church is recovering from multiple scandals, riven from within, financially ensnarled, and, especially in the so-called developed nations, wrestling with a growing disinterest in the stuff it does best—ancient ritual, obligatory gathering, biblical exegesis. But it’s also a teensy bit of a drag to be his brother. 
Pope Leo XIV, 69, is the person to whom lots of people look when they want to come in contact with God. John Prevost, 71, is the person to whom they look when they want to reach the Pope. His mailbox is inundated. A local accounting firm sent him a 30-page pitch deck on how it would sort out the Vatican’s finances. Another opportunist sent him two baseballs, asking for them to be forwarded to His Holiness, newly anointed as the world’s most famous White Sox fan. “Dear Mr. Prevost, please have your brother sign these baseballs,” the accompanying letter said, according to its recipient. “You can keep one and run a fundraiser.” His mail carrier is sympathetic, advising him to hire someone to handle the paper blizzard.
It’s not just mail. His phone (a landline) rings well into the night. One recent warm day, Prevost was watering his yard when he noticed people at his front door. It was congregants from a now shuttered church in Chicago, St. Adalbert’s. “They had a two-page letter to send to the Pope in the hopes that he will convince the Cardinal to reopen the church—and they were not going to give up,” he says. Even Hollywood is getting in on the act. Prevost has already had a showbiz publicist offer to represent him, and a journalist stop by post-interview to give him tips on what is imprudent to say on live TV—such as his imminent travel plans.
Prevost’s travails are one of the many ripple effects of May 8, 2025, when the <a href="https://time.com/7282265/papal-conclaves-surprising-facts-history/" >conclave</a> made several types of history by handing the papal keys to a recently appointed <a href="https://time.com/7283744/cardinal-elects-pope-leo-robert-prevost/" >American Cardinal</a>. Robert Francis Prevost is not only the first <a href="https://time.com/7284812/pope-leos-augustinian-background/https://time.com/7284812/pope-leos-augustinian-background/" >Augustinian</a>, the first modern missionary, and the first devotee of Peeps and Hostess Snoballs to occupy the Throne of St. Peter, he’s also the first leader from a land where opportunism and entrepreneurship are admired only slightly less than the triune God. America is not used to having a local guy as the driving force of an institution with four times as much history and an even greater capacity to inspire fear and awe. But a deep dive into Pope Leo’s education and background shows that either by divine intervention, wise choices, luck, or all three, his path made him uniquely prepared for steering through the choppy waters facing the ancient denomination he now leads.
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As recently as three months ago, it was a truth universally acknowledged that there was not going to be a Pope from the U.S. anytime soon. The Americans were too dominant elsewhere, too loud, too confident, too greedy, too obsessed with individual liberties. They venerated the new and the shiny, preferring novel and homegrown faiths to the traditions of Europe or Asia. They were more concerned with LGBTQ rights and the ordination of women than the plight of the poor and dispossessed.
But if ever there were going to be an American Pope, people could have predicted he’d come from the Midwest. “He’s Midwestern nice,” says Father Paul Galetto, the pastor of St. Paul church in Philadelphia, of the fellow Augustinian he has known since his 20s. “He listens to you. He’s pleasant. He’s not going to jump in the middle of your conversation, tell you you’re wrong. That’s a great advantage for him.”
Even the much prevailed-upon John Prevost can’t stay ticked for long. A few evenings before our dinner party, someone left a package at his doorstep. It was a Wordle cap. (He plays Wordle with his Vatican-based brother every day; he in English, the Pope in Italian.) “And then here comes the card: ‘Dear John, in a world where there are so many evil people right now, you are a breath of fresh air, thank you,’” says Prevost. “‘We so appreciate your sense of humor and your kind words.’ And that changed my attitude. People are watching me, so I’d better not be crabby.”
<hr/>
It was clear from very early on where the youngest of Mildred and Louis Prevost’s three sons was heading. “The only thing that was in question until eighth grade was, would it be an order priest, or would it be a diocesan priest?” says John. (The former belongs to a brotherhood, while the latter serves a church.) “Nothing was forced on him. That was his decision to make.” The family were eager Catholics: his mother, a school librarian, sang in the choir, as did young Robert. They had relatives who were nuns. Before he became a high school principal and district superintendent, Louis, who served in the Navy during World War II, had considered being a priest. His sons’ career choices mirrored their father’s: Louis, the oldest, named after his dad, went into the Navy. John was a principal of Catholic high schools. And Robert took the path his father might have taken.
<figure class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-story-showcase"><img decoding="async" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/american-pope-father-bob-03.jpg" alt="Primary image"/><img decoding="async" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/american-pope-father-bob-02.jpg" alt="Pope Childhood home"/></figure>
Apart from his devotion to the church, and the fact that study came easily to him, Robert was a regular kid, riding his bike around the streets of the south Chicago working-class suburb of Dolton by day, playing flashlight tag by night, and occasionally squeezing the glowing goo out of fireflies and wiping it on an older brother. It didn’t seem odd that he occasionally set up a pretend Communion table on the ironing board and gave his family play sacraments. John confirms that even while very young, Robert had a reputation among the neighbors, with one elderly lady telling him as they played in the yard that he’d be Pope one day.
When young men showed an inclination toward entering the priesthood in 1967 Chicago—a city that was Catholic enough that locals identified themselves by their parish rather than their neighborhood—they’d be visited by representatives of the various orders, football-scout style, to see where they might fit in. “I remember sitting around a table each time someone was coming, and they would come, and then everyone would ask questions,” says John Prevost. “We had to sit there and be nice.” The vocational director who persuaded eighth-grade Robert to give the Augustinians a spin was Dudley Day, a Catholic of the old school, whose views were conservative enough that he later parted ways with his local church over a disagreement about modernization.
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St. Augustine, the minor seminary in Holland, Mich., where Robert Prevost completed his secondary education, was the kind of place that sorted the priests from the merely pious. About 50 boys were accepted every year, and about a dozen graduated four years later. “It was tough; it was rigorous,” says Father Becket Franks, who was the year below the future Pope at school. Students were up at 6 a.m. and had scheduled activities until about 8:30 p.m., when they had a few hours of free time before retiring to a large dormitory lined with beds. There were three Masses a day and a lot of time in close quarters together.
Prevost, who was co-valedictorian and yearbook editor among other accolades, had a reputation for being a good person to turn to for help with homework, especially math or languages. “He was the smartest person I think we ever met,” says Franks, who is now a Benedictine monk and chaplain. “He had mastered French by the middle of high school.” Students were required to undertake certain extracurricular activities (Prevost was in the choir with Franks—both sing tenor—and played tennis) and to keep up their academic performance, but mostly the school’s focus was how to live in community. “Everything that we went through at St. Augustine Seminary High School prepared Robert Prevost for his position,” says Franks. “Not just education but dealing with people and learning patience and how to behave.”
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From Michigan, Prevost went to <a href="https://time.com/7284022/pope-villanova-leo-xiv-robert-prevost/" >Villanova</a>, the Augustinian university just outside Philadelphia. It was in Pennsylvania that he really developed his love of driving, which according to two contemporaries, he would do while reading a book. He and three friends once asked Father Bill Sullivan, who oversaw would-be friars, if they could drive to a church dance in Chicago—some 12 hours away—and be back the following afternoon. In January. Their request was declined. “He just was an easy guy to be with,” says Sullivan, now a parochial vicar at St. Jude’s, the church the Utters belong to in New Lenox, Ill. “He made friends. People really listened to him.” Prevost majored in math and minored in philosophy, but it was pretty much the end of his study of anything not directly related to his faith. In September 1977, shortly after he finished his coursework at Villanova, he made the first round of vows to join the Augustinian order.
<hr/>
At 22, Robert Prevost was committing his life to an establishment in the midst of generational change. The Catholic Church of his parents had been altered profoundly by the Second Vatican Council, which released a series of reports in the mid-’60s, loosening up some of the church’s strictures and establishing a series of new procedures and rules that allowed, among other things, Mass to be said in languages that were not Latin and pastoral care for those who are divorced. One result of these changes was a call for a new style of urban and more ecumenical Catholic university. Prevost joined an institution founded on those principles.
The Catholic Theological Union (CTU), housed in the former Aragon Hotel, was a decade old when Prevost arrived. Two dozen or so men’s orders studied there, as well as women and laypeople, and the school had female professors and a rabbi on staff. What it didn’t have was any students on the way to becoming diocesan priests. (They trained in the more palatial Mundelein Seminary outside Chicago.) The mix of cultures, genders, and orders and the shedding of hierarchy—professors were called by their first names—made it an exciting place to be. “It was, in a certain sense, the best of what religious community can become,” says Sister Dianne Bergant, 88, who taught there for 45 years.
Bergant marveled at the opportunities she was given. “This is going to sound like an exaggeration, but I do not ever remember being minimized by my male colleagues because I was a woman,” she says. “Women were considered to be theologians in the same way as men.” She had Prevost in two classes, Old Testament and Pentateuch, and doesn’t remember him at all but can tell from her class notes that he did well and always turned in his assignments on time. Each student had a spiritual director, and Prevost chose Sister Lyn Osiek, who also supervised his theological-reflection class. “Calm and steady,” says Osiek. “Those are the two words that I would say about him. It was just like nothing fazed him. He was really a person who was at peace with himself.”
<figure class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/american-pope-father-bob-06.jpg" alt="Robert Prevost Pope Leo" alignment="original-size-image"/></figure>
At the end of the day students from a religious order went back to the houses of their communities where professors from the order also lived and dined and prayed with them. About a dozen Augustinians lived together in the St. John Stone Friary in Hyde Park, with others coming and going. While it’s safe to say it was collegial, it was not one of the party houses. “Sometimes we were invited up to different parts of the building where the other communities were to celebrate various things,” says Prevost’s classmate <a href="https://time.com/7284523/how-chicago-shaped-pope-leo-xiv-essay/" >Father Mark Francis</a>, now superior general of the Viatorians. “The Passionists, for example, would always have a Kentucky Derby Day. And the Precious Blood always had kegs of beer.” Bergant confirms this: “Those Precious Blood men put on good parties.”
(The St. John Stone Friary has been in the news over the years because a priest accused of abusing at least 13 minors was allowed to move in there in 2000. A victims’ group filed a <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/67f051268ff9667a0f3091d2/t/67f4da168e3f2740e0f5dca8/1744099864179/Prevost_VELM+Complaint_3.25.25.pdf" target="_blank">complaint</a> with the Vatican in March, alleging that Prevost “endangered the safety” of children by allowing the priest to live near an elementary school. “To our knowledge, Pope Leo XIV has acted in accordance with Church policies in every abuse case,” the <a href="https://abc7chicago.com/post/survivors-network-abused-priests-snap-say-filed-complaint-cardinal-robert-prevost-weeks-before-election/16486859/" target="_blank">Archdiocese of Chicago said in a statement</a> in May, “and has consistently expressed his compassion for survivors of this crime and sin.” A lawyer for Midwest Augustinians has suggested the location was selected because of the supervision the priest would receive. The complaint also alleged that Prevost failed to properly handle three women’s claims of sexual abuse while he was bishop in Peru in 2022; the Vatican has said Prevost <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/world/americas/pope-leo-catholic-church-sexual-abuse-peru-bishop-prevost.html" target="_blank">followed church protocol</a> and sent the results of an initial investigation to Rome. The Vatican closed its own investigation in August 2023, though the diocese later reopened the case.)
The scholarship at CTU was both rigorous and progressive. One of the required classes, on Christology, had two versions, one taught by a professor trained by Edward Schillebeeckx, the respected Belgian theologian who promulgated the idea that the true role of the Christian was not to ascribe to a certain set of beliefs but to right injustice as Jesus did, and the other trained by the equally respected German theologian Karl Rahner, whose emphasis was on the mystical nature of Christ and thus of all humans.
“We were not trained in a very doctrinaire, rigid kind of theology,” says Francis, who served a stint as CTU’s president. “One of the strengths of the school was the missiological part. The question of religion and culture was very important in terms of how we have to recalibrate things if you’re moving from one group to another, one culture to another.” Many of CTU’s graduates became missionaries, including one of Prevost’s contemporaries, Ezechiele Ramin, who was murdered in 1985 in Brazil as he tried to broker peace between the corporate landowners and the local landless farmers. There is a campaign to have him beatified.
Bishop Daniel Turley, who lived in the Augustinian friary for a few months in the late ’70s, remembers Prevost as being particularly committed to the idea of doing missionary work. In general, the Augustinians are considered a missionary order who teach and preach. <a href="https://time.com/7286397/history-saint-augustine-pope-leo-xiv/" >St. Augustine</a> left Europe and moved to North Africa with a handful of other devotees to live out a life saturated by their beliefs while also absorbed in the needs of their neighbors. Augustinians don’t stay in one place like the Benedictines, but move around, bringing their gifts to different places, but always among other Augustinians. The current Pope once described the order as “brothers and friends whose lives and witness truly make a difference.”
Wherever Prevost has gone, he has been among men who had been trained as he was and committed to sharing everything. Even when he was a Cardinal with his own papal apartment, he went to the Augustinian curia for meals and Mass every day, and once a week to play tennis; he dined there at least twice in the early weeks of his papacy. “He was very interested in what I was doing in Peru,” says Turley, who worked there for 52 years. While other students were heading to their rooms to study, Prevost wanted to talk about what people in Turley’s diocese needed. “Of all of them, he was the most community minded,” says Turley.
<hr/>
If Prevost spent most of his first quarter-century less than 800 miles from his home, the decades that followed would take him quite a bit farther. After he graduated from CTU and took his solemn vows in 1981, he was invited to study canon law in Rome. “Americans had stopped going to study in Rome,” says Galetto, who was one of the first to return. “We thought American theology was better, more modern. It wasn’t based on patristics, but more on psychology and sociology.” When he arrived with Robert Dodaro, his co-valedictorian from way back at high school, neither speaking Italian, Galetto was their guide. <a href="https://time.com/3761743/pope-john-paul-ii-history/" >John Paul II</a>, now St. John Paul II, had just been elected, a youngish Polish Pope emerging at the same time as Lech Walesa’s Polish trade union, Solidarity. “There was this electric feel,” says Galetto. “Large crowds were coming to the audiences.”
While Prevost was studying a historic and doctrinaire subject, essentially the legal framework for the Catholic Church’s operations, at the Angelicum, a 440-year-old school where John Paul II had also studied, he was surrounded by the excitement of a new era. The Augustinian house was across St. Peter’s Square from the Vatican, and it was filled with men from around the world. Galetto remembers Prevost really enjoying the global nature of the brotherhood. “When you study in Rome, you realize that the church is really universal,” says Galetto. “Many of the Augustinians who are in the United States, we just think that the American problems are the church’s problems, but there’s so much more than that.”
<figure class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/american-pope-father-bob-07.jpg" alt="" alignment="original-size-image"/></figure>
Because of his legal expertise, Prevost was asked to become personal secretary to a bishop in Chulucanas in northern Peru. But he arrived in the aftermath of deadly El Niño floods and set to work helping rebuild the region. “When you’re a missionary, you just learn how to do everything, from electronics to auto mechanics,” said then Cardinal Prevost during a visit to St. Jude’s last year. It was not a seamless process. There might still not have been an American Pope if one of Prevost’s Augustinian brethren hadn’t saved him from being electrocuted with a well-aimed tackle on a roof after the young missionary picked up the wrong two wires.
While Pope Leo owes his formal education almost solely to the northern hemisphere, much of his shaping as a practitioner occurred in Peru. “Those are the life experiences that give you life to continue on, that nourish you,” says Turley, who was Prevost’s superior when he arrived. “As a young priest, to go through that, and see how beautiful it is, how poor people can be, and yet all of the goodness and the power of people when they come together, and the wonderful things that they can do if you start breaking down prejudices and division.” Prevost said as much at St. Jude’s: “The part of ministry that most shaped my life is Peru.”
After a decade in South America, it must have been quite an adjustment to take on the role of head of his home Augustinian province, which stretches throughout the Midwest and into Canada. One of his duties as provincial prior was to minister to Augustinian schools, and he was called in to help out St. Rita of Cascia High School in Chicago. The students have a retreat every year, and the school likes to invite priests who are unfamiliar to the boys to hear confession so they don’t feel awkward. In 2000, Prevost was one of those priests. “I had gone to confession several times before, but it was like two minutes, let me get out of here as quickly as I can,” says Patrick “PJ” McCarthy. “But this was more of just a conversation.” The two sat knee to knee in the darkened room and talked about underage drinking and sibling rivalry, among other things. “He was not judging me, and he was just very open,” recalls McCarthy. Mike Stawski, who was on the retreat as a student leader, noticed right away that Prevost was different from most priests. “What was so fascinating about him was that almost immediately, we forgot that he wasn’t with us the whole time. He was so welcoming, so caring for what we were doing.”
After two years, Prevost was voted in as the head, or prior general, of all Augustinians, based again in Rome. He traveled a lot, encouraging the other 2,800 or so Augustinian friars around the world. But priors general can serve only two terms, and in 2013, Prevost found himself back in Chicago, back at CTU, helping guide Augustinians in training, work usually done by much younger men. “It’s like having the CEO of an international organization retire from being CEO, but yet be employed by the organization for passing out mail,” says Bergant, the Old Testament scholar.
If Prevost felt it was a comedown, he said nothing to his friends. That’s the Father Bob the folks of New Lenox talk about, never too busy or too big for his community. After Father Mike Schweifler had a heart transplant on Easter in 2005, the women of St. Jude’s who were looking after him struggled to get his brethren to visit. But Prevost, who was prior general, came several times. “Sometimes he was just on a stopover and he drove here from O’Hare for a few hours or a few minutes,” says Denise Utter. “And then he’d go back to O’Hare, because he had a connecting flight.”
<figure class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/american-pope-father-bob-01.jpg" alt="Pope Leo" alignment="original-size-image"/></figure>
At the same time Prevost’s friends want to make clear that he’s not overly reverent. He laughed when they showed him Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment about his election on YouTube. When they get together for pizza (he favors mushroom and sausage), “we mostly don’t talk about faith-based things at all,” says Utter. Lisa Salva and her husband Rich visited Prevost in Rome in 2011, and he took them through a back door to St. Peter’s Basilica for Mass so that they emerged right under the altar. “When I walked up that spiral staircase, I looked up and I went, ‘Jesus Christ!’” recalls Salva. “And he goes, ‘That’s a good reaction.’” The current Pope also knows his way around a good clean Midwestern joke, at least according to his brother. One of the last jokes he told <a href="https://time.com/5762436/pope-francis-dies-obituary/" >Pope Francis</a> was about going to the doctor because his arm hurt in two places, says John Prevost. “And the Pope said, ‘Really? What did the doctors say?’ And Bob said, ‘Doctors told me: Don’t go to those places.’”
Prevost’s return to Chicago also turned out to be something of a stopover, because in 2014, Francis, whom Prevost had met when the <a href="https://time.com/7280693/pope-francis-funeral-legacy-celebrated-catholic-church-transformation/" >late Pontiff</a> was still Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, asked him to return to Peru, this time as bishop of Chiclayo, a large metropolis in the north. The diocese was dominated by clerics who were members of Opus Dei, a very conservative sect of Catholicism, and Prevost, who had to become a Peruvian citizen to become a bishop, was charged with moving it back to the middle. “So you had some resistance to the new bishop,” says Turley. “But those [Opus Dei adherents] who were in control quickly lost control, because the people really wanted someone who was open and welcoming.”
The challenges weren’t only from within the church. “Right after he became a bishop, we had the tremendous problem of Venezuela,” says Turley, who oversaw the Catholic Church’s response to the 1.5 million asylum seekers accepted into Peru after the Venezuelan economy and civil society began to collapse in 2014. They needed housing, jobs, and medical help. “One of the best bishops to work with in dealing with migrants was none other than Bishop Robert Prevost,” says Turley. “His diocese was so well organized to take care of them.”
The combination of Prevost’s formal but reformist education and long fieldwork among people with very little but each other to insulate them from hardship was perhaps what drew Pope Francis to swiftly raise his standing at the Vatican as the Pontiff saw the dying of the light. In Hope, Francis’ last book, he wrote that for the church to grow, it had to focus less on conversion and more on attracting people through the way Christians lived, and therefore for high-ranking church officials, “the title of ‘servant’—here in the sense of ministry—should obscure that of ‘eminence.’”
<figure class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-story-showcase"><img decoding="async" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/american-pope-father-bob-910.jpg" alt="Pope Leo"/><img decoding="async" src="" alt="Secondary image"/></figure>
In 2023, Prevost was made a Cardinal and moved back to Vatican City, working in successively more prominent roles, until the announcement of his election in May. “He’s been formed in the kind of church that is forward-thinking, missionary in its outlook, globally aware, and then, especially in Peru, very deeply formed by his accompaniment of people who were the poorest,” says Sister Barbara Reid, the current president of CTU. “You can hear it in everything he says.”
<hr/>
For many, it can be hard to believe the Catholic Church has any relevance today. All those ornate empty buildings with men in robes waving smoke around elderly congregants, preaching homilies with references to activities as quaint as shepherding and sowing, and praying to dead saints whose miracles are now forgotten or considered dubious. The first American Pope officially comes from the Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel, which seems almost as fantastical as coming from the Gladden Fields of Middle Earth. The church of his childhood, St. Mary of the Assumption, is abandoned, its stained-glass windows (one displaying the papal keys) uncontemplated.
But every time one expression of faith dies, a new one seems to rise up offering something more in keeping with the needs of the era. History records the first Pope Leo as an adept diplomat; he’s credited with persuading Attila the Hun not to sack Rome. The current Pope Leo has already offered Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky a place to negotiate. In the wake of the U.S. bombing of Iran, he urged world leaders to “stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss.”
When Galetto saw his fellow Augustinian <a href="https://time.com/7284004/robert-prevost-new-pope-leo-vatican-photos/" >step onto the balcony</a>, he paused for a moment to reflect on the mysterious ways of the universe. “We started at the same place 40 years ago. Here I am stapling papers together at a parish because we’re having a prayer service,” he says, “and he’s going to be talking to Putin about the war in Ukraine. God had a plan for him, and God had a plan for me.”
Bob Prevost might never climb behind the wheel of a car again. But Pope Leo might be able to drive something. Already inquiries about becoming an Augustinian novitiate are up fivefold from last year. Augustinian websites have been flooded with traffic. And another type of visitor has been showing up on John Prevost’s doorstep: people who feel that an American Pope is a sign. “Because of my brother, they are going back to the church,” says the older Prevost. “They say, ‘I’ve been away for a long time. And I’d like to come back.’”
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<title>Shuttering of USAID Will Lead to Millions of Deaths Around the World: Studies</title>
<link>https://time.com/7298994/usaid-deaths-studies-estimates-foreign-aid-hiv-aids-malaria-sudan/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7298994/usaid-deaths-studies-estimates-foreign-aid-hiv-aids-malaria-sudan/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Chad de Guzman]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 09:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[Multiple studies have estimated millions will die annually as a result of the Trump Administration’s closure of the foreign-aid agency.]]></description>
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<img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/usaid-closed.jpg" alt="Trump And Musk's USAID 'Shut Down' Threat Opens Door For China"/>
President John F. Kennedy <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-foreign-aid-1" target="_blank">said</a> in 1961 that “there is no escaping” what he described as America’s “moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations; our economic obligations as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people, as a nation no longer dependent upon the loans from abroad that once helped us develop our own economy; and our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
He was speaking to Congress about foreign aid and later that year would establish through <a href="https://archives.federalregister.gov/issue_slice/1961/11/7/10467-10472.pdf" target="_blank">executive order</a> what has since been known as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which helped make the U.S. the world’s largest foreign aid provider. 
For more than six decades, USAID has helped dozens of low- and middle-income countries, including conflict-stricken ones, to improve access to food, water, health care, and education. It’s helped stop disease outbreaks, revolutionize agricultural practices, and in some cases, promote democracy.
But on Tuesday, USAID shutters its doors for good.
The agency’s <a href="https://time.com/7211200/usaid-foreign-aid-freeze-trump-rubio/" >dismantling</a> began just days after President Donald Trump returned to the White House at the start of this year. Tech billionaire and <a href="https://time.com/7298982/musk-trump-big-beautiful-bill-debt-primary-republicans-america-party/" >one-time Trump ally Elon Musk</a>, who was spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency, singled out the agency as a locus of “<a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885777925158437177" target="_blank">corruption and waste</a>,” despite the fact that it constituted just about 0.5% of government spending.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took the reins of the agency in February, <a href="https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1899021361797816325" target="_blank">said</a> in March that more than four-fifths of USAID programs were cancelled, and the approximately 1,000 that remained would be absorbed by the State Department by <a href="https://www.state.gov/on-delivering-an-america-first-foreign-assistance-program/" target="_blank">July 1</a>, even amid <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5332274/judge-ruling-usaid-shutdown" target="_blank">court battles</a> about the constitutionality of USAID’s closure.
On the eve of USAID’s final day, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama gathered with former staffers as well as U2 singer and humanitarian Bono on a video call. Obama described USAID’s gutting as a “travesty” and a “tragedy,” according to the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/obama-bono-bush-usaid-trump-950f7708c01502c759f1c10524752b8e" target="_blank">Associated Press</a>.
“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work,” Bush told the USAID staffers. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you.”
Trump, evidently, does not.
Just how many lives won’t be saved as a result of the closure of USAID has been the subject of several studies and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/health/usaid-cuts-deaths-infections.html" target="_blank">projections</a>. 
On Monday, medical research journal <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext" target="_blank">The Lancet</a> estimated that USAID prevented the deaths of more than 90 million people between 2001 to 2021. The study, conducted by researchers from Brazil, Mozambique, and Spain, forecasted that the defunding of the agency could lead to some 14 million deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths of children and babies under the age of 5.
Here are some of the biggest estimated impacts of the U.S. shirking Kennedy’s “obligations.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Hundreds of thousands of HIV-AIDS deaths</h2>
To fight against HIV globally, President Bush launched PEPFAR, or the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, in 2003. The program supports some 20.6 million people with HIV worldwide, including 566,000 children, through providing anti-retroviral therapy (ART) to control the infection. The program also provided HIV testing services to 83.8 million people in 2024.
USAID was PEPFAR’s <a href="https://www.state.gov/about-us-pepfar" target="_blank">main implementing agency</a>, and while the State Department is seeking <a href="https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/FY-2026-State-CBJ-.pdf" target="_blank">$2.9 billion</a> in funding to continue HIV-AIDS programs, it’s far lower than the <a href="https://2021-2025.state.gov/pepfar-world-aids-day-2023/update-on-pepfars-programming-budget-for-2024-2025/" target="_blank">at least $4.7 billion</a> budget PEPFAR had.
A <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11959925/" target="_blank">study</a> published in the Retrovirology journal in March said that the suspension of USAID funding could hamper access to ART and cause a potential resurgence of up to <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11959925/" target="_blank">630,000</a> HIV-AIDS-related deaths annually, with <a href="https://data.unaids.org/pub/globalreport/2008/20080715_fs_ssa_en.pdf" target="_blank">sub-Saharan Africa</a> most affected.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Millions of malaria cases</h2>
USAID has invested <a href="https://oig.usaid.gov/node/7478" target="_blank">$9 billion</a> to help tackle malaria, the mosquito-borne illness that is preventable and curable but causes millions of deaths in Africa every year, since the inception of the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) in 2005.
An <a href="https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=interval_minutes&order=asc" target="_blank">impact tracker</a> by Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeller and health economist Dr. Brooke Nichols and Amsterdam-based product manager Eric Moakley forecast almost 10 million additional cases of malaria globally—of which an estimated 7 million would affect children—in just one year due to USAID funding cuts.
The tracker also only considered African countries that were part of PMI and did not include countries in Asia that have also been supported by USAID. “Thus we may be underestimating the effect of PMI’s cessation,” it said.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Millions of Sudanese to lose access to ‘lifesaving’ health services</h2>
The war-torn northeast African country of Sudan was among those worst hit by USAID’s suspension. <a href="https://www.rescue.org/article/crisis-sudan-what-happening-and-how-help" target="_blank">More than half</a> of its 50 million population is in need of humanitarian assistance as residents suffer from famine and disease outbreaks amid ongoing conflict. The World Health Organization estimates that 5 million Sudanese people may lose access to “lifesaving” health services as a result of the cuts, according to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/29/sudan-usaid-funding-cuts-trump-musk/" target="_blank">Washington Post</a>.
Naomi Ruth Pendle, a lecturer at the University of Bath in the U.K., wrote for <a href="https://theconversation.com/usaid-the-human-cost-of-donald-trumps-aid-freeze-for-a-war-torn-part-of-sudan-254215" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> in April that the sudden suspension of USAID is “is set to make the famine in Sudan the deadliest for half a century.”
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<title>‘Don’t Bankrupt America’: Musk Vows to Campaign Against Republicans Who Support Trump’s Debt-Raising Megabill</title>
<link>https://time.com/7298982/musk-trump-big-beautiful-bill-debt-primary-republicans-america-party/</link>
<comments>https://time.com/7298982/musk-trump-big-beautiful-bill-debt-primary-republicans-america-party/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Chad de Guzman]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[The tech billionaire warned that members of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending but vote for Trump’s bill “will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”]]></description>
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<img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/elon-musk.jpg" alt="Tesla CEO Elon Musk looks on during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C. on April 30, 2025."/>
President Donald Trump has made clear that any Republican member of Congress who opposes his sprawling tax-and-spending package dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will face his wrath. He launched a campaign to primary <a href="https://time.com/7296692/thomas-massie-trump-mr-no-contrarian-obbb-iran-primary-campaign/" >Rep. Thomas Massie</a> of Kentucky and suggested he would do the same against <a href="https://time.com/7298637/thom-tillis-retirement-reelection-north-carolina-senator-trump-republican-obbb/" >Sen. Thom Tillis</a> of North Carolina, before Tillis announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection.
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Now, however, another powerful political <a href="https://time.com/7177802/elon-musk-donald-trump-2024-election/" >kingmaker</a> has vowed to challenge any Republican who supports the bill.
“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame!” tech billionaire and former close ally of Trump Elon Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1939776586989150590" target="_blank">posted</a> on X. “And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”
Musk spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump in 2024 but <a href="https://time.com/7287098/elon-musk-trump-political-spending/" >said</a> in May that he had “done enough” and was going to do “a lot less in the future.” He added at the time, however, “if I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it.”
Musk posted his warning, among many posts on the topic, on Monday night as Senators continued to vote on a series of amendments to the megabill, which estimates say will add trillions to the <a href="https://time.com/7286837/what-trumps-big-beautiful-bill-would-do-to-the-national-debt/" >national deficit</a> and lead to cuts to <a href="https://time.com/7298772/medicaid-big-beautiful-bill-health-insurance/" >Medicaid</a>.
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<div class="time-embed time-embed__twitter" data-provider="twitter" data-url="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1939861925514682487" ><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">Anyone who campaigned on the PROMISE of REDUCING SPENDING , but continues to vote on the BIGGEST DEBT ceiling increase in HISTORY will see their face on this poster in the primary next year <a href="https://t.co/w13Qkm2e1A" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/w13Qkm2e1A</a>— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1939861925514682487?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">July 1, 2025</a></blockquote></div>
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Reigniting a <a href="https://time.com/7293095/elon-musk-donald-trump-regret-went-too-far-posts-relationship/" >once-regretted feud</a> with the President and Republicans that exploded after <a href="https://time.com/7289045/musk-trump-big-beautiful-bill-national-debt-deficit-disappointed-doge/" >Musk left a temporary government role</a> in the Administration in May, Musk reiterated a prior idea he’d floated of starting a <a href="https://time.com/7291937/elon-musk-new-political-party-the-america-party-idea/" >new political party</a>.
“It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country – the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” he <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1939762942851027127" target="_blank">posted</a> on X. “Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people.” In another post, he <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1939806847504105683" target="_blank">said</a> that if the bill actually passes, the “America Party will be formed the next day” to provide “an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty so that the people actually have a VOICE.”
When former Rep. Justin Amash, who <a href="https://time.com/5696967/justin-amash-2/" >left the Republican Party in 2019</a> and opted not to run for reelection in 2020 amid criticisms of Trump, asked Musk to support his friend and fellow libertarian-minded conservative Massie, whom Trump has set his sights on ousting from the House, Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1939823052566708554" target="_blank">responded</a> “I will.”
“The establishment is working to primary him because he’s a genuine fiscal conservative and opposes the Big, Bloated Scam,” Amash said of Massie.
Trump took to his own Truth Social platform Monday night to lash out at Musk, suggesting that the wealthiest man in the world, who is also the CEO of electric-car company Tesla and space-technology company SpaceX, is self-interested.
“Elon Musk knew, long before he so strongly Endorsed me for President, that I was strongly against the EV Mandate,” Trump <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114776149269773065" target="_blank">posted</a>, referring to <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/trump-says-he-ended-the-ev-mandate-what-does-that-mean/" target="_blank">policies</a> that incentivize—though don’t require—the manufacture and purchase of electric vehicles. “It is ridiculous, and was always a major part of my campaign. Electric cars are fine, but not everyone should be forced to own one. Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE,” Trump added. Musk’s companies are estimated to receive about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/" target="_blank">$38 billion</a> in government contracts and subsidies. “Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this?” Trump added, referencing the Department of Government Efficiency that Musk spearheaded. “BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”
Musk previously dismissed Trump when the President made a similar claim about the former White House adviser’s priorities. “Whatever. Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!),” he <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1930660788739698878" target="_blank">posted</a> on X in early June.
Over the weekend, however, Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1939390933205991585" target="_blank">posted</a> that “A massive strategic error is being made right now to damage solar/battery that will leave America extremely vulnerable in the future.” The bill threatens to end <a href="https://apnews.com/article/senate-clean-energy-tax-credits-trump-87f7ac850247f8a183d7c7933645b331" target="_blank">billions of dollars</a> in green-energy tax credits, which some say could decimate the country’s wind and solar industries.
Musk reposted on Monday a <a href="https://x.com/SenThomTillis/status/1939751507143881163" target="_blank">post by Tillis</a>, the <a href="https://time.com/7298833/thom-tillis-one-big-beautiful-bill/" >Republican Senator</a> who announced on Sunday that he planned to retire at the end of his term and would be free from expected deference to party leaders, which backed Musk. “Folks, @ElonMusk is 100% right, and he understands this issue better than anyone,” Tillis posted. “We should take his warnings seriously. We can’t let Communist China become the long-term winner.”
On Tuesday morning as Trump was heading to the so-called <a href="https://time.com/7297505/florida-alligator-alcatraz-migrant-detention-center/" >Alligator Alcatraz</a> detention center in Florida, he <a href="https://x.com/Emilylgoodin/status/1940020592360509908" target="_blank">said</a> “I don’t know. We’ll have to take a look,” when asked by a reporter if he would deport Musk, before adding: “We might have to put DOGE on Elon. You know what DOGE is? DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.”
Still, Musk insists that his main focus is the national deficit. “All I’m asking is that we don’t bankrupt America,” he <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1939912881098957160" target="_blank">posted</a> as Senators continued to vote on amendments early Tuesday.
The White House has <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/the-one-big-beautiful-bill-slashes-deficits-national-debt-while-unleashing-economic-growth/" target="_blank">maintained</a> that the bill “actually reduces the debt burden on future generations,” claiming that it “will unleash robust, real economic growth and restore fiscal sanity in America.”
But a new estimate from the nonpartisan <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61534" target="_blank">Congressional Budget Office</a> released on Sunday showed that the Senate version of the bill would add nearly $3.3 trillion to the deficit over a decade.
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