One of the first checks ever recorded was written in the 11th century, in a marketplace in Basra, in present-day Iraq. There, a merchant issued a sakk: written instructions to his bank to make a payment from his account.
A thousand years later, this form of payment is finally disappearing. Target said it would stop accepting checks as of July 15; other retailers, including Whole Foods and Old Navy, have already stopped accepting them. It’s just the latest sign that the form of payment is nearing obsolescence: The average American writes just one check a year, down from 3 in 2016, according to a Federal Reserve survey.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“I absolutely think that we are moving to a world of ‘check zero,’” says Scott Anchin, vice president at the Independent Community Bankers of America. “As we see new payment methods come to the fore, we see new opportunities for consumers and businesses to move away from check usage.”
From a security perspective, this is a positive. Checks are not particularly safe ways to send money. They have your account and routing numbers on them, sensitive information that criminals could use. They can be stolen in the mail and changed to be made out to different people or for different amounts. For instance, in April 2023, a U.S. Postal Service employee stole $24 million in checks from the mail and sold them through Telegram, a popular messaging app, according to a federal indictment in the Western District of North Carolina.
Read More: Why Mail Theft Is On the Rise
Flawed as checks are, though, they haven’t gone away entirely because many people still depend on them, especially to pay rent and utility bills. But experts say a new kind of payment may finally change that.
Instant Payments Come to the Fore
The newest type of payment— the first to be introduced in the U.S. since the ACH network in the 1970s—is called instant payments, in which money moves from your account to another account immediately. You may think you already use instant payments with services like Venmo, but you don’t—behind the scenes, the money can take some time to move, and it’s not coming directly from your bank account but from a Venmo account, for instance.
Here’s how instant payments work: Different types of payments—wire transfers, checks, ACH—all happen over what are called rails. A rail is essentially the system that gets your money from one place to another. Think of a pile of cash in a briefcase. You could move that briefcase from one place to another in a car, or a bus, or a train, or an airplane; those transportation methods are like the rails that move your money. Instant payments are a new kind of payment rail, but there still needs to be a user interface to allow consumers to access them. Some payments on Zelle already happen on an instant payment rail, says Bridget Hall of ACI Worldwide.
One year ago, the Federal Reserve launched FedNow, an instant payment rail that allows for people to send money to each other if they’re enrolled in participating institutions. Another payment rail, RTP, short for Real Time Payments, was launched in 2017 by The Clearing House, a private payment-system infrastructure owned by large commercial banks. But it has fewer participants than FedNow, which boasts about 900 participating banks and credit unions.
Instant payments are different from anything that exists now, including wire transfers, ACH payments, and debit cards. Wire transfers can take 24 hours to reach customer accounts, and they’re not available 24/7; ACH payments are processed in batches and can only happen during banking hours; debit-card purchases don’t settle in accounts immediately. But instant payments happen in real-time, at any hour of any day, and don’t cost anything for the sender.
Real-time payments accounted for just 1.5% of total payments in 2023, which is about 3.5 billion transactions, according to ACI Worldwide, which sells software facilitating real-time payments. Experts expect that number to grow to 14 billion real-time transactions by 2028.
Instant payments are already extremely popular in other parts of the world. In India, real-time payments were launched in 2010 and now make up 84% of the share of all electronic payments—that’s 129 billion transactions. Brazil had 37 billion real-time payment transactions in 2023, and Thailand had 20 billion, according to ACI Worldwide.
But the two rails for instant payments in the U.S.—FedNow and RTP—are relatively new. It’s taken this long for the U.S. to adopt real-time payments because there were intermediaries like PayPal that allowed people to feel like they were paying someone else instantly, says Hall.
There are some big advantages to instant payments. Say you have to fund a lunch account at your kids’ school: You can provide a credit card (and be charged a transaction fee), or write a check, which takes days to get processed and may mean your kid has to skip a few days of tater tots. The velocity of instant payments is a good thing for businesses too; instead of waiting for a check to arrive, and then cashing it to find out there’s no money in the user’s account, an electricity company can get paid instantly.
“If we start looking at the payment methods used to complete a transaction today,” Hall says, “we have many use cases where the options either aren’t great or aren’t good enough.”
Some people might already be using instant payments and not realizing it—a share of transactions on Zelle, a digital payments network run by big banks, run over instant payment rails. Your payment may go over the instant payment rails if both parties in the transaction are part of member banks that use RTP or FedNow.
There are downsides to real-time payments. People without mobile phones or computer access, or who aren’t comfortable with technology, may have a hard time switching to real-time payments. And real-time payments are irrevocable, meaning once you send them, you can’t get them back—a potential problem in a world that is increasingly plagued with scams that involve one person sending money to another.
Read More: Defrauded? Banks May Not Give Your Money Back.
But most forms of payment have some kind of downside. Consider the check, for example. Long after its medieval origins, checks slowly became popular around the world, booming in the U.S. between 1938 and 1952, when the number of checks written annually reached 8 billion, according to a history by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Banks had to process all of these checks, usually manually, meaning they had to be handled by employees who notated all the information on them as they were passed from one bank to another. Then credit cards started gaining in popularity, and consumers moved onto what was more convenient, which was a big cost savings for banks. That move towards convenience—and cost savings—is now happening once again.
Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, announced on July 22 that he intended to leave the highly influential position by the end of 2025. Under his 11-year tenure, Ford’s endowment grew from just over $11 billion to just under $17 billion, slightly smaller than the GDP of Jamaica. He divested the fund from fossil fuels and for-profit prisons and redirected much of the fund’s attention to addressing inequality.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Walker, who was born in Ames, Texas, was one of the first children ever enrolled in a Head Start program, in a one-room schoolhouse. “It opened up a world for me, a world of learning and knowledge and curiosity and thirst to know more about the world,” he says. “It gave me a head start, and it changed my life.”
As for his future endeavors, he says he has no plan. “I think it’s important to have clarity about what you don’t want to do,” he says. So far he has crossed university president and running for public office off his list. He’s mostly focused on the next 15 months and smoothly moving one America’s biggest money-givers into its next era. He spoke to TIME in the foundation board members’ meeting room the day after he announced his departure.
You’re leaving the Ford Foundation at what you say is a critical time in its history. What do you mean by that?
If you are a philanthropy committed to the idea that democracy is the best form of government, and that the full participation of the citizenry is essential for democracies to be healthy, this is a challenging time. Hope is the oxygen of democracy, but inequality is the enemy of hope. How do we imagine a flourishing democracy when we have increasing numbers of people who feel left out and left behind, disaffected and disillusioned and therefore hopeless? Hopeless people will do things that we thought were never possible in our society. That worries me.
Americans have begun to realize that the inequity is baked into the system. It’s structural inequity, which is very hard to root out without destroying the structure. Can you point to a program that has begun to reform rather than destroy?
I am a reformer, not a destroyer. I’m a believer that capitalism is the best way to organize an economy, but I’m not naive. The kind of capitalism we have now does not generate shared prosperity. People like me benefit more from the current system. We have supported over the years research and policy development on asset building strategies. I’ll give you an example: Baby bonds, a way of setting aside money, early in life of a newborn that over the years accretes in value. That is a mechanism to address inequality, because it allows, at some point in adulthood, for an amount of capital that can make possible a college education, or a downpayment on a home, or the start of a small business. There are three things that we need to fund a program: an institution, a forceful, terrific individual at the helm, and a powerful idea, an idea that might be marginal, but our support can help move it to the mainstream. Our early support, for example, of Muhammad Yunus when he was an unknown economics professor in Bangladesh, who brought an idea for macro credit to rural women, a marginal idea in the 1970s that now is a part of World Bank policy.
People who push back against the notion that income inequality is a bad thing often say billionaires have the scope to take the big swings. And if you don’t have these risk takers, you don’t have progress. How would you answer that?
I think it’s important not to demonize the wealthy. I think it’s one of the special attributes of this country is that people of very modest means can be extraordinarily successful. And we should celebrate that success and the wealth that they create. Henry Ford was a complicated character. And there is no doubt that he would be surprised that a Black gay man is president of his foundation. I think the fact that I am is a testament to the progress that has been made in America during my lifetime, and to the ideals that are written in our Constitution, that inspire people all around the world, and certainly inspire me. The contradiction that rests in American philanthropy is a metaphor for the larger contradictions that exist in American society. My love for this country is unyielding, in part because this country is the only place in the world my story could be possible. But I do believe that if we have so much inequality that the balance of wealth distorts our democracy, then we should push back against that. Because democracy can’t be sustained. When democracy and capitalism intersect, democracy has to win. Capitalism has to exist, and be vibrant, and muscular, but it also should produce some semblance of shared prosperity.
Are there instances where you think philanthropy does more harm than good?
The things that I consider problematic for philanthropy are not the grants, but how we invest the billions in our investment portfolios. In our case, as we reflected on our own behaviors, we learned some startling things about ourselves. On the one hand, we want to reform the criminal-justice system and reduce the expansion of for-profit prisons. And in our investments, we were investing in the prison system; how does one reconcile that? How does one reconcile being a public-health foundation, seeking to improve the health of people in low-income communities, and then be a significant investor in the largest polluter in those communities? These are the paradoxes that I believe are the most challenging: how we do our best to ensure that we’re not doing harm with the money we’re investing?
I know that you’d hoped for New York City’s notorious Rikers Island prison to be closed. It remains open. Why is it so difficult?
I served on the Commission on the Future of Rikers Island. And among the recommendations was absolutely that Rikers had to be closed as soon as possible and that there needed to be small facilities in other parts of the city. The challenge is, we have some advocates who are abolitionists who want no prisons. And we have citizens who don’t want facilities in their community. It’s very frustrating. It is not because there is no momentum to close Rikers. It’s that we do need in this city a minimum number of decent beds where people can be treated with dignity.
You’ve been the recipient of a lot of criticism from the abolitionists, including from former Ford fellows who protested against you outside this building? Did that smart?
I was profoundly wounded, emotionally, very, very wounded by the protesters, and by disapproval of some of my own staff. But one of the things you learn about leadership is that you have to be guided by values and principles and the framework to navigate really complex challenges. And that was one such occasion. In my personal life, I had just lost my partner [David Beitzel]. It was wrenching. There’s no other way to describe it. But I don’t regret the decision I made.
While you have been at Ford, we have seen the rise of several prominent female philanthropists. Are they different?
The most exciting philanthropy underway in America today is led by women philanthropists—Melinda French Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Laurene Powell Jobs, Alice Walton, Barbara Hostetter. These women are doing philanthropy differently. They aren’t interested in controlling their grantees. So much of philanthropy has been about controlling our grantees, directing them to do what we want them to do and be accountable for our investments. These women are taking a different tack where they say, “We want to support institutions.”
Are there any big moonshot projects you wish that you started earlier?
I wish I had started earlier on the question of philanthropy and AI. We have a working group–a group of foundations have come together recently. I wish we had started that earlier and developed a framework for how AI could help us with our grant-making, to improve and bring efficiency. And to think about what are the implications for philanthropy? What are the implications for our grantees, most of whom do not have the resources or time to explore that question?
When you are the head of an organization like this, how does it affect your personal relationships?
There is no doubt that when you become a foundation president, you breathe rarefied air, you never have a bad meal. When you’re the president of the Ford Foundation, people go out of their way to be deferential, to extend amazing kindness, because most people want something from it. So there are many people with whom I engage in a very transactional way. I’ll be able to move on, after I leave Ford, with joy and happiness and confidence that I’m an OK person. But I will absolutely have fewer friends, and have more dinners with real friends.
If you were starting now with just $1 million, what would you do?
I would probably seek ways to influence thought about policy and technology that ensures that we get the very best of technology while mitigating the harm. I believe that technology is going to be the intermediating force in our society for opportunity. And we cannot have the bias, discrimination, and unfairness that existed in the analog world to simply be transferred to the digital realm. It will only exacerbate inequality.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands before Congress on Wednesday, he will present himself as the voice of Israel. But an Israeli man who spoke before Congress a day earlier is a more accurate voice of the Israeli public. His name is Jonathan Dekel-Chen, and he is the father of Sagui Dekel-Chen, a 35-year-old Israeli American who has been held hostage by Hamas—and in a way, by Netanyahu—since Oct. 7. Dekel-Chen was speaking for millions of Israelis when he told lawmakers, “Any true friend of Israel today must pressure our Prime Minister to finish the deal now.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Netanyahu is expected to call for a hostage deal in Washington, as if such a deal is being held up by Washington. Yet back home, Netanyahu is accused by many Israelis—including the family members of hostages—of sabotaging that deal. On the eve of Netanyahu’s flight to Washington, just one-fifth of Israelis felt he was doing enough to secure the release of the 116 hostages still held by Hamas.
Netanyahu reportedly told his cabinet last week that “the hostages are suffering, but they are not dying,” drawing shock and outrage from the families of hostages who have indeed died while hostage negotiations falter. On Monday, the families of two additional hostages were notified of their deaths, raising the total to an estimated 44 dead out of those who remain in captivity. “The urgency of the matter did not seem to resonate with him,” said Daniel Neutra, the brother of 22-year-old American hostage Omer Neutra, referring in his own Tuesday testimony to his family’s meetings with Netanyahu. Hostage family members who have met with both Joe Biden and Netanyahu have said they received more empathy from the U.S. President than their own leader.
Read More: It’s Time to Rethink the U.S.-Israel ‘Special Relationship’
Hostage family members, who number in the thousands, have been protesting in Israel almost daily for weeks, calling on Netanyahu to agree to the deal that is now on the table—the same deal that Biden accurately described as a proposal from Israeli negotiators. Even Israel’s security establishment has urged the government to accept that deal. Military officials have stated that the time is right for a ceasefire, and that the Prime Minister’s refusal to formulate a legitimate “day after” plan has hamstrung the military, enabling Hamas to return to areas that the IDF had already cleared. With near-daily drone and missile attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon, tens of thousands of Israelis are still waiting to return to their homes in the north, nearly ten months into the war. And of course, the lives of more than 2 million people in Gaza have been devastated beyond recognition—to say nothing of the many thousands dead.
According to the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute, a majority of Israelis support a deal to end the war and secure the release of all the hostages. Most Israelis believe that freeing the hostages should be Israel’s first priority, dismissing Netanyahu’s stated objective of eliminating Hamas as fantasy. Even the IDF spokesman has said that the goal of eliminating Hamas is unachievable.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu is likely to repeat his Trumpian calls for “Total Victory” in Gaza. He is far more intelligent than his American ideological counterpart. Surely he knows there is no total victory in Gaza. His political calculation is almost certainly counting on the ovations that greet his speech to deliver a political boost back in Israel, at least among the minority of Israelis who still support him. As Israel fights its most consequential war since 1948, the man steering his country through it has an approval rating of just 32%. Even before Oct. 7, Netanyahu was already considered the most divisive Prime Minister in Israeli history. Since the Hamas attack, he has become even more unpopular. Polls have consistently shown that most Israelis believe he should resign over the failures that led to Israel’s deadliest day.
Yet Netanyahu has dismissed calls to resign or hold early elections. While other military and political leaders have apologized or accepted responsibility for those failures, the man who has for decades framed himself as Israel’s protector has dismissed the overwhelming evidence that he failed to heed numerous warnings in the days, weeks, and months before the Oct. 7 attack shook the nation.
The last time Netanyahu spoke before Congress, he placed a wedge between Israel and the Democratic Party, whose voters had until then been far more supportive of Israel. That wedge has widened ever since. I suspect this speech will have the same detrimental impact on U.S.-Israel relations—at a time when Israel needs the support of its most important ally more than ever before.
It is the hope of many Israelis that Americans remember that Netanyahu does not speak for all—or even a majority—of Israelis.
The tech industry is currently embroiled in a heated debate over the future of AI: should powerful systems be open-source and freely accessible, or closed and tightly monitored for dangers?
On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fired a salvo into this ongoing battle, publishing not just a new series of powerful AI models, but also a manifesto forcefully advocating for the open-source approach. The document, which was widely praised by venture capitalists and tech leaders like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, serves as both a philosophical treatise and a rallying cry for proponents of open-source AI development. It arrives as intensifying global efforts to regulate AI have galvanized resistance from open-source advocates, who see some of those potential laws as threats to innovation and accessibility.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]At the heart of Meta’s announcement on Tuesday was the release of its latest generation of Llama large language models, the company’s answer to ChatGPT. The biggest of these new models, Meta claims, is the first open-source large language model to reach the so-called “frontier” of AI capabilities.
Meta has taken on a very different strategy with AI compared to its competitors OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic. Those companies sell access to their AIs through web browsers or interfaces known as APIs, a strategy that allows them to protect their intellectual property, monitor the use of their models, and bar bad actors from using them. By contrast, Meta has chosen to open-source the “weights,” or the underlying neural networks, of its Llama models—meaning they can be freely downloaded by anybody and run on their own machines. That strategy has put Meta’s competitors under financial pressure, and has won it many fans in the software world. But Meta’s strategy has also been criticized by many in the field of AI safety, who warn that open-sourcing powerful AI models has already led to societal harms like deepfakes, and could in future open a Pandora’s box of worse dangers.
In his manifesto, Zuckerberg argues most of those concerns are unfounded and frames Meta’s strategy as a democratizing force in AI development. “Open-source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn’t concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society,” he writes. “It will make the world more prosperous and safer.”
But while Zuckerberg’s letter presents Meta as on the side of progress, it is also a deft political move. Recent polling suggests that the American public would welcome laws that restrict the development of potentially-dangerous AI, even if it means hampering some innovation. And several pieces of AI legislation around the world, including the SB1047 bill in California, and the ENFORCE Act in Washington, D.C., would place limits on the kinds of systems that companies like Meta can open-source, due to safety concerns. Many of the venture capitalists and tech CEOs who celebrated Zuckerberg’s letter after its publication have in recent weeks mounted a growing campaign to shape public opinion against regulations that would constrain open-source AI releases. “This letter is part of a broader trend of some Silicon Valley CEOs and venture capitalists refusing to take responsibility for damages their AI technology may cause,” says Andrea Miotti, the executive director of AI safety group Control AI. “Including catastrophic outcomes.”
The philosophical underpinnings for Zuckerberg’s commitment to open-source, he writes, stem from his company’s long struggle against Apple, which via its iPhone operating system constrains what Meta can build, and which via its App Store takes a cut of Meta’s revenue. He argues that building an open ecosystem—in which Meta’s models become the industry standard due to their customizability and lack of constraints—will benefit both Meta and those who rely on its models, harming only rent-seeking companies who aim to lock in users. (Critics point out, however, that the Llama models, while more accessible than their competitors, still come with usage restrictions that fall short of true open-source principles.) Zuckerberg also argues that closed AI providers have a business model that relies on selling access to their systems—and suggests that their concerns about the dangers of open-source, including lobbying governments against it, may stem from this conflict of interest.
Addressing worries about safety, Zuckerberg writes that open-source AI will be better at addressing “unintentional” types of harm than the closed alternative, due to the nature of transparent systems being more open to scrutiny and improvement. “Historically, open-source software has been more secure for this reason,” he writes. As for intentional harm, like misuse by bad actors, Zuckerberg argues that “large-scale actors” with high compute resources, like companies and governments, will be able to use their own AI to police “less sophisticated actors” misusing open-source systems. “As long as everyone has access to similar generations of models—which open-source promotes—then governments and institutions with more compute resources will be able to check bad actors with less compute,” he writes.
But “not all ‘large actors’ are benevolent,” says Hamza Tariq Chaudhry, a U.S. policy specialist at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI risk. “The most authoritarian states will likely repurpose models like Llama to perpetuate their power and commit injustices.” Chaudhry, who is originally from Pakistan, adds: “Coming from the Global South, I am acutely aware that AI-powered cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns and other harms pose a much greater danger to countries with nascent institutions and severe resource constraints, far away from Silicon Valley.”
Zuckerberg’s argument also doesn’t address a central worry held by many people concerned with AI safety: the risk that AI could create an “offense-defense asymmetry,” or in other words strengthen attackers while doing little to strengthen defenders. “Zuckerberg’s statements showcase a concerning disregard for basic security in Meta’s approach to AI,” says Miotti, the director of Control AI. “When dealing with catastrophic dangers, it’s a simple fact that offense needs only to get lucky once, but defense needs to get lucky every time. A virus can spread and kill in days, while deploying a treatment can take years.”
Later in his letter, Zuckerberg addresses other worries that open-source AI will allow China to gain access to the most powerful AI models, potentially harming U.S. national security interests. He says he believes that closing off models “will not work and will only disadvantage the U.S. and its allies.” China is good at espionage, he argues, adding that “most tech companies are far from” the level of security that would prevent China from being able to steal advanced AI model weights. “It seems most likely that a world of only closed models results in a small number of big companies plus our geopolitical adversaries having access to leading models, while startups, universities, and small businesses miss out on opportunities,” he writes. “Plus, constraining American innovation to closed development increases the chance that we don’t lead at all.”
Miotti is unimpressed by the argument. “Zuckerberg admits that advanced AI technology is easily stolen by hostile actors,” he says, “but his solution is to just give it to them for free.”
President Biden announced on Sunday he was ending his bid for a second term and endorsed Kamala Harris to be the Democratic Party’s nominee, upending the race for the White House less than four months before Election Day. The stunning move by Biden reflects the precipitous loss in confidence he faced within his party following a disastrous June 27 debate performance in Atlanta against Donald Trump.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Biden made the announcement in a letter addressed to “My Fellow Americans” posted on social media.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” the letter reads. “And while it has been the my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
In a separate post, Biden said Harris has “my full support and endorsement.”
The historic decision makes Biden, 81, the first sitting president to cancel his re-election bid in over half a century, when Lyndon Johnson announced in March 1968 he would not accept the Democratic Party’s nomination amid disapproval over his handling of the Vietnam War.
Biden’s departure opens the door for the party to select a new, younger nominee at next month’s Democratic National Convention and lead the party’s ticket against the 78-year-old Trump. Although Biden endorsed Harris, 59, others have called for an open primary to decide on a new nominee.
Democrats were shaken in June when Biden, 81, stumbled his way through his debate with Trump, mixing up names and figures, losing his train of thought, failing to parry back against Trump’s lies, and struggling to describe his own accomplishments and vision for a second term. In the days and weeks after, a growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers and donors sounded the alarm, warning that Biden was likely to lose in November, potentially dragging down the party’s candidates across the country and handing the House and Senate to Republicans.
For weeks, Biden insisted he would stay in the race and worked overtime to shore up his main pillars of support: union leaders and the Congressional Black Caucus. He blasted Democratic donors and “elites” for trying to push him out of the race. But it wasn’t enough.
The list of prominent Democrats calling for him to step aside continued to grow last week and into this weekend.
“I will speak to the Nation later this week in more detail about my decision,” Biden wrote in his letter.
In a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform, the former President said, “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was!”
Other Republicans echoed Trump’s suggestion that Biden lacks the mental capacity to finish out his term.
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” Speaker Mike Johnson wrote on X. “He must resign the office immediately.”
The prospect of Harris replacing Biden at the top of the ticket has drawn concerns from some within the party that she may be as weak or a weaker candidate against Trump. Biden has previously said he wouldn’t have picked Harris for vice president if he didn’t think she would make a strong President.
At the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump officially assumed his role as the GOP’s nominee for the 2024 presidential election and announced Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.
It was not just the patriarch of the Trump family that took center stage at the RNC, but Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and his granddaughter, Kai Trump, who also addressed the crowd. Trump’s wife Melania and his daughter Ivanka were present at the convention, though they did not speak.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]With the Trumps firmly in the limelight, here is a breakdown of the business mogul and former President’s family tree.
Trump’s eldest son, and one of three children from his first marriage with the late Ivana Trump, has assumed a public-facing role throughout his father’s business and political career. He serves as executive vice president in The Trump Organization and often defends his father’s Make America Great Again platform. At the time of publication, Trump Jr. has over 11 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) and often uses his profile to champion his father’s campaign. Over a decade before his father was elected president in 2016, Trump Jr. was arrested for public intoxication in downtown New Orleans.
In 2021, Trump Jr. launched a hunting- and outdoors-focused lifestyle media brand called Field Ethos.
He was previously married to Vanessa Trump, with whom he shares five children. He is now engaged to Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, a former prosecutor in San Francisco and Los Angeles, also took to the stage at the RNC. Guilfoyle, 55, is the former wife of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and served as the first lady of San Francisco in the first two years Newsom served as Mayor, from 2003 to 2005.
Guilfoyle has a son, Ronan, from a previous marriage to businessman Eric Villency, who she wed after Newsom.
Trump Jr.’s eldest daughter, Kai Trump, addressed the crowd at the RNC to “show a side of [her] grandpa that people don’t usually see,” making her public speaking debut. Kai, 17, is an avid golfer, and is on the varsity team at her high school in Florida.
Donald Trump III is 15 years old. His IMDB lists four credits.
Tristan Trump, second son to Trump Jr., is 12 years old. In October 2023, Trump Jr. posted “happy birthday” to his son on Instagram, the note accompanied with a photo of all five of his children around a Tampa Bay Buccaneers birthday cake.
The Trump heir’s fourth child, Spencer, is 11. Trump Jr. has posted pictures of the two fishing together on his Instagram, and also posted a happy birthday tribute to his youngest son last year.
Trump Jr.’s youngest child, Chloe, turned 10 last month. Her father has posted pictures of her helping him fish and of her with her grandpa at Trump Golf Course in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, has frequently accompanied him on the campaign trail or acted as a surrogate for her father. During her father’s presidency, Ivanka, 42, was a senior advisor in his administration, and also was the director of the Office of Economic Initiatives and Entrepreneurship. Since her father’s presidency, though, she has retreated from politics and the public eye. She did not speak at the 2024 RNC, but she did make an appearance on computer scientist Lex Fridman’s podcast, which was released in early July.
Ivanka’s husband, 43, is a business mogul in his own right. The CEO of New Jersey real estate empire Kushner Companies and publisher of the New York Observer is the son of Charles Kushner, a real estate developer who founded Kushner Companies..
The Kushner-Trump couple reported between $172m and $640m in outside income while working in the White House, according to analysis by CREW. after Trump left the White House, Kushner’s private equity firm received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Ivanka and Kushner’s oldest child, Arabella, is 13 and had her Bat Mitzvah in June 2023. After her grandfather was elected, Arabella occasionally joined her mom at the White House for official state visits and duties and also visited the Supreme Court. As displayed on Ivanka’s public Instagram profile, Arabella plays piano, rides horses, and practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
The couple’s eldest son, Joseph Kushner, 10, shares a name with Jared’s grandfather, a real estate developer and investor.
Kushner and Ivanka’s youngest child, Theodore, is 8 years old. Ivanka has shared multiple milestones of her son’s life on Instagram, including his birth and his first steps.
Former President Trump’s son Eric, 40, maintains less of a public persona than his older brother, but still has a leading presence in the Trump family business. Eric spoke at the RNC in defense of his father’s presidential candidacy. Eric, like his brother, is an executive vice president at The Trump Organization.
Eric’s wife, Lara Trump, is a CBS producer. She took center stage at the 2024 RNC, closing the second day of the convention. She focused her speech on Trump’s role as grandparent to her children with Eric.
Lara, 41, has co-chaired the Republican National Committee since March 2024, and has been a major fundraiser for the party, helping them rake in more than $280 million since March. In the past few years, she has risen the ranks in the Republican party, and is overseeing the organization’s early voting drive, dubbed “Swamp the Vote,” a nationwide initiative to encourage Republicans to vote by mail.
Read More: The Lara Trump Project
Eric Trump Jr., named after his father, is 6 years old. His mother has posted multiple pictures on her Instagram account of him and his sister with their grandpa, including one for Father’s Day this year.
Carolina Trump is the former President’s 10th grandchild, and the youngest currently. She is 4 years old.
Donald Trump’s fourth child, Tiffany, stood with her father in the arena at the RNC. Tiffany, 30, is Trump’s only child with second wife and actress Marla Maples, to whom he was married between 1993 and 1999. In 2011, Tiffany released a pop song called “Like a Bird.” She has spoken to the public a few times during her father’s political career, and made a speech during the 2016 RNC.
Michael Boulos is a businessman, who’s family, according to Page Six, founded SCOA Nigeria and Boulos Enterprises. He married Tiffany in November 2022.
Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron, now 18, largely stays out of the limelight. Throughout his childhood and his father’s presidency, Barron attended private high schools in the New York, Washington D.C., and Palm Beach areas.
In May 2024, Barron graduated from Oxbridge Academy in Palm Beach, Florida, though he has not announced where he will attend college. Barron joined his father on the campaign trail in July at a rally in Doral, Florida.
NEW YORK — Thousands of workers at Disney’s theme park and resort properties in California voted late Friday to authorize a potential strike, as contract negotiations drag on.
The strike authorization was approved by an overwhelming margin, nearly 99% of the members who cast votes according to a union statement. The election was held by a coalition of four unions, which represents 14,000 Disney ride operators, store clerks, custodians, candy makers, ticket takers, parking attendants and other employees.
Union leaders will now have the option to call a strike in the event that they are unable to negotiate a new contract deal with Disney. Leaders from both sides return to the bargaining table starting Monday.
Union members have been in talks with Disney over wage increases, safety measures, attendance policies and other benefits since April.
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Depending on their vantage, Democrats who watched Donald Trump’s record-breaking 92-minute acceptance speech on Thursday—and stretching into Friday—came away with very different verdicts.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]For those who have been urging President Joe Biden to rethink his own re-nomination for three full weeks, Trump’s ominous rhetoric proved the risks the former President poses and why the incumbent should step aside for a stronger captain. For those still working to salvage Biden’s bid for a second term, Trump’s wildly inconsistent delivery and tone made the task of blocking him seem perhaps doable for the first time in a long while.
But a third audience—population, one—was the only one that mattered, and that was Biden himself isolating at his beach house on the Delaware coastline while he recovers from what doctors described as a mild case of Covid-19. And after watching the Trump’s meandering hodgepodge of a greatest-hits speech in Milwaukee, Biden still sees himself as the strongest player to boot his predecessor from the field of American politics. The White House declared “a lid” just after 9:30 a.m., meaning there would be no sightings of Biden in public on Friday, and he would remain at home with no public events. The bunkering continued with no public timeline for his return to Washington, although he says he wants to get back on the campaign trail next week.
Biden, aides say, is still working the phones and Zoom rooms with advisers and staff, going about the day-to-day task list of the President, such as facing a global computer meltdown that left U.S. airspace a hellscape on Friday. But Biden is also finding himself increasingly, albeit begrudgingly, open to conversations about his next moves. His family is starting to plot his exit. In that, Democrats mindful of their own fortunes are suddenly less sullen about the slog toward November’s Election Day.
After three full weeks of pummeling, Biden is finally starting to take the hint that no one in his party’s institutional ranks wants him to helm the ticket. Even his former boss, Barack Obama, is harboring fears, insiders say. Public and private polls alike are showing Biden a drag on fellow Democrats, although his defenders argue that he’s not as much of a clunker as the critics say. For the first time since the debate, Biden is at least testing his own assumptions even as he is disinclined to cede ground to his critics. His weekend in Rehoboth is expected to give him a window to reflect on the information that is reaching him.
As the private conversations that started as a rumble have grown into a roar, it still remains Biden’s call how to proceed. As Republicans gavel out their convention, the disparity between the comity-soaked Republicans and the chaos-sacked Democrats is glaring. Behind the scenes, Democrats were left in an awkward holding pattern. Biden’s top operative, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a television interview on Friday that Biden was 100% committed to staying atop the ticket. “Absolutely, the President is in this race,” she told MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Joe Biden is more committed than ever to beat Donald Trump, and we believe on this campaign [that] we are built for the close election that we are in, and we see the path forward.”
Still, another Biden insider, former two-time chief of staff Ron Klain, acknowledged his boss gets it. “I think he’s feeling the pressure,” Klain told the network.
To be clear: the pressure is real. The Democratic National Committee on Friday and again on Sunday was set to revisit the rules and guidelines for the nominating process. Party insiders quietly agreed that they’d delay Biden’s official renomination timeline to start after Aug. 1, a slight shift rightward on the calendar. Still, Democrats are moving forward with a plan to have Biden arrive at his nominating convention in Chicago on Aug. 19 as the settled nominee. A repeat of the messy 1968 convention in Chicago was to be avoided at all costs, even if that meant deciding the nomination by GoogleDoc and silencing the protests on social media timelines. Democratic insiders agreed to put off the formality, but not too long.
That doesn’t mean Democrats of any stripe are exactly happy after the last month. Biden’s campaign insisted on an early debate and then the candidate bombed. Biden’s clean-up efforts were miserable. His fundraising has all but dried up, with aides bemoaning that they’d be lucky to hit 25% of their major-dollar goal this month. And down-ballot Democrats—including marquee party insiders like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries—are telling the White House in stage whispers that the party’s fortunes were sinking with Biden’s poll numbers.
“He just doesn’t get it,” says a senior Democratic hand on the Hill. “Joe Biden has done so much for this country but he stands to be the undoing of this party.”
Democrats across the spectrum are trying to discern if Biden understands that being an anchor for his party is not always an asset. Sure, he’s keeping the Democratic barge in place, but it’s not a good place. The inertia is the best case scenario but insiders say the drift is actually benefiting Republicans, who have a narrow majority in the House and are within real striking distance of winning back the Senate. Other Democrats who want Biden to keep fighting looked at Trump’s Milwaukee soliloquy as evidence that he’s still defeatable if only the media would focus on his precedent-shattering posture rather than Biden’s verbal stumbles. Biden’s campaign has a simple counter: stop fighting Biden’s renomination and the focus moves back to Trump.
One common emotion pervaded both Democratic camps, though: they’re all waiting on Biden to either plow forward as the presumptive nominee or to bow out. Biden has been trying to demonstrate the former, but not convincingly enough. In private, Biden’s top deputies say he’s less headstrong than he was over the July 4 holiday weekend, finally starting to grasp that his choices matter to more than just those who share his surname.
By no means does this mean Biden is ready to exit. No, he’s still plotting an aggressive travel schedule this month and readying tens of millions in advertising. The money is becoming tougher to come by, but he has a pile of cash that is letting him lap Trump on air by a 25-to-1 margin in some markets. Things are going to be rough for Biden as he tries to quiet the tumult in his own party’s ranks but he’s found himself running against the conventional wisdom before. And, if things go sideways in a big way, he still controls the levers of his party’s nominating machinery; the nod is his until he doesn’t want it, and the signs that he may soon be ready to give it up remain fuzzy. Put plainly: Democrats have only one opinion that matters, and that belongs to an embattled Joe Biden who has never been at his best when backed into a corner.
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“We’re going to defeat Crooked Joe Biden,” Donald Trump promised his rally crowd in Butler, Pa., “and we’re going to take back our country. We’re going to take it back. Our country, our country has been stolen from us. One of the greatest crimes is what they’ve done over the last four years!” Then as Trump railed against immigration, a shooter perched on a nearby rooftop sprayed bullets at the rally crowd, wounding Trump’s ear, killing one crowd member, and sending two more people to the hospital in critical condition.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Astoundingly, as Trump left the stage surrounded by Secret Service, he pumped his fist and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight!” The crowd then chanted “U-S-A!”
America is often a violent nation. Our history is filled with lynchings, assassinations, and mass shootings—we are violent in both public and private spaces. But our current political moment is characterized by violence masquerading as politics. Since the 1990s the dominant frame for understanding American politics is “politics is war and the enemy cheats.” Our political news is dominated by appeals of outrage, accusations of corruption and hypocrisy, and charges of conspiracy. All of that violent rhetoric threatens the fragile trust upon which democracy and political stability thrive.
Read More: How the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump Fits Into America’s Violent History
Politics is for solving problems through consensus, cooperation, and compromise, but our public sphere is broken. Violence is always anti-democratic because it’s the use of force instead of persuasion.
To call politics war cheapens the sacrifices made by actual soldiers and turns our political opponents from good people (who have good reasons for wanting different policies) to enemies (who have no redeeming qualities and must be destroyed).
Unfortunately invoking violence has a great deal of rhetorical power, which is why so much of our political discourse is saturated with the language of brutality. Throughout American history, and especially over the past 10 years, political leaders have found that ad hominem attacks are useful for delegitimizing and creating hate-objects out of others, that threats of force and intimidation are useful for silencing opponents, that violent metaphors attract attention, and that fear motivates voters.
But it’s not just figures such as Trump who have turned our public sphere into a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” Research in media studies, psychology, sociology, and other fields has established that media (print, radio, television, cable, podcasts, etc.) overrepresent crime news and other kinds of crime content. Our social media apps are designed to optimize for engagement, which means that highly emotive “moralized content” and “fake news” circulate more frequently than good old boring truth. Consuming all of that crime content leads to people cultivating what researchers call a “mean world syndrome,” in which they overestimate how likely they are to be victims of crime.
Read More: A Stark Look at the Recent History of Political Violence in America
While we have a long history of violence, the United States is actually a pretty safe place to be. According to FBI statistics, violent crime in the U.S. had been steadily declining since its peak in 1991 and it’s still near record lows. And yet “mean world syndrome” may help explain why, according to Gallup, a record 95% of Republicans “think there is more national crime” today. Everybody—but especially conservative news consumers—think they live in a mean world full of enemies. People are scared by the media and politics information they consume, and they’ve bought lots of guns.
Trump has built his political persona with a hero narrative that claims that he has risked everything to save the nation. As I explained in my book Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, Trump ran in 2016 by telling the nation a story of sin and redemption—he claimed that because he was once “the ultimate insider,” he knew how the system was rigged and he was the only one qualified to fix it. His 2024 campaign has been built around the themes of persecution and revenge—he claims in a frequently used meme that “they’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way” and has vowed to seek “retribution” against his political enemies.
It may make good political sense to campaign on those kinds of violent themes, but it doesn’t help the cause of democracy in America. It certainly doesn’t help us to solve political problems to think of our opponents as enemies who are out to get us. Instead it helps to cultivate outrage, erode trust and fellow feeling, and increase the potential for actual violence.
“We are not enemies, but friends,” Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” Though politicians and the media may tell us differently, politics is not war, war is war.
