half their former level. America now gives about as much as Germany, which has an economy one-fifth its size. Mr Trump is similarly sanguine about the risks to the country’s pre- eminence in research and innovation. America has more top universities than any other country—35 out of the top 100—but this number is dropping. China’s spending on research and development exceeded America’s in 2024. More than a third of top journal articles are now written by Chinese researchers, who last year published as many papers as their American, British, German and Japanese peers combined. At the very pinnacle of science—Nobel prizes—America remains dominant. That is probably a lagging indicator. Over the past decade the median recipient has been 72 years old. Mr Trump is not working to reverse the trend. More than 7,800 research grants were frozen or terminated last year, estimates Nature, a scientific journal. The president is ceding innovation in green technologies to America’s rivals. Most dramatic, and in contrast to much of the country’s 250-year history, is the view that this nation of immigrants is harmed by them. America may have near-zero net migration this year. Polling by Gallup suggests that America remains the top destination for migrants, but just 15% of adults who say they want to move permanently to another country name America as their top choice, down from 24% in 2007-09. In polling by Nira Data of people in 85 countries, respondents ranked America as the world’s fifth- most-disliked country, more abhorrent than Russia or China. This swing in sentiment may be temporary, linked to an unpopular president. Among America’s greatest strengths is its dynamism, and its ability to change course. For now those outside America’s borders observe, with caution, a country that is still mighty—but in motion.■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//interactive/united-states/2026/07/01/america-is-mighty- but-becoming-less-dominant
The Supreme Court leaves Donald Trump with plenty to celebrate The justices handed the president some notable defeats. But their biggest decisions strengthened him July 2nd 2026 AS THE Supreme Court wrapped up its latest term, Donald Trump took stock. The president had suffered some conspicuous defeats over the preceding months. In February, for example, the court struck down his “Liberation Day” tariffs, sending Mr Trump into a rage. More recently, it turned back a Republican bid to upend mail-in voting practices. And on June 30th it declared unconstitutional an executive order ending birthright citizenship for babies born in America to parents who are there unlawfully or temporarily.
But on the whole, the president seemed pleased with the court’s work. “The Republican Party was treated very fairly,” he wrote on social media. In the past week alone the court upheld bans on transgender athletes, loosened campaign-finance rules and expanded presidential power. There is now speculation that Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s six conservatives, might step down this summer. If he does, Mr Trump—who appointed three justices in his first term—will have the opportunity to deepen his already substantial imprint on the court. No decision seemed to delight Mr Trump more than Trump v Slaughter. For decades conservatives have argued that the constitution vests all executive power in the president rather than giving some of it to semi-independent officials insulated from political control. On June 29th the court embraced that view. By a 6-3 vote it swept aside a 90-year-old precedent, ruling that presidents may fire the commissioners of independent agencies at will. Mr Trump hailed the ruling as “the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years”. In a dissent that she summarised from the bench—a mark of unusual pique —Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by her liberal colleagues, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, asserted that the majority’s position had “very little support” in history or precedent. She accused the majority of replacing decades of settled practice with a “half-baked” theory. And she argued that the ruling would upend agencies built on the understanding that some decisions should be made by bipartisan bodies with a measure of independence. The dissenters also warned of a wider blast radius. Slaughter casts doubt on the statutory protections afforded to inferior officers—and perhaps even to swathes of the 2m-strong civil service. Many of those employees, after all, exercise at least some executive power. Mr Trump has already fired thousands of federal workers; the question now is whether Congress can impose any limits on their removal. The president’s own reaction suggested he grasped the ruling’s breadth. He has previously argued that Article II of the constitution, which outlines the powers of the executive branch, allows him to do “whatever I want”.
The Slaughter ruling came with a caveat, though. In Trump v Cook the court refused to let Mr Trump remove Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, despite his allegations that she had lied on a mortgage application. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Chief Justice Roberts said the Fed occupies a “unique” constitutional position, rooted in a tradition of insulating monetary policy from political interference. The result, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted in dissent, is a curious asymmetry: the president may now dismiss leaders overseeing labour relations, securities markets and nuclear safety—but not central bankers. As with executive power, Mr Trump may also be pleased, on balance, with the court’s decisions on immigration. It ruled against him on birthright citizenship, but in a trio of 6-3 decisions it held that migrants waiting in Mexico cannot claim asylum in America; made it easier to treat some green- card holders as though they were seeking admission for the first time; and allowed the administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some 340,000 Haitians and Syrians. Under TPS migrants from countries deemed unsafe can remain in America. Justice Kagan, dissenting in the case, said the majority had blinded itself to Mr Trump’s rhetoric in concluding that his choice of people to de-authorise was not “overtly racial”. She pointed to his claim that Haitian migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country. Even in Trump v Barbara, the birthright-citizenship case, the margin was closer than had been expected. Though the ruling was 6-3, Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred on statutory grounds alone, leaving just five justices to hold that the 14th Amendment means what it says: “All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Stephanie Barclay, a law professor at Georgetown University, notes that Mr Trump’s three appointees split three ways in Barbara. In other cases, too, they have sometimes frustrated the president, prompting him to call them “very unpatriotic” and “an embarrassment to their families”. Would he therefore appoint a more dependable—or more pliant—justice if Justice Alito were to step down?
The timing of such a move would make sense ahead of the midterms, when Republicans could lose the Senate. It would also come before another consequential term for the court. The docket includes cases involving bans on semi-automatic weapons, new requirements for voter registration and a law allowing runaway teenagers to get gender-transition care. With so much at stake, Mr Trump will hope, once again, to be treated very fairly. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/29/the-supreme-court-leaves- donald-trump-with-plenty-to-celebrate
Transforming the cradle of the Confederacy Tourists are flocking to monuments on America’s racial history July 2nd 2026 ACROSS AMERICA more than 4,400 black people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. Some were killed for flirting with white women, others for talking back to bosses or trying to vote. In downtown Montgomery, Alabama, each of their names is carved into a rusted steel column marking the county where they lived and died. As visitors walk through the six-acre memorial the columns seem to rise. By the end they resemble a sea of dark bodies hanging heavily overhead. Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, once had more slave-trading depots than churches. More recently, it has become home to memorials that commemorate this history. As Donald Trump sets out to build grand new structures in Washington, DC, Montgomery’s monuments offer another
model of urban reinvention. About a decade after the project was conceived, Montgomery’s downtown is transformed and tourism is booming. The project has been led by Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit law firm that defends death-row inmates. Mr Stevenson had observed how Berlin, Johannesburg and Kigali confronted their bleakest chapters. When he first moved to Montgomery, it didn’t have a single marker that mentioned “slavery”, yet had 59 monuments to the Confederacy and three high schools named for its war generals and soldiers. This seemed odd. Montgomery had been home to the first White House of the Confederacy. It also is the city where, in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white passenger, sparking wide boycotts; where segregationists bombed Martin Luther King junior’s home; where a mob beat activists at a bus depot; where George Wallace, Alabama’s governor, declared “segregation forever” in 1963; and where, two years later, the long march from Selma concluded with King calling for “a society that can live with its conscience” from the steps of the state Capitol. So Mr Stevenson set out to develop sites to tell the story of American slavery, racial violence and civil rights.