Donald Trump

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Ex-Trump lawyer says president using Comey indictment to conceal being ‘criminal’

      by

      The indictment of former FBI director James Comey is part of a concerted effort by Donald Trump to “rewrite history” in his favor, a former senior White House lawyer claimed on Sunday as he warned of more retribution to come for the president’s political opponents.Ty Cobb, who defended Trump’s first administration during the Mueller investigation into his 2016 campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, also told CBS that he doubted Comey would be convicted, if the case ever reached trial.Trump’s moves, he said on the Sunday morning show Face the Nation, were “wholly unconstitutional [and] authoritarian” and an attempt to hoodwink future generations.“Trump wants to rewrite history so that the next generation may not know that he incited a violent insurrection, refused to peacefully transfer the power of the presidency after losing an election, stole classified documents and showed them to friends and guests at Mar-a-Lago, and that he was a criminal,” Cobb said.“He’s a convicted felon. All, anybody involved in those events that offended him, they’re in real danger.”Cobb, a distant relative of the baseball legend with the same name, has become a vocal Trump critic since serving as his liaison to special counsel Robert Mueller, and said his role as lawyer for the administration, not as a personal attorney to the president, allowed him to call “balls and strikes” now.He laid out why he thought the indictment against Comey, for allegedly lying to Congress, was fatally flawed; and assailed Trump’s appointment of a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience to pursue the case, after he fired a federal prosecutor, Erik Siebert, when he declined to bring charges.“So, you have the rewriting history stuff. The US attorney that he appointed, his personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, her role previously in the administration was, you know, trying to eliminate the theory that, you know, America had slaves, at the Smithsonian,” he said.“She was there to whitewash the Smithsonian and paint America as something that it isn’t. America needs to learn from the mistakes and lessons that we’ve had, and one of the biggest mistakes that America ever had was re-electing President Trump.”Cobb’s front-row seat to the machinations of Trump’s first term has made him an in-demand commentator on the workings of the second, and he told CBS he does not like what he sees.“Former attorney general [Robert] Jackson, the Nuremberg prosecutor, highlighted in 1940 that the most important thing at the justice department when he was attorney general was that people not target individuals, that they merely pursue crimes,” he said.“Griffin Bell years later said essentially the same thing [and] emphasized how politics and favor have no business at the justice department. It’s all about even-handedness.”Cobb said Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, has “wholly abandoned that and is now merely doing the president’s bidding when he says, ‘Prosecute my enemies, now’”.But the case against Comey, he said, was flimsy at best, and would almost certainly collapse.“The grand jury rejected one of the counts, the top count, actually, in the indictment, approved two, but by a very slim margin, 14 out of 23 in a process where there’s no defense attorney in the room, and the standard is merely probable cause,” he said.“The next courtroom that this will be assessed in, if it gets to trial, requires unanimity from 12 people, and there will be a vigorous defense. I don’t see any way in the world that Comey will be convicted. And I think there’s a good chance, because of the wholly unconstitutional, authoritarian way that this was done, that the case may get tossed out well before trial.”Separately, without mentioning Trump, his appointed FBI director Kash Patel contradicted a recent social media claim by the president that nearly 275 of the bureau’s agents were planted among the pro-Trump crowd that carried out the 2021 US Capitol attack.Patel reportedly issued a statement to Fox News Digital, according to the outlet, in which he said FBI agents at the scene of the attack were only sent to the scene after the mob attacked the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep Trump in office despite his losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.Issued Saturday night, the statement from Patel did make it a point to say that was not “the proper role of FBI agents”, among other things.In yet another bizarre social media episode for Trump, he posted – and then deleted – an artificial intelligence video in which his likeness was promoting magic medical beds that a far-right conspiracy claims can cure any ailment. The video depicted Trump touting a card guaranteeing access to new hospitals equipped with such beds. More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump to meet with US congressional leaders in last-ditch effort to avoid shutdown

      by

      Donald Trump has reversed course and is purportedly planning to host a bipartisan gathering of the top four US congressional leaders at the White House on Monday afternoon in a last-ditch effort to avoid a looming government shutdown, the House speaker and the US president’s fellow Republican Mike Johnson said on Sunday.Trump’s climbdown comes days after he scrapped a planned meeting to discuss the crisis with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the respective Democratic minority leaders in the House and Senate.The president accused the pair of making “unserious and ridiculous demands” in return for Democratic votes to support a Republican funding agreement to keep the government open beyond Tuesday night – but left the door open for a meeting “if they get serious about the future of our nation”.Johnson, appearing on CNN, said he spoke with Trump at length on Saturday, and that the two Democrats had agreed to join him and John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, for an Oval Office discussion Monday.He did not say if Trump would be negotiating directly with the Democrats – but portrayed Trump as keen to “try to convince them to follow common sense and do what’s right by the American people”.Schumer, talking to NBC’s Meet the Press, said he was “hopeful we can get something real done” – but was uncertain of the mood they would find Trump in when they sat down for the 2pm ET discourse.“If the president at this meeting is going to rant, and just yell at Democrats, and talk about all his alleged grievances, and say this, that, and the other thing, we won’t get anything done,” Schumer said.“We don’t want a shutdown. We hope that they sit down and have a serious negotiation with us.”According to CBS News on Sunday, meanwhile, Trump is not hopeful the meeting will lead to an agreement.The network’s chief national correspondent, Robert Costa, told Face the Nation he spoke with Trump by phone Sunday morning and that a government shutdown “looks likely at this point based on my conversation … He says both sides are at a stalemate.”Costa said: “Inside the White House, sources are saying president Trump actually welcomes a shutdown in the sense that he believes he can wield executive power to get rid of what he calls waste, fraud and abuse.”If no deal is reached, chunks of the federal government are set to shut down as early as Wednesday morning, with the White House telling agencies to prepare to furlough or fire scores of workers.Republican and Democratic leaders have been pointing fingers of blame at each other for days as Tuesday’s deadline for a funding agreement approaches.The narrow House Republican majority passed a short-term spending bill known as a continuing resolution earlier in September that would keep the government funded for seven weeks – but it faces opposition in the Senate, where it needs the support of at least eight Democrats to pass.Democrats have made the extension of expiring healthcare protections a condition of their support, warning that planned Republican spending cuts would affect millions of people.“If we don’t extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits, more than 20 million Americans are going to experience dramatically increased premiums, copays, deductibles, in an environment where the cost of living in America is already too high,” Jeffries told CNN on Sunday.“We’ve made clear that we’re ready, willing and able to sit down with anyone, at any time and at any place, in order to make sure that we can actually fund the government, avoid a painful Republican caused shutdown, and address the healthcare crisis that Republicans have caused that’s [affecting] everyday Americans.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Trump and Republicans have repeatedly accused their political opponents of exploiting the issue to force a shutdown while there was still plenty of time to fix healthcare before the subsidies expire on 31 December.“The Obamacare subsidies is a policy debate that has to be determined by the end of the year, not right now, while we’re simply trying to keep the government open so we can have all these debates,” Johnson said.“There is nothing partisan about this continuing resolution, nothing. We didn’t add a single partisan priority or policy rider at all. We’re operating completely in good faith to get more time.”Thune, on Meet the Press, also attempted to blame Democrats for the potential shutdown and said “the ball is in their court” as to the next development.“There is a bill sitting at the desk in the Senate right now, we could pick it up today and pass it, that has been passed by the House that will be signed into law by the president to keep the government open,” he said.“What the Democrats have done is take the federal government as a hostage, and by extension the American people, to try [to] get a whole laundry list of things that they want.”But US senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who has previously urged his party leadership to be stronger in standing up to the Trump administration, said the problem was Republicans handing “a complete blank check” to the president to spend money on his own political interests, and not those of the nation.“Until now the president has said he’d rather shut down the government than prevent those healthcare costs from spiking,” he told CNN.“Democrats are united right now on this question. I’m glad we’re finally talking. We’ll see what happens.” More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      We Americans love remaking British TV. Must the UK remake our odious politicians? | Dave Schilling

      by

      I’ve always wanted to visit the UK. This might sound absurd to you, considering I’m from California – home of sunshine, half-naked bodies and the studio where they film Jeopardy. What could possibly pull me to the cold, damp, gray shores of England? The oppressively brown food? The dodgy colonialist history? Tesco? No, it was the glowing box that vibrated with whatever passed for culture in my small town: television.British TV was an obsession in my house, via those purveyors of affordable, exotic entertainment at PBS. We’d get classy fare through the Masterpiece Theatre series, but also more downmarket comedies like Are You Being Served? (a variety of sexually obsessed retail clerks trip over each other) or Keeping Up Appearances (lower-middle-class oafs desperately wish they were posh). I had no concept of what people were saying in their thick accents or most of the jokes meant, especially the double entendres.But even the dumb shows seemed smart. I learned more about European history from Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and Ben Elton’s Blackadder series than I ever did in school. British television, especially the comedies, assumed a certain futility to life. It probably won’t get better. In fact, it might get worse. Often. This is a tradition that carried over to other classic sitcoms such as I’m Alan Partridge and The Office, which I discovered in college. If it’s a small-town crime drama or a half-hour comedy, British TV is usually going to express something close to misery by the time the credits roll. In America’s land of good cheer and opportunity, this was like a salve of reality.My obsession with all things British (even the food) carried on into adulthood, but despite that abiding interest, I had never visited the UK until this year. I seemed to have picked the worst year imaginable. Or maybe the best. The country is in the midst of a political upheaval. Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party is on the march, commanding the polls. Obviously, the first thing I did when I arrived was turn on the television to see how it compared to American media, which feels at all times like Jurassic Park after the electricity went out.In the US, we are obsessed with remaking British TV shows – The Office, Steptoe and Son, Absolutely Fabulous. But the British would rather remake our politicians. They’re just not as good at it.Farage is the English Trump, but only in the sense that he is dangerously unqualified for leadership and therefore believes he is actually qualified. He recently claimed that migrants were “eating swans” in parks. I can imagine a TV executive angrily shaking their fist at the ham-handed adaptation of Trump’s infamous dog comment. “Who would actually eat a swan? You don’t even get it!”Nigel Farage is just not the showman that Trump is, any more than Doctor Who is as flashy as Star Wars or Star Trek. British news is less single-mindedly fixated on him than we are with Trump. Because Farage is so tacky and second rate, it’s been easier for the UK media to shoo him away like a fly up until now. When I was in London this summer, it was the opposite of the wall-to-wall Trumpathon that is America. Maybe that’s why I found ITV’s Good Morning Britain so relaxing to watch. The noticeable lack of screaming or partisan rancor. The reassuring presence of former Labour politician and ex-Strictly Come Dancing competitor Ed Balls. Whatever it is, I came to love my daily dose of dry toast in TV form. One recent GMB episode featured a segment on an app designed to identify and catalog butterflies around the UK. It was sweet, until the presenter reminded the audience that this is important because butterflies are dying off due to the climate crisis. Even cheerful news segments need to remind you that life is a series of tiny hells.I did a few things besides watch TV, though. The Tate Modern is easily the best contemporary art museum I’ve ever been to. I think reading a newspaper in a pub at 11am is as civilized as life gets. I can’t tell if Waitrose is posh or a Trader Joe’s equivalent, but they had everything I needed, plus delicious cheeses I’ve never heard of. The Barbican Estate, where I stayed, is an architectural marvel that could never exist in a place like California. It’s purposefully difficult to get around, has an art gallery and a movie theater, and people crush bottles of wine openly in the courtyard long past bedtime. I found that people took tube etiquette so seriously that I wondered if not giving up your seat for an elderly person was now punishable by stoning. I’m sure there’s plenty of horrendous behavior in London, but I was so eager to enjoy myself that I didn’t even notice. And almost no one I met in London asked me, the dumb American, about Donald Trump. Almost.My one conversation about Trump took place in Whitechapel, a neighborhood known for a series of murders attributed to Jack the Ripper that is now home to a significant immigrant population – particularly people from Bangladesh. A sign was added to the Whitechapel tube station in Bengali, which upset Elon Musk (who is definitely not British) and assorted rightwing politicians obsessed with fighting multiculturalism. I was eager to have a proper British curry experience before flying back to LA and was given a recommendation for a restaurant in Whitechapel by my friend and co-creator of The Inbetweeners, Iain Morris (who is definitely British). I was asked very specifically not to name the restaurant, lest it become discovered by more brutish American tourists like myself. That’s what Dishoom is for, after all.After settling the bill for my meal, the waiter/proprietor asked me what I thought of “him.” The movie had not come out yet, so I realized “him” meant Trump. I said I was generally not a fan, that he would not be fond of a place like the restaurant we were in, and that I definitely did not vote for him. He chuckled, as though I had read him a joke written on a popsicle stick. “Every time an American comes in here and I ask if they voted for him, they say no,” he responded. I surmised that that’s because the people who did vote for him aren’t stopping into a curry house in Whitechapel on their UK vacation.The British and American political dilemmas can sometimes look eerily similar. Trump and Farage have both stuck around far longer than anyone expected. Anti-immigrant and anti-trans sentiment animate the right wings of both nations. The “unite the kingdom” rally feels like a hyper-charged Maga gathering. But, like the quality of our respective cheeses, we couldn’t be more different. Nihilism and a crazed impulse to start over from scratch animates both of our cultural schisms, but while in the US the face of populism is the frozen scowl of Trump, in Britain, it’s the vacuous grin of Farage. A recent feature in the New Yorker described the mood of the Reform party conference as jubilant. Farage is always smiling, which is either comforting to his sympathizers or terrifying for his detractors. Regardless, Reform is capturing Britain’s imagination precisely because of that smile.Labour and the Tories bumble around desperate to prove that they are the most serious, when what the nation seems to want is someone who admits that things aren’t great, but that the country (and the world) have a future. The future Reform offers is a terrifying one that looks a lot more like the worst aspects of modern America, but it’s a vision nonetheless. What afflicts both the US and the UK is a feeling of emptiness, of futility, and a growing realization that we’re all stuck. Technology, grand economic forces we don’t understand, and a dwindling social safety net have left the average citizen in a state of abandonment and isolation. The Democratic party and the Labour party just want things to go back to a mythical state of normalcy, hopelessly nostalgic and out of touch. This has pushed the dreamers, the malcontents and the futurists to the fringes. Maga and Reform seem nostalgic, but what they offer is not a return to anything, but a radical reshaping and perversion of the system that keeps our society functioning.When faced with the grim reality of British TV every day on my trip, I yearned for a bit of good ol’ Yankee razzle-dazzle – a dose of mindless optimism. I think maybe the most potent similarity between our two countries is that we could both use some of that right now.

      Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

    • 188 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Like the Gestapo’: trailblazing immigration judge on Ice brutality and Trump’s damage to the courts

      by

      Dana Leigh Marks had the kind of career most immigration judges dream of.At 32, she won a precedent-setting supreme court case that made it easier to claim asylum in the US. In the decades that followed, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges to gain collective bargaining rights, fought to protect immigration courts from political meddling and blazed a trail for a generation of female judges.Now retired at 71, she’s seen her share of political ups and downs over her 10 years as an immigration lawyer and 35 years on the bench. But nothing could have prepared her for what she’s seen the Trump administration do to the court systems she once served.“I have seen my entire career destroyed by Trump in six months,” said Marks, reflecting on the state of her profession while sipping coffee near her home in Marin county, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where she spent much of her career. “I’m flat out terrified on all fronts.”Whip-smart, with a shock of white curls, Marks can speak more freely than a sitting immigration judge. And the picture she paints is alarming.Trump’s immigration crackdown has thrown the already backlogged courts into chaos. More than 100 immigration judges have been fired since Trump was sworn in, including roughly a third of the judges in San Francisco, home to one of the largest immigration courts in the country. People across the US are routinely arrested outside their court hearings by Ice agents “acting like the Gestapo”, Marks said.She described her former colleagues as under siege. “If I were an immigration practitioner now, I’d tell my clients that they have to act like they’re in a war zone,” she said. “Be prepared for any eventuality, because it is so random and so chaotic.”Despite the grim subject matter, Marks is full of wisecracks and seems to have her spirits permanently set on high – gushing at every passing dog and baby.“Immigration judges do death penalty cases in a traffic court setting” is among her oft-quoted zingers.She describes the frenetic work of an immigration judge as like “the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz”: managing dockets, juggling courtroom tech and interpreters, typing verbatim notes while monitoring audio recording levels, then issuing immediate oral rulings with few clerks and barely any time to think. It’s an already frenzied job, and one she believes the Trump administration is intentionally trying to make harder.Humor aside, her message for the public is a serious one: that the Trump administration is “attacking” immigration courts “on all fronts” in order to eliminate them entirely by proving they’re “dysfunctional”. There’s a backlog of 3.6m cases waiting to be adjudicated, and Marks believes the courts have been purposefully starved of resources.“I feel like the immigration courts are the canaries in the coalmine,” she said, “and what’s happening to them is an illustration of what might happen to other court systems if we don’t stop it.”A critical eye and an open mindMarks’ interest in refugees and the immigrant experience comes from her own family’s lucky escape to America.“I was raised with an awareness of immigration to begin with,” said Marks. Her Jewish grandmother fled pogroms in Lithuania and was on one of the last boats to the US before the first world war severely restricted transatlantic migration. By the 1920s, the US enacted laws imposing strict quotas on refugees from eastern and southern Europe that almost completely shut down legal pathways for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.View image in fullscreenMarks grew up in a diverse part of west Los Angeles, and spent a year in Chile after Salvador Allende’s election, where she learned Spanish and saw first-hand the dissonance between US media coverage of his presidency and how Chileans talked about politics around dinner tables. She learned to read and listen to many perspectives with a critical eye and an open mind.She wanted to be a social worker, but went to law school and nearly dropped out before falling in love with immigration law. “You met the world coming into your office,” she said, describing her years in private practice.In 1987, at the age of 32, she won the supreme court case known as INS v Cardoza-Fonseca, which expanded asylum eligibility by granting relief to those with a “well-founded fear” of persecution. The morning after that victory, she started her training to become a judge.Alongside her work in court, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges for nearly two decades and recruited half a dozen female judges to the bench. She prided herself on using compassion and humor to lower the tension in her courtroom: when people feel heard and judged fairly, they’re more likely to accept your decisions, she said, even when you rule against their claim.View image in fullscreenMarks retired in 2021 to become “Nana Dana” and care for her grandchild, but she remains deeply engaged in the field, speaking at conferences, advising the National Association of Immigration Judges, educating law students, officiating weddings and serving on the advisory board of the non-profit Justice Connection.What’s been playing out now in courtrooms, in policy memos and on the streets has chilling echoes of the authoritarian eras her Jewish ancestors fled.Among her more recent concerns is the push to recruit hundreds of military lawyers to serve as immigration judges. In late August, the Trump administration scrapped the rule requiring temporary immigration judges to have spent a decade practicing immigration law before qualifying for the bench. Days later, 600 military lawyers were cleared to fill vacant judge seats. All of this is “absolutely unprecedented”, said Marks. “I don’t want to slam military lawyers, but there is the concern that they’re being picked because there’s a perception that they will just follow orders.”Political interference in the courtFor Marks, political encroachment on immigration courts has been “a slow creep that now has gone to light speed”.A hallmark of American democracy is the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. But this has never been so for immigration courts, which are overseen by the Department of Justice, a part of the executive branch rather than the judicial branch.“Deep in my bones, I always felt the placement of the immigration court in the Department of Justice was wrong,” she said. “The boss of the prosecutor should not be the boss of the judge.”The court’s placement has led to political interference and underfunding by both parties in power, and Marks wanted to fight back. She spent decades advocating for the nation’s immigration court system to be moved out from under the political whims and meddling of the justice department and into an independent judiciary. In 2022, the congresswoman Zoe Lofgren introduced a bill that would have created an independent immigration court system – but the bill ultimately died. Marks thinks reviving that bill should be a top priority for Democrats.She believes everyone across the political spectrum should be incensed by the current level of meddling with due process: from firing immigration judges, to pressuring them to toss out asylum cases so they can be reassigned as emergency deportations, to turning courthouses into traps where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents scoop up immigrants to meet deportation quotas, and more.“Americans were raised with the golden principle that everybody deserves due process, and I really think the majority of Americans believe that, and that that’s what makes us exceptional in the world,” she said.“What kills me, as a lawyer, is that Trump turns everything on its head and blows through clearly established legal precedent as if it doesn’t exist. Fealty to precedent is the core of our legal system.”If there’s a silver lining for her, it’s that she predicts the administration’s embrace of chaos will ultimately backfire. For example, she thinks that dropping military reservists on to the bench for six-month stints is a recipe for failure. Rather than expediting the backlog of asylum cases, it will unleash chaos, “screw up the records” and “make appeals go wild”.“If you build by chaos, even if you’re right in what you construct,” she quipped, “it’s going to crumble.” More

    • 200 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      The week in Trump absurdities: from Turkey’s ‘rigged elections’ to ‘your countries are going to hell’

      by

      In Donald Trump’s world there are weeks and then there are weeks. This one was a doozy. From declaring war on Tylenol to an escape with an escalator, Trump surpassed himself with his gaffes, outlandish statements and unhinged stunts – many of which involve decisions with real world consequences.This was the week in the theatre of the politically absurd:Saturday“Pam”, Trump wrote on social media, addressing Pam Bondi, the attorney general. The president demanded that Bondi pursue legal action against political adversaries including James Comey, a former FBI Director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, whose name he misspelled as “Leticia”.Pronouncing them “all guilty as hell”, Trump insisted: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.” But the president deleted his Truth Social post about an hour later, prompting speculation that he had been trying to send Bondi a direct message but hit the wrong button.SundaySpeaking at a memorial service for the killed rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, Trump delivered a message that stood in stark contrast to the event’s prevailing theme of reconciliation.The president recalled that Kirk had said he wanted his ideological opponents to know he loved them. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” he said. “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”In another jarring moment during a singing of America the Beautiful, Trump performed a little dance as he stood beside Kirk’s grieving widow, Erika.MondayTrump directed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue new guidance advising pregnant women to avoid acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, citing an unproven link to autism.But “acetaminophen” proved tough to pronounce. “Effective immediately, the FDA will be notifying physicians that the use of aceta – well, let’s see how we say that,” Trump said. “Acetam – enophin. Acetaminophen. Is that OK? Which is basically commonly known as Tylenol.”Pregnant women with a high fever should consult their doctors about taking a small dose, the president added. “If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re going to have to do. You’ll take a Tylenol, but it’ll be very sparingly. I think you shouldn’t take it.”A link between Tylenol and autism has not been established. Health experts pointed to a Swedish study published last year that tracked 2.4m births and found no evidence of an association between prenatal exposure to the drug and autism.TuesdayA decade after he descended a Trump Tower escalator to announce his run for president, Trump was stopped in his tracks at the UN headquarters in New York. He and his wife, Melania, had just stepped on an escalator when it abruptly stopped.In his address to the UN general assembly, Trump falsely claimed that he “ended seven wars” and bitterly complained that he never received a phone call from UN leaders. “All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that, on the way up, stopped right in the middle. If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would have fallen, but she’s in great shape. We’re both in good shape.”He added: “These are the two things I got from the United Nations, a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much.”Trump also used the global stage to boast of US glory and chastise world leaders: “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. It’s – I can tell you. I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”WednesdayEscalator-gate escalated further. In a 357-word social media screed, Trump alleged: “A REAL DISGRACE took place at the United Nations yesterday – Not one, not two, but three very sinister events! This wasn’t a coincidence, this was triple sabotage at the UN. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”The escalator “stopped on a dime”, he wrote, expressing relief that he and the first lady “didn’t fall forward onto the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first”. Then, when Trump took the podium, his teleprompter went “stone cold dark”, he added.Then, after being forced to ad lib part of his speech to the general assembly, he asked his wife how he had done and she replied: “I couldn’t hear a word you said.”Trump demanded an immediate investigation, adding: “All security tapes at the escalator should be saved, especially the emergency stop button. The Secret Service is involved. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”The UN said a videographer from the US delegation who ran ahead of Trump may have inadvertently triggered the stop mechanism at the top of the escalator, while the White House was responsible for the teleprompter.ThursdayTrump kicked off an Oval Office meeting with the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan by remarking: “We’ve been friends for a long time, actually, even for four years when I was in exile – unfairly, as it turns out. Rigged election.”Pointing at Erdoğan, he added: “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody.”During the meeting Trump also blamed the left for rising political violence, even though statistics show otherwise, and delivered a menacing warning: “I mean, bad things happen when they play these games and I give you a little clue: the right is a lot tougher than the left. But the right’s not doing this, they’re not doing it and they better not get them energised, because it won’t be good for the left.”Later, while signing executive orders, Trump veered off script to denounce Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who is Black. “Is she any relation to the late, great Davy Crockett? I don’t think so. Let me tell you before you even ask. She’s a very low IQ person.”Meanwhile he added a presidential walk of fame to the White House, featuring portraits of his himself and his predecessors – except for one. Instead of Joe Biden’s portrait, Trump hung a photo of an autopen signing the Democratic president’s name.FridayFour days from a looming government shutdown, Trump went to see US golfers take on Europe in the Ryder Cup. “The team is not doing so well,” he explained. “So, when I heard that I said, ‘Let’s get on the plane. We have to fly and help them.’”Trump also circled back to baseless medical advice, repeating his plea for pregnant women to stop using Tylenol. He also called for the measles-mumps-rubella combination vaccine to be split into separate shots, and for children not to get the hepatitis B vaccine, normally given in the first 24 hours after birth, before the age of 12 years.In a Truth Social post, the president wrote: “Pregnant Women, DON’T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, DON’T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON, BREAK UP THE MMR SHOT INTO THREE TOTALLY SEPARATE SHOTS (NOT MIXED!), TAKE CHICKEN P SHOT SEPARATELY, TAKE HEPATITAS B SHOT AT 12 YEARS OLD, OR OLDER, AND, IMPORTANTLY, TAKE VACCINE IN 5 SEPARATE MEDICAL VISITS!”The advice from Trump goes against that of medical societies, which cite data from numerous studies and decades of practice. More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: Trump orders deployment of national guard to ‘war ravaged’ Portland

      by

      Donald Trump has ordered the deployment of the national guard to Portland, Oregon, authorizing “full force, if necessary”, ignoring calls from local and state officials who say the president has been misinformed about the scale of a protest outside a federal immigration office.The president says that he has directed all necessary troops to be deployed to protect “war ravaged Portland”, claiming that immigration facilities were “under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists”.Officials in Portland have pushed back against the decision and rejected the president’s characterization.“There is no insurrection. There is no threat to national security and there is no need for military troops in our major city,” said Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek.Here are the key stories at a glance.Donald Trump says he is deploying troops to Portland, OregonDonald Trump made the announcement on social media, where he claimed that the deployment was necessary “to protect war ravaged Portland,” and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities he said were “under siege by antifascists and other domestic terrorists”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, rejected the president’s characterization. “In my conversations directly with President Trump and secretary [of homeland security, Kristi] Noem, I have been abundantly clear that Portland and the state of Oregon believe in the rule of law and can manage our own local public safety needs,” Kotek said at a news conference in Portland on Saturday.Read the full storyPortland residents scoff at Trump threat to send military: ‘This is not a war zone’A visit to downtown Portland on Saturday, hours after Donald Trump falsely declared the city “war ravaged” to justify the deployment of federal troops, made it plain the US president’s impression of the city, apparently shaped by misleading conservative media reports, is entirely divorced from reality.There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”.Read the full storyTrump fires US attorney who told border agents to follow law on immigration raidsDonald Trump fired a top federal prosecutor in Sacramento just hours after she warned immigration agents they could not indiscriminately detain people in her district, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times.Michele Beckwith, who became the acting US attorney in Sacramento in January, received an email at 4.31pm on 15 July notifying her that the president had ordered her termination.Read the full story‘Hell on earth’: immigrants held in new California detention facility beg for helpImmigrants locked up in California’s newest federal detention center have described the facility as a “a torture chamber”, “a zoo” and “hell on earth”, saying they were confined in filthy cells and suffered medical crises without help.Six people detained at the California City detention center, which opened in late August and is now the state’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center, shared accounts with the Guardian of poor conditions and alleged mistreatment by staff.Read the full storyUS military brass brace for firings as Pentagon chief orders top-level meetingUS military officials are reportedly bracing for possible firings or demotions after the Trump administration’s Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, abruptly summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world to attend a gathering in Virginia in the upcoming days.The event, scheduled for Tuesday at Marine Corps University in Quantico, is expected to feature a short address by Hegseth focused on military standards and the “warrior ethos”, according to the Washington Post.Read the full storyFBI arrest man who allegedly threatened to shoot people at Texas Pride paradeFederal authorities in Texas have arrested a man for allegedly threatening to shoot people at a pro-LGBTQ+ parade, to avenge the murder of Charlie Kirk.According to court documents viewed by the Guardian, on 18 September, the FBI’s field office in Dallas was notified by Abilene, Texas, police about online threats from a local resident.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Northwestern University students blocked from enrolment after refusing controversial antisemitism training.

      ‘Free speech for me, not for thee’: how Trump’s censorship blitz is splitting the right.

      Trump is flaunting his corruption. Is it changing what the US thinks of scandal? The Guardian’s David Smith on Trump’s brazen approach to the presidency.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened 26 September 2025. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump is flaunting his corruption. Is it changing what the US thinks of scandal?

      by

      As the Watergate scandal unfolded, new editions of the Washington Post newspaper were rushed over to the White House at night so Richard Nixon, the president, could brace for each devastating revelation.Half a century later, Donald Trump does not seem to fear explosive front page headlines or shocking disclosures of malfeasance. Usually because he has written them himself.The US president’s determination to break from his predecessors includes a willingness to shout from the rooftops of misconduct past presidents would have strained every sinew to conceal.And the consequence, observers say, is that Trump’s brazen approach earns him perverse credit for authenticity and takes the sting out of scandals that used to be career-ending when uncovered by muckraking journalists.“This is a dangerous notion that, just because a president chooses to be corrupt in public openly, it’s OK,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “People say, well, if it were really corrupt, it would be hidden. It’s a false assumption, but many people have it. It’s a new theory of scandal.”Trump delivered one of his most blatant examples last weekend. In a social media post addressed directly to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, the president fumed over the lack of legal action against James Comey, the former FBI director, Adam Schiff, the California senator, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW,” he wrote, before deleting the message and posting another supportive of Bondi.It was a glaringly obvious effort to order the justice department to take action against his political opponents. On Thursday the agency followed through by charging Comey with false statements and obstruction over congressional testimony about the investigation into contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.Democrats described it as “a disgraceful attack on the rule of law”, the latest in a series of moves that have threatened the justice department’s traditional independence. But Republicans, who five decades ago forced Nixon to resign over the Watergate burglary and ensuing cover-up, were mostly silent. There was no hint of impeaching Trump over what many saw as an impeachable offence.Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer, said: “It’s what prosecutors do in dictatorships. They want to run up this Comey thing that has no merit to it. That’s what they do in Russia. You piss off Putin and end up in some gulag somewhere. That’s not, I thought, how we want to run our country.”If Trump’s shamelessness is one superpower, his ability to flood the zone is another. He has spent the past decade proving the thesis that while one crisis can topple a politician, a hundred crises are subject to the law of diminishing returns. “It’s Watergate, Every Day,” read a headline on the Bulwark website this week.In a 2005 conversation captured on an Access Hollywood tape released in 2016, he described his approach to women: “I just start kissing them … And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ‘em by the pussy.”He has urged foreign governments to investigate political opponents. During a 2016 campaign rally, Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to rival Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. In 2019 he publicly called on China to target Joe Biden, saying: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”In a 2017 NBC News interview, Trump openly stated that he fired Comey because of “this Russia thing”, referring to an investigation into Russian election interference. This admission was cited in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as potential evidence of obstruction of justice, yet Trump framed it as a decisive action rather than wrongdoing.Trump expressed no contrition over the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 but rather persisted with his false claim of a stolen election, hailed the rioters as patriots and issued a blanket pardon of them on his first day back in office.In May this year, the president said he will accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One, defending the arrangement as a “gesture of good faith” despite concerns that it could violate the US constitution’s emoluments clause. The Trump Organization, run by the president’s two oldest sons, struck a series of lucrative deals in the Middle East.The breaches have come so thick and fast that they have become unremarkable to a numbed, desensitised audience. Sabato commented: “It becomes background noise. If there’s bad news about a particular person or category of public policy then it’s less significant because you expect it. What’s Trump done today? Then you shrug your shoulders and have your third cup of coffee.”Kurt Bardella, a political commentator, agrees that “Trump being Trump” no longer has shock value, especially since he previewed many of his actions during the election campaign. “It’s normalised versus when someone acts completely out of character: ‘Whoa, where did that come from? I never would have expected that person to act this way.’”The lightning-paced news cycle makes it easy for Trump to move on from the scandal du jour, Bardella adds. “Watergate was so powerful, [Monica] Lewinsky was so powerful because it was a singular focus for an extended period of time. Now we consider a long news cycle something that lasts actually an entire week, whereas before a week was a blip on the radar.”Even so, Trump has faced a barrage of lawsuits, ethical complaints and demands for investigations. But Republicans control both chambers of Congress and have shown little appetite for imposing accountability. He has spent a decade purging critics from the party and reshaping it in his own image.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “The institutional structures that should be countervailing, that should be pushing up against this and saying: ‘Oh, this is terrible, he’s breaking the law’, are completely absent. They’ve been co-opted or taken over by the Republican party or the conservative supreme court.“There isn’t a counter voice to say to the American people this is not acceptable behaviour. I don’t think Trump gets credit for flooding the zone or that his strategy is particularly remarkable. It’s that he has neutered the Congress and bought off the supreme court. There isn’t anybody, literally, who can stop him.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s boasting about conduct that others would hide also strikes a particular chord with his Make America great again (Maga) support base. In an October 2016 presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton accused him of avoiding taxes for years, Trump responded defiantly: “That makes me smart.”In a subsequent episode of Saturday Night Live, the comedian Dave Chappelle argued that such moments humanised Trump: his blunt admission of gaming a rigged system made him relatable, not elitist. Chappelle said: “The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call an honest liar.”Years later, that still holds with the Maga faithful. John Zogby, an author and pollster, observed: “For voters who want to rage against the machine, instead of being elected president and head of the machine, he’s the guy who feels he’s been put in place to both enforce and live the rage against the machine.“The very fact that he breaks all the rules so brazenly – takes foreign trips and makes personal business deals – adds to the appeal. He’s the baddest cowboy in town. He does and says what a lot of people wish that they could do and say and he gets away with it. With Donald Trump, the one piece of authenticity is he is exactly what he says he is.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump says he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon

      by

      Donald Trump said on Saturday he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon, “authorizing Full Force, if necessary”, ignoring pleas from local officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who suggested that the president was misinformed or lying about the nature and scale of a single, small protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.Trump made the announcement on social media, using references to antifascists and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). He claimed that the deployment was necessary “to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, rejected the president’s characterization. “There is no national security threat in Portland. Our communities are safe and calm,” she wrote on social media. “My office is reaching out to the White House and Homeland Security for more information. We have been provided no information on the reason or purpose of any military mission.”A visit by the Guardian to downtown Portland on Saturday morning confirmed that the city is placid, the farmers’ market was packed and the protest against immigration enforcement in an outlying residential neighborhood remained small. There were just four protesters on the sidewalk near the Ice field office Trump claimed was “under siege”. One, wearing a chicken costume and draped in an American flag, held up a sign that read: “Portland Will Outlive Him.” Passing motorists honked in appreciation.The White House did not provide details in connection with Trump’s announcement, including a timeline for the deployment or what troops would be involved.Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said at a hastily assembled news conference on Friday night that the city had become aware of “a sudden influx of federal agents in our city. We did not ask for them to come. They are here without clear precedent or purpose.”“The President has sent agents here to create chaos and riots in Portland, to induce a reaction, to induce protests, to induce conflicts. His goal is to make Portland look like what he’s been describing it as,” Oregon’s junior senator, Jeff Merkley said. “He wants to induce a violent exchange. Let us not grant him that wish. Let us be the force of orderly, peaceful protest.”The senator also drew attention to video evidence from the local newspaper, the Oregonian, which showed federal agents using force against a small number of protesters outside the Ice facility, who remained peaceful.Although a spokesperson for the Oregon national guard told the Oregonian that no official request for troops had been made yet, convoys of dozens of federal agents, in marked and unmarked SUVs, were seen on Friday entering a federal building downtown and an Ice field office in a residential neighborhood that has been the scene of regular protests by dozens of protesters.“The President of the United States is directing his self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of War’ to unleash militarized federal forces in an American city he disagrees with,” Representative Maxine Dexter wrote in a social media statement on Saturday, referring in part to the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth. “This is an egregious abuse of power and a betrayal of our most basic American values. Authoritarians rely on fear to divide us. Portland will not give them that.”Both of Oregon’s US senators and three of its House representatives had in recent days strongly rejected Trump’s claims about mass anarchy in the city as a fiction intended to justify the unnecessary deployment of federal troops as part of an “authoritarian” crackdown.Ron Wyden, the state’s senior Democratic senator, told reporters on Friday: “It’s important to recognize that the president’s argument is a fable – it does not resemble the truth.”“If he watches a TV show in the morning and he see Portland mentioned, he says it’s a terrible place,” Wyden added.During an Oval Office event on Thursday to announce that the administration intends to investigate and disrupt what it claims is “organized political violence” funded by leftwing groups, Trump made several wild claims about Portland, which was a center of racial justice protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But life has long since returned to normal, and barriers around the federal courthouse and police headquarters downtown have been removed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe president, however, apparently deceived by video of a handful of protesters gathered outside the Ice facility in a south-west Portland neighborhood broadcast by conservative outlets, insisted that the city has been in non-stop “anarchy” since 2020 and is barely livable.“Portland is, I don’t know how anybody lives there, it’s amazing. But it’s anarchy out there,” Trump said. The president then claimed, falsely, that most of the city’s retail stores had closed, due to arson attacks, and “the few shops that are open” were covered in plywood.Describing the small number of protesters who have gathered outside an Ice facility that has been illegally used for detentions in a residential neighborhood, Trump claimed, without evidence: “These are professional agitators, these are bad people and they’re paid a lot of money by rich people.“But we’re going to get out there and we’re gonna do a pretty big number on those people in Portland that are doing that.”Representative Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, said on Friday: “This proclaimed ‘war on Antifa’ is completely a fallacy. Antifa is an ideology, it is not a group, and so we’re extremely concerned with what he’s going to try to do with that pronouncement.”“Donald Trump does not care about safety. If he cared about safety he would not have released 1,600 convicted insurrectionists into the streets. He cares about control and authoritarianism,” she added, referring to Trump’s clemency for those who carried out the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “Portland does not need the military. We do not want them, we do not need them, we do not welcome them to come here under his orders.”Trump, a Republican, has sent military troops to the Democratic-controlled cities of Los Angeles and Washington DC so far in his second presidency. He has discussed doing the same in Memphis and New Orleans, which are also Democratic strongholds. More