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      The ‘bizarre’ referral of the US housing finance agency chief to oust Lisa Cook

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      The head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency embraced a highly unusual process to accuse Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, of committing mortgage fraud, former officials and experts have said. One former high-ranking official called the director’s involvement in a criminal referral “bizarre”.William Pulte, a businessman and major GOP donor whom Donald Trump appointed to head the powerful housing agency earlier this year, has accused Cook of committing mortgage fraud by misrepresenting her homes as a primary residence, potentially securing more favorable mortgage rates. The justice department formally opened a criminal investigation into whether Cook committed fraud and has issued subpoenas related to the transaction. Cook’s lawyers have called the discrepancies a “clerical error” and she has denied any wrongdoing.Trump has used those accusations as the basis to try to fire Cook, who has strongly denied the allegations and is contesting her firing in court. Pulte has also made similar referrals against New York attorney general Letitia James and California senator Adam Schiff, both political rivals of Trump.Investigations into mortgage fraud are usually handled by the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s office of inspector general (OIG), an agency watchdog, staffed with lawyers and agents with an expertise in investigating crimes, including mortgage fraud. The OIG is then the office that typically makes a criminal referral.“It’s very bizarre for Pulte to be the one making a criminal referral himself and it’s not coming from the IG’s office,” said Janell Byrd-Chichester, a former chief of staff at FHFA. “If we thought there might be criminal activity, that would go to the IG for review and a determination and the IG would be making any referral, not the agency.”Three other former officials across the inspector general’s office and FHFA said Pulte’s involvement was unusual.After assuming his position earlier this year, Pulte started an FHFA hotline to report waste, fraud and abuse. The move seemed strange to some in the office of the inspector general, which already has its own hotline to report fraud, according to a person familiar with the matter.“It’s certainly unusual, if not unprecedented, for the director of FHFA to make a single request to the justice department that someone be investigated for alleged mortgage fraud,” said Guy Cecala, the executive chair of Inside Mortgage Finance, an information company and research firm that has covered the mortgage market for more than four decades. “Historically, we haven’t seen a lot of people prosecuted for mortgage fraud in terms of misrepresenting their occupancy on a house.”While the FHFA inspector general would take referrals from FHFA, their investigations were typically walled off from FHFA, former officials said. The separation helped protect the privacy of borrowers and their sensitive mortgage information. The inspector general’s office would typically only pursue cases that resulted in substantial losses to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises that are regulated by FHFA.The extent of the FHFA inspector general’s involvement in Cook’s mortgage is unclear. Also uncertain is whether Pulte requested that officials at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac pull Cook’s loan documents – highly sensitive information – or whether the claims are based entirely on publicly available mortgage information. In Schiff’s case, the OIG appears to have at least requested documents about his home loans, according to the Los Angeles Times.“Your inquiry relates to public statements made by the Director of FHFA. I recommend that you reach out to FHFA’s media shop,” a spokesperson for the FHFA inspector general said in a statement. “FHFA OIG does not comment on the existence or non-existence of investigations conducted by this office.” FHFA did not return a request for comment.Pulte has refused to say why his agency started its inquiry into Cook. There is widespread belief that the decision was politically motivated because Trump wants to remove her from the Federal Reserve board in order to stack it with his appointees.Understanding the origins of Pulte’s inquiry is significant because misrepresenting occupancy on a mortgage application does not appear to be uncommon. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a Republican, and at least three members of Trump’s cabinet have listed multiple places as their primary residence, but have not faced the kind of scrutiny Cook has.“Issues with Cook’s loan file weren’t caught in some routine audit or the like. No one ever goes back and examines loan applications on performing loans for occupancy fraud; that would entail expenses for no benefit,” Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown University, wrote in a post on the blog Credit Slips. “Instead, the only way anyone would have noticed a problem with Cook’s loan application is that Pulte, as head of FHFA, directed Fannie or Freddie to pull her application. That is unheard of.”Furthermore, Pulte had referred Cook for a criminal inquiry without presenting bona fide evidence of a crime.“If Cook broke her promise about property use (and that isn’t clear), all that shows is a breach of contract,” Levitin wrote in a separate blog post in August. “For it to be fraud, she would have to have never intended to perform the promise in the first place. Pulte has no evidence whatsoever about Cook’s intent at the time she took out the mortgage. He hasn’t even shown a breach of contract, much less common law fraud, not to speak of a federal criminal law violation.”Observers have said it was also unusual for a loan to attract scrutiny if it was being paid. “This case is unusual because I’m not aware of any actual loss that’s occurred. I’m assuming neither of these mortgages are in default. I’m assuming neither of the mortgages in question are underwater,” Cecala said.After the financial crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began conducting random sampling on performing mortgages to see if there were issues that could put them at risk. But in cases where they found issues, it was rare that they would seek criminal punishment for the borrowers.“Normally in those cases – and again this is just precedent – Fannie and Freddie don’t get involved in the prosecution or even referring it to the justice department,” Cecala said. “They’ll just say, we see a problem with this mortgage and they just require the lender who made the loan to buy the loans back out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities.” More

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      Donald Trump maelstrom likely to leave US economic model unrecognisable | Heather Stewart

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      Donald Trump observed blithely last week that if his cherished tariff regime is struck down by the US supreme court, he may need to “unwind” some of the trade deals struck since he declared “liberation day” in April.It was a reminder, as if it were needed, that nothing about Trump’s economic policy is set in stone. Not only does the ageing president alter his demands on a whim, but it is unclear to what extent he has the power to make them stick.Yet even if the “reciprocal” tariffs first announced on 2 April are rolled back, they are only one aspect of a much wider assault on the last vestiges of what was once known as the “Washington consensus”.To name just a few of Trump’s recent interventions, he has taken a 10% government stake in the US tech company Intel, demanded 15% of the revenue of Nvidia’s chip sales to China and suggested the chief executive of Goldman Sachs should go.This at the same as taking a sledgehammer to Federal Reserve independence by lobbing insults at the chair, Jerome Powell, and trying to sack Lisa Cook from the central bank’s board.The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was removed by Trump after a run of poor jobs data; the chief of the National Labor Relations Board, Jennifer Abruzzo, was fired, too.The tech bros who back Trump loathe the NLRB for its role in upholding workers’ rights – mandating unionisation ballots at Amazon warehouses, for example.Trump’s approach is simultaneously systematic, in its determination to smash existing norms, and utterly chaotic. It is hard to categorise: corporate America is being unleashed – through the wilful destruction of environmental and labour standards, for example – and brought to heel.The leftwing senator Bernie Sanders welcomed Trump’s efforts to take a stake in Intel in exchange for government grants, for example – something he advocated in the Guardian back in 2022 – while some Republicans have condemned the approach as (heaven forbid) “socialism”.Partly because it coincides with the AI-fuelled stock boom that has propelled the value of tech companies into the stratosphere, the market response to this torching of the status quo has so far been modest.Whatever emerges from another three and a half years of this maelstrom is likely to be unrecognisable as the US economic model of recent decades.Its destruction has not happened overnight. The days were already long gone when the US, as the world’s undisputed economic superpower, could export free market, financialised capitalism worldwide.After the 2008 crash, the conditions for which were created in Wall Street boardrooms, any moral or practical claim the US had to offer an economic example to other nations evaporated.As the turmoil rippled out through the global economy, and the US government responded by bailing out large chunks of its financial sector, the lie of laissez-faire was laid bare.The crisis exposed the risks of turbocharged capitalism to countries outside the US, too – not least in the former Soviet bloc – that had been advised to adopt the model wholesale.As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes put it in their compelling polemic The Light that Failed, “confidence that the political economy of the west was a model for the future of mankind had been linked to the belief that western elites knew what they were doing. Suddenly it was obvious that they didn’t.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBack home in the US, meanwhile – as in the UK – the perception that banks had been bailed out, while the galaxy brains behind the crisis got off scot-free, sowed the seeds of a corrosive sense of injustice.Similarly, even before the crash, the idea that ever-expanding free trade brings economic benefits was bumping up against the fact that even if that is true in aggregate, for workers across the US rust belt, just as in the UK’s former manufacturing heartlands, it brought deindustrialisation and unemployment.This was fertile ground for Trump’s populist economic message. His first-term China tariffs were, with hindsight, a relatively modest stab at, as he saw it, tilting the playing field back towards the US.Joe Biden did not unwind those tariffs, which went with the grain of geopolitics, as any hopes that economic liberalisation would bring China into the fold of democracies were sadly dashed, and President Xi’s regime took on an increasingly authoritarian bent.Biden also took a muscular approach to the state’s role in the economy, with the billions in grants and loans distributed under the Inflation Reduction Act linked to national priorities of cutting carbon emissions and creating jobs.So the idea that before Trump arrived on the scene, free market US capitalism was motoring along unchallenged is misleading, but the pace at which he is crushing its remaining norms is extraordinary.There is ample ground for legitimate disagreement here: taxpayer stakes in strategic companies are much more common in European economies, for example. Trump may be laying down tracks that future US governments with different priorities could follow.Given that it is so unclear even what kind of economy he is groping towards, the overriding sense for the moment is of radical uncertainty. Friday’s weak US payrolls data, with the unemployment rate close to a four-year high, suggested companies may be responding with caution.Investors appear to have decided to avert their eyes for now, buoyed up by the prospect of Fed rate cuts, and the mega returns of the tech companies. However, with every chaotic week that passes, the risks must increase – and as the UK has learned in the wake of the Liz Truss debacle, economic credibility is quicker to lose than to rebuild. More

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      Peter Mandelson lauds Trump as ‘risk-taker’ in call for US-UK tech alliance

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      Donald Trump is a risk-taker sounding a necessary wake-up call to a stale status quo, Peter Mandelson has told the Ditchley Foundation in a speech before Trump’s second state visit to the UK this month.The UK’s ambassador to Washington portrayed Trump as a harbinger of a new force in politics at a time when business as usual no longer works for fed-up voters.The bulk of the speech was focused on a call for a US-UK technology partnership covering AI, quantum computing and rare-earth minerals as part of efforts to win a competition with China that Lord Mandelson said would shape this century.He said that such a partnership with the US had the potential to be as important as the security relationship the US and UK forged in the second world war, adding: “If China wins the race for technological dominance in the coming decades, every facet of our lives is going to be affected.”The first steps to that partnership are likely to be unveiled during Trump’s state visit, including new commitments for cheap nuclear energy to power the AI revolution.Mandelson, although a fierce pro-European, also said Brexit had not made the UK less relevant to the US, but by freeing the UK from European regulatory burdens had made Britain a more attractive site for US investors.Critics of Mandelson’s interpretation of Trump’s populism will argue that it assumes a set of common values between Trump’s Maga movement and European liberal democracy that is fading.In his pitch for a close US-UK alliance, he made no mention of key points of difference including Gaza, the international rule of law, Trump’s inability to see that Vladimir Putin is stalling in Ukraine, or Trump’s creeping domestic authoritarianism.Insisting he was not cast in the role of Trump’s “explainer-in-chief” and denying there was any need to be sycophantic with the Trump team, he praised the US president for identifying the anxieties gripping millions of impatient voters deprived of meaningful work.He accused those arguing for a pivot away from Trump’s America of “lazy thinking”, arguing that the America First credo on the climate crisis, US aid cuts and trade did not preclude a close partnership.He said: “The president may not follow the traditional rulebook or conventional practice, but he is a risk-taker in a world where a ‘business as usual’ approach no longer works.“Indeed, he seems to have an ironclad stomach for political risk, both at home and abroad – convening other nations and intervening in conflicts that other presidents would have thought endlessly about before descending into an analysis paralysis and gradual incrementalism.“Yet – and this is not well understood – although the Trumpian national security strategy is called ‘America First’, it does not actually mean ‘America Alone’.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We see him leverage America’s heft to put the right people in the room and hammer out compromises in order to grind out concessions.“I am not just thinking of Ukraine where the president has brought fresh energy to efforts to end Putin’s brutal invasion and bring peace to that region. If the president were so indifferent to the rest of the world, if he was so in love with America alone, he would not have intervened in multiple spheres of conflict over the last seven months.“Furthermore, the ‘international order’ people claim he has disrupted and the calm he has allegedly shattered was already at breaking point. So, I would argue that Trump is more consequence than cause of the upheaval we are experiencing.”He continued: “He will not always get everything right but with his Sharpie pen and freewheeling Oval Office media sprays he has sounded a deafening wake-up call to the international old guard.“And the president is right about the status quo failing from America’s point of view. The world has rested on the willingness of the US to act as sheriff, to form a posse whenever anything went wrong, a world in which America’s allies could fall in behind – not always that close behind either – and then allow the US to do most of the heavy lifting.”Going further than the UK’s official line, he praised Trump’s military attack on Iran, saying: “Trump understands the positive coercive power of traditional American deterrence, deterring adversaries through a blend of strength and strategic unpredictability, as we saw in his decisive action on Iran’s nuclear programme. Well beyond their military impact, these strikes gave a swathe of malign foreign regimes pause for thought.” More

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      One by one, leaders learn that grovelling to Trump leads to disaster. When will it dawn on Starmer? | Simon Tisdall

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      Sucking up to Donald Trump never works for long. Narendra Modi is the latest world leader to learn this lesson the hard way. Wooing his “true friend” in the White House, India’s authoritarian prime minister thought he’d conquered Trump’s inconstant heart. The two men hit peak pals in 2019, holding hands at a “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas. But it’s all gone pear-shaped thanks to Trump’s tariffs and dalliance with Pakistan. Like a jilted lover on the rebound, Modi shamelessly threw himself at Vladimir Putin in China last week. Don and Narendra! It’s over! Although, to be honest, it always felt a little shallow.Other suitors for Trump’s slippery hand have suffered similar heartbreak. France’s Emmanuel Macron turned on the charm, feting him at the grand reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. But Trump cruelly dumped him after they argued over Gaza, calling him a publicity-seeker who “always gets it wrong”. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen, desperate for a tete-a-tete, flew to Trump’s Scottish golf course to pay court. Result: perhaps the most humiliating, lopsided trade deal since imperial Britain’s 19th-century “unequal treaties” with Peking’s dragon throne.The list of broken pledges and dashed hopes is lengthy. Relationships between states normally pivot on power, policy and strategic interests. But with faithless, fickle Trump, it’s always personal – and impermanent. Disconcertingly, he told Mexico’s impressive president, Claudia Sheinbaum, that he “likes her very much” – then threatened to invade her country, ostensibly in pursuit of drug cartels. Leaders from Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and South Africa have all attempted to ingratiate themselves, to varying degrees. They still haven’t fared well.All this should set red lights flashing for Britain’s Keir Starmer ahead of Trump’s state visit in 10 days’ time. The prime minister’s unedifying Trump-whisperer act has produced little benefit to date, at high reputational cost. Starmer apparently believes his handling of the US relationship is a highlight of his first year in office. Yet Trump ignores his Gaza ceasefire pleas and opposes UK recognition of a Palestinian state. He hugely boosted Putin, Britain’s nemesis, with his half-baked Alaska summit. US security guarantees for postwar Ukraine are more mirage than reality. His steel tariffs and protectionist policies continue to hurt UK workers.His second state visit is an appalling prospect. The honour is utterly undeserved. It’s obvious what Trump will gain: a royal endorsement, a chance to play at being King Donald, a privileged platform from which to deliver his corrosive, divisive populist-nationalist diatribes at a moment of considerable social fragility in the US and UK. Polls suggest many Britons strongly oppose the visit; and most don’t trust the US. So what Starmer thinks he will gain is a mystery. The fleeting goodwill of a would-be dictator who is dismantling US democracy and wrecking the global laws-based order championed by the UK is a poor return.View image in fullscreenAs he demands homage from abject subjects, this spectacle will confirm the UK in the eyes of the world as a lackey state, afraid to stand up for its values. Starmer’s government is now so morally confused that it refuses to acknowledge that Israel, fully backed by Trump, is committing genocide in Gaza, while at the same time making the wearing of a pro-Palestine T-shirt a terrorist act. The Trump travesty will be an embarrassment, signalling a further descent into colonial subservience. As next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence approaches, the chronically unhealthy “special relationship” has finally come full circle.Not everyone is genuflecting to Trump – and evidence mounts that resistance, not grovelling, is by far the best way to handle this schoolyard bully. Modi’s geopolitical fling in China showed he’s learned that when dealing with Trump, firm resolve, supported by alternative options, is the better policy. Last week’s defiant speech by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, reflected a similar realisation. Both he and Putin have discovered that when they dig their heels in, whether the issue is Ukraine, trade or sanctions, Trump backs off. Xi has adopted an uncompromising stance from the start. Putin uses flattery, skilfully manipulating Trump’s frail ego. The result is the same. Like cowards the world over, Trump respects strength because he’s weak. So he caves.The bigger the wolf, the more sheepishly Trump responds. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, like Putin, an indicted war criminal, has shown that by sticking to his guns (literally, in his case), he can face down Trump. More than that, Trump can be co-opted. After Netanyahu attacked Iran in June, against initial US advice, he induced the White House to join in – although, contemptibly, Trump only did so once he was certain who was winning. Then, typically, he claimed credit for a bogus world-changing victory. North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, similarly bamboozled Trump during his first term. Having learned nothing, and nursing his implausible Nobel peace prize ambitions, Trump is again raising the prospect of unconditional engagement with Kim.Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has the right idea. The more Trump tries to bully him with 50% tariffs and a barrage of criticism, the more he resists. Trump is particularly exercised over the fate of Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s hard-right predecessor, who, like Trump, mounted a failed electoral coup. But Lula is not having any of it. “If the United States doesn’t want to buy [from us], we will find new partners,” he said. “The world is big, and it’s eager to do business with Brazil.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the spirit! And guess what? Lula’s poll ratings are soaring. Wake up, Keir Starmer – and dump Trump.

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Anxiety in Chicago as Trump plans to send troops; postal traffic into US drops 80%

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      At least three events connected to Mexican Independence Day have been canceled or postponed in Chicago, amid reports that Donald Trump plans to send troops and immigration agents as part of plans to launch mass deportations.Organizers decided to cancel El Grito Chicago, an event that drew 24,000 people last year and was scheduled for 13-14 September.“It was a painful decision, but holding El Grito Chicago at this time puts the safety of our community at stake – and that’s a risk we are unwilling to take,” the event’s website stated. “While we’re torn by this decision, when we brought this celebration back, our aim was to create a safe, affordable, family-friendly, community festival for all.”The anxiety in the country’s third-largest city comes after Trump deployed national guard troops to Los Angeles and Washington DC. Illinois governor JB Pritzker said he was concerned about Ice agents targeting people at the Mexican Independence Day events.Here’s the day’s Trump administration news at a glance.Mexican festivals in Chicago canceled amid Trump plans to deploy troopsDonald Trump’s plan to deploy national guard troops and federal immigration agents to Chicago is already having an impact on the city’s Mexican community.Organizers have canceled several local events tied to Mexican Independence Day, which occurs on 16 September.Read the full storyTrump claims Chicago is ‘world’s most dangerous city’. The most violent ones are in red statesAs Donald Trump threatens to deploy national guard units to cities ostensibly to quell violence, he repeatedly targets Democratic run-cities.But an analysis of crime trends over the last four years shows two things. First, violent crime rates in America’s big cities have been falling over the last two years, and at an even greater rate over the last six months. The decrease in violence in America is unprecedented.Second, crime in large cities in the aggregate is lower in states with Democratic leadership. But the president focuses his ire almost exclusively on large blue cities in blue states, sidestepping political conflict with red Republican governors.Read the full storyPostal traffic into US plunges by more than 80% after Trump ends exemptionPostal traffic into the US plunged by more than 80% after the Trump administration ended a tariff exemption for low-cost imports, the United Nations postal agency said Saturday.Read the full storyRightwing conference reveals muddled lines between Trump and far rightA rightwing conference recently saw theocratic Christian nationalists, far-right publishers and members of men-only secret societies speaking alongside the Missouri senator Eric Schmitt, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at Donald Trump’s Department of Justice and other senior Republican figures.The speaker list at the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC raises questions over what distinctions exist between the nationalist hard right in the US and members of the Trump administration and the Republican party.Read the full storyTrump’s former surgeon general urges president to fire RFK JrThe surgeon general from the first Trump administration on Saturday said that the US president should “absolutely” fire health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr over his “dangerous” policies on vaccines and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Read the full storyTrump administration begins new Ice operation in MassachusettsThe Trump administration has targeted Massachusetts as its next location to begin arresting and deporting immigrants, a Department of Homeland Security official confirmed to NBC News on Saturday.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      US supreme court rulings are “not just an opinion poll” of its nine judges’ beliefs, conservative Amy Coney Barrett has said, as she and her colleagues weigh a request to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage.

      US Open broadcasters have been asked not to air any booing of Donald Trump at Sunday’s men’s final.

      The West Point Association of Graduates has reportedly canceled a ceremony to honor Tom Hanks just weeks before it was to take place.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on Friday 5 September. More

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      Trump’s former surgeon general urges president to fire RFK Jr

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      The surgeon general from the first Trump administration on Saturday said that the US president should “absolutely” fire health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr over his “dangerous” policies on vaccines and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Jerome Adams, who has become a pointed critic of the public health decisions being swiftly rolled out in the second Trump administration, made his most fierce attack yet on what has been unfolding.“He’s putting us at risk,” Adams said of RFK Jr, adding that Kennedy is “endangering America at large” with moves to limit access to vaccines, such as shots to protect against the deadly Covid-19 virus.In an interview with CNN on Saturday morning, anchor Victor Blackwell asked Adams, who served as Donald Trump’s surgeon general from 2017 to 2021, including through the height of the coronavirus pandemic, whether Kennedy should resign.“Well, he’s not going to resign,” Adams said.Asked whether, therefore, Trump should fire his health secretary, Adams said: “I absolutely believe that he should, for the sake of the nation.”Kennedy was praised by the president after a stormy committee hearing in the US Senate on Thursday where Democrats called for his resignation or firing and accused him of ignorance and “reckless disregard for science and the truth”.Although more muted, a select few Republicans were critical, including Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who had been a crucial vote to confirm Kennedy to his post, who said the secretary was “effectively denying people the vaccine” with his policy positions. Kennedy snapped back: “You’re wrong.”Adams said he was “flabbergasted” by new restrictions from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month on who is eligible to receive the latest version of the Covid-19 vaccination and hoped that Trump “will begin to see the danger … to America” of Kennedy’s leanings and will not be “in thrall” of his health secretary.On Friday, Adams was a co-author of a bipartisan opinion piece published in USA Today from three former surgeons general that said that Kennedy’s actions to shake up the CDC were actions that “jeopardize not only the institution’s integrity but also the health and well-being of millions of Americans”.The other authors were Jocelyn Elders, surgeon general in Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration, and Richard Carmona, surgeon general under Republican George W Bush’s presidency.The CDC erupted in chaos in late August when the Trump administration fired the center’s director Susan Monarez, who had been in the post for mere weeks, in an apparent divide over vaccine policy – although she is refusing to leave. Several senior CDC leaders quit in protest at Kennedy’s move to oust her. This followed his June firing of all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) and his replacing them with some who publicly hold anti-vaccine views.The three former surgeons general wrote that they were “gravely concerned” for the CDC as a “cornerstone of public health in America and across the world” that had saved countless lives through its science-driven approach, earning public trust.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The recent turbulence at the CDC threatens to undermine this legacy, and we feel this is not just a bureaucratic or political issue. It’s truly a matter of life and death,” the article said.Adams said in the CNN interview that organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association have lost trust in the CDC under Kennedy’s leadership.He warned that Kennedy could effectively destroy the CDC and was “putting lives at risk by doing so”.Adams at times clashed with Trump when he was his surgeon general, including over policies over public masking during the pandemic.On Saturday, he warned that Kennedy’s policies threatened public health in general but that Covid vaccine restrictions were “specifically endangering Black, Hispanic and Native American communities, who experienced death rates during the pandemic that were twice as high as white Americans”.The day after the Senate hearing, former Massachusetts Democratic representative Joe Kennedy III, RFK Jr’s nephew, posted a statement on X calling the health secretary “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American” and urging him to resign.Echoing that call to resign was one of the secretary’s siblings, Kerry Kennedy, who also posted on X and decried what she called “the decimation of critical institutions, like the [National Institutes of Health] and the CDC”. More

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      Trump claims Chicago is ‘world’s most dangerous city’. The four most violent ones are all in red states

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      As Donald Trump threatens to deploy national guard units to Chicago and Baltimore, ostensibly to quell violence, a pattern has emerged as he describes which cities he talks about.Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Baltimore.But not Jackson, Birmingham, St Louis or Memphis.An analysis of crime trends over the last four years shows two things. First, violent crime rates in America’s big cities have been falling over the last two years, and at an even greater rate over the last six months. The decrease in violence in America is unprecedented.Second, crime in large cities in the aggregate is lower in states with Democratic leadership. But the president focuses his ire almost exclusively on large blue cities in blue states, sidestepping political conflict with red Republican governors.The four cities of populations larger than 100,000 with the highest murder rates in 2024 are in Republican states: Jackson, Mississippi (78.7 per 100,000 residents), Birmingham, Alabama (58.8), St Louis, Missouri (54.1) and Memphis, Tennessee (40.6).On Tuesday, Trump called Chicago “the most dangerous city in the world”, and pledged to send military troops there, as well as to Baltimore. “I have an obligation. This isn’t a political thing,” he said at a press conference. “I have an obligation when 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks and 75 are shot with bullets.”When talking about crime in Chicago, Trump regularly refers to the number of people who may have been shot and killed there. But Chicago has a population of about 2.7 million, which is larger than each of the least-populous 15 states. It is roughly the same population as Mississippi. Chicago’s homicide rate for 2024 was 17.5 murders for every 100,000 residents, only a few points higher than that of the state of Louisiana, which was 14.5 per 100,000 in 2024.As has become tradition, news outlets reported how many people were killed in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend. At Louisiana’s rates, one would predict almost twice as many people to have been murdered there over the long weekend.But those numbers are harder to count. Chicago police report a single figure. One has to scour a hundred local news sites around Louisiana to aggregate the count for comparison.Notably, Trump discussed sending troops to New Orleans this week. “We’re making a determination now,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “Do we go to Chicago or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad?”And Landry signaled his willingness to accede. “We will take President Trump’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!” he wrote on X, posting a clip of the exchange.Still, Chicago is bracing to be the next city targeted by the Trump administration. To date this year, 278 people have been killed in Chicago, 118 fewer people killed when compared with 2024. It is at pace for 412 deaths for the year, which would be a rate of about 15 per 100,000 residents. The rate is likely to be lower still than that, because homicide rates increase during summer months.The Windy City ranked 37th in homicide rate in 2024 for cities larger than 50,000 residents in the United States. For cities with more than 100,000 residents, it placed 14th. This year, it is likely to slide farther down the list, even as violence falls to 60-year lows.As reported by the FBI’s crime data unit in August, the United States had a homicide rate of about 4.6 per 100,000 residents in 2024. It is the lowest figure since 2014, and very close to the generational lows of 4 to 4.5 per 100,000 last experienced in the early 1960s. The pandemic wave of increased violence has largely receded.“We know that across the nation [violence is] going down,” said Dr Thaddeus Johnson, a former Tennessee police officer and senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a policy thinktank.The 2024 homicide rate in the US decreased by about 15%, one of the largest drops in American history. Most of that decrease can be attributed to declines in the largest cities, Johnson said.Criminal justice researchers tend to place higher value on murder rates than other indicators of violent crime, because murder statistics are harder to manipulate. “It’s the most trustworthy data point,” Johnson said. But it’s not the only data point. “When you start talking about aggravated assaults and robberies, generally, we’ve seen that going down across the nation as well.”Both Chicago and Baltimore implemented or expanded antiviolence programs in 2022 using American Rescue Plan funding – much of which has been cut under Trump. Baltimore’s homicide rate has fallen about 40% since 2020, and in 2025 is pacing a 50-year low to date.Violent crime had also been falling in Washington DC by substantial margins before Trump took over the city’s policing. His announcement last month referenced DC’s 2023 crime rates, which spiked during the pandemic, while saying nothing about the precipitous fall since.In January, the Metropolitan police department and US attorney’s office reported that total violent crime in DC in 2024 was down 35% from the prior year, marking the lowest rate in over 30 years.The Guardian analyzed the murder rates for the largest 50 cities in the US and found that cities in blue states had the lowest, with just 7.8 murders per 100,000 people. The cities in red states have a much higher murder rate, of 12.9. Cities in swing states sit in the middle, with a murder rate of 10.2.Baltimore ranks fifth on a list of cities over 50,000 population by murder rate in 2024, as reported to the FBI statisticians. Washington DC is 15th. Between them are Wilmington, Delaware; Detroit; Cleveland; Dayton, Ohio; North Little Rock, Arkansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Shreveport, Louisiana; Camden, New Jersey, and Albany, Georgia.Compliance with federal rules on crime reporting is incomplete, and some agencies report incomplete data. One notable example of this is Jackson, Mississippi, which has consistently gathered crime data but only started submitting it to the FBI’s system this year. Jackson recorded 111 homicides in 2024, in a population of about 141,000: a rate of 78.7, the highest in America for any city with a population over 50,000.Though St Louis posted the second-highest homicide rate in 2024, violence there has been falling since 2023, and is on pace today for a 10% annual drop. Its rate will fall less sharply, however, because St Louis is losing population.Memphis led the country’s homicide rate in 2023. To date in 2025, murders and non-negligent homicides are down about 25%, after a 22% decrease in 2024. Like Baltimore, Memphis leaders attribute the decrease in part to an aggressive gun violence reduction initiative, Memphis Allies.Notably, small changes in smaller cities can have a big statistical effect.Birmingham, with a population of about 200,000, has cut its murder rate by more than half since the start of the year. Local officials attribute this, in part, to the arrest of a handful of people accused of violence, including Damien McDaniel, who has been charged in the murders of 18 people as a hired hitman. His arrest in October – and that of four other people who are linked to him – coincides with a 55% drop in Birmingham’s homicide rate since. More

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      The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy | Rebecca Solnit

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      Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.Democracy, in this context, means a society and system in which everyone’s rights matter, everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is equal under the law. Rapists count on this not being true, but is has become more true over the past half century, thanks to feminism, and changed a lot more over the past dozen years, thanks to more feminism. There has been a shift toward equality of of voice, rights and support from the legal system, from arresting officers to investigations, judges and juries (who, thanks to feminism, are no longer exclusively male). It hasn’t changed enough, but it’s changed a lot, which is how a hundred survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s rape club were able to gather with the support of Thomas Massie, a Republican congressperson from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, on Wednesday morning to speak to the world about their experiences and demand justice.They became victims, and some were abused for years, because of the power differential between Epstein and the girls and young women. His power consisted not only of his immense and still-unexplained wealth, but of aid from a host of others. Some actively cooperated in manipulating and abusing them, as groomer and pimp-in-chief Ghislaine Maxwell did, along with the fellow rapists to whom Epstein offered these children and young women. Others knew and chose to protect him and his fellow abusers, and some still do, all the way to the very top.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, adjourned Congress earlier this summer to prevent votes on measures relating to Epstein and thereby protect Donald Trump. As the New Republic reported on Tuesday, “House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full.” Johnson’s main concern in this (and pretty much everything else he does) is to protect Trump. He is not alone. Jamie Raskin said in July: “They’d conscripted a thousand FBI agents to be working around the clock 24 hours going through a hundred thousand Epstein documents and told them to flag any mentions of Donald Trump … This might be one of the most massive cover-ups in the history of the United States unfolding before our eyes.”The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, ordered this frantic censorship scheme to protect Trump, which should have begotten a thousand front-page news stories demanding to know what exactly it took a thousand agents to hide from us and who exactly Trump is that he requires this kind of anti-democratic protection. Like Johnson, and like Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who conducted a long, deeply wrong exculpatory softball interview with Maxwell, she’s serving one man rather than the 342 million people of this country. Trump himself, who over the summer seemed terrified and eager to distract from whatever there is to be found out about his role in all this, once again attempted to silence victims by calling the whole thing “a Democrat hoax” immediately after the news conference. Survivor Haley Robson called out Trump and declared: “I cordially invite you to the Capitol to meet me in person so you can understand this is not a hoax.”The women who spoke at Wednesday morning’s press conference made it clear they still fear they face threats, that the machinery of silencing is still at work. Katie Tarrant of the Washington Post writes, “Lisa Phillips, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, and her lawyer Brad Edwards, said victims were scared to speak publicly about other abusers for fear of legal action. Her response came in response to a question about a client list some victims said they are compiling.” Another Post journalist reports, “Anouska De Georgiou, who said she was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, said she and her daughter were threatened when she volunteered to be a witness in a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell.”And this attempt to suppress the truth about crimes and silence victims is only too consistent with the Republican party and the Trump administration. The attacks on immigrants, refugees, Black and brown people, women, trans people, the positioning of the administration as above the law with the cooperation of the rogue conservatives of the supreme court: all this is an attempt to roll back not only the democratic gains of the past several decades, but the democratic principles of universal rights and equality under the law embedded in the constitution and the Bill of Rights.Rendering women second-class or maybe 11th-class citizens again is at the heart of the current rightwing agenda, with its pursuit of criminalization of pregnancy, denial of reproductive rights including access to birth control, the right to choose whether to bear children, and life-saving care for women who have miscarriages or otherwise need a pregnancy terminated. But this is only part of the attack on women. The administration has disproportionately fired Black women from government jobs. 300,000 Black women have left – or been pushed out of – the workforce in the last three months.Pete Hegseth, who himself settled rape allegations out of court, has fired women in high positions in the military, claims women are less qualified than men and has been reposting videos from Christian fanatics asserting women should not have the right to vote. Trump’s is quite literally a pro-crime administration, as major branches of federal government are pulled away from pursuing criminals to persecuting immigrants, often violating the law to do so. The administration has sought to cut funding for and dismantle programs addressing domestic violence. And of course the Trump administration is headed by Donald J Trump – a judge found in a civil claim that it was “substantially true” that Trump raped journalist E Jean Carroll. It’s rapists all the way down, and enablers all the way up.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More