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      DC mayor says she ‘greatly appreciates’ Trump’s surge of federal officers but adds there is ‘break in trust’ with residents – as it happened

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      “We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser says.She cites police data which shows there has been an 87% reduction in carjackings in DC over the last 20 days, compared to the same period last year.Boswer then says she spoke with Donald Trump today, and that she was “reminded” of their first meeting after his re-election earlier this year.“We discussed shared priorities for the district,” Bowser adds. “I was reminded that the president’s interest in cities predates his time in office, and his knowledge of DC had significantly increased from the first time he was in the White House.”Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is being ousted from the position less than a month after being sworn in, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing multiple Trump administration officials familiar with the matter.The Washington Post did not cite a reason for the departure. Citing several anonymous CDC employees, the newspaper reported that Monarez on Friday canceled an agency-wide call that had been scheduled for Monday. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately provide comment.Monarez, a federal government scientist, was confirmed by the Senate on 29 July and sworn in by Robert F Kennedy Jr two day later. Her departure comes after a police officer was killed in a shooting at the CDC.

      Donald Trump has ordered the American flag to be flown at half-staff at the White House and across federal buildings until 31 August, following the mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis which killed two children and injured 17 people. My colleagues are tracking the latest developments here.

      Earlier, DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, held a press conference to discuss the federal takeover of the DC police. The mayor balanced deference towards Trump with occasional bursts of defiance. Bowser said that while she “greatly appreciates” the impact of the federal law enforcement surge on district crime (pointing to the substantial decrease in carjackings compared to this time last year), there was ultimately a “break in trust” between officers and local residents. “We know having masked Ice agents in the community has not worked, and national guard from other states has not been an efficient use of those resources,” she added.

      Bowser said she has a “courtesy meeting” with the president today, where they did not discuss any of his plans to extend the federal takeover beyond 30 days (a move that would require congressional approval). The mayor did say that Trump’s “knowledge of DC” appeared to have “significantly increased” from the first term in office. She declined to offer any details about her “substantive” conversation with attorney general Pam Bondi and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

      Bowser offered glimpses of pushback against the administration when taking questions from reporters. She said was was “devastated” to hear that immigrants in DC are living in fear of being arrested by Ice agents, and claimed that if the Metropolitan police department had more officers –a recurring plea from DC government – local law enforcement wouldn’t require any federal intervention.

      Staying in the nation’s capital, The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said that his department is taking back control of Union Station from Amtrak –the railroad company that receives federal subsidies and has managed the daily operations of the DC transportation hub for over a year. At a launch event for a new fleet of high-speed trains today, Duffy said that the station has been “neglected for decades”. He added that reclaiming station management “will help make this city safe and beautiful at a fraction of the cost.”

      Meanwhile, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said on CNN today that Donald Trump hasn’t “made a final call” on when he plans to nominate a replacement for Lisa Cook – the Federal Reserve governor he moved to fire this week. Hassett’s comment came after Trump suggested at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday that he had a candidate in mind. Cook has not been charged with a crime, and is expected to file a lawsuit challenging her attempted firing.

      Meanwhile, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that Kilmar Ábrego García cannot be deported again until at least early October. Judge Paula Xinis has set a hearing for 6 October on the administration’s plans to deport Ábrego. His lawyers also said their client wants to seek asylum in the US, for fear of torture and persecution if deported to Uganda.
      California Republicans are proposing a “two-state solution” for the Golden State.James Gallagher, the top Republican in the California assembly, unveiled a resolution on Wednesday that would split the state in two – their response to the Democrats’ attempt to redraw the congressional boundaries in the state, itself a response to a Republican-led redistricting effort in Texas.The provocatively named proposal – adopting a phrase more often used in reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – is a political nonstarter. But it underscores the new messaging Republicans in the state plan to use to rally opposition to the ballot initiative in November.Gallagher argued that the redistricting push would further “silence rural voices and rig the political system against them forever” in California.“I have come to see that the only way we can obtain proper attention is by pursuing our own statehood. With this measure, we will begin the first step of that process,” he said.The Republican plan would divide California vertically, splitting the deep-blue slice of the coast from the more rural and red inland. According to Gallagher, it would create a state with a population of more than 10 million people – making it one of the 10 most populous states in the US.“Whether you are from the north state, Central valley, or the Inland Empire, life has become harder and completely unaffordable,” the Republican leader explained. “We have been overlooked for far too long, and now they are trying to rip away what little representation we have left.”The referendum, led by the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, will ask voters to approve a gerrymander aimed at securing five more Democratic House seats in California to offset the five new Republican-heavy districts created by the Texas legislature.“We will not be subject to a state that deprives us of a fair voice,” he said. “Gavin, let my people go.”Florida’s immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will probably be empty of detainees within days, a state official has said, indicating compliance with a judge’s order last week that the facility must close.The Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s administration appealed the order by federal court judge Kathleen Williams that the tented detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which attracted criticism for its harsh conditions, must be dismantled within 60 days.But in an email reported Wednesday by the Associated Press, Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the federal government, appeared to confirm it would be shuttered.“We are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days,” Guthrie wrote to Mario Rojzman, a Miami Beach rabbi who has been helping to arrange chaplaincy services.Representatives for Rojzman confirmed the authenticity of the memo to the news agency. Guthrie’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Miami Herald had previously reported that hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities in the state in advance of Williams’s’ ruling.Donald Trump has ordered the American flag to be flown at half-staff at the White House and across federal buildings until 31 August, following the mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis which killed two children and injured 17 people.A reminder that my colleagues are bringing you the latest developments from Minneapolis.Grand jurors have rebuffed federal prosecutors by refusing to approve a criminal indictment against a man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a law enforcement agent in protest against Donald Trump’s deployment of armed troops on the streets of Washington DC.It is the second time in recent days that a grand jury had declined to vote to indict a person accused of assaulting a federal officer and signaled strong public objection to Trump’s decision to send national guard troops and federal agents onto the streets of the US capital, purportedly to crack down on violent crime.The case of Sean Charles Dunn, who was accused of hurling the sub-style sandwich, became a cause celebre after video of the episode went viral on social media.Dunn, 37, a former justice department paralegal, was initially charged on 13 August after being accused of throwing a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer who was patrolling an area of Washington’s north-west district known for its bars and restaurants with other agents.The DC mayor said officials will “answer any questions” that are posed to local government, when it comes to the House oversight committee’s investigation into allegations of manipulated DC crime statistics.On Monday, Republican congressman James Comer, who chairs the committee, asked the DC police chief, Pamela Smith, for transcribed interviews with the seven commanders of DC’s patrol districts.Bowser also confirmed today that there was no update on the internal Metropolitan police department investigation – after local reports of a former DC commander facing accusations from the police union of falsifying data.Earlier, Bowser said that she was “devastated” by immigrants in DC living fear during the surge of federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
      I think you know very clearly how I feel about our nation needing comprehensive immigration reform, about Congress establishing a pathway to citizenship for hardworking people who came to this country for a better life, and who are not criminals, who are law abiding. And I think when that question is finally answered, that’s the only way to deal with this fear, or to deal with these agencies going after law-abiding people.
      Bowser is now addressing a direct question from a reporter about whether she pushed back in her meeting with the president, particularly when it comes to the anger from DC residents at the federal law enforcement presence in the district, and the use of masks covering the faces of agents.She characterizes her discussion with Trump as a “courtesy meeting”, but says that she had a “substantive” conversation with the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, and Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, but declined to discuss the details of her meeting.Boswer confirms that the Metropolitan police department is “supporting the ask” of the administration to assist Ice agents with immigration enforcement efforts.A notable exchange at this press conference. A reporter asked how Bowser can be sure that MPD officers wouldn’t have made all the arrests illustrated today on those charts without the additional federal law enforcement.“Let me put it this way, if there were 500 additional MPD officers…that same activity, arrests and gun recovery would have likely been made,” Bowser said, underscoring the city’s aim to increase the number of local police.Bowser also just said that when she spoke to the president earlier today, they didn’t talk about his possible plan to try to extend the federal takeover of the DC police beyond 30 days. A reminder: Trump would need congressional approval for an extension, according to section 740 of the DC Home Rule Act.Reporters are now asking questions, and the mayor says the number of cited arrests (more than 1,500) represents a combined number – from both the Metropolitan police department (MPD) and federal law enforcement.However, she says this number might not include all federal arrests.The DC mayor says that despite statistics that show a reduction in crime, the “break in trust” between police and the local community is “not working”. She says this is particularly apparent between federal law enforcement and DC locals.“We know having masked Ice agents in the community has not worked, and national guard from other states has not been an efficient use of those resources,” she adds.A short while ago, Muriel Bowser said that her office “will be supportive” of Donald Trump’s $2bn “beautification” request to Congress.“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser says.She cites police data which shows there has been an 87% reduction in carjackings in DC over the last 20 days, compared to the same period last year.Boswer then says she spoke with Donald Trump today, and that she was “reminded” of their first meeting after his re-election earlier this year.“We discussed shared priorities for the district,” Bowser adds. “I was reminded that the president’s interest in cities predates his time in office, and his knowledge of DC had significantly increased from the first time he was in the White House.”The deputy mayor for public safety and justice, Lindsey Appiah, is now talking about the hiring push for the DC police department. “We continue to do that work to stabilize, and to increase our for strength to what we believe is where we need to be – 3,800 to 4,000 officers,” she says.Bowser is now speaking, and says she’s providing a “situational update” on the surge of federal law enforcement in DC.“I always want to remind people give you a quick little primer of who we are in Washington, DC,” Bowser adds. “We function as a city, county and state…We pay federal taxes. In fact, we pay more per capita than most places, and we get back less.”The pre-amble that Boswer is giving seems to be a pointed refresher on what the limited rights and representation of the district.The mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, is about to hold a press conference to give an update on the federal takeover of law enforcement in the nation’s capital. More

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      America survived a coup attempt. Can it endure dictatorial creep? | Lawrence Douglas

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      January 6 demonstrated that longstanding democracies can readily resist a disorganized effort at a coup. They are less equipped to withstand the normalization of exceptional measures: the use of federal agents to quell domestic protest, the staging of police raids on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, the pretextual invocations of emergency powers. Each of these steps may seem temporary and targeted; they may even enjoy a thin patina of legality. But over time, a democratic order turns into what Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish lawyer whose book The Dual State stands as one of the first and most perceptive examinations of Hitler’s regime, called a “prerogative state” – a government in which the executive “is released from all legal restraints and depends solely on the discretion of the persons wielding political power”.So let us be clear: Trump’s commandeering of control of the Washington DC police department was simply an opening salvo. While Americans were greeted with images of soldiers in combat gear, toting rifles and establishing roadblocks and checkpoints near the National Mall, Trump was already tasking his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with creating “specialized units” of the national guard to be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues”.What are the politics behind this militarization of domestic policing? Trump says he alone has the will and resources to pacify the “killing field” of Chicago, but clearly his “crime fighting” justification is no more than a ruse. Statistics – that is, reality – tell us that the crime rate in Washington DC was at a 30-year low when Trump sent in the troops. Which is not to deny the rhetorical power of ruses. Installing soldiers in Democratic strongholds allows Trump to present himself as the protector of law and order, especially to Maga supporters who have been trained by rightwing news outlets to view the nation’s largest and most multiethnic metropolitan areas as dens of iniquity and vice. Never mind that this is the president who pardoned members of the lawless mob that stormed the Capitol, fired career justice department prosecutors who worked to hold insurrectionists to account, and has installed in the department the likes of Jared Lane Wise, an insurgent who was charged with urging his fellow rioters to kill members of the police.Militarizing the police also serves Trump’s politics of intimidation. Here we can connect the deployment of troops on the National Mall to the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s residences. Both are disturbing displays of the kind of force more familiar to a police state than to a constitutional democracy. The fact that both acts were formally legal – two federal magistrates signed off on the Bolton warrants, while several statutes specific to the District of Columbia authorized the president’s use of the national guard – makes them textbook examples of the kind of dictatorial creep that Fraenkel diagnosed.Deploying troops to police Chicago would, of course, represent a far more alarming and legally dubious exercise of executive power. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a post-Reconstruction law, essentially bars presidents from using troops as domestic police. But we would be naive to conclude that federal law provides an adequate safeguard against the consolidation of the prerogative state. The Insurrection Act carves out disturbing exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, allowing the president, in cases of “rebellion”, to deploy the military to enforce federal law. Would a supreme court that has held that a president enjoys broad immunity from future prosecution for all “official acts”, no matter how nefarious, question a president’s determination of what constitutes a “rebellion”?While the appearance of troops on the streets of Chicago or New York may frighten marginalized communities from exercising their basic rights of free movement, it may also trigger an equally dangerous and predictable response. The specter of city streets patrolled by soldiers trained to fight enemy combatants, not US citizens, may well serve not to quell violence but to invite it. The prospect of protests turning ugly and violent is all too real. The deployment of troops, under the pretext of responding to an emergency, then works to create the very emergency that justifies an ever-greater deployment. The danger is this is precisely what the president wants.Why? Trump has already aggressively inserted himself in the battle over the 2026 midterms, pushing Texas to further gerrymander its already gerrymandered districts; jesting that war may supply a justification for delaying elections; and pledging to issue an executive order ending mail-in ballots – while clearly lacking the authority to do so. What if he were to deploy troops to polling places on election day?In principle, a strong edifice of law explicitly bars such a deployment on election day, but imagine if the president, in the wake of a series of violent protests, invokes the Insurrection Act to “safeguard” polling stations from domestic unrest. Now we have armed soldiers at polling stations, handling ballots and “monitoring” the chain of custody – all done in the name of protecting democracy. Legally, such a deployment would stretch the Insurrection Act beyond recognition, but courts deliberate slowly; elections are decided in days.As Fraenkel noted, authoritarianism does not operate outside law; it manipulates law until legality and illegality are indistinguishable.

      Lawrence Douglas is a professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts More

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      Democrat flips Iowa state senate seat and breaks Republican supermajority

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      A Democratic candidate has defeated an extremist Republican in a state senate election in Iowa, claiming that voters are “waking up” to realise Donald Trump’s party “sold the working class a bill of goods”.Catelin Drey flipped Iowa state senate district 1, beating Christopher Prosch in a special election held on Tuesday to fill the seat of the late senator Rocky De Witt.Prosch had aligned himself with Trump’s Maga movement, floating conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and climate crisis. He also compared abortion access to the Holocaust.But Drey, a 37-year-old marketing executive, won with 55% of the vote to Prosch’s 44%, representing a swing of more than 20 points from Trump’s performance last year in the district, which covers most of Sioux City.Describing herself as “thrilled” with the result, Drey said on Wednesday: “We delivered a message that resonates with voters. People right now are frustrated with the way things are going. Iowa’s economy is last in the country, we’re last for maternal healthcare providers per capita, and people are ready for a change.”Asked whether the outcome delivered a verdict on Trump’s Maga agenda, Drey said: “It speaks to the level of authenticity and transparency that’s necessary to win in this environment. People want to make a connection with their candidate and they want to believe that person is going to be looking out for their best interests.”The founder of the grassroots organisation Moms for Iowa added: “Folks are waking up to the fact that Republicans in Iowa and, frankly, across the country have sold the working class a bill of goods and they are ready for policies that actually work for them.”Despite Democrats’ struggles in Washington, this is the second Iowa state senate district they have flipped this year, after a January victory in a district Trump won by more than 20 percentage points.Democrats have consistently overperformed in special legislative elections across the country, including winning another Trump-friendly seat in the state senate in Pennsylvania in March.The trend potentially spells trouble for Trump before next year’s midterm elections for the US House of Representatives and Senate. An Economist/YouGov poll last week found that 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency while 56% disapprove. Republicans have also faced rowdy town halls in their congressional districts.Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said: “As Trump and Republicans wreck the economy and erode democracy with power-grabbing schemes, Democrats’ special election wins should send a flashing warning to the GOP: voters are rejecting the failing Maga agenda and leaving Republican candidates in the dust.”Drey had raised $165,385 and spent $75,066 on the campaign as of 21 August, the Des Moines Register newspaper reported, while Prosch raised $20,020 and spent $18,425 as of the same date. Both candidates received substantial in-kind support from their state parties.The Democratic National Committee (DNC) also deployed 30,000 volunteers for “get out the vote” efforts and hosted text and phone banks in conjunction with the Iowa Democratic party for Drey’s campaign.Ken Martin, chair of the DNC, said: “Iowans are seeing Republicans for who they are: self-serving liars who will throw their constituents under the bus to rubber-stamp Donald Trump’s disastrous agenda – and they’re ready for change.“They are putting Republicans on notice and making it crystal clear: any Republican pushing Trump’s unpopular, extreme agenda has no place governing on behalf of Iowa families.”Republicans poured scorn on the intervention by national Democrats as a sign of desperation.Jeff Kaufmann, chair of the Iowa Republican party, said: “National Democrats were so desperate for a win that they activated 30,000 volunteers and a flood of national money to win a state senate special election by a few hundred votes.“If the Democrats think things are suddenly so great again for them in Iowa, they will bring back the caucuses.”Drey’s victory breaks a Republican supermajority in the Iowa state senate for the first time since the 2022 election. The new chamber margin is 33 Republicans to 17 Democrats. This gives Democrats the ability to block governor Kim Reynolds’s picks for state agencies, boards and commissions.Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster and strategist, on the X social media platform posted: “If you’re wondering why Republicans are rigging maps, this is what they’re afraid of.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: president hints he already has replacement in mind for Fed governor Lisa Cook

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      Donald Trump has suggested he already has a replacement in mind for the Federal Reserve governor he is trying to force, even as Lisa Cook said she would sue the administration over her removal.Speaking during a cabinet meeting lasting more than three hours on Tuesday, the US president said: “We have some very good people for that position. I think, maybe in my own mind, I have somebody that I like.”Trump said he would consult Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.Trump is reportedly considering the possibility of naming his economic adviser Stephen Miran to serve out the remainder of Cook’s term, which does not expire until 2038. Earlier this month, Trump nominated Miran to serve for a much shorter term, as a replacement for another member of the Fed’s board, Adriana Kugler, a Biden nominee who was due to be replaced in five months.Cook has said that she will sue to keep her position as a governor of the independent central bank and her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, called Trump’s move to fire her “illegal”.Here is the key Trump administration news of the day:Fed governor to sue over Trump attempt to fire herThe Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook will sue the Trump administration over its bid to fire her over unconfirmed allegations of mortgage fraud, her attorney has said.Donald Trump announced he was firing Cook on Monday night, in an extraordinary move that marks the latest escalation in the US president’s attack on the central bank’s independence.But Trump has “no authority” to remove her from the Fed’s board of governors, Cook’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, argued in a statement to reporters, saying: “His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis. We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action.”Read the full storyTrump says he wants ‘nothing less than $500m’ from Harvard Donald Trump said on Tuesday that his administration “wants nothing less than $500m from Harvard” as a condition for restoring billions of dollars in federal funding to the Ivy League university.“Don’t negotiate with them, they’ve been very bad,” Trump told his education secretary, Linda McMahon, in a cabinet meeting.Read the full storyTexas sued for allegedly stripping Black voters of political power Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, accusing the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.Read the full storyCourt tosses Trump lawsuit against Maryland judges over US deportationsA federal judge on Tuesday dismissed an unprecedented lawsuit filed by the Trump administration earlier in the summer against all 15 judges serving on Maryland’s federal district court – a case that opposed pausing some deportations from the state.In a 37-page ruling, US district judge Thomas Cullen of Virginia’s western district – nominated and confirmed to his position during Donald Trump’s first presidency – wrote that “any fair reading of the legal authorities cited by defendants leads to the ineluctable conclusion that this court has no alternative but to dismiss”.Read the full storyUS envoy sparks uproar after telling Lebanese journalists to ‘act civilised’Journalists in Lebanon have demanded an apology from a senior US envoy after he told them to “act civilized” and not be “animalistic”.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The Trump administration is cancelling another $175m in funding for California’s high-speed rail, marking another setback for the state’s much-delayed project.

      Melania Trump on Tuesday invited schools students to participate in a government-sponsored nationwide contest that is designed to encourage them to work together to use artificial intelligence tools to solve community issues.

      The Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, has hit back at Donald Trump for commenting on his weight, saying the Republican president is himself “not in good shape” amid escalating tension over the possible deployment of the national guard on the streets of Chicago.

      Trump has welcomed Cracker Barrell’s decision to reverse changes to its logo that were considered “woke”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 25 August 2025. More

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      Trump is out to end the Fed’s autonomy. Here’s how he’s trying to get his way

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      When Donald Trump stepped up his campaign to influence the US Federal Reserve, he traveled less than a mile from the White House, to tour the central bank’s headquarters. But as the administration considers how to actually get what it wants, one of the US president’s acolytes looked about 500 miles south.A condominium above the Four Seasons hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, is at the heart of an extraordinary battle over the future of the Fed, and the independence of its power of the world’s largest economy.For a generation, presidents have respected the Fed’s autonomy. They might disagree with its decisions. But they allowed it to make long-term calls in the best interest of the economy, even if they caused short-term political discomfort.Trump has ignored this precedent.Since returning to office in January, he has lambasted the Fed publicly and relentlessly – calling its chairperson, Jerome Powell, a “moron”, a “numbskull” and a “disaster” – and accused the central bank of damaging the US economy by failing to cut interest rates.As the Fed declined to lower rates at five consecutive meetings, Trump escalated his attacks, even suggesting (without evidence) that multi-billion dollar renovations of its Washington headquarters were tantamount to fraud.But policymakers held the line. With most rate-setting officials wanting to wait and see the impact of Trump’s policies – from trade wars to deportations – on the economy, they sat on their hands.While the Fed might be on the cusp of resuming rate cuts, Powell has made clear rates are unlikely to fall as drastically as the president wants.So how does Trump actually get what he wants?Back to that condo in Atlanta. It was allegedly bought by Lisa Cook, a respected economist appointed by Joe Biden to serve on the Fed’s board of governors, in July 2021. Trump’s officials claim she took out a mortgage which listed the property as her primary residence – two weeks after taking out another mortgage, which listed a property in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as her principal residence.The allegations – similar to those that the administration has leveled against other opponents – are unconfirmed. But that didn’t stop Trump from immediately demanding Cook’s resignation.When Cook refused to be “bullied”, he tried to fire her. Cook has insisted Trump has no authority to do so, and her attorney has pledged to sue the administration over its bid to remove her from her post.The Fed’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is in Trump’s sights. There are 12 seats around the table, filled by five representatives of local reserve banks and seven governors.Fed governors, once appointed, are hard to replace. A full term lasts 14 years, enabling them – in theory – to take a longer view on the economy than, say, presidential administrations working on four-year cycles.Cook’s term is not due to expire until 2038. It now appears likely that her future at the Fed will be settled in court. But Trump’s bid to exert control over the central bank, and its rate-setting committee, does not end there.He has already nominated one ally to sit on the Fed’s board of governors, following the exit of Adriana Kugler, another Biden appointee, earlier this month. Two other governors have already publicly sided with the president on rate cuts, and reportedly made the administration’s shortlist of potential successors to Powell.Powell’s term as Fed chair is due to end in May. His term as a governor is not due to expire until January 2028, but departing chairs have typically left the board at the same time.The Fed has so far defied Trump’s demands. But each departure enables him to build his influence over its policy committee – with view to obtaining an outright majority. Like the supreme court, these nominations have implications for years to come.The administration is arguing a mortgage on a condo in Atlanta should allow it handpick another official to join the Fed’s board. Who knows what the next purported reason will be, should it have another go.Trump has made no secret of this plan. “We’ll have a majority very shortly,” he claimed to reporters at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “So that’ll be great.”Of course, receiving his backing today does not guarantee his support tomorrow.Eight years ago, when he tapped Powell to lead the Fed, the president delivered a strikingly different verdict to the ones he now routinely publishes on social media. “He’s strong, he’s committed and he’s smart,” said Trump. More

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      Who is Lisa Cook, the Fed governor facing removal by Trump?

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      Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to sit on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, is now facing removal by Donald Trump, another obstacle in a long line she has faced and written about during her experiences as one of a small number of Black women in the field of economics.Cook was nominated to the Fed in 2022 by then president Joe Biden after building a career that spanned both government and academia, including work at the treasury department, service in the White House, and a long record of scholarly contributions.But her path to confirmation wasn’t without hostility. Republicans opposed her nomination, forcing Vice-President Kamala Harris to break a 50–50 Senate deadlock. That narrow vote made Cook the first, and so far the only, Black woman to serve as a Fed governor.Her potential dismissal comes just days after federal housing finance agency director Bill Pulte alleged on social media that she falsified records and other documents to obtain favorable mortgage terms prior to her appointment. Cook has not been charged with a crime or found guilty of misconduct.By law, governors on the Fed’s board are appointed to 14-year terms and can only be removed for “cause”, generally understood to mean corruption or serious wrongdoing. Cook has continued to push back. Last week, she declared she had “no intention of being bullied” and promised to gather “accurate information to answer any legitimate questions and provide the facts”.In a statement on Tuesday, she insisted that “no cause exists under the law, and he [Trump] has no authority” to strip her of the seat she has held since 2022. Her attorney has said they intend to sue.Since joining the board, Cook has consistently voted in line with chair Jerome Powell, supporting last year’s decision to cut interest rates and this year’s decision to hold them steady. She is sometimes described as a “dove”, a label economists use for officials who lean toward lower rates.Cook was born in Georgia, where she was raised by a hospital chaplain and a nursing professor. She and her sisters were among the first Black students to integrate their schools.She went on to study at Spelman College, then Oxford University as a Marshall scholar, before earning her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997.Her academic work often linked economics with the realities of race and discrimination. One of her most recognized works, Violence and economic activity: evidence from African American patents, described how lynchings and other acts of racial violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s drastically reduced patent activity among Black inventors.Cook has also written candidly about the challenges she has faced in her profession. In a 2019 opinion piece in the New York Times, she and a co-author argued that “economics is neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women”.She added: “But if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.” More

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      What the Democrats can learn from Gavin Newsom’s Trump mockery | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      Gavin Newsom’s recent mockery of Donald Trump proves that imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery. Amid the ongoing battle over congressional redistricting, Newsom’s pitch-perfect posts about Trump’s “TINY HANDS” and California’s “PERFECT MAPS” have been wildly entertaining, and, at least by one measure, wildly successful – the posts have garnered millions of views and counting.While it’s refreshing to see a prominent Democrat unapologetically standing up to the current administration, Newsom’s jabs also reinforce the staying power of Trump’s blustery and incoherent style. And they reveal the degree to which the attention economy has disrupted our focus and degraded our language.Trump continues to benefit from the steady decline in the American attention span driven by social media. His style of short, punchy, inflammatory language – and his strategy of flooding the zone with a new federal freak show day after day – is engineered to succeed in this chaotic environment. But some recent online victories seem to indicate that progressives can also win on this battlefield if they deploy the right combination of profane style and policy substance.It’s possible the Trump era would never have been inaugurated without the concurrent smartphone era reshaping attention spans and media habits. One survey has found that Americans check their phones an astonishing 144 times daily, and about 40% of adults report being “almost constantly online”. As a result, Americans are reading less. In 2024, less than half of adults said they had picked up a book in the past year, continuing a consistent downward trend.The MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes has analyzed this regression in his book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (a story that millions of Americans could benefit from understanding, if only they were still reading). He argues that the relentless competition for attention erodes thoughtful discourse while incentivizing the most thoughtless voices. It has contributed to mental health crises, the decline of journalism, and political polarization. It also fueled the rise of Donald Trump, who long ago proved himself to be a malignant savant of attention manipulation.Trump’s understanding of the new media ecosystem propelled all three of his presidential campaigns. In 2016, he received an estimated $5.6bn worth of free media. By that September, the word Americans associated the most with Hillary Clinton was “email”, while they connected Trump with “speech”, “president” and “immigration”.Fast forward to 2024, and he kept courting online attention with stunts such as working a choreographed 30-minute “shift” at McDonald’s. He dominated news media with mendacity which demanded journalistic coverage, such as his promotion of the xenophobic falsehood that Haitian migrants were eating Ohio pets. As Hayes wrote, Trump’s approach to politics over the last decade has been the “equivalent of running naked through the neighborhood: repellent but transfixing”.Now, Trump is not just benefiting from but intentionally accelerating these reversals. He has defunded and harassed leading research universities, censored historical exhibits at museums, and created Truth Social – an imitation of Twitter that has emerged as a playground for conspiracy theorists.He is attempting the governmental equivalent of a lobotomy.These setbacks have led progressives to increasingly understand that electoral victory requires digital dominance. And squaring up with Trump on social media appears a prerequisite for rallying the public around any political vision. As one strategist put it while praising Newsom’s Trump impersonation: “Democrats are over being the ‘nice guy’ party.”Already, there is some delightful needling of the right easily found in the proverbial social media haystack. The streamer Hasan Piker has been described as a “gateway drug” for progressive politics, while his engaging brand of explicit quips led GQ to name him “the hottest left-wing political commentator online”. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez streamed herself playing the game Among Us with Piker before the 2020 election, she almost broke a livestreaming record on the Twitch platform, drawing about 440,000 concurrent viewers.Elected Democrats are also taking off their virtual gloves. The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, responded to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico by threatening to rechristen Lake Michigan “Lake Illinois”. In an example of game respecting game, Zohran Mamdani’s strategy of speaking directly to voters through social media received unlikely praise from Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is less a fan of the Texas representative Jasmine Crockett, who went viral for describing Greene as having a “bleach blond, bad-built, butch body”. And in Maine, the oysterman and Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner is drawing headlines for a pugnacious campaign launch video in which he declares: “The difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz is at least Ted Cruz is honest about selling us out and not giving a damn.”Still, talking the talk also requires walking the walk by implementing bold, authentically progressive initiatives. One of Newsom’s Trump-mocking posts announced an aggressive redistricting plan to counter Republican gerrymandering in Texas. Bernie Sanders has endorsed that move, just as he endorsed Mamdani, whose affordability agenda represents another ambitious stance to match pugilistic rhetoric.Otherwise, adhering to the philosophy of “when they go low, we go high” risks failing to meet voters where they are. It seems Americans seek a fighter on their behalf and at their side.“THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.” More

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      Republicans are trying to ensure we’ll never have another fair election | Judith Levine

      by

      “Christians, get out and vote, just this time,” Donald Trump exhorted the audience at a campaign event organized by the conservative Turning Point Action in July 2024. “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”Since his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has been building toward delivery on that promise, first by fomenting suspicion of widespread election fraud, then by trying to overturn the results via legal challenge and intimidation, and finally, on 6 January 2021, by force. Now the White House and Republicans both in Washington and the states are colluding more brazenly than ever to “fix it” – “it” meaning free and fair elections they might lose.Republicans’ aim is permanent control of the US government. Trump’s is the crown. As their assaults on voting rights – and the institution of elections itself – escalate, their success begins to look, if not inevitable, alarmingly possible.Trump’s tactics are working.The 2020 election was the cleanest and most efficient in memory. Claims of rampant fraud are lies – the big lie, as the 2021 House impeachment committee put it. But not among Republican voters. A Pew survey taken before the 2024 election found that Trump supporters were “deeply skeptical about the way the election will be conducted”, especially compared with Harris supporters. Whereas over 85% of Democratic voters believed in 2024 that absentee ballots would be counted accurately, and ineligible voters prevented from voting, among Trump supporters only 38% and 30%, respectively, felt the same.Buoyed by the big lie – and liberated by the supreme court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act – voter suppression attempts reached a peak after the 2020 elections, when legislators introduced more than 400 restrictive bills. Signing Georgia’s 98-page Election Integrity Act in 2021, Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, was unambiguous about its partisan aim. “After the November election last year” –when record turnout in the reliably red state yielded victories for Biden and two Democratic US senators, and the secretary of state resisted Trump’s shakedown to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse the outcome – “I knew, like so many of you, that significant reforms to our state elections were needed,” he said.By September 2024, 31 states had enacted 114 such laws.In May 2024, Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would accept the results of the election only if “everything’s honest” – that is, if he won. This definition of honesty took hold. According to some polls, before election day, fewer than a quarter of Trump supporters believed the election would be fair. After it, their confidence rates more than doubled. And while Republican concerns about fraud were pervasive in 2020, they were – surprise, surprise – virtually nonexistent when the 2024 results came in.With their man in the White House, congressional Republicans set about preparing for his coronation. Three days into Trump’s term, the Tennessee representative Andy Ogles introduced a bill to amend the constitution to allow presidents to serve three terms. At Trumpstore.com, you can buy a red “Trump 2028” cap for $50.On 25 March Trump issued the executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which melds his xenophobic paranoia-mongering with his desire to “fix” elections. Its mandates range from requiring proof of citizenship to vote (an answer to the spectral threat of undocumented people stuffing the ballot boxes) to a ban on the bar codes that expedite vote counting.The executive order itself is illegal. The constitution gives the states, not the president, the power to regulate elections.On 4 April, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, requiring registrants and voters to document citizenship.The GOP’s election-interference campaign is accelerating. On 7 July, the justice department’s civil rights division wrote a letter to Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, and Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, alleging that four of its majority-minority “coalition districts” are illegal under the Voting Rights Act and directing the state to redraw its electoral map. Voting rights experts dispute this interpretation. In fact, the law prohibits the dilution of the electoral power of voters of color either by packing them into one district or spreading them out by gerrymandering–which is what the new map would do.In mid-July, the justice department issued broad requests to state election officials to turn over their election data and voter rolls. In Colorado, where Biden won by 11 points in 2020, a guy called Jeff Small – chief of staff to the Colorado Republican representative and Save Act cheerleader Lauren Boebert – began contacting officials claiming he was working with the Trump administration on election “integrity” and asking if they would kindly let the feds, or somebody, inspect their voting machines, according to Washington Post reporting. After one such request, the Department of Homeland Security called to follow up.Officials of both parties were outraged, especially when it came to monkeying with the equipment, an illegal act. “Anybody who is asking for access to the voting machines outside of the law” is suspicious, the Republican executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association told the Washington Post. “That automatically raises red flags in terms of their intent.”Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state made the larger point: “This all is part of a bigger ploy to further undermine our voting in this country,” she said. “They are actively in a power grab.”Meanwhile, the White House was leaning on Texas’s governor and legislative leaders to redraw their electoral map according to Trump’s specifications, dismantling Democratic strongholds to create five more Republican House seats – to which the president averred his party was “entitled”. When Texas got onboard, on 3 August the state’s 51 Democrats left the state, risking fines and arrest, to thwart the effort.To cover all bases, on 7 August, Trump ordered the commerce department to prepare a new US census leaving out undocumented immigrants. Under the constitution, the census counts the number of “persons”, not citizens; it must be conducted “within every … ten years”, and states must redistrict to concur with new data. In a post on Truth Social, the president described a bespoke tally “using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024”.The same day, the vice-president, JD Vance, descended on bright-red Indiana with a trio of Trump appointees to strong-arm its leaders to redistrict as well. Afterward, on X, Indiana’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, genuflected to Vance: “Your bold leadership and unwavering support for President Trump’s mission to expand the conservative majority in Congress is exactly what America needs right now.”On Fox News, the vice-president echoed Trump’s contention that counting undocumented immigrants in the census unfairly gives the advantage to Democrats, whom he also charged with “aggressive” gerrymandering. “We’re just trying to rebalance the scales,” Vance said.After two weeks, Democrats returned to the Texas state house. Republican leaders forced them to sign “permission slips” to leave the chamber and assigned police escorts to monitor them. After refusing to sign, one Democrat spent nights in the chamber. While speaking on the phone with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, from the bathroom, she was informed the call constituted a felony, she said.On Saturday, the Texas senate approved legislation creating the new map, which Abbott says he will sign “swiftly”. The move had already set off an avalanche of mid-decade redistricting, led by California. Other states, controlled by both parties, may follow.Last week on Truth Social, Trump announced he would “lead a movement” to eliminate mail-in ballots – an idea he apparently picked up from Vladimir Putin – and also “inaccurate” voting machines. He said he would sign an executive order to this effect soon. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump fantasized. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”Maybe the following order will eliminate voting altogether – for the good of our country, of course.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More