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      US House committee releases more than 33,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein files

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      The US House of Representatives oversight committee on Tuesday released thousands of pages of records related to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein from the department of justice.The release comes as the Trump administration has been embroiled in months of controversy over its decision not to release additional files in the case. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and was alleged to have abused hundreds of girls.The 33,000 pages included years-old court filings related to Epstein and his former girlfriend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as what appears to be bodycam footage from police searches and police interviews. The files appear to contain information that is already public knowledge.The records were posted online as the Trump administration was facing renewed attention on the investigation into Epstein. With Congress back in session this week, Democratic and Republican representatives had planned to hold press conferences to demand greater transparency from the administration in the case.Donald Trump, a longtime friend of Epstein and part of his rich and powerful social circle, has, in recent weeks, tried to avoid the subject. Earlier this year he sued the Wall Street Journal for its reporting on his relationship with Epstein on a birthday note Trump was alleged to have written to him. The president has called the recent Epstein controversy a hoax.The White House has urged Republican lawmakers not to support a discharge petition from Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, which would force the release of all of the Epstein files.James Comer, the Republican chair of the committee, said there was no need for the discharge petition since the committee had subpoenaed the records. The question of how many of the files will be released by the committee remains unanswered.Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, said the petition was “moot” because of the release.“It’s superfluous at this point, and I think we’re achieving the desired end here,” he said.Johnson was among a bipartisan group of lawmakers who met with survivors of abuse by Epstein and Maxwell.The Trump administration has faced intense criticism, even from its fervent supporters, over its decision not to release additional files related to Epstein. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from July found that most Americans and the majority of Republicans believe the government is hiding details about the case.Most of the documents released this week were already public, including records from the 2005 investigation into Epstein which contained a notation indicating the inquiry had been released previously in a 2017 public records request. The files include a recording of a police interview of an Epstein employee who told law enforcement “there were a lot of girls that were very, very young” visiting Epstein’s Florida home but said he couldn’t say for sure if they were minors.The release appears to have done little to alleviate the controversy. Robert Garcia, the top Democratic representative on the House oversight committee, chided Republicans for releasing material that he said was almost entirely already available information.“The 33,000 pages of Epstein documents James Comer has decided to ‘release’ were already mostly public information. To the American people – don’t let this fool you,” Garcia said in a statement. More

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      Utah emerges as a pivotal battleground amid race to redraw congressional maps

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      In the fast-escalating national arms race over redistricting, Utah has emerged as an unexpected and potentially pivotal battleground.The campaign began in Texas, where Donald Trump openly declared he was “entitled to” five additional Republican House seats. It quickly expanded to California, where Democratic lawmakers are asking voters to retaliate with new congressional maps drawn to “neutralize” Texas.At least half a dozen other states have been recruited into what has is now an unprecedented push to redraw their congressional boundaries in ways that could lock in political advantage ahead of next year’s midterms.The president has been candid about his aims: to safeguard Republicans’ fragile hold on the House. A loss of the speaker’s gavel would derail Trump’s legislative ambitions in the second half of his term – and open the door to a wave of investigations, from his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files to its mass detention and deportation policies.Deeply conservative Utah, by contrast, has been pulled into the redistricting fray not by the president but by a judge.This week, Judge Dianna Gibson tossed out Utah’s current congressional map and gave the Republican-led state legislature until 24 September to submit a new one.The existing boundaries fracture Salt Lake City – a splash of blue in a sea of red – across all four congressional districts, effectively diluting Democrats’ political influence. A redrawn map could consolidate more of Utah’s capital city into one district, giving Democrats a rare opening in one of the nation’s most reliably Republican states.“There’s no doubt that any map that complies with this ruling would be more competitive than the current map,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the non-partisan Cook Political Report. But he cautioned that lawmakers could still carve up Salt Lake City in ways that would maintain a Republican edge.On Friday, lawyers for the Utah legislature asked Gibson to pause her gerrymandering order to allow time for lawmakers to appeal the decision to the state supreme court, according to local news reports. The request comes a day after the state’s Republican legislative leaders said they would comply with the ruling, which they denounced as “misguided” and “unreasonable” given the 30-day deadline.“While we will continue to pursue every legal option available – including requesting a stay from the Utah Supreme Court if necessary – we will attempt to redistrict under these unprecedented constraints, consistent with our oath to represent the best interests of Utah,” the state house speaker, Mike Schultz, and senate president J Stuart Adams, said in a statement.The ruling in the Utah case stems from a yearslong legal battle over Proposition 4, a ballot initiative narrowly passed by voters in 2018 that aimed to ban partisan gerrymandering through the creation of an independent redistricting commission. Although the Republican-controlled legislature weakened the commission and enacted its own map, the state supreme court – made up of five justices all appointed by Republican governors – ruled last year that lawmakers had probably overstepped, paving the way for this week’s decision.Mark Gaber, an attorney representing the groups challenging Utah’s congressional maps, called the ruling a “vindication of a fair and neutral process”.“The voters passed this in 2018 to effectively ban partisan gerrymandering and now we’re seeing a push across the country to gerrymander,” he said. “It’s nice to see this standing out as a shining example of a process that can work.”Mid-decade redistricting on this scale is extraordinary. Typically states draw new congressional maps at the start of each decade following the census to account for population shifts.At stake is the balance of power in Congress, where the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections. House Democrats need to flip only a handful of seats to retake the majority, and early signs point in their favor: Trump’s approval ratings are low and falling, and since his return to the White House, Democrats have outperformed expectations in a series of low-turnout contests from Florida to Iowa.In a tit-for-tat redistricting fight, political analysts and experts say Republicans still hold the advantage: they control more state legislatures and have fewer constraints on gerrymandering.Yet the Texas plan, which was signed into law on Friday by the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, faces multiple lawsuits, including one alleging that the new districts are racially discriminatory. In California, Republicans have asked the state supreme court to block the proposed countermeasure from reaching the ballot. And even seats drawn to favor one party can become competitive depending on candidate quality, voter turnout and the national mood.In a closely fought election, even a single seat could tip the balance of power, making the prospect of a Democratic pickup in Utah all the more worrying for the president.On Wednesday night, Trump called the Utah decision “absolutely unconstitutional”.“How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so.”Gibson, the judge, was appointed to the district court in 2018 by the then governor Gary Herbert, a Republican.Trump continued, urging Republicans in Utah to “stay united” and ensure the state’s “four terrific Republican Congressmen stay right where they are!” (One of Utah’s four House members, Celeste Maloy, is a woman.)Trump’s outrage over the Utah ruling is a reminder, experts say, that courts – and voters – also have a say in shaping the political map.Kareem Crayton, the vice-president of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Washington DC office and a leading expert on redistricting, said the Utah ruling “achieves something closer to redistricting with guardrails” – in stark contrast to what is unfolding elsewhere.The lurch toward maximalist gerrymandering underlines the need for national standards, long sought by advocates of less partisan maps, Crayton said, but for now the message from the White House is: “Do more of it.”“This system is broken,” he said. “It’s a broken one when the outcome of the people’s house – the one that’s actually supposed to be the most representative of the public – turns out to be the least representative because people are going back to the maps multiple times and, with no abandon, with respect to partisanship, drawing districts that choose their voters and not the other way around.” More

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      ‘He’s trying to rig the midterms’: Trump intervenes to protect his allies in Congress

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      They are more than a year away – a lifetime in today’s fast and furious political cycle. But one man is already paying attention, pulling the levers of power and trying to tip the scales of the 2026 midterm elections.Donald Trump has made clear that he is willing to bring the full weight of the White House to bear to prevent his Republican party losing control of the US Congress in the midterm elections next year, orchestrating a more direct and legally dubious intervention than any of his predecessors.The US president’s multipronged approach includes redrawing congressional district maps, seeking to purge voter rolls, taking aim at mail-in voting and voting machines, and ordering the justice department to investigate Democrats’ prime fundraising tool.“Nobody’s ever tried to do this,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “Most American presidents, Democratic or Republican, have basically played by the same rules and been careful of the constitution. But in his business career Trump never cared about whether he was doing something legal or not; he just went to court and same thing here.”Campaigning, not governing, has often been Trump’s comfort zone. He is constitutionally barred from running for president again but already has an eye on the November 2026 elections that will determine control of the House of Representatives and Senate.He senses that law and order, a populist cause long exploited by Republicans, could play to his advantage. Earlier this month Trump deployed the national guard to reduce crime in Washington DC and threatened similar federal interventions in other big cities. Fifty-three per cent of the public approve of how he is handling crime, according to an AP-NORC poll, higher than other issues.Trump told a cabinet meeting this week: “I think crime will be the big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election. I think it’s going to be a big, big subject for the midterms and I think the Republicans are going to do really well.”But this is no ordinary campaign. Trump said at the same marathon meeting: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”Taking a familiar political manoeuvre to new extremes, he has pushed Republican state legislators in Texas to redraw their congressional map because he claims “we are entitled to five more seats”, and he is lobbying other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to take similar steps to pad the margin even more.Other steps involve the direct use of official presidential power in ways that have no modern precedent. He ordered his justice department to investigate ActBlue, an online portal that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in small-dollar donations for Democratic candidates over two decades.The site has been so successful that Republicans launched a similar venture, called WinRed. But Trump did not order a federal investigation into WinRed.Trump’s appointees at the justice department have also demanded voting data from at least 19 states in an apparent attempt to look for ineligible voters. Earlier this year he signed an executive order seeking documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other changes, though much of it has been blocked by courts.Last week the president announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to end mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly one in three Americans, and threatened to do away with voting machines. He claimed that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told him mail-in voting was responsible for his 2020 election loss.There is nothing remarkable about a sitting president campaigning for his party in the midterms and trying to bolster incumbents by steering projects and support to their districts. But Trump’s actions constitute a unique attempt to interfere in a critical election before it is even held, raising alarms about the future of democracy.Allan Lichtman, a distinguished history professor at American University in Washington, said: “We’re seeing a new concerted assault on free and fair elections, harkening back to the discredited efforts of the white supremacists in the Jim Crow south. He’s trying to rig the midterms and then of course beyond that the next presidential election in his political favour.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump previously attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in an insurrection by his supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. On that occasion, he was constrained by elected Republicans such as his then vice-president, Mike Pence, and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. This time he has locked down near-total loyalty from the party and assembled a cabinet that again this week offered an ostentatious display of fealty.His power grab will not go entirely unchallenged. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, signed legislation that will allow voters to decide in November on a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more House seats next year, neutralising Republicans’ gerrymandering in Texas.But Democrats, activists and lawyers will have to find others ways to “fight fire with fire” when it comes to Trump’s more extreme meddling.Lichtman, author of a new book, Conservative at the Core, added: “Republicans have no principles; Democrats have no spine. Democrats need to grow a spine. They need to stop playing not to lose – that’s a sure way to lose. They need to respond to these outrages powerfully and aggressively by whatever means are possible or we’re going to lose our democracy.”Yet while Trump’s gambit is a flex of executive power, it could also be seen as an admission of potential weakness. The incumbent president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections. In 2018, Democrats won enough to take back the House, stymieing Trump’s agenda and leading to his impeachment.Only 37% of voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on Wednesday, while 55% disapprove. House Republicans, who currently have just a three-seat margin, have faced a series of raucous town halls that bode ill for their fortunes.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “President Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to stack the deck if they didn’t think they were going to lose the hand. They are looking at poll numbers and they know midterms are bad to incumbent presidents over the last 60 years and it’s a very slim margin in the House.“In order for Trump to sustain the loyalty of the House – he’s already gotten everything he pretty much wants – he needs them to think he’s on their side so he’s going to go out and be very public about rigging the voting system to keep them in power.”But Schiller added: “Will that be enough to overcome general unhappiness at the moment that the voters seem to have with the economy, inflation, even Trump’s border policies? It’s not enough to keep the Republicans in line. You have to get independent voters to vote for you again and that’s at risk for the Republicans right now.” More

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      Duke Cunningham, Vietnam flying ace and congressman convicted of bribery, dies at 83

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      Randy “Duke” Cunningham, whose feats as a US navy flying ace during the Vietnam war catapulted him to a House of Representatives career that ended in disgrace when he was convicted of accepting $2.4m in bribes, has died. He was 83.Cunningham died Wednesday at a hospital in a Little Rock, Arkansas, according to former representative Duncan L Hunter, who spent time with him a week before his death.He “represented the very best of American heroes who go out to meet our enemies at the gates”, said Hunter, whose served alongside Cunningham in Congress.Cunningham was one of the most highly decorated pilots in the Vietnam war, becoming the first navy fighter ace in the war for shooting down five enemy aircraft. He received a Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, 15 Air Medals and a Purple Heart for his actions during the war.“With complete disregard for his own personal safety he continued his attack through a hail of cannon fire to rescue his wingman,” read the citation for his second Silver Star.He went on to serve eight terms in Congress before pleading guilty in 2005 to receiving illegal gifts from defense contractors in exchange for government contracts and other favors, in what was considered at the time to be the largest bribery scandal in congressional history.The Republican congressman from San Diego admitted to accepting a luxury house, a yacht, a Rolls-Royce, lavish meals and $40,000 in Persian rugs and antique furniture from companies in exchange for steering lucrative contracts their way. He was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison in March 2006.His corruption case was one of several that led to the creation of the Office of Congressional Ethics in 2008.“In my life, I have known great joy and great sorrow. And now I know great shame,” Cunningham said in his resignation statement. “I cannot undo what I have done. But I can atone.”He took a less contrite tone as time went on, telling news organizations and others that he regretted his guilty plea and complaining that the Internal Revenue Service was draining his savings.“A lot of these things that they say are bribes I can absolutely black-and-white prove 100% that they were reimbursement for things that I had already paid,” Cunningham said in a phone interview with KGTV while he was in prison.In December 2012, Cunningham was released from a federal prison in Arizona to serve the remainder of his sentence in a federal halfway house in New Orleans. It was the longest prison sentence for a member of Congress for taking bribes until Louisiana Democrat William Jefferson got 13 years in 2009.His sentence also required he pay $1.8m for back taxes and forfeit an additional $1.85m for bribes he received, plus proceeds from the sale of a home in the highly exclusive San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. He was ordered to pay $1,500 a month in prison and $1,000 monthly after his release.Cunningham was born in Los Angeles on 8 December 1941, but grew up in Shelbina, Missouri, where his parents owned a five-and-dime store, according to court documents. He graduated from the University of Missouri and a few years later enlisted in the navy in 1967.He retired as a navy commander in 1987 and gained national recognition as a media commentator on military topics. When he ran for office in 1990, he replaced Democratic congressman Jim Bate in a left-leaning district who had been driven from office by charges of sexual harassment.Cunningham took an interest in military affairs while in Congress and supported socially conservative positions. He drew attention for his outbursts – during a floor debate in 1995, he attacked his adversaries as “the same ones that would put homos in the military”.“He brought military operational expertise to the debates in Congress,” said Hunter, recalling a debate he watched Cunningham have with a colleague over the fate of a fighter jet. “He was a strong conservative, strongly opinionated, and brought a real spark of light to the US Congress.”The disgraced former congressman received one of the pardons issued by Donald Trump in 2021 at the end of his first term.He has largely stayed out of the public eye since his release from prison, enjoying retirement in the countryside and serving as the president of the American Fighter Aces Association, according to Hunter.He is survived by his wife, Sharon Cunningham, his adult son and two daughters, and other family members. His family could not be immediately reached for comment. More

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      NAACP sues Texas over congressional redistricting, saying it strips Black voters of political power

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      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.The lawsuit, joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, names Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and secretary of state, Jane Nelson, as defendants. It asks a federal judge for a preliminary injunction preventing the use of the redrawn maps, arguing that the redistricting violates the US constitution by improperly reducing the power of voters of color. It also argues that the maps violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.“We now see just how far extremist leaders are willing to go to push African Americans back toward a time when we were denied full personhood and equal rights,” the president of the Texas NAACP, Gary Bledsoe, said in a statement. “We call on Texans of every background to recognize the dangers of this moment. Our democracy depends on ensuring that every person is counted fully, valued equally and represented fairly. We are prepared to fight this injustice at every level. Our future depends on it.”Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map on Saturday, with the expected result of an increase in Republican representation by five seats in the next Congress. Democratic state legislators are a minority in both chambers of the Texas legislature, leaving them with few options to block it. A group of state house representatives spent nearly a month away from the state to deny Republicans a quorum. That maneuver ended last week, after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the state legislature began a process to counter the Republican gerrymander with a Democratic gerrymander of their own.“The state of Texas is only 40% white, but white voters control over 73% of the state’s congressional seats,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”Democrats in Texas promised lawsuits out of the gate.The League of United Latin American Citizens – a group of 13 Texas voters – filed suit within hours of the redistricting bill’s passage. The map “eviscerates minorities’ opportunity to elect their candidates of choice in four key areas of the state”, the filing states.Other challenges are likely to follow. Republicans, however, believe that they are operating on favorable legal ground, hoping to overturn key sections of the Voting Rights Act as the lawsuits work their way through the courts.The US supreme court will hear a re-argument of Louisiana v Callais in the term to come. In that case, the court will be asked to upend the core tenet of the Voting Rights Act and hold that the use of racially identifying voter data to prevent voters of color from being able to select a candidate of their choice is actually an act of racial discrimination.Without that protection, Republican state lawmakers across the country can be expected to redraw maps for increased partisan advantage by cutting Black-majority districts into ribbons.Meanwhile, Donald Trump said the Department of Justice would sue California for its redistricting. Last week, the Democratic-led legislature placed a measure to redraw the state’s district lines on the 4 November ballot.In a sharp break against longstanding progressive efforts to turn redistricting over to neutral commissions, the NAACP said today that it “is urging California, New York and all other states to act immediately by redistricting and passing new, lawful and constitutional electoral maps” to counter expected efforts in Texas and other states to redraw maps for midterm advantage. More

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      Judge rules Utah’s congressional map must be redrawn for the 2026 elections

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      The Utah legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled on Monday that the Republican-controlled body drew them in violation of voters’ rights.The current map, drawn in 2021, divides Salt Lake county – the state’s population center and a Democratic stronghold – among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins. District court judge Dianna Gibson declared the map unlawful because the legislature circumvented a commission established by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.New maps will need to be drawn quickly for the 2026 midterm elections. Lt Gov Deidre Henderson, the state’s top elections official, asked the courts for the case to be finalized by November to leave time for the process before candidates start filing in early January. But appeals promised by Republican lawmakers could help them run out the clock to possibly delay adopting new maps until 2028.The ruling creates uncertainty in a state that was thought to be a clean sweep for the GOP as the party is preparing to defend its slim majority in the US House. Nationally, Democrats need to net three seats next year to take control of the chamber. The sitting president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms, as was the case for Donald Trump in 2018.The US president has urged several Republican-led states to add winnable seats for the GOP. In Texas, a plan awaiting governor Greg Abbott’s approval includes five new districts that would favor Republicans. Ohio Republicans already were scheduled to revise their maps to make them more partisan, and Indiana, Florida and Missouri may choose to make changes. Some Democrat-led states say they may enter the redistricting battle, but so far only California has taken action to offset Republican gains in Texas. More

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      Trump ‘manufactured crisis’ to justify plan to send national guard to Chicago, leading Democrat says

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      Donald Trump has “manufactured a crisis” to justify the notion of sending federalized national guard troops into Chicago next, over the heads of local leaders, a leading Democrat said on Sunday, as the White House advanced plans to militarize more US cities.Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a New York Democratic congressman, accused the US president of “playing games with the lives of Americans” with his unprecedented domestic deployment of the military, which has escalated to include the arming of troops currently patrolling Washington, DC – after sending troops into Los Angeles in June.The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, said any such plan from Trump was perpetrating “the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century”.Late on Friday, Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News that up to 1,700 men and women of the national guard were poised to mobilize in 19 mostly Republican states to support Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown by assisting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) with “logistical support and clerical functions”.Jeffries said he supported a statement issued by the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, that Trump was “abusing his power” in talking about sending the national guard to Chicago, and distracting from the pain he said the president was causing American families.The national guard is normally under the authority of the individual states, deployed at the request of the state governor and only federalized – or deployed by the federal government – in a national emergency and at the request of a governor.Jeffries said in an interview with CNN on Sunday morning: “We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular.”He continued: “I strongly support the statement that was issued by Governor Pritzker making clear that there’s no basis, no authority for Donald Trump to potentially try to drop federal troops into the city of Chicago.”The White House has been working on plans to send national guard to Chicago, the third largest US city, dominated by Democratic voters in a Democratic state, to take a hard line on crime, homelessness and immigrants, the Washington Post reported.View image in fullscreenPritzker issued a statement on Saturday night that began: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”Trump has argued that a military crackdown was necessary in the nation’s capital, and elsewhere, to quell what he said were out of control levels of crime, even though statistics show that serious and violent crime in Washington, and many other American cities, has actually plummeted.Talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday the president insisted that “the people in Chicago are screaming for us to come” as he laid out his plan to send troops there, and that they would later “help with New York”.“When ready, we will start in Chicago … Chicago is a mess,” Trump said.Johnson, in an appearance on Sunday on MSNBC, said shootings had dropped by almost 40% in his city in the last year alone, and he and Pritzker said any plan by the White House to override local authority and deploy troops would be illegal.“The president has repeated this petulant presentation since he assumed office. What he is proposing at this point would be the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century,” Johnson said.California sued the federal government when it deployed national guard and US marines to parts of Los Angeles in June over protests against Ice raids, but a court refused to block the troops.Main target cities mentioned by Trump are not only majority Democratic in their voting but also run by Black mayors, including Washington, DC, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Oakland.Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic former Illinois congressman, chief of staff to former president Barack Obama, and a former mayor of Chicago, also appeared on CNN on Sunday urging people to reflect that Trump, in two terms of office, had only ever deployed US troops in American cities, never overseas.Emanuel said if he was still mayor he would call on the president to act like a partner and, although crime was coming down, to “work with us on public safety” to combat carjackings, gun crime and gangs and not “come in and act like we can be an occupied city”.He added about Trump’s agenda: “He gave his speech in Iowa, he said ‘I hate’ Democrats, and this may be a reflection of that.” The speech was in July, when Trump excoriated Democrats in Congress who refused to vote for his One Big Beautiful Bill, the flagship legislation of the second Trump administration so far that focuses on tax cuts for the wealthy, massive boosts for the anti-immigration agenda and benefits cuts to programs such as Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor Americans. 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      Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Bernie Sanders in urging US to end Gaza famine

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      Amid mostly silence in Congress, some US lawmakers on opposite sides of the political spectrum spoke out Saturday over a UN-backed report warning of famine in parts of Gaza.“Let’s be clear: President Trump has the power to end the starvation of the Palestinian people,” Vermont’s politically independent senator Bernie Sanders posted on X. “Instead he is doing nothing while watching this famine unfold. Enough is enough. No more American taxpayer dollars to Nethanyahu’s [sic] war machine.”Sanders, who also pushed resolutions to ban selling US weapons to Israel, has long been consistent about his concern regarding the humanitarian crisis in Gaza amid the war.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the outspoken, far-right Georgia Republican, also called for greater compassion for Palestinians in a social media post Saturday, a day after UN secretary general António Gutteres described the famine in the territory as a “failure of humanity”.The US representative, in a departure from the majority of her peers in Congress, described the Gaza humanitarian crisis as a genocide last month. In a long post on X, she then said that while Israel’s war against Hamas was justified, the suffering of civilians was not.“Does Hamas deserve it? Yes,” Greene wrote, in part. “Do innocent people and children deserve it? No.”“The innocent people in Gaza did not kill and kidnap the innocent people in Israel on Oct 7th,” she continued. “Just as we spoke out and had compassion for the victims and families of Oct7, how can Americans not speak out and have compassion for the masses of innocent people and children in Gaza?”Greene linked the entirety of US financial and military aid to Israel to the conflict, arguing that it “means every U.S. tax payer is contributing to Israel’s military actions”.“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with,” Greene concluded. “And I will not be silent about it.”The post received an almost immediate response from far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who reportedly petitioned the White House to suspend the entry of injured Palestinian children from Gaza to the US.Greene and Loomer, both claiming the mantle of Maga authenticity, have bitterly clashed on the issue, with Loomer falsely describing Palestinian children as a “national security threat” and “Islamic invaders”.Loomer, who is Jewish, once claimed that her ban from social media platforms for anti-Muslim hate speech was antisemitic, while Greene infamously shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory that wildfires in California might have been started by Jewish space lasers.On Saturday, Loomer hit out at Greene, falsely accusing her of calling for Palestinians from Gaza to be resettled in the US and asking: “Why are you advocating for GAZANS to come to the US? How is Islamic immigration ‘America First’?”The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said last week that parts of Gaza are experiencing a “man-made” famine in the Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City, site of a new Israeli offensive.“As this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed,” the report said. “The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed.”The Israeli agency heading aid distribution in Gaza, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), rejected the report, saying it “relies on partial, biased data and superficial information originating from Hamas”.On Saturday, Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said on X that “the [international] media is missing the real story of ‘famine’ in Gaza. Hostages ARE starving, Hamas is getting fat, & the UN declares famine while 92% of THEIR food is stolen to be sold by Hamas. Meanwhile UN food sits rotting in sun. The UN should declare itself corrupt & incompetent.”In her post, Greene wrote that if the US were being bombed day and night, with millions killed or injured, and the world said “Americans voted for their government so they deserve it… How would you feel? What would you think? What would you do?” More