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    Trump dreams of ‘everlasting peace’ as acolytes drop heavy hints to Nobel committee

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    So to peace in our time. And why not? The Nobel committee is meeting in Oslo to divvy up its annual gongs and Donald Trump, convening his cabinet – and the media – in the White House had a good story to tell.After two years of death, destruction, starvation and captivity for Israeli hostages in Gaza, peace at last was at hand. Israel and Hamas were on the brink of a historic deal, brokered by the man in the Oval Office, who has made no secret of his desire to be known as the president of peace.The stakes in Gaza are so gravely baleful that it would be churlish to ascribe selfish motives to the cabinet meeting’s main theme.Yet the timing was, shall we say, serendipitous.Today is Thursday, tomorrow Friday – by coincidence, the day the winner of the Nobel will be announced.But Trump, whose previous expressions of desire for the same prize awarded to Barack Obama have bordered on the avaricious, was all decorum and restraint – at least on that narrow issue alone.In the course of a 70-minute meeting, the N word went unmentioned – apart from by one journalist near the end, whose question about Trump’s views on the prize went unanswered.There was going to be “peace in the Middle East”, he said portentously.“I think it’s going to be a lasting peace, hopefully an everlasting peace,” he added, no ambition being too great.“It will be a day of joy,” the president said, when the remaining living Israeli hostages – believed to be 20 in number – are released on Monday or Tuesday.“They’re dancing in the streets. They’re so happy. Everybody’s happy. They’re dancing in the streets of Arab countries, Muslim countries, I’ve never seen anything like it.”Everyone around him deserved credit, the president said magnanimously. “JD [Vance], you were fantastic. And Pete [Hegseth], you were great. Marco [Rubio] was fantastic. I mean, some of you were very much involved. I think almost everybody in this room was involved. Susie [Wiles, the White House chief of staff], I want to thank you very much. You were incredible … and then you have Steve Witkoff [his personal envoy].”But it fell to Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security adviser, to supply the heavy hint to the Nobel committee in Norway.“I don’t know if the one day perhaps the entire story will be told about the events of yesterday, but suffice it to say – it’s not an exaggeration – that none of it would have been possible without the president. Without the president of the United States being involved,” enthused the man once disparaged by Trump as “little Marco”.That drew a round of applause from the cabinet – the second of the meeting, the first being for Trump’s announcement at the beginning that a national holiday on the second Monday of October would henceforth be known as Columbus Day.Rubio warmed to his theme. The achievement transcended dry geopolitics to encapsulate the person of Trump himself.“Yesterday was a human story,” he said. “And because of the work you put in. And honestly, not only is there no other leader in the world that could have put this together, Mr President, but frankly, I don’t know of any American president in the modern era that could have made this possible because of the actions you have taken unrelated to this, and because of who you are, and what you’ve done, and how you’re viewed.”But this was still a Trump cabinet meeting, and it would not have been complete without some dissonant notes.They were duly supplied by the jarring contrast between the promise of peace and harmony in the Middle East and the darkening prospect of war, or at least civil disharmony, in America.Trump only had good words to say about countries in the Middle East who were he said were on board with his peace deal – even Iran, a country which he recently bombed but now said he wanted to see rebuilt.But here at home an “enemy from within” had to be confronted. Troops were to be deployed onto the streets of US cities to show elected local Democratic mayors and governors who was boss.Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, reported going to Portland and meeting the governor, mayor, chief of police and highway patrol superintendent.“They are all lying and disingenuous and dishonest people,” she declared, charitably, “because as soon as you leave the room, then they make the exact opposite response.” This presumably because the officials named depicted their city in somewhat more peaceful terms than the warzone of Noem et al’s fevered narrative.Yet taking the prize for low blows was JD Vance, who understood that the unifying theme of the meeting was Trump’s nascent success in ending bloodshed in the Middle East – yet failed to grasp that this call for a display of graciousness on his part.The vice-president has been known at cabinet gatherings to double up with contrived laughter at his boss’s jokes.This time he decided the best policy was to repurpose for his own use one of Trump’s tried-and-tested jibes – at the expense of Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.“The one thing I would say is obviously the president of the United States, a New York real estate billionaire, one of the most famous New Yorkers in the world, has a lot of interaction with a lot of people who are very pro-Israel,” said Vance.Then, perhaps realizing that he could not reach the giddy heights of Rubio’s testimonial, he added: “He also, of course, knew one of the most famous Palestinians in the world, Chuck Schumer.”The crack provoked laughter. It is one of Trump’s cruelest taunts against Schumer, a fellow New Yorker who is proudly Jewish and a staunch supporter of Israel. Given the current backdrop, retreading it at this point struck a particularly discordant note.JD, it seems, has secret aspirations as a king of comedy. A calling missed, perhaps. But someone needs to tell him about timing – and context. More

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      Why is the US House speaker refusing to seat an elected Democrat? | Moira Donegan

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      The people of Arizona’s seventh congressional district – a vast territory extending across the state’s south, along the Mexican border – have been denied representation in Congress for weeks. That’s because Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has refused to swear in Adelita Grijalva, their representative-elect, who won a special election to fill the seat vacated by her father, the late Raúl Grijalva, in a landslide late last month. Grijalva, a Democrat, has been largely ignored by the speaker. Unlike sworn representatives, she has to go around the Capitol with an escort. There’s an office with her name on the door, but she hasn’t been allowed inside, and has worked instead out of a conference room on another floor.It is an unprecedented abuse of procedural power on the part of the speaker, one that has had the effect of silencing a political opponent and denying representation to the citizens of her district. In refusing to seat Grijalva, Johnson has defied the will of Arizona’s voters, and effectively nullified, at least for the time being, a legitimate congressional election. He has persisted in this even in defiance of his own promises, after saying on Friday he would seat her this week once the House returned to session – and then telling lawmakers they wouldn’t reconvene this week after all. Last week, Grijalva showed up to a three-and-a-half-minute pro forma session, hoping to be sworn in then. (Johnson has sworn in other representatives at pro forma sessions in the past.) But the Republican presiding over the session, Morgan Griffith, ignored the effort. On a weekend talkshow, Grijalva said she had heard “absolutely nothing” from the speaker about the timing of her swearing in.Grijalva thinks she knows why. There is no political calculation that could justify Mike Johnson’s refusal to seat a duly elected member of the House: Grijalva won her race, and both his oath to the constitution and his responsibilities to the body that he leads require Johnson to seat her. But in lieu of deference to these higher aims, Grijalva suspects that Johnson is pursuing a much more cynical one: in refusing to swear her in and allow her to take up the office to which she has been elected, Johnson, Grijalva thinks, is aiming to stop her becoming the final member of Congress whose signature is needed to force a vote on the release of confidential files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Currently, the petition has 217 signatures; it needs only 218. Grijalva has pledged to support it. “Why the rules are different for me – the only thing that I can think of is the Epstein files,” Grijalva told the New York Times.The Epstein scandal, and the ensuing fallout from new and resurfaced revelations about Donald Trump’s deep and longstanding friendship with the deceased child sex trafficker and financier, has long plagued the Trump administration. One of the few genuine threats to Trump’s grip over his coalition came a few months ago, when his justice department refused to release files relating to the case, causing outrage among a group of rightwing podcasters, media personalities and conspiracy theorists who had long traded on speculation about the case and accusations that powerful Democrats were involved in a cover-up.The discharge petition, if passed, would not be likely to result in the actual release of the documents. The move has little support in the Republican-backed Senate; there is no chance that Donald Trump, who has opposed the release of the Epstein files, calling them a “waste” of “time and energy”, would sign a bill into law making them public. But what the move would accomplish is forcing a full chamber vote on the matter, requiring every member of the Republican caucus to go on the record either endorsing the release of the files – and thereby displeasing Trump – or opposing it – thereby displeasing their voters. The Times has reported that Johnson’s delay is giving the White House more time to pressure Republicans who have already signed on to the discharge petition to remove their signatures before the Grijalva is sworn in.And so it seems that Johnson is ignoring the constitution and subverting the will of the voters in order to buy time, in an effort to spare his party embarrassment over their president’s one-time close confidence with a pedophile.But the refusal to seat Grijalva has broader implications. In using his procedural control over the functioning of Congress to deny a seat to an elected Democrat, Johnson is setting a dangerous precedent and raising questions about future transfers of power. If a Democratic majority is elected in 2026, will the outgoing Republican speaker duly swear in its members? Or will he use his procedural powers to delay one, several or many of them from taking their oaths of office – either under the pretext of election fraud or personal ineligibility, or out of sheer, bald unwillingness to hand over power to members of a party that the president and his allies have repeatedly described as illegitimate?These are no longer fanciful questions; they are ones that must be asked. The Republicans who refused to subvert the law for Trump’s benefit on January 6 are now largely gone; the ones who have replaced them appear much more willing to place party before country. Every day that Grijalva is not sworn in, the shadow they cast over 2026 darkens.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Republican lawmakers praise Trump for Gaza deal as Palestinian Americans remain wary: ‘So much remains unclear’

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      While Republican lawmakers lined up to praise Donald Trump on Wednesday for brokering a tentative deal on the “first phase” of an agreement between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, and win the release of the remaining Israeli hostages, Palestinian American were more wary.“President Trump is the peace president! Finally, the living nightmare the hostages have been forced to endure will end and Americans Itay and Omer can be laid to rest,” Joni Ernst, the Iowa senator wrote on social media, referring to Israeli hostages who died in captivity. The tentative agreement would ensure the return of living Israeli hostages, and the remains of those who have died in Gaza since 7 October 2021.Bernie Moreno, the Ohio senator who introduced a resolution in June calling for Trump to be awarded the Nobel peace prize for bombing nuclear sites in Iran, said the announcement made this a “historic” day, “for the United States, Israel, and peace in the Middle East”.“President Trump has once again delivered on his promise to achieve peace through strength. An incredible feat that will go down in history. NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!” Moreno added.Brian Mast, a Florida representative who once served as a civilian volunteer in the Israeli military, and wore his old Israeli uniform to work in the aftermath of the 7 October 2021 Hamas-led attack, also praised Trump.“President Trump just did what career diplomats never could – he brought the world closer than it’s ever been to peace in Gaza,” Mast, who chairs the House foreign affairs committee, wrote. “This deal only works if Hamas follows through. We don’t trust terrorists, we trust results.”While the US lawmakers did not mention the suffering of the Palestinian people, and the exact terms of the agreement remain unknown, a senior Qatari official said on social media that it also includes the release of Palestinian prisoners and the entry of aid.Still, Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet who won a 2025 Pulitzer prize for his New Yorker essays about Gaza and is now living in Syracuse, New York, expressed trepidation.“Trump officially announces that Hamas and Israel signed off the first phase of ‘Peace Plan.’ To be honest, I do not like the language here,” Abu Toha wrote on social media. “The agreement signed should be emphatically about a permanent ceasefire. No more slaughtering of more Palestinians. It must not take phases to end a genocide. This is not truly anything close to peace! To me, it sounds like a pause of bloodshed for a few days or weeks!”“I’m old enough to remember the first phase of the previous ‘ceasefire deal’ in January this year,” he added.There was caution too from Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American who leads the Palestine/Israel program at Arab Center Washington DC. “Very likely scenario moving forward,” he wrote on X. “1 Trump gets his Nobel Friday 2 Israel gets it’s captives back Saturday 3 Genocide continues Sunday.”Shibley Telhami, a Palestinian American who is the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, scoffed at the idea that Trump deserves to be awarded the Nobel peace prize this week.The agreement Trump announced on Wednesday “would be very welcome, especially if it includes full ceasefire and flood of badly needed Gaza aid”, Telhami wrote. “But so much remains unclear, even about first phase, including point of Israeli withdrawal. Key will be measures agreed to assure that first phase doesn’t become last phase.”“While ending carnage is badly needed, Keep in mind: Gaza is obliterated, 10% of its population killed or wounded, possibly more, with overwhelming majority rendered homeless. Could take decades just to build what has been destroyed – and that’s assuming killing has really ended,” the scholar, who was born into a family of Palestinian Christians outside Haifa, added.“Agreement is welcome, but ‘peacemakers’ don’t enable war crimes, including the killing of thousands of children, for most of a year, then expect Nobel prize when a ceasefire is finally achieved,” Telhami observed. “Italy’s PM has been referred to the ICC for much lesser enablement of war crimes.”The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said on Tuesday that she had been reported to the international criminal court for alleged complicity in genocide in connection with support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza. More

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      Senate Republicans vote against check on Trump using deadly force against cartels

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      Senate Republicans voted down legislation Wednesday that would have put a check on Donald Trump’s ability to use deadly military force against drug cartels after Democrats tried to counter the administration’s extraordinary assertion of presidential war powers to destroy vessels in the Caribbean.The vote fell mostly along party lines, 48-51, with two Republicans, Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski, voting in favor and the Democrat John Fetterman voting against.It was the first vote in Congress on Trump’s military campaign, which according to the White House has so far destroyed four vessels, killed at least 21 people and stopped narcotics from reaching the US. The war powers resolution would have required the president to seek authorization from Congress before further military strikes on the cartels.The Trump administration has asserted that drug traffickers are armed combatants threatening the United States, creating justification to use military force. But that assertion has been met with some unease on Capitol Hill.Some Republicans are asking the White House for more clarification on its legal justification and specifics on how the strikes are conducted, while Democrats insist they are violations of US and international law. It’s a clash that could redefine how the world’s most powerful military uses lethal force and set the tone for future global conflict.The White House had indicated Trump would veto the legislation, and even though the Senate vote failed, it gave lawmakers an opportunity to go on the record with their objections to Trump’s declaration that the US is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels.“It sends a message when a significant number of legislators say: ‘Hey, this is a bad idea,’” said the senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who pushed the resolution alongside Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California.Wednesday’s vote was brought under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was intended to reassert congressional power over the declaration of war.“Congress must not allow the executive branch to become judge, jury and executioner,” Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has long pushed for greater congressional oversight of war powers, said during a floor speech.Paul was the only Republican to publicly speak in favor of the resolution before the vote, but a number of Republican senators have questioned the strikes on vessels and said they are not receiving enough information from the administration.The senator Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, acknowledged “there may be some concern” in the Republican conference about the strikes. However, Republican leaders stridently argued against the resolution on the Senate floor Wednesday, calling it a political ploy from Democrats.“People were attacking our country by bringing in poisonous substances to deposit into our country that would have killed Americans,” said the senator Jim Risch, the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee. “Fortunately most of those drugs are now at the bottom of the ocean.”Risch thanked Trump for his actions and added that he hoped the military strikes would continue.Members of the Senate armed services committee received a classified briefing last week on the strikes, and Cramer said he was “comfortable with at least the plausibility of their legal argument”. But, he added, no one representing intelligence agencies or the military command structure for Central and South America was present for the briefing.“I’d be more comfortable defending the administration if they shared the information,” he said.Kaine also said the briefing did not include any information on why the military chose to destroy the vessels rather than interdict them or get into the specifics of how the military was so confident the vessels were carrying drugs.“Maybe they were engaged in human trafficking, or maybe it was the wrong ship,” Schiff said. “We just have little or no information about who was onboard these ships or what intelligence was used or what the rationale was and how certain we could be that everyone on that ship deserved to die.”The Democrats also said the administration has told them it is adding cartels to a list of organizations deemed “narco-terrorists” that are targets for military strikes, but it has not shown the lawmakers a complete list.“The slow erosion of congressional oversight is not an abstract debate about process,” the senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, said in a floor speech. “It is a real and present threat to our democracy.”The secretary of state Marco Rubio visited the Republican conference for lunch Wednesday to emphasize to senators that they should vote against the legislation. He told the senators that the administration was treating cartels like governmental entities because they had seized control of large portions of some Caribbean nations, according to the senator John Hoeven of North Dakota.Rubio told reporters at the Capitol: “These drug-trafficking organizations are a direct threat to the safety and security of the United States to unleash violence and criminality on our streets, fueled by the drugs and the drug profits that they make. … And the president, as the commander in chief, has an obligation to keep our country safe.”Still, Democrats said the recent buildup of US maritime forces in the Caribbean was a sign of shifting US priorities and tactics that could have grave repercussions. They worried that further military strikes could set off a conflict with Venezuela and argued that Congress should be actively deliberating whenever American troops are sent to war.Schiff said, “This is the kind of thing that leads a country, unexpectedly and unintentionally, into war.” More

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      US shutdown deadlock deepens as senators reject competing bills

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      The deadlock over ending the US government shutdown deepened on Wednesday, with senators once again rejecting competing bills to restart funding as Democrats and Republicans remain dug in on their demands for reopening federal agencies.The funding lapse has forced offices, national parks and other federal government operations to close or curtail operations, while employees have been furloughed. Signs of strain have mounted in recent days in the parts of the federal government that remained operational, with staffing shortages reported at airports across the US as well as air traffic control centers. Further disruptions may come next week, when US military personnel and other federal workers who remain on the job will not receive paychecks, unless the government reopens.When the Senate met on Wednesday afternoon, it became clear that sentiment had not shifted in the eight days since the shutdown began. For the sixth time, Democratic and Republican proposals to restart funding both failed to receive enough support to advance, and no senators changed their votes from recent days.Democrats are demanding that any bill to fund the government be paired with an array of healthcare-centered provisions, including an extension of premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans. Those expire at the end of the year, and costs are set to rise for the plans’ roughly 20 million enrollees if they are not renewed.Donald Trump has sought to pressure the Democrats to accept the GOP’s proposal, which would only extend funding through 21 November. On Tuesday, the White House office of management and budget released a memo arguing that federal workers were not entitled to back pay, despite a 2019 law saying they should be.The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, poured cold water on that prospect at a press conference the following day, saying: “I think it is statutory law that federal employees be paid. And that’s my position. I think they should be.”Both parties otherwise remained unmoved in their demands. The House of Representatives passed the GOP’s bill on a near party-line vote last month, and Johnson has kept the chamber out of session ever since in a bid to force Senate Democrats to approve it.At his press conference, the speaker alleged that top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer was opposing the Republican bill out of fear from a primary challenge by the “communists” in his party.“They are worried about the Marxist flank in their Democrat party,” Johnson said.“He’s terrified that he’s going to get a challenge from his far left. I’ve noted that Chuck Schumer is a very far-left politician, but he is not far enough left for the communists, and they’re coming for him, and so he has to put up his dukes and show a fight.”In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer once again faulted Republicans for refusing to negotiate on the Democrats’ healthcare demands. The Senate’s majority leader John Thune has said he will discuss the ACA tax credit issue, but only when government funding is restored.“We can do both: fix healthcare and reopen the government. This is not an either-or thing, which Republicans are making it. The American people don’t like it,” Schumer said.While both parties’s rank-and-file lawmakers have appeared united around their leaders’ strategies, the GOP suffered a high-profile defection on Monday when far-right lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene backed negotiations over the tax credits. However in the days since, no other Republicans have publicly joined her.Jen Kiggans, a Virginia Republican congresswoman representing a swing district, has received bipartisan support for legislation that would extend the credits for a year, and is viewed a potential compromise in the funding standoff.At a press conference on Tuesday, top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries called the idea a “nonstarter”.“It was introduced by the same people who just permanently extended massive tax breaks for their billionaire donors,” Jeffries said, referring to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Republicans passed this year without Democratic votes. More

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      White House says furloughed federal workers not entitled to back pay amid shutdown

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      The White House’s office of management and budget (OMB) is arguing that federal workers who are furloughed amid the ongoing government shutdown are not entitled to back pay.In a draft memo first obtained by Axios, OMB argued that an amendment to the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act (GEFTA) of 2019 would not guarantee furloughed workers back pay and that said funds must be set aside by Congress.“The legislation that ends the current lapse in appropriations must include express language appropriating funds for back pay for furloughed employees, or such payments cannot be made,” said Mark Paoletta, OMB’s general counsel, in a draft addressed to White House budget director Russell Vought, the Washington Post reported.The OMB previously revised a shutdown guidance document on Friday to remove reference to the GEFTA Act, reported Government Executive, a media site reporting on the US executive branch.Donald Trump previously signed GEFTA into law after the 2019 government shutdown, which lasted for 35 days. While many understood the law to automatically guarantee pay for federal workers, the White House’s OMB is arguing against that interpretation, suggesting that the law only created the conditions for back pay.Trump and other Republicans have not confirmed if workers would be paid when the government reopens. When asked about the White House’s stance on back payment for federal workers, Trump said “it depends who we’re talking about” during comments in the Oval Office on TuesdayTrump also added that he planned to announce additional government programs that will be permanently eliminated as the shutdown continues as well as possible layoffs, CNN reported.House speaker Mike Johnson said that federal workers affected by the shutdown should receive back pay, but noted that “some legal analysts [are] saying that [back payments] may not be appropriate or necessary, in terms of the law requiring that back pay be provided,” the Hill reported.Several Republicans have said that questions on back pay should put pressure on congressional Democrats to support a continuing resolution to reopen the government.Meanwhile, Democrats have slammed the reinterpretation of GEFTA as unlawful. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, which is home to thousands of federal workers, said any suggestion of withheld back pay is “more fear mongering from a president who wants a blank check for lawlessness”.Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a top Democrat on the Senate appropriations committee, called the latest reinterpretation “lawless”. “They’re plotting to try and rob furloughed federal workers of backpay at the end of this shutdown,” said Murray during Senate floor remarks. “This flies in the face of the plain text of the law, which could not be more clear.”An estimated 750,000 federal workers have been furloughed during the federal government shutdown, now in its seventh day, the Post reported citing congressional bookkeepers. More

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      Bondi spars over Epstein but stays silent on Comey: takeaways from a tense hearing

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      In an often tense hearing before the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, stood accused by Democrats of weaponizing the US Department of Justice, “fundamentally transforming” the department, and leaving “an enormous stain on American history” that it will take “decades to recover [from]”.Bondi criticized Democratic lawmakers in personal terms as she faced questions over the department’s enforcement efforts in Democratic-led cities, her mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, and inquiries into Donald Trump’s political adversaries. Here are the key takeaways from Bondi’s appearance.1. Democrats criticized Trump’s weaponization of the justice departmentBondi faced questions about her tenure at the department, as Democratic senators condemned the Trump administration for weaponizing the DoJ to investigate and prosecute Trump’s political enemies.“Our nation’s top law-enforcement agency has become a shield for the president and his political allies when they engage in misconduct,” Dick Durbin said. Durbin called Lindsey Halligan, the new US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, part of a “network of unqualified mega-loyalists masquerading as federal prosecutors”.“Attorney General Bondi: in eight short months, you have fundamentally transformed the justice department and left an enormous stain on American history. It will take decades to recover,” Durbin said.When asked by Amy Klobuchar whether she saw the president’s post on Truth Social, urging her to prosecute his political adversaries such as James Comey and Letitia James, as a “directive”, Bondi evaded the question.“President Trump is the most transparent president in American history,” Bondi said.She refused to “discuss personnel issues”, when Klobuchar asked about Bondi’s reported pushback to the president’s pressure campaign to remove Erik Siebert, Halligan’s predecessor. Bondi also refused to discuss the case against Comey, after Siebert said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the former FBI director.Adam Schiff said that the department, under Bondi’s leadership, had become Trump’s “personal sword and shield to go after his ever growing list of political enemies and to protect himself, his allies and associates”.Schiff is a noted adversary of the president, and served on the House select committee that investigated the Capitol insurrection. Bondi snapped at him when she refused to answer questions about the allegations against Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, for allegedly accepting $50,000 in bribes before Trump took office: “Deputy attorney general [Todd] Blanche and [FBI] director [Kash] Patel said that there was no evidence that Tom Homan committed a crime, yet now you’re putting his picture up to slander him.“If you worked for me, you would have been fired,” Bondi continued. “Will you apologize to Donald Trump for trying to impeach him?”2. Bondi refused to discuss the arrest of James ComeyIn a line of questioning by Richard Blumenthal, Bondi refused to discuss or disclose any conversations she may have had with the president in the lead-up to the indictment of Comey last month. Blumenthal said Bondi attended a dinner with Donald Trump, just days before the former FBI director was criminally charged.Bondi instead pushed back against the Democratic senator from Connecticut. “I find it so interesting that you didn’t bring any of this up during President Biden’s administration, when he was doing everything to protect Hunter Biden, his son,” she said.3. Bondi and Durbin sparred over EpsteinDurbin grilled Bondi as to why she made a public claim that the Epstein “client list” was “sitting” on her desk for review earlier this year, only to “produce already public information and no client list”.Bondi pushed back, saying she had “yet to review” the documents, and reaffirmed that there was no Epstein client list.Bondi sparred with Durbin, questioning why he “refused repeated Republican requests to release the Epstein flight logs in 2023 and 2024”. Durbin said Bondi’s claims were not accurate.“I did not refuse. One of the senators here wished to produce those logs, and I asked her to put it in writing, and she never did,” Durbin said, apparently referring to his Republican colleague Marsha Blackburn.4. Republicans focused on ‘Arctic Frost’ revelationsPam Bondi said that Operation Arctic Frost – an intelligence-gathering effort that led to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election – was “an unconstitutional, undemocratic abuse of power”.On Monday, several Republican lawmakers said the FBI gathered phone records from Republican senators. These records were obtained through a grand jury. Republicans have called this move part of the wider pattern of political weaponization of the previous administration.“This is the kind of conduct that shattered the American people’s faith in our government,” Bondi said at the hearing. “Our FBI is targeting violent criminals, child predators and other law breakers, not sitting senators who happen to be from the wrong political party.”Republican Josh Hawley also chimed in. “I’ve heard them say that Joe Biden never targeted his political enemies,” he said. “Huh? That’s interesting, because I could have sworn that yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone.”5. Bondi said ‘national guard are on the way to Chicago’In a heated exchange with Durbin, Bondi refused to answer a question about whether she was consulted about Trump’s decision to send national guard troops to Illinois – the state that Durbin represents.“You voted to shut down the government, and you’re sitting here. Our law enforcement officers aren’t being paid. They’re out there working to protect you,” Bondi said, after declining to discuss internal conversations with the White House.“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump. Currently the national guard are on the way to Chicago. If you’re not going to protect your citizens, President Trump will.” More

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      House speaker says Democrats aren’t serious about shutdown negotiation as Democratic leader blames Republicans

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      The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, accused Democrats of being “not serious” in negotiations to end the federal government shutdown, while the Democratic leader accused Republicans of driving the shutdown, now on its fifth day and expected to last at least through next week.Talks between the opposing political parties stalled over the weekend, with no votes anticipated to end the standoff. A CBS poll found just 28% of Democratic voters and 23% of Republicans consider their party’s positions worth shutting down the government.In his comments to NBC’s Meet the Press, Johnson said his body had done its work in passing a measure to keep the government financed but now it was up to the Senate “to turn the lights back on so that everyone can do their work”. He accused Democrats of failing to engage “in a serious negotiation”.“They’re doing this to get political cover because Chuck Schumer is afraid that he won’t win his next re-election bid in the Senate because he’s going to be challenged by a Marxist in New York, because that’s the new popular thing out there,” he said, referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx representative who may be looking to challenge Schumer for his Senate seat next year.But Johnson’s counterpart, minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, told the same show JD Vance lied last week when he claimed Democrats were themselves being dishonest claiming they are not trying to give healthcare benefits to undocumented immigrants.“Republicans are lying because they’re losing in the court of public opinion,” Jeffries said, and added his party was “standing up for the healthcare of hard-working American taxpayers, of working-class Americans, of middle-class Americans”.Jeffries also hit back at comments by Donald Trump in a social media post on Thursday in which he called Democrats the party of “the party of hate, evil, and Satan” alongside pictures of party figures, including Ocasio-Cortez, Schumer, speaker emeritus Nancy Pelosi, and former president and first lady Joe and Jill Biden.Asked if he could still negotiate with Trump, Jeffries said the president’s behavior “is outrageous, it’s unhinged, it’s unreasonable, and it speaks for itself. The American people deserve better than lies, than attacks, than deepfake videos and the president spending all of his time on the golf course.”Leaders of the political leadership have not had formal talks for almost a week as both seek to gain a political edge ahead of renewed discussions.Jeffries said that since that meeting last Monday, “Republicans, including Donald Trump, have gone radio silent” and the Democratic party leadership “will continue to make clear, leader Schumer and myself, that we will sit down any time, any place, with anyone to address this issue with the seriousness that it deserves”.The battle for high political ground continued on Sunday with Johnson claiming that the potential for temporary government job suspensions, known as furloughs, hardening into permanent job layoffs “is a regrettable situation that the president does not want”.White House national economic council director Kevin Hassett increased pressure on Democrats, saying the Trump administration will start mass layoffs of federal workers if Trump decides negotiations with Democrats are “absolutely going nowhere”.Hassett told CNN’s State of the Union that Trump and Vought “are lining things up and getting ready to act if they have to, but hoping that they don’t”. But he predicted it is possible that Democrats could back down.“I think that everybody is still hopeful that when we get a fresh start at the beginning of the week, that we can get the Democrats to see that it’s just common sense to avoid layoffs like that,” Hassett said.But some fear Democrats have walked into a trap. Johnson said on Sunday that Trump had asked the Democratic leadership to keep the government open.“In a situation like this, where the Senate Democrats have decided to turn the keys to the kingdom over to the White House, they have to make tough decisions,” he said, pointing to Russ Vought, the director of the office of management and budget.Vought, Johnson said, “has to now look at all of the federal government, recognizing that the funding streams have been turned off and determine what are essential programs, policies, and personnel. That’s not a job that he relishes. But he’s being required to do it by Chuck Schumer.”The spirit of mutual recrimination continued with Schumer telling CBS Johnson “doesn’t want to discuss the real issue, the healthcare crisis facing the American people. So he puts up all these fake lies to try and divert attention.”But in an interview set to broadcast on Monday, Johnson told MSNBC he considers the issue of expiring healthcare subsidies – that Democrats place central to their negotiating position – as one that can be addressed later.“We have effectively three months to negotiate in the White House and in the hall of Congress, that’s like an eternity,” Johnson said. “We need folks in good faith to come around the table and have that discussion. And we can’t do it when the government is shut down,” he added.Adam Schiff, a California senator also speaking to Meet the Press, was asked if his party delegates in the Senate would stay united after three Democratic senators broke away to vote with Republicans. Schiff said he was confident that “all Democrats understand that millions and millions of their constituents are about to be priced out of their healthcare”.“We need a president who can act like an adult, who can come to the table and negotiate an end to their self-imposed healthcare crisis,” Schiff said. “Right now we don’t see that. We see Trump out on the golf course, we see the speaker telling his House colleagues not to even come to session, that there’s no work for the federal government to do, apparently.” More

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      Democrats are embracing the risky politics of a government shutdown to rein in president, activists say

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      For months, as Donald Trump has used the levers of the US federal government to consolidate power, silence dissent and punish his political enemies, Democrats have been bombarded with a single demand: do something. Last week, they did.In a rare display of unity, out-of-power Democrats embraced the risky politics of a government shutdown – their boldest effort yet to rein in a president whom many Americans and constitutional scholars now view as a threat to US democracy.“It’s not a fight for fighting’s sake,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, one of the outside groups closely coordinating with Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill. “This is a battle about Donald Trump’s attacks on the constitution and him seizing the power over all spending from Congress – and whether Congress is going to let him get away with that.”Washington is bracing for what could be an extended government shutdown, which officially began at 12.01am on Wednesday. Last week, Senate Democrats repeatedly blocked a Republican funding measure to reopen the government, as the parties traded blame and each side insisted they would not bend to the other’s demands.Democrats are pressing for an array of healthcare-centered priorities, including the extension of tax credits for Affordable Care Act plans set to expire at the end of the year. The White House and Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, have refused to include any healthcare concessions as part of a deal to reopen the government, though some GOP lawmakers are open to extending the ACA subsidies.Democrats, with little leverage and deep skepticism that Republicans will honor any future deal, view the shutdown as their only option to force the issue.But the Trump administration is working to make the closures as painful as possible for Democrats, who Republicans accuse of trying to “sabotage” the president’s agenda.Trump has called the shutdown an “unprecedented opportunity” to dismantle federal programs and what he called “Democrat agencies”. In a sharp break from precedent, the Trump administration is readying plans to permanently layoffs of federal workers while it takes punitive action against Democratic-led states. Several government departments have posted partisan and potentially illegal messages saying their operations are curtailed due to “the Radical Left Democrat shutdown”. In the Senate, the majority leader John Thune has said he plans to hold more votes on a plan to reopen the government this week.But Democrats say the stakes are too high – and the greater risk is capitulating to the president.“Remember, right now, our healthcare system is broken. Right now, we’re the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people,” the senator Bernie Sanders said in a video with progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, explaining the Democrats’ opposition to the Republican funding bill. “And these guys want to make it even worse. We’re not going to let that happen.”Progressive activists who have been sharply critical of the party’s congressional leaders, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, are now praising them for continuing to “hold the line on healthcare”.“What our members see is Democrats willing to stand up and fight,” said Joel Payne, a spokesperson for MoveOn, which is part of a coalition of progressive groups flooding Democrats with calls to hold fast in shutdown negotiations.Payne said healthcare was Democrats’ “north star” – the party’s strongest issue with voters and one that has helped propel them to victory in the past. If Democrats are successful, he added, the showdown over healthcare could serve as a blueprint for safeguarding other rights under attack by the administration.House Republicans did not need Democrats to pass their short-term spending bill last month, which would fund the government mostly at current levels through 21 November. But in the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority, they need Democratic support to clear the 60-vote threshold required to advance most legislation.So far, only three members of the Senate Democratic caucus have broken ranks: John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Angus King, an independent of Maine.In the House, Maine congressman Jared Golden, was only House Democrat to back the Republican funding bill when it passed the House last month. In a statement last week, Golden said the shutdown was the “result of hardball politics” driven by the demands of “far-left groups” eager to show their opposition to Trump.Early polling suggests voters are more inclined to blame Trump and Republicans than Democrats for the federal shutdown. A Washington Post poll released on Thursday found that, by a 17-percentage-point margin, Americans blame Republicans for the shutdown. Independents overwhelmingly sided with Democrats, the survey found.Yet there were signs public opinion could shift as more Americans face the ripple effects of government-wide closures. In several polls, a significant share of voters said they held both parties equally responsible or were unsure of whom to blame.The call for Democrats to take a harder line against Trump has been building for months. Across the country, progressive activists, disaffected Republicans and voters outraged by the administration’s actions have packed town halls, marched in protests and launched campaigns of their own – sending a clear message to Democrats: step up, or step aside.“Everybody wants a fighter,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice-president at the centrist thinktank Third Way that is often at odds with the party’s left flank.Erickson said the focus on healthcare – an issue that unifies the party’s diverse coalition and falls squarely in the “Venn diagram of things voters care about” – was both good politics and good policy.“The ACA subsidies are a real ask,” she said. “If Democrats got that, it would be a way to declare victory in this moment.”Democrats feel confident going to battle over healthcare. A Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) poll showed that 78% of Americans support extending the credits, which disproportionately benefit Republican-held congressional districts.Without action, insurance premiums for millions of Americans could double next year, according to an analysis by KFF. Democrats have also sought to reverse Medicaid cuts included in Trump’s marquee tax-and-immigration package, which the nonpartisan congressional budget office projects will leave 10 million more Americans uninsured over the next decade.Republicans have countered by falsely claiming Democrats forced a shutdown to provide free health benefits to undocumented immigrants. The White House has taunted Democrats with a deepfake video of Schumer and Jeffries, wearing a sombrero and fake mustache that has been widely denounced as racist. Vance laughed off the criticism, calling the video “funny”.Democrats like Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, fired back with memes and taunts of their own. In one tweet, Newsom’s press team posted an AI generated image of Trump in a towering wig and an 18th-century gown: TRUMP “MARIE ANTOINETTE” SAYS, “NO HEALTH CARE FOR YOU PEASANTS, BUT A BALLROOM FOR THE QUEEN!”Democrats are betting that the shutdown strategy can help shift momentum heading into next year’s midterm elections. By wielding their most powerful legislative tool, party leaders aim to rebuild trust with their disillusioned base – a group whose frustration has dragged Democratic approval ratings to decade lows and hurt fundraising.Many Democrats argue that their best hope of restraining Trump is to regain the House in 2026, and that the most straightforward path to doing so is to focus on kitchen-table issues like healthcare.Some Democratic strategists warn that by focusing primarily on healthcare, the party risks downplaying what many view as Trump’s authoritarian lurch – reducing it to just another policy showdown in Washington’s partisan budget battles.Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic strategist and communications researcher, believes a sharper message – such as “we will not fund fascism” or “no dollars for dictatorship” – would help cut through the noise and clarify the stakes.“In order for people to fight this regime, they have to understand it as a regime hellbent on taking our freedoms,” she said.As part of their demands, Democrats are also pushing for ways to curtail Trump’s ability to rescind funding already approved by Congress, as he has done with foreign aid programs and public broadcasting. An alternative short-term funding bill offered by Democrats included provisions that would make it harder for the president to undermine Congress’s funding power.Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible and a leading voice on the left pushing Democrats to fight harder against what he calls the Trump “regime”, said he was encouraged to see the party’s leadership sharpen its tactics. Though Levin shares the view that the stakes are far bigger than a healthcare policy dispute, he believes Democrats’ demands, if met, could “constrain the regime in some meaningful ways”.Indivisible is helping to coordinate a second wave of No Kings rallies across the country to protest what organizers described as Trump’s “authoritarian power grab”. The day of action, planned for 18 October, will be another opportunity to mobilize Americans and, Levin hopes, to celebrate Democrats for their resolve.“I hope what we will not be doing is criticizing them for having surrendered again,” he said. “So the play is to win.” More