Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 200 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s assault on voting intensifies as midterms loom: ‘a wholesale attack on free and fair elections’

      by

      A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections, Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senate next year, Trump and some prominent supporters have sought to discredit the possibility that Republicans could lose in a fair fight and are using that premise to justify demands for a drastically different kind of electoral system.This is not the first time Trump has questioned the credibility of US elections – he did it almost as vigorously in 2016 and 2024, when he won his bids for the White House, as he did in 2020, when he did not – but now the president’s confidants are threatening emergency powers to seize control of a process over which presidents ordinarily have no control.Trump’s former chief political adviser, Steve Bannon, is urging him to get the elections “squared away” even before the voters have a chance to weigh in. Former legal advisers have suggested the electoral system is in itself an emergency justifying extraordinary intervention, possibly including federal agents and the military stationed outside polling stations.When Bannon was asked whether voters might find this intimidating, he replied: “You’re damn right.”View image in fullscreenThe administration itself, meanwhile, is moving on multiple fronts. Most visibly, Trump is pressuring Republican-run states to redraw their congressional maps outside the usual once-a-decade schedule and lock in as many additional safe Republican seats as possible.Texas has gerrymandered an additional five GOP seats, Ohio two, and Missouri and North Carolina one each, and other states are considering whether to follow suit. (California voters, in response, have just approved a map promising five additional Democratic seats.)Meanwhile, the justice department has abandoned its decades-long defense of voting rights, and in some instances – notably, a pending supreme court case that risks erasing a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – has switched to the side arguing against protecting minority rights. The Department of Homeland Security has slashed funding and cut staff at an agency dedicated to protecting elections from physical and cybersecurity threats.The administration is also demanding states hand over sensitive voter data and purge voter rolls, despite grave concerns about this deterring or disenfranchising large numbers of legitimate voters. In an executive order issued in March, the White House said it wants voters to produce birth certificates or passports as proof of eligibility. It wants the vote count to be over on election night, disregarding provisional and late mail-in ballots. In fact, Trump would like to do away with mail-in balloting altogether.View image in fullscreenIf all that doesn’t suffice – if Democrats still threaten to prevail next year – the administration has a multi-agency infrastructure set up to trumpet allegations of voter fraud and threaten legal action, including possible criminal prosecution of poll workers, election administrators, political adversaries and individual voters. “We’re going to come after the people … who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel, now FBI director, vowed in the run-up to the 2024 race. (No court has ever substantiated Trump’s claims that Biden was not the rightful winner in 2020.) “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”Another possibility is that Trump will seek to wrest control of voting machines from state and local officials, as he came close to doing five years ago.“Those of us engaged in this fight are witnessing a wholesale attack on free and fair elections,” said Marc Elias, a prominent election lawyer involved in more than 60 election-related suits. “From executive orders to budget cuts, the Trump administration is undermining election security and promoting voter disenfranchisement.”Perhaps the biggest underlying fear is that Trump has no interest in democracy and aims, ultimately, to destroy it. “I don’t think Donald Trump wants another election,” California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, opined as Trump invoked legally questionable emergency powers to deploy national guard troops to US cities.Administration officials insist their concern is to prevent cheating by the Democrats and improve electoral security. But on the campaign trail last year, Trump told evangelical Christian supporters they would need to vote for him only one more time. “Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”Whatever the ultimate goal, the question uppermost in the minds of many voting rights advocates is how much Trump and his allies will be able to pull off over the next 12 months. The president has almost no power over elections under the constitution, and much of what the administration has advocated is being challenged in court. It is, for example, a federal crime to deploy troops at any election site. Voter intimidation of any kind is similarly prohibited.For that reason, advocates and lawyers say, the risk is less about what Trump is allowed to do and more about what he can persuade people to do anyway.View image in fullscreen“Donald Trump is a marketing machine, and what he is doing right now is marketing power he does not have,” said Justin Levitt, a lawyer who served as a senior adviser on voting rights in the Biden administration. He described Trump’s March executive order, with its demands for strict voter identification procedures and new voting equipment standards, as just “a piece of paper with a scrawly signature on it”. (A federal judge recently blocked the order, saying the president was improperly asserting powers the constitution assigned to Congress and the states.)“It’s an attempt to fool people,” Levitt added. “Trump’s primary power is the power we give him when he asserts he is in control of everything, and we believe him.”Jasleen Singh, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, has no doubt Trump is “directing, dismantling and weaponizing agencies” with the ultimate goal of “election subversion”. But she, too, said it was important not to give in to the force of Trump’s personality.“The law is on our side,” she said. “We have the right to vote. We have the right to participate … Part of this is not letting voters forget the power that they have.”The White House had no specific comment about Trump’s actions or intentions. Deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson limited herself to a crack about “Newscum” – Trump’s favored term of abuse for the California governor – and his “doomed-to-fail” (but unannounced) presidential campaign.Resisting Trump’s pull is proving easier said than done. On a variety of seemingly settled issues – from district maps to the grace period granted for postal ballots to reach their destination – Republican state legislatures have either reversed their own decisions or are considering doing so because of instructions from the White House. “States are under enormous pressure to do what they can to pacify this incredibly vindictive administration,” said Elisabeth Frost, a partner with Elias’s election law group.Election administrators have expressed widespread fears of doxing and physical threats, and many hundreds have quit their jobs under the pressure. The Maga movement has encouraged supporters to run for election offices to influence the process from the inside.In a worst-case scenario, voting rights activists say, Trump would win the rhetorical battle and convince large numbers of Americans that voter rolls are corrupted and ineligible voters are casting ballots in large numbers. He could thus muster support for the emergency intervention his allies are pushing for.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe administration certainly seized on this week’s elections to keep beating the rhetorical drum. The justice department sent federal monitors to California and New Jersey, which some local officials saw as intimidation. Trump called the California ballot initiative a “giant scam”. And New Jersey’s US attorney, Alina Habba, put out a video vowing to prosecute a long list of virtually nonexistent election-related crimes.View image in fullscreenExperts still said they thought that invoking a national emergency remained a remote possibility. More likely, they said, was a continuation of the pressure campaign to suppress votes and cast doubt on results Trump does not like. They expected the administration to continue to push legal limits first and deal with any blowback from the courts after.“Everyone is seeing the polls,” Frost, the Elias Law Group lawyer, said. “Literally none of their policies are popular, so they are terrified of this election. The more Trump can say that the vote count can’t be trusted, the more it serves his purpose … Either voters will be repressed by laws or they will be repressed by misinformation and made-up bombastic nonsense.”Marpheen Chann, a Cambodian American advocate in Maine, has seen first-hand how pressure from the Trump administration – and, in particular, demands for sensitive personal data in the state’s voting records – has deterred community members from participating next November.“Personally, I’m concerned because I’m politically active. I’m a Democrat,” Chann said. “Will I end up on a list?”What is true for him, a community leader with a law degree, runs even deeper through the membership of his organization, Khmer Maine. Many either experienced the 1970s Cambodian genocide first-hand or have been traumatized by it across generations, making them particularly sensitive to any hint of authoritarian behavior. “The fact that the federal government is trying to break into our voting data and violate our privacy definitely does not feel good for the community,” Chann said.Top of mind is the fear that immigration enforcement agents might seek to use inconsistencies in the data – a missing birth certificate, or a mismatch between a birth name and a name on a passport, both of which are issues for Chann – as a pretext to pursue even naturalized citizens for arrest and deportation. Regardless of how justified those fears are, Chann said they are vivid enough to scare people away from civic engagement. “It makes it really hard for me to get people participating and making their voices heard,” he said. “If they make their voices heard, they feel they’re going to be targeted.”In some parts of the country, Republican state legislatures have needed no pressure from the administration to suppress votes – they have been tightening voter ID requirements, cutting early voting hours, restricting voter registration drives and reducing the number of polling stations for the past 20 years. In other places, though, they have done Trump’s bidding even though it offers them little or no partisan advantage.Kansans, for example, recently voted to get rid of a three-day window for mail-in ballots to be counted after election day, even though the mail is notoriously slow there and mail-in voting is popular in rural areas, where voters tend to be conservative.Frost, who is part of a lawsuit to reinstate the three-day window, agreed that Trump’s personal animus against mail-in voting was not necessarily aligned with Republican partisan interests. Still, she saw a political advantage for Trump in demonizing parts of the electoral system.“The same way he’s been painting the Oval Office with gaudy gold adornments,” Frost said, “he’s been trying to pre-paint all these conspiracy theories so if the election doesn’t go the way he wants, he and his allies can point to the sea of litigation they’ve triggered, or they can point back to the March executive order, and say these were things that should have been done to begin with.”To counter the chaos and the conspiracies, voting rights groups have most often turned to lawsuits and have been heartened to see lower courts, at least, blocking crucial parts of the Trump agenda. Increasingly, they have also seen judges reprimand political appointees arguing on behalf of the justice department following a wave of career lawyers being fired or resigning.“The quality of lawyering they are doing now is, in a word, garbage,” Levitt, the former Biden official, said. “You’re going to see the [justice department] lose a lot of cases, and these are cases they should lose.”View image in fullscreenIn the voter data lawsuits, for example, government filings have repeated far-right talking points – and the language of Trump’s executive order – about voter rolls being vulnerable to “illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error”. That assertion flies in the face of mainstream research going back decades that shows it is passingly rare for ineligible voters to cast a ballot.“This tells you a lot about what the [justice department] is willing to endorse,” Frost said. “There are not going to be arguments too wild as we get deeper into the election cycle and we start to see other conspiracy theories float to the top.”Chann, the Cambodian American advocate, worried that facts and the law would not be enough to protect voting rights, especially in immigrant communities. “Even though people I trust in local and state government are saying they’re doing what they can,” he said, “that doesn’t give me any consolation when it comes to whether the federal government will obey its own election and voting laws.”Still, Chann acknowledged that legal avenues were the best hope for holding on to democracy, and he did not hesitate in coming forward as a named defendant seeking to keep the federal government at bay in a lawsuit over Maine’s voter data.“Congress isn’t going to do anything, and the executive branch is overreaching,” he said. “We need to make our last stand in the courts.” More

    • 163 Shares97 Views

      in US Politics

      How Mamdani is defying immigrant expectations by embracing his identity: ‘His boldness resonates’

      by

      Across the country, Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in New York, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani’s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.Two days before the election, a Super Pac supporting Andrew Cuomo had run an ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers crashing down on 9/11. Earlier, it had artificially thickened and enlarged Mamdani’s beard to make him appear more menacing on a flyer circulated around the city. Towards the end of October, a tearful Mamdani had addressed these accusations in a moving speech in the Bronx. He vowed that as an immigrant, and especially as a Muslim: “I will no longer be in the shadows.”On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, he drove that point home: “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”Minhaj Khan, who works with the Indian American Muslim Council of North America, a New Jersey organisation that focuses on the tri-state area, told me what “Zohran offers is something different than any other Muslim candidate who fought an election anywhere in the United States: he took a pretty bold stand against the ill that is spoken about Islam and Muslims in this country and his boldness actually resonates a lot with the community right now.”“I think the way that he is not diminishing his identity and all the parts of his experience that have driven him to be pushing his affordability platform is huge,” said Alina Shen, the organising director of CAAAV Voice, the sibling organisation of Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, which played a crucial part in engaging South Asian residents of the city in Mamdani’s campaign. “I think it’s part of what made him stand out as a political candidate, that he’s not changing who he actually is.”Mamdani also started his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs, the American socialist who was the son of French immigrants, and borrowed the hopefulness for a new dawn in New York City from Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous address to Indians on the eve of the country’s independence: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”Khan, who moved to the US from India in the 1990s, said he was “proud” to hear Mamdani quoting Nehru from the podium. “Nehru was a man who brought everyone together,” Khan told me. “At the time of partition, it was a very vicious environment in India, and in that moment, Nehru stood up as a secular leader, brought people together.”In Khan’s eyes, Mamdani offers something similar: “Zohran’s campaign has shown how you can bring together Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Christians in this highly divisive time in this country.”View image in fullscreenMamdani’s own parents are both children of the Nehruvian age of Indian democracy, steeped in the ideas of pluralism.His father Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of colonialism and a professor at Columbia University, was born to Gujarati Muslim parents in Mumbai. But he grew up in Kampala, Uganda, and first came to the United States on a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh and became involved in the civil rights movement; he was among the students arrested for travelling to Montgomery, Alabama, from northern universities during the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.After finishing his master’s at Tufts University, Mahmood moved back to Uganda, only to be expelled from his adopted country as part of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Indian diaspora, ending up at a refugee shelter behind the Kensington Palace in London. In the 1980s, Amin’s successor, Milton Obote stripped Mahmood of his Ugandan citizenship for criticizing government policies. His status as a thinker and writer only rose, culminating in a tenured professorship at Columbia University, where he continues to work today.The celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, Zohran’s mother, was born in Orissa, on the other side of the subcontinent from Mumbai, in a family of high-ranking bureaucrats. While in her teens, she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge University – the scars of British colonialism were still fresh in the Indian psyche – and instead went to attend Harvard. She spent her summers in New York city among the artists and writers, developing an affinity for theater and films. Her first forays into filmmaking explored the lives of residents of Old Delhi, an Indian newspaper dealer in New York, and strippers and street-children of Mumbai.It was while researching her second feature film, Mississippi Masala, which follows the lives of Ugandan Indians displaced by Idi Amin, that Nair first met Mahmood, as part of her research. In 1991, the same year the film was released, the couple got married, and had a son: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who got his middle name in honour of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary who became the country’s first president.Zohran spent the first five years of his life in Kampala, living in a bungalow overlooking Lake Victoria, where part of Mississippi Masala was shot. In a 2002 profile of Nair in The New Yorker, he was introduced as “Nair’s talkative doe-eyed son, Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, [and] is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani”.Like his father, Zohran lived an itinerant childhood. After his father moved to New York in a faculty apartment close to Columbia University, Zohran, leaving behind Kampala, was enrolled in the private Bank Street School in Manhattan. Evenings were spent in Riverside Park. At home, dinner guests included Columbia scholars like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, close friends of his father. For high school he went to a selective public school in the Bronx, and attended college in Maine, graduating in Africana Studies in 2014.Zohran’s first meaningful brush with the desperation among the city’s working-class families came during his work as a foreclosure prevention and housing counsellor in Queens. During the 2016 presidential election, he was inspired by the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which focused on costs-of-living, affordability and healthcare. Those same issues would go on to become the bedrock of his mayoral campaign. At a town hall in Brooklyn with Sanders this September, Zohran said it was Sanders’s campaign that first exposed him to the language of democratic socialism. During his term as the representative of New York’s 36th state assembly district, his most notable work was with the taxi drivers in the city.At a time when immigrants around the country are feeling increasingly threatened under the Trump administration, as masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stalk the streets of American cities, harassing, arresting and deporting immigrants, Zohran’s campaign has cultivated a sense of hope among the community.“We are an organization made up of immigrants,” Irene Hsu, communications and media manager at CAAAV, said. “The people who work with us, they’re cooks, they’re restaurant workers, they’re cab drivers, they’re home care workers, they’re students, they’re teachers, they’re parents, they’re elderly folks who have retired from working jobs as construction workers. It’s all these people who really run the city. And I think that Zohran’s platform, which is their own platform, is about shifting the terrain of power in this country.”On Tuesday night, as the results started to trickle in, Faidra Tzedakis, who moved to New York from Greece in 2014, went to a watch party organised by the Democratic Socialists of America in Astoria, Queens. Tzedakis became a US citizen during the summer and has been grappling with what that means.“The previous generation had the American Dream of this nice big house with a fence, and a stable nine-to-five job and that, kind of, has died,” said Tzedakis, who grew up amid the economic crisis in Greece. “It doesn’t really exist anymore.”“I think this campaign just proves that immigrants and younger people and educated people have a voice, and there’s hope: like we can change things,” she said. “So I think that the new dream is that we would live in a world where our leaders speak up and stand up for reproductive rights, against genocides, against Islamophobia and antisemitism, and do their best to protect marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants.”“We’re not afraid of the money or the establishment anymore,” she said. “And we can create a world that is just more accepting, and, yeah, loving.” More

    • 175 Shares90 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: President suggests scrapping Obamacare as shutdown flight chaos continues

      by

      Donald Trump on Saturday urged Republican senators to redirect federal money used to subsidize health insurance costs under the Affordable Care Act toward direct payments to individuals, in an effort to overcome an issue at the heart of the US government shutdown.“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over,” Trump wrote in a social media post.His comments came as US senators met on the 39th day of the shutdown and seemed to begin negotiating in earnest. As Saturday’s session got under way, senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Rick Scott of Florida and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana welcomed the proposal from Trump – but the Republicans seemed unable to grapple with the fact that consumers would still need to buy plans from the same insurance companies, or that Republican lawmakers need the support of eight Democrats to reopen the government, and the idea of repealing and replacing Obamacare with savings accounts is unlikely to earn a single Democratic vote.Nearly 1,500 flights canceled on second day of cuts tied to government shutdownUS airlines canceled 1,460 flights on day 2 of the government-mandated flight cuts.So far, the slowdown at many of the nation’s busiest airports hasn’t caused widespread disruptions. But it has deepened the impact felt by what is now the US’s longest federal shutdown.Analysts warn that the upheaval will intensify and be felt far beyond air travel if the cancellations pick up and move closer to the Thanksgiving holiday.Read the full storySenate Republicans embrace Trump’s call – from his Florida golf course – to replace ObamacareUS senators are working through the weekend for the first time since the government shutdown began more than a month ago, but hopes for a bipartisan agreement on how to end the standoff, and keep healthcare affordable for millions of Americans, appeared to recede as Republican senators floated a proposal toxic to Democrats: scrapping the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare.Read the full storyTrump reportedly wants new NFL stadium in Washington named after himDonald Trump is pressing the NFL’s Washington Commanders to name their planned $3.7bn stadium after him, a bid he is pursuing through back-channel conversations with ownership and by leaning on the government bodies that must approve the project, according to several sources familiar with the discussions.Read the full storyBusinesses worldwide brace for extra Trump tariffs on steel importsBusinesses around the world are steeling themselves for another round of Donald Trump’s tariffs, this time on goods ranging from bicycles to baking trays, as US industry embraces a call for more products to tax on import.Small, medium and large American companies have asked the US Department of Commerce to add about 700 more items to an August list of 407 products already facing extra tariffs because of their steel content, which hit items such as Ikea tables with metal nuts and bolts and German combine harvesters.The demands are ringing alarm bells across Europe where industry leaders are fearful of a rolling and growing list of “steel derivatives” that will now face levies because they contain the metal.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Olivia Rodrigo has criticized the Trump administration after one of her songs was featured in a clip posted on the official Department of Homeland Security and White House Instagram accounts, encouraging undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the US.

      The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened 7 November 2025. More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Olivia Rodrigo condemns Trump administration’s use of her music for ‘racist, hateful propaganda’

      by

      Olivia Rodrigo has criticized the Trump administration after one of her songs was featured in a government video promoting deportation efforts.A clip posted on the official Department of Homeland Security and White House Instagram accounts encouraged undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the US. The video used a segment of Rodrigo’s song all-american bitch as its soundtrack.Rodrigo, who is Filipino American, reportedly condemned the use of her music in a comment on the post, writing: “don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.” The comment was later taken down, but not before screenshots were captured and circulated widely.The video, uploaded Tuesday as Americans voted in several states, opens with the loud intro of the track as ICE agents are shown detaining people, accompanied by the caption: “IF ICE FINDS YOU.” It then transitions to scenes of immigrants seemingly choosing to self-deport, underscored by the song lyrics: “All the time/I’m grateful all the time/I’m sexy and I’m kind/I’m pretty when I cry.”The caption concludes with a warning: “LEAVE NOW and self-deport using the CBP Home app. If you don’t, you will face the consequences.”After Rodrigo’s response went viral on Friday, Instagram removed the soundtrack from the clip. An error message, reading “This song is currently unavailable”, is currently displayed.In a statement shared with the Guardian, a DHS spokesperson said: “America is grateful all the time for our federal law enforcement officers who keep us safe. We suggest Ms. Rodrigo thank them for their service, not belittle their sacrifice.”The department did not confirm whether they had removed the original comment by Rodrigo from the post.Rodrigo joins a growing list of artists who have objected to Trump or his administration using their music without consent, with others including Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones and the singer Jess Glynne.Glynne voiced her anger when one of her songs was similarly used, writing on Instagram: “This post honestly makes me sick. My music is about love, unity, and spreading positivity – never about division or hate.”This isn’t the first time Rodrigo has spoken out against the Trump administration. She publicly condemned ICE raids that took place in Los Angeles earlier in the year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe singer, 22, wrote on Instagram: “I’ve lived in LA my whole life and I’m deeply upset about these violent deportations of my neighbors under the current administration. LA simply wouldn’t exist without immigrants. Treating hardworking community members with such little respect, empathy, and due process is awful.”Rodrigo previously collaborated with the federal government under very different circumstances. In 2021, she visited the White House wearing a vintage pink Chanel suit to meet then-president Joe Biden and Dr Anthony Fauci, recording a video to encourage youth vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic.From the White House podium, she said: “I am beyond honored and humbled to be here today to help spread the message about the importance of youth vaccination. I’m in awe of the work President Biden and Dr Fauci have done and was happy to help lend my support to this important initiative.” More

    • 188 Shares73 Views

      in US Politics

      DHS head reportedly authorized purchase of 10 engineless Spirit Airlines planes that airline didn’t own

      by

      The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.The bizarre anecdote was contained in a Wall Street Journal report released on Friday, which recounted how Noem and Corey Lewandowski – who managed Donald Trump’s first winning presidential campaign – had recently arranged to buy 10 Boeing 737 aircraft from Spirit Airlines. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two intended to use the jets to expand deportation flights – and for personal travel.Those sources also claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had cautioned them that buying planes would be far more expensive than simply expanding existing flight contracts.Complicating matters further, Spirit, which filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time, in August, did not own the jets and their engines would have had to be bought separately. The plan has since been paused, according to the Journal.Meanwhile, Democrats on the House appropriations committee said in October that during this fall’s record-long government shutdown, the DHS had already acquired two Gulfstream jets for $200m.“It has come to our attention that, in the midst of a government shutdown, the United States Coast Guard entered into a sole source contract with Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation to procure two new G700 luxury jets to support travel for you and the deputy secretary, at a cost to the taxpayer of $200m,” Democratic representatives Rosa DeLauro and Lauren Underwood wrote in a letter to the DHS.A DHS spokesperson told the Journal that parts of its reporting about the plane purchases were inaccurate but declined to provide additional clarification.Congress had previously approved Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” in July, which dedicates roughly $170bn for immigration and border-related operations, a sum that makes ICE the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.In September, the Guardian reported that the Trump administration was moving immigrants detained as part of its deportation agenda in ways that violated their constitutionally protected rights, often by plane.Leaked data reviewed from charter airline Global Crossing (GlobalX) detailed the journeys of tens of thousands of immigrants who have been shuttled around the country before deportation. More

    • 150 Shares124 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court issues emergency order blocking full Snap food aid payments

      by

      The supreme court has issued an emergency order temporarily blocking full Snap food aid payments.The high court’s order came after the Trump administration asked a federal appeals court on Friday to block a judge’s order that it distribute November’s full monthly food stamp benefits amid a US federal government shutdown.After that request to block was denied, the Trump administration turned to the supreme court in a further attempt to block the order to fully fund Snap food aid payments.The application to stay reads: “If forced to transfer funds to Snap to make full November allotments, there is no means for the government to recoup those expenditures – which is quintessential irreparable harm. Once those payments are made, there is every indication that the States will promptly disburse them. And once disbursed, the government will be un-able to recover any funds. Worse, these harms will only compound if the decision below stands.“There is every reason to expect that if the shutdown lingers, the court below will not command the government to tap these funds again in December to support Snap – blowing a bigger hole in the budget for the child nutrition programs.”The application – which was filed at about 7pm ET – also requested that the supreme court grant the “immediate administrative stay of the district court’s orders by 9.30pm” on Friday.Shortly after 9.30pm, attorney general Pam Bondi shared a note on X saying that the supreme court “just granted our administrative stay in this case. Our attorneys will not stop fighting, day and night, to defend and advance President Trump’s agenda.”US district judge John J McConnell Jr had given the Trump administration until Friday to make the payments through Snap, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, after the administration said last month that it would not pay benefits for November because of the shutdown.On Friday, Patrick Penn, deputy undersecretary at the Department of Agriculture, wrote in a memo to states that the government “will complete the processes necessary” to fully fund Snap for now and the funds will be available on Friday.But also on Friday, the Trump administration asked the appeals court to suspend any court orders requiring it to spend more money than is available in a contingency fund.The court filing came even as Britt Cudaback, the spokesperson for Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, said on Friday that some Snap recipients in the state already had received their full November payments overnight on Thursday.“We’ve received confirmation that payments went through, including members reporting they can now see their balances,” she said.The court wrangling prolonged weeks of uncertainty for the food program that serves about one in eight Americans, mostly with lower incomes.Last week, in separate rulings, two judges ordered the government to pay at least part of the benefits using an emergency fund. It initially said it would cover half, but later said it would cover 65%. More

    • 175 Shares117 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Huge victory’ in Portland as judge’s final order bars Trump from sending national guard

      by

      A federal judge in Oregon on Friday blocked Donald Trump from deploying national guard troops to Portland, ruling there was no evidence of widespread violence to justify federal intervention.The US district court judge, Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, delivered her final order in the case on Friday. She found that protests near Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility were “predominately peaceful, with only isolated and sporadic instances of relatively low-level violence”.Earlier this week, Immergut barred Trump’s administration from deploying the national guard to Portland until at least Friday, saying she “found no credible evidence” that protests in the city had grown out of control before the president federalized the troops earlier this fall.In Friday’s ruling, she concluded that most altercations occurred between protesters and counter-protesters, not between protesters and federal agents. Immergut also acknowledged that while she “may lack jurisdiction to enjoin President Trump in the performance of his official duties”, her injunction only bars the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, from deploying members of the national guard to Oregon.This is the latest development in weeks of legal back and forth in Portland, Chicago and other US cities as the Trump administration has moved to federalize and deploy the national guard in city streets to quell protests.The ICE facility in south-west Portland has been the site of ongoing protests since June, when Portland police declared one a riot. The city of Portland and the state of Oregon sued the Trump administration in September after the president announced he had directed the defense department to federalize and deploy the Oregon national guard.Immergut previously issued a temporary restraining order barring the deployment of the national guard in Oregon, a decision the Trump administration appealed.The judge heard three days of witness testimony from law enforcement officers and officials describing conditions around the ICE facility. Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield called Friday’s ruling “a huge victory”.“The courts are holding this administration accountable to the truth and the rule of law,” Rayfield said. “From the beginning, this case has been about making sure that facts, not political whims, guide how the law is applied. Today’s decision protects that principle.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration is expected to appeal the ruling. More

    • 213 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: supreme court blocks full Snap food aid payments following White House request

      by

      On Friday, moments after a federal appeals court ruled the Trump administration needs to fully fund Snap food aid payments, the White House turned to the supreme court in a further attempt to block the order.Within hours, the top US court issued an emergency order temporarily blocking full Snap food aid payments, which nearly 42 million people rely on to put food on the table.“Our attorneys will not stop fighting, day and night, to defend and advance President Trump’s agenda,” attorney general, Pam Bondi, posted on social media just after 9:30pm in Washington.Administration officials had asked the federal appeals court to block a judge’s order that it distribute November’s full monthly food stamp benefits amid a US federal government shutdown, and was denied later the same day.US supreme court issues emergency order blocking full Snap food aid paymentsThe high court’s order came after the Trump administration asked a federal appeals court on Friday to block a judge’s order that it distribute November’s full monthly food stamp benefits amid a US federal government shutdown.After that request to block was denied, the Trump administration turned to the supreme court in a further attempt to block the order to fully fund Snap food aid payments.Read the full storyJudge’s final order bars Trump from sending national guard to PortlandUS district court judge Karin Immergut issued her order minutes before a temporary restraining order was set to expire.Immergut, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in his first term, ruled last month that the president’s wildly false claims about conditions in Portland resembling those in a war zone, due to a small protest against immigration raids, were “simply untethered to the facts”.Read the full storyPeople at over 100 US universities protest against TrumpStudents, faculty and staff at more than 100 campuses across the US rallied against the Trump administration’s assault on higher education on Friday – the first in a planned series of nationwide, coordinated protests that organizers hope will culminate in large-scale students and workers’ strikes next May Day and a nationwide general strike in May 2028.Read the full storyUS grants Hungary one-year exemption from sanctions over Russian oil and gasThe decision came after Viktor Orbán pressed his case for a reprieve during a friendly meeting with Donald Trump in Washington.Last month, Trump imposed Ukraine-related sanctions on Russian oil companies Lukoil and Rosneft that carried the threat of further sanctions on entities in countries that buy oil from those firms.Read the full storySupreme court may take up case challenging legality of same-sex marriageThe US supreme court is considering taking up a case that could challenge the legality of same-sex marriage across the country. Hours after ruling that Donald Trump’s administration can block transgender and non-binary people from selecting passport sex markers that align with their gender identity, the justices are holding their first conference on the Davis v Ermold case. While their deliberations are typically kept private, the court may announce whether it will take the case as early as Monday.Read the full storyTrump says US will boycott G20 summit in South Africa, citing treatment of white farmersThe Trump administration has long accused the South African government of allowing minority white Afrikaner farmers to be persecuted and attacked. As it restricted the number of refugees admitted annually to the US to 7,500, the administration indicated that most will be white South Africans who it claimed faced discrimination and violence at home.But the government of South Africa has said it is surprised by the accusations of discrimination, because white people in the country generally have a much higher standard of living than its Black residents, more than three decades after the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule.Read the full storyWashington National Opera may leave Kennedy Center due to Trump ‘takeover’Leaving the Kennedy Center is a possible scenario after a collapse in box office revenue and “shattered” donor confidence in the wake of Trump’s “takeover”, according to WNO’s artistic director, Francesca Zambello.The president declared himself chair of the institution in February, sacking and replacing its board and leadership.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The federal government shutdown dragged consumer sentiment in the US to a near record low in November, according to a monthly survey conducted by the University of Michigan.

      Students, faculty and staff at more than 100 campuses across the US rallied against the Trump administration’s assault on higher education on Friday – the first in a planned series of nationwide, coordinated protests.

      Cornell University announced a settlement with the Trump administration, becoming the fifth university under investigation by the US government to do so.

      Elise Stefanik, a Republican New York representative and staunch supporter of Donald Trump, has officially launched her long-anticipated campaign for governor.

      Donald Trump has pardoned former New York Mets great Darryl Strawberry on past tax evasion and drug charges, citing the 1983 National League rookie of the year’s post-career embrace of his Christian faith and longtime sobriety.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 6 November 2025. More