US federal government shutdown 2025

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      Trump backer Timothy Mellon identified as donor of $130m for US troop pay during government shutdown

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      A reclusive billionaire, anti-tax crusader and major financial backer of Donald Trump has been named as the anonymous private donor who gave $130m to the government to help pay US troops during the federal shutdown that is now in its fourth week, according to the New York Times.Timothy Mellon, heir to the gilded age industrialist and former treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, is the secret donor whom Trump has described as a “friend”, “great American” and “patriot”, but has refused to name, the Times reported on Saturday, citing two anonymous sources familiar with the arrangement.Trump first announced the secret, legally controversial donation on Thursday amid growing clamor about the potential financial hardship being caused by the ongoing federal shutdown on the 1.3 million active duty military troops.​​“He doesn’t want publicity,” Trump said on Friday as he headed to Malaysia. “He prefers that his name not be mentioned, which is pretty unusual in the world I come from, and in the world of politics, you want your name mentioned.”​​The Pentagon told the Times that the donation was accepted under the “general gift acceptance authority”.“The donation was made on the condition that it be used to offset the cost of service members’ salaries and benefits,” said Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, in a statement.Still, the donation, which equates to about $100 per service member, appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending funds in advance or in excess of congressional appropriations – and from accepting voluntary services “except in the case of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property”.Potential penalties for violations include both administrative and criminal sanctions such as suspension or removal from duty, fines and imprisonment.A White House spokesperson referred the Guardian to the treasury department, which has been contacted for comment.Mellon, 80, pumped over $165m to back Trump, Robert F Kennedy and other Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle, making him the top donor fueling outside spending groups last year, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets. This included $125m to the Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc, which supported Trump, according to Federal Election Commission documents. Mellon has also given money to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense.Mellon, a retired railroad magnet who lives mostly in Wyoming, is a relatively new player in campaign financing, donating just $32,000 in the 2016 election cycle when Trump first ran for office. This jumped to $10m in 2016 and $60m in 2020, when in a rare interview with Bloomberg the recluse said he believed Trump had delivered on what he’d said on the stump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2021, the Texas Tribune reported that Mellon had donated $53m to Texas governor Greg Abbott’s fund to build a wall on the state’s border with Mexico.Mellon’s wealth and anti-tax leanings can be traced back to his industrialist grandfather, who made his money in banking and investments in startups before serving as treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932.The Mellon family remains one of the country’s richest with a combined net worth of $14bn in 2024, according to Forbes. Timothy Mellon’s individual wealth is unclear, with reported estimates ranging from $700m to $4bn. More

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      Federal workers squeezed as shutdown drags on: ‘I can’t believe we’re not going to get paid’

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      More furloughs, more anxiety and more economic stress are bearing down on federal employees as the shutdown of the federal government continues into its fourth week with Republicans and Democrats at a standstill on negotiating a budget deal.“There’s no sight of this ending and we’re starting to wonder if we’re going to be made whole and if this is going to continue into the next round of pay, which is what we’re headed into now. On Friday, we will be missing our first full paycheck,” Johnny Jones, council secretary treasurer for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) TSA Council 100, and a TSA employee in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, said.“Now people are really starting to get nervous. They’re starting to make preparations for liquidations or they’re making preparations in their lives of how we’re going to survive.”He cited cases of members crying and starting to get desperate, citing the previous shutdown in 2019 where he and other co-workers had to help a co-worker transport her children to Colorado to be with family because she could no longer afford childcare.“I just can’t believe we’re not going to get paid,” Jones added. “ It’s unbelievable. If you worked at McDonald’s and they did this, they could sue you, shut your business down, but you’re working for the government, they cannot pay you, and it’s OK. And this is a problem. People are now going to have to take home debt. People are going to have to take on new things, maybe even work their full shift, pick up their kids and do GrubHub or something, looking for other means of income on the side.”Meanwhile in Washington, the deadlock continues.“I don’t have a strategy,” Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, told reporters on 21 October, as the House of Representatives’ calendar for October remains empty. House members have been on paid vacation since 19 September, when it went on recess.The House speaker’s office said in a statement: “He has consistently said that the House will return to regular legislative session as soon as Chuck Schumer and the Democrats vote to end the shutdown and reopen the government.”Democrats have held firm on a budget that includes extending healthcare subsidies that would prevent health insurance premiums from soaring for millions of Americans, resulting in loss of health insurance for about 15 million Americans due to the subsidy expirations and cuts to Medicaid.Throughout and leading up to the shutdown, federal workers have been subjected to threats by the Trump administration, which have included threatening to withhold back pay to furloughed workers, conducting reductions in force (though a federal court has temporarily blocked the firings), and cutting federally funded infrastructure programs with threats to go after programs deemed priorities for Democrats.Trump referred to Russell Vought, the White House office of management and budget director, as “Darth Vader” on 21 October.“They call him Darth Vader, I call him a fine man. He’s cutting Democrat priorities, and they’re never going to get them back,” Trump said, in claiming the shutdown allows the administration to enact cuts to federal services and programs.“It’s played hell with our psyche, for sure,” said Ruark Hotopp, District 8 national vice-president of the AFGE in the midwest and an employee at the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, on the consistent attacks on federal workers since January 2025, from “department of government efficiency” (Doge) cuts, to rhetoric from Vought and other Trump administration officials criticizing federal civilian employees.Hotopp explained he was in Washington DC lobbying various members of Congress around these issues last week, and the threats were laughed off by Republican Senate staff.“This was a Republican senator’s office, and they reassured me that, while we understand what the president’s saying, that we don’t agree with the president’s position, and it is the full intention of the United States Congress to make sure these those folks get paid. So while that’s reassuring to me, to see this sort of public rhetoric to the folks on the frontlines, that’s not reassuring at all,” he said.“The president is one of the very first people to say this rhetoric needs to be toned down, while he then fans the flames,” added Hotopp. “If we’re going to get back to some sort of normalcy, it has to start with the president himself.”Nicole Cantello, president of the AFGE Union Local 704 and an attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), explained the rollout of furloughs had been “chaotic” for federal employees at the agency, with the EPA using leftover funds to stave off furloughs in the beginning of the shutdown, only for mass furloughs to be issued earlier this week.“I’m located here in the Great Lakes, and we are the ones that do all the work to try to protect the Great Lakes. Drinking water for over 40 million people come from the Great Lakes. The people that check the health of the lake to those who find cases against polluters, all those inspectors, they were all just furloughed,” Cantello said. “The human health and environment will definitely be impacted. More pollution will go out.”She expressed concern for the prolonged shutdown and its impact on attrition. Since January 2025, the EPA said its workforce had been slashed from 16,155 employees to 12,448 employees through firings, retirements and buyouts. The Trump administration had attempted to cut dozens more workers at the agency through a reduction in force during the shutdown.“Given everything that’s happened here, who knows who will come back from the furlough?” Cantello said. “I don’t have a good handle on that, but I’m worried that we’re losing and more people and the agency will be rendered even more ineffective.”A spokesperson for the EPA would not comment on or provide numbers on how many workers were furloughed at the agency, but said: “Congressional Democrats are not only unwilling to vote for a clean funding bill, but their goal is to inflict as much pain on the American people as possible. The false narratives being peddled by union bosses and their Democratic allies are nothing more than deliberate fear-mongering designed to create chaos and deceive hardworking Americans.” More

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      Americans brace for food stamps to run out: ‘The greatest hunger catastrophe since the Great Depression’

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      Two decades ago, Sara Carlson, then a mother of three, was newly single because of a traumatic event, and the US’s food stamp program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), helped her feed her children with free food supplies.“I wouldn’t have been able to afford to live,” said Carlson, 45, who lives in Rochester, Minnesota, and now works as an operations manager for a wealth-management firm and serves on the board of Channel One Regional Food Bank, which works to increase food access.While the food stamps helped her, the government cut her off after a couple years because she started making too much money, which meant she again had to worry about having enough food.Now, nearly 42 million people around the country could face the same fate if the federal government shutdown continues and funding for Snap is cut off on 1 November.While Republicans have sought to blame Democrats for the potential loss in benefits that people who make little money rely on, those who work in the food-insecurity space say that is misleading because Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act already eliminated almost $187bn in funding for Snap through 2024, according to a congressional budget office estimate.Should funding run out at the end of the month, “we will have the greatest hunger catastrophe in America since the Great Depression, and I don’t say that as hyperbole”, said Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America.Snap supports working families with low-paying jobs, low-income people aged 60 years and older and people with disabilities living on a fixed income, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.Snap participants generally must be at or below 130% of the federal poverty line. The average participant receives about $187 a month, the center reports.The Department of Agriculture recently sent a letter to regional Snap directors warning them that funding for Snap will run out at the end of the month and directing them to hold payments “until further notice”.More than 200 Democratic representatives have urged the USDA to use contingency funds to continue paying for Snap benefits.“There are clear steps the administration can and must take immediately to ensure that millions of families across the country can put food on their table in November,” a letter from the lawmakers to the USDA states. “SNAP benefits reach those in need this November would be a gross dereliction of your responsibilities to the American people. We appreciate your consideration of these requests.”Democrats have refused to pass a funding resolution to reopen the government because they want the legislation to include provisions to maintain healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, which the Trump administration cut and are set to expire at the end of the year.A USDA spokesperson blamed Democrats for the upcoming loss in Snap benefits.“We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats,” the spokesperson told Fox News. “Continue to hold out for healthcare for illegals or reopen the government so mothers babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive timely Wic [special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children] and Snap allotments”.That claim is inaccurate: undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Affordable Care Act subsidies.While his organization is focused on food insecurity, Berg supports the Democrats in fighting for healthcare subsidies because “this has grave repercussions for the people we represent”, he said.“The population getting the healthcare subsidies may have a marginally higher income than people getting Snap, but there is certainly a lot of overlap,” Berg said.Brittany, a 38-year-old mother of three, lives in Greenup, Kentucky, and works 35 to 40 hours each week as a home health nurse.She also has received Snap benefits for a few years.“It’s not like I receive benefits and not work,” said Brittany, pushing back against the misconception that people who receive food stamps just sit on the couch.They allow her to get “most of the necessities throughout the month and then I just pay cash for the rest of them”, said Brittany, who did not want her last name used.If the Snap funding is cut off, she said, she would have to work on the weekends to make up the difference, which would mean she would have “hardly any time with my children”.Still, she supports Trump and blames Democrats for the shutdown because “they are not agreeing on anything that the Republicans offer”. More

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      Trump vows to ‘take care of Chicago’ after backing off plan to send troops to San Francisco – live

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      Donald Trump continued his threats to send the national guard to Chicago.“They don’t have it under control,” Trump said. “It’s getting worse, so we’ll take care of as soon as we give the go ahead.”This comes as the administration filed an emergency appeal to the supreme court after a federal judge blocked the administration’s from deploying troops to the Chicago indefinitely.Speaking to reporters at City Hall, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie elaborated on his Wednesday evening call with Donald Trump.Lurie said he had not reached out to Trump but that the president “picked up the phone and called me”. During the call, Lurie said he told Trump that crime was falling in San Francisco and the city was “on the rise”. Pressed on whether Trump sought any concessions from the city in exchange for calling off the “surge” Lurie said he “asked for nothing”. Lurie said he did not know if Trump’s decision extended to the rest of the Bay Area and acknowledged that the mercurial president could yet change his mind.“Our city remains prepared for any scenario,” Lurie said. “We have a plan in place that can be activated at any moment.”Asked if other Democratic mayors could learn from his approach, which has been notably less antagonistic than the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, Lurie demurred, suggesting that was more a question for the political chattering class than for a mayor “laser-focused” on his city.“Every day I’m focused on San Francisco,” he said. “Heads down. How do we keep our city safe?”Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has condemned a racist AI-generated ad posted – and then deleted – by Andrew Cuomo’s campaign depicting “criminals for Zohran Mamdani”.On Thursday, De Blasio wrote on X: “This is disqualifying. No candidate who approves a racist, disgusting ad like this can be allowed to govern. Bye, @andrewcuomo.”The ad which was shared on Cuomo’s official account on Wednesday featured Mamdani, the popular democratic socialist state assemblyman, eating rice with his hands before being supported by a Black man shoplifting while wearing a keffiyeh, a man abusing a woman, a sex trafficker and a drug dealer.In June, Mamdani, who if elected would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, accused donors of Cuomo’s campaign of “blatant Islamophobia” after an altered image of him in a mailer to voters depicted him with a visibly darkened and bushier beard.Outside of San Francisco’s city hall on Thursday afternoon, local leaders and organizers were grappling with the whiplash.“At this time, do not know which federal agencies are being called off. We don’t know if that’s the National Guard. We don’t know if it’s ice, if it’s Border Patrol,” said Jackie Fielder, the San Francisco city supervisor representing parts of the city’s Mission neighborhood. “I also want to be clear that ICE, CBP, any federal agency deputized by Trump, to help him carry out his mass deportation plans, are absolutely not welcome in San Francisco.”Fielder also criticized Benihoff, Musk and other tech leaders who had voiced support for a National Guard deployment in the Bay Area. “I condemn every tech billionaire who supported this,” she said. “This city doesn’t belong to them.”Fielder and other leaders and organizers emphasized that even as the region awaits clarity on whether and where there will be a federal deployment, and the extent to which the administration plans to ramp up immigration enforcement in the city, local leaders are going to continue to mobilize rapid response networks, legal aid and other support systems for the residents most impacted.“We don’t need to get ready because we’ve been ready,” Fielder said. “This is not a time for panic. It is a time for power across this area.”Organizers urged residents to check in regularly with friends and family, and prepare for the possibility that they may be arrested by immigration officers, urging immigrants to entrust their full legal names and A-Numbers with trusted allies. “Without this information, it becomes very challenging, and it takes time to locate our loved ones,” said Sanika Mahajan, Director of Community Engagement and Organizing for the local advocacy group Mission Action. Organizers who had lent support during the militarized raids in Los Angeles this summer encouraged San Franciscans to store important documents at home, and let loved ones know where to find them.“Mexico is run by the cartels, I have great respect for the president”, Donald Trump just said near the end of the White House event to justify what he calls the success of his militarized war on drugs. “Mexico is run by the cartels and we have to defend ourselves from that”.After a first phase of the roundtable discussion, in which senior administration officials took turns praising Trump and claimed that the crackdown on drugs has been a spectacular success, the president then took questions from reporters invited to cover the event.Many of the correspondents he called on were from partisan, rightwing outlets who also laced their questions with praise for the president.Clearly aware that many of the correspondents he called on to ask questions were on his side, Trump even said “This is the kind of question I like” to Daniel Baldwin of the pro-Trump news channel One America News, before Baldwin even asked his question.When Trump did not recognize a correspondent, he asked them who they were with.And when he did call on a reporter he views as adversarial, Kaitlan Collins of CNN, he even made a point of joking that her question would be a bad one.No matter what the questions were, Trump repeated many of his familiar talking points, exaggerations, insults and lies, including that the Biden administration had “lost” hundreds of thousands of children.At one point, unprompted, he said: “Let me tell ya, Barack Hussein Obama was a lousy president.”Donald Trump was just asked about a call from Daniel Goldman, a Democratic congressman from New York, for the New York police department to arrest federal agents “who assault or detain New Yorkers without legal authority” during immigration raids or outside immigration courts in New York City.Goldman referred specifically to a woman who was hurled to the floor by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer outside a court.“Well, you know, I know Dan, and Dan’s a loser,” Trump replied. “It’s so ridiculous, a suggestion like that.”What Trump did not explain is that he no doubt knows Goldman primarily from his role as lead counsel in the first impeachment of Trump, over his attempt to force Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to open a sham investigation into Joe Biden in 2019 by withholding military aid.Rather than address the issue, Trump then pivoted to suggesting that Democrats were desperate for attention and even imitating him by cursing more in public. Goldman did not curse when he told reporters on Tuesday: “No one is above the law – not ICE, not CBP, and not Donald Trump. Federal agents who assault or detain New Yorkers without legal authority must be held accountable and the NYPD must protect our neighbors if the federal government refuses to.”Donald Trump was just asked by a French reporter about the vote in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on formal annexation of the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967, where hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers now live, in a violation of international law.He asked the reporter to repeat the question but louder. She did, in a distinct French accent.Trump asked Pam Bondi, seated next to him to answer, saying, “I cannot understand a word she’s saying”.When the question was then explained to him, the president told the reporter: “Don’t worry about the West Bank, Israel’s not going to do anything with the West Bank.”Earlier on Thursday, the vice-president, JD Vance, said that Israel would not annex the West Bank, the day after Israeli lawmakers voted to advance two bills paving the way for the territory’s annexation.“If it was a political stunt it was a very stupid political stunt and I personally take some insult to it,” Vance said on the tarmac as he wrapped up his visit in Israel.Israeli analysts have pointed out that Israel currently rules the entire West Bank, except for limited urban enclaves under Palestinian self-rule, as if it were formally part of its territory.As is customary of Trump’s public-facing events, he has spent much of his time speaking blaming the Biden administration for the country he inherited.“By the way, the cartels control large swaths of territory. They maintain vast arsenals of weapons and soldiers, and they used extortion, murder, kidnapping, to exercise political and economic control,” he said. “Thank you very much, Joe Biden, for allowing that to happen. Biden surrendered our country to the cartels.”Donald Trump continued his threats to send the national guard to Chicago.“They don’t have it under control,” Trump said. “It’s getting worse, so we’ll take care of as soon as we give the go ahead.”This comes as the administration filed an emergency appeal to the supreme court after a federal judge blocked the administration’s from deploying troops to the Chicago indefinitely.The president has spent his opening remarks claiming his administration’s efforts in curbing cartels had been successful.“These groups have unleashed more bloodshed and killing on American soil than all other terrorist groups combined. These are the worst of the worst. It should now be clear to the entire world that the cartels are the Isis of the western hemisphere,” he said.We’re waiting for Donald Trump to appear in the state dining room for an announcement on cartels and human trafficking. Several cabinet members are already seated. Including defense secretary Pete Hegseth, attorney general Pam Bondi, and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.It’s important to note that so far, Donald Trump has paid members of the military by ordering the Pentagon to use any unspent funds for the 2025 fiscal year. A move that experts and lawmakers alike say is squarely illegal.Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at Cato Institute, emphasized that Congress has the sole prerogative to authorize funding.“The executive can’t just look for money under the cushions. It’s not their money to spend,” Boccia said. “If Congress doesn’t step up and reclaim its spending authority, the administration here is potentially setting very dangerous new precedents for executive spending that was never envisioned by America’s founders.”She added that there is the option for the administration to repurpose “unobligated balances” using the rescissions process. However, this isn’t playing out in this case because it still requires Congress’s authorization.“What we’re witnessing is the executive taking unprecedented steps to repurpose funding unilaterally,” Boccia said.While today’s failed Senate vote might give Trump the “political justification” for inappropriate government spending, there was no “legal justification”.Pivoting back to the Senate, where lawmakers failed to pass a bill to keep certain government workers and members of the military paid during the government shutdown.As I noted earlier, only three Democrats broke ranks with their party to vote in favor of the legislation. Most Democratic lawmakers voted against the bill, arguing that it would give Donald Trump the ability to handpick which workers and departments get to receive paychecks. Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called the bill a “ruse” that “doesn’t the pain of the shutdown” but “extends it”.Democrats also offered alternative pieces of legislation. This included the True Shutdown Fairness Act, which would pay all roughly 700,000 furloughed federal employees, and inhibit the administration from carrying out any more mass layoffs while the government is shutdown. Senate Republicans, however, objected to their attempt to pass this bill by unanimous consent.John Thune, the upper chamber’s top Republican, said that Democrats are “playing a political game” by blocking today’s bill, in an attempt to appease their “far-left base”. On the Senate floor, Thune said that the failed legislation introduced by Republicans today would include the more than 300 federal workers at the Capitol who had to “work through the night and into the next day” during Oregon senator Jeff Merkley’s marathon speech lambasting the Trump administration, which lasted almost 23 hours. More

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      US Senate fails to pass bill to pay federal essential workers and troops through shutdown

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      The Senate failed on Thursday to pass legislation that would keep federal workers deemed essential and troops paid throughout the ongoing government shutdown, which stretched into its 23rd day with no end in sight.The upper chamber held a vote on Republican senator Ron Johnson’s “shutdown fairness act”, which would guarantee pay for certain federal employees even when government funding lapses.“With Democrats continuing the Schumer shutdown, they should at least agree to pay all the federal employees that are forced to continue working,” Johnson said when he introduced the bill last week.But Democrats opposed the legislation, arguing that it would just give Donald Trump more power by letting the president choose which employees receive pay.“The bill, the Republican bill, is a ruse. It’s nothing more than another tool for Trump to hurt federal workers and American families and to keep this shutdown going for as long as he wants,” Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, said.The bill did not receive the 60 votes necessary to advance, with only three Democratic senators – John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and the Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff – breaking with their party to support it.Congress has been paralyzed since the start of the month, after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach an agreement on extending government funding beyond the end of September. The ensuing shutdown has led to an estimated 700,000 federal workers being furloughed, while hundreds of thousands of others are working without pay.Last week, Donald Trump authorized the defense department to pay US military personnel, using funds meant for research and development. Budget experts who spoke to the Guardian have described the move as likely illegal.The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has kept his chamber out of session since 19 September, in a bid to pass a Republican-backed government funding bill that cleared the House along near party lines.Democrats have rejected the measure, which would extend funding through 21 November, and instead demanded that Republicans extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans that are set to expire at the end of the year. They also want curbs on Trump’s use of rescissions to slash funding that Congress has approved, and the reversal of cuts to the Medicaid program for poor and disabled Americans.The Senate’s Republican leader, John Thune, has said he is willing to negotiate over the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but only once the government reopens. He has held 12 votes on the Republican spending bill, which has yet to receive enough Democratic support to advance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Thursday, Democratic senators debuted two counterproposals to pay federal workers. The “military and federal employee protection act” proposed by Michigan’s Gary Peters would provide a one-time payment to federal workers from the start of October to the date the bill is enacted.The “true shutdown fairness act”, proposed by Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, would pay all federal workers during a shutdown, whether they are furloughed or required to continue working.Neither received a vote in the Senate.Fetterman, whose state broke for Trump last November, released a video after the Senate vote in which he urged his fellow Democrats to change their approach.“Reopen this government and have an earnest conversation about extending those tax credits,” he said, standing alongside Dave McCormick, a Republican who is Pennsylvania’s junior senator. More

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      Top Senate Republican casts further doubt on Trump special counsel pick after ‘Nazi streak’ comments – live

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      Addressing reporters after lunch in the Rose Garden, Senate majority leader John Thune took a question about the White House’s updated stance on Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which now remains in question after Politico reported text messages in which Ingrassia allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.“They’ll have something official to say about that. But you know what we’ve said,” Thune said, after he told reporters on Monday that Ingrassia’s nomination is “not going to pass”.During the White House celebration of Diwali, Donald Trump repeated a disputed claim that he brokered a ceasefire this year between India and Pakistan by threatening to impose tariffs if the conflict continued.“Let me also extend our warmest wishes to the people of India. I just spoke to your prime minister today. We had a great conversation. We talk about trade, we talk about a lot of things, but mostly the world of trade, he’s very interested in that,” Trump said.“Although we did talk a little while ago about, ‘let’s have no wars with Pakistan,’ and I think the fact that trade was involved, I was able to talk him out of that,” Trump added.Trump’s claim that he brokered the India-Pakistan ceasefire in May reportedly infuriated the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who insists that it was settled directly between the two nations, and caused a rift between Trump and Modi.The fact that Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, gave Trump credit and nominated the US president for the Nobel Peace Prize, is unlikely to have improved relations between Modi and Trump.In his remarks, Trump repeatedly suggested that he had used tariffs to bring peace around the globe, perhaps previewing the case his administration will make next month at the supreme court when it asks the court to overturn lower court rulings that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal.Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, at a celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, Donald Trump was asked about a report that he is demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the thwarted legal cases against him after his first term.While Trump initially suggested that he was unaware of the report, he said, “I guess they probably owe me a lot of money for that.”He added that he would donate any money paid to him by the government to charity or to pay for public works, like the construction of a massive ballroom at the White House.“We have numerous cases, having to do with the fraud of the election, the 2020 election” Trump added. “Because of everything we found out, I guess they owe me a lot of money.”He then suggested that both Kash Patel, the FBI director, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, “are working on” investigations of the 2020 election he falsely claims was stolen from him.“What they did, they rigged the election,” Trump said later, suggesting that the compensation he expects is not simply to pay his legal fees but a sort of compensation for not being named the winner of the 2020 election he lost.Graham Platner, the Maine oysterman and former US marine campaigning to be the Democrat’s candidate in next year’s US Senate race, “has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest” and “knows damn well what it means,” according to one of his close aides who resigned last week.Platner tried to get ahead of the revelation that he has a skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest known as Totenkopf, a symbol used by the Nazi SS, by releasing video of himself shirtless to Pod Save America, and offering an explanation to the podcast run by former Obama communications staffers.In the interview, Platner claimed that he was unaware of the Nazi link when he got the tattoo while on leave in the Croatian city of Split during his time in the marines.Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, disputed that in a Facebook post shared by Alex Seitz-Wald, the editor of Maine’s Midcoast Villager newspaper.“Graham has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest,” McDonald wrote. “He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff. Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”“His campaign released it themselves to some podcast bros,” she added, “along with a video of him shirtless and drunk at a wedding to try to get ahead of it.”Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, told Igor Bobic of HuffPost on Tuesday that he continues to support Platner. “There’s a young man who served his country in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he went through some really difficult experiences seeing friends of his killed or whatever, and in spite of all of that he had the courage to run”, Sanders said.“I personally think he is an excellent candidate. I’m going to support him, and I look forward to him becoming the next senator in the state of Maine”, he added.Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill today, House speaker Mike Johnson said a vote to release the full tranche of Epstein files will hit the House floor, after representative-elect Adelita Grijalva is sworn in.Grijalva will be the 218th signature needed on a discharge petition that would force a vote in the House. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have accused Johnson of delaying the formal swearing in of the Arizona representative and staving off a vote.“If you get the signatures, it goes to a vote,” Johnson said today. However, at a press conference earlier he said the bipartisan effort would be redundant as the House oversight committee continues its investigation into the handling of the Epstein case.Democratic congressman Ro Khanna said that Johnson saying he would not block the vote is ultimately “a big deal”.“I appreciate Speaker Johnson making it clear we will get a vote on Rep. Thomas Massie and my bill to release the Epstein files. The advocacy of the survivors is working. Now let’s get Adelita Grijalva sworn in and Congress back to work,” Khanna added in a statement.In his gaggle, Thune noted that the next vote in the Senate, on the House-passed stopgap funding bill to reopen the government, will take place tomorrow. He said he’s confident that he’ll get enough Democrats on board to cross the 60-vote threshold.Addressing reporters after lunch in the Rose Garden, Senate majority leader John Thune took a question about the White House’s updated stance on Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which now remains in question after Politico reported text messages in which Ingrassia allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.“They’ll have something official to say about that. But you know what we’ve said,” Thune said, after he told reporters on Monday that Ingrassia’s nomination is “not going to pass”.The New York Times reports that the president is demanding the justice department pay him about $230m in compensation for the federal investigations into him. They cite anonymous sources familiar with the matter.The sources tell the Times that Trump is seeking damages for “a number of purported violations of his rights”, including the FBI and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign.They add that the president has made these complaints through and administrative claims process, that have yet to be made public. Another complaint allegedly says that the FBI violated Trump’s rights when his Mar-a-Lago estate was searched in 2022 for classified documents.The report has raised significant concerns from legal experts about the ethics of these unprecedented demands – which would essentially require a department, that the president now oversees, to pay him out for their work investigating him.Attorneys for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and legal US resident who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) following his pro-Palestinian activism, have filed appeals to prevent the Trump administration from detaining him again.Lawyers representing Khalil argued to the federal third circuit court of appeals in Philadelphia that his release from Ice detention by a lower court should be affirmed and that the US government should be barred from detaining or deporting Khalil in the future.“The Trump administration is still trying to bring me back to detention and block the federal court in New Jersey from reviewing my case, the same court that ordered my release and ruled that their actions against me were unlawful,” said Khalil of his case in a press release. “Their intention couldn’t be more clear: they want to make an example of me to intimidate those speaking out for Palestine across the country.”Khalil was released from Ice detention in June after spending more than 100 days in the LaSalle detention center, an immigration jail in Jena, Louisiana. Michael E Farbiarz, a US district judge in New Jersey, ordered Khalil’s release and blocked the Trump administration from deporting him for foreign policy reasons.But in September, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Khalil should be deported to Syria or Algeria for not reporting certain information on his green card application.The ruling from the judge, Jamee Comans, came amid a previous order from Farbiarz which bars Khalil’s deportation as the federal case proceeds in New Jersey. Khalil’s lawyers said they planned to appeal the latest deportation order and that Farbiarz’s mandates prevent Khalil’s removal.A group consisting of several hundred former US national security officials have issued a letter to Congress, urging its leaders to examine the existence of an “Interagency Weaponization Working Group.”The Steady State, a group of over former officials committed to their oath to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” wrote the letter Tuesday in response to reports of the IWWG, which is “apparently tasked with pursuing retributive actions against individuals perceived as political opponents of the president.”Citing a recent Reuters investigation, the letter said:
      If accurate, these reports describe a profound and dangerous subversion of the apolitical foundation of the Intelligence Community… The activities described in the Reuters report echo the worst examples of intelligence politicization and misuse of ‘security services’ in our history, and would represent a direct violation of the statutory and ethical boundaries designed to separate intelligence functions from domestic political operations.
      The letter went on to call leaders from the Senate and House intelligence, judiciary and armed services committees to:
      1. Hold immediate closed hearings with the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, and relevant agency heads to determine the existence, authority, and scope of any such interagency group;2. Request all documents, communications, and membership lists related to the IWWG and similar “weaponization” initiatives, including taskings and technical-collection authorizations;3. Assess potential violations of the National Security Act, Executive Order 12333, and statutory prohibitions on domestic intelligence activities; and4. Affirm publicly—in a bipartisan statement—that the Intelligence Community must never be employed for political or personal retribution.
      It is nearly 2pm ET in Washington DC. Here’s a look at where things currently stand across US politics:

      There are no plans for Donald Trump to meet with Vladmir Putin “in the immediate future”, a White House official told the Guardian. The official added that the recent call between secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was “productive”, and therefore an additional-in-person meeting between the envoys is “not necessary”.

      Hosting several Republican lawmakers at the White House for lunch, Trump spent most of his opening remarks heralding the success of his sweeping tariffs. “We’re a wealthy nation again, and we’re a nation that can be secure. We’re a nation that can start paying down our debt, and with tariffs, we’re the wealthiest nation ever in the history of the world,” he said.

      Earlier today, Trump said on Truth Social that several Middle East allies told him they would “welcome the opportunity” at Trump’s request to go into Gaza “with a heavy force” and “straighten our Hamas” if they “continue to behave badly”. This comes after the 11-day ceasefire in Gaza was seriously undermined on Sunday when Israel launched waves of deadly airstrikes and said it would cut off aid into the territory “until further notice” after a reported attack by Hamas, which the militant group denied being involved in.

      Meanwhile, JD Vance, who is currently on a visit to Israel, said that he would not “put an explicit deadline” on Hamas to comply with the key points of the Gaze ceasefire deal. “If Hamas doesn’t comply with the deal, very bad things are going to happen,” Vance said, reiterating Donald Trump’s threats earlier today on social media.

      New York state police announced recently that a pardoned rioter at the January 6 insurrection was arrested last weekend for allegedly threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader. House Republican speaker Mike Johnson noted that “anybody who threatens political violence against elected officials or anyone else should be have the full weight and measure of the Department of Justice on their head.”

      Johnson also said that lawmakers on the House oversight committee are “working around the clock” to ensure “maximum transparency” in the ongoing investigation into the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. He added that the committee’s work is “already accomplishing” what the bipartisan discharge petition, which would force a vote on the House floor to release the full tranche of Epstein records, seeks to do achieve.

      Some Republican senators have said they don’t support Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, ahead of his confirmation hearing on Thursday. Politico reported on Monday that Ingrassia told other Republicans he “has a Nazi streak” and said holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated”, in a private group chat.

      The CIA is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal air strikes by the Trump administration against boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations. Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.
      The Senate’s top Republican, John Thune, closed out the lunch in the Rose Garden by urging his colleagues across the aisle to “get wise” and “vote to reopen the government”.“Everybody here has voted now 11 different times to open up the government, and we are going to keep voting to open up the government, and eventually, the Democrats, hopefully, sooner or later, are going to come around,” Thune said.Trump is running through what he sees are the greatest hits of his first nine months back at the White House. “We don’t need to pass any more bills. We got everything in that bill,” the president said, referring to his sweeping domestic policy agenda that he signed into law in July.Here are a few pictures of some of the senators and officials in the Rose Garden today. More

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      Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t block House vote to release Epstein files

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      The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, on Tuesday said he would not prevent a vote on legislation to make the Jeffrey Epstein files public, even as the chamber remained out of session for a fourth straight week.Johnson has kept the House of Representatives in recess ever since the shutdown began at the start of the month, after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach an agreement on extending government funding beyond the end of September.That has had the knock-on effect of delaying the success of a legislative maneuver known as a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill that would make public documents from the federal investigation into Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking and died while awaiting trial in 2019. The justice department this year said he died by suicide, but Donald Trump and his officials have previously restated conspiracy theories that Epstein was at the center of a larger plot.The president opposes the release of the documents and called the controversy over them a “Democrat hoax”, but all House Democrats along with three Republicans have signed the petition, bringing it one signature away from reaching the 218-member threshold to trigger a vote.“If it hits 218, it comes to the floor,” Johnson told Politico in an interview. “That’s how it works: If you get the signatures, it goes to a vote.”It was speculated that the speaker could look for ways to undermine the petition. Earlier this year, Johnson backed efforts to block a discharge petition on legislation allowing proxy voting for new parents in the House.The final signature on the petition is expected to be Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat elected last month to fill her late father’s seat representing a district along the state’s border with Mexico. However, Johnson has refused to swear her in until the House reconvenes, which he says he will not allow until the government reopens.Grijalva has told the Guardian she believes that Johnson, a close ally of Trump, is attempting to delay the vote on the legislation concerning the Epstein files. But even if the bill is approved by the House, it will have to clear the Republican-controlled Senate and be signed by Trump to take effect.At a press conference earlier in the day, Johnson argued that the discharge petition was unnecessary because a House committee is conducting its own investigation into Epstein.“The bipartisan House oversight committee is already accomplishing what the discharge petition, that gambit, sought, and much more,” he said. That investigation has resulted in the release of tens of thousands of pages related to the government’s handling of the case, including a salacious drawing Trump apparently sent Epstein for his birthday.In a statement, Democrat Ro Khanna, a co-sponsor of the discharge petition, called Johnson’s comments “a big deal”.“I appreciate Speaker Johnson making it clear we will get a vote on Rep. Thomas Massie and my bill to release the Epstein files. The advocacy of the survivors is working. Now let’s get Adelita Grijalva sworn in and Congress back to work,” Khanna said.The government shutdown entered its 21st day on Tuesday with no signs of ending. The Senate’s Republican leaders have held 11 votes on a continuing resolution (CR) that would approve federal funding through 21 November, but Democrats have refused to provide the support necessary for it to clear the 60-vote threshold to advance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe minority party has countered by demanding an extension of subsidies for Affordable Care Act healthcare plans, which will otherwise expire at the end of the year. They also want curbs on Trump’s ability to slash congressionally approved funding through rescissions, and the undoing of cuts to Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, that Republicans approved unilaterally early this year.The Republican Senate majority leader, John Thune, said he is willing to negotiate over the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but only once the government reopens.Trump held a lunch at the White House with Republican senators in the afternoon, during which he delivered a rambling speech thanking them for their cooperation in which the shutdown was mentioned only occasionally.“From the beginning, our message has been very simple: we will not be extorted on this crazy plot of theirs,” Trump said. “Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats need to vote for the clean, bipartisan CR and reopen our government. It’s got to be reopened right now.”In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, dismissed the White House event as a “a mini pep rally” and pressed Republicans to negotiate.“Democrats were ready to work with the other side to get it done. But Republicans continue to act like these ACA premiums are not their problem,” he said. More

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      Senate vote fails again as shutdown becomes one of the longest in US history

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      One of the longest government shutdowns in US history just got longer after the Senate again failed to pass a funding resolution after a majority of Democrats continued their pressure campaign after the No Kings nationwide weekend protests.The Senate vote fell for the 11th time with a vote of 50 to 43, with no new defectors from the Democratic side.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, has for weeks kept the House shuttered on an extended recess, and defended his strategy as necessary to push Senate Democrats into passing the House’s continuing resolution without policy additions. But Democrats have refused to support the measure without provisions addressing healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, which are set to expire at the end of the year.Johnson, in a Monday morning press conference flanked by other Republican congressional leaders including Andy Harris, the House freedom caucus chair, said the reason for the shutdown was to appease Democratic voters, particularly putting blame on the No Kings rallies.“It is exactly why Chuck Schumer is pandering, in this whole charade. We’ve explained from the very beginning, the shutdown is about one thing and one thing alone: Chuck Schumer’s political survival,” Johnson said.The stuffed vote also came after a prominent Republican lawmaker, representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, on Monday morning criticized Johnson’s strategy, calling on the House to return to session immediately.“The House should be in session working,” Greene wrote on X. “We should be finishing appropriations. Our committees should be working. We should be passing bills that make President Trump’s executive orders permanent. I have no respect for the decision to refuse to work.”The criticism from Greene, who is aligned with the right flank of her party, is a noticeable crack in support for Johnson’s hardline approach from the GOP over an extended congressional recess. Since 19 September, when members last cast votes, the chamber has not been conducting legislative business, although members have staged press conferences.The shutdown, which began on 1 October, has become the longest full government shutdown in US history, and the third-longest when including partial shutdowns. If it extends past Tuesday, it will surpass the 21-day shutdown of 1995-96 to claim second place. Only the 35-day partial shutdown during Donald Trump’s first term, from December 2018 to January 2019, has lasted longer.The shutdown’s impact grew more severe on Monday as the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration began furloughing approximately 1,400 federal employees responsible for maintaining and modernizing the US nuclear weapons arsenal. Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, is scheduled to address the furloughs at a press conference in Las Vegas later on Monday, a spokesperson told the Guardian.Kevin Hassett, the White House economic adviser, speculated on Monday, citing “friends in the Senate”, that the impasse might soon break.“I think the [Senate minority leader Chuck] Schumer shutdown is likely to end some time this week,” Hassett said in a CNBC interview. He reasoned that some Democrats had been reluctant to reopen the government ahead of last Saturday’s No Kings protests against Trump, which drew millions of demonstrators nationwide to rebuke corruption and authoritarianism. More