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      Trump news at a glance: president eyes ‘long-term’ DC police takeover; warns Putin of consequences if no ceasefire reached

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      After deploying the national guard to the streets of the American capital, Donald Trump is now eyeing longer-term powers over authorities, saying on Wednesday that he is seeking to extend his temporary powers over Washington DC’s police department.Trump earlier this week invoked a never-before-used clause of the law that sets out the federal district’s governance structure to take temporary control of the police department, but will need Congress’s permission to extend it beyond the 30 days allowed under the statute.“We’re going to need a crime bill that we’re going to be putting in, and it’s going to pertain initially to DC,” Trump said. He alluded to other options for extending control of the police department, saying “if it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump suggests other Democratic-led cities follow suit on crime legislationDonald Trump said on Wednesday he would ask Congress for “long-term” control of Washington DC’s police department and signaled he expected other Democratic-led cities to change their laws in response to his deployment of national guard troops and federal agents into the capital.The president’s comments came as the White House took credit for dozens of arrests overnight in Washington as part of Trump’s campaign to fight a “crime crisis”, which its leaders say does not exist.Read the full storyTrump: Putin to face ‘severe consequences’ if he doesn’t agree ceasefireVladimir Putin will face “very severe consequences” if he does not agree a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine at his summit with Donald Trump in Alaska, the US president said on Wednesday.Speaking after a call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Trump also suggested he would push for a second summit if his meeting with Putin goes well – this time including his Ukrainian counterpart.Read the full storyTrump says he will host Kennedy Center awardsDonald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will host the Kennedy Center honors this year and said he had been heavily involved in choosing who to nominate, rejecting people he thought were too liberal.Read the full storyTrump official led thinktank that promoted lies about Tren de AraguaA senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.Read the full storyHealth professionals call for RFK Jr to be removedA grassroots organization of health professionals has released a report outlining major health challenges in the US and calling for the removal of Robert F Kennedy Jr from the US Department of Health and Human Services.Read the full storyTrump revokes signature Biden order promoting economic competitionDonald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A US judge ordered the Trump administration to restore a part of the federal grant funding that it recently suspended for the University of California, Los Angeles.

      Veteran climate scientists are organizing a coordinated public comment to a US Department of Energy report which cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 12 August 2025. More

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      Trump revokes Biden order promoting competition in the US economy

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.The move by the Republican US president further unwinds a signature initiative by his predecessor, a Democrat, to crack down on anti-competitive practices in sectors from agriculture to drugs and labor.The justice department welcomed Trump’s revocation of the order, saying it was pursuing an “America first antitrust” approach focused on free markets instead of what it called the “overly prescriptive and burdensome approach” of the Biden administration.It said it was also making progress on streamlining the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (HSR) review process of mergers and reinstating more frequent use of targeted and well-crafted consent decrees.Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe initiative, which was very popular with Americans, was championed by top Biden economic officials, many of whom had previously worked for or with the senator Elizabeth Warren, who played a key role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Barack Obama.Trump has attacked that agency since taking office, announcing plans to shrink its workforce by 90%.Those moves have cost Americans at least $18bn in higher fees and lost compensation for consumers allegedly cheated by major companies, according to an analysis released in June by the Student Borrower Protection Center and the Consumer Federation of America.Biden’s order said it aimed to “enforce the antitrust laws to combat the excessive concentration of industry, the abuses of market power, and the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony”, focused on areas such as labor and healthcare. More

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      Trump to seek extension of DC police takeover past 30-day limit and touts Republican support – live

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      At the Kennedy Center today, Donald Trump announced that he would host this year’s honors himself – scheduled for December. But some of the biggest news came out of the far-reaching press conference he held after announcing this year’s honorees (which include ‘Rocky’ star and fervent Trump supporter Sylvester Stallone).

      Trump promised ‘very severe consequences’ if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to ceasefire at their Friday meeting in Alaska. He didn’t, however, elaborate on what those penalties will be. He also floated the idea of a trilateral summit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy “almost immediately” after his individual meeting with Putin.

      The president said that he’s eyeing an extension of the initial 30-day limit for the federal takeover of the DC Metropolitan Police. “I don’t want to call national emergency. If I have to I will. But I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously,” Trump said. He added that any discussions about DC statehood are “ridiculous” and “unacceptable”.

      When it comes to the surge of federal law enforcement on DC streets, a White House official said 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night –twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.

      The city’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial working relationship with the president since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.

      At his Kennedy Center appearance today, the president continued to disparage Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. “He’s truly incompetent,” Trump said. He went on to reveal that he’ll be naming the nomination for Powell’s replacement “sometime in the next week”. He’s down to “three of four names,” he added. A reminder that Powell’s term ends in May.

      Additionally, on the foreign diplomacy front, the president took part in a virtual meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders today which the German chancellor described as “very good” and “constructive”. Zelenskyy confirmed that Trump would call him straight after the Friday meeting with Putin to talk it through details.

      And finally, for now at least, a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction that required the state department to continue making payments to foreign aid contractors. In a 2-1 decision, the appellate panel effectively granted a Trump victory – allowing the administration to cut billions in congressionally appropriated funding for foreign assistance.
      Donald Trump named David Rosner chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc), where he has served since June 2024 as a commissioner, the agency announced on Wednesday.The appointment of Rosner, a Democrat whose nomination to the commission was supported by then Senator Joe Manchin, is expected to be temporary. In June, Trump nominated two Republicans to the commission who are awaiting Senate confirmation.Ferc, which has a maximum of five members, regulates the power grid, liquefied natural gas projects and interstate transportation of oil and natural gas. It currently has just three members, after Mark Christie, a Republican, left last week.In June, Trump nominated Laura Swett to take Christie’s place and the president is expected to name her to become chair once the Senate confirms her.If both of Trump’s nomines are confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, Ferc would then have a 3-2 Republican majority.Rosner, who has worked in energy in and out of government for two decades, said he was honored to be named.Last year the environmental group Friends of the Earth ran a campaign calling on the Senate, then controlled by Democrats, to block Rosner’s nomination, calling him “a paid cheerleader for the LNG boom”.Trump has said he wants to open pipelines to bring natural gas from Pennsylvania’s gas fields to states in the Northeast. The projects have been opposed by states.A judge in Adams County, Illinois just rejected a request from the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, to order the arrest of Democrats from the Texas state legislature who left Texas to block a Republican plan to redraw congressional districts.In a petition filed last Thursday, Paxton had asked the court in a conservative county that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump to to honor so-called quorum Warrants — civil arrest orders issued by Dustin Burrows, the Republican speaker of the Texas state house — and order Illinois police officers to “effectuate the civil arrest” of the Democratic lawmakers.In the ruling, which was posted online by Aarón Torres of the Dallas Morning News, the judge ruled that the Illinois circuit court “does not have the inherent power to direct Illinois law enforcement officers, or to allow the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Representatives of the State of Texas, or any officer appointed by her, to execute Texas civil Quorum Warrants upon nonresidents temporarily located in the State of Illinois.”Today, a US federal judge struck down rules from 2018 that allow employers to not provide insurance coverage for birth control on religious or moral grounds, Reuters is reporting.During Donald Trump’s first term in office, the supreme court ruled that employers were eligible for religious exemptions when it comes to providing health insurance that covers women’s birth control.The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, requires employers to offer health insurance with access to contraception, but stipulates that they can apply for religious exemptions. The 2018 rules, however, offered a blanket exemption.According to Reuters, Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia said there was a gap between how vast the exception is, and the number of employers who would need it.Planned Parenthood clinics treated people who rely on Medicaid at more than 1.5m visits in 2024, new research published on Wednesday shows.But the reproductive health giant’s ability to treat those patients is now in jeopardy due to Republicans’ efforts to “defund” Planned Parenthood by kicking it out of Medicaid.Donald Trump’s tax and spending package, passed in July, bans Planned Parenthood from receiving reimbursements from Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people. After Planned Parenthood sued over the ban, a judge temporarily stopped it from taking effect.If the ban moves forward, experts warn that it could cripple the entirety of the US healthcare social safety net.Republicans have long sought to defund Planned Parenthood over the organization’s commitment to providing abortions. But Planned Parenthood does not rely on Medicaid to fund its abortion provision as it is already illegal to use federal dollars, including Medicaid, to pay for the vast majority of abortions. The 1.5m visits documented in Wednesday’s research paper, which was published in the medical journal Jama, only include visits for reasons other than abortion.“Planned Parenthood has filled a very important role in the reproductive healthcare safety net for people living on low incomes,” said Kari White, executive and scientific director at Resound Research for Reproductive Health. White was the lead author on the research paper released on Wednesday. “Other providers have counted on them to do so. They just don’t have the capacity to step in and fill the place that Planned Parenthood has had in the safety net.”The state department has approved potential sales of munitions, precision bombs and precision rockets to Nigeria, according to a statement from the Pentagon. The estimated cost totals $346 million.Several Texas Democratic lawmakers are now speaking about their redistricting fight alongside Indiana Democrats. They’re joining the legislators to push back against the president’s push for Indiana governor Mike Braun to redraw the state’s congressional map – in a similar vein to Texas governor Greg Abbott.Today, state representative Gene Wu, who is also chair of the Texas House Democrats, said that “we need more people to join us”.He added that if Texas Republicans continue to “block the will of the people” Democrats will make to “nullify their actions”.A number of Indiana Democratic lawmakers said that they stand in solidarity with their Texas counterparts. “We need to support them and stand with them, otherwise our people will be subjected to ever changing districts, none of which are representative,” said Indiana state representative Ed DeLaney.

      At the Kennedy Center today, Donald Trump announced that he would host this year’s honors himself – scheduled for December. But some of the biggest news came out of the far-reaching press conference he held after announcing this year’s honorees (which include ‘Rocky’ star and fervent Trump supporter Sylvester Stallone).

      Trump promised ‘very severe consequences’ if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to ceasefire at their Friday meeting in Alaska. He didn’t, however, elaborate on what those penalties will be. He also floated the idea of a trilateral summit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy “almost immediately” after his individual meeting with Putin.

      The president said that he’s eyeing an extension of the initial 30-day limit for the federal takeover of the DC Metropolitan Police. “I don’t want to call national emergency. If I have to I will. But I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously,” Trump said. He added that any discussions about DC statehood are “ridiculous” and “unacceptable”.

      When it comes to the surge of federal law enforcement on DC streets, a White House official said 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night –twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.

      The city’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial working relationship with the president since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.

      At his Kennedy Center appearance today, the president continued to disparage Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. “He’s truly incompetent,” Trump said. He went on to reveal that he’ll be naming the nomination for Powell’s replacement “sometime in the next week”. He’s down to “three of four names,” he added. A reminder that Powell’s term ends in May.

      Additionally, on the foreign diplomacy front, the president took part in a virtual meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders today which the German chancellor described as “very good” and “constructive”. Zelenskyy confirmed that Trump would call him straight after the Friday meeting with Putin to talk it through details.

      And finally, for now at least, a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction that required the state department to continue making payments to foreign aid contractors. In a 2-1 decision, the appellate panel effectively granted a Trump victory – allowing the administration to cut billions in congressionally appropriated funding for foreign assistance.
      We can soon expect to hear from Texas Democrats in Chicago, who will join several Indiana Democratic lawmakers who are pushing back against the president’s pressure campaign to redraw their own state’s congressional map.The White House said on Wednesday that law enforcement made dozens of arrests in Washington DC overnight after federal agents and national guard troops fanned out across the city as part of Donald Trump’s campaign to quell a “crime crisis” that local officials say does not exist.The national guard arrived on the National Mall late on Tuesday, while agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), FBI and Department of Homeland Security were seen in several neighborhoods , sometimes accompanied by local police officers.Video circulating on local media showed police and federal agents arresting at least one person that evening in Columbia Heights, home to the city’s largest Hispanic population. Other videos showed traffic stops near Kennedy street in Northwest Washington, which in years past has been the site of gang activity.A White House official said to expect a “significantly higher” presence of national guard troops over the days to come, as well as round-the-clock patrols by federal agents, which have thus far only been present in the evenings. The administration argues the steps are necessary to fight what Trump has called an “out of control” crime problem in the nation’s capital, but local officials have disputed that characterization.Data shows that crime rates plunged last year to the lowest levels in three decades, though the capital does have higher rates of some violent crimes compared with cities with similar populations.Democratic lawmakers have condemned Trump’s incursion as an authoritarian move intended to distract his supporters from outrage over his refusal to make public files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a one-time friend who has become a fixation of conspiracy theorists.The Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial relationship with Trump since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our city, to protect our autonomy, to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.A White House official said a total of 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night, twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.The White House said a total of 19 teams of officers from various federal agencies are in the city “to promote public safety and arrest violent offenders”, while the national guard will “protect federal assets, provide a safe environment for law enforcement officers to make arrests, and deter violent crime with a visible law enforcement presence”.More than 40 Ice agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI, which does long-term investigations into transnational crimes) are working with the DC police, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies this week as part of Trump’s takeover of the capital to mitigate crime, NBC News is reporting.Per NBC’s report, “they can make arrests of citizens with no nexus to immigration violations”. “Yesterday, HSI worked with other agencies in an operation near the DC Metro in Union Station; its agents told NBC News that they were not there for anything immigration related, but were surveying busy areas around DC.”Separately, Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO, which carries out operations like arresting immigrants for immigration crimes and detaining and deporting them) is increasing its operations in DC, according to NBC. The news outlet reports that “there was a ‘targeted enforcement operation’ to arrest immigrants in a Home Depot parking lot in DC yesterday, and there have been reports of other immigrant arrests in the DC area.”“The President was clear, he will make DC safe and beautiful again, and ICE is proud to be a part of the solution alongside our federal law enforcement partners,” an agency spokesperson told NBC about the operations. The agency is conducting both immigration enforcement operations and undertaking efforts to fight crime in support of the US Marshals Service, they said.They said the operations were intelligence-based, and the efforts at Union Station and the Home Depot resulted in arrests of criminal undocumented immigrants convicted of assault, theft and gang activity.“We will support the re-establishment of law and order and public safety in DC, which includes taking drug dealers, gang members, and criminal aliens off city streets,” they said.A senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.Joseph Humire was appointed this summer to be the head of policy focusing on the western hemisphere within the office of the under secretary of defense for policy. He was previously the executive director of a conservative thinktank focused on global security. Humire’s appointment comes as the Trump administration is ramping up its aggressive strategy against organized crime in Latin America and the Venezuelan government, which it accuses of working with TdA.Under Humire’s leadership, the Center for a Secure Free Society thinktank published the “TdA Activity Monitor”, tracking alleged crimes by accused members of the gang throughout the US. According to InSight Crime, at least five event entries in the tracker appeared to have been “completely fabricated”. InSight Crime found zero basis for the false entries, with local police departments telling researchers the purported crimes were nonexistent. InSight Crime analyzed more than 90 of the entries, finding many relied on unverified sources.“Some incidents are included multiple times, inflating the gang’s perceived presence and activities,” researchers found.Asked if he was confident he could get Putin to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine, Trump said:
      Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ve had that conversation with him. I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him. Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the street.
      So I guess the answer to that is no, because I’ve had this conversation.
      He ended his briefing there. More

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      ‘Severe’ staff shortages at US veterans’ hospitals, watchdog finds

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      The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is experiencing “severe” staff shortages at all its hospitals, with the number of shortages increasing by 50% this fiscal year, according to a new report from the agency’s independent watchdog.The report, released on Tuesday, came a day after the Guardian revealed the department had lost thousands of healthcare professionals deemed “core” to the system under Donald Trump, without which, the agency said, “mission-critical work cannot be completed”.The inspector general found 94% of VA facilities faced a “severe” shortage of doctors, while 79% faced a severe shortage of nurses. Psychology was “the most frequently reported clinical occupational staffing shortage”. A majority of VA facilities also reported severe shortages of police officers, who keep veteran patients and staff safe.The VA operates the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, serving 9 million veterans annually. The report is required under two laws, one signed by Trump in 2017, which require the agency’s inspector general annually to determine the extent of staffing shortages within each medical center.In a statement, Congressman Mark Takano of California, the ranking Democrat on the House committee on veterans’ affairs, said the report “confirms our fears” that shortages of medical staff were leading to “decreased access and choice for veterans”.The VA press secretary, Peter Kasperowicz, told the Guardian the congressionally mandated watchdog report was “not a reliable indicator of staffing shortages” and that it was “completely subjective, not standardized and unreliable”.The report is based on a survey of VA medical centers in April. Since then, a Guardian review of agency staffing records found, the VA has continued to lose doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers and other frontline medical professionals.Kasperowicz did not dispute the fact that the agency had lost thousands of “mission-critical” healthcare workers under Trump – including after the watchdog’s survey period concluded.The VA is in the midst of a department-wide reduction of 30,000 workers, which the secretary of veterans affairs, Doug Collins, said could be accomplished by September through a combination of attrition, a hiring freeze and deferred resignation program.The staff cuts, Collins said, would not affect patient care, but were “centered on reducing bureaucracy and improving services to veterans”.In May, the Guardian reported that staff losses at the VA had led to unit closures, reduced hours of operations and exam backlogs across the hospital system. More

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      And here is your host … Trump casts himself for Kennedy Center honours

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      “There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts,” are among the words inscribed in marble at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The age of Elizabeth was the age of Shakespeare, it says.The age of Donald Trump is the age of Trump’s ego. Trump the president, commander-in-chief and master builder. Trump the supremo of the upcoming Olympics, football World Cup and America’s 250th birthday. Trump whose self-aggrandisement is the size of a planet: on Wednesday not even the Kennedy Center’s cavernous Hall of Nations could contain it.The president announced that he will host this year’s Kennedy Center Honors – after all, he used to be on The Apprentice, so how hard can it be? He unveiled this year’s honourees – screened by him to veto “wokesters” – and grumbled that he had never been one. He reminded everyone that he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Nearby, the giant bust of Kennedy may have shed a tear or two as Trump, wearing dark suit, white shirt and red tie, strode into the marble-walled, red-carpeted Hall of Nations to continue his hostile takeover of the nation’s capital – and the country’s cultural life.The 100ft-high arts complex on the banks of the Potomac River and its annual arts awards might seem trivial in the scheme of Trump’s authoritarian crusade. But there are few better measures of how his second term is proving more ambitious, intentional and effective than his first.View image in fullscreenTrump 1.0 never set foot in the Kennedy Center. Each year the Honors took place without him, with recipients including his critics such as as Cher, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sally Field. And there were diverse lineups: Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, Lionel Richie, Debbie Allen, Berry Gordy, Gladys Knight and Queen Latifah.Trump 2.0 has been a very different proposition in his targeted approach to immigration and crime, his vendettas against political opponents and his bullying of law firms, media companies and universities. Suddenly the Kennedy Center, like the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, finds itself in the line of fire of Trump’s war on woke.Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, who feigns reluctance to take the throne as a tactic to appear more virtuous, Trump claimed he didn’t really want to take on hosting responsibilities when his staff asked.“I said: ‘I’m the president of the United States! Are you fools, asking me to do that?’ ‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said: ‘I don’t care, I’m president of the United States. I won’t do it.’”But then, in his telling, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, intervened. “I said, OK, Susie, I’ll do it. That’s the power she’s got. So I have agreed to … They’re going to say: ‘He insisted.’ I did not insist but I think it will be quite successful actually. It’s been a long time. I used to host The Apprentice finales and we did rather well with that.”The Kennedy Center Honors were established in 1978 and recipients have included George Balanchine, Warren Beatty, Aretha Franklin, Tom Hanks, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim and Barbra Streisand. Trump remarked: “I wanted one. I was never able to get one.”A group of Trump lackeys sitting stage left burst into laughter then realised he wasn’t joking and fell silent. “It’s true, actually. I would have taken it if they would have called me. I waited and waited and waited and I said: ‘To hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honour. Maybe next year we’ll honour Trump, OK?”All right, now that time he was joking. Wasn’t he?Trump announced a characteristically white male-heavy list for this year’s honourees: actors Michael Crawford and Sylvester Stallone, singers George Strait and Gloria Gaynor, and members of the rock band Kiss. As he spoke of each, a curtain was pulled back on their photo in very retro, low-tech style.Crawford, he noted, was born in England in 1942 and made his Broadway debut in 1967. “I was there. I shouldn’t say that but I was there. It seems like a long time ago, and he became an international sensation in the 1980s for his original portrayal of the Phantom of the Opera – one of the greatest ever, ever, ever, ever.”It was hardly surprising from a man whose cultural tastes refuse to acknowledge the existence of the 21st century, though there was no mention of the 70s British sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em in which Crawford played accident-prone Frank Spencer, known for the catchphrase “Ooh Betty!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStallone’s characters Rambo and Rocky are more Trump’s style: macho, muscular, primal, violent, taking no prisoners. The kind of great white hopes that he would now like to see policing the streets of Washington. The president mused: “Rocky, Rambo – if you did one, you’re good. You do two?“I’ll never forget I was a young guy and I went to see a thing called Rambo and it had just come out. I didn’t know anything about it but I was in a movie theatre – like we used to go to movie theaters a lot – and I said: ‘This movie is phenomenal! What the heck?’ And that turned out to be a monster.”Trump described Stallone as one of the biggest names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but then remembered this is supposed to be all about him. “In fact, the only one that’s a bigger name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they say, is a guy named Donald Trump. I’m on the Hollywood Walk of Fame too, if you can believe that one.”Strait, Gaynor and Kiss met with his approval too. Trump might have stopped five wars in the past six months, by his own estimate, but he still had time to handpick the Kennedy Center honourees and make sure no agitators, dissidents or subversives slipped through the net. The role of the artist is the worship of Trump.“I would say I was about 98% involved,” he remarked. “They all went through me … I turned down plenty. It went too woke. I turned I had a couple of wokesters. Now, we have great people. This is very different than it used to be. Very different.”The Oscars, he said, now gets “lousy ratings” because “it’s all woke” and “all they do is talk about how much they hate Trump.”Just as he is vowing to make Washington DC beautiful again, Trump has big plans for the Kennedy Center, which at least one Republican in Congress has proposed renaming after him. Trump promised to “fully renovate” the entire infrastructure, ripping out and replacing all the seats, and make it a “crown jewel” of arts and culture in the US. “The bones are so good,” he cooed.But if his White House desecration is anything to go by, expect the Kennedy Center to become a monument to dictator chic, dripping in rococo gold and festooned with garishness. Another Kennedy quotation inscribed on the exterior marble wall says: “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” More

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      Scientists rush to bolster climate finding Trump administration aims to undo

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      Veteran climate scientists are organizing a coordinated public comment to a US Department of Energy (DOE) report that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.The report, published late last month, claimed concerns about planet-warming fossil fuels are overblown, sparking widespread concern from scientists who said it was full of climate misinformation; it was an attempt to support a proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to undo the “endangerment finding”, which forms the legal basis of virtually all US climate regulations.“A public comment from experts can be useful because it injects expert analysis into a decision-making process that might otherwise be dominated by political, economic, or ideological considerations,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University who is organizing the response to the report. “Experts can identify technical errors, highlight overlooked data, and clarify uncertainties in ways that improve the accuracy and robustness of the final policy or report.”The response comes as part of a broader wave of experts’ attempts to uphold established climate science as the Trump administration promotes contrarian and unproven viewpoints.The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Nasem), the country’s top group of scientific advisers, has launched a “fast-track” review of the latest evidence on how greenhouse gases threaten human health and wellbeing – a move announced following the proposed endangerment-finding rollback.Nasem, which advises the EPA and other federal agencies, plans to release their findings in September, in time to inform the EPA’s decision on the endangerment finding. The initiative will be self-funded by the organization – a highly unusual practice from the congressionally chartered group, which usually responds to federal bodies’ calls for advice.“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, in a statement.Trump administration efforts to block access to data have also inspired pushback. This month, the president ousted the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after baselessly saying the data it publishes is “rigged”.In earlier weeks, federal officials have also deleted key climate data and reports such as the national climate assessments and the US Global Change Research Program from government websites. The administration has changed 70% more of the information on official environmental websites during its first 100 days than the first Trump administration did, according to a report the research group Environmental Data and Governance Initiative published last week.In light of these actions, research organizations such as the Public Environmental Data Project and Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative have worked to safeguard and publicize data that the federal government is hiding from the public.“Attacks on science are dangerous because they erode one of society’s most effective tools for understanding the world and making decisions in the public interest,” said Dessler. “When political or ideological forces undermine scientific institutions or discredit experts, they weaken our ability to harness this powerful tool.”Asked for comment about the Nasem review, an EPA spokesperson repeated a comment offered earlier this month: “Congress never explicitly gave EPA authority to impose greenhouse gas regulations for cars and trucks.”The Clean Air Act authorizes the EPA to set emission standards for cars if the EPA administrator determines that their emissions endanger public health or welfare. That includes greenhouse gas emissions, due to the endangerment finding.Asked for comment on the DOE report supporting the EPA’s position, Department of Energy spokesperson Ben Dietderich also repeated an earlier comment. “This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence – not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations,” he said.The UN and the US have regularly convened top scientists to produce scientific climate reports, which warn that urgent action to curb emissions is needed.Dietderich also said officials “look forward to engaging with substantive comments” on the report.However, “the real question is whether they’ll listen to us”, said Dessler. More

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      New York mayor frontrunner Mamdani trains fire on Trump as Cuomo attacks

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      New York City’s mayoral race is heating up, with Zohran Mamdani, the young progressive who leapt ahead of establishment figures in the primary to win the Democratic party nomination, appearing to widen his lead over his main rivals this week.Mamdani, 33, edged further ahead of the former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, with the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, far behind, in advance of the election this November to pick a leader for the largest city in the US.In a metropolis that leans Democratic, he was also far ahead of the Republican talkshow host Curtis Sliwa, and also another independent, the sky-diving former federal prosecutor Jim Walden.According to a poll released on Tuesday, Mamdani, who has been endorsed by fellow leftwingers on the national stage such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, held a 19-point lead over Cuomo, his nearest rival.It was however, a small-scale survey, in which the Siena poll sampled just 317 registered voters and cited an unusually wide 6.7% margin of error.Mamdani is a Muslim, which garnered some negative attacks ahead of the primary, and a member of the Democrat Socialists of America’s nine-member “State Socialists in Office” bloc in New York’s state assembly.Cuomo had been expected to win the Democratic primary, but despite his almost universal name recognition, he was beaten after being weighed down by an overly conventional campaign and a damaged political past having resigned as governor in a torrent of accusations of sexual harassment and bullying on the job.Mamdani was deemed on Tuesday by Siena to be 32 points ahead of Sliwa and held a 37-point lead over Adams, who has been plagued by allegations of corruption.With Mamdani as the candidate to beat, his credentials are now under attack and he has just four years under his belt as a state legislator. Cuomo has hit Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized – or rent-regulated – apartment – where the rent is $2,500 a month when the market rate would be $8,000, while he earns $147,000 a year and is campaigning on housing affordability and calling for higher taxes for the wealthiest New Yorkers.Cuomo has accused Mamdani of “callous theft” and proposed a new means-test law, “Zohran’s Law”, that would control who gets to live in the city’s 1m rent-stabilized dwellings. The Mamdani campaign has said their candidate would have met Cuomo’s proposed qualify 30% rent-to-income standard when he moved in and was earning $47,000 a year, and described Cuomo’s proposal as “petty vindictiveness”.However, the Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said the issue was an opening for New York City voters who are leaning against Mamdani.“It won’t move the numbers for younger people who are the base of his support, but the argument could benefit both Cuomo and Adams because it makes Mamdani look like a hypocrite,” he said.Mamdani, meanwhile, has launched a “Five Boroughs Against Trump” tour of the city, shifting his focus to what many Democratic New Yorkers could agree is the common enemy, the Republican US president.Trump has threatened to intervene in New York – a threat made vivid with the national guard now patrolling Washington DC’s streets – if Mamdani is elected, and Cuomo posted that that was likely to happen and that “Trump will flatten him like a pancake”.Sheinkopf said Mamdani’s switch to attacking Trump was a wise political strategy because it deflects from his lack of governing experience. “He can be beaten but the problem is will any of these guys be able to figure it out? Cuomo’s numbers have to be much lower for Adams to win, and Adams has to pick up momentum.“The only way he [Mamdani] can get the Black vote back is offer a mea culpa that he made some mistakes early on but argue that crime is down, education and job numbers are up, tourist numbers are great, but what I need is more time to make sure 85,000 new housing units already budgeted for come through,” Sheinkopf says.Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, a state assembly Democrat whose district includes much of eastern Brooklyn, is among moderates who are coming aroundto the leftwinger and attended a Mamdani-led anti-Trump meeting on Tuesday.“Democrats, both moderate and progressive, are uniting around urgent issues like affordability, housing, and protecting our democracy,” Hermelyn said. More

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      Trump’s Washington DC takeover is straight out of a fascist playbook| Moustafa Bayoumi

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      A key chapter in the fascist playbook has always been to convince the public that it is living in such a state of mortal danger and unbridled chaos that the only chance of survival is to cede individual rights to the determined will of the Dear Leader. That’s why fascist leaders have constantly demanded that their populations venerate all violence performed in the service of the state and revere the apparatuses of state violence, such as police forces and the military. In this scenario, state violence is not only necessary for the nation’s survival. State violence is understood as even beautiful, something the public can and must believe in.Buying into state violence this way produces something historian Robert Paxton has called a “mobilizing passion”. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton described how “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will” is produced and then mobilized by fascists by creating “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions”. In other words, there’s always a grave, existential threat lurking around every corner, and only fascist violence can restore order to a lawless world. To the fascist, as Umberto Eco once put it, “life is a permanent war”.Enter Donald Trump. Whether it’s an existential threat of “wokeness” run amok in American universities, or the extraordinary danger of unauthorized immigrants picking our vegetables, Trump is prepared to battle everyone and everything, including his own windmills, to restore the country to some illusory past glory that we are all supposed to believe in, and be willing to sacrifice ourselves for.But the sad truth is that many, if not most, of Trump’s justifications for his policies, are unsurprisingly based on bald-faced lies or gross exaggerations simply to further his pursuit of absolute power. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. With each new announcement, Trump continues to prove how excellent he is at crafting the illusion of problems where there basically are none and leading his followers down an often-violent path of retribution. (Remember January 6, DC’s most violent day in recent history?) By doing so, he seeks to constantly expand his authority while also deflecting from all the substantial problems that are staring him in the face. And these problems are not insignificant. Think of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the continuation of global conflicts that he promised months ago he would uniquely be able to end.The federal takeover of the Washington DC police department, announced with loud fanfare by Trump on Monday, is the latest example of this phenomenon. About 800 national guard troops will be deployed in the nation’s capital because, according to the president, “our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.”This does sound rather frightening. Fortunately, it’s not true. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter.First, the facts. Crime in DC is at historic lows. “Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years,” the justice department announced earlier this year. And crime numbers for 2025 are even better, substantially lower than 2024. Violent crime in 2025 is down 26% compared with 2024.The DC council understands this. The council responded to Trump’s announcement with an angry joint statement: “This is a manufactured intrusion on local authority. Violent crime in the District is at the lowest rates we’ve seen in 30 years. Federalizing the DC police is unwarranted because there is no Federal emergency. Further, the National Guard has no public safety training or knowledge of local laws. The Guard’s role does not include investigating or solving crimes in the District. Calling out the National Guard is an unnecessary deployment with no real mission.”Such facts ought to matter. So why don’t they to Trump?Facts don’t matter for Trump because facts have always operated as nothing more than an inconvenience for him. Just ask Erika McEntarfer, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was recently fired by Trump after accurately reporting employment statistics, and those specific numbers contradicted Trump and his policies. But with every new policy enacted by this administration, Trump’s fact-free worldview becomes a lot more worrisome.That’s true for this policy, too. Owing to its historically limited autonomy, the District of Columbia is governed differently than other parts of the county. And under the Home Rule Act of 1973,the federal government can take over its policing functions for a period of 30 days. Congress would probably then have to extend that time limit if needed. But to think that Trump is focused on federal policing authority solely to deploy it to Washington DC is to also believe that Donald Trump has never seen a spray tan machine.Here is Trump: “We have other cities also that are bad, very bad,” he said at his press conference. “You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York is a problem. And then you have of course Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that any more, they’re so far gone. We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We’re starting very strongly with DC.”Now, here are the facts. In Chicago, homicides are down 33% in 2025. Los Angeles had the “lowest homicide total in nearly 60 years” in 2025. New York’s police department is reporting that “from January 2025 through May 2025, New York City experienced the lowest number of shootings and murders in recorded history.” The Baltimore police department has stated that 2025 “continues to see double-digit reductions in gun violence, including a 22% decrease in homicides”. And the Oakland police department reported last week “that overall crime in Oakland has dropped by 28% in the first six months of 2025” including a 24% decrease in homicides.Donald Trump wants to take over all forms of law enforcement in the United States, from local policing to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency that is now pumped up on budgetary steroids. (Under Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, Ice will now expand to become the largest federal law enforcement agency in US history, with a bigger budget than most nations’ militaries.) Trump’s desire to control all forms of state power, and to expand them beyond belief, is a move straight out of the fascist playbook. And it’s completely dependent on the production of both extraordinary fear and blatant lies.The first way of fighting such an obvious power grab is not to give in to the fear and not to believe the lies. But what is less understood about Trump is that he doesn’t even care if we believe his lies. Like all such leaders, what Trump really wants is just that we no longer believe in the truth. The difference between not believing the lies and believing in the truth may sound slight, but it’s exactly in that distinction where some people are allowed to live and others must die. It’s where democracy is found or democracy is lost. And it’s why holding on to the very concept of truth ultimately matters so much more than just arguing over the lies.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More