US politics

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