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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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      Democratic senator’s anti-Trump floor speech ends after nearly 23 hours

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      Oregon’s Jeff Merkley gave a marathon, nearly 23-hour speech on the Senate floor that began on Tuesday and ended late Wednesday, pressing the case that Donald Trump is acting as an authoritarian by prosecuting political enemies and deploying the military into Merkley’s home town of Portland.The 68-year-old senator began speaking around 6.20pm on Tuesday evening and continued until just after 5pm on Wednesday. Standing continuously on the Senate floor alongside placards that read “authoritarianism is here now!” and “Trump is violating the law”, Merkley paused only to take questions from fellow Democratic senators who joined him in the chamber to make their own points about the president’s conduct.“I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the civil war. President Trump is shredding our constitution,” Merkley said as he began his speech.He repeated those words as he finished speaking just before sunset the following day, and thanked the No Kings protesters who had filled the streets of American cities in anti-Trump demonstrations the prior weekend.“They were ringing the alarm bells. They were saying that it is absolutely unacceptable to have an authoritarian government,” Merkley said.The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said the Oregonian delivered an “amazing tour de force over these many hours. Jeff Merkley has been the Paul Revere of 21st-century America, literally, figuratively, riding from one corner of this country to the other, alerting people to the danger.”Republican whip John Barrasso followed him up by saying Merkley’s speech was “what I can only describe as rubbish” and noting it did nothing to resolve the deadlock over government funding that has forced a shutdown.Merkley spoke a day after a federal appeals court had allowed the president to send the national guard into Portland over the objections of local leaders, who say there is no merit to the president’s claim that the city is a “war zone”. Trump has also ordered a similar deployment of troops into Chicago, where federal agents are carrying out an aggressive crackdown targeting people they believe to be undocumented immigrants. The supreme court is poised to consider a legal challenge to that move.The senator touched on those deployments to cities that are overwhelmingly Democratic, as well as other instances where the president is seen as retaliating against his political enemies, including the charges a handpicked US attorney has filed against the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, and former FBI director James Comey.“Equal justice under law – that’s the vision here in America. Not unequal injustice, which is what the president is pursuing by taking the power of the government and going after individuals that he does not like or perceives to be political opponents,” Merkley said.“That’s what you read about in authoritarian governments far away, and you go, that would never happen in the United States of America, but it is happening right here, right now.”Merkley’s address is the second instance this year in which a Democratic senator has staged a lengthy floor speech to condemn Trump’s policies. About two months after Trump’s inauguration, Cory Booker of New Jersey spoke for 25 hours and five minutes, setting a new record for the longest speech ever by a solo senator.On Wednesday morning, the Oregon senator stood speaking from a lectern where he had placed a small glass of water and a copy of How Democracies Die, a 2018 book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt detailing how representative governments around the world have been dismantled.Among those who joined him on the floor was Booker, who said: “We are seeing a time now that if we do not ring the alarm bells, more and more Americans will be hurt by a president who is acting more like an authoritarian leader than a democratically elected executive.”Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal likened Trump’s partial demolition of the White House East Wing to layoffs and funding cuts he has ordered across the government.“This destruction that Donald Trump is doing to the White House is emblematic of the wrecking ball he is taking to our democracy. Put aside the waste of money that could be used to improve our education system, solve food insecurity, guarantee the election integrity of this nation – the damage that he’s doing to this iconic symbol of America is so costly to our image and esteem around the world,” Blumenthal said.Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior senator, said in an interview that his counterpart was “making some particularly, relevant and important points about the threat”.Asked if other Senate Democrats were planning such lengthy speeches, Wyden said: “You take them one at a time, but I think what Senator Merkley is doing is very important.”The speech comes on the 22nd day of the government shutdown that began at the start of the month, when Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on legislation to extend funding beyond the end of September.The Senate has held 11 unsuccessful votes on a Republican-backed bill to extend funding through 21 November, which Democrats have blocked because it does not including healthcare funding that they are demanding, as well as curbs on Trump’s use of rescissions to slash funding approved by Congress.After Merkley finished his speech, the Senate’s Republican leaders moved to hold a 12th vote on the funding bill. More

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      Trump nominee to lead whistleblower office drops out after racist texts surface

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      Paul Ingrassia, Donald Trump’s nominee to oversee federal whistleblower protections, has dropped out after racist text messages he sent surfaced this week.Ingrassia, currently a White House liaison at the Department of Homeland Security, was the subject of a report on Monday published in Politico. The report featured text messages where he allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday evening, Ingrassia said: “I will be withdrawing myself from Thursday’s HSGAC hearing to lead the Office of Special Counsel because unfortunately I do not have enough Republican votes at this time.“I appreciate the overwhelming support that I have received throughout this process and will continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again!”After the release of the alleged text messages earlier this week, reporters asked John Thune, the Senate majority leader, if the administration should pull Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the office of special counsel. Thune said on Monday: “I think so. He’s not going to pass.”Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin also said on Tuesday, prior to Ingrassia’s withdrawal, that he would not support Ingrassia’s nomination: “I’m a no. It never should have got this far. They ought to pull the nomination.”By late afternoon on Tuesday, at least five Senate Republicans told the Washington Post they opposed Ingrassia’s nomination. Had his nomination gone to a vote, Ingrassia could have lost up to three Republican votes on the homeland security committee, which Republicans control by a single seat. Democrats were expected to vote unanimously against the confirmation.The 30-year-old’s attorney, Edward Paltzik, questioned the authenticity of the messages to Politico and suggested they could be AI-generated. He said they were “self-deprecating” and “satirical humor”, adding that his client is “the furthest thing from a Nazi”.Prior to the publication of the alleged texts, Ingrassia found himself in hot water after a separate Politico report from earlier this month revealed he had been investigated by the Department of Homeland Security. The investigation took place after he allegedly canceled the hotel reservation of a female colleague before a work trip and told her that they would share a room. Politico noted that the woman filed a complaint against Ingrassia and later retracted it. Ingrassia has denied any wrongdoing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s nomination of Ingrassia came down in June and would have seen the agency that protects federal employees from prohibited personnel practices such as retaliation from whistleblowing being led by a relative novice.Historically, the agency has been led by nonpartisan lawyers with decades of experience. Ingrassia was admitted to the New York bar last year.Joseph Gedeon contributed reporting 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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      John Bolton indicted on charges of mishandling and transmitting classified information – US politics live

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      A federal grand jury has indicted John Bolton, the former national security adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, on charges of mishandling and transmitting classified information.The indictment, filed in Maryland, appears to ultimately have had sign off from career prosecutors in the US attorney’s office there despite initial reluctance to bring a case before the end of the year.The 18-count indictment against Bolton involves 8 counts of unlawfully transmitting national defense information and ten counts of retaining classified information under the Espionage Act, according to the 26-page indictment.A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s request to lift a lower court’s order that temporarily blocks the deployment of National Guard troops in Illinois during its appeal.The ruling allows a temporary restraining order against the deployment issued by US District judge April Perry in Chicago last week to remain in place.A three-judge panel of the Chicago-based 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals, made up of judges nominated by George HW Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, concluded that that “the facts do not justify the President’s actions.”Trump had asserted the power to deploy National Guard troops in Illinois after claiming federal immigration enforcement officer had faced violent protests as they attempted to arrest people.“Immigration arrests and deportations have proceeded apace in Illinois over the past year, and the administration has been proclaiming the success of its current efforts to enforce immigration laws in the Chicago area,” the court said.The court said there had likely been a violation of Illinois’ constitutional right to sovereignty, made worse by the fact that Texas National Guard troops were sent into the state.The court did pause a portion of Perry’s order that had barred the federalization of Illinois National Guard troops, allowing the troops to remain under federal control.The Trump administration announced Thursday that it is urging US employers to create new fertility benefit options to cover in vitro fertilization and other infertility treatments.In an announcement from the Oval Office, Donald Trump also said his administration had cut a deal with the drug manufacturer EMD Serono to lower the cost of one of its fertility drugs and list the drug on the government website TrumpRx.The justice department says that Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, has been charged with 10 counts of unlawful retention of national defense information and eight counts of transmission of that information.The indictment alleges that Bolton used personal email and messaging app accounts to send documents classified as high as Top Secret.The documents contained intelligence about what the government terms “future attacks, foreign adversaries, and foreign-policy relations.”The indictment also alleges that Bolton, like Trump after he left office in 2021, kept secret documents in his home. The documents Bolton kept included “intelligence on an adversary’s leaders as well as information revealing sources and collections used to obtain statements on a foreign adversary,” the government alleges.“Anyone who abuses a position of power and jeopardizes our national security will be held accountable,” Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, said. “No one is above the law.”When Donald Trump was indicted for the same crime by special counsel Jack Smith in 2023, in an indictment that cited evidence that Trump showed a ghostwriter working for his former chief of staff Mark Meadows “a four-page report” detailing US plans for striking Iran.According to audio of the conversation obtained by CNN, Trump even acknowledged that the document he showed the writer was “highly confidential, secret information” he could not make public because it was “still a secret”.A federal grand jury has indicted John Bolton, the former national security adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, on charges of mishandling and transmitting classified information.The indictment, filed in Maryland, appears to ultimately have had sign off from career prosecutors in the US attorney’s office there despite initial reluctance to bring a case before the end of the year.The 18-count indictment against Bolton involves 8 counts of unlawfully transmitting national defense information and ten counts of retaining classified information under the Espionage Act, according to the 26-page indictment.John Bolton, who served as Donald Trump’s national security advisor during his first term, but turned into a fierce Trump critic, has reportedly been indicted on federal charges by a grand jury in Maryland, officials tell MSNBC and CNN.At the White House a reporter asked Trump for his reaction to the news that Bolton was just indicted by a grand jury in Maryland.The president said: “I didn’t know that. You’re telling me for the first time, but I think he’s a bad person. I think he’s a bad guy.”“That’s the way it goes, right? That’s the way it goes,” said the president who vowed retribution on his political enemies while campaigning to be restored to office last year.Bolton becomes the third Trump critic to be indicted by his justice department in the past month, along with James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.Bolton has reportedly been under investigation for retaining classified information after leaving office, and showing it to associates.The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to a stark new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched without organized resistance.The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, was released on Thursday by the Steady State, a network of more than 340 former officers of the CIA, NSA, state department, and other national-security agencies.“These are people who have seen these indicators develop in countries that shifted dramatically away from democracy towards authoritarianism,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior intelligence official who spent two decades at the NSA, told reporters on Thursday. “And we’re seeing those things happening in our country today.”The analysts conclude with “moderate to high confidence” that the US is moving toward what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which elections and courts continue to function, but are “systematically manipulated” to consolidate executive power and weaken checks and balances. According to the assessment, these trends are increasingly visible in the US, as part of a broader effort by Donald Trump in his second term to “ensure loyalty and ideological conformity” across the federal government.Amid escalating tensions with Venezuela, and US military strikes on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean, the US admiral who commands military forces in Latin America will step down at the end of this year, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth announced on social media.The admiral, Alvin Holsey, just took over the US military’s Southern Command late last year for a position that normally lasts three years.A source told Reuters that there had been tension between him and Hegseth and questions about whether he would be fired in the days leading up to the announcement.The New York Times reports that an unnamed US official said that Holsey “had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.”Hegseth, in his social media post, did not disclose the reason for Holsey’s plan “to retire at year’s end.”Hegseth’s post noted that Holsey began his career “through the NROTC program at Morehouse College in 1988.” Morehouse is a private, historically black college in Atlanta.In February, Donald Trump abruptly fired the air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff, sidelining a history-making Black fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign to purge the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.In 2021, Holsey recorded a public service announcement urging Black Americans to take the covid-19 vaccine.Trump on his social media site said he’s “outraged” by a vote planned on Friday by the International Maritime Organization to impose a global fee on the carbon emissions produced by container ships.“The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping, and will not adhere to it in any way, shape, or form,” the president wrote on Truth Social.He added: “We will not tolerate increased prices on American Consumers OR, the creation of a Green New Scam Bureaucracy to spend YOUR money on their Green dreams. Stand with the United States, and vote NO in London tomorrow!”The US Chamber of Commerce is suing the Trump administration over the $100,000 fee imposed on H-1B visa petitions.The country’s biggest business lobbying group argues that the new fee is unlawful because it overrides provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that govern the H-1B program, including the requirement that fees be based on the costs incurred by the government in processing visas.Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s chief policy officer, said in a statement:“The new $100,000 visa fee will make it cost-prohibitive for US employers, especially start-ups and small and midsize businesses, to utilize the H-1B program, which was created by Congress expressly to ensure that American businesses of all sizes can access the global talent they need to grow their operations here in the U.S.”The University of Pennsylvania has become the latest educational institution to reject the White House’s proposed preferential funding compact, according to an email to the University community.“Earlier today, I informed the US Department of Education that Penn respectfully declines to sign the proposed Compact,” President J Larry Jameson wrote in a message to the Penn community Thursday, adding that his university did provide feedback to the department on the proposal.The “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is a proposed agreement from the Trump administration that would impose restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and limits on international student enrolment.Penn’s refusal makes it the third of the nine institutions that had initially been offered the deal to publicly turn it down. No institution has agreed to sign the compact so far.Brown University announced it had rejected the offer Wednesday, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the same last Friday. After MIT’s rejection, the Trump administration said the compact was open to all colleges and universities that want to sign it.Senate Democrats blocked debate on a defense appropriations bill on the floor earlier this afternoon, which was seen as a test for whether regular individual bipartisan funding bills can gain any traction despite the shutdown, now dragging into its third week.The bill, which passed out of committee with strong bipartisan support earlier this year, needed 60 votes to advance, but the final vote was 50 to 44. Several Democrats including Jeanne Shaheen voted to advance the bill.Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer objected to considering the bill without also voting on the annual labor, health and human services appropriations bill.“Right now, the only thing that is on the floor is just the defense bill. [John] Thune needs unanimous consent to add anything else to it. We don’t even know if he’ll get that,” Schumer told reporters earlier ahead of the vote.
      It’s always been unacceptable to Democrats to do the defense bill without other bills that have so many things that are important to the American people, in terms of healthcare, in terms of housing, in terms of safety.
      Senate majority leader John Thune expressed frustration that they couldn’t take that first step and said the optics were bad for the Democrats.
      If they want to stop the defense bill, I don’t think it’s very good optics for them. Particularly since this is just getting on it, and they would have multiple opportunities after this to block it if they want to.
      “I believe it is critical that the Senate and Congress return to a bipartisan appropriations approach and try to begin rebuilding trust,” Shaheen said in a statement after voting. “This vote would allow us to consider Senate appropriations bills which were passed out of committee with overwhelming bipartisan support.”The other Democratic senators who voted with Republicans were Catherine Cortez Masto and John Fetterman. Majority leader John Thune changed his vote to “no” so that procedurally he can bring the bill up for consideration again.Cortez Masto and Fetterman have previously voted for the GOP’s House-passed bill to reopen the government while Shaheen has been at the heart of talks with GOP colleagues about finding a way to end the shutdown.Vladimir Putin told Donald Trump in their phone call today that supplying US Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine would harm the peace process and damage US-Russia ties, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters.As I said earlier, this comes a day before Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s meeting with Trump at the White House tomorrow in which he is set to push for more US military support, including the crucial long-range offensive missiles.Ushakov said the planned new summit between the two presidents will be preceded by a phone call between US secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the coming days.The Putin-Trump call took place at Russia’s initiative, Ushakov added.In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump has just said:
      If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them.
      It comes after Hamas fighters have been captured on video in recent days ramping up their presence and reasserting the group’s authority by executing members of rival groups on the streets of Gaza.This is Trump’s clearest indication on the matter yet, after giving mixed messages in recent days, initially saying the violence “didn’t bother me much” as Hamas was clearing up “gangs”. Yesterday he appeared to concede that it could be “gangs plus” when asked if there was a possibility that Hamas was killing innocent civilians.“They will disarm, and if they don’t do so, we will disarm them, and it’ll happen quickly and perhaps violently,” Trump also said yesterday, though, as with the statement today, he hasn’t specified how he would follow through on his threat.A reminder that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is heading to the White House tomorrow to push for more US military support, including potential long-range offensive missiles. He will no doubt be nervous by Trump’s positive tone following his call with Putin.Trump has said he could supply the long-range weapons to Ukraine if Putin fails to come to the negotiating table. In its latest barrage, Russia launched more than 300 drones and 37 missiles to target infrastructure across Ukraine in overnight attacks, Zelenskyy said. Kyiv has ramped up its own attacks on Russian targets, including an oil refinery in the Saratov region today.Russia has been hitting Ukraine’s energy and power facilities for consecutive winters as the war drags into its fourth year.In the latest warnings to Russia, Trump said yesterday that Indian PM Narendra Modi had pledged to stop buying oil from Russia, and that the administration would push China to do the same. India has not confirmed any such commitment, though Reuters reported some Indian refiners are preparing to cut Russian oil imports, with expectations of a gradual reduction.US defense secretary Pete Hegseth said yesterday that Washington would “impose costs on Russia for its continued aggression” unless the war ends. More

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      Johnson says ‘I don’t have anything to negotiate’ as US shutdown drags on

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      The top House Republican said he won’t negotiate with Senate Democrats as the government shutdown dragged into its 14th day on Tuesday, while defending the Trump administration’s decision to shuffle Pentagon funds to make sure military personnel get their paychecks.Speaking to reporters, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, claimed: “I don’t have anything to negotiate” and accused Democrats of playing games ahead of the Senate’s scheduled eighth vote Tuesday evening on a House-passed measure to fund the government.He also dismissed Democratic concerns about the legality of the Pentagon’s decision to use unspent research and development funds to pay service members during the shutdown, starting with a paycheck on Wednesday.“If the Democrats want to go to court and challenge troops being paid, bring it,” Johnson said. “I’m grateful for a commander in chief who understands the priorities of the country.”The payment arrangement came after Donald Trump ordered his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to find money for military salaries over the weekend. Trump said in a post on TruthSocial that he wouldn’t let Democrats “hold our military, and the entire security of our nation, HOSTAGE” during the shutdown.The Pentagon and Office of Management and Budget announced that troops will receive their scheduled 15 October paycheck using reallocated funds, eliminating the immediate need for a separate US military pay bill.Johnson has said the Trump administration has “every right” to redirect the appropriated defense department funds, though Democratic lawmakers have questioned whether the action is legal.The speaker continued to blame the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, for the impasse, accusing him of blocking the House-passed “clean” continuing resolution to appease his party’s progressive wing.“We’re certainly not going to allow the American people to be taken hostage for his political gain,” Johnson said, adding that he had “no strategy” beyond “doing the right thing, the clearly obvious thing, the traditional thing”.Johnson claimed the Republican stopgap funding bill contains no partisan priorities, telling reporters on Tuesday: “I don’t have anything that I can take off of that document to make it more palatable for them.”The Republican speaker has kept the House in extended recess and scrapped scheduled votes as he attempts to pressure Senate Democrats into accepting the Republican proposal without modifications. Playing hardball has drawn praise from the rightwing House Freedom Caucus but criticism from some Republicans who argue the House should negotiate.According to a court filing by the country’s largest federal workers union, the American Federation of Government Employees, more than 4,000 government employees have been laid off during the shutdown. Senate Democrats representing Maryland and Virginia, states with high concentrations of federal workers, condemned the dismissals on Tuesday.“This is all part of the Trump 2025 playbook,” said Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland senator. “Stop attacking employees, stop attacking the American people, and start negotiating to reopen the federal government.” More

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      Republican and Democratic senators dig in heels over government shutdown

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      Republican and Democratic senators Lindsey Graham and Mark Kelly have dug their heels in over the government shutdown – which is now approaching two weeks, with the former saying that the closure won’t push him to meet Democrats’ demands for a restoration of Obama-era healthcare subsidies.Graham said on NBC News’s Meet the Press on Sunday that he was in favor of the Senate voting to reopen the government and prepared to “have a rational discussion” with Democrats – but not with the government shut down.“I’m willing to vote to open the government up tomorrow,” Graham said. “To my Democratic friends: I am not going to vote to extend these subsidies.”Graham, speaking to Democrats, added: “It’s up to you. If you want to keep it shut down, fine. It’s not going to change how I approach healthcare.”The senator’s comments came as Vice-President JD Vance warned that permanent cuts to the federal workforce will only get “deeper” as the shutdown continues.Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures that “the longer it goes on, Maria, the more significant they’re going to be. If you remember, we went nine days before announcing any significant layoffs.“The longer this goes on, the deeper the cuts are going to be,” Vance continued.More than 4,000 federal workers have so far been identified for job terminations. The Senate has voted multiple times over the last two weeks on a stopgap funding measure but not enough Democrats have joined the proposal to reach a 60-vote threshold.Graham’s comments may indicate a hardening approach to negotiations over healthcare subsidies with or without a functioning government.“The subsidies we’re talking about here,” Graham told NBC. “If the (Obama’s) Affordable Care Act is so affordable, why, every time I turn around, are we spending $350 billion to keep it afloat?”The dispute on the network continued with Arizona senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, criticizing Republicans for refusing to negotiate with Democrats.“We need a real negotiation, and we need a fix. We need this corrected for the American people. This is for so many people – their healthcare is running towards a cliff, and if we don’t fix this, it’s going to go right over it,” Kelly told host Kristen Welker on Meet the Press.Against increasing pressure to reach a deal, with both sides weighing the political cost of a lack of a resolution, House speaker Mike Johnson said on Monday that Republicans had “probably a hundred different ideas about how to fix it but we can’t do that overnight”.He said Democrats’ demands for a resolution to the healthcare subsidies issue without lengthy discussions were “impossible and inappropriate”.“It’s not a deliverable and they know it,” Johnson said. “They chose that issue because they thought it would sell well to the public and it would show they were fighting Trump. It’s all a big facade and I’m so frustrated by it.” More

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      The populist playbook: Democratic US Senate candidate seeks to replicate Mamdani’s success

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      During Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s Fight the Oligarchy tour stop in Michigan, Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed hit on bold populist policies like Medicare For All and taxing the rich.But he drew among the loudest cheers from the crowd in Kalamazoo, when he bellowed his updated reversal of an Obama catchphrase that signified a new pugilistic tactic when dealing with Maga attacks. “When they go low, we don’t go high. We take them to the mud and choke them out,” he said.El-Sayed’s fiery speech and his populist campaign in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the Senate race comes on the heels of Zohran Mamdani’s stunning June win in New York City’s mayoral primary, which has generated momentum on the left-wing of the party.The Sanders-endorsed, anti-establishment El-Sayed, 40, follows a similar blueprint as Mamdani, and Michigan in some ways offers favorable terrain for the leftwing populist playbook. But at the same time a repeat of Mamdani’s success in the more conservative, upper midwest swing state is far from certain, and the race is viewed as a possible bellwether on leftists’ electability in statewide campaigns across the US.“This is a time when that call for new politics is resonating beyond the places one would expect it to resonate, like in the far reaches of Michigan’s rural communities,” said Yousef Rabhi, a former Michigan House Democratic floor leader who has endorsed El-Sayed. “Abdul and Mamdani are speaking to this moment.”Like Mamdani, El-Sayed eschews partisanship in favor of leftwing populist economic ideas, sharply criticizes Israel, and leans heavily on a sense of authenticity. In New York City, that formula resonated with younger people, activated disaffected voters and attracted support for Mamdani from across the political spectrum. Mamdani remains strongly ahead in the New York mayoral raceUsing that style in Michigan is a break from the moderate Democratic politics that for decades have dominated in the state, and which defeated El-Sayed in 2018 when he lost to now governor Gretchen Whitmer in a gubernatorial Democratic primary.But since then, El-Sayed has run health departments in Detroit and Wayne county, and touts accomplishments like helping to eliminate $700m in medical debt for local residents.The economic playing field has also shifted since 2018, and El-Sayed thinks his message is more likely to resonate now than seven years ago. “People now understand Donald Trump was not the cause, but the symptom,” he said during an interview with the Guardian at a Detroit coffee shop.Moreover, Democratic voters’ frustration with the party is near all time highs, and the left believes there is appetite for outsider candidates, populist economics and criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. It has boosted El-Sayed, especially in a state that’s home to the uncommitted movement and large Arab-American and Muslim populations.But there are some crucial differences between El-Sayed’s and Mamdani’s races.El-Sayed’s opponents are not damaged like Mamdani’s main competitors, mayor Eric Adams and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. In the August 2026 primary election, El-Sayed faces US congresswoman Haley Stevens, and state senator Mallory McMorrow. The latter is similarly young and critical of party leadership, and has styled herself as an outsider. But McMorrow largely shares the establishment’s economic policy positions and brought on political insiders, like controversial former Cuomo consultant Lis Smith.Educated, middle-class voters who wanted to vote for an outsider were key to Mamdani’s win. El-Sayed also needs those votes, but they may be split among him and McMorrow, even if the two candidates have substantially different policies and El-Sayed is more truly an outsider, said Josh Cohen, a progressive political analyst who writes the Ettingermentum newsletter.“The race is not the ideal feel and circumstance in the way that New York was for Mamdani,” Cohen said. An El-Sayed win would suggest voters are concerned with policy, he added. “It would be a very meaningful sign that people’s desire for a shift isn’t superficial.”Another key difference between McMorrow and El-Sayed lies in Israel policy. El-Sayed calls for an end to “blank check” military aid to Israel and other countries, and uses the term “genocide”. McMorrow, by contrast, has tried to walk a tightrope, calling for humanitarian relief while not using the term “genocide” until October.El-Sayed’s populist economic proposals include a ban on tax incentives for companies like Amazon, new taxes for billionaires, the elimination of medical debt and a strengthening of anti-monopoly laws to address corporate price gouging.Though those are leftist ideas, El-Sayed said he avoids the “left-right” label, which might help thread a needle in places like the rural, conservative upper peninsula. Financial pain and its cause are the same everywhere, El-Sayed added, so his focus is on the economic divide, not the cultural or political one.“It’s the divide between the people who have been locked out and those doing the locking out,” he said. He added that his solutions have broad appeal no matter what they are labeled, and that explains why some Trump voters surprisingly show up for “a guy named Abdul”.“They didn’t vote for Donald Trump out of a sense of hate for Muslims. They voted for him because of a sense of frustration with the way the system has locked them out,” El-Sayed said. Indeed, the Trump-to-Mamdani voter was a key piece of the story in New York City.But Mamdani also had built-in help from politically aligned groups who in recent years laid dow campaign and issue infrastructure that was key to his win. No such infrastructure to push these ideas exists in Michigan.Even if El-Sayed wins the primary, Republicans will try to make the general election about social wedge issues instead of economics, said Jared Abbott, a political scientist and director of the Center for Working Class Politics.Mamdani and El-Sayed have so far been “very disciplined” in focusing on the “working class’s bread and butter economic issues”, Abbott added, and that would be essential to his overcoming GOP general election attacks.A win in the general could have an outsize impact on national politics – just as the Squad members’ 2018 midterm wins reverberated into the presidential primary and Biden’s domestic policy, El-Sayed’s election in a swing state could help pull the 2028 presidential race and next president to the left.“It would be a massive proof of concept that progressives do not [currently] have,” Abbott said. More