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      Construction appears to start on Trump’s $250m White House ballroom

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      Construction crews appear to have started demolishing part of the East Wing of the White House to make way for Donald Trump’s planned ballroom, prompting widespread criticism on social media and beyond.One former lawmaker even called the renovation an “​​utter desecration”.The Washington Post, which obtained and published photos of the demolition activity and cited two eyewitnesses, reported on Monday that demolition is under way and shared an image showing construction in progress and parts of the exterior ripped down.Other images, including ones seen in the New York Post, also show demolition of parts of the East Wing.The White House did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.On his Truth Social platform on Monday, Trump said that “ground has been broken on the White House” to build the new ballroom.“I am honored to be the first President to finally get this much-needed project underway — with zero cost to the American Taxpayer! The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly,” he added.Earlier, at a ceremony in Washington DC celebrating the NCAA champion Louisiana State University baseball team on Monday, Trump said his administration plans to build “the most beautiful ballroom in the country”.“I didn’t know I’d be standing here right now because, right on the other side, you have a lot of construction going on, which you might hear periodically,” he said during the White House event.Plans to build an enormous $250m ballroom addition to the White House – one of the largest projects at the White House in more than a century – emerged in July. At the time, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the renovated space would span 90,000 sq ft (8,300 sq meters) and seat up to 650 people. Officials said that it would be paid for by Trump and unnamed donors.View image in fullscreenOf the renovation, Trump said in July: “In the White House, for 150 years, they’ve wanted to have a ballroom,” adding that “there’s never been a president that was good at ballrooms.“I’m good at building things and we’re going to build quickly and on time” he said. “It’ll be beautiful, top, top of the line.”Reports broke in August that work would begin in September. It’s expected to be completed before the end of Trump’s second term, in January 2029.Trump previously claimed that the new structure would not “interfere with the current building”, according to the Washington Post.View image in fullscreen“It’ll be near it but not touching it – and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” Trump said during an executive order signing in July, according to the Post. “It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”Earlier this month, Trump hosted a dinner at the White House for donors funding the ballroom. During the event, he reportedly opened the curtains of the East Room to show where construction on the ballroom had started. He told the guests that the new venue would feature bulletproof glass, accommodate 1,000 people and be capable of hosting a presidential inauguration.Guests at the dinner reportedly included representatives from Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Palantir and Lockheed Martin.Concerns and criticisms over Trump’s renovation plans have cropped up from lawmakers and on social media.Democratic representative Mark Takano of California proposed a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds for any construction or renovation at the White House during a government shutdown, unless the work is directly related to health or safety. Monday marked day 20 of the ongoing government shutdown.Joe Walsh, a former Republican member of Congress, called the renovation an “​​utter desecration”.“If I ran for President in 2028, I’d run on taking a bulldozer to Trump’s ballroom, an utter desecration of the peoples’ house,” Walsh said in a post on X on Monday, reacting to a picture showing part of the White House being demolished.“In fact, I’d invite the American people one weekend to bring their own sledgehammers & crowbars to the White House to help tear that abomination down.”“Wealth & income inequality is at record highs in America, but glad we’re spending $250M on a vanity project,” said human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid. More

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      No Kings protesters on their hopes for resistance movement against Trump: ‘If we lose momentum, we lose the fight’

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      Saturday’s No Kings protests brought millions to the streets across all 50 states in the latest demonstration against Donald Trump’s administration amid a government shutdown. But many protesters are already strategizing about what to do next.Some said continuing protests were a sign of vibrant civil resistance against the administration’s heavy-handed policies, which have challenged legal and constitutional norms in the US. They also discussed economic boycotts and strikes.Others were concerned it would take more Americans feeling direct impact to catalyze change. “I think we have to see the demise before it can turn around, sadly, but we’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Eric Stone, a 35-year-old from Oklahoma who attended the protest in Washington DC.Guardian reporters covered protests in Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago and Los Angeles and asked attendees why they showed up, what they are hoping to see from the resistance movement, and whether the Democratic party was an effective opposition party. Here is what they said:Washington DCMary PhillipsA Native American originally from the Omaha tribe in Nebraska and Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico who now lives in Washington DCView image in fullscreen“I think there are brilliant minds who are here today who know what bad legislation, bad policies, can do to our entire country, and what the future looks like if we continue down, not able to stop what’s happening and proceeding. These are all people from different walks of life, different skills and and levels of masteries in their own disciplines.“I believe the [leaders] who are vocal are definitely making waves and doing what they’re supposed to do, but I think there are others who are still on the fence. [There are] key issues that we need them to be 100% towards democracy, and it feels like they’re not. It feels like they are sticking to the old rules. But we have all set a set of new rules right now and they need to look at what those rules are to make up their decisions in their backrooms. And then speak on the floor what those are, what we are fighting on the streets.“So No Kings, I think, is the pinnacle of what we’re so close to right now, having a king. Once martial law goes into place, we would be under that threat, and we don’t know what the end of it looks like really, other than changing the constitution, which I think is easier done than we thought ever could be. This movement may turn into more than No Kings. It may turn into saving lives, period – saving our life, saving our freedom to be United States citizens because anybody right now can be told you’re not a citizen any more.”Laura BuckwaldNo Kings protesterView image in fullscreen“People are waking up because right now, it’s affecting people immediately in their day-to-day lives. It’s affecting our health insurance. It’s affecting our ability to just live our lives as we choose to live them. The government is trying to tell us how to run our lives, and that’s just not acceptable in the United States. As far as leadership is concerned, we’ve been disappointed on the leaders that we should have, particularly in Congress, and we’re hoping that this gives them the courage to stand up. We’re proud of what they’re doing now right now, not opening up the government until we have proper healthcare covered. But they need to do a lot more doing that, so I hope they do.“Just yesterday, I got a notice from my health insurance company about my premiums going up – they’re almost doubling. They put straight out that they are not going to cover any healthcare that is for transition purposes, so our transgender Americans will not have coverage under the plan that I have. That is totally unacceptable. I teach young people and I’ve encountered trans youth, and they have told me that without this healthcare, it makes some of them want to commit suicide.“I think [what Republicans have done has] been despicable. They have cut so many programs just so that they can give tax breaks to rich people, make billionaires trillionaires … Our taxes aren’t going to go down. We’re not going to see any benefit from it and we’re going to have the same taxes, if not more, and we’re going to have less in benefits that we have paid for. This is a tyrannical regime in office right now and they need to resign. They can’t handle the job. They’re incompetent and they’re mean. They’re cruel to people in the United States and that is anti-American. It is un-Christian and it’s unacceptable.”Mike ReidA former Republican from Maryland who switched parties during Bill Clinton’s administration. He said he hasn’t voted for Trump in any electionsView image in fullscreenReid was holding up a sign of the founding fathers with “No Kings” on it.“It’s actually my wife’s idea, but these were the original No Kings gang and they’re the ones who first had said ‘no kings in America.’ And then on the back we have the original Bill of Rights, which has the part about freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion and the right of people to peaceably assemble. So we and the people here are standing up for what America is supposed to be … We’re the ones who represent what real America is. Those rightwingers and the White House and Congress – they are betraying everything this country was supposed to be about, and that’s why people, common people, have to stand up.“I think that some Democratic governors like Gavin Newsom [in] California and JB Pritzker in Illinois are doing very well. They’re standing up. And I mean, there is a limit to what they can do with the bloc, they’re totally out of power right now. But state government, Democratic state governors, some of them are standing up – not all unfortunately, but some of them.“I grew up in a Republican family. I was Republican up until about 20-some years ago, back when the party was about limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual rights. They have betrayed all of that. And the party that today calls themselves Republicans – they’re not Republicans, they’re fascists, and they’re betraying my great-great-grandfather who served in the Union army in the civil war.”Eric Stone, 35Identifies as an independent and said most of his family are Republican Trump supportersView image in fullscreen“My family is Maga; my family is Trump supporters. I grew up in a small town where they didn’t want a dictatorship. They didn’t want people who were disrespectful to women. They didn’t want people who were racist and all these hateful things. And yet here they are supporting and cheering on this man like they want him to be the second coming of God. And now that I’m out here protesting this, it’s like … everybody in that circle drank the Kool-Aid. “I got people losing their jobs [around me because of the shutdown]. They’re scared that they can’t pay their bills. They’re stressing … and they’re everyday people who work their jobs and work for this country to keep it running. And we’re going to tell them they shouldn’t be paid for, what for? “I support what they stand for. For the most part, you’re not going to agree with everybody on everything. However, I feel like Democrats, they don’t have, for a lack of better terms, the balls – they’re too weak, because we always end up in this situation. The Democrats just want to talk for long hours and go on TV and do these events, which is beautiful … It’s powerful. However, you have access to that building right there. We’re standing right next to the Capitol building. Go do something about it.”Shawn SkellyFormer assistant secretary of defense for readiness in the Biden-Harris administration (only the second-ever out trans person to hold a Senate-confirmed position) and the co-founder of Out in National Security. She was a speaker at the rallyView image in fullscreen“The United States military is made up of people from every background, from every part of the country, to include immigrants and to include LGBTQ people. [Trump officials have] decided that you can’t allow transgender service members to serve. [These members have] been in command of units flying aircraft. They are high-end engineers. They are small unit leaders. None of them have blown up or failed or been drummed out of service because of the fact that they’re transgender. Each and every one of our 2.1 million service members are American heroes in their own way. You can’t have people in that institution while you’re trying to make trans people the enemy and the reason for oppression in that way.“There should never be a shutdown, frankly, and that it’s lasted this long is the fault of the [Republican] party, the political party that has all the levers of power right now … and a very willing supreme court to let them do pretty much what they want to do, pending appeal. This is democracy in action right here. This is our constitution and our civil rights in action. It’s about ‘we the people’. As Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, it’s government of the people, by the people, for the people. This is America at its best.” Los Angeles, CaliforniaGinny Eschbach, 72Turned out on Saturday for her 42nd protest since Trump’s inauguration. She wore a SpongeBob SquarePants costume to be ‘whimsical’View image in fullscreen“I have felt that the movement needed a face for a long time, someone to rally the troops, who we respect and admire. But who is that? I do not know.” She suggested it might possibly be a figure like Barack Obama. “There’s all these groups and these protests all coalesce, but I’m afraid it’s too fragmented. There needs to be one movement.”“This is not a joke,” she said of Republicans’ resistance to negotiate with Democrats over the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies. “If they defund people’s health insurance by not continuing the subsidies, it’s gonna be a mess. Even if they got that through, our healthcare is being so eroded by cutting science funding. There’s already reports of rural hospitals closing down. This is just going to spread through the country. It’s going to be a nightmare.”Eschbach said she will definitely continue to protest – sometimes she will attend two to three a weekend. She is currently canvassing to help pass Proposition 50 in California, part of the plan to counter Texas’s gerrymandered maps. “I’ll just carry on,” she said. “I write postcards, I go to protests, I talk to people.  I’ll do whatever I can.”Talia Guppy, 46Social worker in Los AngelesView image in fullscreenGuppy comes from a long tradition of social justice activism – her parents marched with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. “The least I can do is be out here,” she said.Among the leaders stepping forward, Guppy mentioned her state’s governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, who is widely expected to run for president in 2028. She credited the governor with going “head to head and toe to toe” with the president. “Sometimes we have to fight fire with fire,” she said. “We can’t always take the easy road.”Guppy said she has many friends who are federal workers and have told her they want Democrats to keep fighting to preserve access to affordable healthcare and to constrain the Trump administration. “I’ve been protesting since the first big raid on June 6,” she said, and vowed to continue. “We’ve been doing as much as we can anytime that we can because it has to continue. If we lose the momentum, then we lose the fight.”Taylor G, 55 No Kings protesterHe said some people have stepped up to try to check Trump – the unions, certain universities and among Los Angeles’s entertainment industry, including Jane Fonda.  But he said he has been disappointed so far by the lack of response from the “dotcom” companies, such as Facebook and other tech giants. “All of those companies just seem to be going along with it because it’s good for their business,” he said. “People have to get way out of their comfort zones,” he added, suggesting the left-leaning movement needed more leaders willing to venture into less friendly territory and try to persuade people who may not be ideologically aligned with Democrats. “Even though we might not agree on everything, we could agree that what’s going on in the country is not good,” he said.  He added that he has friends who have left the country because of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. He approved of the Democrats’ hardball approach to the government shutdown and would absolutely be willing to walk off the job. “I think that we need to do a lot more like what they do in Europe, a general strike, meaning everybody walks out, not just Democrats,” he said. Chicago, IllinoisOscar Gonzalez, 28From the west side of the cityView image in fullscreen“My parents are immigrants. I love them to death. 
I want Chicago to be a safe city. I want America to be a great nation for everybody. No human’s illegal, so I’m here to embody that and show everybody that we have all the power to make change.“We need a Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, Martin Luther [King], we need somebody to embody. Fred Hampton, you know, we’re in Chicago.”Abel Mebratu, 43From Rogers Park, a neighborhood in ChicagoView image in fullscreenMebratu was carrying a sign depicting Silverio Villegas-González, who was killed by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) last month. “[I’m here] giving a voice to a voiceless man that has been taken from us – unfairly and unlawfully – and his kids need justice. “I’m originally from Ethiopia and I consider myself a Chicagoan. We have values that we share and when our values are attacked, we come together. We’re led by our values and what we stand for and what we want to pass on for our next generation.” Lindsay Weinberg, 43No Kings protesterView image in fullscreenWeinberg held a sign referencing her great-grandmother, who died in the Holocaust.“It’s really personal to me when I hear people getting grabbed off the streets and taken away … I mean, many, many victims of the Holocaust don’t know what happened to their relatives, but I happen to know that [my great-grandmother’s] bones are in a mass grave … that’s important history for people to remember.“People are getting disappeared. 
People are hiding. People are being murdered. People are being wounded. 
People are experiencing trauma. It’s escalating.”Atlanta, GeorgiaGeoff Sumner, 68A retired military veteran from Stone Mountain, GeorgiaView image in fullscreen“There don’t seem to be any [leaders of the resistance] at the moment, so we’re it. Right now we got nobody. Where are they? [Chuck] Schumer-crats? Hakeem [Jeffries]? We got nobody.”Sumner doesn’t agree with what the Democrats are doing regarding the shutdown. “We don’t need to negotiate with fascists … You want our votes? Stop all this fascism. Stop all this arresting people in the street … It’s a hell of a lot more than healthcare, ain’t it?”“We gotta get the Trump regime out – all of them out. We gotta do it fast before they consolidate whatever they’re doing … How far should we go? That’s up to every individual. But I think people in America are in denial or they don’t know how bad it’s fixing to get.”Jake Riley, 44Project manager from AtlantaView image in fullscreen“I would say AOC, first of all, she would be a leader if I had to pick somebody. She would probably be up there. But as far as the protesters and on-the-ground people? I think it’s better if it’s more of a loose alliance of people. I don’t really think we have a leader structure.“After the rally, we have to get [everyone] running for every office imaginable. There’s lots of contests that go unchallenged.”Joshua Wilson, 22Multimedia producer from Lawrenceville, GeorgiaView image in fullscreen“I work with a lot of government officials at my job as clients. With the shutdown happening, I’ve been getting less work … and less work. Recently my boss politely told me, ‘Hey, you know, if you don’t want to come to work’ … I can just stay home on certain days because of it. I do think Democrats are doing the right thing, but granted it does affect me and affect me in a big way. So I’m willing to risk my paycheck for doing what’s right.“I feel like this [protest] is actually something. We should be joining organisations, reading up, getting educated and knowledgeable about the situation, or at least listening to outlets. You know, at least trying to join the community.” More

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      ‘My vote is my voice’: protesters fight for democracy as Trump casts shadow

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      Wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “We won’t Black down”, Wanda Mosley had made the trip from Atlanta. “I had to be here because the Voting Rights Act is on life support,” the 55-year-old explained. “Today the court will synthesise the arguments and decide if they’re going to kill it – or allow it to live.”Mosley was among a few hundred protesters who gathered in warm October sunshine outside the supreme court on Wednesday. Inside the building, whose facade was obscured by scaffolding, justices were weighing arguments in a case involving Louisiana electoral districts and section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.From afar, it might seem like a dry debate over an arcane law enacted by Congress half a century ago. But to those gathered at the court steps, most of whom were Black, there was a palpable consciousness that the legacy of civil rights giants such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King and John Lewis was on the line.Speakers noted that the Voting Rights Act had been a landmark law intended to prevent racial discrimination in voting. Undercutting it would reverse decades of progress.People held aloft signs that said “Black voters matter”, “Build Black political power”, “Fight for fair maps”, “Fight like hell!”, “It’s about us”, “My vote is my voice”, “Protect people, not power”. One said, “Protect our vote” around a photo of Lewis, the Georgia congressman who died five years ago.Donald Trump cast a shadow. An African American man waved a black-and-white flag that declared: “Fuck Trump and fuck you for voting for him.” A white woman carried a sign with a mocking cartoon image of the president and the slogan: “Trump’s afraid of free and fair elections.”Another held a sign that referenced Marshall, the first African American supreme court justice, and current justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative who is also African American. “Thurgood is watching you, Clarence,” it said. The back of the sign added: “Stop legalizing Trump’s race war.”There were chants of “Power to the people” and “We shall not be moved”. Songs including Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come, Common and John Legend’s Glory and Jill Scott’s Golden boomed from loudspeakers.Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, admitted mixed feelings to the crowd: “There’s a part of me that gets sad at the impending death of this thing that has meant so much. I feel that sadness. There’s a part of me that feels weak, that feels small as I stand outside this huge building with so much history.”But Albright also insisted on hope, referencing Lewis’s role in the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965, where he led peaceful protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “When we believe, we got the power to move mountains, we got the power to cross the bridge in a city called Selma and changed the course of history.“We got the power to make good trouble and we’ve got the power to move this court. This court ain’t nothing but another mountain for us to move. We’ve got that kind of power but we’ve got to believe, y’all.”A great cheer went up when Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who had been arguing on behalf of a group of Black voters, emerged from the court building and descended the steps that have witnessed many past triumphs. Two white women in police uniform and sunglasses looked on.Nelson struck an optimistic tone, telling the gathering: “We believe in the future of this multiracial democracy. We believe that, no matter what assaults and attacks we are currently facing, the right to vote is still the lifeblood of our democracy and that it must be protected at all costs.“And we know that the law is on our side. We know that if these justices follow their own words, we will prevail in this case and so that is the argument that we made today.”Speakers framed the legal fight as the latest chapter in a long, generational struggle for civil rights, frequently invoking the movement’s heroes.Terri Sewell, a Democratic congresswoman who represents Alabama’s seventh congressional district, which includes her home town of Selma, said: “I want to remind all of you of what John Lewis said on his very last time on that bridge in Selma.“John’s body was riddled with cancer but he stood up tall and strong at the apex of that bridge and he said with a very strong voice: ‘Never give up. Never give in. Keep the faith and let’s keep our eyes on the prize.’”Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, cited King’s “promissory note” analogy from the March on Washington, stating that “America had defaulted on that promise” and that generations later the question remains: “When will this country make good on what it put down on paper?”As the crowd dispersed, Mosley, the activist from Atlanta, lingered a while and reflected on why she had come. “It’s frustrating because I’m as American as anybody else,” she said. “I’m a descendant of enslaved Africans that literally built this country.“I deserve to have unfettered rights to vote, and I deserve to have representation that lives in my neighborhood, that comes from my community and knows what our community needs. And we’ll fight for those things.” More

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      Mocktails for Maga: why the US right is turning sober

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      Butterworth’s, an eclectically decorated restaurant in Washington DC, is an unofficial lounge of the Maga elite. A nameplate on one table declares it the official “nook” of Raheem Kassam, the former adviser to the rightwing British politician Nigel Farage and a co-owner of the restaurant. Steve Bannon is also frequently sighted holding court over Carolina gold rice – though the signature dish is bone-marrow escargot, which some young Maga politicos swear is good for your collagen.When he opened the farm-to-table brasserie in 2024, Bart Hutchins, Butterworth’s chef and one of its partners, was determined to resist what he sees as “the new puritanism” of wellness and sobriety culture. Hutchins finds non-alcoholic “mocktails” annoying on principle. “I did this edict, where I was like, ‘I’m not stocking that stuff,’” he said. “If you want to drink a glass of juice, just ask for a glass of juice; I’m not gonna pretend it’s a cocktail.”Hutchins has never felt teetotalism’s temptation, he told me, and his memory of drinks marketed as alcohol alternatives, like the near-beer O’Doul’s, was that they were “terrible”. But lately, as more Republican staffers, pundits and politicians patronize Butterworth’s antler-bedecked environs, a fifth column of non-drinkers has quietly undermined his anti-mocktail edict.It’s not just at Butterworth’s where rightwingers are drinking less. A Gallup poll in August found that the share of Americans of any political stripe who say they consume alcohol is at its lowest in nearly 90 years – though by only one percentage point. More strikingly, Republicans are the group, of the many demographic cohorts measured, that has turned most aggressively to sobriety.Gallup, which has asked Americans about their alcohol use since the 1930s, found in 2023 that 65% of Republicans said they drink alcohol – about the same as Democrats and independents. Just two years later, in 2025, that number has plunged a staggering 19 points to 46%. Democrats and independents also report drinking less, but each only by single digits. (All the results are self-reported; Gallup took participants at their word.)The decline is surprising and “statistically significant”, Lydia Saad, the director of US social research at Gallup, told me – though she has “no real hypothesis” for the sudden rise of Republican teetotalism.View image in fullscreenLaurence Whyatt, an analyst at Barclays who covers the beverage industry, “can’t explain it” either. He suspects the broader US decline in drinking may have to do with pandemic-era inflation and belt-tightening and may not last. “But there’s no obvious reason why Republicans would be drinking less,” he said. “Of course, I’m aware that some prominent Republicans don’t drink. Could that be the reason?”Yet theories abound. Perhaps this is another manifestation of the cult of personality around Donald Trump, a Diet Coke enthusiast. Maybe the rising tide of Christian nationalism has revived an old-fashioned Protestant temperance. Or perhaps red-blooded rightwingers, eager to “Make America healthy again”, are eschewing beer, barbecues and bourbon to become the sort of smoothie-drinking health nuts they might once have mocked.Prominent rightwing or right-adjacent abstainers include Trump himself, whose older brother died of alcoholism-related heart attack; Robert F Kennedy Jr (who has spoken about his own substance problems); Tucker Carlson (a recovering alcoholic); and the activist Charlie Kirk (for health reasons). JD Vance drinks, but his predecessor Mike Pence, a devout born-again Christian, did not. Joe Rogan, the podcaster and gym-bro whisperer who endorsed Trump in 2024, quit drinking this year for health reasons.“None of my core team [of colleagues] under 30 drinks,” Bannon, who hosts the podcast War Room, said in a text message.The War Room’s 24-year-old White House correspondent, Natalie Winters, does not drink for health reasons – nor wear perfume, consume seed oils or drink fluoridated tap water. Earlier this year a friend of hers told the Times of London that elective sobriety had become common and accepted in rightwing political circles. “Here you don’t second-guess,” the friend said. “In London if someone isn’t drinking, you think they have an alcohol problem. Here it’s either that, or they’re Mormon, or because they’re focused on health.”Carlson, speaking to me by phone as he returned from grouse hunting with his dogs, said he had noticed that young conservatives, particularly men, were far more health-conscious than they once were. When he came up as a journalist, he said, the milieu was awash in booze and cigarette smoke. “I’m just from a different world. When I was 25, the health question was ‘filter or non-filter?’” he said. “And I always went with non-filter.”Carlson quit drinking in 2002, after a spiral whose nadir saw him having two double screwdrivers for breakfast. He said he was surprised – but happy – to see people today, even those who are not problem drinkers, quitting or moderating their consumption. The Athletic Brewing Company’s alcohol-free beers are popular, he has noticed, and not just among “sad rehab cases like me. I think it’s normal young people.”Carlson – who has recently offered a range of unorthodox health advice including using nicotine to improve focus and testicle tanning to improve testosterone levels – says political professionals and journalists today also inhabit a 24/7 news cycle in which “there’s just, substantively, a lot more going on; the world is reshaping in front of our eyes,” he said. “I think there’s an incentive to pay attention in a way that there wasn’t before. It’s just kind of hard to imagine spending three hours away from your phone – or three hours, like, getting loaded midday.”View image in fullscreenHutchins, Butterworth’s chef, noticed when diners, including those he considered “reasonable people, and not insufferable”, kept asking for non-alcoholic options. The restaurant was gradually “brought over to the dark side”, he said, ruefully. He tested a few zero-proof drinks that he deemed respectable enough to serve beside marrow without shame.Many patrons still drink enthusiastically, and by 10pm most nights the atmosphere is “pretty bacchanalian”, he said. But Butterworth’s now offers a pre-packaged alcohol-free Negroni, verjus (a wine alternative made from unripe grapes) and non-alcoholic Guinness (“super popular”, Hutchins said).Changing health attitudes are probably a factor in the broader decline in US alcohol consumption. Recent research has cast doubt on the idea that even moderate drinking is an acceptable health risk. In January, the US surgeon general suggested that alcohol bottles should carry warnings that drinking can contribute to cancer.Malcolm Purinton, a beer historian at Northeastern University, noted that many young people learned adult socialization during Covid lockdowns, meaning their relationship with alcohol may differ from that of their parents or older siblings. People turning 21, the legal drinking age, do not necessarily see drinking as cool.“There’s always some form of rebellion between generations,” he said. Thanks to the cruel march of time, for instance, craft beer – which millennials once embraced as a sophisticated alternative to their fathers’ Miller Lites – is now itself a “dad drink”.Yet none of this explains the dramatic shift among Republicans. Nor does it explain another odd anomaly: the same Gallup poll found that Republicans, despite reporting drinking less than other groups, were less likely than Democrats or independents to say they viewed moderate drinking as dangerous.Some observers suggest the shift may have more to do with who now identifies as Republican. “Republicans made a big push in toss-up states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2024 to register more Republicans, especially among far-right Christians, Mormons and Amish,” Mark Will-Weber, the author of a book on US presidents’ drinking habits, told the Financial Times in August. “These religious groups abstain from alcohol.”Saad is not sure. Republican respondents report drinking less regardless of other factors such as religiosity, she noted. “We’re not seeing anything that would tell us, you know, ‘It’s religious Republicans,’ ‘It’s pro-Trump Republicans,’ ‘It’s Republicans paying attention to the news.’ It’s really across the board.”It’s also difficult to determine the ideological correlation with sobriety. Although rightwing parties have gained ground in many other countries in recent years, Whyatt said, those places have not typically seen the same “aggressive decline in consumption”. The phenomenon seems specific to conservative Americans.The best guess may be that Republicans have turned against alcohol for the same economic and health reasons that Americans in general have – but amplified by “Make America healthy again” politics (with its hostility to vaccines and chemicals, and its faint granola paranoia) and a self-help podcast culture popular on the right that extols wellness, discipline, and treating your body like a temple.Months before his death, Charlie Kirk spoke on his podcast about the reasons he had quit drinking. He said he had done so “four or five” years earlier to improve his sleep and general health. Sobriety was “becoming trendier”, he argued, listing Trump, Carlson, Elon Musk and the Christian pundit Dennis Prager among prominent conservatives who don’t drink – or, in Musk’s case, don’t often.“The top-performing people I’ve ever been around,” Kirk said, “are very against alcohol, against substances. They’ll tell you they perform better, think clearer, have better memory, better recall, more energy, more pace. And I [also] find that some of the people who drink the most, they’re hiding something, they’re masking something.”Most experts acknowledged that it is too soon to tell whether this new sobriety will stick. “You can tie yourself in knots trying to solve those puzzles,” said Saad, the Gallup pollster. “We’re going to just have to wait and see if this holds up next year … maybe by then we’ll see other groups catch up.”Hutchins said Butterworth’s will continue to cater to drinkers and non-drinkers, just as it caters to diners of all political persuasions. But one group of patrons, he added, seems particularly unsettled by the sight of conservatives – or anyone – succumbing to the vice of sobriety.“We have a lot of British clientele, for some reason,” he said. “As soon as some new [British] journalist or diplomat type moves to DC, they come here. And they all say: ‘Nobody drinks here. Nobody even has martinis at lunch. What is happening in this country?’” More

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      US authorities remove Trump-Epstein statue from National Mall

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      An impromptu statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands was unceremoniously removed from the National Mall in Washington just a day after a group of anonymous artists erected it there.The piece showed the president and the late convicted sex offender, who were friends in the past, looking joyful together, with wide grins and feet kicked back.A plaque stated that it was built in honor of friendship month. “We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J Trump and his ‘closest friend’ Jeffrey Epstein,” the accompanying text stated.The Secret Handshake, the group that created the art, had obtained a permit that allowed it to keep the statue displayed in the capital until 8pm on Sunday.But the National Park Service, the federal agency that oversees the area, removed the statue because “it was not compliant with the permit issued”, Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson for Department of the Interior, said to CNN.Trump, who usually is adept at shaking free of any scandal, has not been able to temper the widespread curiosity and also anger from some on the right over the administration not disclosing the so-called Epstein files – all the material the authorities have on the business dealings, crimes and investigations into same regarding the New York financier, who killed himself in jail while awaiting federal trial in 2019 on sex-trafficking offenses. His accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving a long prison sentence.A Secret Handshake artist who identified himself as Patrick but would not provide his full name to the Guardian said in a telephone interview that the group built the Trump-Epstein statue to “honor the one and only true friend Donald Trump seems to have in his life”.In 2002, Trump told New York magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with” but has repeatedly said in recent times that the two fell out long ago. The White House has called Epstein “a creep”.Epstein had also told the journalist Michael Wolff that he was Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years”.Trump recently said he was “not a fan” of Epstein and that he stopped talking to him because Epstein “stole people that worked for me”.Patrick said he was confused by the authorities’ decision to remove the statue.“The Trump administration has mostly been all about rebuilding statues that have already been torn down, of Confederate generals and other racist tropes and figures from the past” he said. “I would argue that Trump is a racist figure from the past, so why would you tear that down?”In a statement to the New York Times, the White House said: “Democrats, the media and the organization that’s wasting their money on this statue knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents.” More

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      Trump threatens to call national emergency in Washington DC over Ice cooperation – US politics live

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      Welcome to our live coverage of US politics.Donald Trump has threatened to call a national emergency and federalize Washington DC after the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, said its police would not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), whose agents have been taking illegal suspects into custody and have been accused of racially profiling people in doing so.The US president took charge of the city’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) on 11 August for 30 days, activating the National Guard and deploying federal officers in what he framed as a crackdown on crime and homelessness but what was widely seen as another example of federal overreach.It is true that Washington DC has struggled with the scourge of gun violence, but its violent crime rate is at a 30-year low, much lower than that of cities in many red states.Trump’s 30-day emergency declaration has expired but over 2,000 national guard troops are patrolling the district – reportedly including several hundred sent from Republican-run states. It is unclear when their mission will end.Bowser issued an executive order at the beginning of the month requiring ongoing coordination between local law enforcement and various federal partners, though Ice was notably excluded.Trump blamed “Radical Left Democrats” for pressuring Bowser to inform the government about the non-cooperation with Ice, adding that if the police halted cooperation with Ice, “Crime would come roaring back.”He said: “To the people and businesses of Washington, D.C., DON’T WORRY, I AM WITH YOU, AND WON’T ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN. I’ll call a National Emergency, and Federalize, if necessary!!!”We will have more on this and other US politics stories throughout the day so stick with us.In mid-June, Donald Trump extended a deadline for TikTok to find a (non-Chinese) buyer or face a ban in the US. That extension is due to expire on Wednesday.The US is “very close” to a deal with China to settle their dispute over TikTok, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said earlier today.“On the TikTok deal itself, we’re very close to resolving the issue,” he told reporters as he arrived at Spain’s foreign ministry for the second day of talks with Chinese officials.Congress has approved a US ban on the popular video-sharing platform unless its parent company, ByteDance, sold its controlling stake.After initially calling for TikTok to be banned during his first term, Trump has so far extended the deadline three times during his second term.A federal law requiring TikTok’s sale or a ban on national security grounds was due to take effect the day before Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.But the Republican president, whose 2024 election campaign relied heavily on social media and who has said he is fond of TikTok, put the ban on pause.China and the US – the world’s two biggest economies – have agreed to several 90-day pauses on a series of increasing reciprocal tariffs, staving off an all-out trade war.Donald Trump said on Friday he’ll send the National Guard to address crime concerns in Memphis, Tennessee, his latest test of the limits of presidential power by using military force in American cities.Speaking on Fox News, Trump said “the mayor is happy” and “the governor is happy” about the pending deployment. Calling the city “deeply troubled,” he said “we’re going to fix that just like we did Washington.”Paul Young, the Democratic Memphis mayor, had signaled the intervention was coming. “Earlier this week I was informed that the government and the president were considering deploying the national guard,” he said on Thursday, while requesting “financial resources for intervention and prevention” rather than military deployment.“I did not ask for the National Guard and I don’t think it’s the way to drive down crime,” Young, who ran for office on a tough-on-crime platform, told a news conference the following day.The Guardian US’ democracy editor, Kira Lerner, has explored the ways in which Trump’s Washington takeover led to the indiscriminate detention of immigrants, the rise of racial profiling and the arrests of large numbers of people for low-level crimes. Here is an extract from her story, published on 10 September 2025, the day Trump’s direct control of Washington DC’s police force ended:
      A White House official said on Monday that 2,120 people have been arrested since the start of Trump’s takeover, 20 known gang members had been arrested and 214 firearms had been seized. Although violent crime has decreased during this period, Washington residents say the impact has not been worth the overbearing law enforcement presence.
      Federal agents with numerous agencies, including Immigrations and customs enforcement (Ice), Customs and Border Protection, Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Park Service, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the US marshals service have all been activated across the city. Often a single arrest will involve officers from multiple agencies and the local Metropolitan police department (MPD).
      Though the deployment of national guard troops from six states was the most high-profile aspect of the 30 days, the camo-clad troops, who are now armed, were largely focused on patrolling tourist sites and Union Station, the city’s main train station. With little work to be done, some were instructed to do landscaping and other “beautification” tasks …
      Washington DC residents have pushed back against what many call an occupation, which is deeply unpopular in the largely Democratic city. On Saturday, thousands marched from Malcolm X park in Northwest DC to the White House in an event organized by Free DC, a community organization working to protect the city’s Home Rule that has trained thousands of people since 11 August.
      Welcome to our live coverage of US politics.Donald Trump has threatened to call a national emergency and federalize Washington DC after the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, said its police would not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), whose agents have been taking illegal suspects into custody and have been accused of racially profiling people in doing so.The US president took charge of the city’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) on 11 August for 30 days, activating the National Guard and deploying federal officers in what he framed as a crackdown on crime and homelessness but what was widely seen as another example of federal overreach.It is true that Washington DC has struggled with the scourge of gun violence, but its violent crime rate is at a 30-year low, much lower than that of cities in many red states.Trump’s 30-day emergency declaration has expired but over 2,000 national guard troops are patrolling the district – reportedly including several hundred sent from Republican-run states. It is unclear when their mission will end.Bowser issued an executive order at the beginning of the month requiring ongoing coordination between local law enforcement and various federal partners, though Ice was notably excluded.Trump blamed “Radical Left Democrats” for pressuring Bowser to inform the government about the non-cooperation with Ice, adding that if the police halted cooperation with Ice, “Crime would come roaring back.”He said: “To the people and businesses of Washington, D.C., DON’T WORRY, I AM WITH YOU, AND WON’T ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN. I’ll call a National Emergency, and Federalize, if necessary!!!”We will have more on this and other US politics stories throughout the day so stick with us. More

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      ‘She doesn’t have the power to stop him’: DC mayor walks a tightrope with Trump

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      During a press conference at the end of August, Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, made sure to say “thank you” – in her own way – for Donald Trump’s influx of federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital.“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said. She admitted that, after a recent meeting with the president, his knowledge of DC had “significantly increased” since his first term in the White House.Bowser pointed to recent data that shows a significant drop in violent crime, particularly carjackings, since more federal law enforcement began working with DC police. But she also offered some pushback.“What we know is not working is a break in trust between police and community,” Bowser said. “We know having masked Ice agents in the community has not worked, and national guards from other states has not been an efficient use of those resources.” She also underscored that if there were more local police officers, it would cancel out any need for any supplemental federal law enforcement.The president has spent years denigrating DC. After leaving office in 2021, and mounting his re-election campaign, he called the district “horribly run” and a “nightmare of murder and crime”. In August, he justified his “crime emergency” – after a former Doge staffer was attacked in DC – by describing the “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” of the nation’s capital. He has also falsely claimed that violent crime in the district is the “worst it’s ever been”, despite it reaching a 30-year low in 2024, according to data compiled by the justice department.Trump promised repeatedly to “take over” DC on the campaign trail. Then, on 7 August, he started to send hundreds of federal agents to the capital to work with local law enforcement. Just days later, he declared a “public safety emergency”, allowing him to federalize the MPD for 30 days . He supplemented all of this by deploying the DC national guard. Now, about 2,300 national guard troops are patrolling the district – including several hundred sent from Republican-run states.Bowser did not denounce the move. Instead, she called it “unsettling” and said that it resembled an “authoritarian push” on a Zoom call with local organizers.Expressing deference to the president, while displaying a quiet pushback against his policies, is emblematic of the tightrope Bowser, who is the second-longest-serving mayor in DC’s history and is eyeing a fourth term, has been walking since Trump returned to office this year.It’s a far cry from her past willingness to undermine the president publicly. In 2020, during the height of the George Floyd racial justice protests that swept the country, the mayor called Trump a “scared man” on social media, as he tried to quell the demonstrations in the capital.She also called his use of federal law enforcement officials and national guard at the time an “invasion of our city” before announcing that a section of 16th Street, which is in front of the White House, would be renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza” – with the road’s new name painted in tall yellow letters on the ground.When Trump returned to office, the pressure from the president and congressional Republicans to rename and pave over the plaza, or risk losing federal funding, forced Bowser’s hand in March. “We have bigger fish to fry,” she said of her decision to comply with the administration’s demands. “Now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survives.”Arguably, it signaled a new dawn in her ongoing power struggle with the president.Her apparent cooperation, including a recently signed executive order that ensures cooperation between MPD and federal officers indefinitely, has earned her praise from the administration. Trump congratulated Bowser’s compliance in a post from Truth Social. “Wow! Mayor Muriel Bowser of D.C. has become very popular because she worked with me and my great people in bringing CRIME down to virtually NOTHING in D.C,” the president wrote.On Monday, he also suggested that the mayor was more aligned with the administration’s goals than he had previously thought. “That’s not her ideology, but now I think that maybe is her ideology,” he said, while giving remarks at the Museum of the Bible in DC. “She’s taking a lot of heat from the radical left.”But Bowser’s apparent willingness to work with Trump has elicited frustration from members of the DC council. In a post on Twitter/X, the at-large council member Robert White pushed back against the mayor’s choice to credit federal officers in the capital.“This is trampling on democracy in real time, on our watch,” he said. “Sometimes we want to wait and see what’s happening, but that time has passed.” White later issued a statement that called for the rescission of the mayor’s order, calling it a “permission slip” that Trump was using to justify sending forces into other Democratic-led cities.“I wish there was greater resistance in this moment,” said Zachary Parker, a DC council member who represents Ward 5, which spans the Northeast quadrant of the district.“The mayor has been conciliatory to the president from the day she went to Mar-a-Lago to greet him to now – and look where we are,” he said.For longtime DC political analysts like Tom Sherwood, Bowser is stuck between a rock and a hard place.While he notes that her public appearances, like the late August press conference, could have more “vinegar”, Sherwood also says that language is only part of the dance – Bowser is ultimately forced to bend to the whims of a mercurial president who has a majority in both chambers of Congress.“The mayor has to consider pushing back where she can and not provoking even more attacks from this president, whose mind is like a weather vane when it comes to his attention to the district,” he said. “Both legally and politically, she doesn’t have the power to stop him.”Although DC does have limited self-governance, Congress is ultimately in charge of the district. Meanwhile, the president is allowed to keep both federal agents and national guard troops in the capital for as long as he deems necessary.“Every political person I’ve spoken to who doesn’t like what the mayor is doing can’t answer one question,” Sherwood said. “If you were mayor, with the limited power you had, what would you have done differently?”Many progressives in DC argue that Bowser is playing too nice, and isn’t reflecting the fact that almost 80% of DC residents oppose the takeover, according to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll.While there isn’t any recent polling to show how the impact of the federal takeover has affected the mayor’s approval among DC locals, in May, 53% of residents were happy with Bowser’s job leading the district – a marked improvement from 46% the year prior. But the mayor has failed to reach the crest of approval ratings she received in the first five years of her tenure, which began in 2015.Recently, more than a hundred groups, local organizations and unions signed an open letter to Bowser, saying that her actions since 11 August had appeased Trump. “History is calling upon you to lead our people, not to cower in the face of an authoritarian who does not have our best interests in mind,” the letter reads.Ultimately, the mayor has to play the long game when handling the administration, according to a DC government source familiar with the mayor’s thinking. “We’re only eight months into this. There’s a lot of time left on the clock. DC’s only tool in the toolbox is soft power,” the source said. “Her only job is to protect the residents of Washington DC. She’s going to use whatever strategy is going to yield the best result for that specific mission.”Trump’s police takeover expired on 10 September, and the US House is not expected to vote on an extension – a sign that there might be a payoff to Bowser’s strategy.But, for Michael Fanone, the former DC police officer who has chronicled his work helping to defend the Capitol during the January 6 attack, it’s not as simple as hoping that Trump’s focus on the district will wane.“I don’t think we can say whether or not we know definitively that he’s off her back. I think that you see he’s moved on to another shiny object,” he said, referring to the surge of federal immigration agents in Chicago, and the president’s repeated threats to deploy national guard troops to the city. “Quite frankly, this isn’t just a local fight.”While the governors of blue states, like California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s JB Pritzker and Maryland’s Wes Moore, have all taken vocal stands against the president, Sherwood recognizes that Bowser can’t risk the same ferocity. “I think she has made the calculation that most DC citizens will support her effort trying to battle Trump without the weapons other governments have,” he said. More

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      ‘Free DC’: the group leading fight against Trump’s Washington takeover

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      When a protest against Donald Trump’s militarized crackdown in Washington DC reached the White House last Saturday after a mile-and-a-half march, the thousands-strong crowd shouted a simple, two-word chant: “Free DC.”It’s a slogan with a long history in the federal district that has again become prominent after an activist group formed this year specifically to respond to the president’s threats of meddling took it as their name. Arguing that the struggle for the city’s rights is part of the larger fight for the country’s democracy, Free DC has galvanized thousands of district residents against the president’s attempts to interfere in Washington DC – a cause that came into focus last month when the president took over the police department and sent the national guard and federal agents on to city streets.“DC being under attack is a problem for American democracy, and that is what is at stake here,” said executive director Keya Chatterjee, a former neighborhood commissioner and climate activist who drew on her experience researching authoritarian takeovers at Democracy Fund to co-found the group.“You have to be able to have dissent in the capital in order to curb authoritarianism. You have to be able to do that and because we are uniquely vulnerable, it is a danger to everyone in this country, and therefore everyone in the world, that we don’t have equal rights under the law.”Though its population of more than 700,000 eclipses that of Vermont and Wyoming, Washington DC’s status as a federal district means it has no voting representation in Congress, which has the ability to meddle in policies approved by voters or the city council. While past presidents have found themselves occasionally drawn into the overwhelmingly Democratic city’s politics, Trump has targeted Washington DC like no one before him, most recently by saying federal intervention was needed to fight crime – rates of which are at 30-year lows.In the weeks since, he has threatened similar treatment to Chicago and New Orleans over their crime rates, while making no similar threats to the cities in Republican-led states that are in fact the most violent in the country.Washington DC residents watched nervously as Trump campaigned for re-election last year on a platform that included promises to “take over” their city. Two days after his victory, about 1,000 people gathered at a church in the capital to discuss how deal with the federal interventions that they expected under the new administration.“Every group that works on housing or unhoused neighbor support or immigrant support, all of us understood the gravity of what was coming, and we developed, had conversations, about what the right approach was, and recognized that a new campaign was going to be necessary,” said Alex Dodds, who co-founded the group and serves as its campaign director.View image in fullscreenThe group’s four co-founders had been involved in the racial justice protests that took place in the city after George Floyd’s death, as well as in efforts to protect Washington’s autonomy after Joe Biden and some Democrats supported a Republican-led effort to prevent the city from modernizing its criminal code in 2023. For their name, the new group chose a slogan that dates back to Washington’s struggle for self-governance in the 1960s and 1970s.“We’re fighting to protect home rule in the short term,” said Dodds, referring to the federal law that outlines the city’s government, “and win lasting dignity for DC communities in the long term, and for us, that does mean DC statehood ultimately.”Since forming in January, Free DC has trained about 5,000 people in the city’s eight wards, Chatterjee said, and held workshops on jury service, campaigning and how to safely take video of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents. Financially supported by the progressive organizing group Community Change, Chatterjee said small-dollar donations from individual donors have made up as much as a fourth of their budget, with foundations contributing the rest.True to his word, Trump set about meddling in the capital within weeks of taking office. He tried unsuccessfully to appoint a supporter of pardoning January 6 rioters as the top federal prosecutor, while congressional Republicans threw the city’s budget into chaos by stripping $1bn in funding, and refusing to pass legislation restoring it.Free DC’s goal has been to ensure that each of the president’s actions do not go unanswered, Chatterjee said. When Trump took control of the Kennedy Center in February and said he would stop the performing arts center from hosting drag shows, Free DC collaborated with other groups to host one nearby.In April, they brought parents and children to the Capitol to encourage lawmakers to pass legislation to restore the funds cut from the city’s budget, and held a rally outside the White House as Trump announced his takeover of the police department in August.“I have been amazed at how many of my neighbors I’ve met through doing this that I just have passed by 100 times on the street, probably, but, like, haven’t connected with,” said Stephanie Rudig, a freelance graphic designer who was visiting congressional offices last week with Free DC to encourage House representatives to oppose Trump’s involvement in policing the city.“It really is bringing people together in a trauma-binding kind of way.”Despite all the time they spend in Washington DC and their power over it, senators and representatives can be disconnected from the city’s needs, said Ankit Jain, one of the city’s two elected shadow senators, who advocate for its rights and the long-term goal of becoming the 51st state.When Jain has met with lawmakers to encourage them to restore funds to the city’s budget recently, they have often mentioned that they had heard about the issue from Free DC’s visits.“We were talking to everyone, Republicans and Democrats, and you’d have quotes from people saying, oh yeah, I heard about this from some group of DC residents. And it was always Free DC,” Jain said.View image in fullscreenHis office has coordinated with the group on ways to make federal lawmakers aware of the city’s issues.“What I think is really important about them is that they are thinking long term. They’re thinking proactively,” he said.“We need them in this moment, but I think there will be many more moments that we need this kind of support, and I think they’re building a structure and a support base that’ll keep them around for the long run.”Trump’s foray into policing the city energized support for Free DC. Flyers bearing the group’s name have been plastered across the city, and in mid-August, chants of “Free DC” were heard from the stands at a Washington Spirit women’s soccer game. Protesters shouted the slogan at the president when he made a rare trip to a restaurant in the capital this week.Last Saturday’s protest march was the largest demonstration against Trump’s meddling since it began, and was co-hosted by Free DC along with dozens of labor unions and activist groups. Thousands streamed through downtown Washington as churches rang their bells and a black-clad server at the Cheesecake Factory around the corner from the White House stood on a chair and shouted, “Free DC.”“It’s important that our community be united against that which is making us unsafe,” said Koach Baruch Frazier, a rabbi who volunteers with Free DC and attended the march.Trump, he said, “is throwing everything at us, and we are throwing it back”. More