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Pentagon names new press corps from far-right outlets after reporter walkout

by Evelyn Reynolds 22 October 2025, 20:41

After the recent departure of Pentagon reporters due to their refusal to agree to a new set of restrictive policies, the defense department has announced a “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” featuring 60 journalists from far-right outlets, many of which have promoted conspiracy theories.Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted the news on X but did not provide any names.The Washington Post, however, obtained a draft of the announcement, which stated that the new reporters, who agreed to the department’s new policies, were from outlets such as Lindell TV, started by Trump ally Mike Lindell; the Gateway Pundit; the Post Millennial; Human Events; and the National Pulse.The list also includes Turning Point USA’s media brand Frontlines, influencer Tim Pool’s Timcast and a Substack-based newsletter called Washington Reporter, the Post reported.The Pentagon did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for the list of journalists.Parnell described the group as a “broad spectrum of new media outlets and independent journalists”.“New media outlets and independent journalists have created the formula to circumvent the lies of the mainstream media and get real news directly to the American people,” Parnell wrote. “Their reach and impact collectively are far more effective and balanced than the self-righteous media who chose to self-deport from the Pentagon.”The new press corps includes rightwing outlets that have promoted conspiracy theories. For example, the Gateway Pundit spread false information about the 2020 election and then settled a defamation lawsuit with two Georgia election workers it falsely accused of wrongdoing and admitted that there was no fraud in the election.Similarly, Lindell denied the results of the election and was ordered to pay $2.3m to an employee of a voting machine company who sued him for defamation.Pool, a conservative podcast host, was among the influencers who allegedly were associated with a US content creation company that was provided with nearly $10m from Russian state media employees to publish videos with messages in favor of Moscow’s interests and agenda.Pool said they were “deceived and are victims”.The journalists who turned in their press credentials earlier this month did so after the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, introduced a policy that required that they agree not to obtain unauthorized material and restricted access to certain areas unless accompanied by an official.Outlets including the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Atlantic, as well as reporters from rightwing outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax, all refused to sign on to the new rules.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We believe the requirements are unnecessary and onerous and hope that the Pentagon will review the matter further,” Newsmax told Times journalist Erik Wemple.The Guardian also declined to sign the revised Pentagon press pass policy because it placed unacceptable restrictions on activities protected by the first amendment.During a White House press briefing, Pool, a member of the new Pentagon press corps, asked Karoline Leavitt to comment on the mainstream media and “their unprofessional behavior as well as elaborate [on] if there’s any plans to expand access to new companies?”In a segment on Wednesday on the rightwing television network Real America’s Voice, defense department spokesperson Kingsley Wilson thanked the show’s host, Jack Posobiec, for joining the press corps.Wilson misstated the policies that caused journalists to leave the Pentagon. She did not mention that it included a requirement that they not obtain unauthorized material.“They walked out because they refused to sign an agreement that was simple. It was common sense. It said, wear a visible press badge. Don’t go in classified spaces, stay in the correspondence corridor and follow the building’s rules,” Wilson said.“That was their right, but also their loss, because now we get to have incredible journalists like yourself who are going to be here in the Pentagon reporting on what the Department of War is doing every single day,” Wilson said. “It’s really the next generation of journalism at the Pentagon.” More

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Trump nominee to lead whistleblower office drops out after racist texts surface
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 October 2025, 23:38
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
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 October 2025, 21:31
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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Trump is threatening Venezuela. But his own country looks a lot like it | Daniel Mendiola
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 October 2025, 14:00
Here in the Americas, we have a peculiar tradition. Every time there is a major election, prominent figures on the right find themselves compelled to repeat some version of the vaguely menacing prediction: if the candidate for the left wins, we will become “the next Venezuela”.Whether Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia or Ecuador, countries throughout the western hemisphere keep this tradition. Donald Trump has also participated in this ritual, proclaiming during the 2024 election cycle that if Kamala Harris won, our country would become “Venezuela on steroids”.Oddly spoken with disdain.Harris, of course, lost the election, so we will never know how Venezuela-esque her version of the US might have been. But we are seeing Trump’s America, and the reality is: it’s looking a lot like Venezuela.Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez – a charismatic yet polarizing leftwing figure – political discourses have shrouded Venezuela in conflicting layers of partisan caricature, often making it difficult to parse what is actually happening. At this point, however, there is no doubt that the country is in crisis.Migration statistics alone provide compelling evidence. Amnesty International and the UN refugee agency estimate that nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014 – as much as 25% of the population. Hyperinflation and food shortages have driven this exodus, compounded by authoritarianism and increasing repression under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, who has held on to power since 2013 through elections with overwhelming evidence of fraud.Significantly, the US has hardly been an innocent bystander. Not only have we frequently doled out reprehensible treatment to Venezuelan asylum seekers, but we have also played a role in creating the conditions that are forcing people to migrate in the first place. The US has maintained a belligerent stance toward Venezuela for more than two decades – for example, supporting a short-lived coup to overthrow Chávez in 2002, as well as hitting the country with sanctions – and the Trump administration has recently escalated the conflict by ordering a series of deadly strikes on civilian boats suspected of smuggling drugs off the Venezuelan the coast. Reports also indicate that Trump is considering an intervention to depose Maduro, and the CIA may already be carrying out covert operations in the country.Journalists and legal analysts have done excellent work explaining how these strikes are illegal according to US and international law, in addition to being murderously cruel. There has also been great coverage of how the demonization of Venezuelan immigrants – including a steady stream of propaganda painting Venezuelan immigrants as gang members and terrorists – has long been a centerpiece of Trump’s platform.These actions are disgraceful on their own terms. But they are also bitterly ironic: even while terrorizing Venezuelans in the name of defending democracy, Trump has, in fact, been running a strikingly similar authoritarian playbook. Noteworthy parallels include dismantling constitutional limits on presidential authority, manipulating electoral districts to inflate his party’s representation in Congress, and using state power to repress political opponents.In Venezuela’s case, the story begins with a fraught referendum. Immediately upon taking office in 1999, Chávez decreed a new executive power: the ability to call for a referendum on writing a new constitution. The legality of the claim was dubious given that the Venezuelan legal system already had mechanisms for updating the constitution, and a simple majority popular vote was not one of them. Nonetheless, the Venezuelan supreme court relented, and when the referendum passed, Chávez asserted a heavy hand in creating the process for how a constitutional assembly would work. Moreover, he unilaterally gave this assembly outsized powers to govern, suspending Congress and the supreme court in the meantime. Unsurprisingly, the resulting constitution of 1999 expanded executive authority considerably, and the entire process established a precedent to continue using these largely hand-picked constitutional assemblies to overrule congress whenever the opposition gained ground.While there are, likewise, calls for a constitutional convention coming from Trump allies that could function in a similar way, this hasn’t actually been necessary in the US. Rather, the conservative supermajority on the supreme court has managed to effectively do the same thing on its own: repeatedly ignoring plain text as well as its own precedent in order to assign new powers to the presidency while at the same time eviscerating longstanding checks from other branches of government and independent agencies alike. In short, even without literally rewriting the constitution, the supreme court has in practice served as a comparable constitutional assembly, fundamentally reshaping constitutional norms to create a “unitary executive” with fewer checks on executive power than ever before.Taking this comparison even deeper, there are also important parallels in Trump’s efforts to stack Congress through “gerrymandering”: a trick that hinges on exploiting the mathematical quirks of single-member, winner-take-all districts. For example, in a system where every district has an isolated winner-take-all race, even if one party gets 49% of the vote across the country, that does not mean that it will end up having 49% of the representation in Congress. In fact, if each district is a perfect microcosm of society with 49% of voters supporting this party, it could actually end up with zero seats in congress, despite representing roughly half the population.In short, single-member, winner-take-all districts have the potential to massively inflate or deflate a party’s overall electoral showing, depending on how the voters are distributed among the districts. And if the party in power gets to redraw the districts, they can easily rig the game. Knowing full well the consequences, the US supreme court blessed this approach during Trump’s first term, and now at a time when Republicans have a clear advantage in controlling redistricting, the justices are poised to make it even easier. Within this context, Trump is pushing Republican-governed states to capitalize.Significantly, Chávez’s early efforts to consolidate power used a similar mechanism. Though under-appreciated now, Venezuela’s earlier election system under its 1961 constitution actually included a clause guaranteeing minority representation, and officials developed a clever method to allocate seats roughly proportional to a party’s overall support. This made gerrymandering impossible, limiting the ability of the ruling party to press their advantage by further manipulating districts. In 1999, however, Chávez’s constitutional assembly eliminated this system, changing the rules so that most congressional seats would instead come from winner-take-all districts. The effect – at least in the short term while Chávez consolidated power – was to considerably inflate his party’s congressional representation.Along with expanding executive power and manipulating congressional elections, a third commonality – repression of political opponents – needs little explanation. Even before Maduro apparently resorted to overt election fraud, the Chávez government faced accusations of intimidating judges and arresting opposition candidates. Vocal critics of the government have also reported heavy-handed tactics from formal military and paramilitary forces alike.As we now watch Trump deploy troops in Democratic-led cities across the country; turn federal agencies such as Ice and into personal secret police who operate with impunity; and push to systematically arrest political opponents, the parallels are obvious.Ultimately, while there is every reason to believe that Venezuela is in crisis, there is no reason to believe that Trump’s military aggression will have any benefit for the people of either country. The bottom line: the Trump administration has demonstrated time and time again that it has no qualms about wreaking havoc on Venezuelan civilians – nor on its own. Trump’s abuses of power at home and in the Caribbean are two sides of the same coin. We must condemn both.
Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More
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Scrutiny grows over Trump competence – but can an unfit president be removed?
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 October 2025, 13:00
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Donald Trump looked out across the White House ballroom at his audience of wealthy donors and business figures – people who had given millions of dollars to his extravagant plan to build a vast ballroom attached to the building’s East Wing.The president, 79, told the crowd he had enjoyed a “really historic trip” to the Middle East, and indulged in some of his familiar patter: saying his tariffs were successful, and claiming that under Joe Biden, countries were “literally emptying out insane asylums into our country”.As his speech, given last Wednesday, labored on, Trump turned to ballroom specifics.He said: “So I just wanna say, thank you all. Uh, simply, behind me, so, is a knockout panel. This panel, the next time you come here, will be opened up and gone. No – uh, no problem with any of the surrounding areas. These, this room will be fixed. This will be like a cocktail – the whole floor will be cocktails or pre-briefings or whatever it may be, lots of different things. So the entire floor. So you come in, the entire floor sets up. We didn’t have to do any of that. Usually, you have to do that. You need different rooms to go along with a ballroom.”The speech, with its confusing false starts and repeated tangent-veering, was typical of many addresses Trump, the oldest person to be inaugurated president, has given recently. The president frequently appears to lose his train of thought, before retreating to the verbal safe ground of repeating frequently incorrect claims about the current success of the US.Republicans seem happy to ignore Trump’s odd speeches and claims. But his performances in public settings, whether a lengthy soliloquy about how former president Barack Obama walks down the stairs – “Da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop,” Trump told a room full of generals in September – or his focus on water pressure – “The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet,” the president said at a roundtable discussion about immigration in July – has slowly begun to raise questions from experts, Democrats, and the general public.Among those: what guardrails exist to remove an impeded commander-in-chief from office?“The system is really set up to protect the president. It’s really hard to get rid of a president between elections,” said Brian Kalt, a professor at Michigan State University College of Law and author of Unable: The Law, Politics, and Limits of Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.There are essentially two ways a US president could be removed from office: through impeachment and conviction by the Senate, and through the aforementioned section 4. No president has ever been removed by either measure – although three presidents have been impeached: including Trump, twice.A simple majority of the House of Representatives has to vote to impeach a president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”, and the president is then tried in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required to convict. In 2021, 57 of the 100 senators voted to convict Trump – 10 short of the 67 votes required.Given there are 53 Republican senators, it is hard to imagine Trump being convicted and removed from office.That leaves section 4 of the 25th amendment, designed to be used when a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. This month, JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, who has repeatedly clashed with Trump, called for the amendment to be invoked against the president, claiming “there is something genuinely wrong with this man”.It came as Trump bizarrely reposted to Truth Social an AI-generated fake video which featured himself making an announcement about “med-bed hospitals”, and after he spoke confusingly of “certain elements of genius that can be given to a baby” during a speech at the White House.Speaking about grants awarded to investigate autism, Trump added: “They have to move quickly. They, they – when the alternative is that nothing bad can happen, let’s do it now. I was just saying to Bobby [health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr] and the group, let’s do it now. Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.”The examples keep coming. At a press conference last week Trump repeated himself several times when talking about immigration, in one case appearing to become confused on the issue of so-called legal immigration.“We’ve got the strongest border of anybody – nobody has a border. We have a border where the numbers just came out again, you saw zero people came in illegally. Now we do take people into our country legally, but zero people,” Trump said. Approximately 7 million people entered the US from abroad during the first three months of 2025 alone.Section 4 of the 25th amendment is designed for when a president is “not just doing a bad job, but not doing anything at all – like can’t function”, Kalt said. For it to be invoked, JD Vance and a majority of Trump’s cabinet would have to agree that Trump is unable to perform the duties of president. But even then, Trump could disagree, which would force a vote in the House and the Senate. A two-thirds majority in both would be required to remove the president – a higher bar than impeachment. Kalt said it’s a deliberately high bar.“It’s not just about protecting the president, although that is the most direct manifestation of it. It’s really about protecting the system of elections. So once the people elect a president, it’s supposed to be four years before they get to say anything again – their choice is respected, is put in place,” Kalt said.Despite the White House claiming earlier this year that Trump’s “mental sharpness is second to none”, the examples of unusual behavior keep stacking up. There was an incident this summer where Trump invented an entire story about his deceased uncle having met the Unabomber. The time in July when he went on a sudden rant about windmills driving whales “loco”, during a meeting with the European Commission president. The occasion when he derailed a cabinet meeting by talking, unprompted, for 13 minutes about the decor of the room.Last month, Democratic congresswoman Madeleine Dean made national news after she confronted the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, in an exchange about Trump’s health recorded by MSNBC.“The president is unhinged. He is unwell,” Dean told an uncomfortable-looking Johnson. His reply was a strong indicator that there is zero appetite among Republicans to subject their leader to scrutiny.“A lot of folks on your side are too,” Johnson said.body{–primary-text-color: #121212;–secondary-text-color: #707070;–tertiary-text-color: #707070;–primary-bg-color: #ffffff;–secondary-bg-color: #f3f3f3;–tertiary-bg-color: #f6f6f6;–primary-line-color: #333333;–secondary-line-color: #dcdcdc;–border-divider-color: #dcdcdc;–axis-color: #bababa;–primary-button-color: #121212;–primary-button-text-color: #ffffff;–primary-button-highlight-color: #333333;–highlight-color: #ffe500;–highlighted-text-color: #121212;–info-color: #00b2ff;–news-grey-01: #121212;–news-grey-02: #707070;–news-grey-03: #a1a1a1;–news-grey-04: #bababa;–news-grey-05: #dcdcdc;–news-grey-06: #f3f3f3;–news-core-01: #005689;–news-core-02: #0094da;–news-core-03: #c70000;–news-core-04: #23b4a9;–news-core-05: #494949;–news-core-06: #cca36e}@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark){body.ios,body.android{–primary-text-color: 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‘Rogue president’: growing number of US judges push back against Trump
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 October 2025, 11:00
US district and appeals courts are increasingly rebuking Donald Trump’s radical moves on tackling crime, illegal immigration and other actions where administration lawyers or Trump have made sweeping claims of emergencies that judges have bluntly rejected as erroneous and undermining the rule of law in America.Legal scholars and ex-judges note that strong court pushback has come from judges appointed by Republicans, including Trump himself, and Democrats, and signify that the administration’s factual claims and expanding executive powers face stiff challenges that have slowed some extreme policies.Among the toughest rulings were ones this month by Judge Karin Immergut in Oregon and Judge April Perry in Chicago. Both district judges sharply challenged Trump’s plans to deploy national guard troops to deal with minimal violence that Trump had portrayed as akin to “war” zones, spurring the judges to impose temporary restraining orders.Immergut, whom Trump nominated for the court in his first term, rejected Trump’s depiction of Portland as “war-ravaged”, and in need of saving from “Antifa and other domestic terrorists” concluding that the “president’s determination was simply untethered to the facts”. But a court of appeals ruled on 20 October that Trump could send national guard troops to the city.Elsewhere, district judge William Young in Boston issued a scathing 161-page ruling last month calling some of Trump’s deportation policies illegal efforts to deport non-citizen activists at colleges in violation of their first amendment rights “under the cover of an unconstitutionally broad definition of antisemitism”. Young was nominated by Ronald Reagan.Some former appeals court judges say that the district courts and courts of appeals are responding appropriately to a pattern of unlawful conduct by Trump and his top deputies.“The president and attorney general are openly contemptuous of the constitution and laws of the United States and of the federal courts, and the arguments they make to the courts mirror that personal contempt,” said retired court of appeals judge J Michael Luttig. “The federal district courts and the courts of appeals well understand that and they are going to have none of it.”View image in fullscreenRecent court rulings reveal a pattern of strong judicial rebukes to the Trump administration from district and appeals courts on multiple issues since Trump took office again, which the legal news and analysis site Just Security has documented.A Just Security study, which was spearheaded by New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, revealed that courts’ distrust of government information and representations hit over 40 cases as of 15 October versus 35 cases in mid-September. Similarly, it noted that courts’ findings of “arbitrary and capricious” administrative action totaled 58 cases on 15 October versus 52 in mid-September. The study showed courts’ concerns over noncompliance with judicial orders totaled over 20 cases as of 15 October up from 15 cases a month before.But despite the growing number of strong lower court rulings against the administration, some may well get reversed by the supreme court given its 6-3 conservative majority, and its rulings that have markedly expanded presidential powers.Nonetheless, legal scholars and ex-federal judges stress that recent district court rulings against Trump’s radical policies are grounded in fact and reveal profound scepticism about a number of the administration’s sweeping legal claims.“US district judges have the responsibility to determine the relevant facts before applying the law. Accordingly, the credibility of a party and its counsel are immensely important,” said former federal judge John Jones, who is now president of Dickinson College.“Simply put, the president’s reputation for hyperbole that lapses into outright lies precedes him in these cases, and judges are increasingly refusing to take the administration’s rationale for its actions at face value.”For example, Perry called the Department of Homeland Security’s depiction of events in Chicago “simply unreliable” with a “lack of credibility”. She noted that state and local law enforcement contradicted the case for deploying the national guard and Trump’s assertion that it was a “war zone”, and warned that using the guard could fuel “civil unrest”.Days later, the seventh circuit court of appeals upheld Perry’s ruling that denied a White House request to deploy national guard troops on Chicago streets in response to a lawsuit brought by the city of Chicago and Illinois.But on Friday the Trump administration asked the supreme court to pause those rulings and permit Trump to deploy troops in Illinois, boosting efforts to send the national guard into the Chicago area.Elsewhere, on Monday a three-judge appeals court panel ruled 2-1 that the Trump administration can send the national guard to Portland, lifting Immergut’s ruling and allowing some 200 federalized guard troops to be sent to the city to protect federal buildings.Responding to the ruling, Oregon’s attorney general said if the decision is allowed to stand Trump would have “unilateral power to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification”.More broadly, scholars and other experts voice strong criticism of the administration’s legal claims.“Trump is abusing the laws that authorize domestic military deployment in a crisis, and the courts are starting to push back,” said Liza Goitein, the Brennan Center’s senior director of liberty and national security.“In the United States, federal armed forces cannot be used to execute the law except when civilian authorities have been completely overwhelmed. As judges in Oregon and Illinois have recognized, the facts on the ground simply don’t justify deployment of the military.“A court could reach the opposite conclusion only by extending a dangerous level of deference to the president, effectively giving him free rein to use the military as a domestic police force. That would be contrary to American principles and traditions, and it would pose a grave threat to democracy and individual liberty.”Not surprisingly, some recent rulings by district judges have outraged Maga world and top Trump officials, who have decried them in incendiary terms. The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called Immergut’s ruling “legal insurrection”, which some analysts worry could incite violence.Trump, too, fired back at Immergut’s ruling. “I wasn’t served well by the people who pick judges,” Trump told reporters soon after the ruling, seemingly forgetting he had nominated her, and then misidentifying her sex. “Portland is burning to the ground … That judge ought to be ashamed of himself.”Trump’s attacks on Immergut and earlier dust-ups with judges who ruled against the administration were advanced this month by El Salvador’s authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele, who urged the Trump administration to emulate his policies and impeach “corrupt judges”.“If you don’t impeach the corrupt judges, you CANNOT fix the country,” Bukele tweeted, sparking multi-billionaire and Maga ally Elon Musk to retweet it as “essential”.But legal experts say the ruling by Immergut and other district judges who have pushed back hard against administration policies are fully warranted and reasonable, given extreme moves by Trump on immigration, crime and other fronts they deem unjustified or illegal.“I think the strong district court response in these contexts is striking,” said Columbia law professor Gillian Metzger. “It’s occurring in other Trump contexts as well – for example, the administration’s efforts to deny appropriated funding or target law firms – but immigration enforcement and calling out the national guard are traditional executive areas where you’d expect the president to get deference.”Metzger said: “Judges are perceiving an administration that is asserting power in novel ways and at odds with basic norms and longstanding practices – eg, employing the national guard in a partisan fashion over the objections of state and local leaders, deploying Ice officers in aggressive ways, etc – and at times violating governing statutes.”Other legal scholars go further.“The problem is not rogue judges, but a rogue president. The problem is not what judges are doing but what the president is doing,” said former Massachusetts judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches law at Harvard.Gertner pointed in particular to Young’s ruling in a deportation case involving efforts by the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security to deport pro-Palestinian non-citizen students and professors who protested against Israel’s actions in Gaza.In his ruling, Young wrote that Trump’s conduct violated his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States” and the actions of his administration represented a “full-throated assault on the first amendment”.Gertner noted that the “case involved sending people to countries without due process. We gave due process to people involved with the September 11 attacks. Sending people to countries where they had no relatives, NO TIES, was a flagrant violation of law.“What the Trump administration has been doing is so unprecedented and so far from normal and so illegal it makes sense that judges have issued injunctions stopping them.”Luttig stressed: “The judges of the United States will not be threatened and intimidated by this president and this attorney general. They will continue to honor their oaths to the constitution, which means the president and attorney general can expect loss after loss after loss, at least before the nation’s lower federal courts.” More
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Senate vote fails again as shutdown becomes one of the longest in US history
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 October 2025, 22:39
One of the longest government shutdowns in US history just got longer after the Senate again failed to pass a funding resolution after a majority of Democrats continued their pressure campaign after the No Kings nationwide weekend protests.The Senate vote fell for the 11th time with a vote of 50 to 43, with no new defectors from the Democratic side.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, has for weeks kept the House shuttered on an extended recess, and defended his strategy as necessary to push Senate Democrats into passing the House’s continuing resolution without policy additions. But Democrats have refused to support the measure without provisions addressing healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, which are set to expire at the end of the year.Johnson, in a Monday morning press conference flanked by other Republican congressional leaders including Andy Harris, the House freedom caucus chair, said the reason for the shutdown was to appease Democratic voters, particularly putting blame on the No Kings rallies.“It is exactly why Chuck Schumer is pandering, in this whole charade. We’ve explained from the very beginning, the shutdown is about one thing and one thing alone: Chuck Schumer’s political survival,” Johnson said.The stuffed vote also came after a prominent Republican lawmaker, representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, on Monday morning criticized Johnson’s strategy, calling on the House to return to session immediately.“The House should be in session working,” Greene wrote on X. “We should be finishing appropriations. Our committees should be working. We should be passing bills that make President Trump’s executive orders permanent. I have no respect for the decision to refuse to work.”The criticism from Greene, who is aligned with the right flank of her party, is a noticeable crack in support for Johnson’s hardline approach from the GOP over an extended congressional recess. Since 19 September, when members last cast votes, the chamber has not been conducting legislative business, although members have staged press conferences.The shutdown, which began on 1 October, has become the longest full government shutdown in US history, and the third-longest when including partial shutdowns. If it extends past Tuesday, it will surpass the 21-day shutdown of 1995-96 to claim second place. Only the 35-day partial shutdown during Donald Trump’s first term, from December 2018 to January 2019, has lasted longer.The shutdown’s impact grew more severe on Monday as the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration began furloughing approximately 1,400 federal employees responsible for maintaining and modernizing the US nuclear weapons arsenal. Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, is scheduled to address the furloughs at a press conference in Las Vegas later on Monday, a spokesperson told the Guardian.Kevin Hassett, the White House economic adviser, speculated on Monday, citing “friends in the Senate”, that the impasse might soon break.“I think the [Senate minority leader Chuck] Schumer shutdown is likely to end some time this week,” Hassett said in a CNBC interview. He reasoned that some Democrats had been reluctant to reopen the government ahead of last Saturday’s No Kings protests against Trump, which drew millions of demonstrators nationwide to rebuke corruption and authoritarianism. More
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Trump nominee reportedly boasted of ‘Nazi streak’ in group chats
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 October 2025, 21:03
A Donald Trump nominee who is scheduled for a confirmation hearing this week told other Republicans he “has a Nazi streak” and that holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated,” according to a report based on a private group chat.Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to serve as special counsel of the United States, a role charged in part with safeguarding federal whistleblowers from retaliation. His confirmation hearing is set for Thursday.Politico reported on Monday that Ingrassia told other Republicans in a group chat that the Martin Luther King Jr holiday, which celebrates the civil rights icon, should be ended.“MLK Jr was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” Ingrassia wrote in the messages from early 2024, Politico reports. He also wrote that holidays commemorating Black people, such as Black history month or Juneteenth, should all be “eviscerated”, though he used an Italian slur for Black people.His comment about a “Nazi streak” came amid a discussion of a Trump campaign staffer who wasn’t being deferential enough to the founding fathers being white, Politico reported. Another participant said Ingrassia “belongs in the Hitler Youth”, to which Ingrassia responded: “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.”Ingrassia’s attorney, Edward Andrew Paltzik, told the outlet that the texts could have been manipulated or lacking context, though that if they were real, they “clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor making fun of the fact that liberals outlandishly and routinely call Maga supporters ‘Nazis’”.Ingrassia, 30, has had several roles in the second Trump administration. He was a White House liaison to the justice department, then moved to the Department of Homeland Security. He was nominated in May to lead the office of special counsel, but his appointment was postponed. His critics have drawn on his public comments and inexperience for the role, as well as his support of white supremacist Nick Fuentes.Ingrassia was also accused of sexual harassment earlier this year, Politico reported. He has called the report about the alleged harassment a “vexatious political attack” and said it should be retracted.Politico reported last week on a trove of 2,900 pages of leaked chats from a Telegram group with young Republicans, in which the participants made racist comments, praised Hitler and celebrated rape.“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr,” said Bobby Walker, who was recently made chair of the New York division.The New York Republican state committee suspended the authorization of their young Republicans chapter after its members were implicated in the chat. More
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The Guardian view on Ukraine peace talks: Europe must ensure Zelenskyy can resist Trump’s bullying | Editorial
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 October 2025, 17:55
It wasn’t quite the calamity of February, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was publicly humiliated in the Oval Office by Donald Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance. But the Ukrainian president’s latest visit to the White House on Friday was, by all accounts, a disquieting experience. Mr Trump’s public musings before the meeting suggested that his stance had hardened towards Vladimir Putin, to the strategically significant extent of being willing to sell long-range Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv. But by the time Mr Zelenskyy arrived in Washington, the US president had changed his mind, instead lecturing his guest on the need to make territorial concessions to Russia.So far, so familiar. Since being re-elected, Mr Trump has repeatedly resiled from following up tough talk on Russia with meaningful action. Faux deadlines for Mr Putin to make substantive steps towards peace have come and gone, treated with indifference by the Kremlin. Last week, the US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, stated that Washington was ready to “impose costs” if Russia continued the conflict. But a two-hour phone call at Mr Putin’s request was enough to defuse that threat, and for Mr Trump to once again position himself as a neutral arbitrator between two warring parties.The return of that insidious and amoral framing signifies a moment of diplomatic peril for Mr Zelenskyy. In language that is more suitable for describing a contested real-estate deal than an illegal invasion costing hundreds of thousands of lives, Mr Trump told Fox News that Mr Putin was “going to take something … he’s won certain property”. Should a planned meeting in Budapest take place between the US and Russian presidents – to be hosted by Hungary’s Putin-friendly leader, Viktor Orbán – discussion of a potential carve-up will dominate the agenda, as it did in the failed Alaska head-to-head.That prospect should concentrate minds ahead of a EU leaders’ summit later this week in Brussels. In the wake of the signing of the Gaza peace agreement – in relation to which Mr Putin was careful to offer fulsome congratulations – Mr Trump has taken to describing himself as “the mediator president”. In grimly paradoxical fashion, there is every possibility that he will try to bully Mr Zelenskyy into an unacceptable deal that rewards Russia’s aggression, in order to burnish his supposed credentials as a supreme peacemaker.It is critical that Europe provides Ukraine with the resources and staying power which allow it to resist such pressure. Progress is reportedly being made on proposals backed by the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, which would use frozen Russian assets to secure an interest-free £122bn loan to Kyiv. Such money, however it is sourced, will be fundamental to supporting Ukraine’s defence effort into next year. At a more symbolic level, there are also signs of a new determination to find ways to circumvent Mr Orbán’s opposition to advancing Ukraine’s bid for EU membership.As Mr Trump pursues his mercurial path, guided only by vanity, mercantilism and admiration for the exercise of brute force, EU leaders will need to be creative and determined in ensuring that Ukraine’s interests are adequately defended in the weeks and months to come. Mr Putin is playing the US president again, exploiting the absence of a moral compass in Washington. More than ever, a robust counterweight is required on the other side of the Atlantic. More

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