Closing summary
This concludes our live chronicle of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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The three top House Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar, called the Republican leadership “cowardly” for cancelling a scheduled vote on a war powers resolution to end US hostilities in Iran that would likely have passed.
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Progressive House Democrats Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said they were stunned that a draft 192-page autopsy of the Democratic party’s 2024 election loss did not mention Gaza once.
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Republican congressman Tom Kean Jr, who represents New Jersey but has not been seen for more than two months, spoke by phone on Thursday to David Wildstein, a former aide to New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
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Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to Barack Obama who is now a host of the Pod Save America podcast, called on Thursday for the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, to resign or be fired over the botched autopsy of the party’s 2024 election loss.
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The Senate refuses to vote on funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as up to 25 Republican seantors objected to a $1bn proposal for security measures tied to Trump’s White House ballroom and his $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund.
Democratic senator calls for investigation into transportion secretary Sean Duffy's 'Great American Road Trip' reality show
Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, called for the Department of Transportation’s independent inspector general to open an official investigation into transport secretary Sean Duffy, a former Republican congressman, Fox News host and and reality TV star, over his involvement in the Great American Road Trip, a reality TV show starring his family that was paid for by the many of the corporations his agency regulates.
“The Secretary of Transportation spent 24 days over several months recording a ridiculous promotional TV show about himself—an all-expense paid vacation—sponsored by the very corporations he is tasked with regulating,” Murray said in a statement. “The companies he regulates—Shell, United, Toyota, Boeing, Royal Caribbean, among others—paid for his family’s vacation.”
Although the filming of the show was conducted in secret, earlier this month the Department of Transportation released this trailer for the program, which includes a scene in which Duffy takes his children to the location of a home he lived in 1997 as a cast member of MTV’s Real World: Boston. A year later, as a cast member of Road Rules: All Stars, Duffy met his future wife, Rachel Campos, a star of another Real World show.
Both went on to host Fox News shows. In 2024, Rachel Campos Duffy was the Fox & Friends host who asked then presidential candidate Donald Trump if he would pledge to release the Epstein files.
“Yeah, I would,” Trump answered, before equivocating. “I guess I would. I think that, less so, because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”
The Fox co-host sitting next to Campos Duffy during that awkward interview, Pete Hegseth, is now the US defense secretary.
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Missing Republican congressman speaks
Republican congressman Tom Kean Jr, who represents New Jersey but has not been seen for more than two months, spoke by phone on Thursday to David Wildstein, a former aide to New Jersey governor Chris Christie who now edits the politics website the New Jersey Globe.
“My doctors are confident that I’m on the road to a full recovery,” Kean told Wildstein. “I understand the need for public transparency, and I appreciate the support of my constituents.”
Kean, however, was less than transparent about what condition he is suffering from, merely saying his prognosis is positive, and expects it to have no long-term impact on his physical or cognitive health.
“I anticipate that in the next couple of weeks, I’ll return to voting and to the campaign trail,” said the congressman, who has been quietly running for reelection without being seen or heard for over two months.
Wildstein came to political journalism late in his career, after a career in politics which ended when he pleaded guilty in 2015 to masterminding the so-called Bridgegate scandal.
According to Wildstein, he came up with a scheme to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey for refusing to endorse Christie, a Republican, for governor, in which the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey blocked lanes of traffic near the George Washington Bridge to flood Fort Lee with traffic.
The Christie administration and the authority said the lanes were closed to study traffic patterns, but an email later made public showed that Christie’s deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, Bridget Anne Kelly, had written to Wildstein the month before the lanes were closed: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer says DNC chair Ken Martin 'has to go'
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to Barack Obama who is now a host of the Pod Save America podcast, called on Thursday for the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, to resign or be fired over the botched autopsy of the party’s 2024 election loss.
In a post for Message Box, his Substack newsletter, Pfeiffer noted that Martin was forced to release the incomplete report after “an incredibly viral interview on Pod Save America” in April in which the DNC chair argued to Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter, that the report was useful but releasing it would distract from the upcoming midterm elections.
Then, after CNN obtained and published portions of the report, Martin relented and admitted that while he had “commissioned a comprehensive review of the 2024 election”, when he received the report late last year, he discovered that it was poorly done and decided to shelve it rather than start the process over.
“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it,” Martin said in a preface to the draft report he finally released on Thursday.
Pfeiffer’s response to Martin’s admission was scathing:
In other words, the autopsy wasn’t released because the political crony that Martin hired to do the job didn’t really do the job. He failed to speak to many of the top decision makers and never really wrestled with the tough questions like Biden’s decision to run for reelection, his age, or the impact of his Gaza policy.
The final product was a joke. Not good enough to be released, so Ken Martin just lied about it until he got caught.
This is the final straw.
Ken Martin is not up to the job, and his continued presence is going to make the DNC woefully ineffective heading into the midterms and then the critical 2028 primaries, where the DNC plays a major role.
He should step down for the good of the party, and if he won’t, the DNC should fire him.
On the Pod Save America YouTube channel on Thursday, Pfeiffer’s podmates, Favreau and Tommy Vietor, a former national security spokesperson for Obama, suggested that Martin had to go for not just lying about his reasons for not releasing the report, but “gaslighting” critics.
Vietor pointed out that the 192-page autopsy included “zero mentions of the word Israel, Palestine or Gaza; not even examining the impact of that issue on the results is crazy.”
The former Obama aides suggested that the party could replace Martin with a transitional figure, should he resign before the midterms, and also discussed the odd fact that Martin only came on the podcast to discuss the report after heatedly confronting the hosts in person at a Grindr-sponsored party ahead of this year’s White House Correspondents’ dinner.
Among the names they suggested as possible interim leaders of the committee were Roger Lau, a former Elizabeth Warren campaign manager, Addisu Demissie, who has run campaigns for Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker, and Faiz Shakir, a Bernie Sanders advisor who founded More Perfect Union, a progressive nonprofit newsroom.
One name they did not put forward was that of Ben Wikler, who ran the Wisconsin Democratic Party from 2019 to 2025 and finished second to Martin in the 2025 election for DNC chair despite the backing of the Pod Save America hosts.
Wikler (who, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say I worked with briefly at Air America in 2004) has a new book out in July, titled, “This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy”.
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House Democrats call Republicans 'cowardly' for cancelling scheduled vote on war powers resolution to check Trump on Iran
The three top House Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar, called the Republican leadership “cowardly” for cancelling a scheduled vote on a war powers resolution to end US hostilities in Iran that would likely have passed.
“For nearly three months, Donald Trump has forced America and our men and women in uniform into a reckless and costly war of choice in Iran. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth took us to war without clear objectives, an exit strategy, public support or the authorization required by the United States Congress,” the Democrats said.
”The Republican-controlled House continues to behave like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump administration. Republicans cowardly pulled a scheduled vote on a War Powers Resolution—legislation that would have passed with bipartisan support and required the President to end the conflict in the Middle East,” they added.
The vote has been postponed until lawmakers return from a recess in June, but it appears likely that the resolution could pass then.
According to Politico, Brian Fitzpatrick, a Philadelphia-area Republican congressman who broke with his party last week to vote for the last Iran war powers resolution, and was attacked by Donald Trump on Wednesday, said the delay would not stop the resolution from passing soon. “The next time they bring it, it’s passing,” he said.
Among the Republican House members absent on Thursday but expected to be present when the resolution is put to a vote in June was Thomas Massie, the Kentucky congressman who has been a critic of the joint US-Israeli war on Iran. Massie lost a primary election this week to a Trump-backed candidate who was encouraged to run after the president was angered by Massie’s role in forcing the Department of Justice to release investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender Trump socialized with for nearly two decades.
Donald Trump announced on Thursday he would deploy an “additional” 5,000 US troops to Poland, just days after the Pentagon controversially halted a long-planned rotation of forces to the largest country on the eastern flank of Nato.
“Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland,” Trump said on his social media platform.
It was not immediately clear whether the deployment would be rotational or permanent, or if there was any link to Trump’s previous decision to pull 5,000 troops out from Germany. There are some 10,000 US troops in Poland, but most of them serve on a rotational basis.
The announcement seems to mark a rare U-turn after the Pentagon said last week it would delay a rotation of 4,000 US troops from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division to Poland as part of a broader review of the US force posture in Europe.
Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, defended the decision as recently as Wednesday, telling a Polish reporter that the US wanted Europe to take more responsibility for its defence and security, and adding “Poland is capable of defending itself with a lot of support from the United States.” He criticised the media for “overreacting” over what he said was “a very minor thing” and “a standard delay.”
But the original decision – which appeared to catch Warsaw by surprise – prompted anxious reactions from top Polish leaders worried about the assertive Russian stance in the region amid continuing war in Ukraine, and drew criticism in the US Congress.
Over the years, Poland has sought to position itself as a top US ally in Europe, with its troops serving alongside the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the country’s successive government leading the defence spending charts among Nato’s European members.
Announcing the move, Trump pointedly praised his relationship with Poland’s conservative president, Karol Nawrocki, who unexpectedly won last year’s presidential election after being hosted by Trump at the White House in the final weeks of the campaign. The pair has had a close relationship ever since, with Trump regularly referencing the importance of his endorsement for Nawrocki’s election.
Despite the announcement being made late in the evening in Europe, the Polish president immediately thanked Trump “for his friendship towards Poland and for the decisions, the practical dimension of which we see very clearly today.”
“I stand and will continue to stand guard over the Polish-American alliance – a vital pillar of security for every Polish home and for all of Europe,” Nawrocki said.
“Good alliances are based on cooperation, mutual respect, and a commitment to our shared security,” he added.
Poland’s defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz also said Trump’s decision “confirms the Polish-American relations are very strong, and that Poland is a model and ironclad ally.”
Earlier this week, Kosiniak-Kamysz sought urgent talks with US defence secretary Pete Hegseth to get clarity on the original decision, telling reporters that he hoped to see “all misunderstandings, or media noise, will be explained in the coming days.”
Hours before Trump’s announcement, US undersecretary of defense Elbridge Colby held talks with a senior Polish official in Washington DC. After the meeting, he said on X that “Poland stands out as a model ally and a leader among our allies,” and said the US would work closely with Warsaw “ensure our presence in Poland remains strong and robust.”
Congressman Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska and a retired Air Force Brigadier General, responded to the news saying “this is good news for Poland and our Baltic allies.”
“I’m glad the President reversed the SecDef decision to withdraw the Brigade from Poland. Poland walks the talk and deserves our close partnership,” he added.
The announcement comes just hours before the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is due to take part in a Nato ministerial meeting in Sweden after weeks of tense relations between the US administration and its European allies caused by their refusal to get involved in the Iran war.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says 'it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once' in DNC 2024 autopsy report
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York many progressives want to run for the presidency in 2028, told reporters on Thursday that it was stunning that there was no mention of Gaza, Israel or the Uncommitted movement in the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the party’s 2024 election loss.
“I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report,” the congresswoman said. “I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. Regardless of how one feels about that issue, the fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight.”
“I think that for young people it was a huge part of the environment”, she continued. “I can tell you, for myself as a candidate during that cycle, there’s no way that it was an ignorable issue, or totally immaterial. So I think that it’s a real disservice to not speak to that or include or assess that.”
In February, Ocasio-Cortez said during a Munich security conference panel that the Democratic party’s next presidential nominee should reconsider the country’s military aid to Israel.
She was responding to a question from Hagar Shezaf of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who asked the US congresswoman if “the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2028 elections should re-evaluate military aid to Israel”.
“To me this isn’t just about a presidential election,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws.
“I think that, personally, the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what one does, does not make sense,” she added. “I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead … that was completely avoidable.”
“So I believe that enforcement of our own laws, through the Leahy laws, which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations is appropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.
The Leahy laws are two statutory provisions, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy who introduced them in the 1990s, which prohibit the US defense department and state department from providing funds to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”.
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Congressman Ro Khanna says enabling 'genocide in Gaza' cost the Democrats the 2024 election
Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California thought to be considering a run for the presidency in 2028, joined the criticism of the Democratic National Committee’s reluctantly released, incomplete postmortem on the party’s disastrous 2024 election defeat.
In a social media video, Khanna said: “There’s not a single mention of Gaza in the 192-page DNC autopsy report that was just released today. As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you: one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York many progressives want to run for the presidency in 2028, told reporters she too was stunned by the omission of any mention of Gaza, Israel or the Uncommitted movement in the report.
“I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report,” the congresswoman said. “I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. Regardless of how one feels about that issue, the fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight.”
Ocasio-Cortez said in February that the Democratic party’s next presidential nominee should enforce laws barring US aid to countries that violate human rights, since unconditional aid to Israel had “enabled a genocide in Gaza”.
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Stephen Miller suggests 'innocent' rioters who attacked Capitol police on January 6 are 'owed' more than just $1.776bn by US taxpayers
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, took three minutes of questions from reporters on Thursday.
He concluded by defending the $1.776bn in taxpayer funds the Trump administration set aside this week to compensate people who claim they were wrongly prosecuted by the federal government, apparently including the hundreds of violent rioters convicted of attacking police officers as they tried to get at lawmakers on January 6 2021 in a failed bid to keep Donald Trump in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
Miller was asked about the fact that there was significant pushback over the fund from lawmakers on Thursday, reportedly including 25 Republican senators who objcted to it during a nearly two-hour meeting on Thursday with Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer now serving as the acting attorney general.
“That’s a good closing question only because it allows me to say this, which is that the- we lived through four years of– more than four years, actually, but I’ll just say four years in this case, of unimaginable weaponization of the federal government against innocent people,” Miller said.
“We’ve had so many lives- it really goes back to, I would say, further, but so many lives destroyed, so many livelihoods ruined, so many people who were deprived of their fundamental rights and freedoms as American citizens. And this settlement is just a small measure of the justice that they are owed,” he continued.
Having delivered what seemed like his pre-scripted talking points, the influential adviser then immediately concluded the briefing, holding up his hands and saying “anyway, thank you all for your time”, and walking away before any follow-up questions could be asked.
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has circulated a “Be on the Lookout” alert to law enforcement nationwide, targeting a comedian whose satire of US immigration enforcement went viral.
The subject of the alert, known as a “Bolo”, was Ben Palmer, a Nashville-based standup comedian and prankster who created a parody anti-immigration tip website. His revealing videos of calls with members of the public who thought they were reporting immigrants to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have garnered millions of views on TikTok and YouTube.
The DHS bulletin was issued by the department’s Nashville field office in February, about a week before the Washington Post profiled Palmer after a kindergarten teacher reported one of her student’s parents to Palmer’s supposed-tip page on spurious grounds, thinking she was communicating with the government.
The Bolo was then shared by the Illinois State Police to a distribution list of state and local law enforcement agencies. The alert on Palmer was obtained by the Chicago-based journalism nonprofit Injustice Watch through a series of public records requests. It was not immediately clear how many other law enforcement departments around the US may also have shared the federal alert, as Injustice Watch was investigating matters in Illinois.
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Even in Greenland, the shadow of Jeffrey Epstein looms over Trump's ambitions
As our colleague Miranda Bryant reports, hundreds of Greenlanders protested against the opening of a new US consulate in the island’s capital, Nuuk, on Thursday.
The protesters waved Greenlandic flags, held up signs that read “USA ASU” (“USA stop it” in the local Inuit language) and shouted “go home”, one day after Donald Trump’s envoy, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, toured the capital trailed by a dogged protester who shouted at him: “Colonizer go home! You’re not welcome here! This is Indigenous land!”
Amid speculation that Trump has turned to foreign military adventures at least in part to change the subject from the uproar over his long friendship with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, photographs and video of the protest in Nuuk showed that Greenlanders were also keen to associate the US president with his friend of nearly two decades.
One pair of signs seen near the front of the march in video and photographs of the protest march featured a 1997 photograph of Trump smiling with his hand on Epstein’s shoulder as the two friends posed together at the future president’s Mar-a-Lago beach club.
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As South Carolina proceeds forward in passing the new congressional map that would eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district, Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California spoke out in a video post on X.
“We must stand up to this modern day Dred Scott Court,” he said. The Dred Scott court refers to the US Supreme Court’s 1857 decision about Black Americans not being US citizens and hence not being able to sue in federal court, among other limitations to their rights.
“They have unleashed a process that will eliminate the only Black-majority district in the state of South Carolina. South Carolina has a black population of 25% but they would be left with not a single Black majority district or Black political representation in the House,” said Khanna.
Calling out the Supreme Court, Khanna said “We need term limits for these justices now,” adding that the Court should to be expanded from 9 justices to 13 justices.
Here's a recap of the day so far
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US Senate refuses to push through ICE funding amid row over Trump’s ballroom. A bid to restore funding to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol has been derailed by rows over a $1bn proposal for security measures tied to Trump’s White House ballroom and controversial plans to create a $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund.
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The Democratic National Party belatedly released a copy of a report about why Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election, written by a Democratic strategist. The report focuses on key demographics that Harris lost – including Latinos, men and rural voters in many states – and compares her performance to other Democrats in key state races, such as North Carolina governor Josh Stein.
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Trump insists White House ballroom security costs would be a ‘very good expenditure’ despite GOP backlash. Asked about Republican backlash over plans to provide $1bn in security funds for his White House ballroom project, Trump drew distinctions between the ballroom and proposed security improvements.
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Trump postponed a signing ceremony for an executive order on artificial intelligence because he didn’t like some aspects of the text. He announced this just a few hours before the ceremony with top CEOs at the White House was due to take place.
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Trump says ‘it looks like I’ll be the one’ to intervene in Cuba after Castro indictment. Asked about the US aircraft carrier that arrived in the Caribbean yesterday and whether it was meant to intimidate the Cuban government, Trump said: “No, not at all.”
“Today the American people had a win in the US senate,” said Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen in a video post on X Thursday afternoon. “We stopped them from moving forward on a huge slush fund for ICE to provide billions of your taxpayer dollars for a lawless ICE operation.”
Van Hollen said that after the Democrats laid out their concerns with Trump’s $1.8 bn taxpayer funded slush fund, Republicans “pulled down votes & are going home.”
Former head of Minnesota non-profit gets nearly 42-year prison sentence for fraud
A federal judge has sentenced the Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock to nearly 42 years in prison for orchestrating what prosecutors called the largest pandemic fraud scheme in the country.
Thursday’s sentencing follows a $250m plot that exploited federal child nutrition programs. The plot later became a flashpoint in Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, leading to violent demonstrations and the ICE killings of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Prosecutors had asked for a 50-year sentence, arguing Bock’s crimes – which included conspiracy, wire fraud and bribery – stole millions intended to feed children during the Covid-19 pandemic and caused “profound” damage that would reverberate far beyond the state.
“I understand I failed. I failed the public, my family, everyone,” Bock said in federal court.
“Feeding Our Future operated like a cash pipeline, open to anyone willing to submit fraudulent claims and pay kickbacks,” prosecutors said in a court filing. “The ripple effects of her actions are profound, immeasurable, and will have lasting consequences for both Minnesota and the nation.”
Bock was convicted last year of multiple counts involving conspiracy, wire fraud and bribery. She had long insisted she was innocent.
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The DNC autopsy report focuses on key demographics that Harris lost – including Latinos, men and rural voters in many states – and compares her performance to other Democrats in key state races, such as North Carolina governor Josh Stein.
It also takes an in-depth look at campaign spending and advertising, and highlights the need to involve new voters in campaign messaging rather than just pushing out messages.
Notably, the autopsy does not mention the role that Joe Biden’s age or the US’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza played in the wider Democratic defeat, despite widespread polling about the impact of those issues.
Misgivings about the quality and contents of the 192-page document are stated graphically at the beginning and at the top of each page in the form of a disclaimer marked in red, stating: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”
Sections thereafter are punctuated with multiple qualifiers questioning sourcing, data accuracy or a perceived lack of evidence.
One qualifier undermines the author’s version of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters bent on overturning the 2020 presidential election result, which he states led to the deaths of five people. “Claim contradicts public reporting”, reads an interposed remark. In fact, five people died within 36 hours of the attack. A further four police officers who responded to the insurrection died by suicide in the following seven months.
Jay Bhattacharya, the director of National Institutes of Health, testified in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee about Trump’s 2027 fiscal budget Thursday morning.
When Bhattacharya was asked about the Trump’s proposal to cut $6bn of dollars in funding for research at NIH, he said:
“Senator, the budget is obviously a major problem for this country. The NIH, my job is to make sure that my colleagues have the resources they need to fund the best biomedical research in this country. And I am really grateful to work with Congress and the administration to make sure that that’s possible.”
The budget hearing comes amid questions about the severity of the hantavirus. Bhattacharya, who is also the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said hantavirus “is largely contained”.
US Senate refuses to push through ICE funding amid row over Trump’s ballroom
A bid to restore funding to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol has been derailed by rows over a $1bn proposal for security measures tied to Donald Trump’s White House ballroom and controversial plans to create a $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund.
The US Senate will not pass the $70bn legislation ahead of a 1 June deadline set by the US president, Republican senators told reporters on Thursday, as lawmakers leave Washington for the Memorial Day recess.
It comes amid backlash from members of Trump’s own party against an attempt to latch funding for his ballroom project on to the immigration bill.
The plan prompted intense anxiety among congressional Republicans, who feared diverting taxpayer dollars toward Trump’s “East Wing modernization project” amid mounting cost of living concerns across the US would risk alienating voters ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Some Senate Republicans have also expressed concerns about a plan, announced on Monday, to create a secretive $1.776bn fund – which critics have argued is essentially a slush fund – to compensate Trump allies as part of an agreement in which the president and his sons dropped a $10bn long-shot lawsuit against the US Internal Revenue Service.
The DNC autopsy report is a disgrace, said RootsAction, a progressive grassroots advocacy group, in a statement Thursday.
The report focuses extensively on ad spending and fundraising, without providing enough attention to the Democratic policy positions and the context of the 2024 election, said the advocacy group.
“The word “affordability,” arguably the most important issue in the 2024 election, appears twice in the 129-page report,” said the statement. “The report makes no mention whatsoever of Gaza or Israel — neither word even appears in its text.”
The Democratic party is trying to distance itself from the report by poking holes into its legitimacy instead of taking responsibility after commissioning it, the statement said.
Republicans are also reacting to the report. Democrats didn’t need a report to tell them the obvious, said Mike Marinella, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
“Democrats keep stepping on the same rake and seem genuinely surprised when it smacks them in the face,” said Marinella. “Americans have made it pretty clear they’re tired of radical social experiments and out of touch priorities.”
On the Supreme Court’s decision about birthright citizenship that was expected today – but wasn’t announced – Trump claimed the US is the only country in the world to have it.
About 32 other countries, most of them in the Western Hemisphere, have birthright citizenship laws that are similar to the US, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Approximately 50 other countries have variations of birthright citizenship.
“This was not meant for Chinese billionaires to come in and have their kids here,” he said. “This was meant for the babies of slaves. You look at the dates, it was right after the Civil War, and you can tell.”
Trump said are misusing the birthright citizenship and “if allowed to stand, it will be a disaster.” The Supreme Court will probably rule against eliminating birthright citizenship, he said.
“Birthright citizen is done by no other country in the world,” Trump said. “We are a laughingstock.”
If birthright citizenship is overturned, hundreds of thousands of children born annually would be blocked from US citizenship.
Trump says ‘it looks like I’ll be the one’ to intervene in Cuba after Castro indictment
Asked about the US aircraft carrier that arrived in the Caribbean yesterday and whether it was meant to intimidate the Cuban government, Trump said: “No, not at all.”
“We’re going to help them along … because I want to help them,” he said, adding: “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years. It looks like I’ll be the one that does it. We want to open it up to Cuban Americans where they can go back and help.”
Fears of potential US military strikes on Cuba are growing, following the issuing of a federal criminal indictment against former president Raúl Castro and five others yesterday, marking a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign to oust the country’s six-decades-old communist regime.
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I’ve just been in the Oval Office, wishing I’d worn dark glasses to dim the glare of all that gold. Donald Trump was ostensibly promoting of the reversal of Joe Biden’s regulations on fridges but sounded more enthusiastic about his White House ballroom, Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and triumphal arch, which just received approval from a fine arts commission.
I asked the US president why today’s AI executive order signing ceremony - which tech titans were expected to attend - has abruptly been called off. “Because I didn’t like certain aspects of it, I postponed it,” said Trump, sitting at the Resolute desk. “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s gonna get in the way of that lead.”
He said AI is “causing tremendous good and it’s also bringing in a lot of jobs, tremendous numbers of jobs. Again, we have more people working right now than we’ve ever had. I really thought that could have been a blocker and I want to make sure that it’s not.”
Trump travelled to China last week with Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple and other tech leaders. Did he discuss AI safeguards with Chinese leader Xi Jinping? “I did, I did, I discussed it and he acknowledges how well we’re doing,” the presidenty said. “It’s the two of us, the two countries are fighting for it. Other countries are way behind. Way, way behind.
“They’re fighting for it, they want it, everybody wants it but they’re way behind. But I didn’t want to do it – I postponed that meeting – it was a signing actually – because I didn’t like what I was seeing.”
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Trump insists White House ballroom security costs would be a 'very good expenditure' despite GOP backlash
Asked about Republican backlash over plans to provide $1bn in security funds for his White House ballroom project, Donald Trump drew distinctions between the ballroom and proposed security improvements.
He said the ballroom was being built “in conjunction” with the military and the Secret Service and claimed that “a tremendous amount” of the project “is for national security”.
The president also said that the changes were “not for me because I’ll be gone” - even though he’s repeatedly mused about remaining in office after his term, including yesterday.
Pressured by the White House, Republicans tried to add the funds to a roughly $70bn bill to restore funding to ICE and the Border Patrol. But the security proposal is expected to be scrapped after being met with opposition from some GOP lawmakers who feared diverting taxpayer dollars to the project amid mounting cost of living concerns across the US would risk alienating voters ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Asked if he was losing control of the Senate, Trump said:
I really don’t know. I don’t need money for the ballroom, I’m making a gift of the ballroom.
We’re on time, on budget, it’s going beautifully. I have all the money I need, I’m making a gift to the United States. The ballroom is paid for, it’s a gift.
He then claimed the funds needed for the ballroom are for “national security”, including the drone port and bulletproof glass.
If they want to spend money securing the White House, I think it would be very much a good expenditure.
Asked what if Congress doesn’t sign off on the security money, Trump replied:
Well, the White House won’t be a very secure place.
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Trump postpones signing AI executive order because he 'didn't like some aspects'
Donald Trump also called off a signing ceremony for an executive order on artificial intelligence because he didn’t like some aspects of the text.
“Because I didn’t like certain aspects of it I postponed it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office a short while ago, just a few hours before the ceremony with top CEOs at the White House was due to take place. “I didn’t like what I was seeing.”
He added: “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.”
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In response to a comments about the DNC autopsy report and the 2024 presidential election, Trump said “US election are so rigged and we have to do something about it.”
He again brought up that voters should have proof of citizenship and that the practice of mail-in ballots should be eliminated.
“We have elections that are more corrupt than third world countries,” said Trump, then changing the conversation to talk about Democratic support towards the participation of transgender people in sports.
Trump’s environmental protection agency has rolled back refrigerant rule for grocery stores, claiming it will lower prices.
The EPA is relaxing a Biden-era federal rule that mandated US businesses to reduce greenhouse gases used in cooling equipment. Officials say the relaxation is a push to lower grocery costs.
“Substantial and big savings are expected for a lot of families,” said Trump from the White House. “Numbers will come soon.”
Trump said the relaxation of in the rule did not raise any environment concerns.
“There will not be any impact on the environment,” he said.
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Annotations throughout the Democrat autopsy report suggest that the report makes claims that are contradicted elsewhere in the same report and evidence and data is not provided for numerous claims. At times the report’s methodology appears inconsistent, and public reporting and data oppose the claims the report is making.
In the “What happened” section of the DNC autopsy report, one of key takeaways from the Democrats failure in the 2024 presidential election is “despite winning the popular vote, Trump won the election by a little more than 2 million votes in the popular vote, meaning the election was swayed by 0.15 percent of the votes cast across the country in the election.”
The annotations on the report, however, suggest that this analysis is not supported by data.
Another takeaway is that “the margin of defeat for Kamala Harris was among the smallest in American history. Under the structure of the Electoral College, a handful of swing states are generally determinative in the outcome, meaning the margins of victories in those states are the key to the overall outcome.”
The report suggests that in the future, Democrats should identify early on, in what states and battlegrounds they will fight the hardest.
California governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to prepare workers, small businesses, and communities from the economic disruption that AI could bring to the workforce, the governor’s office said in a statement Thursday.
“The order mobilizes state agencies, labor experts, economists, universities, and industry leaders to develop new policies, gather data, and identify early warning signs of workforce disruption — while ensuring workers share in the gains created by AI-driven productivity,” said the statement.
“California has never sat back and watched as the future happened to us – and we won’t start now,” said Newsom. “This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future — and that work is starting right here in the Golden State.”
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Trump health officials issue advisory on children and teens’ excessive screen time
Health officials in the Trump administration have issued an advisory about children and adolescents’ excessive screen time, warning that negative impacts on sleep and mental functioning have “become a public health concern”.
The advisory from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notes that the amount of screen time reaches an average of four or more hours per day by the time a child becomes a teenager and can be linked to poor sleep, decreased functioning in school, less physical activity and weakened in-person relationships.
“A concern at all stages of life, and a particularly important one around children’s screen exposure, is its potential to disrupt healthy sleep, which is fundamental to learning, mood, behavior, physical health, and overall development,” the report says.
The department provided guidance about how to identify harmful behaviors around screens and how to set limits, including no screen time for children under 18 months old, less than one hour per day for children under six and two hours per day for ages six to 18.
“Exposure often begins before a child’s first birthday and increases as children age. By adolescence, children may spend more time on screens than sleeping or attending school,” the report says.
DNC releases autopsy of party's 2024 presidential campaign
The Democratic National Party released a copy of a report about why Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera Thursday.
News about the report and the full report was first published by CNN.
The report was commissioned at the request of Ken Martin, the DNC’s committee chair, and the version CNN published includes annotations that the DNC added to Rivera’s report.
The report was handed to Martin late last year, he told CNN in a statement, but he didn’t share it then because no source material was provided. He apologized for the delay, but said he was releasing it now even though it still does not meet his standards, because “people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
Senator Angela Alsobrooks, like other Democratic leaders, spoke about how families are being forced to think about how to cut back in the face of rising prices of gas and groceries, and the budget allocating more money to ICE.
“We are here with this bill as further proof of what Republicans are thinking about, and its not about the American people,” she said. “They wanna give billions of your dollars to the wasteful ballroom.”
Nothing in this bill talks about relief in gas or grocery prices, she said.
Democrats did not open the news conference for questions from the press.
Democrats say taxpayers' money shouldn't be used 'to brutalize or kill American citizens'
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and other Democrats spoke held a news conference, ahead of the vote-a-rama Thursday morning.
“The Republican agenda is one big broken promise,” said Schumer, criticizing the Republican budget bill. “We still haven’t seen the bill, because they are fighting with each other.”
Schumer said the Republicans tried to sneak a billion dollars for Trump’s ballroom, while the Democrats are fighting for lower costs.
“Democrats want to put an end to the reckless Iran war,” he said. “Trump and Republicans are fueling the war and keeping gas prices high.”
Schumer introduced Jeffries as “soon to be House Speaker,” and handed him the podium.
“Taxpayer dollars under no circumstances should be used to brutalize or kill American citizens,” said Jeffries, while speaking about the powers the Trump administration has given ICE. “That’s unpatriotic and unacceptable and thats why we are strongly opposing this bill.”
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Supreme court poised to issue opinions
The supreme court will hand down opinions at 10am ET today. Here’s a reminder of the major cases we’re tracking closely.
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Trump v Cook: Donald Trump’s case for firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, as he continues to exert greater control over the US central bank.
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Trump v Slaughter: A case which examines the legality of Trump’s firing of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) member, Rebecca Slaughter.
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Trump v Barbara: In which the court will decide if the administration’s attempts to restrict birthright citizenship are unconstitutional.
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On Capitol Hill today we are expecting votes in the House and in the Senate.
Lawmakers in the lower chamber could vote for legislation that would hold Trump back from continuing the war with Iran.
In the upper chamber, a “vote-a-rama”, in which lawmakers were able to offer amendments to the bill, about the reconciliation bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, is expected. Democrats are expected to offer amendments regarding the proposed ballroom budget and the Trump administration’s “Anti Weaponization Fund.”
Also on the agenda are House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer holding a news conference to talk about the tensions regarding the Republican budget proposal at 10am.
Student sues University of Michigan over alleged surveillance tied to Gaza protests
A University of Michigan student is suing the school, accusing it of violating his constitutional rights when it waged a vast undercover surveillance operation against him in response to his protest of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The lawsuit, which will be filed on Thursday in federal court by Cair-MI and U-M student Josiah Walker, claims the university and individual private investigators conspired to intimidate, terrorize and retaliate against Walker in 2024 and 2025.
According to the suit, the university and private investigators falsified police reports, manipulated police documents, illegally stalked and assaulted Walker, illegally seized his property and executed “malicious prosecutions” against him. The “targeted and relentless” campaign caused Walker “psychological trauma”, says the suit, which was shared in advance with the Guardian.
Walker is a leader with Students Allied For Freedom and Equality (Safe), a group affiliated with Student for Justice in Palestine, and a volunteer with the campus Muslim chaplaincy.
The Guardian in June 2025 revealed that U-M had hired dozens of undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian students, trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations. The investigators sometimes threatened students, and one drove a car at Walker who had to jump out of the way, video Walker captured shows.
In addition to the indictment of former Cuban leader Raul Castro and Trump’s comments about Cuba being a “failed nation,” US secretary of state Marco Rubio delivered a direct video address to the Cuban people in Spanish Wednesday.
“The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel, or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people,” he said.
Rubio spoke about GAESA, the Cuban military business conglomerate founded by Castro.
“Cuba is not controlled by any ‘revolution.’ Cuba is controlled by GAESA,” he said. “The only role played by the so-called ‘government’ is to demand that you continue making ‘sacrifices’ and repressing anyone who dares to complain.”
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Video shows ICE violently arresting Oregon farm workers and using facial recognition
Body-cam footage shared with the Guardian shows US immigration officers forced farm workers out of a van, in what a judge has called ‘unlawful’ arrest, in Oregon, smashing their windows and using facial recognition software to try to identify one of them.
Videos from a 30 October 2025 operation were disclosed in court as part of an ongoing class-action lawsuit challenging Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) arrest tactics and racial profiling by agents. Lawyers for one of the detained farm workers shared the footage with the Guardian.
The officers did not have warrants to detain the workers, and a federal judge later said the arrests appeared to be unlawful and unjustified.
The footage shows an agent using his phone to capture the face of one of the detained workers, and agents later admitted in court that they used a facial recognition app during the operation. The case provides a window into ICE’s expanding use of this surveillance technology across the US, which has raised significant privacy and civil liberties concerns, particularly since the app can yield inaccurate results.
A previously undetected outbreak of Ebola is coursing through parts of central Africa, and the US appears to be doing little to help stop it, after massive cuts to global and domestic public health efforts.
There is no cure and no vaccine for the rare Bundibugyo variant of Ebola, which has caused two outbreaks in recent decades. Health leaders and scientists are now racing to understand where the virus is spreading and attempting to stop it – but the US is notably absent in these efforts.
In the past year, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dismantled, thousands of staff at US health agencies were laid off, communications stalled and key scientific research canceled.
There are 482 suspected cases and about 116 deaths reported since April in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with two cases and one death in Uganda and potential spread to neighboring South Sudan. The outbreak “might have been going on for a few months”, said Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research.
The outbreak was immediately declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), before even convening the committee that usually makes that determination. Officials say it may last for months.
“The DRC is one of the most vulnerable health systems in the world, and was the second-biggest recipient of USAID funding,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University. The US withdrawal of funding with “zero notice” has been “disruptive to the country’s basic activities”, he said.
US foreign assistance to the DRC dropped from $1.4bn in 2024 to $431m in 2025 and only $21m so far this year. Assistance to Uganda dropped from $674m to $377m in 2025 and a negative $1.2m so far in 2026.
President Donald Trump’s plan to build a triumphal arch in Washington is getting a second look from a federal agency that suggested changes before it approved the concept last month.
The proposed 250ft (76m) arch is one of several projects the Republican president is pursuing alongside a White House ballroom to leave his imprint on Washington.
He has said some of his other projects, such as adding a blue coating to the interior of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool , will beautify the city in time for 4 July celebrations of America’s 250th birthday.
The US Commission of Fine Arts, whose members were appointed by Trump, approved the concept for the arch at its monthly meeting in April.
Commissioners are set to consider and possibly vote on updated plans when they meet again on Thursday.
A prominent environmental organizer calling for a nationwide moratorium on data centers as he runs for the Democratic nomination in a swing Michigan congressional district has secured an endorsement from Bernie Sanders.
Will Lawrence, co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement climate justice group, was a key figure behind the campaign for a Green New Deal to battle economic and racial injustice while also fighting climate change.
Now he’s running for US Congress, in a three-way Democratic primary to represent the party in Michigan’s purple seventh district.
“I learned at Sunrise just how important it is who is in office,” Lawrence, a Lansing native, said. The group made headlines in 2018 when it stormed the office of then House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi, demanding a swift end to fossil fuels and a jobs guarantee.
Voters in Michigan’s seventh district voted for Donald Trump in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections, and also elected Republican Tom Barrett to Congress in 2024. But the district has been labelled a “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report ahead of November’s midterm elections, and is a key target for Democrats.
On Thursday morning Sanders, the influential independent US senator from Vermont, threw his support behind Lawrence.
In a statement, Sanders praised Lawrence as an “accomplished organizer” who will “demand real accountability for big tech and AI companies” as gargantuan data centers are constructed across the US.
Republicans could abandon $1bn security proposal for Trump's ballroom complex
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Senate Republicans could strip Donald Trump’s lavish White House ballroom complex from the Department of Homeland Security funding bill after members queried the timing and lack of detail in the $1bn Secret Service request.
Facing pressure from the Trump administation, Republicans have tried to add the money to a roughly $70bn bill to restore funding to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol.
However, the security proposal met with backlash from some GOP lawmakers who are questioning the cost and how the taxpayer dollars would be used, AP reported. While the bill’s text has yet to be released, the Senate hopes to pass it this week and send it to the House before leaving for a week-long Memorial Day recess.
The dispute comes as Senate majority leader John Thune acknowledged “ongoing vote issues” on Wednesday with leaders attempting to measure Republican support, as well as “ongoing parliamentarian issues” as they try to figure out what will be allowed in the bill under the chamber’s rules.
“There’s always a consequence with taking on United States senators,” Thune said. “[The president] obviously has his favorites and people he wants to endorse and that’s his prerogative. But what we have to deal with up here is moving the agenda, and obviously that can become slightly more complicated.”
Republican senator John Kennedy said on Wednesday that the bill would be “back to square one” without the security money because “the votes are not there.”
Meanwhile, senator Thom Tillis said the effort to add the security package to the bill was a “bad idea” because he does not think there is enough backing to pass it, even if the cost were reduced. Axios reported recently that Tillis would not support the bill if it is considered this week.
Democrats have criticized Republicans for trying to fund Trump’s ballroom when voters are concerned about basic affordability issues.
In other developments:
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The US issued a federal criminal indictment against Raúl Castro, Cuba’s former president, potentially paving the way for a US military raid to capture him.
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Two police officers attacked by rioters at the US Capitol during the January 6 riot sued Donald Trump over plans to create a $1.776bn “anti-weaponization” fund.
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Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican congressman from a Philadelphia-area district carried by Kamala Harris in 2024, pledged on Wednesday to “try to kill” the $1.776bn slush fund created by Donald Trump’s Department of Justice this week, which could be used to compensate rioters who tried to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election.
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Republican senator Bill Cassidy denounced two of Trump’s passion projects: $1bn in taxpayer funding for the White House ballroom the president can’t stop talking about, and the $1.776bn slush fund he plans to use to reward supporters who stormed the Capitol to try to keep him in office despite losing the 2020 election.
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A former federal prosecutor in Florida pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges that she illegally emailed herself a copy of the unreleased special counsel report on Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.
