Closing summary
We have reached the end of another day in the life of the second Trump administration, but we will return on Wednesday to continue our live coverage. In the meantime, here are some of the day’s developments:
Donald Trump held a televised, three-hour cabinet meeting, in which various secretaries seemed to compete to praise him in more effusive terms, and he took questions from reporters from partisan outlets.
Trump told reporters that “I think, maybe in my own mind, I have somebody that I like” to take the place of the Federal Reserve governor he is trying to force out, Lisa Cook, who is fighting to keep her place.
Two reporters for pro-Trump outlets offered testimony about crime in Washington DC to support the president’s claims.
Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, accusing the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.
A whistleblower complaint alleges that Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) copied and uploaded the sensitive Social Security data of hundreds of millions of Americans to a vulnerable cloud server, potentially violating federal privacy laws. One of the Doge staffers accused in the complaint is Edward Coristine, whose recent assault in Washington DC provided the pretext for Trump’s federal takeover.
In a deeply partisan press release, Sean Duffy, the former Republican congressman and Fox host serving as Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, announced the cancellation of $175m in funding for four projects related to what he called “California’s High-Speed Rail boondoggle”.
The Trump administration retaliated against some Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers who signed a letter of dissent about the agency’s leadership, the Washington Post reports.
A local television outlet in Washington DC recorded video of “a full busload of National Guard members … picking up trash Lafayette Park, just outside of the White House”.
Cracker Barrel announced that it is scrapping its new logo, and returning to its old one, hours after Donald Trump joined the conservative backlash to the change.
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National guard troops deployed to pick up trash outside the White House
Fox 5 Washington DC, a Fox News affiliate in the nation’s capital, reports that “a full busload of National Guard members were seen Tuesday morning picking up trash Lafayette Park, just outside of the White House”.
Lafayette Park is the location where federal agents attacked racial justice protesters with chemicals in 2020, the week after George Floyd was murdered, to clear them away for a photo op in which the president stood outside a church and held up a Bible.
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