Donald Trump‘s former aide Sebastian Gorka was involved in a scuffle with members of the press in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday as a host of right-wing commentators congregated to attend the president’s Social Media Summit.
Despite not inviting any representatives from Twitter to the event, Mr Trump used the platform to attack Republican former House speaker Paul Ryan over comments he made about the president in a new book and to lay into FacebookLibra and other cryptocurrencies, which he said were “not money” but should be subjected to banking regulations.
The day unfolded against the backdrop of a major defeat for Mr Trump, who abandoned plans to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census in favour of ordering federal agencies to turn over their data on the matter with a view to mining it for information.
A federal appeals court meanwhile seemed inclined Friday to side with a House committee seeking some of Mr Trump’s financial records as part of an investigation, a disclosure he is fighting.
A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard more than two hours of arguments in the case Friday, but the judges gave no indication when they would rule.
It seemed that at least two of the judges were inclined to side with the Democratic-led House committee, which in April issued a subpoena for records from Mazars USA, which has provided accounting services to Mr Trump. A lower court previously ordered the records turned over, but the president called the decision “crazy” and his lawyers appealed.
The case is one of several working its way through courts in which Mr Trump is fighting with Congress over records.
Earlier this month, the House Ways and Means Committee sued the Trump administration over access to the president’s tax returns. And in a case in New York, Trump sued to prevent Deutsche Bank and Capital One from complying with House subpoenas for banking and financial records. A judge ruled against him, and Mr Trump is appealing.
The president has argued that House Committee on Oversight and Reform seeking the records from Mazars is out to get him and lacks a legitimate “legislative purpose” for its request. His lawyers have argued that congressional investigations are valid only if there is legislation that might result from them.
On Friday, Judge Patricia Millett told Trump lawyer William Consovoy at one point that he was suggesting that the president was “absolutely immune from any oversight.” And her colleague, Judge David Tatel, told Consovoy that what the House is seeking is “just financial disclosure which presidents for years have been doing.” Tatel was appointed by President Bill Clinton and Millett by President Barack Obama.
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Donald Trump's former aide Sebastian Gorka was involved in a scuffle with Playboy journalist Brian Karem in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday as a host of right-wing commentators congregated to attend the president's Social Media Summit.
Gorka - who had earlier suffered the indignity of having to introduce himself to the president during a Q&A session in case Trump had forgotten his name - was one of a host of oddball conservative personalities invited to the event.
Other guests included Diamond and Silk, Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, singer and MAGA enthusiast Joy Villa and alt-right filmmaker Ali Alexander, who recently attempted to suggest 2020 candidate Kamala Harris was not "an American black" with a view to sparking a new "birther" conspiracy theory like that used to argue Barack Obama was not eligible to be president of the United States.
Trump hailed his audience for "challenging the media gatekeepers and the corporate censors".
"The crap you think of is unbelievable," he said, later hitting out at the "tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination and suppression practiced by certain companies", alluding to Facebook and Twitter, neither of whom were invited to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Without providing any evidence, Trump insisted the liberal-minded Silicon Valley giants were engaged in a conspiracy to keep his follower numbers down.
He also played to his crowd by goading left-wing Antifa protesters as cowards with thin arms who live in their mothers' basements and who would be afraid to fight Bikers for Trump.
Here's a selection of some of the president's choicest remarks, including his annoyance that a fly could ever have gotten into the White House.
Here's Chris Riotta's assessment of the day.
Despite haranguing Twitter, Trump made frequent use of the platform yesterday, notably to boast of his own handsomeness.
Ahead of a trip to Wisconsin on Friday, he attacked the state's Republican former House speaker Paul Ryan over comments he made about the president in a new book, American Carnage by Tim Alberta.
Ryan told Alberta he regarded his retirement as an "escape hatch" out of the Trump presidency.
"I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right," Ryan said. "Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government... I wanted to scold him all the time."
Alberta quotes Ryan saying those around Trump "helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time."
Ahead of a trip to Wisconsin on Friday, he attacked the state's Republican former House speaker Paul Ryan over comments he made about the president in a new book, American Carnage by Tim Alberta.
Ryan told Alberta he regarded his retirement as an "escape hatch" out of the Trump presidency.
"I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right," Ryan said. "Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government... I wanted to scold him all the time."
Alberta quotes Ryan saying those around Trump "helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time."
"We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now I think he’s making some of these knee-jerk reactions."
All of which provoked this furious response from the president, who labelled Ryan "a lame duck failure".
All of which provoked this furious response from the president, who labelled Ryan "a lame duck failure".
Here's more on their feud from Emma Snaith.
Trump also went after Facebook Libra and other cryptocurrencies, which he said were “not money” but should be subjected to banking regulations.
Here's Anthony Cuthbertson on the inevitable boost to the price of the currency Trump's tweets inspired.
All of this unfolded against the backdrop of a major defeat for Trump, who abandoned plans to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census in favour of ordering federal agencies to turn over their citizenship data to be mined for information.
Here's Andrew Buncombe to explain.
Trump's strange obsession with veteran Hollywood action star Arnold Schwarzenegger continued at the Social Media Summit yesterday, with the president making the bizarre claim the former California governor has passed away.
Arnie, of course, couldn't resist bait that juicy.
Oddly, this wasn't the only Schwarzenegger story doing the rounds in DC yesterday, the president himself retweeting Lindsey Graham on ousted British diplomat Sir Kim Darroch likening Trump to the Terminator.
Here's Greg Evans with more.
The Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee yesterday voted to issue subpoenas to a dozen more members of Trump's inner circle over Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election hacking and the administration's immigration policies.
There are some big names on their list, including the president's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, former attorney general Jeff Sessions, ex-deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, ex-White House chief of staff John Kelly and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
The subpoenas are part of a probe into discussions of potential presidential pardons and the "zero tolerance" policy in operation on the US-Mexico border, which has seen children cruelly separated from their families and detained in unsanitary detention centres.
Democratic 2020 front-runner Joe Biden released this pretty stinging attack video last night, going after on Trump's foreign policy record land referencing his praise for Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Iran, his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord and the ongoing trade war with China and its impact on farmers in the American Midwest.
Another 2020 challenger, long-shot Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton, has given an interview to Politico in which he says Democrats should not launch a "moral crusade" against Trump because his support base "already know he's an asshole".
"I think a lot of Democrats think, 'You know, these Trump voters, what we need to do is we just need to educate them, and we're going to get it through their heads that this guy is a bad guy,'" Moulton said.
"OK, Trump voters are not idiots. We don’t need to give America a moral education; they know that he’s an asshole. They get it. They’ve just baked that in.
"When we’re trying to win over Trump voters in the general election, we can’t go on this moral crusade because people are like, 'Give me a break'. What they’re really saying is, 'I get it, I get this guy is immoral. I’m voting for him anyway because you don’t give me a better alternative'."
Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are set to carry out their postponed raids on migrant families with court-ordered removals across nine US cities this Sunday.
Speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN, Francis Suarez, the Republican mayor of Miami, told viewers: "The city of Miami is not coming after you."
"Frankly, we're in the dark. I don't know how whatever the crisis is on the southern border relates to the city of Miami," Suarez said.
His counterpart in New York - Bill de Blasio, who is also running for president - has called out the "fear and division" the measure is inspiring and demanded the abolition of ICE altogether.
Meanwhile, here's Nancy Pelosi speaking for the opposition on the alarming prospect of mass deportations.
President Trump loves to reminisce about his upset Wisconsin win in the 2016 election after Democrat Hillary Clinton took the state for granted. He's determined not to make the same mistake himself.
Once part of the Rust Belt's blue wall meant to keep Trump out of the White House, Wisconsin now counts as a pivotal state for the president's re-election chances in the view of his campaign.
Trump will visit Wisconsin today for the sixth time since taking office. It's one of two Midwest stops that day designed to warm up Trump's 2020 campaign engine with fundraisers. He'll also use the visit to try to showcase the strong economy and push for Congress to pass the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which could squarely impact Wisconsin.
Trump became the first Republican to win Wisconsin since Ronald Reagan in 1984, defeating Clinton by just 22,748 votes. Along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, the state was meant to be the Democrats' safety net against Trump, but Clinton failed to visit the state even once during the general election campaign - a fact the president has mentioned time and time again.
"The Republicans haven't won the great state of Wisconsin in decades," Trump incongruously reminisced in Florida in March. "I went there a lot and in all fairness, her husband Bill, who's a good politician - they didn't listen to him. He said, 'You better go to Wisconsin."'
The state remains starkly divided over the president and appears a toss-up again in 2020.
The latest Marquette University Law School poll in April found 52 per cent of respondents disapproved of how Trump is handling his job, while 46 per cent approved. The poll also found that 54 per cent of respondents said they would definitely or probably vote for someone else in 2020, while 42 per cent said they would definitely or probably vote to re-elect him.
In a troubling sign for Trump's chances in the state, Democrats swept every statewide office in the 2018 fall elections. In the most notable victory for Democrats, Tony Evers defeated Republican governor Scott Walker after eight years in office. Republicans retained their tight grip on the state Legislature but they benefited from district boundaries they redrew to consolidate their power in 2011. And Republicans pushed back this past spring, when conservative Brian Hagedorn won election to the state Supreme Court.
The Trump campaign believes the state is winnable and plans an all-out blitz there again. But the president's approval rating has slipped in several key Midwest battlegrounds.
Trump will make two stops in Milwaukee, one a fundraiser, and the other a visit to Derco Aerospace, a subsidiary of aviation giant Lockheed Martin (whom he praised on Twitter this week) that provides parts, logistics and repair services to fixed-wing aircraft. White House officials said the president would use the visit to push for the USMCA, whose fate is uncertain in Congress.
Canada and Mexico are Wisconsin's top two foreign export markets. Last year the state exported $31m (£24.7m) worth of products to Canada and $15.2m (£12m) worth of products to Mexico, according to census data.
Wisconsin imported $15.5m (£12.4m) worth of goods from Canada in 2018, behind only China. The state imported $9.3m (£7.4m) worth of goods from Mexico last year, the fourth highest amount of imports among the state's foreign trade partners.
Karen Gefvert, executive director of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, said the USMCA could help dairy farmers struggling with low milk prices.
The agreement allows the US to increase the amount of dairy exports to Canada and removes retaliatory tariffs Mexico has placed on US exports, Gefvert said, which should boost Wisconsin cheese exports by making them cheaper.
Derco Aerospace was accused of fraud in a 2014 lawsuit by the federal government that alleges it and two related companies schemed to overbill on a Navy contract for airplane maintenance. The case is pending in federal court in Milwaukee. The companies have denied wrongdoing.
After his visit to Wisconsin, Trump will travel to Ohio for a fundraiser in Cleveland. Democrats are criticising the president for appearing with Brian Colleran, a nursing home magnate who was forced to pay $19.5m (£15.6m) by the Justice Department for his role in a Medicare fraud nursing home scheme.
AP
A former campaign aide to Trump has said a newly emerged video proves her claim the president kissed her without her consent in 2016.
Alva Johnson, who spent months working on Trump’s campaign, first came forward in February when she announced she was suing the president over the alleged incident.
She told The Washington Post at the time that Trump was with her at a rally in Florida in August 2016 when he went in to kiss her without warning. She said she managed to turn her head in time so his lips only hit the side of her mouth.
"I immediately felt violated because I wasn’t expecting it or wanting it," she told the newspaper.
Here's Tim Wyatt's report on the clip in question.
In Britain, Tory leadership contender and probable prime minister-in-waiting Boris Johnson has said Trump's Twitter etiquette could be "more diplomatic" in the wake of the Sir Kim Darroch affair.
Chiara Giordano has this report.
For Indy Voices, Tom Rogan has this on the changing face of international diplomacy in response to the Trump presidency.
Here's how billionaire paedophile and former friend of President Trump Jeffrey Epstein managed to exploit loopholes in the US sex offender registry, making his presence known to the authorities in Florida but neglecting to do so in New York and not having to in New Mexico, where he owned a palatial residence in Santa Fe.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been accused of "playing the race card" by black Democratic congressman Lacy Clay as her row with Nancy Pelosi threatens party unity.
In an interview with The Washington Post earlier this week, AOC accused Pelosi of the "persistent singling out of women of colour" in her criticism of the young progressive wing of the House.
“What a weak argument, because you can’t get your way and because you’re getting pushback you resort to using the race card? Unbelievable. That’s unbelievable to me,” Clay said. “I could care less. I could really care less. I agree with the Speaker. Four people, four votes out of 240 people, who cares.”
“It shows you how weak their argument is when they have to resort and direct racist accusations toward Speaker Pelosi… it’s very disappointing to me.”
CNN pundit Michael Smerconish being an absolute buzzkill here about the Mueller hearing next Thursday.
He believes little new will come out of it and congressmen will simply use the occasion for grandstanding.
Trump has been busily tweeting this morning, once more complaining about the US being treated like a "piggy bank" by its trading partners and defending his trade wars with China and Mexico.
He has otherwise been retweeting attacks on the Democrats by loyalists, publicising a Rush Limbaugh interview on Fox, mocking CNN's ratings and promoting his decidedly iffy White House Social Media Summit.
He also appears to believe Sebastian Gorka came off best in his spat with a fellow journalist.
Trump's nominee to become the next top US military officer has promised that, if confirmed, he would not be cowed by the White House as he provides advice on national security matters.
General Mark Milley, who serves as US Army chief of staff, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday at a moment when Trump’s moves to pull the Pentagon into his border wall plans, Independence Day festivities and other initiatives have generated concerns about the erosion of the military’s nonpartisan traditions.
If confirmed, General Milley would replace Marine General Joseph Dunford Jr as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff this autumn.
The House Judiciary Committee is now holdings its third hearing reviewing the conclusions of the Mueller report.
