Donald Trump has failed to inspire confidence in his handling of Hurricane Dorian, returning to his Virginia golf course on Labor Day after wrongly warning the storm could come as far inland as Alabama and claiming never to have previously heard of a Category 5 natural disaster, despite this being the fourth of his presidency.
With Dorian causing devastation in the Bahamas and bringing mass evacuations to Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, Mr Trump has been branded “the global poster-boy for white nationalism” by London mayor Sadiq Khan and is under renewed pressure to take meaningful steps on gun control following the latest mass shooting in Texas.
The president had also spent his Saturday playing 18 holes after ducking out of Second World War commemorations in Poland and on Sunday resumed old Twitter beefs with ex-FBI director James Comey and the Federal Reserve and started a new one by attacking Will & Grace star Debra Messing.
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Donald Trump has failed to inspire confidence in his handling of Hurricane Dorian, wrongly warning it could come as far inland as Alabama and claiming never to have previously heard of a Category 5-magnitude storm, despite this being the fourth of his presidency.
Trump's Alabama claim came on Twitter on Sunday afternoon before he repeated it to reporters on the White House lawn, declaring: "The original course was dead into Florida. Now it seems to be going up toward South Carolina, toward North Carolina. Georgia's going to be hit. Alabama's going to get a piece of it, it looks like."
His careless words sent locals into a needless state of panic and regional weather authorities scrambling to reassure them.
Later speaking at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Washington - a disaster relief organisation whose budget he trimmed just last week to push funds towards his anti-immigration initiatives at the US-Mexico border - Trump made another mistake in claiming to never have previously heard of a Category 5 storm, forgetting Hurricanes Irma, Maria and Michael in the process.
Here's the latest on Dorian.
London mayor Sadiq Khan resumed his feud with President Trump in the pages of The Observer on Saturday, labelling the commander-in-chief the "global poster-boy for white nationalism" in a comment piece on the eve of the anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September 1939.
Trump, incidentally, had been expected to attend commemoration services in Poland but elected to stay behind to monitor Hurricane Dorian instead and sent Mike Pence in his place, only to then take himself off to his golf resort in Virginia for 18 holes.
"An entire generation of brave men and women around the globe sacrificed everything to defeat the singular evil of Nazism and fascism,” Khan wrote. "[But now] for the first time in more than 70 years, it seems the lessons of the second world war are genuinely at risk of being forgotten or, worse still, being rewritten."
“This comes as a new wave of extremist far-right movements and political parties are winning power and influence at alarming speed - fueled by Donald Trump, the global poster-boy for white nationalism,” he said.
“Vulnerable, often minority, communities are being demonised... and in appalling new parallels with the horrors of the past, migrants, refugees, people of colour, LGBTQ+ and Jewish communities are bearing the brunt,” he added.
“Hungary’s Viktor Orban has systematically destroyed the independence of both the judiciary and the press - institutions that are also under daily verbal attack from Trump and other far-right leaders around the world.”
Trump memorably branded the Muslim "a stone cold loser" as he arrived in Britain in early June, repeatedly seeking to depict the capital as crime-infested.
Here's my story on Trump's weekend and events in Poland.
Following the latest mass shooting in Odessa and Midland, Texas, in which seven died and 22 people were injured, Trump finds himself under renewed pressure to take meaningful steps on gun control.
He isn't inspiring much hope there either, after telling reporters the perpetrator - a 36-year-old white male who had recently lost his job as a truck driver - was "another very sick person", appearing to place the blame once again on mental health ahead of easy access to lethal assault weapons.
Asked what he planned to do to address America's gun violence crisis, the president was characteristically vague, but did say he did not believe stricter background checks would have made a difference in preventing any of the high-profile killing sprees over the past few years.
Prior to this depressing pivot to the status quo, Pennsylvania's Republican senator Pat Toomey had appeared on ABC's This Week to state his faith that Trump remains "very interested in doing something meaningful" to change things. Hmmm.
Here's Andrew Buncombe's report.
Leading Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer yesterday used the events in Texas to call on Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to finally allow an upper chamber vote on the HR8 universal background checks bill the House of Representatives passed way back in February, which he has sat on ever since, presumably hoping people would simply lose interest in the subject.
Meanwhile, Texas-native 2020 presidential candidates Beto O'Rourke and Julian Castro spoke from the heart.
The timing of the killings was even more politically pointed because Sunday just so happened to be the day that a raft of new laws agreed in the 86th Texas legislature came into effect in the Lone Star State, actually making it easier to obtain access to guns, not more difficult.
Here's my report.
So with Hurricane Dorian tearing up the Caribbean and Texas reeling from its second massacre in a month, what was Trump doing on Sunday?
Picking over old Twitter beefs of course!
The president found time to tweet angrily about ex-FBI director James Comey, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell and the Federal Reserve and start a whole new feud by attacking sitcom actress Debra Messing, star of Will & Grace, who has been calling for a blacklist of Hollywood celebrities who attend Trump fundraising events.
"What was on Trump’s mind in the midst of such tragedy, was me. The LAST thing that should be on his mind or in his tweets," Messing responded on Instagram, sounding like the voice of reason in a mad world.
Here's Jacob Stolworthy with the latest.
"We need to buy back every single assault weapon."
Chris Riotta has more on Beto O'Rourke's impassioned response to Texas and his uncompromising call for the government buy-back of AK-47 and AR-15s.
Lonnie G Bunch III, the first black secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is publishing a memoir and in it recounts the guided tour he gave Trump of the then newly-opened African American History Museum in DC while he was president-elect in early 2017.
The Washington Post has seen an advanced copy of Bunch's forthcoming book, A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama and Trump, and recounts Bunch's description of Trump's arrival at the museum.
"[He] was in a foul mood and said that he did not want to see anything 'difficult'," Bunch recalled, the facility of course being primarily dedicated to study of the slave trade.
As their hour together progressed...
"The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade. As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum," Bunch writes. "He quickly proved me wrong."
"As he turned from the display he said to me, 'You know, they love me in the Netherlands.' All I could say was let’s continue walking."
"There is little I remember about the rest of the hour we spent together," Bunch concludes. "I was so disappointed in his response to one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history. Here was a chance to broaden the views and the understanding of the incoming president and I had been less successful than I had expected."
Bunch also offers this timely and damning assessment of Trump's subsequent record on race in the Oval Office:
"His administration’s combative relationship with many in the African American community - from his feuding with congressman John Lewis... to the attacks on professional athletes, the overwhelming number of those singled out for critical tweets were African American, to his refusal to criticise the white supremacists whose rioting in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the death of Heather Heyer - have deepened the racial divide."
Don Jr took aim at the American right's favourite hate figure, Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, after The New York Post reported last week she had been cited in a divorce filing by one Dr Beth Mynett, alleging that the Minnesota representative had had an affair with her husband Tim Mynett, a political consultant who worked for Omar.
The president's son's naked hypocrisy and comic lack of self-awareness was duly pointed out on Twitter.
Greg Evans has more.
Another member of The Squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has meanwhile been brutally mocking the "Straight Pride Parade" held in Boston, Massachusetts, over the weekend.
Iran's information and IT minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi has been teasing Trump on Twitter after the president posted a classified satellite photograph from his morning intelligence briefing late on Friday to deny US involvement in a mysterious explosion at the Imam Khomeini Space Center in the country.
With security experts marvelling at Trump's idiocy in publishing a secret graphic complete with annotations, speculation as to what caused the blast was rife, with the Nahid-1 satellite thought to have been the cause in some quarters.
Not so, says Jahromi.
Here's my report.
As the Trump administration continues to whip up tensions at the border, a protester was arrested in Oakland Park, Florida, on Friday for throwing a Molotov cocktail into the lobby of a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office.
Celia Hunt, 35, tossed a bottled filled with gasoline into the building but its fuse failed to ignite, meaning no one was hurt.
The incident follows a similar attack in August when a gunman fired on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in San Antonio, Texas, from a car. There too, no one was injured.
Ken Cuccinelli, acting head of USCIS, responded on Twitter:
Here's the latest from the US-China trade war after both sides slapped extra tariffs on each other's goods in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
Trump is up and staring at an empty schedule.
After retweeting several Dorian updates from the National Hurricane Center, he is back to tweeting about whatever is on Fox News and attacking another New York Times columinst he takes exception to, this time Paul Krugman, followed by American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) chief Richard Trumka.
That last coming on Labor Day, no less.
More Comey-bashing via Fox. Has Dorian made landfall yet?
Someone grab the remote, I'm begging you.
Fresh from covering for Trump in Poland, veep Mike Pence will arrive in Ireland later today for an official visit that will give him a chance to "reconnect with his Irish roots". Cue the memes.
Put it this way, he can't do any worse than Eric Trump, who made a chump of himself utterly failing to pour a Guinness on a night out in Doonbeg earlier this summer.
This resurfaced video from Texas senator and former Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is absolutely insane and speaks volumes about America's toxic relationship with guns.
Bearing in mind Sadiq Khan's comments about the president and white nationalism, here's Chris Riotta on efforts underway to deradicalise those to whom the hate movement appeals.
For more on Hurricane Dorian as "tropical-storm force winds" begin to be felt in southern Florida for the first time, you can follow Conrad Duncan's dedicated liveblog here.
