Donald Trump began the week embroiled in a racism row after attempting to exploit divisions among the opposition by telling young progressive congresswomen like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”, demanding an apology from the victims in his latest round of tweets.
Despite boasting of a 94 per cent approval rating among Republicans, the president found himself lagging behind Democratic 2020 challengers Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in a new poll conducted for NBC News/Wall Street Journal.
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began mass deportations raids on at least 10 American cities, Mr Trump also hit out at media coverage of vice president Mike Pence's visit to a border detention centre in McAllen, Texas, on Friday, insisting the facility in question was “well run and clean” despite evidence to the contrary.
During a press conference, Ms Ocasio-Cortez, Ms Omar, and their colleagues Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib all denounced the president's attacks on them, which he doubled down on Monday afternoon at the White House.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez, finishing up her remarks, called the president "weak", and said he focuses on personal attacks because he cannot debate issues.
"Weak minds and leaders challenge loyalty to our country in order to avoid challenging and debating the policy," Ms Ocasio-Cortez said.
"This president does not know how to defend his policies, so what he does is he attacks us personally, and that is what it is all about. He cant look a child in the face and he can't look Americans in the face and justify why this country is throwing them into cages," she continued.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives announced it would hold a vote to condemn Mr Trump's "xenophobic" remarks.
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Despite boasting of a 94 per cent approval rating among Republicans, Donald Trump finds himself behind Democratic 2020 challengers Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in a new poll conducted for NBC News/Wall Street Journal.
Biden scores 51 per cent in the latest survey of American voting intentions, with Trump on 42 per cent.
A match-up between Vermont senator Sanders and the president finds Bernie on 50 per cent and Trump on 43 per cent.
Massachusetts senator Warren, whose stock has soared since she excelled in the first Democratic Party debate in Miami last month, is projected to beat Trump by 48 per cent to 43 per cent.
California senator Kamala Harris, who also enjoyed a major boost from the debates, would also beat Trump, albeit by a much tighter margin, poling 45 per cent to 44 per cent.
The president begins the week embroiled in a racism row after attempting to exploit divisions among the opposition by telling young progressive congresswomen like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”.
The president was attempting to capitalise on a feud rumbling on last week between House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a quartet she dubbed "The Squad" - consisting of AOC, Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley - whom Pelosi called out in an interview over their outspoken use of social media.
AOC had hit back at Pelosi in a Washington Post interview, observing that the speaker had singled out four women of colour for criticism - a line of attack the president picked up on and magnified.
Which was not only appalling but outstandingly hypocritical given that his own wife, Melania Trump, was born in Slovenia and his own grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf, was a migrant from Germany. Of the four congresswomen the president targeted, only Omar was actually born outside of the United States.
When Trump's tweets were met with howls of condemnation - with many calling out his long history of racist rhetoric against Mexicans and Muslims and support for white nationalists at Charlottesville - he elected to double down rather than apologise, alluding to Omar's attack on the influence of Israeli lobbyists in Washington to imply the party is anti-Israel, an inflammatory line he has repeated loudly in the past.
Here's more from Jane Dalton and Gemma Fox.
With #TrumpIsARacist and #RacistInChief trending on Twitter on Sunday night, here's how "The Squad" reacted to the president's appalling tweets.
This was Nancy Pelosi's response to the tweets...
...Elizabeth Warren, Beto O'Rourke and Kamala Harris were equally forthright...
...But Democratic congressman Ted Lieu perhaps has the pithiest response of all.
The Republicans, for their part, have been mysteriously quiet.
Here's Adam Forrest on their collective failure to call out Trump.
The reaction on Fox to all of this has been interesting.
Fox and Friends attempted to laugh it off as a joke, saying "someone's in a very comedic mood today", before reminding AOC, Omar, Tlaib and Pressley, with breathtaking audacity: "This is real life, this isn't social media - just having fun and trying to rile people up - this is real life, the words you say have real life consequences."
But Fox pundit Geraldo Rivera has been one of the few conservative voices to take the president to task thus far.
Also on social media, Trump hit out at press coverage of vice president Mike Pence's visit to a border detention centre in McAllen, Texas, on Friday, insisting the facility in question was “well run and clean”.
Pence himself had joined in with a rare attack on the "fake news media" by calling out CNN's coverage of his trip.
Footage like this though argues otherwise and critics have been quick to question Pence's Christian compassion when confronted by such scenes.
Here's Dave Maclean's report on Pence's encounter with the caged detainees.
Outrage at the administration's treatment of migrants continued over the weekend as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began mass deportations raids on nine cities.
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio said the agents had entered parts of Brooklyn and Harlem on Saturday, as reports of frightened families stockpiling food and hiding indoors emerged.
In Los Angeles, the city's churches have offered themselves as sanctuaries for migrant families while in Chicago a 65-strong "bike patrol" comprised of aldermen and activists are out in force to oversee the situation and ensure people confronted by ICE know their rights and have access to an attorney.
Emma Snaith has this on Trump's response to the fury his latest Twitter bomb has provoked.
This is interesting.
Here are all the euphemisms the press have deployed in their efforts to avoid calling the president of the United States racist, dancing around the issue in their coverage by labelling his tweets everything from "anti-immigration rhetoric" to "racially-charged" rather than use the R word.
Tim Wyatt has more.
Here's some more of the outraged reaction to the president's racist tweets.
ICE director Mark Morgan was on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday to defend the raids on urban migrants, where he was rightly challenged by anchor Margaret Brennan on why they were ordered at a time when the focus should surely be on the crisis in US detention centres, a problem he blames on Congress denying sufficient funding to Border Patrol.
Morgan - who has enough on his plate - wisely sidestepped an invitation to explain the racist tweets.
Meanwhile on State of the Union, acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli was there to defend the ICE agents themselves, insisting they are "compassionate" people.
Bill de Blasio was also on that show and launched into a coruscating attack on ICE and Trump that is well worth your time.
Jane Dalton has this on the anti-ICE protests held over the weekend in Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and New York in opposition to the raids.
Here's Adam Forrest on AOC hitting back at Trump by calling him a "white nationalist".
Let's change tack and look at a different crisis momentarily.
President Trump seems to have lost interest in Iran for the moment - having come mighty close to blasting the country with airstrikes over a downed drone last month - but the powers that be in Europe have warned that their continued support for the rogue state's nuclear deal is dependent on Tehran coming back in line with provisions limiting its stockpiles of enriched uranium.
President Trump seems to have lost interest in Iran for the moment - having come mighty close to blasting the country with airstrikes over a downed drone last month - but the powers that be in Europe have warned that their continued support for the rogue state's nuclear deal is dependent on Tehran coming back in line with provisions limiting its stockpiles of enriched uranium.
Here's our political editor Andrew Woodcock with more.
In addition to slamming Trump's racism, 2020 candidate Beto O'Rourke also took to the internet on Sunday to explain that he had recently been handed genealogical documents confirming that both he and his wife Amy had ancestors who were slave owners.
"That those enslaved Americans owned by my ancestors were denied their freedom, denied the ability to amass wealth, denied full civil rights in America after slavery also had long term repercussions for them and their descendants," O'Rourke wrote in a post on Medium.
"I benefit from a system that my ancestors built to favor themselves at the expense of others.
"We all need to know our own story as it relates to the national story, much as I am learning mine. It is only then, I believe, that we can take the necessary steps to repair the damage done and stop visiting this injustice on the generations that follow ours."
The debate over reparations for the ancestors re-entered mainstream American political discourse in June when the House Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on the issue in a decade.
Here's the latest installment from The Donald, who appears to have finally, comprehensively lost the plot.
This was prefaced with a boast about the impact of his tariffs are having on the Chinese economy, including the vague claim that "thousands of companies are leaving".
This is timely stuff from the increasingly impressive Warren.
On Morning Joe, they're wondering "how is it possible" Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell can say "no comment" when asked about the Trump tweets.
Joe Scarborough speculates Trump is lashing out because he is "humiliated" after he was forced to back down on the 2020 census last week and because his long-trailed ICE raids have so far not amounted to the spectaculra show of force he was hoping for.
Here's more from the president, losing all touch with reality in describing "the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen".
