Donald Trump has launched an extraordinary attack on Anthony Scaramucci, his short-lived communications director, branding him a “highly unstable nut job” and a “mental wreck” on Twitter.
The president and his advisers have meanwhile moved to reassure Americans over the state of the economy amid growing recession fears, with Mr Trump insisting: “We’re doing tremendously well. Our consumers are rich. I gave a tremendous tax cut and they’re loaded up with money.”
He is also facing further ridicule after confirming his interest in buying Greenland, telling reporters in New Jersey on Sunday: “Strategically it’s interesting and we’d be interested... It’s not number one on the burner, I can tell you that.”
The president has also stepped back from his position calling for background checks for gun sales, and has begun focusing once again on mental health's part in mass shootings. He has done before as well.
Mr Trump has also ramped up his claims that the 2016 election results were impacted by fraudulent efforts, this time going after Google and claiming the search engine flipped millions of votes in favour of Hillary Clinton.
In making the claim, Mr Trump cited a right-wing conspiracy website, Judicial Watch.
Please allow a moment for our liveblog to load
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Donald Trump is facing further ridicule after confirming his interest in buying Greenland - despite Denmark rejecting the idea as “absurd” - telling reporters in New Jersey: “The concept came up and... strategically it’s interesting and we’d be interested... It’s not number one on the burner, I can tell you that.”
The president said the idea originated in conversations between members of his administration and was essentially “a large real estate deal.” Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory administered from Copenhagen, is thought to be represent an attractive asset to the former real estate magnate because of its natural resources.
But the country's premier, Kim Nielsen, is having none of it. “Greenland is not for sale, but Greenland is open for trade and cooperation with other countries, including the USA,” he said in a statement.
Zamira Rahim has more.
The president moved over the weekend to reassure Americans on the economy, with Trump insisting as he jetted back to DC from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey: “I don’t see a recession.”
”We’re doing tremendously well. Our consumers are rich. I gave a tremendous tax cut and they’re loaded up with money," he told the press.
He was busy spreading the same message on Twitter over the weekend - given that a strong economy is integral to his re-election prospects and consumer confidence dropped 6.4 per cent in July - tweeting: “Our economy is the best in the world, by far. Lowest unemployment ever within almost all categories. Poised for big growth after trade deals are completed.”
The president - clearly rattled - has upped the ante in his attacks on the media in recent days, apparently in response to reporting on the early economic warning signs that have begun to flash, despite US unemployment being near historic lows and relatively high marks by voters on Trump’s economic stewardship.
For one, global growth has been slowing. Last week, stock markets plunged as the yield on the 10-year Treasury note briefly fell below that of the two-year Treasury note, an unusual situation known as an inversion of the yield curve - considered one of the most reliable leading indicators of recession in the US.
Meanwhile, the consequences of Trump’s trade war with China have begun to be felt. His anxiety that the anti-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong might delay a truce being agreed with Beijing has been particularly telling.
"I’d love to see it worked out in a humane fashion," Trump told reporters on Sunday. "It does put pressure on the trade deal."
He did at least acknowledge a potential impact on consumers from the tarriff war when he paused a planned 10 per cent tariff hike for many items coming from China, such as cellphones, laptops, video game consoles, some toys, computer monitors, shoes and clothing.
"We're doing [it] just for Christmas season, just in case some of the tariffs could have an impact," he said yesterday.
The White House yesterday sent its top trade advisers out to push the same line.
On CNN's State of the Union, Peter Navarro dismissed a study from researchers at Harvard, the University of Chicago, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston that showed the cost of Trump’s tariffs had "fallen largely on the US".
"There’s no evidence whatsoever that American consumers are bearing any of this,” he said, despite abundant data to the contrary. "They’re not hurting anybody here."
Navarro also joined in Trump's recurrent attacks on Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell: "[He] should look in the mirror and say, 'I raised rates too far, too fast, and I cost this economy a full percentage point of growth.'"
Last month, the Fed reduced its benchmark rate, which affects many loans for households and businesses, by a quarter-point to a range of 2 per cent to 2.25 per cent. It's the first rate cut since December 2008 during the depths of the Great Recession. Powell stressed that the central bank was worried about the consequences of Trump's trade war and sluggish economies overseas.
On Fox News Sunday, economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the US economy "is kind of a miracle, because we face severe monetary restraint from the Fed."
"We're doing pretty darn well in my judgement. Let's not be afraid of optimism."
An appearance on Meet the Press inspired some to recall the same man's famous dismissal of the prospect of a recession in late 2007 (the US economic answer to Michael Fish and the hurricane).
Dave Maclean has more on Kudlow, whose slurred delivery inspired some on the internet to suggest he'd either had a late one on Saturday night or started drinking early doors.
Back to Twitter, where Trump has been busy predicting the demise of The New York Times, attacking the Democrats over Israel and branding Fox News pundit Juan Williams “always nasty and wrong”, having already complained about the broadcaster running polls unfavourable to him.
The Williams line followed this attack on the channel at Morrisown Municipal Airport:
Perhaps most bizarrely, he has also retweeted an old clip of Barack Obama - then an Illinois senator - speaking out against illegal immigration and a video montage of himself being nice to African-Americans set to the song "Donald Trump (Black Version)" thought to have been written by Prince for The Time in 1990. It appeared on their album Pandemonium.
As Rolling Stone points out, the track is satirical: "The song’s narrator attempts to woo a money-hungry lover by promising her a '$100 dinner at Adriano’s' and a 'brand-new coat or a brand-new hat'. The chorus goes: 'Donald Trump (black version), maybe that’s what you need. A man that fulfills your every wish, your every dream. Donald Trump (black version), come on take a chance. A 1990s love affair, the real romance.'”
Chris Baynes has more 280-character fire and fury for you.
Trump said he had spoken with Tim Apple... sorry, Apple CEO Tim Cook... on Sunday about the impact of US tariffs on Chinese imports as well as competition from South Korean company Samsung.
Trump said Cook "made a good case" that tariffs could hurt Apple, given that Samsung's products would not be subject to those same tariffs. Tariffs on an additional $300bn (£247bn) worth of Chinese goods, including consumer electronics, are scheduled to go into effect in two stages on 1 September and 15 December.
By contrast, the United States and South Korea struck a trade agreement last September.
"I thought he made a very compelling argument, so I'm thinking about it," Trump said of Cook.
US stock futures rose upon opening on Sunday after Trump's comments. In addition to his comments on Apple, Trump said on Twitter earlier in the day that his administration was "doing very well with China."
Apple's MacBook laptops and iPhones would not face the additional tariffs until 15 December, but some of the company's other products, including its AirPods, Apple Watch and HomePod, would be subject to the levies 1 on September.
Clark Mindock has this on Trump testing the loyalties of heartland farmers, who concede they are hurting from his China trade war but are not yet ready to abandon the president.
Former vice president Dick Cheney is to appear at a Trump fundraising lunch in Jackson, Wyoming, news that is being interpreted as a sign of the Republican establishment getting behind their man despite private disapproval over his methods.
Cheney has been critical of the president administration's foreign policy stances, particularly towards its Nato allies, and once said that Trump’s 2015 call for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” went “against everything [America] stands for and believes in.”
Conrad Duncan has more.
Ivanka Trump went camping with her young family over the weekend, posting scenes from her delightful life on social media.
Such posts, of course, attracted a storm of derision from hostile commentators - quick to point out her hypocrisy given the administration's appalling treatment of children in border detention centres and utterly regressive environmental record.
Marianne Eloise has more for Indy100.
Trump's beef with Anthony Scaramucci, White House communications director for all of 11 days, rumbles on.
El Mooch tells Vanity Fair he thinks he knows the precise month Trump will drop out of the 2020 presidential race, which is surely fanciful in the extreme.
Darren Richman has more.
In perhaps the biggest twist ending of the summer blockbuster season, USA Women's World Cup star Megan Rapinoe has revealed her own father voted for Trump.
“Go look at President Trump’s Twitter. He talked about Portland, said he’s watching Antifa. That’s all we wanted.”
So said Joe Biggs after the far-right rally he helped organise in the Oregon city went ahead on Saturday with 13 people arrested and at least six injured in sporadic violence breaking out between the likes of the Proud Boys and anti-fascist demonstrators (collectively known as Antifa).
Biggs was referring to the president's tweet below, threatening to have Antifa classified as a terror group without a word about neo-Nazi organisations or the Proud Boys, who actively epouse violence as a means to an end.
Chris Baynes has more on the latest disturbing scenes courtesy of a movement only emboldened by Trump's refusal to admonish them post-Charlottesville.
More on the threat posed by white nationalism in the US, where one James Reardon Jr has been arrested after allegedly threatening to carry out a mass shooting at a Jewish community centre in Ohio via a sinister post on Instagram.
The 20-year-old was arrested at his home in Mahoning County on Saturday on telecommunications harassment and aggravated menacing charges.
Rounds of ammunition, semi-automatic weapons and antisemitic information were found at his home, New Middletown police said. He is also known to have been at Charlottesville in August 2017.
Reardon's arrest came just two weeks after a suspected white supremacist shot dead 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in an attack aimed at the city's Hispanic population.
Alarmingly, Reardon's was one of three potential mass shootings foiled this weekend.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis's report.
One of Trump's contentions over the weekend to cause concern was that "we do have a lot of background checks right now", which some have interpreted as an attempt to walk back his already vague and non-commital stance on tougher gun controls in the wake of the deadly mass shootings in Texas and Ohio earlier this month.
"It's the people that pull the trigger, not the gun that pulls the trigger so we have a very, very big mental health problem and Congress is working on various things and I will be looking at it," Trump told reporters on the tarmac at Morristown.
Florida politician Andrew Gillum has had enough and accuses him of being "not a person of his word".
"The emperor has no clothes on," he says, which is a ghastly thought to be sure.
Here's more from Tom Embury-Dennis.
An even stronger condemnation of the president came yesterday from another star of last November's Midterms, Georgia Democrat Stacy Abrams, who told ABC's This Week: "I have said many times he's a racist, but, more importantly, he does not value Americans and he does not value humanity."
Trump privately suggested stationing US Navy ships around Venezuela to form a blockade and pevent goods from entering and exiting the country, Axios reports.
The administration moved in January to recognise National Assembly leader Juan Guaido as the country's interin president in the hope of forcing incumbnent Nicolas Maduro out of office, whom it accuses of winning office illegimiately.
Five current and former officials told Axios they had either directly heard the president discuss the idea - which would represent a significant escalation in the ongoing standoff with Maduro - or been briefed about it.
Trump has reportedly raised the idea for at least a year and a half, and as recently as several weeks ago, after stringent sanctions and the threat of US military intervention failed to budge Maduro.
Earlier this month he answered "Yes, I am" when a reporter asked whether he was considering a blockade, according to Reuters, although he declined to elaborate.
"He literally just said we should get the ships out there and do a naval embargo," one source who heard the president’s comments in private told Axios. "Prevent anything going in."
Rhode Island Democratic congressman David Cicilline brings the bants on Trump's unnervingly influential senior adviser Stephen Miller, architect of the administration's most heartless "zero tolerance" immigration policies, including family seperations.
Conservative pundit, podcaster and failed Republican politician Dan Bongino, often retweeted by Trump, has been on Fox and Friends this morning accusing the press of misleading the public over Antifa before misleading the public himself by giving a bogus explanation of their name.
God this is depressing.
Trump visited Dayton, Ohio, two weeks ago in the guise of "national healer" after nine people were gunned down in cold blood.
The city's mayor Nan Whaley now has to have a security detail after standing up to the president on the need for tighter gun controls.
In the last hour the president has gone in big on The Mooch, accusing him of being a "highly unstable 'nut job'" and "mental wreck" who "made a fool of himself, bad on TV. Abused staff, got fired". Wow.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis with more.
