Donald Trump has returned to DC after the G7 summit in France and hit out at press reports suggesting the Trump National Doral Miami hotel, his proposed venue for the next gathering of world leaders, had a problem with bedbugs, blaming “Radical Left Democrats” for the slur.
The president’s erratic performance in Biarritz was characterised as “a whiplash weekend of mixed messages” and saw him row back on his latest trade war threats to China, lie about Melania Trump having had a secret meeting with Kim Jong-un and duck out of a key climate change meeting he had pledged to attend.
The House judiciary committee has, meanwhile, filed a court motion seeking to expedite a ruling on Don McGahn, Trump‘s ex-White House counsel, to compel him to testify to its impeachment inquiry as the panel issues a new subpoena for ex-staff secretary Rob Porter.
Elsewhere, the Associated Press reported the president will travel to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for a campaign rally on September 9, one day before a special election to fill a congressional seat that has been vacant all year.
Mr Trump will campaign for the Republican candidate in the race, state senator Dan Bishop of Charlotte. Democrat Dan McCready and two others are also running.
Michael Glassner, chief operating officer for Mr Trump's presidential campaign, said the president would talk about “historic achievements” for the country and “his long record of accomplishments in the state”.
A 9th District election was held last November, but state officials ordered a do-over after an investigation found evidence of fraud involving the collection of mail-in ballots. The Republican who ran last year did not run again, the AP said
If you're interested in seeing how Mr Trump's day played out, read below
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
The White House has been forced to deny Donald Trump’s claim that the first lady, Melania Trump, held a secret meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Speaking at his final press conference of the G7 summit of world leaders in Biarritz, France, before jetting home to DC, President Trump said "the first lady has gotten to know" Kim and likely agrees he's "a man with a country that has tremendous potential."
Press secretary Stephanie Grisham rushed to explain the remarks in a statement issued from aboard Air Force One, saying that the president "confides in his wife on many issues including the detailed elements of his strong relationship with Chairman Kim - and while the first lady hasn't met him, the president feels like she's gotten to know him too."
But the internet thinks it's her relationship with Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, that Trump should be more concerned about.
Here's our report.
Trump's performance at the diplomatic gathering in southwestern France was memorably characterised as “a whiplash weekend of mixed messages” by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, at which the president rowed back on his latest trade war threats to China, complained relentlessly on Twitter about negative press coverage and ducked out of a key climate change meeting he had pledged to attend.
At that farewell press conference, he nevertheless insisted the meet-up was "truly successful" and that "tremendous unity" was on display. "Nobody wanted to leave!" the president assured the press. "It really was the G7".
Discussing global geopolitical concerns, Trump expressed his belief Russia should be allowed back into the fold, following its expulsion in 2014 as a rebuke for the annexation of Crimea, saying it was better Vladminr Putin be kept "inside the room".
He again offered to mediate in talks between India's Narendra Modi and Imran Khan of Pakistan over Kashmir, said there was "no timeline" in talks with the Taliban to bring an end to the 18-year war in Afghanistan and that the fate of Isis fighters held in US captivity had not been determined.
Regarding the trade war, he said China has taken a "hard hit" in recent months and stressed his belief that its leaders are sincere about wanting to reach a deal, having admitted earlier in the summit to having had "second thoughts" about the tarrif escalations he had angrily ordered on Twitter on Friday. Trump said he had had since received two "very good calls" from Beijing and promised: "We are going to start talking very seriously."
Trump denied he had any plans to impose tariffs on imported Japanese cars "at the moment" after agreeing the basis for a new trade deal with prime minister Shinzo Abe that would include more US agricultural exports to Japan, such as beef and pork, bringing relief to Midwestern farmers currently up against it
The president made clear he considers imposing auto tariffs in the name of national security an option at a later date but added: "We're not looking at that. We just want to be treated fairly."
He said Japan has run a large trade surplus with the US and claims new trade deals will help transform the economy, though his latest round of trade tensions have spooked financial markets around the world.
On the environment, he said he was "not going to lose" America's riches "on dreams, on windmills."
He insisted the US has "tremendous wealth... under its feet" and saw no contradiction between extracting it and his claim to be "an environmentalist" and to know "more about the environment than most people."
He has previously described climate change as a "hoax" invented by the Chinese to damage the US economy.
He also defended his offer to host the 2020 gathering of the G7 at his own golf resort, the Trump National Doral Miami, insisting he would not "make any money" from such an offer after the suggestion attracted a storm of criticism.
Here's Chris Riotta on that last point.
Trump also had plenty to say on Iran throughout the summit, declaring he thought there was a good chance the US could sit down with their counterparts in Tehran to end the prevailing nuclear standoff, only for Iranian president Hassan Rouhani to say a meeting was “not possible” and would amount to little more than a photo opportunity unless the US lifted sanctions against his country.
The issue came to the fore when French president Emmanuel Macron intervened by inviting Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif to Biarritz in a bid to end the crisis brought about by Trump exiting the 2015 nuclear accord.
Of Macron's actions, Trump commented: "He asked me. I don't consider that disrespectful at all, especially when he asked me for approval."
Which is all very well, but contradicts the word of his own White House officals, who said they had no idea the gesture was being made.
Here's our report.
No sooner had the wheels of Air Force One touched the runway at Joint Base Andrews last night, the president was busy laying into the media for covering Axios's story about his suggestion behind the scenes that the way too tackle tropical storms was by blasting them with nuclear bombs.
Here's Clark Mindock on what would happen if that were actually attempted.
Trump also tweeted a video from right-wing mouth Katie Hopkins from Biarritz, purporting to show him "off camera" and interacting charmingly with "ordinary people".
Here's Darren Richman with more on the obvious flaw in Hopkins' argument..
Here's more on the president's confused G7 messaging on China, whose foreign ministry denies any knowledge of the "very good calls" he claims to have had with Beijing.
Clark Mindock has this assessment of the the president's chaotic summit, from skipping meetings to lavishing praise on Boris Johnson and backing Vladimir Putin’s return from diplomatic exile.
Interestingly, Trump's periodic feuding with Fox News resumed on Sunday. Even across the Atlantic in France, he couldn't resist watching his unofficial propaganda arm and dictating who and what they should broadcast.
Here's Clark Mindock's report.
The president also found the time to watch and retweet a racist conspiracy theory video about Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, which purports to have "credible evidence" the Muslim married her own brother - a favourite story put about by the alt-right.
Chris Riotta has more.
Conrad Duncan has this on Trump's apparent ongoing inability to understand the difference between England and the United Kingdom.
Narjas Zatat has this on the president's bogus claim yesterday - talking up his credentials as an "environmentalist" - that the US has "the cleanest air and water on the planet”.
Tell that to the people of Flint, Michigan.
Turning our attention towards the Democratic 2020 contenders for a moment, a new poll from Monmouth University has found front-runner Joe Biden skidding down 13 points from June, as voters defect to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, leaving the race a three-way tie at present.
Conservative talk radio personality and former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh announced his intention to challenge Trump to a Republican primary over the weekend.
It's already going badly.
"I wouldn’t call myself a racist, but I would say, John, I’ve said racist things on Twitter. There's no doubt about it. And an apology is not enough," he told MSNBC's John Heilemann yesterday, referring to his past insistence 44th president Barack Obama was a Muslim and therefore somehow unfit to lead.
"You’ve apologised for helping to spawn Trump. You’ve apologised for going too far," Heilemann countered. "For a lot of people, the fact is the president is a stone-cold racist and so are you."
Conrad Duncan his this report.
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro will reject the G7's emergency $20m (£16.36m) aid package to stop the forest fires destroying the Amazon after accusing the assembled heads of state of "colonial" meddling, his chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni has confirmed today.
The "Trump of the Tropics" has meanwhile lived up to his nickname by endorsing a meme comparing his wife Michelle Bolsonaro favourably to Brigitte Macron, wife of French president Emmanuel Macron, commenting: "Do not humiliate the guy... haha".
His antics - which echoed Trump's taunting of Texas senator Ted Cruz on the campaign trail in 2016 - naturally angered Macron, who answered: “For him to have made incredibly disrespectful comments about my spouse - what can I say to you?
“I think that Brazilian women are probably ashamed to read that their president has done that... I think that Brazilians, a great people, are a bit ashamed of this behaviour. As I have a lot of friendship and respect for the Brazilian people, I hope that they will quickly have a president who is up to the job."
Here's Adam Withnall's report on the forest fire package.
After the president seized the opportunity to promote his "magnificent" Trump National Doral Miami as a potential venue for next year's G7 gathering, The Miami Herald reminded its readers of the golf resort having to settle a bedbugs lawsuit just two years ago.
Naturally, there have been jokes.
Attorneys general for 19 states and the District of Columbia announced on Monday they are suing the Trump administration to block a sweeping new rule to indefinitely detain migrant families seeking to settle in the United States.
The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Los Angeles, was the first in an expected flurry of litigation seeking to stop the rule, officially published on Friday, from taking effect in October.
"This new Trump rule callously puts at risk the safety and well-being of children. It undermines a decades-old agreement reached in court by the federal government to prevent the unlawful detention of immigrant children," California attorney general Xavier Becerra said in announcing the lawsuit.
The new rule seeks to scrap a 1997 agreement, known as the Flores settlement, which puts a 20-day limit on how long children can be held in immigration detention.
The settlement was expanded in 2015 to apply not just to unaccompanied children but also to those traveling with their parents.
Trump administration officials say the detention limits have become a "pull" factor for migrants, who hope that if they show up at the US -Mexico border with a child and ask for asylum, they will be allowed in pending a hearing in US immigration court, a practice the president has called "catch-and-release."
The Trump administration's efforts to overturn the Flores settlement are likely to face more than just legal hurdles.
Even if the courts allow the new rule to take effect, there are also practical problems: paying for thousands of additional family detention beds.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has only three family detention facilities - two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania - that have between 2,500 and 3,000 beds, acting secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan said in announcing the rule last week.
More than 42,000 families, mostly from Central America, were arrested along the US southern border just last month. The July arrest numbers are at record highs, even though they have dropped more than half compared with levels seen in May.
"Even if the number of border crossings doesn't go back up in the fall, all this (new rule) would enable them to do is to detain a relatively small percentage of the arriving families for longer," said Kevin Landy, a former ICE assistant director responsible for the Office of Detention Policy and Planning under the Obama administration.
Without more space, that practice is likely to continue, Landy said.
Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman for ICE, said the agency could not comment on potential increases to the agency's detention capacity.
Congress mandates how much ICE can spend on immigration detention, and the 2019 budget has $2.8bn (£2.2bn) earmarked to pay for 49,500 beds for solo adults - but only 2,500 beds for parents and children.
However, ICE is currently detaining more than 55,000 immigrants, a record high, a small percentage of them at family facilities, according to agency statistics.
ICE has also had a hard time finding communities willing to accept the construction of facilities, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former policy adviser at US Customs and Border Protection now at the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center.
It is also not clear how the family detention rule will work with another Trump administration policy pushing Central American families back to Mexico to wait out their US court hearings there, she said.
Reuters
Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III - the grandson of slain presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy and the grandnephew of JFK and Ted Kennedy - took to Facebook yesterday to say he's intending to run for the Senate in 2020, setting up a primary challenge to the current Democratic incumbent, Ed Markey.
"Over the past few weeks I've begun to consider a run for the US Senate. This isn't a decision I'm approaching lightly and - to be completely candid - I wasn't expecting to share my thoughts so soon," Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy said that he is motivated to run because "our system has been letting down a lot of people for a long time, and we can't fix it if we don't challenge it."
"I've got some ideas on how to do that. And I don’t think our democratic process promises anyone a turn. What it does promise is the chance for anyone to earn it - if we think we have something to offer and are willing to put ourselves and our ideas out there," he said.
You know he's keen as he's already filed the paperwork.
This is a timely graphic from NBC on the 2020 Democratic presidential race.
Despite the odd fluctuation here and there, Elizabeth Warren's surge in recent months is the only significant challenge to the Biden-Sanders front two. Kamala Harris's first debate boost appears to have well and truly dissipated for now.
CNN's Harry Enten also offers this qualification to the eyebrow-raising Monmouth poll quoted earlier, indicating a significant drop-off from Biden.
The House Judiciary Committee, currently investigating obstruction of justice allegations against Trump arising from the Mueller report with a view to launching impeachment proceedings against him, has filed a motion to expedite a ruling on whether his former White Counsel, Don McGahn, can be compelled to testify.
The administration has worked overtime to stonewall congressional committees since the release of the report in April, blocking the subponeas issued for the testimony of former aides on executive privilege grounds.
News of the court motion came hours after it emerged the panel was issuing a new subpoena Rob Porter, Trump’s former staff secretary who resigned last year over allegations of domestic abuse.
