President Donald Trump continued his criticism of Canada on Friday over an advertisement that featured Republican icon Ronald Reagan extolling the virtue of free trade, accusing the country of trying to influence the US Supreme Court.
“Canada is trying to illegally influence the United States Supreme Court in one of the most important rulings in the history of our Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
The US high court set a date of 5 November for arguments it will hear concerning the legality of Trump’s sweeping global tariffs.
A Republican member of the Georgia state election board is accepting anonymous donations via an online fundraising campaign established by a local election board member with ties to the “election integrity” movement.
Janice Johnston, the state board’s vice-chair and one of the three Republican board members praised by name by Donald Trump last year, is the beneficiary of a GiveSendGo fundraising campaign established by Salleigh Grubbs, who serves on the Cobb county board of registration and elections and is first vice-chair of the Georgia Republican party.
The funds are being raised for Johnston’s defense against a lawsuit filed by American Oversight, a watchdog non-profit that has gone after state and federal officials for evading open-records laws. The group sued the state election board and Johnston individually, accusing her of withholding emails from her private email account after discovering from other Open Records Act results that her address had been on email chains.
Grubbs is a former chair of the Cobb county Republican party, who successfully petitioned the state election board to adopt a rule that gives county election officials more power to refuse to certify election results. Grubbs has since been appointed to the county’s election board. When election conspiracy theories ran rampant in Georgia in 2020, Grubbs once chased a refuse truck she believed was carrying shredded paper ballots, the Atlantic reported. There is no evidence paper ballots were discarded in that incident, election authorities have said.
She also has business before the board: she is a co-author of a proposed rule that would indemnify election board members such as herself and Johnston and allow defenses against lawsuits to be paid for with public funds.
On Wednesday morning, as the state election board (SEB) met at the Georgia capitol, $29,300 in donations had been made to the GiveSendGo campaign, including one anonymous donation of $10,000.
“To say this is a potential conflict of interest and a potential violation of Georgia’s ethics policy is, in my opinion, a laughable understatement,” said Marisa Pyle, senior democracy defense manager with All Voting Is Local Georgia. “A SEB member is considering a rule proposed by someone who has raised tens of thousands of dollars for her direct use. At the last SEB meeting, attendees distributed flyers advertising the fundraiser.”
As Donald Trump continues to slap tariffs on major trading partners, polling from a Democratic campaign arm finds that a majority of voters in districts likely to decide the majority in the House of Representatives blame the president’s trade policies for increasing their cost of living.
The survey, shared exclusively with the Guardian, also confirms that many voters are sour on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the GOP’s signature legislative accomplishment passed earlier this year that enacts Trump’s tax policies, pays for his immigration crackdown, and downsizes the Medicaid health insurance program for poor and disabled Americans.
“The public is turning on House Republicans and tired of their broken promises. Costs are rising, the GOP healthcare crisis is hurting millions of Americans and the public hates their disastrous economic agenda. Voters are ready for change and eager to give House Democrats back the majority in 2026,” said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which conducted the poll.
The committee surveyed 1,000 likely voters earlier this month in 61 battleground districts, and found that 61% of respondents blamed Trump’s tariffs for raising prices, while a 52% majority of voters opposed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Trump last year won the districts surveyed by an average of 4%, but Democrats nonetheless led on the generic ballot ahead of the 2026 midterm elections by 47%, to the GOP’s 43%. The DCCC said the four-point split is higher than a similar poll of battleground districts it conducted in November 2017, ahead of the 2018 midterms in which Democrats gained 41 seats in the House and retook the majority.
The poll was conducted between 2 and 6 October – right after the government shut down following Democratic and Republican lawmakers failing to agree on legislation to continue funding. The DCCC found 43% of those surveyed blamed Trump and Republican lawmakers for the lapse in operations.
Letitia James expected to plead not guilty in mortgage fraud case
The New York state attorney general, Letitia James, is expected to plead not guilty on Friday to charges of bank fraud and false statements brought after Donald Trump publicly called for her to be prosecuted in a move widely seen as political retribution.
James is scheduled to made her first appearance in the case and be arraigned in federal district court in Virginia before US magistrate judge Jamar Walker at 11am ET, according to court documents.
The five-page indictment against James accused her of falsely claiming in loan documents that she would use a home she bought in Norfolk, Virginia, as a secondary residence in order to get more favorable loan terms, when she in fact used it as an investment property.
But the charges, which were filed by Trump’s hand-picked US attorney Lindsey Halligan, came over the objections of career prosecutors who believed there was insufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and said that James did not materially profit from the loan.
James is also expected to soon submit a motion to dismiss the indictment, according to court filings, on grounds that Halligan was improperly appointed and since she alone filed the charges, the entire case should be thrown out.
The prosecution comes at a turbulent time for the justice department, which has found itself itself buffeted by constant pressure from Trump and other administration officials to pursue cases against their perceived political enemies regardless of the strength underlying evidence.
Before Halligan obtained an indictment against James, she also brought charges against former FBI director James Comey after the president publicly demanded it. And the department has opened investigations into California senator Adam Schiff and former CIA director John Brennan.
Top House Democrats have accused Donald Trump of orchestrating an illegal scheme to pay himself $230m in taxpayer money, demanding he immediately abandon claims they say violate the constitution.
The representative Jamie Raskin, ranking member on the House judiciary committee, and the representative Robert Garcia, ranking member of the oversight committee, sent a letter to the president on Thursday condemning his plan to use a confidential administrative process to direct treasury funds into his own pocket.
“Your plan to have your obedient underlings at the Department of Justice instruct the US Treasury to pay you, personally, hundreds of millions of dollars – especially at a time when most Americans are struggling to pay rent, put food on the table, and afford health care – is an outrageous and shocking attempt to shake down the American people,” the lawmakers wrote.
The letter also comes as Democracy Forward, a leading legal advocacy group, filed a public records request on Wednesday seeking documents related to Trump’s claims for restitution over those same earlier Department of Justice cases against him.
While in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump insisted to reporters that the government owes him “a lot of money” for past justice department investigations, including the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search and the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The president claimed personal authority over the decision, saying: “It’s interesting, ’cause I’m the one that makes the decision, right?”
This week, Raskin said his staff’s analysis suggests that Trump could receive the money without immediately disclosing it.
“Our reading is that, even though this is a private settlement, it doesn’t have to be disclosed anywhere until there is an accounting of where all the money has gone at the end of the year,” Raskin said in an interview with the New Republic.
Donald Trump picked Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary as a personal favour to his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski despite objections that she was “obviously unqualified”, according to a new book.
The factional infighting behind Trump’s cabinet selection, where inexperience was no barrier to success, is detailed by journalist Jonathan Karl in Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Soon after his election victory last November, the book recounts, Trump picked Noem to run the Department of Homeland Security, central to fulfilling his campaign promise of the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
Like Pete Hegseth, who landed the job of defense secretary, Noem, then the governor of South Dakota – who faced an outcry over her admission in a book that she once shot a pet dog – had not been on the transition team’s list of possible candidates and had not gone through vetting for the job, Karl writes in Retribution.
“When a surprised Trump advisor asked the president-elect why he had decided to nominate Noem to be secretary of Homeland Security, he had a simple answer. ‘I did it for Corey,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing Corey asked me for.’”
Lewandowski was Trump’s campaign manager until he was fired in June 2016 after a string of controversies that included being accused of forcibly yanking the arm of a female reporter. Rumours of an affair between Lewandowski and Noem have swirled in Washington for years, though both deny the relationship.
Karl notes that even some of Trump’s closest allies were uncomfortable with putting Noem in charge of a sprawling department that includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
The White House has revealed that major companies in the tech, defense and crypto industries are helping Donald Trump fund his $300m ballroom at the White House, where work is under way to demolish the entire East Wing.
The list of donors includes tech companies Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google; the defense contractors Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Palantir; and the communication companies T-Mobile and Comcast, according to CNN.
Billionaire Trump supporters who were major donors to his campaign last year are also featured on the list, including Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; the Blackstone CEO, Stephen Schwarzman; the oil tycoon Harold Hamm; and the cryptocurrency billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary and former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, is also on the list.
Some donors last week were invited to a White House dinner celebrating their contribution to the ballroom project, including representatives from Google, Amazon and Lockheed Martin.
“Chief executives throughout history have contributed to making the White House special, and nothing of this magnitude has been done,” Trump told the donors at the start of the dinner, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said the ballroom “is being paid for 100% by me and some friends of mine”. While the president initially said the 90,000 sq ft ballroom would cost $200m, he upped the figure to $300m on Wednesday.
Trump backs down on sending federal troops to San Francisco for immigration crackdown
Donald Trump canceled plans for a deployment of federal troops to San Francisco that had sparked widespread condemnation from California leaders and sent protesters flooding into the streets.
The Bay Area region had been on edge after reports emerged on Wednesday that the Trump administration was poised to send more than 100 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other federal agents to the US Coast Guard base in Alameda, a city in the East Bay, as part of a large-scale immigration-enforcement plan. By early Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters had gathered outside the Coast Guard base, holding signs with slogans such as “No ICE or Troops in the Bay!”.
But just hours later, the president said he would not move forward with a “surge” of federal forces in the area after speaking with the mayor, Daniel Lurie, and Silicon Valley leaders including Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO who recently apologized for saying Trump should send national guard troops, and Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia.
Lurie said he spoke with the president on Wednesday night, and that Trump told him he would call off the deployment.
“In that conversation, the president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, reaffirmed that direction in our conversation this morning,” Lurie said in a statement.
Trump confirmed the conversation on his Truth Social platform, saying: “I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around.”
Trump says all Canada trade talks ‘terminated’ over ad criticising tariffs
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I am Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that president Donald Trump said on Thursday all trade talks with Canada were terminated following what he called a fraudulent advertisement from Canada in which former and late US president Ronald Reagan spoke negatively about tariffs.
“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The Thursday night post on Trump’s social media site came after Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said he aims to double his country’s exports to countries outside the US because of the threat posed by Trump’s tariffs.
Trump posted: “The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is fake, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs.”
The president wrote: “They only did this to interfere with the decision of the US supreme court, and other courts”. He added: “Tariffs are very important to the national security, and economy, of the USA. Based on their egregious behaviour, all trade negotiations with Canada are hereby terminated.”
Carney’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night. The prime minister was set to leave on Friday morning for a summit in Asia, while Trump is set to do the same on Friday evening.
Earlier on Thursday, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation + Institute posted on X that the ad created by the government of Ontario “misrepresents the ‘Presidential Radio Address to the Nation on Free and Fair Trade’ dated April 25, 1987.” It added that Ontario did not receive foundation permission “to use and edit the remarks”.
The foundation said it is “reviewing legal options in this matter” and invited the public to watch the unedited video of Reagan’s address.
Read our full story here:
In other developments:
The federal government remains shut down.
Donald Trump canceled plans for a federal deployment to San Francisco at the request of two billionaire supporters, but he reiterated threats to Chicago.
Trump said that he does not plan to ask Congress to declare war on Venezuela, ahead of possible strikes targeting suspected drug cartels as “we’re just gonna kill people”.
Trump said an unnamed “friend” had just sent him “a check for $130m” to be used to pay military salaries during the government shutdown.
A federal judge in Texas on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Republican congressman who argued that California’s redistricting proposal would cause him personal injury and should be blocked.
Trump claimed his militarized war on drugs was a huge improvement over the Biden administration’s effort, but a government database shows drug seizures are down from 2022.
The White House has revealed that major companies in the tech, defense and crypto industries are helping Trump fund his $300m ballroom at the White House, where work is under way to demolish the entire East Wing.
Top House Democrats have accused Donald Trump of orchestrating an illegal scheme to pay himself $230m in taxpayer money, demanding he immediately abandon claims they say violate the constitution.
