Trump news: President sends warning to Iran after attacking AOC and Ilhan Omar in rambling presser
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Donald Trump‘s former aide Sebastian Gorka was involved in a scuffle with members of the press in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday as a host of right-wing commentators congregated to attend the president’s Social Media Summit.
Despite not inviting any representatives from Twitter to the event, Mr Trump used the platform to attack Republican former House speaker Paul Ryan over comments he made about the president in a new book and to lay into Facebook Libra and other cryptocurrencies, which he said were “not money” but should be subjected to banking regulations.
The day unfolded against the backdrop of a major defeat for Mr Trump, who abandoned plans to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census in favour of ordering federal agencies to turn over their data on the matter with a view to mining it for information.
A federal appeals court meanwhile seemed inclined Friday to side with a House committee seeking some of Mr Trump’s financial records as part of an investigation, a disclosure he is fighting.
A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard more than two hours of arguments in the case Friday, but the judges gave no indication when they would rule.
Trump 2020 launch: Fascist Proud Boys, baby blimps and Uncle Sam
Show all 30It seemed that at least two of the judges were inclined to side with the Democratic-led House committee, which in April issued a subpoena for records from Mazars USA, which has provided accounting services to Mr Trump. A lower court previously ordered the records turned over, but the president called the decision “crazy” and his lawyers appealed.
The case is one of several working its way through courts in which Mr Trump is fighting with Congress over records.
Earlier this month, the House Ways and Means Committee sued the Trump administration over access to the president’s tax returns. And in a case in New York, Trump sued to prevent Deutsche Bank and Capital One from complying with House subpoenas for banking and financial records. A judge ruled against him, and Mr Trump is appealing.
The president has argued that House Committee on Oversight and Reform seeking the records from Mazars is out to get him and lacks a legitimate “legislative purpose” for its request. His lawyers have argued that congressional investigations are valid only if there is legislation that might result from them.
On Friday, Judge Patricia Millett told Trump lawyer William Consovoy at one point that he was suggesting that the president was “absolutely immune from any oversight.” And her colleague, Judge David Tatel, told Consovoy that what the House is seeking is “just financial disclosure which presidents for years have been doing.” Tatel was appointed by President Bill Clinton and Millett by President Barack Obama.
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Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Donald Trump's former aide Sebastian Gorka was involved in a scuffle with Playboy journalist Brian Karem in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday as a host of right-wing commentators congregated to attend the president's Social Media Summit.
Gorka - who had earlier suffered the indignity of having to introduce himself to the president during a Q&A session in case Trump had forgotten his name - was one of a host of oddball conservative personalities invited to the event.
Other guests included Diamond and Silk, Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, singer and MAGA enthusiast Joy Villa and alt-right filmmaker Ali Alexander, who recently attempted to suggest 2020 candidate Kamala Harris was not "an American black" with a view to sparking a new "birther" conspiracy theory like that used to argue Barack Obama was not eligible to be president of the United States.
Trump hailed his audience for "challenging the media gatekeepers and the corporate censors".
"The crap you think of is unbelievable," he said, later hitting out at the "tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination and suppression practiced by certain companies", alluding to Facebook and Twitter, neither of whom were invited to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Without providing any evidence, Trump insisted the liberal-minded Silicon Valley giants were engaged in a conspiracy to keep his follower numbers down.
He also played to his crowd by goading left-wing Antifa protesters as cowards with thin arms who live in their mothers' basements and who would be afraid to fight Bikers for Trump.
Here's a selection of some of the president's choicest remarks, including his annoyance that a fly could ever have gotten into the White House.
Here's Chris Riotta's assessment of the day.
Despite haranguing Twitter, Trump made frequent use of the platform yesterday, notably to boast of his own handsomeness.
Ahead of a trip to Wisconsin on Friday, he attacked the state's Republican former House speaker Paul Ryan over comments he made about the president in a new book, American Carnage by Tim Alberta.
Ryan told Alberta he regarded his retirement as an "escape hatch" out of the Trump presidency.
"I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right," Ryan said. "Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government... I wanted to scold him all the time."
Alberta quotes Ryan saying those around Trump "helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time."
"We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now I think he’s making some of these knee-jerk reactions."
All of which provoked this furious response from the president, who labelled Ryan "a lame duck failure".
Here's more on their feud from Emma Snaith.
Trump also went after Facebook Libra and other cryptocurrencies, which he said were “not money” but should be subjected to banking regulations.
Here's Anthony Cuthbertson on the inevitable boost to the price of the currency Trump's tweets inspired.
All of this unfolded against the backdrop of a major defeat for Trump, who abandoned plans to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census in favour of ordering federal agencies to turn over their citizenship data to be mined for information.
Here's Andrew Buncombe to explain.
Trump's strange obsession with veteran Hollywood action star Arnold Schwarzenegger continued at the Social Media Summit yesterday, with the president making the bizarre claim the former California governor has passed away.
Arnie, of course, couldn't resist bait that juicy.
Oddly, this wasn't the only Schwarzenegger story doing the rounds in DC yesterday, the president himself retweeting Lindsey Graham on ousted British diplomat Sir Kim Darroch likening Trump to the Terminator.
Here's Greg Evans with more.
The Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee yesterday voted to issue subpoenas to a dozen more members of Trump's inner circle over Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election hacking and the administration's immigration policies.
There are some big names on their list, including the president's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, former attorney general Jeff Sessions, ex-deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, ex-White House chief of staff John Kelly and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
The subpoenas are part of a probe into discussions of potential presidential pardons and the "zero tolerance" policy in operation on the US-Mexico border, which has seen children cruelly separated from their families and detained in unsanitary detention centres.
Democratic 2020 front-runner Joe Biden released this pretty stinging attack video last night, going after on Trump's foreign policy record land referencing his praise for Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Iran, his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord and the ongoing trade war with China and its impact on farmers in the American Midwest.
Another 2020 challenger, long-shot Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton, has given an interview to Politico in which he says Democrats should not launch a "moral crusade" against Trump because his support base "already know he's an asshole".
"I think a lot of Democrats think, 'You know, these Trump voters, what we need to do is we just need to educate them, and we're going to get it through their heads that this guy is a bad guy,'" Moulton said.
"OK, Trump voters are not idiots. We don’t need to give America a moral education; they know that he’s an asshole. They get it. They’ve just baked that in.
"When we’re trying to win over Trump voters in the general election, we can’t go on this moral crusade because people are like, 'Give me a break'. What they’re really saying is, 'I get it, I get this guy is immoral. I’m voting for him anyway because you don’t give me a better alternative'."
Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are set to carry out their postponed raids on migrant families with court-ordered removals across nine US cities this Sunday.
Speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN, Francis Suarez, the Republican mayor of Miami, told viewers: "The city of Miami is not coming after you."
"Frankly, we're in the dark. I don't know how whatever the crisis is on the southern border relates to the city of Miami," Suarez said.
His counterpart in New York - Bill de Blasio, who is also running for president - has called out the "fear and division" the measure is inspiring and demanded the abolition of ICE altogether.
Meanwhile, here's Nancy Pelosi speaking for the opposition on the alarming prospect of mass deportations.
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