political

SACRAMENTO — Until the FBI raided his Capitol office last August, Assemblyman Pat Nolan of Glendale was a blazing young star of Republican politics.

Leader of the Assembly GOP, with a reputation for relentless pursuit of his goals and boundless ambition, he hoped to pick up enough seats over the next few elections to win a majority and become Speaker. He talked about running for governor one day.

None of it seemed beyond his reach.

Now, at age 38, stripped of his leadership post, Nolan is struggling for political survival.

Last June 29, Nolan and an aide were videotaped at a meeting in a hotel room where FBI agents posing as businessmen handed him two $5,000 checks for his campaign committees, sources familiar with the three-year FBI probe have told The Times.

Nolan failed to report one of those checks until after the Capitol raid, a full month after it should have been disclosed; just a mistake, according to those close to him.

The lawmaker has not been accused of a crime, but federal sources say he is a target of the investigation.

Nolan’s attorney has told him not to talk to the press beyond a brief statement, issued the day after the raid, saying that “when the investigation is completed, my office will be completely cleared.”

Friends and enemies alike describe Nolan as a driven soul, someone who has devoted himself unflaggingly to conservative politics since adolescence and who, once he attained power, could be ruthless in his exercise of it.

A review of public records as well as his daily calendar shows his preoccupation with raising money for political campaigns. During one hard-charging stretch last August, he was scheduled to attend five fund-raising events in a day as he hustled to keep pace with the money-raising of Assembly Democrats.

Spoils of High Office

The same records illustrate that with power came the spoils of high office. Special-interest groups paid him for speeches, sent him gifts and provided him with trips.

In his 10 years in the Legislature, the documents show, he has collected more than $60,000 in honorariums–about $55,000 of it in the four years that he was Republican leader.

Other legislators have collected far larger amounts for speaking, but some of the specifics about Nolan’s honorariums raise questions.

Nolan was one of several legislative leaders, for example, to receive sizable speaking fees–in his case, $5,000–from the California Retailers Assn. during the 1987-88 legislative session. Last year, the lobbying group won approval of its bill to eliminate an 18% cap on interest rates that department stores may charge customers, a limit in place since the early 1960s.

Arranged Meeting

One payment of $2,500 in 1988 came from Glaxo Inc., which was lobbying to have its anti-ulcer drug Zantac added to the list of medications covered by Medi-Cal. After a bill to add the drug to the list died in the Legislature, Nolan arranged a meeting between Glaxo representatives and top Administration health officials. The money, payment for a speech that Nolan never delivered, was deposited into his personal account by his secretary. But the payment was returned in late September, three months after it was received and one month after the FBI raid.

Other special-interest groups–the Seafood Institute and Ralphs Grocery Co.–in 1986 provided a total of $6,612 in food and beverages at Nolan’s wedding reception. And businessman Del Doye, whose firm, TSD Systems of Bakersfield, was trying to win a toxic disposal permit from the state, provided the newlyweds with a honeymoon condominium in Hawaii. (Doye has left the company and the permit still is pending.)

As leader of the Assembly GOP, Nolan met regularly with Gov. George Deukmejian and his top aides, according to his calendar, which was obtained by The Times from a Republican source.

Wife Hired

Through his contacts, Nolan learned that there was an unadvertised Administration job available that might be suitable for his wife, Gail, a marketing specialist. In February, she was appointed by the governor to the $3,323-a-month public relations post at the Department of Food and Agriculture. Part of her job was to win a spot for the Dancing Raisins on the “Today Show” on National Agriculture Day, department officials said. The raisins did not make the show and Gail Nolan left her job in June to have a baby.

While a legislator, Nolan has continued to receive a $6,000-a-year-retainer from Kinkle, Rodiger & Spriggs, a Southern California law firm he joined after law school. The firm specializes in defending individuals and insurance companies in personal injury cases. Nolan’s duties include meeting with attorneys and clients to discuss legislative procedures, according to managing partner John V. Hager.

Nolan’s friends defend him as a committed idealist, an honest man who has not profited personally from his office.

“There is not a more honest guy in the whole world, with more integrity and just good character than Pat Nolan,” said Assemblyman Dennis Brown (R-Los Alamitos), a close friend of Nolan’s for 20 years.

‘Decent, Caring Person’

“Pat is really a very decent, caring person, who has very strong political beliefs and has spent 10 years trying to advance them,” said his former chief of staff, Bill Saracino, who like Brown has known Nolan since their student days at USC. “He’s not one of those legislators who have enriched themselves.”

Saracino, now a deputy director at the state Department of Commerce, also defended Nolan’s acceptance of speaking fees from various interest groups: “No. 1, it’s legal. And look who Pat’s getting honorariums from–people who agree with him on the natural anyway.”

One of his chief Republican opponents, Assemblyman Stan Statham of Oak Run, in a bitter speech before the Assembly, accused Nolan of being a liar–harsh language for one legislator to use against another on a house floor, and especially so in this case because the attack came during normally festive opening-day ceremonies with Nolan’s family in attendance.

Personal Dealings Told

“I can’t be charitable because I’ve had too many personal dealings with him (Nolan),” Statham said in an interview. Nolan broke a promise not to become involved in 1986 Republican primaries and opposed a candidate supported by Statham, the lawmaker said.

“Nothing in politics is any more important than a person’s word,” Statham said.

He also pointed out that Nolan is a central figure in an investigation of forged letters sent out on White House stationery under a phony signature of then-President Ronald Reagan in support of Republican Assembly candidates in 1986.

Although Sacramento County Dist. Atty. John Dougherty decided not to press criminal charges in the case last fall, he asserted that both Nolan and Assemblyman John R. Lewis (R-Orange) “asked staff members to give false explanations to White House staff” on how the forgery took place.

State Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, who conducted the initial investigation and referred it to Dougherty, is now deciding whether to drop the matter or move ahead on his own.

Several Maladies

Nolan is a large man, hefty but not obese, someone whose size can be intimidating in a head-to-head confrontation.

Recently his usually florid skin has had an orange cast from medication he takes for a chronic yeast infection, one of several maladies that he has complained of over the years, according to those close to him.

“He’s a bit of a hypochondriac,” observed Republican Assemblyman Gil Ferguson of Newport Beach, who acknowledges that Nolan does have some real health problems.

Ferguson, a Nolan ally, was one of several people interviewed who commented on Nolan’s hot temperament–something Ferguson attributed to hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. “He’d explode because of a lack of sugar content,” Ferguson said.

‘Jekyll and Hyde’

Others describe him as having a “Jekyll and Hyde” personality–a charming teller of jokes and stories one minute, an ogre growling out his displeasure the next.

As a young man, his storytelling got him booted from a group of conservative students attending free enterprise seminars sponsored by Coast Federal Savings, when a woman in the group complained that he was telling dirty jokes.

“People thought conservatives were humorless, stuffy and boring,” said another member of the group, Bilenda Harris. “Pat is a wonderful teller of jokes.”

He also sprinkles his conversations with quotations–from Shakespeare and Marcus Aurelius, Sophocles and Machiavelli–a practice that dates back to his days at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks.

“He’s like the renaissance man, a very well-read, very rounded individual,” Harris said.

But Harris, who also was a classmate of Nolan’s at USC and later an aide in his Glendale office, knows what it’s like to fall into Nolan’s disfavor. In 1983, Nolan fired her only six weeks after she moved with her son to Sacramento to take a new job in the lawmaker’s Capitol office.

Nolan is the boy’s godfather.

Others say that in 1987 Nolan fired another USC classmate, then-chief of staff Saracino, who had been the best man at his wedding.

“Pat just cut his head off,” Assemblyman Ferguson said.

Saracino denied that he was fired, saying that he and Nolan had agreed to go their separate ways because of “differences of style.”

But he agreed that Nolan was a tough boss. “ ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ is a bit of hyperbole,” Saracino said. “But he is a very demanding person, as you have to be if you want to get anything done.”

“Pat gets torn in this stuff,” Harris said. “The need to get elected overrides the friendship that used to be there.”

Focus on Goals

Ruthless is an adjective that Ferguson ascribes to Nolan.

“Few people have the ability or the willingness to focus on their objectives at the cost of almost everything else–friends, family life,” Ferguson said.

The sixth of nine children, Nolan showed a precocious interest in politics. He got his first taste in 1960 when he hung brochures on doorknobs for Richard M. Nixon’s unsuccessful first campaign for President.

In 1964, he walked precincts for Barry Goldwater.

Two years later, at the age of 16, he threw himself into Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for governor.

Nolan’s large family was solidly middle class. His father was an accountant, his mother a homemaker with wide interests, a constant reader. Nolan’s official biographies point out that he is a fifth-generation Californian, a direct descendant of the ranching family that founded the town of Agoura.

Nine Dancing Nolans

As children, he and his brothers and sisters celebrated their Irish roots as the Nine Dancing Nolans, a group that performed at festivals and at Disneyland.

The clan, dressed in kilts, has continued to dance together for Nolan’s political events–a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Glendale and a campaign fund-raiser in Sacramento.

Nolan’s passion for politics came to dominate his life.

While a student at USC, he helped found the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a right-wing youth group that spawned a generation of conservative politicians. Among the members of the USC chapter were Assemblymen Dennis Brown and John Lewis, who remain two of Nolan’s closest friends and political confidants.

With the campus bitterly divided over the Vietnam War, the group staged a mock treason trial of Jane Fonda and hanged her in effigy. (A few years ago, however, Nolan found himself working hand in hand with Fonda’s husband, Democratic Assemblyman Tom Hayden of Santa Monica, on a bill to study the effects of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans. The measure was vetoed by Deukmejian.)

Variety of Jobs

To make ends meet while at USC, Nolan worked at a variety of part-time jobs, waiting tables at the faculty center, serving in dormitory food lines and passing out towels in the gym. Later, he found a job with Los Angeles City Councilman John Ferraro.

He managed to find the time to learn to ride horseback, became a riding instructor and rode as Tommy Trojan in the 1974 Rose Parade.

An average student in college, Nolan scored well enough on qualifying tests to enter USC Law School. Graduating in 1975, he passed the Bar exam on his second try and started practicing law.

In 1978, he upset more seasoned politicians in his first bid for an Assembly seat by conducting an old-fashioned, door-to-door campaign that stressed his support for Proposition 13, California’s trend-setting property tax-cutting initiative.

At first, he was an outsider in his own caucus–so conservative that he and his closest allies were dubbed “the cavemen.”

Succeeded on Second Try

But by 1983, he came within one vote of being elected Republican leader. He succeeded on his second try a year later with the backing of two new GOP assemblymen he had recruited to run for office–Ferguson and Wayne Grisham of Norwalk.

Nolan’s goal was to win enough seats for Republicans to gain a 41-vote majority in the Assembly in time for the GOP to play a central role in drawing up new legislative and congressional districts after the 1990 Census.

To get the legislative staff he wanted, the new Republican leader worked out a compromise with Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown–”the devil incarnate” to many of the Republicans, according to Ferguson.

In return for staff appointments and the ability to decide which Republicans would serve on which committees, Nolan agreed not to challenge Brown’s position as Speaker as long as the Democrats held a majority.

Solid Voting Bloc

With control over his own members, Nolan was able to whip a divided Republican Assembly membership into a solid voting bloc. The GOP members could stop any measure requiring a two-thirds vote, including the annual state budget and attempts to override a Deukmejian veto.

To plot Republican strategy, Nolan drew on a tight group of colleagues, which called itself “the board” and met secretly every Monday night at the offices of Heron, Burchette, Ruckert & Rockert, a lobbying firm, according to Ferguson, a charter member. Other lawmakers in the group included Nolan’s USC friends, Dennis Brown and John Lewis, along with Frank Hill of Whittier, Ross Johnson of La Habra, William P. Baker of Danville, Bev Hansen of Santa Rosa, William P. Duplissea of San Marcos and a few others.

In 1986, despite a divisive Republican primary in which several Nolan-backed candidates were defeated, the GOP picked up three Assembly seats.

Within Reach

With 36 Republican members, five short of a majority, Nolan’s goal suddenly seemed within reach, if not in 1988, then perhaps by 1990–in time to redistrict the state.

In preparing for the 1988 elections, Nolan stepped up his fund-raising in a continuing effort to compete with Speaker Brown.

“You’re there to make a difference,” Saracino explained. “The way to do that is to compete with the Democrats on an equal footing. The way to do that is to raise political contributions. Legally.”

Another former Nolan employee believed that his boss had become too eager to collect money. “Willie Brown would never have walked across the street to pick up a check at the Hyatt Hotel,” where Nolan met with FBI agents posing as businessmen, the ex-staffer said. “Pat apparently did.”

By 1988, Nolan’s life had changed. He was married and his wife was expecting a baby. On June 28, the night he was originally scheduled to meet with “businessmen” who later proved to be FBI agents, he also planned to attend a natural childbirth class with his wife, his calendar shows. (He postponed his meeting with representatives of the bogus company to June 29, when he and an aide picked up the checks that have caused Nolan so much trouble.)

Nolan’s daughter was born a month later.

On the surface at least, Nolan had everything he wanted, according to Bilenda Harris. A family. A promising career.

But on Aug. 24, 30 FBI agents armed with search warrants raided the Capitol offices of Nolan, aide Karin Watson, and Assemblyman Hill. The FBI searched offices of Democrats as well–Assemblywoman Gwen Moore of Los Angeles, her aide Tyrone Netters, and Sen. Joseph B. Montoya of Whittier. Former Democratic Sen. Paul Carpenter, now a member of the State Board of Equalization, was questioned by the FBI.

While the federal investigation bruised the Democrats, it struck at the heart of the Assembly Republican leadership.

Many are convinced that the sting hurt Republicans at the polls last November.

“The Pat Nolan name was for the first time as negative as Willie Brown,” said one GOP lawmaker, who asked not to be identified. The contributions raised by Nolan for other Republicans suddenly became “tainted money, dirty money,” a liability for members in close races, the assemblyman said. “The Democrats beat them to death.”

Instead of picking up additional seats in the November election, the Assembly Republicans lost three. The losses finished whatever hopes Nolan might have had of remaining GOP leader.

Now his prospects for the future are uncertain.

Even if he is exonerated, his connection to the FBI sting could hamper his hope of ever running for an office outside his own heavily Republican district, according to two Republican assemblymen, who asked not to be identified.

His friends, however, believe that he will in the end be vindicated and that his career can recover.

“This is an ethical cloud, even if nothing comes of it,” said his former top aide, Saracino.

It’s hard to imagine a stranger twist to the MAGA’s “war on woke” than FBI Director Kash Patel’s announcement that the Bureau is cutting ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In a social media post, Patel wrote that the agency won’t partner with “political fronts masquerading as watchdogs”. The decision came after right-wing backlash over the ADL’s inclusion of Turning Point USA and its late leader, Charlie Kirk, in its “glossary of extremism”.

Not surprisingly, the organisation, with whom the FBI had collaborated on issues related to tracking anti-Semitism and other forms of extremism for well over half a century, quickly declared much of its “research” “outdated” and began scrubbing its websites of criticism of conservative figures and organisations.

Patel is certainly not wrong that the ADL is a deeply political organisation. Although it was founded in 1913 “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all”, since the 1970s, the organisation has focused ever more intently on shielding Israel from criticism. In parallel, it has also monitored right-wing racist and anti-LGBTQ+ extremism so that it could remain solidly within the liberal Jewish fold in the US.

Today, the ADL claims to be one of the country’s leading organisations fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of hate. But in fact, its primary mission continues to be to protect Israel from any criticism by using its considerable resources to ensure that any serious, systematic criticism of its policies, even by Jews, be considered – and when possible, punished – as anti-Semitic.

The ADL was a close partner to the Joe Biden administration in its campaign against pro-Palestinian mobilisation on university campuses, and until last week, it was a close partner to Donald Trump’s administration, as well. It is under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism on campuses that the organisation has contributed to the massive assault on freedom of dissent and freedom of thought in US higher education.

When pro-Palestinian demonstrations broke out at Columbia University in 2024, triggering a wave of similar protest action across the country, the ADL led the charge against the university, calling for “swift action” on “virulent antisemitism” on college campuses. For the Biden administration, a quick and harsh crackdown on campus protests was critical to enable it to pursue its policy of unconditional support for Israel’s ever more violent prosecution of the war in Gaza without major public backlash.

For the Trump administration, the ADL and other pro-Israel Jewish organisations served another purpose: their relentless focus on the “new anti-Semitism” that overlapped seamlessly with anti-Zionism and that was allegedly infecting higher education, was the perfect cudgel with which to bludgeon universities into submission.

By working closely with the government, the ADL was able to engage in the classic “arsonist and fireman” scam: accusing universities across the country of anti-Semitism, and then offering itself as the organisation that could put out the anti-Jewish fire.

How does the trick work? The ADL continuously puts out statements criticising universities for enabling or doing nothing to combat anti-Semitism on campus. In particular, its Antisemitism Report Card – which has faced strong criticism for its flawed methodology – grades schools across the country on the prevalence of anti-Semitism on their campuses.

Similar to the US News and World Report college rankings, a bad ADL “grade” can tarnish a school’s reputation with an important segment of the college-aged population. Accusations of anti-Semitism would then motivate leading university donors to threaten to withdraw their support.

Given its access to centres of political power – at least until now – the ADL has been suitably positioned to collaborate on addressing alleged anti-Semitism on university campuses and reassuring donors and the government.

And so, for example, in July, Columbia announced it was partnering with ADL to create programmes aimed at combating anti-Semitism.

How much is the ADL paid for this and other collaborations? Calls and emails to the ADL requesting comment were not returned, but from its own statements, it is clear that the organisation has “collaborations” and “partnerships” with a large number of universities across the country through various programmes – the exact number is not public.

To cite one in-house statistic, the ADL boasted that “over 56,000 faculty, staff, administrators and students on 900 college and university campuses nationwide have participated” in its Campus of Difference programmes, although it seems the programme, similar to the “glossary of extremism”, was pulled offline since Trump returned to power, possibly because it used terms like “diversity” and “inclusion”.

The ADL has not been the only one benefitting from whipping up the anti-Semitism campaign on university campuses.

Brown University, which also reached an agreement with the Trump administration earlier this year, has made a pledge to increase cooperation with Hillel. So did UPenn, which now allows donations to Hillel to be made directly through the university. Most damning for me as a University of California faculty member is UCLA’s recent pledge of $2.3m to “eight organizations that combat antisemitism,” including the ADL and Hillel. All eight are unremittingly pro-Israel.

With all this, the ADL, along with other pro-Israel organisations, have played a central role in the coup-de-grace against academic freedom and shared governance, forcing university leaderships to pivot to the right in order to maintain tens of billions of dollars in mostly science funding. They have facilitated the larger project of remaking the university as a system for regenerating mindless conservatism throughout society.

The question that has arisen with the sudden frontal assault by senior Trump administration officials and conservative figures is whether, having played their role all too well, these pro-Israel organisations are no longer needed, and the markedly increasing anti-Israel – and anti-Semitic – rhetoric among Trump’s base will now have freer rein. In hindsight, the ADL’s obsequious support for Elon Musk after his Nazi salute and anti-Semitic comments may well be owed to a sense among the leadership that it would be on shakier ground with Trump than it was with Biden.

Another hint at this realisation comes from ADL’s claim in a newly released report to care for “Jewish faculty under fire” from colleagues and protesters who portray themselves as “anti-Zionist, but [are] truly anti-Semitic”.

This kind of whingeing at a moment when pro-Israel forces had unprecedented support at the highest levels of power reveals a discourse of infantilisation of Jews that is damning in its own right, but also likely indicative of a growing insecurity within the pro-Israel establishment. Suddenly the victim of conservative ire, it needs Jews to feel even more afraid to maintain already fraying support within the community.

Yet an unintended consequence of the ADL being on the outs with Trump and his forces would be to give Jewish faculty and students more room to breathe and to understand the relative privilege, and responsibility, of our position today. It certainly would be welcome.

Seventy years ago, my mother was refused entry to Columbia because of an openly acknowledged Jewish quota. Thirty years later, when I attended the City University of New York, accusations by some CUNY faculty that Jews predominated in the slave trade were mixed with Black-Hasidic violence in Brooklyn and the growing popularity of the Nation of Islam to create an ostensibly toxic brew for Jewish students attending an urban public college.

The ADL was around then, but was focusing on spying on the anti-Apartheid movement – a policy it continues today with progressive activists – and defending Israel against the incipient movements against the occupation. We, Jewish college students, were largely and thankfully left to our own devices. Like every other – far more oppressed – minority, we learned what to ignore and what to learn from, when to stand our ground or fight, and when to let things go. In other words, how to navigate and deal with the discomforts of life as an adult.

The Trump-MAGA slapdown of ADL might well open space for the growing criticism of Israel and for everyone to grow up just a bit when it comes to debating Palestine-Israel. Whether university leaderships seize the opportunity to assert more independence and defend academic freedom or continue to sell out and name names remains, tragically, an open question.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has seized on the government shutdown as an opportunity to reshape the federal workforce and punish detractors, meeting with budget director Russ Vought on Thursday to talk through “temporary or permanent” spending cuts that could set up a lose-lose dynamic for Democratic lawmakers.

Trump announced the meeting on social media Thursday morning, saying he and Vought would determine “which of the many Democrat Agencies” would be cut — continuing their efforts to slash federal spending by threatening mass firings of workers and suggesting “irreversible” cuts to Democratic priorities.

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump wrote on his social media account. “They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The post was notable in its explicit embrace of Project 2025, a controversial policy blueprint drafted by the Heritage Foundation that Trump distanced himself from during his reelection campaign. The effort aimed to reshape the federal government around right-wing policies, and Democrats repeatedly pointed to its goals to warn of the consequences of a second Trump administration.

Vought on Wednesday offered an opening salvo of the pressure he hoped to put on Democrats. He announced he was withholding $18 billion for the Hudson River rail tunnel and Second Avenue subway line in New York City that have been championed by both Democratic leaders, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, in their home state. Vought is also canceling $8 billion in green energy projects in states with Democratic senators.

Meanwhile, the White House is preparing for mass firings of federal workers, rather than simply furloughing as is the usual practice during a shutdown. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this week that layoffs were “imminent.”

“If they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government,” Leavitt said Thursday said of Democrats.

A starring role for Russ Vought

The bespectacled and bearded Vought has emerged as a central figure in the shutdown — promising possible layoffs of government workers that would be a show of strength by the Trump administration as well as a possible liability given the weakening job market and existing voter unhappiness over the economy.

The strategic goal is to increase the political pressure on Democratic lawmakers as agencies tasked with environmental protection, racial equity and addressing poverty, among other things, could be gutted over the course of the shutdown.

But Democratic lawmakers also see Vought as the architect of a strategy to refuse to spend congressionally approved funds, using a tool known as a “pocket rescission” in which the administration submits plans to return unspent money to Congress just before the end of the fiscal year, causing that money to lapse.

All of this means that Democratic spending priorities might be in jeopardy regardless of whether they want to keep the government open or partially closed.

Ahead of the end of the fiscal year in September, Vought used the pocket rescission to block the spending of $4.9 billion in foreign aid.

White House officials refused to speculate on the future use of pocket rescissions after rolling them out in late August. But one of Vought’s former colleagues, insisting on anonymity to discuss the budget director’s plans, said that future pocket rescissions could be 20 times higher.

Shutdown continues with no endgame in sight

Thursday was Day 2 of the shutdown, and already the dial is turned high. The aggressive approach coming from the Trump administration is what certain lawmakers and budget observers feared if Congress, which has the responsibility to pass legislation to fund government, failed to do its work and relinquished control to the White House.

Vought, in a private conference call with House GOP lawmakers Wednesday, told them of layoffs starting in the next day or two. It’s an extension of the Department of Government Efficiency work under Elon Musk that slashed through the federal government at the start of the year.

“These are all things that the Trump administration has been doing since January 20th,” said Jeffries, referring to the president’s first day in office. “The cruelty is the point.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) underscored Thursday that the shutdown gives Trump and Vought vast power over the federal government. He blamed Democrats and said “they have effectively turned off the legislative branch” and “handed it over to the president.”

Still, Johnson said that Trump and Vought take “no pleasure in this.”

Trump and the congressional leaders are not expected to meet again soon. Congress has no action scheduled Thursday in observance of the Jewish holy day, with senators due back Friday. The House is set to resume session next week.

The Democrats are holding fast to their demands to preserve health care funding and refusing to back a bill that fails to do so, warning of price spikes for millions of Americans nationwide.

The shutdown is likely to harm the economy

With no easy endgame at hand, the standoff risks dragging deeper into October, when federal workers who remain on the job will begin missing paychecks. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated roughly 750,000 federal workers would be furloughed on any given day during the shutdown, a loss of $400 million daily in wages.

The economic effects could spill over into the broader economy. Past shutdowns saw “reduced aggregate demand in the private sector for goods and services, pushing down GDP,” the CBO said.

“Stalled federal spending on goods and services led to a loss of private-sector income that further reduced demand for other goods and services in the economy,” it said. Overall CBO said there was a “dampening of economic output,” but that reversed once people returned to work.

How Trump and Vought can reshape the federal government

With Congress as a standstill, the Trump administration has taken advantage of new levers to determine how to shape the federal government.

The Trump administration can tap into funds to pay workers at the Defense Department and Homeland Security from what’s commonly called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that was signed into law this summer, according to the CBO.

That would ensure Trump’s immigration enforcement and mass deportation agenda is uninterrupted. But employees who remain on the job at many other agencies will have to wait for government to reopen before they get a paycheck.

Mascaro, Boak and Kim write for the Associated Press. AP writers Chris Megerian, Stephen Groves, Joey Cappelletti, Matt Brown, Kevin Freking, and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

A year after his huge election win, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Wednesday faced the daunting task of trying to rally his party amid dismal ratings.

His most serious challenge comes from the right-wing Reform UK Party, helmed by Nigel Farage. Its hardline stance on immigration is adding pressure for more border security from Labour.

Starmer’s address at the Labour Party conference showed energy and passion — things he’s been criticized for lacking in recent months.

But will it be enough to help Starmer overcome his challenges, or are his days in office numbered?

Presenter: Nick Clark

Guests:

Patrick Diamond – Professor in public policy at Queen Mary University of London, former policy adviser to Labour governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

Jennifer Nadel – Political communications strategist and co-founder of Compassion in Politics, a cross-party think tank that works towards legislative change and ethical governance

Michael Walker – Contributing editor at Novara Media, an independent outlet, a former Labour Party member who left in 2020

India’s cricket team hoisted an imaginary trophy after winning the 2025 Asia Cup against Pakistan, refusing to accept the real one from Pakistani Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi. The match came four months after a brief aerial war between the two nuclear-armed rivals over a deadly attack on a tourist area in Indian-administered Kashmir.

A crowd crush at a campaign rally for popular actor-turned-politician Vijay has killed at least 39 people in Karur, in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state.

A crowd crush at a rally for a popular Indian actor-turned-politician in the southern state of Tamil Nadu has killed at least 39 people and injured 40, the southern state’s chief minister, MK Stalin, told reporters in Karur, the district where the incident occurred on Saturday.

The rally, which officials estimate was attended by tens of thousands of people, was addressed by Vijay, one of Tamil Nadu’s most prominent actors who goes by only his first name.

Indian media, citing local officials, reported that as Vijay addressed the enthusiastic crowd, a group of his supporters and fans fell while attempting to get closer to his bus, triggering the crowd crush.

Hours after the tragedy, Vijay expressed his condolences.

“My heart is shattered,” he posted on X. “I am writhing in unbearable, indescribable pain and sorrow that words cannot express.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the “unfortunate incident” as “deeply saddening”.

In 2024, Vijay retired from acting and founded his political party, although it remains unclear whether he intends to stand to govern the state.

Stampedes and crowd crushes are relatively common in India when large crowds assemble. In January, at least 30 people died as tens of thousands of Hindu devotees rushed to bathe in the sacred Ganges during the Maha Kumbh festival, the world’s largest religious gathering.

Grass-roots organizing, voter registration, precinct walking, ward captains, school board elections, city council races, political patronage– the political process. A familiar story in this country, familiar signs to ethnic groups as they proceed along the American Way, signals that they are on the right path to the mainstream.

Not all that familiar, however, to Arab-Americans, at least not until now. That is the contention and the concern of James Zogby, an Arab-American of Lebanese descent from Upstate New York, who is executive director of the Arab American Institute.

Founded Institute

Zogby, a Democrat who was deputy manager of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, and George Salem, a Republican who was executive director of the ethnic voters division of the Reagan-Bush campaign, founded the Washington-based bipartisan institute last year. Their aim, according to their literature, is to organize Arab-Americans into a political constituency able “to claim its place in American politics, just as other ethnic groups have done.”

Zogby recently spoke at the founding dinner of the Arab-American Republican Club in Orange County. The institute is supporting an effort, headed by Mounzer Chaarani, president of the Orange County club, to form 10 such countywide clubs in California and then, a state chapter.

After Detroit and its environs, Southern California has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the country, an estimated quarter-million, Zogby said during his visit here. Later, when the time is right, he said, the institute will be just as supportive helping Arab-American Democrats form California chapters. He is not talking about the distant future.

“We’re a community coming of age,” he says frequently, convinced that until recently such organizing efforts would have been premature. Now, he says, as of 1984–a watershed year for Arab-Americans who were a presence in the presidential campaigns to a degree unprecedented in their history–they are on target.

Exciting Experience

“It was an exciting experience. We had a taste of national politics. It felt right. In 1980 we would not have been ready.”

Until 1984, he said, Arab-Americans, whether they came in the initial wave 60 years ago, or in the more recent group than began arriving 20 years ago, were outside the political process. The earlier immigrants, he said, were largely peasants or others with rural backgrounds and little or no experience with democratic processes or politics. Their efforts were concentrated on making it economically here, which they largely did, in small business, the professions and farming. Recent immigrants, he said, often more urban and professional, have been occupied thus far with making their economic adjustment.

To the degree that there was any political activity among Arab-Americans, Zogby said, it was along more national, factionalized lines. People identified themselves as Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians rather than as Arab-Americans, and that is how they formed their societies, including their few political clubs.

That has been changing, he said, to some extent because of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East, where Arab-Americans found themselves more united than divided in their opposition to the United States’ Middle East policy. Also, he said, it has been changing, thanks to earlier organizing efforts, some of which Zogby himself had a part in.

Zogby was the original executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee founded in 1980 by former U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. That group seeks to organize Arab-Americans to fight ethnic stereotyping and discrimination. In doing so it, as well as the older National Assn. of Arab Americans, he said, has promoted a sense of Arab identity, pride and community.

“Our hope,” he said of the institute’s plans, “is sometime within the next six months to bring together the Democratic and Republican leaders from all over the country and develop a strategy for the Arab community. We don’t want to see a new form of division,” he said, referring to political and religious divisions that exist in the Middle East and that have, at times, carried over to Arab-Americans here. Commenting that “there is a layering of identification to the way people’s consciousness is shaped,” he offered a hypothetical example of what it boils down to: “Yes, I feel more strongly about Lebanon than Palestine, or vice versa, “ he said, but there comes a day and a local issue when “we all have to go meet the mayor. . . .’ ”

Now that Arab-Americans have begun to feel ready to go meet the mayor, however, the mayors, and other elected officials and political figures throughout the land, have not always been ready to meet them, Zogby said.

Ultimately Encouraging

It is why 1984 was such an important, and ultimately encouraging, year he said. Walter Mondale’s campaign got off to a bad start with Arab-Americans, in a well-publicized incident where contributions made by five Arab-Americans in Chicago before the California primary were returned after charges were raised that the donors were anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic. The important thing, Zogby said, was that later Mondale apologized and an Arab-American campaign committee was appointed. Ten Arab-Americans were elected delegates or senior campaign staff at the Democratic National Convention.

Jesse Jackson invited them to join his Rainbow Coalition early on, Zogby said, and Arab-Americans raised more than $350,000 for him. In addition to George Salem’s role with Reagan-Bush, he said, there was an active Arab-American committee that topped all ethnic committees in providing volunteers to the campaign.

Beyond those national examples, he said, Arab-Americans ready to turn to politics are finding that “it is not an open field,” and more difficult for them than Asians or Latinos beginning the political process.

“The problem that Arab-Americans are having is not one of xenophobia, of ‘dirty Arabs,’ ” he said. “It’s a purely political problem and therefore it must be fought politically. The political problem is the result of our challenging a point of view (American policy in the Middle East) that wants to silence us. The way for us to deal with that is to sharpen our political skills, not to run and hide but to become more articulate.”

In the past, he said, the only political issue Arab-Americans ever were active around was the Middle East. (In general, he said, most Arab-Americans want to see an open debate on the Middle East, as other policy issues are debated. Most think the United States policy should recognize the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), he said. They think there should be a Palestinian state, integrity for Lebanon. Just as American Jews are not united in what they think ought to be done about Palestinians, he said, Arab-Americans do not have consensus regarding Israel.)

“People who were sophisticated in other aspects of life were not sophisticated politically. That is changing now. The economy, education, taxes, domestic issues–they can be as articulate on these issues as on foreign policy.”

A Progressive Community

Zogby’s institute has surveyed Arab-Americans and found them, he said, a progressive community. The survey indicated, he said, that like most ethnic groups, they are conservative on issues of personal morality, entrepreneurship, free enterprise.

“We are pleased to find,” he said, “they are very progressive beyond the personal,” saying they are for reductions in arms expenditures, for disinvestment in South Africa, against intervention in Central America, and for negotiated settlements in the Middle East, Central America and South Africa, and in support of a strong human rights policy.

Domestically, they favor spending on education, social programs, women in politics, and indicated they favored stronger ties with the black community.

They are, in short, a mix, fitting neither into conventional Democratic or Republican stereotypes. And, Zogby said, the institute is comfortable with that. So comfortable, in fact, that he was the house guest of Dr. Sabri El Farra, a naturalized Palestinian long active in the Republican party in Los Angeles, who voted for Jimmy Carter, sometimes supports Democrats, counts one of them, City Councilman Robert Farrell, as a close personal friend of many years and recently hosted a meeting for Jesse Jackson at his home.

“It just may be,” Zogby said, “that we reflect the experience of the country in general regarding the two parties–that neither of them, for many reasons, contain the emerging ideology of the people.”

Work With Both Parties

The institute is ready to work with both parties. The objectives, Zogby said, are to solidify and institutionalize the role of Arab-Americans in both parties, to organize voter-registration work, especially in cities where there is a large number of Arab-Americans, to build a network among Arab-Americans in public life and to encourage Arab-Americans to run for office (“no office is too small for us”) and to support those that do.

It is not that there are no elected Arab-Americans to date. There are, for example: Victor Atiyeh, a Republican, in his second term as governor of Oregon; James Abdnor, Republican U.S. senator from South Dakota; Mary Rose Oakar, a Democrat and five-term congresswoman from Ohio; James Maloof, Republican mayor of Peoria, Ill.; Nick Rahall II, a Democrat and five-term congressman from West Virginia. The problem is they are isolated, he said. There are also numerous Arab-Americans in government, the institute is finding. They too will be welcome in the network.

“An important part of ethnic politics is not issue-oriented, but family oriented,” he said. “Italian-Americans and Jewish Americans have used their politics to help each other find positions, appointments, introduce each other to people who can help. It’s being able to help each other.”

And beyond that, there is the forming of alliances with other ethnic groups over issues of mutual interest, such as current meetings with Koreans and Vietnamese in Chicago, where the three groups form a significant part of the small business community but lack the access to City Hall that older ethnic groups have, he said.

In short, the whole American political pie.

“We’ve felt the burden of not being able to challenge the Middle East policy, but until we can become a constituency of note in local communities, we’re not ready,” he said. “It’s important that our people retrace the steps that everybody has walked. Electoral politics is the key to our empowerment. It’s the long road that’s the short road. There is no other.”

Sudan’s transitional Prime Minister Kamil Idris told the 80th United Nations General Assembly Sudan’s civil war has killed 150,000 and displaced 12 million. He urged lifting chemical weapons sanctions he called “political,” condemned foreign mercenaries, and demanded an end to the siege of el-Fasher.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has harnessed the weight of his office in recent days to accelerate a campaign of retribution against his perceived political enemies and attacks on 1st Amendment protections.

In the last week alone, Trump replaced a U.S. attorney investigating two of his political adversaries with a loyalist and openly directed the attorney general to find charges to file against them.

His Federal Communications Commission chairman hinted at punitive actions against networks whose journalists and comedians run afoul of the president.

Trump filed a $15-billion lawsuit against the New York Times, only to have it thrown out by a judge.

The acting U.S. attorney in Los Angeles asked the Secret Service to investigate a social media post by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office.

The Pentagon announced it was imposing new restrictions on reporters who cover the U.S. military.

The White House officially labeled “antifa,” a loose affiliation of far-left extremists, as “domestic terrorists” — a designation with no basis in U.S. law — posing a direct challenge to free speech protections. And it said lawmakers concerned with the legal predicate for strikes on boats in the Caribbean should simply get over it.

An active investigation into the president’s border advisor over an alleged bribery scheme involving a $50,000 payout was quashed by the White House itself.

Trump emphasized his partisan-fueled dislike of his political opponents during a Sunday memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who he said “did not hate his opponents.”

“That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump said. “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.”

It has been an extraordinary run of attacks using levers of power that have been seen as sacred arbiters of the public trust for decades, scholars and historians say.

The assault is exclusively targeting Democrats, liberal groups and establishment institutions, just as the administration moves to shield its allies.

Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney in Virginia, resigned Friday after facing pressure from the Trump administration to bring criminal charges against New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James over alleged mortgage fraud. In a social media post later that day, Trump claimed he had “fired” Siebert.

A few hours later, on Saturday, Trump said he nominated White House aide Lindsey Halligan to take over Siebert’s top prosecutorial role in Virginia, saying she was “tough” and “loyal.”

Later that day, Trump demanded in a social media post addressed to “Pam” — in reference to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi — that she prosecute James, former FBI Director James Comey and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump wrote. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s remarks, saying Monday that the president is “rightfully frustrated” and that he “wants accountability for these corrupt fraudsters who abuse their power, who abuse their oath of office, to target the former president and then candidate for the highest office in the land.”

“It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponize the Department of Justice, and nobody knows what that looks like more than President Trump,” Leavitt told reporters.

As the president called for prosecution of his political opponents, it was reported that Tom Homan, the White House border advisor, was the subject of an undercover FBI case that was later shut down by Trump administration officials. Homan, according to MSNBC, accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover agents after he indicated to them he could get them government contracts.

At Monday’s news briefing, Leavitt said that Homan did not take the money and that the investigation was “another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters.”

“The White House and the president stand by Tom Homan 100% because he did absolutely nothing wrong,” she said.

Some see the recent actions as an erosion of an expected firewall between the Department of Justice and the White House, as well as a shift in the idea of how criminal investigation should be launched.

“If the Department of Justice and any prosecution entity is functioning properly, then that entity is investigating crimes and not people,” said John Hasnas, a law professor at Georgetown University.

The Trump administration has also begun a military campaign against vessels crossing the Caribbean Sea departing from Venezuela that it says are carrying narcotics and drug traffickers. But the targeted killing of individuals at sea is raising concern among legal scholars that the administration’s operation is extrajudicial, and Democratic lawmakers, including Schiff, have introduced a bill in recent days asserting the ongoing campaign violates the War Powers Resolution.

Political influence has long played a role with federal prosecutors who are political appointees, Hasnas said, but under “the current situation it’s magnified greatly.”

“The interesting thing about the current situation is that the Trump administration is not even trying to hide it,” he said.

Schiff said he sees it as an effort to “try to silence and intimidate.” In July, Trump accused Schiff — who led the first impeachment inquiry into Trump — of committing mortgage fraud, which Schiff has denied.

“What he wants to try to do is not just go after me and Letitia James or Lisa Cook, but rather send a message that anyone who stands up to him on anything, anyone who has the audacity to call out his corruption will be a target, and they will go after you,” Schiff said in an interview Sunday.

Trump campaigned in part on protecting free speech, especially that of conservatives, who he claimed had been broadly censored by the Biden administration and “woke” leftist culture in the U.S. Many of his most ardent supporters — including billionaire Elon Musk and now-Vice President JD Vance — praised Trump as a champion of free speech.

However, since Trump took office, his administration has repeatedly sought to silence his critics, including in the media, and crack down on speech that does not align with his politics.

And in the wake of Kirk’s killing on Sept. 10, those efforts have escalated into an unprecedented attack on free speech and expression, according to constitutional scholars and media experts.

“The administration is showing a stunning ignorance and disregard of the 1st Amendment,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School.

“We are at an unprecedented place in American history in terms of the targeting of free press and the exercise of free speech,” said Ken Paulson, former editor in chief of USA Today and now director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.

“We’ve had periods in American history like the Red Scare, in which Americans were to turn in neighbors who they thought leaned left, but this is a nonstop, multifaceted, multiplatform attack on all of our free speech rights,” Paulson said. “I’m actually quite stunned at the velocity of this and the boldness of it.”

Bondi recently railed against “hate speech” — which the Supreme Court has previously defended — in an online post, suggesting the Justice Department will investigate those who speak out against conservatives.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC and its parent company, Disney, with repercussions if they did not yank Jimmy Kimmel off the air after Kimmel made comments about Kirk’s alleged killer that Carr found distasteful. ABC swiftly suspended Kimmel’s show, though Disney announced Monday that it would return Tuesday.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, said it will require news organizations to agree not to disclose any information the government has not approved for release and revoke the press credentials of those who publish sensitive material without approval.

Critics of the administration, free speech organizations and even some conservative pundits who have long criticized the “cancel culture” of the progressive left have spoken out against some of those policies. Scholars have too, saying the amalgam of actions by the administration represent a dangerous departure from U.S. law and tradition.

“What unites all of this is how blatantly inconsistent it is with the 1st Amendment,” Chemerinsky said.

Chemerinsky said lower courts have consistently pushed back against the administration’s overreaches when it comes to protected speech, and he expects they will continue to do so.

He also said that, although the Supreme Court has frequently sided with the president in disputes over his policy decisions, it has also consistently defended freedom of speech, and he hopes it will continue to do so if some of the free speech policies above reach the high court.

“If there’s anything this court has said repeatedly, it’s that the government can’t prevent or stop speech based on the viewpoint expressed,” Chemerinsky said.

Paulson said that American media companies must refuse to obey and continue to cover the Trump administration and the Pentagon as aggressively as ever, and that average Americans must recognize the severity of the threat posed by such censorship and speak out against it, no matter their political persuasion.

“This is real — a full-throttle assault on free speech in America,” Paulson said. “And it’s going to be up to the citizenry to do something about it.”

Chemerinsky said defending free speech should be an issue that unites all Americans, not least because political power changes hands.

“It’s understandable that those in power want to silence the speech that they don’t like, but the whole point of the 1st Amendment is to protect speech we don’t like,” he said. “We don’t need the 1st Amendment to protect the speech we like.”

WASHINGTON — At a banquet table fit for a king, but set specially for him, President Trump called his state visit to the United Kingdom this week “one of the highest honors of my life.”

He then proceeded to tell guests at the white tie event that the United States was “a very sick country” last year before becoming “the hottest” again under his rule.

During a news conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the Chequers estate Thursday, hailing a bilateral deal on artificial intelligence investments said to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, Trump called America’s relationship with Britain “unbreakable,” bigger than any single esoteric policy disagreement.

But he quickly pivoted from magnanimity on the world stage, denying the results of his 2020 election defeat and calling exclusively on conservative reporters, who asked questions about Britain’s Christian nature and his predecessor’s alleged use of an autopen.

It was a familiar study in contrasts from the president, who routinely mixes diplomacy with domestic politics in his meetings with foreign leaders. Yet the sound of Trump engaging in fractious political discourse — not at the White House or a political event in Florida or Missouri, but inside Britain’s most revered halls — struck a discordant tone.

The Mirror, a national British tabloid aligned with Starmer’s Labour Party, wrote that Trump’s “wild … political rant” at Windsor Castle alongside King Charles III “seriously broke royal protocol.”

On Wednesday evening, as the formal banquet concluded, Trump took to his social media platform to designate a far left-wing political movement called Antifa as “a major terrorist organization,” describing the group as “A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER.”

President Trump appears with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a news conference Thursday at Chequers near Aylesbury, England.

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

The move prompted a question to Starmer at the Chequers news conference from a right-ring reporter on whether he would consider taking similar action against leftist British groups.

“We obviously will take decisions for ourselves. I don’t want to comment on the decisions of the president,” Starmer said. “But we take our decisions ourselves.”

In another exchange, Trump repeated dramatically exaggerated figures on the number of undocumented migrants who entered the United States during the Biden administration, as well as false claims about the 2020 presidential election.

“I don’t want to be controversial, but you see what’s happened, and you see all the information that’s come out,” Trump said. “We won in 2020, big. And I said, let’s run. We gotta run. Because I saw what’s happening.”

The Royal Family went beyond its own rule book to show Trump extraordinary hospitality, honoring the president’s arrival with a 41-gun salute typically reserved for special, domestic occasions, such as the king’s birthday.

King Charles was hosting Trump for an unprecedented second state visit — a gesture never before extended to an American president — after the king’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, greeted him at Windsor in 2019.

“That’s a first and maybe that’s going to be the last time. I hope it is, actually,” Trump said in his banquet speech, prompting the king to chuckle and balk.

At the stunning dinner, along a table seating 160 people in St. George’s Hall, guests were offered a 1912 cognac honoring the birth year of the president’s Scottish-born mother, as well as a whiskey cocktail inspired by his heritage. The president, for his part, does not drink.

First Lady Melania Trump, left, President Trump, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Lady Victoria Starmer watch the Red Devils parachute display team at Chequers, the country home of the British prime minister, on Thursday.

(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

But it is unclear whether the king’s soft-power diplomacy helped shift Trump closer to London’s priorities on foreign affairs. A growing chorus in Britain opposes Israel’s continued military operations in Gaza, and major U.K. parties are aligned on a moral and strategic need to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.

“Our countries have the closest defense, security and intelligence relationship ever known,” Charles said at the dinner. “In two world wars, we fought together to defeat the forces of tyranny.

“Today, as tyranny once again threatens Europe, we and our allies stand together in support of Ukraine, to deter aggression and secure peace,” the king added.

A king’s request for Europe

Trump’s reciprocal remarks did not mention Ukraine. But at Chequers, the president repeated his general disappointment with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the ongoing war, a conflict Putin has escalated with attacks on civilians and the British Council building in Kyiv since meeting with Trump in Alaska a month ago.

“He’s let me down. He’s really let me down,” said Trump, offering no details on what steps he might take next.

Starmer, pressing to leverage the pomp of Trump’s state visit for actionable policy change, said that a coordinated response to Putin’s aggression would be forthcoming and “decisive.”

“In recent days, Putin has shown his true face, mounting the biggest attack since the invasion began, with yet more bloodshed, yet more innocents killed, and unprecedented violations of NATO airspace,” Starmer said, referencing Russia’s Sept. 9 drone flights over Poland. “These are not the actions of someone who wants peace.”

“It’s only when the president has put pressure on Putin,” Starmer added, “that he’s actually shown any inclination to move.”

Donald Trump says crime in Democratic cities is “out of control”. And after deployments to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, he’s now planning to send in the National Guard to other Democratic cities, like Memphis, in the Republican-run state of Tennessee. But FBI stats show crime is falling nationwide. So why the crackdown? Jillian Wolf takes a look at the evidence in this Fact Check.

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SACRAMENTO — Hello and happy Monday.

Pigs are flying and Satan has on a puffer jacket. I know these things because the impossible is happening — I am writing about why Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert are right.

And why California’s Republican congressional representatives should be ashamed and shamed.

You may know these women as beacons of the far right, maybe even the fringe-right, in Congress. Hailing from Georgia, South Carolina and Colorado, respectively, they have dabbled in QAnon conspiracy theories, including about sex trafficking and powerful pedophiles, among other questionable actions.

But I’ll say this for the trio — they’ve stayed true to their beliefs, even under direct pressure from the White House. So a (limited) shout-out to Greene, Mace and Boebert.

What am I talking about? Jeffrey Edward Epstein, of course (I think he committed enough crimes to earn his middle name included, serial killer style).

Boebert, Mace and Greene are three of only four Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives who have signed a discharge petition (a kind of work-around to bypass leadership) to release the full Epstein files, supposedly containing a trove of information on men who bought and sold sex with teenage girls.

“These are some of the richest, most powerful people in the world that could sue these women into poverty and homelessness,” Greene said at a recent news conference with some of the victims. “Yeah, it’s a scary thing to name names, but I will tell you, I’m not afraid to name names, and so if they want to give me a list, I will walk in that Capitol on the House floor, and I’ll say every damn name that abused these women. I can do that for them.”

And, to my immense shock at having something in common with Greene, I say — that is how it’s done, lady. You go.

Not a single Republican House member from California has backed releasing the Epstein files. Every California Democratic representative has signed. So let’s talk about that.

I am sick of Epstein. Why are you writing this?

Like most of you, I too am tired of hearing endless political chatter about Epstein.

For the blessedly uniformed among you, Epstein was an extremely rich dude. No one is quite sure where all that money came from, but he apparently used a great deal of it to buy influence with powerful men, and sex traffic underage girls — allegedly children as young as 11 .

He died by suicide while in jail in 2019 (lots of conspiracy theories on whether it was in fact suicide) but in 2021 his paramour-partner Ghislaine Noelle Maxwell was also convicted of child sex trafficking and other offenses.

Epstein and Maxwell have ties to Donald Trump, including a much-discussed “birthday book” that honestly I do not care about other than to say, “Ick.” That has made the whole thing an endless political brouhaha.

But many of the many victims of Epstein and Maxwell have called for their information to be released by the Justice Department, which holds more than 100,000 pages of the investigation. They, like survivors of sexual assault everywhere, want accountability, if justice remains elusive. They want names named. They want to stop being afraid, stop being stuck by their pain and their past, and allow the world to decide, if courts won’t, just how much truth they are telling.

These are brave women who were brutalized as children for the pleasure of men with money. They have a right to have their stories known if that’s what they choose.

This is not politics. This is decency.

The California problem

Like Greene, I’m willing to name some names. Here they are — California’s GOP representatives in the House:

Releasing the Epstein files requires only one of them to sign the discharge petition. Just one of these fine representatives from the Golden State could do the right thing, stand for a bipartisan value that Californians of both parties hold — sex trafficking is bad — and show what real leadership looks like.

Anyone? Anyone?

“If Epstein survivors want this information released, it should be released. These women have had the courage to speak out and it’s infuriating that Congress would block release of information — they’d rather help with a cover-up than stand with survivors,” state Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D-Sacramento) told me.

She’s a former state Justice Department prosecutor who specialized in trafficking, and has worked on controversial bipartisan legislation at the Capitol with Republican Sen. Shannon Grove of Bakersfield. That legislation earned her the ire of her own party, but on an issue this important, she did what she believed was right over what was easy.

“Protecting kids and standing up for survivors of human trafficking should not be a partisan issue and in California, we’ve shown it doesn’t have to be,” Krell said.

In fact, the discharge petition in the House is a bipartisan effort — introduced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and our own Ro Khanna of California, a Democrat.

In particular, I’d like to call out Kiley for his hypocrisy. Recently, he introduced a bipartisan sex trafficking bill in Congress that’s a smart idea — the National Human Trafficking Database Act, which would create a database at the Department of Justice that tracks cases across the country. He did it with Reps. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo) and Hank Johnson (D-Ga). Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) are carrying the bill in the Senate.

“We must do everything we can to prevent human trafficking and having the necessary tools at our disposal will bring us closer to stopping this awful crime,” Kiley said in a press release.

Huh.

Seems like Kiley gets the issue. Seems like he’s saying the right things. And for a guy about to be gerrymandered out of his own district — with his own party not seeming to care — he doesn’t have much to lose by doing the right thing and signing the discharge petition. My email to his office on the topic remains unanswered.

Liz Stein, an Epstein and Maxwell survivor who spoke at the news conference, said (as reported by the 19th News) that her life has never been the same since the abuse started. Since then, it has “felt like someone shut off the lights to my soul.”

There. Is. No. Excuse.

“This is not a partisan issue, but an American issue,” New Mexico Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, said in a press release. “To my Republican colleagues, if these heartbreaking stories aren’t enough, sign the petition for your daughters and for all the women in your lives that you would want protected from pedophiles. Because it’s not just about Epstein, but about all the women and children who are trafficked, abused, sexually assaulted, and ignored in their pain. The survivors today told their stories to not only push for the Epstein files to be released, but for a better future where women and girls are believed and supported, and abusers are held accountable.”

I can’t say it any more directly. Hiding behind politics on this one is the act of a coward.

If you won’t stand up against the rape of children, what do you stand for?

What else you should be reading:

The must-read: L.A. fires burned their block. For each, the disaster was just beginning.
The what happened: Lawyers fear 1,000 children from Central America, dozens in California, are at risk of being deported
The L.A. Times special: What the writings on the bullet casings from Charlie Kirk’s killer might mean

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BROOKLYN PARK, Minn. — As the nation comes to grips with the slaying of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, two candidates in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park are going door to door seeking to win a legislative seat left open by another political attack that killed a longtime state lawmaker and her husband.

The troubling political violence is a clear concern along Brooklyn Park’s tree-lined streets, where voters will head to the polls Tuesday to fill a state House seat left vacant by the fatal home-invasion killing of their neighbor, Rep. Melissa Hortman. The Democrat was first elected in 2005 and served as Minnesota’s Democratic House leader before her death in June.

Hortman, her husband and their dog were killed early on the morning of June 14 in their Brooklyn Park home in what investigators say was a politically motivated attack.

Vance Boelter, 57, faces federal and state murder charges in the Hortmans’ deaths, as well as attempted murder and other charges in the shooting of another Democratic Minnesota lawmaker, Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who both survived a shooting attack at their home the same day.

A neighborhood in fear

The Republican candidate seeking Hortman’s seat, real estate agent Ruth Bittner, noticed early in her campaign that people in the neighborhood where Hortman was killed seemed afraid to open their doors.

“We are in very, very scary times, and we definitely need to get out of this trajectory that we’re on here,” Bittner said.

Bittner said the political violence — particularly since the Wednesday killing of Kirk as he spoke at a Utah college event — briefly gave her pause about running for public office. But she concluded that “we can’t cower.”

“We have to move forward as a country and we have to, you know, embrace the system that we have of representative government, and we have to just do it, you know?” she said. “There’s no way to solve this problem if we shrink back in fear.”

The special election also comes less than a month after two schoolchildren were killed when a shooter opened fire on a Minneapolis Catholic church during Mass. The Aug. 27 shooting injured 21 others, most of them students at Annunciation Catholic School.

Officials identified the shooter as 23-year-old Robin Westman, a former student who they say fired more than a hundred rounds through the windows of the church. Westman was found dead of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot.

“It’s definitely come up, you know, folks have referenced the recent shootings, Annunciation and Charlie Kirk,” the Democratic candidate, Xp Lee, a former Brooklyn Park City Council member, said Thursday as he knocked on doors in the district. “Just yesterday, I was outdoor knocking, [and] a couple of people mentioned it.”

Lee said Hortman was a neighbor whom he would often see walking her beloved golden retriever, Gilbert, around Brooklyn Park. He said she met with him to offer advice when he ran for City Council.

“I can’t think of a better way to honor her than to go to the Capitol and do my best in the seat,” he said.

Kirk killing aftermath

The shooting of Kirk, which happened in front of hundreds of people and was captured on video and widely circulated on social media, has rattled the nation and drawn condemnation from across the political spectrum. Officials announced Friday that the suspected gunman, Tyler Robinson, 22, was taken into custody Thursday night, and investigators said they believe he acted alone.

“An open forum for political dialogue and disagreement was upended by a horrific act of targeted violence,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in a post on X. “In America, we don’t settle our differences with violence or at gunpoint.”

Hoffman, the lawmaker who was shot and wounded in June, and his family also issued a statement denouncing the attack on Kirk.

“America is broken, and political violence endangers our lives and democracy,” the Hoffmans’ statement said. “The assassination of Charlie Kirk today is only the latest act that our country cannot continue to accept. Our leaders of both parties must not only tone down their own rhetoric, but they must begin to call out extreme, aggressive and violent dialog that foments these attacks on our republic and freedom.”

Lee described the political climate in the wake of Kirk’s killing as a “charged atmosphere.”

“So I want to do what I can to really bring that down,” he said. That includes supporting a ban on semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, he said.

Lee keeps a shotgun for home defense, he said, but assault-style rifles “are weapons of, like, war that really we don’t need on our streets.”

Vancleave and Beck write for the Associated Press and reported from Brooklyn Park and Omaha.

Two assassination attempts on President Trump. The assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the wounding of others. The shooting death of a top healthcare executive. The killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington. The storming of the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob intent on forcing the nation’s political leaders to their will.

And, on Wednesday, the fatal shooting of one of the nation’s most prominent conservative political activists — close Trump ally Charlie Kirk — as he spoke at a public event on a university campus.

If it wasn’t already clear from all those other incidents, Kirk’s killing put it in sharp relief: The U.S. is in a new era of political violence, one that is starker and more visceral than any other in decades — perhaps, experts said, since the fraught days of 1968, when two of the most prominent figures in the civil rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were both assassinated in a matter of months.

“We’re very clearly in a moment where the temperature of our political discourse is extremely high,” said Ruth Braunstein, an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who has studied religion and the far right in modern politics. “Part of what we see when that happens are these outbursts of political violence — where people come to believe that violence is the only solution.”

While the exact motives of the person who shot Kirk are still unknown, Braunstein and other experts on political violence said the factors shaping the current moment are clear — and similar to those that shaped past periods of political violence.

Intense economic discomfort and inequity. Sharp divisions between political camps. Hyperbolic political rhetoric. Political leaders who lack civility and constantly work to demonize their opponents. A democratic system that many see as broken, and a hopelessness about where things are headed.

“There are these moments of great democratic despair, and we don’t think the political system is sufficiently responsive, sufficiently legitimate, sufficiently attentive, and that’s certainly going on in this particular moment,” said Jon Michaels, a UCLA law professor who teaches about the separation of powers and co-authored “Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy.”

“If we think there are no political solutions, there are no legal solutions, people are going to resort to forms of self help that are really, really deeply troubling.”

Michaels said the country has been here before, but also that he worries such cycles of violence are occurring faster today and with shorter breaks in between — that while “we’ve been bitterly divided” for years, those divisions have now “completely left the arena of ideas and debate and contestation, and become much more kinetic.”

Michaels said he is still shaken by all the “defenses or explanations or rationalizations” that swirled around the country after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in December — which some people argued was somehow justified by their displeasure with UnitedHealthcare’s policies or frustration with the American healthcare system.

That the suspect, Luigi Mangione, would attract almost cult-like adoration in some circles seemed like an alarming shift in an already polarized nation, Michaels said.

“I understand it is not the beliefs of the typical person walking down the street, but it’s seeping into our culture slowly but surely,” he said — and in a way that makes him wonder, “Where are we going to be in four or five years?”

People across America were asking similar questions about Wednesday’s shooting, wondering in which direction it might thrust the nation’s political discourse in the days ahead.

How will Kirk’s many conservative fans — including legions of young people — respond? How will leaders, including Trump, react? Will there be a shared recognition that such violence does no good, or fresh attempts at retaliation and violence?

Leaders from both parties seemed interested in averting the latter. One after another, they denounced political violence and defended Kirk’s right — everyone’s right — to speak on politics in safety, regardless of whether their message is uplifting or odious.

Democrats were particularly effusive in their denunciations, with Gov. Gavin Newsom — a chief Trump antagonist — calling the shooting “disgusting, vile, and reprehensible.” Former President Obama also weighed in, writing, “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”

Many seemed dismissive of such messages. In the comments on Obama’s post, many blamed Obama and other Democrats for rhetoric demonizing Republicans — and Trump and his followers in particular — as Nazis or racists or fascists, suggesting that the violence against Kirk was a predictable outcome of such pitched condemnations.

Trump echoed those thoughts himself Wednesday night, blaming the “radical left” for disparaging Kirk and other conservatives and bringing on such violence.

Others seemed to celebrate Kirk’s killing or suggest it was justified in some way given his own hyperbolic remarks from the past. They dug up interviews where the conservative provocateur demonized those on the left, suggested liberal ideas constituted a threat to Western civilization, and even said that some gun violence in the country was “worth it” if it meant the freedom to bear arms.

Experts said it is important to contextualize this moment within American history, but with an awareness of the modern factors shaping it in unique ways. It’s also important to understand that there are ways to combat such violence from spreading, they said.

Peter Mancall, a history professor at USC, has delved into major moments of political violence in early American history, and said a lot of it stemmed from “some perception of grievance.”

The same appears to be true today, he said. “There are moments when people do things that they know are violating their own sense of right or wrong, and something has pushed them to it, “ he said. “The trick is figuring out what it is that made them snap.”

Braunstein said that the robust debate online Wednesday about the rhetoric of leaders was a legitimate one to have, because it has always been true that “the way our political leaders message about political violence — consistently, in public, to their followers and to those that don’t support them — really matters.”

If Americans and American political leaders truly want to know how we got here, she said, “part of the answer is the intensification of violent political rhetoric — and political rhetoric that casts the moment in terms of an emergency or catastrophe that requires extreme measures to address it.”

Democrats today are talking about the threats they believe Trump poses to democracy and the rule of law and to immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and others in extremely dire terms. Republicans — including Kirk — have used similarly charged rhetoric to suggest that Democrats and some of those same groups, especially immigrants, are a grave threat to average Americans.

“Charlie Kirk was one of many political figures who used that kind of discourse to mobilize people,” Braunstein said. “He’s not the only one, but he regularly spoke about the fact that we were in a moment where it was possible that we were going to see the decline of Western civilization, the end of American society as we know it. He used very strong us-vs.-them language.”

Particularly given the wave of recent violence, it will be important moving forward for politicians and other leaders to reanalyze how they speak about their political disagreements, Braunstein said.

That’s especially true of Trump, she said, because “one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a moment like this is for a political leader to call for violence in response to an act of violence,” and Trump has appeared to stoke violence in the past, including in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and during racist marches through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

Charlie Kirk speaks during a town hall meeting in March in Oconomowoc, Wis.

(Jeffrey Phelps / Associated Press)

Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at UC Davis, agreed messaging is key — not just for responding to political violence, but for preventing it.

Since 2022, Wintemute and his team have surveyed Americans on how they feel about political violence, including whether it is ever justified and, if so, whether they would personally get involved in it.

Throughout that time frame, a strong majority of Americans — about two-thirds — have said it is not justified, with about a third saying it was or could be.

An even smaller minority said they’d be willing to personally engage in such violence, Wintemute said. And many of those people said that they could be dissuaded from participating if their family members, friends, religious or political leaders urged them not to.

Wintemute said the data give him “room for hope and optimism,” because they show that “the vast majority of Americans reject political violence altogether.”

“So when somebody on a day like today asks, ‘Is this who we are?’ we know the answer,” he said. “The answer is, ‘No!’”

The job of all Americans now is to reject political violence “out loud over and over and over again,” Wintemute said, and to realize that, if they are deeply opposed to political policies or the Trump administration and “looking for a model of how to resist,” it isn’t the American Revolution but the civil rights movement.

“People did not paint over how terrible things were,” he said. “People said, ‘I will resist, but I will resist without violence. Violence may be done to me, I may die, but I will not use violence.’”

The assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk is seen as a significant event amidst rising political violence in the U. S. Experts believe this may lead to further unrest in a country already divided. Mike Jensen, a researcher, noted that in the first half of the year, there were about 150 politically motivated attacks, nearly double from the previous year. He warned that the situation could escalate into wider civil unrest if not controlled, viewing the assassination as a potential trigger for more violence.

Experts attribute the rise in violence to several factors, including economic insecurity, racial and ethnic tensions, and aggressive political rhetoric. The divide in politics has grown from policy disagreements to personal animosity, driven by social media and conspiracy theories. A report by Reuters indicated that there had been over 300 cases of political violence in the U. S. since the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack, reflecting the highest level of such violence in decades. Jon Lewis from George Washington University commented that extreme political violence is becoming more common, regardless of clear motives.

Lilliana Mason, a political science professor, emphasized the tendency for people to retaliate rather than initiate violence. Kirk, a prominent figure in the conservative movement and ally of former President Trump, was shot while speaking at an event, resulting in a panic among the crowd of 3,000. As of Thursday, authorities had not arrested a suspect, and the FBI was investigating. Following Kirk’s death, there has been a call for increased security from many lawmakers.

“Vicious Spiral”

Trump was involved in two assassination attempts last year. In one attempt, the shooter was killed by authorities, and in the other, a man with a rifle was arrested near a golf club where Trump was playing. His trial has started this week. This year, two significant attacks by right-wing conspiracy theorists also occurred. In June, a Christian nationalist killed a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband. In August, a gunman targeting the CDC in Atlanta killed a police officer.

There have been at least 21 deaths from political violence since January, including 14 from an attack in New Orleans by a jihadist linked to the Islamic State. In May, a pro-Palestinian activist killed two Israeli embassy employees, stating it was for Gaza. Additionally, in July, a group of militants attacked an immigration detention center in Texas, injuring a police officer.

Since taking office, Trump has reduced efforts to combat domestic extremism, focusing on immigration instead. A researcher from the University of Maryland warns that the political climate is dangerous, with increasing violence from those who oppose recent government changes.

with information from Reuters

Over the next few days, we are going to hear politicians, commentators and others remind us that political violence is never OK, and never the answer.

That is true.

There is no room in a healthy democracy, or a moral society, for killings based on vengeance or beliefs — political, religious, whatever.

But the sad reality is that our democracy is not healthy, and violence is a symptom of that. Not the make-believe, cities-overrun violence that has led to the military in our streets, but real, targeted political violence that has crept into society with increasing frequency.

Our decline did not begin with the horrific slaying Wednesday of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father and conservative media superstar, and it will not end with it. We are in a moment of struggle, with two competing views for where our country should go and what it should be. Only one can win, and both sides believe it is a battle worth fighting.

So be it. Fights in democracy are nothing new and nothing wrong.

We can blame the heated political rhetoric of either side for violence, as many already are, but words are not bullets and strong democracies can withstand even the ugliest of speeches, the most hateful of positions.

The painful and hard specter of more violence to come has less to do with far-right or far-left than extreme fringe in either political direction. Occasionally it’s ideological, but more often it isn’t MAGA, communist or socialist so much as confusion and rage cloaking itself in political convenience. Violence comes where trust in the system is decimated, and where hope is ground to dust.

These are the places were we find the isolated, the disenfranchised, the red-pilled or the blue-pilled — however you see it — and anyone else, who pushed by the stress and anger of this moment, finds themselves believing violence or even murder is a solution, maybe the only solution.

These are not mainstream people. Like all killers, they live outside the rules of society and likely would have found their way beyond our boundaries with or without politics. But politics found them, and provided what may have seemed like clarity in a maelstrom of anything but.

In the past few years, we have seen people such as this make two attempts on Donald Trump’s life. One of those was a 20-year-old student, Michael Thomas Crooks, still almost a kid, whose motives will likely never be known.

The American flag at the White House is lowered on Wednesday after the slaying of Charlie Kirk.

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

A few months ago, we saw a political massacre in Minnesota aimed at Democratic lawmakers. Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed by the same attacker who shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and attempted to shoot their daughter Hope. Authorities found a hit list of 45 targets in his possession.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home was firebombed this year. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer faced a somewhat bumbling kidnap plot in 2020. In 2017, a shooter hit four people at the congressional softball game, including then U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home was broken into in 2022 and her husband, Paul, was attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant with a unicorn costume in his backpack.

Despite the fact that these instances of violence have been aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, we live under a Republican government at the moment, one that holds unprecedented power.

Already, that power structure is calling not for calm or justice, but retribution.

“We’ve got trans shooters. You’ve got riots in L.A. They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us,” said Fox News commentator Jesse Watters shortly after Kirk was shot. “What are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just going to have to ask ourselves.”

On that last bit, I agree with Watters. We do need to ask ourselves how much political violence we are going to tolerate.

The internet is buzzing with a quote from Kirk on gun violence: “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Like Kirk, I think some things are worth ugly prices. I don’t think guns are one of them, but I do think democracy is.

We can’t allow political violence to be the reason we curb democracy. Even if that violence continues, we must find ways to fight it that preserve the constitutional values that make America exceptional.

“It is extremely important to caution U.S. policymakers in this heated environment to act responsibly and not use the specter of political violence as an excuse to suppress nonviolent movements, curb freedoms of assembly and expression, encourage retaliation, or otherwise close civic spaces,” a trio of Brookings Institution researchers wrote as part of their “Monitoring the pillars of democracy” series. “Weaponizing calls for stability and peace in response to political violence is a real threat in democratic and nondemocratic countries globally.”

The slaying of Charlie Kirk is reprehensible, and his family and friends have suffered a loss I can’t imagine. Condolences don’t cover it.

But the legacy of his death, and of political violence, can’t be crackdowns — because if we do that, we forever damage the country we all claim to love.

If we take anything away from this tragic day, let it be a commitment to democracy, and America, in all her chaotic and flawed glory.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration and the conservative movement were stunned Wednesday by the shooting of Charlie Kirk, a disruptive leader in GOP politics who accomplished what was once thought a pipe dream, expanding Republican ranks among America’s youth.

Inside the White House, senior officials that had worked closely alongside Kirk throughout much of their careers reacted with shock. It was a moment of political violence reminiscent of the repeated attempts on Donald Trump’s life during the 2024 presidential campaign, one official told The Times.

“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!”

Kirk, a founder of Turning Point USA, was instrumental in recruiting young Americans on college campuses to GOP voter rolls, making himself an indispensable part of Republican campaigns down ballot across the country. That mission made his shooting on a college campus in Utah all the more poignant to his friends and allies, who reacted with dismay at videos of the shooting circulating online.

His impact, helping to increase support among 18- to 24-year-old voters for Republican candidates by double-digit margins in just four years, has been credited by Republican operatives as driving the party’s victories last year, allowing the GOP to retake the House, Senate and the presidency.

Democrats have recognized his prowess, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosting him on his podcast earlier this year in an appeal to young, predominantly male voters lost by the Democrats in recent years.

“The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form,” Newsom said on X in response to the news.

As videos of the shooting circulated online, a number of prominent Republicans, including senior members of the Trump administration, reacted to the news by asking the public to pray for the young activist.

“Say a prayer for Charlie Kirk, a genuinely good guy and a young father,” Vice President JD Vance said in a post on X.

Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said federal agents were at the scene of the shooting in Utah. FBI Director Kash Patel added the FBI will be helping with the investigation.

Wilner reported from Washington, Ceballos from Tallahassee, Fla.

When Kamala Harris was contemplating a run for California governor, one of her supposed considerations was the security detail that attends the state’s chief executive.

The services of a life-preserving, ego-boosting retinue of intimidating protectors — picture dark glasses, earpiece, stern visage — were cited by more than one Harris associate, past and present, as a factor in her deliberations. These were not Trumpers or Harris haters looking to impugn or embarrass the former vice president.

According to one of those associates, Harris has been accompanied nonstop by an official driver and person with a gun since 2003, when she was elected San Francisco district attorney. One could easily grow accustomed to that level of comfort and status, not to mention the pleasure of never having to personally navigate the 101 or 405 freeways at rush hour.

That is, of course, a perfectly terrible and selfish reason to run for governor, if ever it was a part of Harris’ thinking. To her credit, the reason she chose to not run was a very good one: Harris simply “didn’t feel called” to pursue the job, in the words of one political advisor.

Now, however, the matter of Harris’ personal protection has become a topic of heated discussion and debate, which is hardly surprising in an age when everything has become politicized, including “and” and “the.”

There is plenty of bad faith to go around.

Last month, President Trump abruptly revoked Harris’ Secret Service protection. The security arrangement for vice presidents typically lasts for six months after they leave office, allowing them to quietly fade into ever greater obscurity. But before vacating the White House, President Biden signed an executive order extending protection for Harris for an additional year. (Former presidents are guarded by Secret Service details for life.)

As the first female, first Black and first Asian American vice president, Harris faced, as they say in the protective-service business, an elevated threat level while serving in the post. In the 230-odd days since Harris left office, there is no reason to believe racism and misogyny, not to mention wild-eyed partisan hatred, have suddenly abated in this great land of ours.

And there remain no small number of people crazy enough to violently act on those impulses.

The president could have been gracious and extended Harris’ protection. But expecting grace out of Trump is like counting on a starving Doberman to show restraint when presented a bloody T-bone steak.

“This is another act of revenge following a long list of political retaliation in the form of firings, the revoking of security clearances and more,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass angrily declared.

True.

Though Bass omitted the bit about six months being standard operating procedure, which would have at least offered some context. It wasn’t as though Harris was being treated differently than past vice presidents.

Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly stepped into the breach, providing Harris protection by the California Highway Patrol. Soon after, The Times’ Richard Winton broke the news that Los Angeles Police Department officers meant to be fighting crime in hard-hit areas of the city were instead providing security for Harris as a supplement to the CHP.

Not a great look. Or the best use of police resources.

Thus followed news that officers had been pulled off Harris’ security detail after internal criticism; supposedly the LAPD’s involvement had always been intended as a stopgap measure.

All well and good, until the conservative-leaning Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing rank-and-file officers, saw fit to issue a gratuitously snarky statement condemning the hasty arrangement. Its board of directors described Harris as “a failed presidential candidate who also happens to be a multi-millionaire, with multiple homes … who can easily afford to pay for her own security.”

As if Harris’ 2024 defeat — she lost the popular vote to Trump by a scant 1.5%, it might be noted — was somehow relevant.

To be certain, Harris and her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, won’t miss any hot meals as they shelter in their 3,500-square-foot Brentwood home. (The one house they own.) But they’re not stupid-rich either.

One person in the private-security business told Winton that a certain household name pays him $1,000 a day for a 12-hour shift. That can quickly add up and put a noticeable dent in your back account, assuming your name isn’t Elon or Taylor or Zuckerberg or Bezos.

Setting aside partisanship — if that’s still possible — and speaking bluntly, there’s something to be said for ensuring Harris doesn’t die a violent death at the hands of some crazed assailant.

The CHP’s Dignitary Protection Section is charged with protecting all eight of California’s constitutional officers — we’re talking folks such as the insurance commissioner and state controller — as well as the first lady and other elected officials, as warranted. The statutory authority also extends to former constitutional officers, which would include Harris, who served six years as state attorney general.

Surely there’s room in California’s $321-billion budget to make sure nothing terrible happens to one of the state’s most prominent and credentialed citizens. It doesn’t have to be an open-ended, lifetime commitment to Harris’ protection, but an arrangement that could be periodically reviewed, as time passes and potential danger wanes.

Serving in elected office can be rough, especially in these incendiary times. The price shouldn’t include having to spend the rest of your life looking nervously over your shoulder.

Or draining your life savings, so you don’t have to.