WASHINGTON — President Trump is trying again to limit the number of people born in the country who can become American citizens, in a sign that even after his first attempt at limiting birthright citizenship was rejected by the Supreme Court, he’s ready to renew his efforts.
The president said he was signing two executive actions on immigration, including one limiting the number of people eligible for citizenship after being born in the United States. The written executive order released Thursday was narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appeared to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations as well as anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.
It also aimed to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.”
A second order seeks to curb what Trump called “birth tourism” by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.
Trump said he thought his latest actions would be constitutional.
“I thought we were going to win it at the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, we had a bad decision, very unfair decision. Our country suffers because of it and we’re ending it a different way,” Trump said.
In June, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s previous efforts to declare that children born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily aren’t American citizens, and upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship.
On the first day of Trump’s second term, he signed an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship, which allows anyone born in the United States to automatically become an American citizen.
Trump’s administration immediately was sued by opponents who said the executive order went against the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, which makes anyone born in the country a citizen, with very limited exceptions.
The executive order was blocked by several lower courts and never took effect.
In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s order by a 6-3 vote. But the vote was too close for many immigration advocates and legal observers who felt the legal question of birthright citizenship was a long-settled issue.
Weissert and Santana write for the Associated Press.
The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 in favor of allowing TV station ownership groups to own more outlets, easing the way for more consolidation.
The Thursday vote that favored the change means companies can own local stations that cover more than 39% of the U.S. They could also own more than two stations in a single market.
The measure supported by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr will allow the agency to approve deals that put station ownership groups over the cap if the agency determines that they are promoting the public interest. Carr has said the agency would consider such issues as commitment to local journalism and “viewpoint diversity.”
“In my view, if you care about trusted sources of local news and information, you have to care about the future of local TV stations,” Carr said. “They are the economic engines that produce the paychecks for so many of the local journalists that remain in the business. So how can the FCC maximize the odds that those institutions continue to survive and hopefully thrive into the future? To start, we should stop hamstringing this one segment of the broader market with outdated restrictions.”
The station groups say the ability of tech companies such as Google and Netflix to reach every consumer in the U.S. puts them at a disadvantage. At the same time, streaming now accounts for more than 40% of all viewing, according to Nielsen, pulling consumers away from traditional TV. Television stations are also seeing their share of carriage fees from cable and satellite companies shrink due to cord-cutting.
Declining viewership and revenue have also made it more challenging to sustain multiple local TV news operations in a single market.
Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, opposed the measure, saying the rule change will only help big firms get bigger and more powerful.
“Eliminating the cap does not free local broadcasters from economic pressure, it just changes who is doing the squeezing,” Gomez said in a statement issued ahead of the vote. “The large station groups positioned to grow even larger under this decision are not local broadcasters, they are national companies that own local stations and increasingly dictate what airs on them.”
The measure ending the cap limits also faced push back from consumer groups and state government officials who believe station consolidation will result in journalist layoffs and fewer voices for the communities they serve.
TV station owners and its lobbying group the National Assn. of Broadcasters have been clamoring for a change in the rule, citing the changes in technology that have occurred since the ownership limit. The 39% threshold was set in 2004 when streaming video was still a nascent business.
Jeff McCall, a professor of communications at DePaux University, agrees the current limit is outdated in the current media environment. “Local broadcasters are struggling in terms of audience and revenue, and this plan could give them some needed relief,” he said.
But McCall added that having the FCC decide who benefits from the rule change will face resistance. “it will give the FCC wide discretionary powers and open up any decisions to second-guessing and, of course, court challenges,” he said.
There are also likely to be questions on how even-handed Carr will be when faced with a proposal that puts a station owner over the caps. The chairman has made his name by threatening to pull the broadcast licenses of TV stations that irritate President Trump with their coverage and commentary. Even Trump-supporting Republicans such as Sen. John Kennedy, R- La., have raised concerns the FCC’s scrutiny of broadcast content could be violating the right to free speech.
Carr also questioned whether ABC’s daytime show “The View,” where negative Trump commentary occurs often, should qualify as a bona fide news program that is exempt from giving equal time to qualified candidates.
Carr also believes large media companies such as Disney and NBCUniversal parent Comcast hold too much sway over the stations affiliated with their networks.
“New York and Hollywood interests have steamrolled those local TV stations and the broader media market in recent years in ways that run directly counter to the regulatory framework that Congress and the FCC put in place,” he wrote. “Their national programs naturally reflect the values of the New York and Hollywood executives that produce them. This power imbalance has contributed to a steady decline in locally produced news — and with it, a weakening of the public’s trust in the media.”
Earlier this year, a group of attorneys general filed suit to block Nexstar Media Group’s proposed $6.2-billion acquisition of Tegna, arguing it violates a 112-year-old U.S. antitrust law by knocking out a major competitor. The deal would give Irving, Texas-based Nexstar control of 265 television stations across the country, up from 164. And, in dozens of markets, including San Diego and Sacramento, Nexstar would own multiple TV network affiliates.
U.S. District Judge Troy L. Nunley issued a preliminary injunction in April that forbids Nexstar — which owns KTLA-TV Channel 5 in Los Angeles — and Tegna, from combining operations. Nexstar is appealing.
President Trump touched down in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening and headed directly to his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course to headline a fundraiser for the Republican Party.
Though the visit was for a standard campaign benefit in the run-up to November’s elections, it was not without drama.
While the President was en route to California, authorities announced the arrest of an armed man who had been spotted suspiciously documenting security preparations at the golf course Sunday.
Sheriff’s deputies discovered the man had brought a gun and ammunition to the golf course. On Monday, they uncovered an alarming weapons stash, including an illegally modified AR-style rifle, a .45-caliber pistol and high-capacity magazines, at his Downey residence.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday afternoon, a group of more than two dozen protesters gathered outside the Trump National Golf Club entrance in anticipation of the president’s arrival.
The demonstrators chanted “Impeach Trump”and waved signs with slogans such as “Save our democracy” and “Pretti good time to resist,” referencing ICU nurse Alexander Pretti, who was fatally shot by federal agents in January, as passing cars periodically honked in approval.
“There are so many things that have happened [during the Trump administration] that are so disgusting, and I’m so worried for my children, my grandchildren and future generations,” said Redondo Beach resident Jeanette Boston. “They deserve better.”
A smaller group of around 10 counter-protesters gathered along Palos Verdes Drive wearing MAGA gear and American flag clothing. Several yelled “We love you Trump” as Marine One landed at the golf course carrying Trump just after 5 p.m.
The campaign fundraiser was closed to members of the media. However, a White House spokesperson said Trump would use the event to tout his administration’s achievements and “draw a sharp contrast between his commonsense agenda and the radical policies of Democrats like Gavin Newsom.”
Tuesday marked Trump’s second visit to Los Angeles during his second term in office. He last visited the region in January 2025, when he toured the fire damage in the Pacific Palisades and signed an executive order intended to expedite rebuilding efforts.
Since then, there has been a standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over federal disaster aid.
California has submitted more than $1.5 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency reimbursement claims for emergency response and infrastructure repairs stemming from the Eaton and Palisades fires, but only $37 million in funding has been approved thus far, according to the governor’s office.
“Donald Trump is coming to Los Angeles to raise money while wildfire survivors are still waiting for the federal recovery funding he promised 18 months ago,” Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a statement. “Californians deserve a President focused on helping families rebuild — not raising money for himself at his golf course.”
Trump, for his part, ignored criticism around the wait for wildfire relief on Tuesday and instead took to social media to promote what he sees as his administration’s economic achievements.
He wrote in a Truth Social post that investments in the U.S. economy and more “factory activity” were evidence of how well the country was doing.
“The Fake News and the Dumocrats are doing everything they can to distract people’s thoughts from these MASSIVE Successes, but it’s getting harder and harder for them to do,” Trump wrote. He added: “This is the GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA, and we’re just getting started.”
On Wednesday, Trump will head to Las Vegas to deliver a speech at a casino focused on the economic achievements of his administration. While his California visit is focused on replenishing campaign coffers, the Nevada stop is more closely tied to election strategy as the swing state could play a key role in deciding who controls Congress after the November midterms.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Tuesday that his office has protected more than $200 billion in federal funding for the state, defended core civil rights and removed military forces from Los Angeles streets by suing the Trump administration about once a week.
“Since President Trump returned to office, California has been under attack — and has led the way in fighting back,” Bonta said.
Bonta said his office has filed 82 lawsuits against the administration since Trump’s inauguration last year, in addition to 122 amicus briefs supporting lawsuits against the administration by other parties and 112 comment letters in response to federal actions.
That work has saved the state an estimated $207.1 billion, Bonta said, including $168 billion — equal to a third of the state’s annual budget — that was threatened when the Trump administration tried to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding to the states last year. Billions in threatened cuts to transportation, emergency preparedness, education and family assistance funding were also prevented, Bonta said.
The work has also protected birthright citizenship for the U.S.- born children of immigrants, ensured that National Guard troops are not deployed in major California cities against the wishes of local leaders, lifted multiple sets of tariffs driving up costs for American consumers and repeatedly blocked administration efforts to interfere in California’s elections, Bonta said.
“We’ve protected funding that keeps our communities safe, feeds hungry families, and ensures our kids get the education they deserve. We’ve gone all the way to the Supreme Court to defend constitutional rights — and won. We’ve protected our elections and stopped the militarization of our cities. We’ve defended our right to prioritize public safety over assisting with the President’s inhumane immigration agenda,” Bonta said.
As it has done in the past, the White House on Tuesday derided Bonta’s lawsuits as misguided.
“Instead of bragging about filing frivolous lawsuits against the Trump Administration, the California AG should focus on addressing problems in his own state — like the countless criminal illegal aliens the Newscum Administration allows to roam free and terrorize communities,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson in a statement to The Times.
The White House has previously said Trump is “trying to restore American Greatness” and that Californians would be “infinitely better off” if Bonta got out of the president’s way.
Bonta’s office is required to report annually to the state Legislature on its work fighting the Trump administration as part of a 2025 special session measure delivering it an extra $25 million to fund such litigation. His office published its latest report to lawmakers Tuesday.
The report said the office had received $19.2 million of the special session funding through July 30, which had “contributed to — but in no way has been sufficient to cover — the costs of the litigation.”
Bonta’s office has also received regular appropriations to fund such litigation in each of the state’s last two budgets, of $14.2 million last fiscal year and $23.9 million this fiscal year. The office’s overall budget is about $1.4 billion.
At a morning news conference with other state leaders, Bonta said his office has spent close to $30 million on its “federal accountability work” overall since Trump took office, and argued that investment has been “paying off in droves” given the billions saved.
Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón (D-Goleta) and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister), standing with Bonta, agreed.
Limón said she was proud to have worked with Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom to form a “collective backstop” against the Trump administration, while Rivas said the funding provided to Bonta’s office “may be one of the smartest investments that this legislature has ever made.”
Of the 82 lawsuits, 66 remain active, according to the report. Despite that, Bonta said his office has won 45 orders providing some early relief from the Trump administration’s actions, and 21 final orders in its favor. In eight cases, he said, the administration “backed down” in advance of a trial.
Bonta’s office has lost arguments made against the Trump administration, including on behalf of other litigants, particularly on issues related to transgender rights and the scope of Trump’s executive power to reshape government and federal immigration policy.
However, Bonta claimed his office has won in 83% of the court orders issued in cases brought by the state and praised his team for having “worked around the clock on behalf of Californians, pulling countless all-nighters along the way” to make it possible.
Bonta, who is up for reelection in November, is campaigning in part on his willingness to stand up to Trump — which polling and voting has suggested many Californians want their elected officials to do.
Xavier Becerra, the Democratic candidate for California governor, is running on a similar message. Before he was the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, Becerra had Bonta’s job and sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times, often successfully.
Bonta said he expects Becerra will be an “incredible partner” in the fight moving forward.
Republicans Michael Gates, who is running against Bonta, and Steve Hilton, who is running against Becerra and is endorsed by Trump, have said they would work collaboratively with the Trump administration to ensure the needs of Californians are met, rather than fighting it at every turn.
“I would be wanting to work with the administration to help Californians,” Hilton has said. Gates has called Bonta’s campaign against Trump “out of touch.”
Many of the lawsuits Bonta’s office has brought against the administration have been filed as part of a multistate coalition of Democratic attorneys general. As presidents of both parties have flexed more executive power in recent decades, state attorneys general have become more collaborative and litigious in fighting back — and that has been especially true under Trump.
Bonta said Trump will be remembered in part for his “repeated attacks on California, on Californians, on our Constitution, and on our democracy,” but California will be remembered for fighting back.
“Are these trying times? 100%. Absolutely, yes,” Bonta said. “But we shouldn’t be helpless, because we’re not helpless.”
Paramount Chairman David Ellison believes the tug-of-war over his proposed $111-billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery comes down to a single question: whether he can be trusted to control CNN.
“I believe this fight is not really about market share,” Ellison wrote in a Tuesday op-ed in the New York Times, noting that regulators around the world, including the U.S. Justice Department, have approved the deal that has been temporarily blocked by an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his coalition of Democrat state attorneys general.
“I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases … The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN,” Ellison wrote.
The rare opinion piece serves as Ellison’s acknowledgment that his family’s close association with President Trump has sullied his standing in Hollywood and beyond.
Shakeups at CBS News, which is part of Paramount, the departure of CBS late night host Stephen Colbert, and a visible presidential lobbying effort — including hosting a dinner for Trump in Washington in late April and attending Trump’s birthday extravaganza in June with UFC fights on the White House lawn — have come with a cost.
Bonta and the other state attorneys general sued, saying the merger of two of the major film studios would give Paramount-Warner Bros. more than 25% of the wide-release theatrical film market. Their lawsuit also alleged the combined company would own too many cable TV channels — more than 50, including CNN, TBS, HGTV and Comedy Central.
Many in Hollywood fear that the consolidation of two historic studios will bring thousands of layoffs and contribute to a bleaker employment picture. Ellison’s Skydance Media’s takeover of Paramount a year ago resulted in the loss of 2,000 jobs.
Some have opposed the Warner Bros. deal, saying one family shouldn’t be allowed to control two significant news operations: CBS News and CNN, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
“There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions,” Ellison wrote.
“Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans,” Ellison said. “And when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.”
“Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle,” he said. “That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve — not to any party or cause.”
“These were founding principles for both CNN and CBS News, for legends like Ted Turner and Edward R. Murrow, and it is exactly that kind of independence that has always fueled the greatness of “60 Minutes,” Ellison wrote.
Fired “60 Minutes” correspondents, including Cecilia Vega, have complained that since Bari Weiss became editor-in-chief of CBS News last fall, journalists have been asked to tilt the presentation of controversial news events, including protests to Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions earlier this year in Minnesota, which led to the deaths of two Americans.
Paramount has pushed back saying the plaintiff states have defined markets that fail to factor in the rise of technology companies, including Netflix, Google’s YouTube and Amazon Studios, which also attract significant swaths of viewership.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, who is overseeing the high-profile case, issued a temporary restraining order to block the merger from finalizing while the two sides hash out the evidence. Late last month, Paramount agreed to delay the merger until after a trial — or until June 1, whichever date comes first.
In court documents filed Friday, Bonta and his coalition of 11 other Democratic attorneys general proposed having a two- to three-week trial in April to weigh the evidence.
Ellison’s Paramount pushed back, saying the media company would like to start the courtroom action on Nov. 4.
Now the judge must schedule the court date.
“The states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators, while the W.G.A. argues that our combined market power will hurt writers,” Ellison said in the opinion piece. “Both suits imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists — an industry ruled by a handful of legacy studios.”
WASHINGTON — Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche cleared a critical hurdle Tuesday in his bid to be confirmed to the post after swaying Republican holdouts on a Senate committee to advance his nomination for a floor vote.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 along party lines in support of the nomination of President Trump’s former personal attorney, who has aggressively pushed the Republican administration’s priorities since taking over from Pam Bondi in April.
The vote followed a deal struck late Sunday between Blanche and two Republican senators who had been threatening to block his confirmation over the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service regarding the president’s leaked tax returns.
Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina had said they were withholding their support unless the Justice Department confirmed in writing that it was not moving forward with a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they were prosecuted for political purposes, which the administration had announced as part of the settlement.
After days of negotiations, Blanche issued an order Sunday evening confirming “beyond any doubt, that there is no Fund.”
Since the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was announced, “No Members were appointed; no funds were transferred; no process for receiving claims was established; no claims were paid,” the order said.
Cornyn and Tillis had also pressed for clarification on a separate part of the settlement that would grant Trump and members of his family immunity from tax audits.
Democrats complain about the fund
Under the deal, the Justice Department clarified in writing that the tax audit immunity agreement applies only to claims open at the time of the settlement and does not protect Trump from examination of future tax filings. It also makes clear that only the parties that brought the lawsuit — Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization — are covered by the tax agreement.
Democrats say Blanche’s order doesn’t go far enough to prevent the Trump administration from reviving the fund after the acting attorney general’s confirmation and have called for legislation to permanently bar it. The order also doesn’t stop the administration from compensating Trump allies — including people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — through a previously established process that allows people to file claims for damages if they believed they were wronged by the government.
The fund “can easily be revived with a new order from the Department of Justice 15 minutes after Mr. Blanche is confirmed as attorney general,” said Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee.
Blanche’s independence has been called into question
Blanche has faced intense scrutiny regarding his ability to maintain independence from the White House, the Justice Department’s pursuit of the president’s political foes and the agency’s handling of files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking investigation.
But it was the settlement of Trump’s $10-billion lawsuit against the IRS that threatened to derail Blanche’s nomination, forcing a delay in the committee vote last week amid pressure from the two Republican senators, who are not returning to Capitol Hill after their terms end in January.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the committee, said Tillis and Cornyn’s demands were “common sense.” Grassley said the senators’ concerns about the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and the IRS settlement were shared by many other lawmakers, including himself.
“I’m grateful that they as well as Mr. Blanche and the White House worked in good faith to solve them, formally rescinding the fund, clarifying the scope of the release of claims has put this issue to bed once and for all,” Grassley said.
Trump’s lawsuit has been sharply criticized because of the highly unusual way it was handled, with the president challenging an agency overseen by the executive branch he leads. A judge last month slammed the case as an improper exercise in self-dealing and referred one of Trump’s attorneys who filed it for potential disciplinary action.
Blanche was an important figure for Trump’s defense
Blanche, a former federal prosecutor and key member of Trump’s defense team as the Republican battled four indictments, arrived at the Justice Department last year as deputy attorney general. He was elevated to acting attorney general following Attorney General Pam Bondi’s failure to meet Trump’s demands to successfully prosecute his perceived political opponents.
While Blanche insisted he wasn’t auditioning for the permanent post, he moved swiftly to accelerate investigations into Trump foes and advance other White House priorities, drawing condemnation from critics who say he has not shed his title as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Shortly after Blanche took the top post, the Justice Department moved to indict longtime Trump adversary James Comey, the former FBI director, on charges of threatening the 47th president by posting a social media photograph of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47.”
Comey’s lawyers have accused the Justice Department of misleading judges, submitting documents containing false statements and withholding key facts to bring what the defense described as a politically motivated prosecution.
Blanche separately appointed Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former Justice Department prosecutor from the Reagan administration, to oversee a Florida-based investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired over the last decade to undermine Trump.
Richer and Jalonick write for the Associated Press.
WASHINGTON — President Trump will travel to Los Angeles on Tuesday and Las Vegas on Wednesday as part of a two-day West Coast trip aimed at highlighting his administration’s economic record ahead of the midterm elections, a White House official confirmed.
In Los Angeles, Trump is scheduled to attend a Republican National Committee dinner at Trump National Golf Club. The visit comes as the administration seeks to draw attention to his economic policies as time runs out for his administration to ease economic pressures ahead of the November election.
“The president will draw a sharp contrast between his commonsense agenda and the radical policies of Democrats like Gavin Newsom, who keep raising taxes, inviting rampant fraud in taxpayer-funded programs, and protecting illegal immigrant drug dealers, rapists, and murderers,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement Monday.
Trump is expected to “tout his wins for the people of the Golden State despite failed Democrat leadership,” Wales said, citing what she described as the “largest middle-class tax cut ever, the most secure border in American history, and a plummeting crime rate.”
Newsom has not yet publicly commented on Trump’s pit stop in California, but the Democratic governor in recent social media posts has criticized Trump’s handling of the economy.
In one post on X, Newsom pointed out that California is raising the minimum wage to $17.40 an hour next year as a way to attack Trump and the GOP for “defending a $7.25 minimum wage while workers scrape by.”
“Pitiful,” the governor wrote.
In a second post, Newsom amplified a post on X that shows how the prices of items like rice, cotton and wheat have increased since the start of the year.
Trump’s visit to Los Angeles will be his second since returning to office. He toured Pacific Palisades in January 2025 after the L.A. neighborhood and Altadena were ravaged by wildfires. During the visit, Trump signed an executive order intended to expedite rebuilding efforts.
Since Trump last visited the city, there has been a standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over federal disaster aid.
In April, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and county Supervisor Kathryn Barger met with Trump in the Oval Office to talk about their request for funding to help with the wildfire recovery efforts, an ask that Trump signaled support for but has yet to formalize.
Following his visit in California, Trump will travel to Nevada, where he will deliver remarks on the economy at Red Rock Casino.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Monday that U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro “choked” and “folded like an umbrella” in moving to drop charges against a former Olympian accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Speaking at an unrelated Oval Office event, Trump ducked questions about whether he’d fire Pirro, a former Fox News host and longtime ally he handpicked as top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital.
But the president kept up his drumbeat of sharp criticism, saying he remained disappointed by her assessment that damage to the Reflecting Pool was the result of shoddy construction, not vandalism.
“Frankly, I think she choked because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question after he signed an executive order for military spouses. “I don’t know what the hell happened.”
The move to dismiss charges against David Hearn was an embarrassing setback for the Justice Department and marked a rare moment during Trump’s second term of an aide or political appointee openly defying him.
After initially posting on social media over the weekend, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” Trump was still fuming two days later, insisting for several minutes that vandalism had marred the troubled project.
“I was disappointed with Jeanine Pirro, really disappointed,” the president said Monday. “She folded like an umbrella.”
Pirro has not commented publicly since Trump’s initial social media post criticizing her.
Hearn has said he was on a bike ride June 19 when he reached in to examine the pool’s newly peeled coating and briefly touched a chunk attached to the side of the pool. But he said he obeyed a park worker who told him to let go of it.
The president also used the opportunity Monday to distance himself from the troubled project, which he had touted as part of his overarching efforts to spruce up the nation’s capital.
Trump said in April that he had consulted with a trio of firms that had worked on swimming pools at his properties and that the one he picked for the Reflecting Pool project had done work at his golf course in Northern Virginia. That firm was Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was awarded a $14.7 million no-bid contract to repaint and waterproof its concrete floor.
“I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” Trump said then. “He looked at it. He called me up. He said, ‘Sir, we can do something on it.’”
But Trump insisted Monday that “I didn’t know the contractor” and for the first time hinted that he wasn’t pleased by the work that was done to get the Reflecting Pool ready in time for Independence Day celebrations.
“I’m not saying I was 100% thrilled with the contractor, but the contractor was rushing. We wanted to get it open for July 4th,” he said.
Crews drained the Reflecting Pool weeks ago to launch a new round of repairs. The White House hasn’t said when those might be finished or how much more they will cost, but the Trump administration did not seek new bids from other companies on the new round of repair work.
Trump also said Monday that the Reflecting Pool would be “fixed” and reopened in the next week and a half to two weeks — without providing further details.
WASHINGTON — California and 22 other Democratic-led states urged the Supreme Court on Monday to block President Trump’s plan to take control of voting by mail through the U.S. Postal Service.
They said it is too late in the election year to impose a new set of regulations for mail ballots.
Doing so, they said, would lead to mistakes, including eligible and registered voters being told they are not on the federal government’s approved list.
“Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting — especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas — would likely be denied mail ballots and disenfranchised,” they told the court.
More broadly, they argued that the Constitution “entrusted the states and Congress — not the president — with the responsibility to set rules for federal elections.”
The justices are likely to act in a few days on whether to allow the Trump administration‘s plan to proceed pending the adoption of new and detailed guidelines.
Last week, Trump Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court contending judges in Boston moved too quickly to halt the administration’s new federal restrictions on voting by mail.
He argued judges should stand back for now, even though the midterm elections are only three months away.
Trump’s executive order required the U.S. Postal Service to use state-by-state lists of eligible voters who may send a ballot by mail.
Until now, states have had the constitutional authority to register voters for federal and state elections. And nearly a third of Americans now vote by mail.
Trump, however, has insisted that voting by mail leads to fraud, including by allowing noncitizens to vote.
Congress has refused to adopt new voting restrictions at Trump’s behest.
Instead, he issued an executive order on March 31 to enlist the Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security to ensure “citizenship verification and integrity in federal elections.”
The order called on Homeland Security to compile state-by-state lists of citizens who are eligible to vote. And it told the postal service that it must use those lists to restrict who may vote by mail.
“The USPS shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled on a State-specific list,” the order said.
But a federal judge and the 1st Circuit Court in Boston ruled Trump’s new regulations may not be enforced this year, at least in the 23 Democratic-led states which sued.
On Monday, they told the court that USPS delivered nearly 100 million mail ballots to or from voters in 2024, with roughly 30% of all voters nationwide casting ballots by mail.
WASHINGTON — Two Republican senators who threatened to block acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche’s bid to lead the Justice Department said Monday that they will vote to advance his nomination, ending an impasse over plans to create a fund to compensate allies of President Trump.
The statement from Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis came after Blanche issued an order late Sunday formally rescinding the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who believe they were unfairly prosecuted by the Justice Department.
Cornyn and Tillis, whose votes Blanche needs to advance through the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, had said they would not endorse his nomination without written confirmation that the fund is dead.
“We want to express our gratitude to Mr. Blanche and his staff for working with us on this, and we look forward to voting to advance his nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee soon,” Cornyn and Tillis, who are not returning to the Senate next year, said in a statement.
DOJ order says ‘beyond any doubt’ that fund is dead
In a statement accompanying the order, the Justice Department said that “although the Acting Attorney General has repeatedly advised Congress through testimony, including under oath, as well as in written responses, that the Fund is not moving forward, and the Department has repeatedly represented to district courts that the Fund is not moving forward, today’s Order officially rescinds the May 18, 2026 Order.”
Since the settlement of the president’s lawsuit against the IRS was announced, “No Members were appointed; no funds were transferred; no process for receiving claims was established; no claims were paid,” the order says. “This order establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no Fund.”
The document released by Blanche on Sunday night also limits the scope of another provision of the settlement that provided broad immunity for Trump and members of his family from tax audits.
The deal clarifies that the tax audit immunity agreement “applies by its terms only retroactively” to claims open at the time of the settlement and does not protect the president from examination of future tax filings.
Cornyn, who lost reelection this year after Trump endorsed his primary opponent, and Tillis, who is retiring when his term ends in January, have blocked Blanche’s nomination as many of their GOP colleagues have criticized the fund.
The Judiciary Committee postponed a vote on Blanche’s nomination that had been scheduled for Thursday morning after Tillis and Cornyn said they needed more from the administration before they could provide the necessary votes.
The two senators have repeatedly said the Justice Department seemed interested in reaching an agreement, but the White House wouldn’t budge even to aid the confirmation of Trump’s loyal former personal attorney, who has aggressively pursued the administration’s priorities as acting attorney general.
“I think as far as Blanche and the Department of Justice, we were pretty much on the same page,” Cornyn said Thursday. “But then when the president got wind of it, he wasn’t willing to go along with it.”
Trump continues to express support for his settlement
The two sides have been negotiating for weeks, but Trump has said repeatedly during the talks that he thinks the fund should go forward and threatened to move forward with it if Blanche was not confirmed.
After the Thursday vote was delayed, Trump said in a social media post that he might pull Blanche’s nomination and resubmit it after Cornyn and Tillis leave office next year.
On Sunday evening, Trump said that people who had faced charges from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and could have benefitted from the fund had “their lives destroyed.”
“This would be a reimbursement for the pain that they suffered,” Trump said. “A lot of people like it.”
Jalonick and Richer write for the Associated Press.
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Saturday sharply criticized U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro’s assessment that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the result of shoddy construction and not the work of vandals, as he claims.
Pirro’s office, in a court filing Friday, moved to drop criminal charges against a former Olympian, David Hearn, who had been accused of deliberately damaging the pool after it went through a renovation ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday celebration last month.
Trump, in a posting on social media, acknowledged that there “may have been some contractor difficulty” in the installation of a new pool liner. But he continues to insist, without evidence, that “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”
“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump added in his post.
The dismissal was a striking reversal for a Justice Department that had previously echoed Trump’s claims and billed the prosecution as pursuing accountability for damage at a Washington landmark, a pet project of Trump. Despite Pirro’s conclusion that there was no evidence of vandalism resulting in widespread damage, the president continued to allege Saturday that most of the damage to the pool was caused by vandals.
Government lawyers in their 20-page court filing Friday said that additional documents provided by the Interior Department since the indictment of Hearn show that the damage was the result of a botched installation by a contractor as well as “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
In addition, a recent visual inspection revealed damage throughout the pool, including in the middle — where prosecutors say a vandal would not likely have attempted to peel the lining.
Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, was accused of pulling up a two-foot-square piece of the pool’s lining.
“Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro, a Trump appointee and former Fox News host, said in her filing asking a judge to formally dismiss the case.
In the filing, Pirro also blamed the Interior Department for providing “less than fulsome information at the outset of the case.”
The filing added that had “DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment.” It was a jarring turn in position from Pirro, who claimed the government’s case was built on “tremendous evidence” when she announced the indictment against Hearn last month.
Hearn’s legal team on Saturday criticized both Trump and Pirro and said it was weighing “legal remedies” on behalf of their client.
“Trump is mad at Pirro because she finally admitted what we made clear in our legal filings all along: Trump’s botched renovation was responsible for the damage — not Davey Hearn,” the legal team said in a statement. “However, her claim that she and her office were previously duped by Interior is nonsense. Starting immediately after the arraignment, our motions repeatedly proved that the administration was to blame for the Reflecting Pool failures, not Davey.”
Trump on Saturday also posted a nearly four-minute video that appears to have been taken from a security camera, in which three individuals can be seen with their hands in the pool, including one for an extended period.
The president claimed the video shows “material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!”
It’s not clear from the video, which appears to be shot from some distance, that any vandalism occurred. Workers can also be seen standing nearby and don’t appear to notice the people sticking their hands into the water.
In May, Trump announced plans to beautify the Reflecting Pool this spring. Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings was awarded a $14.7-million, no-bid contract to repaint and waterproof the pool’s concrete floor.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to requests for comment.
Water was drained and Trump directed that the bottom be painted with what he called “American flag blue.”
But problems emerged within days of the project’s completion, with chunks of the new liner peeling off.
The work on the Reflecting Pool is just one of a number of projects Trump has spearheaded across the nation’s capital. Most prominently, he demolished the White House’s East Wing to build a $400-million ballroom and plans to build a towering arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
Heading into the final weekend of this summer’s World Cup, The Guardian reported that support for FIFA president Gianni Infantino had climbed to record levels. More than 200 of FIFA’s 211 member associations formally endorsed Infantino’s bid for a fourth term as head of world soccer’s governing body, the paper reported, making next March’s vote more of a coronation than an election.
Two weeks later, that support disappeared. Not only is Infantino’s reelection campaign in tatters, but there’s a chance he won’t survive until the spring, with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Javier Tebas, president of Spain’s soccer association, calling for his resignation and close confidants such as Carlos Cordeiro, the former president of U.S. Soccer, and Kevin Lamour, FIFA’s chief operating officer, publicly breaking with their boss.
At the center of that reversal was a closely guarded scheme to raise $4.2 billion by selling a 20% stake in the World Cup to private investors, who would be given influence in planning and executing future events, including broadcasting and commercial deals tied to the tournament.
In short, Infantino was planning, in secret, to sell shares in the World Cup. And once details began leaking in the media, he was forced Friday to scrap the whole thing, an embarrassing retreat that has left him vulnerable just two weeks after he had seemingly reached the heights of his third term as FIFA president.
Infantino’s idea, called the FIFA Forward Enterprise, was intended to turn the World Cup, FIFA’s milk cow, into a golden calf. But to do so, he needed the approval of at least 106 of FIFA’s 211 member countries, so he promised countries that backed him that they would receive $20 million each by mid-September. Those who declined would get just a fraction of that.
Infantino was certain the piles of cash would buy the acquiescence — or at least the silence — of enough members for the plan to go through. Instead, the bribe blew up in his face and FIFA issued a statement late Friday, under Infantino’s name, that basically said “never mind.”
“Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place,” the statement read.
The question now becomes whether Infantino’s presidency will proceed.
He wouldn’t be the first FIFA president to be grievously wounded by unbridled ambition, but the speed and depth of his fall is staggering. The 2026 World Cup was, by nearly every measure, wildly successful. The largest and most complex sporting event in history the tournament, hosted by the U.S., Mexico and Canada, exceeded expectations, drawing more than 6.8 million live fans and a global TV audience of more than six billion. The four-year World Cup cycle brought FIFA revenues of about $15 billion, making it the first sporting event in history to earn more than $10 billion.
Infantino has never been shy about pushing boundaries despite heading a Swiss-based organization that, its wealth notwithstanding, is officially a nonprofit. Nor was this the first time he tried to bring private equity into the World Cup: In 2018, two years into his first term as FIFA president, he considered a plan to raise $25 billion to fund tournaments, only to cave in the face of massive opposition.
He didn’t give up the idea of squeezing more money out of the World Cup, though.
This summer, he introduced three-minute hydration breaks in the middle of each half — ostentatiously a nod to the heat and humidity, but in reality a ruse that allowed broadcasters to generate millions in additional revenue through TV commercials. FIFA also staged a halftime show for the first time ever during the final, sold VIP tickets priced at more than $1 million each and introduced dynamic pricing for the tournament’s 104 games, driving prices for some seats to four times what fans paid four years ago in Qatar.
That pushed the tournament beyond the reach of many of the sport’s most loyal supporters — and soccer, more than any other sport, belongs to the fans. It’s why teams are called clubs and fans are called supporters.
The World Cup, then, wasn’t Infantino’s to sell. So the pushback to his latest idea was immediate and unsparing.
“Football does not belong to investors,” Burnham said in an Instagram post. “Once you have sold a piece, you have sold out. Football belongs to the fans. It always has, and it always will.”
What really angered stakeholders, however, was Infantino’s brazen move to develop the FFE in secret, only to have its details leak out.
Bernd Neuendorf, president of the German soccer association and a member of the FIFA Council, the group’s most influential body, said he first learned of the FFE by reading about it.
“I was very surprised, and also annoyed, that we had to find out about something like this from the press,” he told a German news outlet last week.
Another self-inflicted wound was Infantino’s decision to launch the project with Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm founded by Joshua Kushner, the 41-year-old brother of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a kind of all-purpose White House advisor and negotiator. Thrive Eternal focuses on long-term investments in scarce cultural institutions that technology cannot replace, but it has little relevant experience in managing something as large and complicated as a World Cup.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino, left, and President Trump wave during an award ceremony following Spain’s win over Argentina in the World Cup final July 19.
(David Ramos / Getty Images)
Moreover, the partnership would draw Infantino further into the orbit of Trump, whom the FIFA president has openly courted for years. Infantino, who has been a frequent visitor to the Oval Office and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, attended the president’s inauguration and accompanied him on visits around the world.
Trump’s relationship to Infantino was questioned when Infantino presented him with the first FIFA Peace Prize last December, then became even more controversial when Trump phoned Infantino three times to lobby to have the red-card suspension of U.S. forward Folarin Balogun overturned ahead of a World Cup elimination game last month.
FIFA eventually cleared Balogun to play, marking just the second time in tournament history a red card ban has been lifted. For some, Infantino’s decision to partner with someone close to Trump on his latest venture was a bridge too far.
“It’s a really bad look for Infantino given the concerns about political interference that were already there after Balogun,” said Steven A. Bank, a professor of business law at UCLA who has written and lectured extensively on the economics of soccer. “Especially with the fund led by Jared Kushner’s brother.”
Once details of Infantino’s secret plan began to leak, UEFA, the confederation that governs European soccer, held an emergency meeting during which all 55 members — including Spain, the reigning men’s and women’s World Cup champion — voted to boycott all FIFA competitions.
“Some things are simply too important to sell. The FIFA World Cup belongs to football. It always will,” UEFA, the largest and most powerful of FIFA’s six continental confederations, said in a statement.
CONCACAF, which oversees soccer in North America, Central America and the Caribbean, said its 41 countries also rejected the plan, an opinion the U.S. Soccer Federation backed in a sparse post on X.
“U.S. Soccer stands with CONCACAF and its members,” it wrote.
The Asian Football Confederation joined in, saying in a statement its 47 members stand “in solidarity with UEFA and CONCACAF in expressing serious concerns over FIFA’s proposal to introduce private investment into FIFA’s flagship competitions.”
When it became obvious Infantino would not get the votes he needed to go forward, he pulled the plug on his plan. But it may not have been so much that the idea was bad as it was the execution.
Soccer is awash with private investors. The biggest clubs are owned by billionaires or sovereign wealth funds and many leagues — including Spain’s La Liga, which Tebas oversees — have sold commercial stakes to private equity firms in much the same way FIFA proposed.
Alan Rothenberg, a former U.S. Soccer president and the driving force behind the 1994 men’s World Cup and 1999 women’s World Cup, among the most successful tournaments in history, said the idea of selling a private equity stake in the World Cup isn’t a bad idea. But the way Infantino tried to implement his plan led it to failure.
“What is proposed is not that revolutionary,” Rothenberg said. “There have been private equity investors in MLS, in one of the subsidiaries of the NFL, in F1.
“But I think the combination of everything has doomed it. It does raise the possibility that Infantino, he’s finally become Icarus and gotten too close to the sun. It actually may doom him politically.”
Others including Cordeiro, a former vice chairman at Goldman Sachs, questioned the need to bring in outside investors.
“FIFA already has access to extraordinary financial resources. The organization sits on billions of dollars in reserves and no debt,” Cordeiro pointed out in his resignation letter. “If member associations believe additional investment is needed to develop the game, FIFA already has the financial capacity to provide that support from its existing resources.”
Infantino has flaunted consensus before without significant consequence, cozying up to autocrats while overseeing the 2018 World Cup in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the 2022 tournament in Qatar before being accused of awarding the 2034 tournament to Saudi Arabia in a rigged vote.
This time, however, the stakeholders within FIFA were pushed too far by Infantino’s penchant for wielding unilateral power, so they pushed back and the president blinked. Hours before he backed down, an ally of Infantino’s told the Financial Times that he would not bend, seeing the standoff as “a fight to the death.”
Infantino’s presidency might not be dead, but it is surely in critical condition.
SACRAMENTO — California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, have earned at least $11 million since he took office, with most of their income coming from wineries, restaurants and other investments, according to tax returns from 2019 through their most recent filings for 2024.
The tax records show the couple has earned between $1.4 million and $3.5 million per year, putting them in the upper echelon of Americans when it comes to annual income.
Newsom allowed reporters on Thursday to view four years of the couple’s jointly filed tax returns after receiving criticism for not disclosing his filings since he last released the information for the tax year 2020.
The release of the tax records comes just weeks after Newsom accused the Department of Justice of launching — at President Trump’s request — a baseless and politically motivated investigation into him and his wife, including her business interests and charity work. The governor said the probes, which federal officials have not confirmed, were a personal vendetta launched because he’s considering a run for president in 2028.
Siebel Newsom leads the Representation Project, a nonprofit that advocates for gender equity through film and education programs, and Girls Club Entertainment, a for-profit production company she owns that holds the copyrights to her documentaries. The nonprofit has faced criticism for accepting donations from companies that lobby the governor, including Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and AT&T.
The tax records released Thursday showed that her salary from the Representation Project was $145,000 to $150,000 annually from 2021 though 2024, similar to prior years. While Girls Club paid her $100,000 in 2021, and $11,700 in 2022, she did not report any income from the production company in the two years that followed.
The governor’s office, in a summary of the tax returns provided to reporters, stated that financial documents contradict “the FALSE right-wing claims that the Newsoms ‘enriched themselves’ through new ventures and nonprofit organizations.”
The memo stated that their income has declined since Newsom became governor. The tax records also show that Girls Club Entertainment has been losing money in recent years.
The governor signed a law during his first year in office to require presidential and gubernatorial candidates to release five years of tax returns to appear on the primary ballot. Democrats passed the law in response to Trump’s refusal to make the information public.
Less than six months later, the California Supreme Court struck down the portion that required presidential candidates to comply with the law. Gubernatorial candidates are still required to disclose their tax filings during election season.
Though tax returns became a flash point in the California vs. Trump political saga, Democrats have for decades demanded that candidates for governor and president release their income tax filings.
Presidential candidates dating back to the Nixon administration routinely shared their filings, with only President Ford and Trump refusing to do so. Former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his Republican opponents also declined to share their tax returns before the 2010 and 2014 California gubernatorial elections.
Newsom released his tax returns during his campaigns for governor in 2018 and 2022, again in 2020 and before he beat a recall election in 2021. California candidates, elected officials, judges and some public employees also file annual economic interest statements.
“In the interest of transparency, he’s now voluntarily making all remaining filed tax returns available — going beyond what the law requires — as part of his longstanding commitment to transparency,” said Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for the governor, in a statement.
The governor and his wife put their investments in a blind trust when he took office. Their earnings, which have totaled more than $1 million per year since at least 2011, stem from investments in wineries, restaurants, bars, hotels and hospitality management companies based in San Francisco, Napa Valley, and Lake Tahoe, according to economic interest disclosures filed with the state.
The latest batch of tax returns covers 2021 through 2024. Reporters were allowed to view, but not copy, more than 700 pages of tax records at the governor’s office in Sacramento on Thursday. Their 2025 tax returns were not available because, as he has done most years, the governor filed for an extension with the Internal Revenue Service and he doesn’t expect to file until October.
The couple’s reported income was the highest in 2021, when they sold their home in Kentfield, a wealthy enclave in Marin County, for $5.9 million. The Newsoms reported receiving more than $55,000 in rent for leasing out the home that same year, but declared an overall loss for tax purposes of $70,000 due to their mortgage payments, taxes, legal fees and depreciation.
The family previously moved to a mansion in Fair Oaks that they purchased for $3.7 million in 2019 following a brief residence at the Governor’s Mansion in downtown Sacramento.
The family kept the Fair Oaks home and purchased another $9.1-million estate in Marin County in 2024, where they primarily live and their four children attend school. Newsom and his wife also spend time in Fair Oaks while working at the state Capitol.
During those four years, Newsom and Siebel Newsom paid a high of $1,253,187 in federal income taxes in 2021, and a low of $488,821 in 2023. Their state tax income bill ranged from $34,307 to $213,331 during that time. The annual property tax bills hovered between $48,000 and $64,300 over that span.
The governor’s income included his government salary, which ranged from $167,647 in 2021 to $192,087 in 2024.
The tax returns showed the family paid from $154,000 to almost $200,000 each year for household employees from 2021 through 2024. The returns showed that they paid for Social Security coverage, Medicare and the state’s unemployment benefits fund as part of those expenses.
The governor and his family donated more than $200,000 to charity from 2021 to 2024. While most of those donations were in cash, they also gave $4,900 in “Armani Business Wear” to the Oakland nonprofit organization Restorative Justice, and toys, furniture, appliances, books and other goods to Goodwill in Sacramento.
Among their listed expenses in 2021 was $3,542 in storage costs for silver and platinum holdings. Previously, the couple made nearly a half-million dollars trading silver bars in 2011 alone.
Javier Ramirez was handcuffed in the back of an unmarked car, bruised and confused, when immigration agents used a word he had never heard before.
It was June 2025, and they were bragging about the raids in the Los Angeles area that swept up hundreds of immigrants — and a few U.S. citizens, like Ramirez. The unfamiliar word caught Ramirez’s ear.
Tonk.
“I wondered what that meant — I thought it was some code,” the 33-year-old tow truck driver told me over a Zoom call this week. “But I didn’t make a big fuss about it then.”
Masked men had thrown him to the ground outside a tow yard in Montebello, for reasons they wouldn’t divulge. He ended up in the car with a man detained in another roundup, headed for the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.
The color disappeared from Ramirez’s face when I explained what “tonk” means.
For at least half a century, Border Patrol workers have used the onomatopoeic word, referring to the sound of someone getting hit, as slang for undocumented immigrants. Body camera footage and text chains from last summer’s immigration raids, released this week in a court filing, captures agents throwing around anti-immigrant insults like “wet” and “tonk” with the same ease that the rest of us say “and” or “the.”
The most egregious example, I told Ramirez, was directed at him and his friend, fellow U.S. citizen Brian Gavidia.
A video shows an agent shouting, “One tonk f— got away, dude!” as colleagues manhandle the pair. The same agent, who spoke with a Chicano accent, later sped off in a vehicle while asking in Spanglish, “¿Alguien arresto un tonk, güey?” — Did someone arrest a tonk, man?
“Oh, wow, OK, that’s really bad,” Ramirez finally said, laughing bitterly while gathering his thoughts. “It’s kind of hurtful. They’re just assuming who I am.”
Ramirez asked his attorney, Luis Castillo, if the agents who accosted him “had violence on their mind when they used that word.”
“You’re getting a double whammy,” the longtime civil rights lawyer replied. “They’re hitting you twice, physically and psychologically.”
No, Luis: they’re hitting us all.
Brian Gavidia stands in a parking lot next to East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park in 2025 a day after he and his friend were roughed up by immigration agents outside a tow yard in Montebello. The two are suing the federal government for violating their civil rights.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
If you’re still doubting that racist violence fuels President Trump’s deportation deluge, just consider what Gavidia and Ramirez have been through.
La migra roughed them up even as they screamed that they had documents to prove their U.S. citizenship. They took Gavidia’s Real ID and never returned it. Ramirez was detained for five days and charged with trying to assault a federal officer and interfere with their work — a case that went nowhere because he did no such things.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel, along with other groups and private attorneys, included the body cam footage in a court filing asking a federal judge to bar immigration agents from making stops based on racial profiling.
Gavidia is part of that lawsuit, while Ramirez has sued separately. Now, the two men are more certain than ever that the Trump administration’s deportation strategy isn’t about getting the worst of the worst.
To la migra, all Latinos are tonks.
“I never even heard the word, but once [lawyers] told me the explanation of what it meant, I was disgusted instantly,” said Gavidia, 30, who fixes up and sells cars. “They already knew what they were coming to do. We told them we were Americans. It didn’t matter. We were brown, and that was enough.”
“I saw [the tonk video] 300 times,” Gavidia added, “and it’s giving me more trauma.”
“Tonk” has been a dirty little secret of the Border Patrol for decades — workplace lingo showing that the banality of evil that’s la migra on its best days has transformed into something far uglier under Trump.
The slur is so vile — predicated on violence by law enforcement, unlike ethnic jabs that insult food or culture — that it has never crossed over into mainstream English. “Tonk” in its anti-immigrant meaning doesn’t appear in the Merriam-Webster dictionary or even the Dictionary of American Regional English, the premier academic collection of American slang.
And that’s exactly how the Border Patrol likes it.
The earliest use of “tonk” to demean immigrants that I’ve been able to find is in a 1976 book by Paul Schuster Taylor, an early pioneer of Mexican American studies best known for documenting the plight of Dust Bowl refugees along with his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange.
Taylor quoted a Border Patrol inspector referring to Mexicans as “tonks” but offered no definition. In a 1978 hearing, Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Leonel Castillo said the slur was “sort of like the new term” for “wets.”
Castillo — no relation to Luis — nevertheless defended his agents’ use of anti-immigrant words.
“I think it’s the way — the tone in which you use it, and then how you treat people,” he said, maintaining that the verbiage was ingrained in the “very fine gentlemen” who worked under him.
“It’s very hard to change them,” he said. “But they’re not necessarily bad people.”
A year later, an anonymous Border Patrol agent writing for the white supremacist publication Instauration debunked Castillo’s apologia. He claimed that “tonk” derived from the thudding noise when agents smashed a flashlight on an immigrant’s head.
“The Anglos of the Border Patrol are not as intimidated by federal guidelines as people might think,” the agent wrote. “We have our own methods of interrogation in the desert.”
San Diego State English professor William Nericcio has spent his career studying anti-Mexican hate. He grew up around Laredo, Texas, in the 1970s and 1980s with “guys and their dads who worked in Border Patrol because it was a good job.”
Yet he hadn’t heard of “tonk,” either.
Immigration agents detain two men at a car wash in Montebello, Calif., in 2025.
(Gregory Bull / Associated Press)
“A drum roll of anti-Mexican violence turns into a soundtrack — wetback, beaner, spic and now, tonk,” Nericcio responded when I asked why the slur has stuck for so long among immigration agents. “Of all these anti-Mexican terms, this is the only one that directly connects to an act of violence. It’s a thing of pride when you say it — ‘Hey boss, I got a tonk today! Where’s my bonus?’ It’s glory days for them.”
The casual use of “tonk” by la migra eventually became a PR embarrassment even for the Trump administration. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told an Arizona public radio station that the slur “is now considered a derogatory term and CBP does not condone its use.”
This time around, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told my Times colleagues that “agents are focused on protecting the American people — not entertaining performative outrage.”
CBP didn’t respond to my multiple requests for comment about whether its internal guidelines continue to discourage “tonk” and whether agents face any discipline for using it.
If you’re not disgusted by this devolution in protocol, I’m not sure what can possibly disgust you.
ACLU lawyer Mayra Joachin said the body cam footage is “clear evidence that these stops were always about individuals’ appearance of being Latino working class” and is proof of the “culture of racism underlying” the Trump administration’s deportation strategy.
How are Gavidia and Ramirez feeling now, after being called a racist slur they hadn’t even known existed and that doesn’t even technically apply to them?
“If you’re a U.S. citizen, you can’t be free in the U.S.,” Ramirez said. What happened to him “can happen to anyone, it can happen to their kids and family, and when it happens to their family, that’s when they’re going to see the truth of what’s happening.”
Gavidia, who voted for Trump in 2024, said that immigration agents think they “are above the Constitution and law.”
“That’s sad and disgusting,” he said. “If we don’t stop this and fight this now, it’s going to get worse and worse.”
The Federal Communications Commission has demanded for months that ABC prove its stations deserve to stay on the air — a proceeding with no precedent in the last half-century. This week, the network delivered a sharp retort, accusing the agency of waging a campaign of political retribution.
“The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price,” Disney’s attorneys wrote in the 109-page filing.
ABC has enlisted prominent elected officials, community organizations and seasoned litigators for the 1st Amendment showdown that could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Burbank entertainment giant’s combative stance comes after the FCC, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, took the rare step this spring of demanding that Disney defend the broadcast licenses of its eight ABC stations — including KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles — years before the permits were set to expire.
The government’s move represents a significant threat to Disney because the loss of licenses would hobble the ABC network by forcing its largest stations off the air. Other ABC stations at risk include those in San Francisco, Fresno, Houston, Philadelphia and New York.
The FCC is expected to make a determination next month. It could require ABC to defend the stations in a hearing or before the commission.
The FCC, in a statement, defended its inquiry and hinted that it may go further.
“For decades, Americans of all stripes have been subsidizing broadcast media to the tune of many billions of dollars by giving TV stations free use of a valuable, public resource — the airwaves,” an FCC spokesperson said in a statement.
“Broadcasters are required by law to operate in the public interest — not in the narrow or partisan interests of a political party,” the spokesperson said. “The FCC is going to hold broadcasters accountable to the full extent of the law, regardless of any disinformation campaign that some of them may choose to run.”
ABC accused the FCC of overreach.
“The FCC has spent the last 18 months searching for some pretext for revoking the stations’ licenses,” ABC wrote in the filing. “The Commission has found none, because the stations easily meet the standard for license renewal.”
Disney‘s attorneys cited the unusual nature of the proceedings, linking the FCC’s action to Trump’s dislike of certain ABC network programs. The FCC launched its review in late April — one day after the president lashed out at ABC after late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Trump’s health and First Lady Melania Trump.
Until this spring, the FCC had not called for an early license review in more than 50 years.
“For the first time in history, the Federal Communications Commission has ordered an entire group of local television stations … to undergo simultaneous license renewal proceedings well before their current licenses expire,” Disney’s attorneys wrote.
“This is as clearcut an example of retaliation as one could imagine,” ABC said in the filing. Damage has been done even if the FCC stops short of revoking the licenses, the network said.
“The mere investigation and the threat of finding a violation are sufficient: ‘the value of a sword of Damocles is that it hangs — not that it drops,’” ABC wrote.
The FCC has previously said the review grew out of an inquiry it launched early last year to scrutinize Disney’s internal diversity, equity and inclusion programs to see if they violated federal anti-discrimination laws — part of an expansive Trump-led campaign against DEI initiated as soon as he returned to the White House.
This year, the FCC opened a separate inquiry over whether ABC’s “The View” should keep an exemption granted to news programs so they are not obligated to provide equal airtime for opponents of various political candidates. The FCC had given “The View” the exemption in 2002.
By calling for the early review, the FCC allowed petitioners and ordinary residents to chime in on the stations’ operations and ABC network programming.
By Wednesday night’s deadline, the FCC had received more than 153,000 public comments. An estimated 96% of respondents wrote to support their local ABC station, the company said, including L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna, L.A. Police Chief Jim McDonnell and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.
In his letter, Luna said KABC — which has operated in Los Angeles for more than 75 years — provides residents with “timely and accurate information that has … undoubtedly saved lives.”
Lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), have called on the FCC to drop the review, saying the agency has politicized its regulatory powers.
Disney has hired prominent attorneys Beth Wilkinson, Jennifer Tatel and Paul Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general with experience arguing before the Supreme Court. Disney’s chief legal officer, Horacio Gutierrez, is leading the team.
Several conservative groups have questioned whether ABC was fit to hold its licenses.
“ABC’s rights are important, but they are not preeminent,” Center for American Rights President Daniel Suhr wrote in his 66-page petition to the FCC to deny ABC’s local licenses, adding that the commission must instead focus on “the right of viewers of ABC stations.”
“Disney’s lawyers can wish upon a star, but they cannot make this record disappear,” Suhr said in a statement Thursday. “Disney does not own the public airwaves, and an FCC license is not a corporate entitlement. The FCC should reject Disney’s effort to avoid meaningful scrutiny, require full answers, and designate these applications for a hearing.”
The FCC doesn’t license networks, only the local stations that carry network programming.
In one public comment, an ABC critic named Lawrence Caswell agreed with Suhr’s contention: “ABC is just a grossly biased propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.”
“I rely on their broadcast for accurate, timely, and trusted local news, breaking weather updates, and essential public safety information,” Illes wrote. “ABC 7 Chicago is a vital institution in our community.”
Stations typically file for a license renewal once every eight years. The commission then determines whether the station has “served the public interest” and has not run afoul of the “rules and regulations of the Commission.”
“The FCC has no authority to police the ideological balance of the airwaves, and no matter what this Commission does next, the record now makes clear that this was never a genuine search for the public interest,” Gomez said in a Thursday statement.
There are three commissioners: Gomez and two Republicans — Carr and Olivia Trusty, who joined the panel last year.
Congress restricts the FCC from any regulatory moves that trample on free speech rights for broadcasters.
A coalition of progressive groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, urged Disney Chief Executive Josh D’Amaro to continue to defend 1st Amendment freedoms in the company’s battle with the FCC.
“When you’re standing up for yourself, you are standing up for all of us,” the group wrote. “All of our rights are in danger when the FCC is allowed to censor comedians, journalists, and critics.”
WASHINGTON — The American Dream may not be dead for many Black Americans, but it is further away than at any point since the Civil Rights Movement, warns a report by the National Urban League.
Released on Thursday, the annual “State of Black America” report grimly describes Black Americans ‘ economic and political prospects as having worsened due to policy changes from President Trump’s administration, according to a copy obtained by the Associated Press.
The report contends that the challenges it highlights for Black communities are warning signs for the prosperity of all Americans.
“It may be the focus is us, but the impact is not just us,” said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League. “While they have targeted and focused on Black Americans, these attacks are going to impact broadly working Americans, poor Americans, aspirational middle-class Americans, and this is what this report points to.”
Tracing the arc of American history, the Urban League describes Black Americans’ struggle for emancipation from slavery and equal economic and political rights as a gruesome but optimistic part of the American story.
Now, the report says, the Trump administration is at odds with the goals and achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, citing the overhaul of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as the president’s focus on overhauling voting laws through the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, as examples of rollbacks of long-sought civil rights policies.
The report’s authors offer policy and strategy recommendations for civil rights groups aiming to combat the Trump administration.
“The civil rights community must consolidate its legal resistance and turn courtroom wins into durable policy,” the report says. “The movement must build economic infrastructure that doesn’t depend on the goodwill of any one administration.”
The AP reached out to the White House for comment on the report.
Report contributors include a potential Democratic presidential contender
This year’s report includes contributions from members of Congress, and policy and legal experts, as well as some media personalities.
U.S. Senators Angela Alsobrooks, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Raphael Warnock all contributed to the report, as well as Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey contributed a video message to the report.
Moore, who is widely viewed as a potential 2028 presidential contender, submitted an essay focused on closing the racial wealth gap and Black Americans’ history of economic advancement in the face of adversity.
“With wisdom and grit, my mom was able to lift me and my family to a higher rung on the economic ladder. But too often wisdom and grit aren’t enough,” Moore wrote.
He later called closing the racial wealth gap “a matter of moral clarity” but cautioned that “government alone cannot close the racial wealth gap. It’s going to take all of us,” referencing the private sector and civil society.
Report blasts ‘economic assault’ on Black Americans
Whether corporate America and major nonprofits are still willing to participate is an open question. The report condemns the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back diversity initiatives and economic advancement projects in the private sector, and expresses frustration with companies that cooperated with an “economic assault” on Americans, especially Black Americans.
“This has been a campaign of coercion and oppression directed at these institutions who have been out here working hard to, if you will, change America,” Morial said. “The important thing about companies is that every company has not bent the knee. Some may have done some cosmetic changes. Some have been in full and complete retreat.”
The DEI rollbacks are a jarring reversal for the Urban League, which held sway in the Biden White House on economic and social policies. The report lauds President Biden’s administration for signing a sweeping COVID-19 stimulus package, as well as laws supporting minority small businesses and a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
“Not every promise was kept, and the current administration is pushing to roll our wins back, but these wins serve as a blueprint for what is possible through sustained advocacy and a clear vision,” the authors write. The agenda, the Urban League declares, was “the most consequential federal investments in Black America since the Great Society.”
The organization and its civil rights allies now find themselves in a strikingly different political environment under the Trump administration.
“Looking at our current political landscape, the calls for racial healing and righting of this nation’s wrongs in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd feel like a fever dream,” the report reads.
But the study also acknowledges that Black Americans have overcome more dire and discriminatory moments.
Latest Black America report is the Urban League’s 50th edition
The Urban League’s inaugural 1976 report on the state of Black America was described by the New York Times at the time as “a profoundly depressing document” that laid out the persistent disparities between the economic outlooks of Black and white Americans, a decade after the Civil Rights Movement’s crowning achievements were signed into law.
The report was established as a response to that year’s State of the Union address by President Ford and the Democratic response, neither of which mentioned the economic outlooks for Black Americans. The report offered policy recommendations on crime, education, housing, social services and general economic policy.
“It is a document that does not attempt to cover up the seriousness of the situation black people find themselves in,” the authors wrote at the time. Several of its recommendations were later taken up by President Carter, who was elected to the White House months after the report’s release.
This year’s 50th anniversary document echoes the frustration found in the inaugural report. While Morial acknowledged that the Urban League’s assessments may lead to pessimism, he urged Americans concerned about civil rights and economic progress to respond at the ballot box and with their pocketbooks.
“We cannot be dejected. We cannot be cynical. We must act,” Morial said. “We have to fight to make sure that those that are really trying to kill the essence of the American dream don’t win.”
By almost every measure, Latino communities are bearing the brunt of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, according to a new report.
The League of United Latin American Citizens or LULAC, a Latino civil rights organization, found that court-sanctioned racial profiling has contributed to the disproportionate targeting of Latinos regardless of their immigration status.
“The impact of mass deportation is falling on Latinos as an ethnic group, not on undocumented immigrants as a legal category,” the report read in part. “U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, work-authorized immigrants, and multi-generational American families are absorbing measurable harm: economic, physical, and civic.”
Although other immigrant groups have been targeted, LULAC found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have mostly focused on immigrants from Latin America, particularly workers with no criminal history, who are also more likely to face violence or be placed in detention centers with substandard conditions.
Citing a recent UCLA study, LULAC said from January to October, federal immigration agents arrested more than 187,000 Latinos and deported more than 126,000.
In an email response to The Times, a spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security rejected the report’s findings.
“Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson wrote. “What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S.—NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”
“Law enforcement officers use ‘reasonable suspicion’ to investigate immigration status and probable cause to make arrests consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the spokesperson added. “The Supreme Court has already vindicated us on these practices.”
LULAC’s report comes amid recent court filings claiming that federal immigration agents were caught on body camera footage and in text messages using racial slurs when referring to Latinos.
Additionally, Congress recently approved nearly $70 billion in immigration enforcement funding to cover the rest of Trump’s term with at least $38 billion to go to ICE and $26 billion to Customs and Border Protection.
LULAC said in putting the report together it reviewed public data and published studies to provide a fact sheet that paints a broader picture about the impact mass deportations are having on Latinos.
“The people being removed are disproportionately working-age, employed and without criminal records — the demographic core of the workforce in construction, hospitality, agriculture, food processing, and care work,” the report read.
As of July 11, more than 65,000 people were being held in detention and about 70% of the population had no criminal convictions, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering organization.
ICE detention data show that about 40% of detainees were being held for civil immigration violations including visa overstays and work visa violations.
Unless previously deported, living in the country illegally is considered a civil violation rather than a crime and carries penalties such as arrests, fines and deportation proceedings.
The indiscriminate immigration raids that terrorized Latino communities appeared to have worsened after the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in September, according to LULAC’s report.
The Supreme Court justices overturned a district court injunction that barred immigration agents in Los Angeles from roving around Home Depots and car washes, stopping brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking day laborers and others from arrest on immigration charges.
But once the injunction lifted, federal immigration agents descended once more on Latino communities, even stopping U.S. citizens, according to LULAC.
This month, the American Civil Liberties Union reviewed more than 1,200 enforcement incidents across eight states, identifying 155 U.S. citizens who were detained, targeted, or experienced law enforcement misconduct, and 437 incidents involving likely racial profiling. It also identified 214 children affected, including 32 Americans.
LULAC said the immigration raids had an economic impact. Citing a recent UCLA study, it said small business and Latino entrepreneurs in Los Angeles County saw foot traffic drop significantly, losing millions in potential revenue in June 2025.
A spokesperson for LULAC could not immediately be reached for comment.
WASHINGTON — President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskymet Tuesday ahead of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral, with the two leaders discussing ways for Ukraine to produce its own powerful weapons and “other ideas that could help” in its ongoing war against Russia.
The sit-down in the Oval Office, which was closed to the media, followed a consequential meeting at the NATO summit earlier this month in Ankara, Turkey, where Trump announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine a license to make Patriot defense systems — a long-running request from Kyiv to counter Russian missile attacks.
In a post on social media after the meeting, Zelenskythanked Trump for the “good meeting” and the Republican administration’s efforts to aid Kyiv in the long-running war, which began more than four years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine.
“The President and I discussed licenses for Patriot interceptor production and several other ideas that could help,” said Zelensky, who also noted that he offered condolences to Trump for the death of Graham, a close ally. “We also spoke about diplomacy — it’s important that the diplomatic process be reinvigorated.”
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the meeting.
Trump welcomed Zelenskyto the White House as the Ukrainian leader traveled to Washington to honor Graham, whose final act as a public official was visiting Kyiv and securing an agreement on a package of sanctions that seek to punish countries that purchase Russian oil, gas and other exports.
In a Fox News Channel interview on Tuesday, Trump recalled Graham’s hawkishness and said the Republican South Carolina senator’s support for Ukraine never wavered. Trump said Graham had suggested it was time to make a deal with Iran but had no similar suggestion for the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Ukraine, he’s very militant about,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends.” “I mean, Lindsey liked war, to be honest with you.”
“It’s looking good for Ukraine, right?” Loomer said during an interview with The Associated Press. “Going into this meeting next week at the Oval Office is looking pretty good.”
A federal appeals court has upheld a ruling that in nearly half of U.S. states halted President Trump’s executive order to create a federal list of eligible voters and limit delivery of mail ballots only to people on that list.
The ruling Saturday by judges of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with the mail-in voting restrictions in 23 U.S. states that sued ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Trump issued an executive order in March for the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters. It also ordered the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on that list.
Trump has claimed the proposed changes are necessary safeguards to keep non-U.S. citizens from voting, but state election officials argued they were ripe for abuse and could cause chaos.
Democratic officials in 23 states and the District of Columbia challenged Trump’s order in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston. They argued that Trump’s order was unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the authority to set election rules.
U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani agreed and halted Trump’s order from being implemented for the Nov. 3 elections, but only in the states that have sued.
Trump’s executive order is part of his ongoing campaign to restrict voting access and raise doubts about the integrity of the election system before the November midterms.
The White House and the Justice Department did not immediately return an email seeking comment Sunday about the court ruling.
President Trump ordered his administration Friday to install signs in front of the Smithsonian Institution’s U.S. history museum telling visitors that some of the exhibits are inaccurate, his latest move to reshape how the story of the United States is told.
Trump’s move follows a report released July 4 by his Domestic Policy Council saying leaders of the Smithsonian and its National Museum of American History don’t tell history “in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.”
The president lacks authority to quickly fire the Smithsonian leadership or to order changes to exhibits, so his executive order targets the sidewalks out front, which are maintained by the National Park Service. The order calls for signs telling visitors about the White House report and directing them to resources for what he calls “accurate information regarding America’s history.” It also calls for a temporary exhibit that corrects information he deems inaccurate.
Smithsonian officials declined to comment on Trump’s order.
Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, challenged the White House report during congressional hearings last week.
“As we continue to fact-check the report, we unwaveringly attest that it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum,” she told lawmakers. “There is always room for improvement. But I also know the beauty and the inspiration and the expertise that lies in our collections, our exhibits, and our programming.”
The Smithsonian operates outside the executive branch, and museum directors report to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch, who is subject to oversight from its Board of Regents.
Trump’s escalating effort to force changes at the Smithsonian marks the president’s latest move to transform cultural pillars of society, such as universities and art, that he considers out of step with conservative sensibilities. Trump had himself installed as chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with the aim of overhauling programming, and his handpicked board voted to add his name to the building, only for a federal judge to later order the signs to be removed.
Trump has also imposed changes on historical sites beyond Washington, including in Philadelphia, where the administration won a court ruling this month allowing it to reinstall interpretive panels that critics say whitewash the history of slavery at the site of President Washington’s home. Advocates, academics and officials have been concerned for months that the version that complies with Trump’s order could give a history that plays down the pain in the nation’s past in favor of a more triumphant view.
Trump in March revealed his intention to force changes at the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order that targeted funding for programs that advanced “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology.”
President Trump’s $1.4-billion crypto windfall has become the biggest obstacle to passing his sweeping digital-asset legislation as Democrats demand tougher language to prevent the president from profiting off an industry his administration regulates.
Senate Republicans released a proposal this week intended to break a months-long impasse over the bill, known as the Clarity Act. But Democrats and consumer watchdog groups dismissed the terms almost immediately, complaining the bill would not stop Trump or his family from continuing to profit from his meme coin and other crypto ventures.
Trump needs the support of at least seven Senate Democrats to pass the legislation, which would set rules for digital assets. Ethics has emerged as the biggest, though not the only, sticking point.
“It’s the linchpin,” said Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Maryland Democrat and key negotiator who has been supportive of the crypto industry.
A spokesperson for the White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House has consistently asserted Trump is not involved in managing the family’s crypto ventures and has denied conflicts of interest.
Democrats have specifically taken issue with a provision that would leave Trump’s Justice Department as the primary enforcer of the new ethics regulations, preventing state attorneys general from acting as an independent check.
Another Democratic negotiator, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said they’re working on a compromise ethics proposal to send to the White House but didn’t provide details.
Senators in both parties said they see the negotiations in the coming week as key to whether a bill reaches Trump’s desk this year. But after the chilly initial reception to the latest White House offer, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.C.) said he didn’t think the Clarity Act would pass the chamber before the month-long August recess.
“We’ll see where the votes are,” Thune said.
Alsobrooks, Gallego and other crypto-friendly Democrats are demanding changes to other pieces of the massive bill, including consumer protection and illicit finance measures.
The bill has other issues, including opposition from banks intent on tightening restrictions on stablecoin rewards. Tillis and several other Republicans said they are considering backing changes to reflect banks’ concerns that their deposits could shift to stablecoin accounts, crimping their profits and customers’ access to credit.
Tillis has floated adding “circuit-breaker” language empowering the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. or other regulators to step in if bank deposits drop — an idea opposed by GOP Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, the crypto industry’s biggest backer in the chamber.
Porous provisions
Critics said the draft’s ethics protections are porous. It would let Trump divest a large stake in his crypto venture or move it into a blind trust for the rest of his term, but stops short of requiring him to sell.
“It’s going to allow him to keep making money the way he has in the past,” said Scott Greytak, deputy executive director of Transparency International US, an anti-corruption advocacy group.
The restrictions also hinge on whether an official has a “direct interest” in a crypto asset — a threshold that may not apply to Trump.
The president is a significant owner of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, through an entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC, which holds about a 38% stake. Whether that counts as a direct interest “isn’t clear,” said Zach Everson, research director for Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project. “Does direct interest describe how he holds the crypto?”
Because the bill wouldn’t apply to the children of government officials, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump could continue their own crypto business interests. And much of the family’s fortune has already been made: Trump and his affiliates have earned a huge windfall from meme coin and token ventures, income the legislation would not claw back.
Critics also decried a provision that would sunset the ethics requirements on Jan. 20, 2029, the day Trump’s successor would be inaugurated. That could prevent the next administration from holding Trump accountable.
The White House and Republicans argued that Trump had gone further in backing ethics restrictions in law than any previous president.
“History will remember this as the moment a president chose a higher standard of ethics than the law required of him,” Lummis, a key architect of the bill, said on X.
Democrats were skeptical even before the language was released. “Any meaningful ethics provision would be shot down by the White House,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said.
The politics of crypto have long divided Democrats, and a bipartisan deal on the legislation risks provoking a backlash from progressives. Failure to reach a deal, however, could make the party the target of a torrent of crypto campaign cash.
Crypto group Fairshake and its two affiliated super PACs have raised $164 million for the midterm elections, Federal Election Commission filings show, and have spent $66.6 million so far.
It’s the kind of political arsenal that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York can ill afford to have aimed at his candidates as the party seeks to regain Senate control.
But others, like Murphy, have warned that blessing Trump’s big crypto bill would undermine Democrats’ midterm message.
A potential presidential candidate, Murphy said Wednesday while addressing the left-leaning Center for American Progress that the bill is before the Senate “because the industry paid for it” and urged Democrats to instead turn fighting crypto corruption into a potent campaign issue this fall.
Markets have grown less convinced a deal gets done. On Polymarket, the odds of the Clarity Act passing this year fell to about 1 chance in 3 earlier this week after Republicans released the new draft.
That’s about half the odds the prediction market gave passage after the Senate Banking Committee backed an earlier version of the bill on May 14.
Dennis and Patterson write for Bloomberg. Bloomberg writers Yash Roy, Lydia Beyoud, Aidan Williams, Bill Allison and Olga Kharif contributed to this report.
Tech scion David Ellison for months projected confidence that his blockbuster Hollywood merger was on a glide path to completion.
His media company Paramount Skydance’s pitch early this year was that its proposed $111-billion acquisition of rival Warner Bros. Discovery could easily clear regulatory hurdles — unlike Netflix’s competing bid.
Ellison has heavyweights in his corner: his billionaire father Larry Ellison, co-founder of software giant Oracle, is bankrolling the deal, and President Trump is eager for the Ellison family to own CNN and other Warner assets, including HBO and the Burbank film and TV studios behind “Batman,” Harry Potter, Wile E. Coyote, and “The Pitt.”
“We could technically close [the deal] tomorrow,” Ellison told business new channel CNBC during a March interview. “There is nothing in this transaction that trips anything that would create cause for concern.”
But Paramount made a dramatic retreat Friday after two weeks of legal setbacks. The firm had been aiming to close the deal by September but agreed to table its takeover — perhaps until next spring — to allow a fiercer than expected challenge from California Atty. General Rob Bonta and 11 other Democrat state attorneys general to advance to trial before an Oakland-based federal judge.
The state prosecutors allege Paramount’s proposed merger with Warner Bros. violates a century-old antitrust law by giving the combined company too much heft in theatrical movie distribution and cable television.
The delay could saddle Paramount, the smallest of the major media companies, with substantial legal fees and hundreds of millions of dollars in added deal costs. In February, Paramount offered Warner investors a sweetener, so-called “ticking fees,” to win the auction.
Those fees, which begin accruing in October, will cost Paramount an extra $7 million a day — until the purchase is finalized. And if Paramount fails to close the merger, it would owe Warner Bros. Discovery a $7-billion breakup fee.
“Anyone who thinks they know how this deal ends should think again,” Forrester Research analyst Mike Proulx said in a statement. “This deal may still close or it may not. … The path to either outcome just got longer, messier, and likely more expensive.”
Paramount now must strengthen its case for a high-stakes trial while fortifying Paramount’s existing businesses and holding together a coalition of financiers, which includes the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar which jointly agreed to contribute $24 billion for equity stakes in the combined company.
Paramount reversed course after U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín dealt the company a blow on Monday when she temporarily blocked Paramount from finalizing the acquisition until mid-August. Looming was a key Aug. 3 hearing for the judge to determine whether the moratorium should be extended.
Paramount was concerned the judge would block the deal for the foreseeable future.
“They saw the writing on the wall,” Bonta said in an interview.
Columbia Law School business professor Eric Talley added: “This doesn’t constitute Paramount Skydance coming out and waving a big white flag — but it is a small white flag of surrender.”
Paramount, in a statement, said heading straight to trial would prove advantageous.
“This is the fastest and clearest way to prove that this transaction is good for competition, good for consumers, and good for creators,” Paramount said. “We look forward to proving our case at trial.”
Last week, the Writers Guild of America separately filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the merger, alleging that writers would encounter less work and lower pay should Paramount buy Warner Bros.
Now the merger won’t close until after a resolution in the litigation or by June 1, 2027, whichever date comes first.
“This is what we’ve been asking for from the start,” Bonta said. “We just wanted the court to have sufficient time to review our case without the threat of the companies merging.”
Ellison, through a Paramount spokesperson, declined an interview request.
The delay brings a different set of challenges, Talley said, including pushing the date of the takeover until after November’s pivotal mid-term elections when control of Congress might change hands.
“That itself could be disruptive,” Talley said. “Suppose we get a flip of the House of Representatives or the Senate, then we may see testimony in Congress.”
Prominent Democrats, including Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) have expressed alarm over the potential consolidation, which would shrink the number of legacy film studios and bring CNN in addition to CBS News under Ellison control.
Attempts to get Ellison to testify in Congress have fallen short. The Paramount chief declined an invitation to appear before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights in February, as well as a subsequent request from Booker to appear during an April spotlight hearing.
“To what extent was the rush to get the deal done related to the midterms, and what press coverage was going to look like in the upcoming election season?” Talley asked. “CNN is not a huge money-making asset but it is a prominent asset of Warner Brothers Discovery.”
On Friday night, Trump extolled his friendship with the Ellison family during the White House Correspondents Assn. dinner while also criticizing prominent CNN anchors.
David Ellison is “going to make, I think, fantastic changes and keep some of the great stuff going,” Trump said.
CBS News has been roiled since shortly after the Ellisons acquired Paramount in August, and installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News. She has overseen a series of controversial moves, including shaking up the evening news and sacking several “60 Minutes” correspondents.
Paramount scored one victory: the European Commission gave its blessing for the merger to go forward in the European countries it represents. The company now has gained clearances from more than 60 jurisdictions, including from the U.S. Justice Department, which found the merger would likely boost competition — not harm it.
Now, Paramount’s biggest obstacle is winning the case against Bonta and the other state attorneys general.
The states plan to request a trial in 2027, after the two sides conduct months of discovery to prepare their cases.
“We want to take depositions of employees. We want to take depositions of customers and competitors in these marketplaces that are impacted [and] we want documents,” Bonta said.
“We want to depose their experts and probe and test their experts’ opinions,” he said. “That all takes time.”
Bonta and the other state attorneys sidestepped the political landscape in making their lawsuit arguments.
“This is just a straight-up meat-and-potatoes antitrust case,” Bonta said. “The main point here is that antitrust enforcement is important because monopolies that lessen competition hurt everyday people.
“Once we have a trial, we’re going to win,” Bonta said. “So we think and we hope there will never be a merger.”
