president trump

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.”

Cooper writes for the Associated Press.

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.”

WASHINGTON — For the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner on Friday at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, security will be much tighter, the guest list smaller, the partying pared down, and the dress code more relaxed.

That much, the correspondents’ association can control.

What remains out of its control — and perhaps the biggest question — is what the dinner’s most prominent guest, President Trump, will bring to the table.

Call it White House Dinner 2.0, or Take Two, or, in Trump’s own words, a “HOT ticket.” The big unknown is whether Trump will bring the fighting words (“rather nasty,” he said) against the press that he’d planned to deliver in April — before the event descended into chaos when a gunman stormed a security checkpoint, forcing an evacuation of the room.

“The president looks forward to finishing what he started,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday, confirming Trump’s attendance. “I encourage everyone watching tomorrow night to tune in for what promises to be a very entertaining and memorable evening.”

Trump has been coy about what he might say

As for Trump himself, he indicated last month he wasn’t sure. “I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people, but we will soon find out,” the Republican president wrote on his Truth Social platform. “In any event, it will be a ‘HOT’ ticket!”

Besides the pared-down approach, there is another change at Friday’s dinner: two additional awards. One will be presented to Victor Gonzales, the Secret Service agent who was staffing a security checkpoint in April and was struck in his protective vest.

“Officer Gonzales … ran toward danger so that thousands of others could make it home safely,” WHCA President Weijia Jiang said in a statement. “His courage stemmed from a dedication to service, which we are looking forward to honoring this week.”

A second award will be presented to the staff of the Washington Hilton hotel, site of the first dinner.

Other changes: With security in mind, there will be only one entrance at the much smaller venue, with airport-style metal detectors. Guests received individual QR entry codes in advance, and nobody can get in unless recognized. “There is NO red carpet at this dinner,” said a memo Jiang sent to some guests last month, seen by The Associated Press. “There are NO onsite pre-dinner receptions.”

The dress code this time is a looser “black tie optional,” and dinner includes grilled peach and burrata salad, lobster, and beef Wellington. The evening, as at the last dinner, has entertainment by mentalist Oz Pearlman, along with the awards presentations and Trump’s remarks.

Jiang and her fellow board members worked hard to bring about this WHCA dinner 2.0, not wanting to let a violent act — or the image of colleagues hiding under tables — remain the final thought. Announcing the rescheduling, she emphasized the dinner’s stated purpose: “a celebration of a free press and the vital role of journalism in our democracy for over a century.”

“We will not allow an act of violence to have the last word, especially during a year when we are reflecting on the 250th anniversary of America and everything we stand for,” Jiang said.

There’s still lots of criticism of the event

But it’s also clear that some people felt the dinner should not be rescheduled at all.

Many never thought it was much of a good look in the first place, with the sight of journalists in formal wear cozying up to their sources, or the objects of their reporting.

“It undermines the public faith in how the press does its work, and it makes it look like we are pals with the people we cover,” Kelly McBride, an ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, said when the deliberations were taking place.

The new dinner comes during a time of fast-increasing tension between the media and a president who, in his second term, has tried to exert pressure on media outlets he is unhappy with in a variety of ways. That pressure has ranged from sanctions against members of the White House press corps to regulatory actions through the Federal Communications Commission to outright lawsuits.

Those tensions have only escalated since April, with the latest example reaching a New York courtroom on Thursday. There, criticized by a federal judge for sloppy legal work, the government withdrew subpoenas that would have compelled three New York Times reporters to testify about their sources for articles about Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet.

That escalation was the impetus behind a letter from a coalition of press freedom groups and hundreds of former journalists, urging the WHCA to stand up to Trump forcefully at the dinner.

“We believe it is hypocritical to celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it,” the letter says. “We urge the WHCA to condemn the administration’s actions from the podium and pledge to fight all attempts by his administration to undermine this core pillar of a functioning democracy.”

Noveck writes for the Associated Press.

What’s done is done.

The Dodgers went to the White House on Thursday and met with President Trump for the second year in a row, following back-to-back World Series championships.

At the time of their visit, the Dodgers had the best record in Major League Baseball with 65 wins and 38 losses. Winning three titles in a row won’t be easy, but assuming they pull off another victory in October, here are five reasons the Dodgers should not go back to the White House next year.

What’s the point?

Ceremonial visits have been going on for years, and both Democratic and Republican presidents have embraced the tradition with athletes from various sports.

If you’d like to know why I didn’t have anything to say in 2021, when the Dodgers visited President Biden at the White House, that’s a good question.

I didn’t dwell on it at the time because I think such visits are kind of ho-hum. But now we’ve had three visits in five years, and in my head, this hammers home the point that baseball players have nothing to gain from a visit. They’re baseball players, and as such, there is no higher honor than winning the World Series.

I like baseball, but it’s not like these guys are astronauts, just back from the moon.

If the Dodgers want to mark their achievement and honor the game of baseball in the nation’s capital, fine. They should go to the Smithsonian as a team and visit the display where Jackie Robinson’s jersey is enshrined.

They’re being put in an awkward position

As Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts put it in saying that he wouldn’t join his teammates, he couldn’t win either way.

“If I do” go, he said, “people are gonna hate me. If I don’t, people are gonna hate me.”

That’s an exaggeration, but I get his point. Dodger utility man Kiké Hernandez said he wasn’t going, either, explaining that he was busy rehabbing an injury.

The Dodgers should take the pressure off the players by politely declining an invitation to visit.

Besides, people like baseball because it’s an escape, a distraction, a diversion. You want to have a clear head as you try to remember why you willingly packed up your kids and paid $400 for lousy seats and food at Dodger Stadium to watch Kyle Tucker, at $60 million a year, foul out to the catcher.

You do not want to think about the American political cesspool as you watch the Dodgers rally from behind, win in late innings, and inch ever closer to going back to the White House again next year.

They’re being used

The players were apparently told they could make their own decision about whether to go to the White House.

What they should have been told was that they were being exploited.

When a president hosts a team at the White House, there is only one reason.

It’s a photo op.

Not for the team, but for the president.

Baseball might no longer be the national pastime, but it’s a part of American culture, with fans of every political stripe in every state. There’s kind of a folksy quality in the manufactured banter between a president and the ballplayers. He can fawn over them and joke with them and look more like a regular guy — one of the boys.

“This is really a special team,” Trump said during the Dodger visit. “It’s special winners. They’re champions, and just unbelievable.”

Yeah, we knew that when they beat the Blue Jays.

Nine months ago.

Too much ring kissing is a turnoff

If you are going to go, can you at least not embarrass yourself?

Dodgers Chairman Mark Walter handed Trump a Dodgers jersey and World Series ring at the White House. Somehow, he managed to restrain himself from bending to one knee and kissing the president’s ring.

“Thank you for welcoming us today, Mr. President,” Walter said. “We’re proud of that team and what it has achieved, and we hope to be back here again next year.”

As The Times’ Maddie Lee noted, this was just days after Bloomberg reported that “two insurance companies controlled by Walter, as well as Guggenheim Partners, where Walter is chief executive, are being investigated by federal prosecutors for potential financial improprieties.”

“No charges have been filed,” Lee wrote. “Representatives from the parent company of the insurance firms as well as from TWC Global — the Walter business empire that controls his sporting investments, including the Dodgers and Lakers — have told reporters they are cooperating with the investigation.”

So that’s another problem with the Dodgers’ visit.

How can we not wonder about ulterior motives?

It’s hard to keep track of who’s kissing whose ring.

Politics is unavoidable

The Dodger brain trust has attempted to cast White House visits as an exercise in tradition, not politics.

“Like I’ve always said, my company line, my personal line is I hope that we get this invitation every year,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said before the visit. “Because that’s the goal: to win a championship, to get this invitation to the White House. And I’m not a politician, and I’m doing something that teams have done for decades. And so that’s where I stand, really. I’m a baseball coach. That’s what I do.”

That couldn’t be more naive.

The Dodgers love to project a wholesome, family-friendly essence. But American discourse has not been more vulgar, polarizing or politicized in my lifetime, and I’m reminded of the line, “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”

In Trump’s world, there are only two kinds of people: friends and foes. The Dodgers are now friends, and when Venezuelan World Series hero Miguel Rojas was singled out by Trump, who launched an unprovoked attack on his country, that reeked of calculated political staging.

The White House itself has been a staging ground for political assaults on the Dodgers’ home state and on immigrants who come from regions of the world that are home to some of the Dodger players. Election integrity has been politicized. The Supreme Court has been politicized. The water quality in the reflecting pool has been politicized. And at a White House cage fight, a former first lady was brazenly disparaged.

You can’t peel off your baseball uniform, put on your wedding suit, and stand there with the president, smiling and shaking hands and being voluntarily patronized, without having made a political statement.

Better to stick to what you know best.

And besides.

Trump is a Yankees fan.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham stands by her comments about transgender athletes competing: She says she just ‘wants to protect’ women’s sports.

Despite her views that were expressed in an ESPN article published Tuesday, Cunningham insisted the next day that she doesn’t have anything against the transgender community.

“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,’” Cunningham said in the article. “I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

The article became fodder for questions Wednesday before the Fever’s 123-88 victory against the Connecticut Sun.

“I think it’s kind of common sense,” Cunningham told reporters. “And I think I’ll always believe in that. I think it’s really important to protect children, and that’s little girls who are also involved in that category. And so I’ll stand on what I said, and I’ll always believe that.”

She reiterated that her feelings on the matter don’t stem from hatred.

“I think there is room for absolutely everyone here, and I think there is room to love everyone,” Cunningham said. “I truly think when you get people in the same room and you have conversations, you actually have a lot in common with a lot of people. And so I’m there to love.

“But I’m also there to love biological women, and I think that there are rights that need to be protected. And, like I said, I’m gonna stand true to that. I’ll never falter in my beliefs in that. But I have never once said that I hated the trans community. Like I said, I think there’s space for everyone.”

Cunningham appeared to triple down on her comments Thursday morning on Instagram, writing simply, “I said what I said.”

The topic of transgender athletes participating in women’s sports has become a polarizing issue in recent years. In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” that looked to ensure that entities receiving federal funding abide by Title IX in alignment with the administration’s view that a person’s sex is the gender they were assigned at birth.

Last month, the Supreme Court upheld laws in West Virginia and Idaho that banned transgender athletes from competing on girls’ sports teams. Days later, two transgender girls who were the first to challenge Trump’s executive order dropped their lawsuit in New Hampshire.

“Men should not be playing in women’s sports. It’s completely ludicrous that anyone could support that,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday. “It’s even more ludicrous that you do have [Sophie] Cunningham — a female athlete herself, very accomplished in her own right — coming forth and speaking that truth that men shouldn’t play in women’s sports, we want to protect women and girls, and the backlash she is receiving from Democrats and left-wing figures across the country is astonishing.”

The league’s collective bargaining agreement states that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” but does not specifically exclude transgender women. When reached for comment, a WNBA representative referred The Times to a statement released by the Fever on Wednesday.

“Our players are thoughtful adults with their own perspectives and voices, and those views are their own,” the team said. “We are committed to welcoming fans from every background and treating everyone with respect, and that’s what guides us as an organization.”

Cunningham has been called “MAGA Barbie” since her college days at Missouri, according to Complex, because some of the people she follows and engagement with conservatives on social media.

In 2022, when Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship, Cunningham reposted a since-deleted tweet stating that “female collegiate athletes deserve so much better than this.”

Soon after, Cunningham posted a statement saying that she stands “with all people, especially my fellow athletes.”

“I do not judge, but support all races, religions, sexual preferences and gender equity,” she wrote. “We all have a place in this world to compete and I hope we are able to grant everyone that opportunity fairly.”

Even with a seeming endorsement from the White House and a nickname that’s followed her, Cunningham says her political views are “very much in the middle.”

“I agree with things on both sides, disagree with things on both sides,” she said in the ESPN article. “And that’s all I’ve ever said about my political beliefs. But people love to assume.”

On Wednesday, Cunningham went into more detail, telling reporters “I’m not a very political person.”

“But I do have beliefs, I have morals, and I’ll always stand on those and be true to who I am,” she added. “… And so when it comes to just protecting young girls in sport and women in sport, I feel very strongly about that.

“That’s why you have Title IX. That’s why you have some of the greats in women’s sports. If Title IX and women’s sports weren’t protected, then you wouldn’t hear about any type of women in sport.”

WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday passed a defense policy bill that incorporates President Trump’s request for a historic $1.15 trillion in spending for national security and would designate the Department of Defense as the Department of War.

It also would provide for a pay raise next year ranging from 5% to 7% for service members, depending upon their rank.

The National Defense Authorization Act is generally one of the more bipartisan bills that Congress takes up on an annual basis. That’s not the case this year. The vote was 216-212.

Democrats took issue with steep spending increases for the Pentagon as Republicans attempted to cut numerous non-defense programs through other bills. They also opposed some of the conservative social policy riders that were included.

For example, the bill includes a prohibition on gender-related medical care under the military health program known as TRICARE. It also eases hurdles for service members to carry a privately owned firearm on base, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s lead on the issue.

Republican leaders’ decision to attach Trump’s elections overhaul bill to the defense bill upon its passing also amplified the partisan divide. Speaker Mike Johnson is working to accommodate Republican lawmakers who are angry that the Senate won’t pass the SAVE America Act and are insisting that it be included in must-pass bills until the Senate relents.

House bill tests a normally bipartisan process

Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he knows there were areas of disagreement, but emphasized that Wednesday’s vote was a step in a long process. He promised to work in a bipartisan manner on a final product that can pass both chambers and be signed into law.

Rogers said the United States needs to reverse decades of underinvestment and neglect in the nation’s armed forces and defense industrial base.

“This bill will do that and much more,” he said. “It will build the ready, capable and lethal fighting force we need to deter China and other adversaries.”

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democratic lawmaker on the Armed Services Committee, said the defense spending the administration has asked for this year is approaching $1.6 trillion including separate efforts to pay for the war in Iran and boost weapons stockpiles.

“The American people are struggling to pay their bills and we’re going to put $1.6 trillion into the defense budget. It’s not a reasonable thing to ask,” Smith said.

Smith also expressed concern about the war with Iran and that in supporting the defense bill, lawmakers are “de facto supporting this war with no end in sight.”

“We are in an incredibly, incredibly dangerous time,” Smith said. “I want to maintain the bipartisan nature of this bill. I do. And I know that the chairman does. But if we’re going to do this, we’re going to need some Republicans to stand up to the president of the United States and say, ‘No. No, we’re not going to get you $1.6 trillion. No, we’re not just going to give you a blank check for a war that is totally out of control.‘”

White House backs parts of the legislation

The spending increases authorized in the bill would not take effect until Congress follows up with a separate defense appropriations bill. The Senate has not yet approved its version of the defense measure. It’s possible a final product won’t be ready until after the midterm elections.

The White House applauded the spending levels authorized in the House bill and the Department of War designation that it says recognizes the “willingness to fight and win wars on behalf of our nation.”

The president issued an executive order last year renaming the Defense Department, but it’s up to Congress to make the change official. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the renaming could cost taxpayers as much as $125 million.

The White House’s statement also said that the administration has a number of concerns with certain provisions in the bill and would work with Congress before a final bill is presented to the president. Among those concerns was a section of the bill it said would limit or undermine the president’s ability to name military installations and property.

In 2023, during a national reckoning on issues of race in America, seven Army bases’ names were changed because they honored Confederate leaders. Last year, those bases reverted to their original names, but with different namesakes who share Confederate surnames. The Army found other service members with the same last names to honor.

Freking writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has agreed to work with Saudi Arabia to develop a civilian nuclear program, a watershed moment following a years-long effort to curb the proliferation of nuclear technology in the Middle East.

The announcement comes as President Trump has vowed to continue executing a war against Iran over its own nuclear ambitions. On Wednesday, the president warned he would target a bridge or power plant for every commercial vessel Iran fires upon in the Strait of Hormuz, after earlier this week threatening to strike a new facility Tehran is reportedly building to conceal its continued nuclear work.

The Saudi deal stoked surprise and immediate concern across Washington, where lawmakers are expected to have a vote on the matter, as well as in Israel, itself a nuclear power that has long feared an atomic arms race could grip the region.

A Saudi nuclear program has long been tied to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear work, which successive U.S. administrations have said extends beyond civilian purposes. After Iran struck a nuclear deal with world powers in 2015, Saudi Arabia vowed to match whatever nuclear capabilities Tehran was allowed to keep.

In the decade since, U.S. officials had tried to keep Saudi Arabia from developing its own program, fearing it would fuel nuclear competition across the Middle East. But it became a consistent and central point of negotiation between the two allies.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations ultimately offered to support a limited, monitored program as part of a broader deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, hoping that a diplomatic breakthrough would mitigate the risks of an arms race.

But the agreement secured this week left skeptics in Washington and the region unclear what the United States had secured in return.

The deal comes after Trump told reporters this week that the goal of resuming war with Iran was to prevent them from ever obtaining nuclear weapons, a challenge that has vexed the international community since the outset of the century.

U.S. presidents have long sought to prevent Middle Eastern countries from acquiring technologies that could be used to build weapons of mass destruction. The 2003 invasion of Iraq over false claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs prompted Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi to abandon his nuclear work. Over the next two decades, the United States and Israel also targeted Syria’s nuclear and chemical weapons programs under Bashar al-Assad.

But Iran’s slow march to nuclear weapons capability, enriching uranium near to weapons-grade with no clear civilian or scientific ends, has prompted other countries in the region to question whether they, too, might need similar capabilities to counterbalance a historic foe. Israel, which views the Islamic Republic and its nuclear program as existential threats, is widely believed to possess its own nuclear weapons.

Hours after the nuclear deal was reported by the Wall Street Journal, the White House was silent on the details and Trump administration officials were left scrambling when asked by lawmakers and reporters for answers.

While traveling in Manila, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters he was aware of the news reports, but deferred to the White House to provide more public information.

When pressed about the risks of such a deal, Rubio said he would not “opine directly on the agreement,” but said the United States “is not going to reach any agreement with any country in the world that leads to the risk of proliferation.”

The White House confirmed the deal Wednesday afternoon.

Back in Washington, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he has not yet seen the agreement with Saudi Arabia.

The deal, which would last 30 years and involve American firms developing the program, is expected to be submitted for review to Congress. Lawmakers will consider the deal as they grow increasingly uneasy about the Trump administration’s handling of an expanding Iran war, which Trump and Israel launched, arguing for the need to wipe out Tehran’s capabilities to build nuclear weapons.

As the war enters its fifth month, Trump has continued to defend the military efforts and has dismissed the idea that war is unpopular among Americans as they feel the economic effects.

“Americans aren’t against the war,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “Americans don’t want high gasoline prices but they’re not against the war.”

Trump’s remarks were made as he traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to attend a dignified transfer of U.S. service members killed in the war. Asked what he would say to the families who lost their loved ones, Trump said he’d tell them they’re loved.

“All I’m going to say is, we love you. We love your child, and that’s what they are to them. They’re their children. There’s no games, no nothing,” Trump said. “That’s their child, and all you can do is throw out your heart.”

Earlier in the day, Trump said the United States will destroy a bridge or power plant in Iran each time it shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for the global energy supply.

Trump’s threat to target bridges and power plants would mark yet another escalation that could affect civilians in the region.

Hasan Ghashghavi, a member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, denied Trump’s claim on Tuesday that Iran was requesting negotiations, saying in a statement on X that it was “in no way consistent with the facts.”

“It seems that Trump, in order to extricate himself from the quagmire he’s trapped in, should seek better paths,” he wrote. “Repetitive lies no longer even bring about short-term market relief.”

Times staff writer Nabih Bulos in Beirut contributed to this report.

More than 16 congressional Democrats accused the Federal Communications Commission this week of running a license-review process “tainted by animus and ideology,” demanding the agency back off its early scrutiny of Disney stations, including Los Angeles’ KABC-TV and San Francisco’s KGO-TV — while alleging the FCC has politicized its power.

The lawmakers signed letters to FCC Secretary Marlene H. Dortch to register their dismay and question the legitimacy of the FCC’s review protocol.

The letter campaign is a response to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s decision in April to order an early review of Disney’s licenses for the eight ABC television stations that it owns. The review is entering its home stretch; public comments are due to the FCC by July 29.

Calling a station’s licenses for an early review is rare, and it’s been four decades since the FCC revoked a TV station license.

Carr’s move requiring Disney to submit to an early review came after President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump expressed outrage over a joke by ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that referenced the first lady.

“This early renewal process is merely a smokescreen to pursue President Trump’s vindictive agenda to silence minority voices and punish companies that decline to do his bidding,” according to the letter signed by Reps. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), Kevin Mullin (D-South San Francisco), Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and others.

The FCC maintains the ABC station review sprung from concerns about Disney’s internal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, but the lawmakers said there was no evidence that Disney’s personnel policies violate any laws.

Instead, they said, Trump has made it clear that he sees TV license renewals as a means to squeeze media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

The FCC separately has taken aim at ABC’s daytime discussion show, “The View,” which delves deeply into politics.

Disney has pushed back against the early evaluation of its TV station licenses, which were originally up for review between 2028 and 2031. The Burbank giant filed its renewal applications “under protest.”

“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” Disney’s WABC-TV station, based in New York, wrote in a May filing with the commission. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”

California congressional Democrats have strongly condemned Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s decision to mandate early, unprecedented license renewals for eight Disney-owned ABC stations, including KABC-TV in Los Angeles.

(Google street view)

The FCC maintains that Disney is the one politicizing the station review.

“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said in a May statement. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”

In the tussle over whether “The View” qualifies for an exemption to the so-called equal time rules for politicians, an FCC spokesperson said in a statement: “ABC should focus on complying with its public interest obligations, rather than misleading the public about them.”

The lawmakers, in the two letters, did not wade into the controversy over “The View.”

Instead, they stressed the importance of the two stations — KABC and KGO — to their local communities.

“KABC is an important local television station that millions of our constituents rely on for daily news, traffic, emergency weather alerts, and programming that serves our local community,” according to the letter spearheaded by Friedman, whose district includes Disney’s headquarters.

“Any refusal to renew this license would be strongly against the public interest,” the group wrote.

Congresswoman Laura Friedman is leading a letter campaign by Democrats in Congress to defend Disney’s KABC-TV.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

A second letter highlighted the importance of Disney’s San Francisco station, which serves nine counties in that region.

“For over 75 years, KGO has been operating in the public interest in our region, offering reliable journalism, indispensable emergency information, and steadfast community engagement that our constituents and viewers rely on,” according to the letter headed by Mullin.

The station also serves as a broadcast partner to the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade, the city’s Pride parade, the Oakland Black Joy parade and the Bay to Breakers race. It also raises awareness for organizations including Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired and Bay Area Autism Collective, the lawmakers said.

“KGO’s operations reflects the television station’s deep investment and commitment to viewers in the Bay Area,” the lawmakers wrote. “KGO is a community partner. … We urge the FCC to reconsider its unlawful censorship campaign against ABC and all other political opponents of President Trump.”

After U.S. strikes on Iran’s largest nuclear facilities last year, both President Trump and the White House were adamant that the Middle East nation’s nuclear program had been destroyed.

“Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!” Trump wrote on social media.

“Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News,” the White House wrote in a press release.

A year later, the U.S. and Iran are five months into a war Trump said would be over in weeks. Iran has gained leverage by seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital energy corridor, and the U.S. has been forced to the negotiating table as global gas prices have spiked — including again this week after a ceasefire agreement collapsed.

And Trump — facing mounting criticism that he has pushed the U.S. into another “forever war” despite campaigning on doing exactly the opposite — is leaning back into the notion that Iran presents an unacceptable nuclear threat and strikes are needed, namely at another Iranian nuclear facility known as Pickaxe Mountain.

“Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” the president recently said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready.”

Pickaxe, a heavily fortified facility deep underground that would be difficult to penetrate even with powerful “bunker buster” bombs, was not targeted during last year’s 12 Day War between Iran and the U.S. and Israel, nor in the full-scale war of the last five months.

However, it is less than two miles from Natanz, one of Iran’s primary nuclear enrichment facilities, which was struck both last year and this year. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into Pickaxe last fall — bolstering its ability to reconstitute a nuclear program that threatens the U.S. and regional allies.

Trump’s sudden focus on Pickaxe as a suspected hub of Iranian nuclear activity, which comes as his administration is trying to justify its continued entanglement in its unpopular war there, is an acknowledgment that two prior military campaigns and years of attempted diplomacy by his administration have failed to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Few experts ever bought into the Trump administration’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program had been completely destroyed, and even Trump and his closest allies have walked some of those comments back — including in discussions about Iran’s ability to retrieve and repurpose enriched material buried at Natanz and other targeted sites.

Some experts have cited construction activity around Pickaxe as evidence Iran is continuing to develop the facility in violation of recent agreements with the U.S., but have said the exact nature of the work isn’t known. They’ve also wondered if the Trump administration intends to use the work there to lay the groundwork for a broader, boots-on-the-ground war effort that would be unpopular in the U.S. but necessary to truly accomplish Trump’s stated goal of ending Iran’s nuclear program for good.

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based think tank, said last week that it wasn’t clear “if Iran still plans on installing a large-scale assembly facility” at Pickaxe Mountain “given the destruction of Iran’s centrifuge program,” but “if Iran starts to rebuild its centrifuge manufacturing capability, it could plan to install a smaller centrifuge assembly facility in Pickaxe Mountain able to serve a nuclear weapons program.”

The space under the mountain, the institute said, may be “large enough to also hold a centrifuge enrichment plant capable of producing weapon-grade uranium” and is “likely large enough to also hold certain nuclear weaponization activities such as making weapon-grade uranium metal and shaping it into nuclear weapon components.”

Retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the former head of U.S. Central Command, told The Times that Iran has had a substantial amount of time to relocate equipment since the bombings of last year and has “demonstrated that they are savvy on these kinds of things,” and the U.S. “should be serious about it and try to confirm the intelligence.”

And “if there have been centrifuges that have been moved there and are underground and spinning and developing nuclear bomb grade materials,” he said, “we should be very, very concerned about that.”

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said it is true that Iran is continuing its enrichment program in clandestine ways that present an ongoing threat and that “the war is not going the way the president wanted.” He also said Iran’s activity around Pickaxe helps Trump justify the war — and its possible expansion.

Radd said Iran has used the war to block independent inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency and reconstituted some of its nuclear capabilities in the process, including as talks with the U.S. shifted from its nuclear program to the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump and the U.S., meanwhile, have “vacillated” between trying to “manage” the Iranian nuclear program by reining in enrichment, to trying to “neutralize” the program with targeted attacks on its nuclear infrastructure. Radd said that “even though his rhetoric is there,” Trump hasn’t had “the resolve or the ability or the mandate” to move to fully eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, because that would require “much more forceful intervention” than the American public is willing to accept, such as U.S. troops on the ground in Iran.

He said he wonders now if the president’s talk about Pickaxe is part of a shift in that direction — or at least threatening it — after Trump and his advisors realized that the current cycle of war, negotiations and then more war is giving Iran the time it needs to reconstitute its nuclear program.

“I’m wondering if that is just a threat, or if it’s a genuine option that the president is actually considering,” Radd said.

Under Senate questioning Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declined to say whether American bombs were capable of destroying whatever is under Pickaxe Mountain.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday she’s running for a full term to replace her late brother Lindsey Graham’s Senate seat.

“I’ve made a decision,” Graham told Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, according to a clip released of an interview set to air Monday. “I’m in.”

The entrance of Graham — sworn in last week to fulfill the remaining months of her late brother’s term, which expires in January — into the Republican scramble to select a new Senate nominee further complicates an already rushed process after Lindsey Graham ‘s death this month.

A weeklong filing period opens Tuesday for the special Republican primary, which will be Aug. 11. On Friday, President Trump said that Darline Graham had his “Complete and Total Endorsement” to seek the nomination, adding, “RUN, DARLINE, RUN!”

Last week, Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham to serve the remainder of her brother’s term.

In his announcement, McMaster made no reference to Graham as a placeholder or symbolic appointment, although a person familiar with McMaster’s thinking but unauthorized to speak publicly said the governor had never contemplated that she would run for the seat herself.

Before the emergence of Graham — and their Oval Office meeting after she was sworn in — Trump had suggested he could back a potential candidacy from Republican Rep. Russell Fry, who said Monday he would officially enter the special primary.

Funeral services for Lindsey Graham are scheduled to be held next week in Washington and South Carolina.

The millions in Graham’s campaign account aren’t funds that Darline Graham could directly access in a run of her own, said Bradley A. Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.

Under federal rules, Lindsey Graham’s campaign would be limited to transferring just $2,000 to a potential Darline Graham candidacy.

However, Smith said there is no limit on how much it could transfer to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which could — thanks to a Supreme Court decision last month — “spend an unlimited amount in coordination with Darline’s campaign.”

Kinnard writes for the Associated Press.

BEIRUT  — President Trump long railed against forever wars.

For years, whether as president or candidate, he flayed electoral opponents and previous presidents with his signature barbs, calling their entanglements a “complete waste of time” (Afghanistan), “the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country” (Iraq) and “stupid” (Ukraine).

Yet he now appears to be stumbling into a forever war of his own.

From the first days of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, Trump and his officials insisted their adventure abroad would be the exception, that the conflict would end in a matter of weeks.

Now, 4½ months later, after a torturous, start-stop vacillation between truce and war, the U.S. is pressing on with a fight that has no end in sight — or even a clear definition of what an acceptable end would be.

In the last week, the ceasefire collapsed, with the U.S. and Iran trading daily waves of strikes, leading to the deaths of two American servicemen on Friday when Iranian ballistic missiles struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, where U.S. assets and personnel are stationed.

On Sunday, as the U.S. and Iran launched more air assaults, the U.S. announced that a service member was killed Saturday in Iraq during the controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone.

On March 9, the remains of U.S. Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, 26, of Glendale, Ky., then the seventh U.S. service member to die in combat during the Iran war, are transferred at Dover Air Force Base, Del.

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)

The deaths in Jordan were the first combat fatalities since the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. One soldier remains missing, according to a statement from U.S. Central Command.

Including the most recent casualties, 17 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 430 wounded since the war began, the Pentagon says.

In Iran, at least 57 people have been killed and more than 517 injured in U.S. attacks in the last three weeks, according to Iranian health authorities. The death toll since the beginning of the war has surpassed 3,500, and more than 27,000 have been wounded.

The U.S. and Israeli militaries have — in the telling of Trump and various officials — decimated Iran’s navy and air defenses, eviscerated multiple layers of its leadership and bombed tens of thousands of targets across the country.

Despite that military pressure, and Trump’s insistence that members of Iran’s leadership “want to make a deal” (he’s said that an accord was on hand no less than 46 times since the start of the war), Tehran has refused to surrender its nuclear and missile arsenals and continues to support its regional militia allies.

Iran has also created a new pressure point to use against adversaries by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas flowed before the war. And it has widened the war’s footprint by targeting countries hosting American military assets.

Trump has vowed to expand bombings to include civilian infrastructure such as power plants and bridges in what he says is a bid to force Iran into negotiations once more.

He has also brought additional forces to the Middle East. According to Centcom, there are now 50,000 troops in the region, along with 20 naval warships and hundreds of warplanes.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, declined to comment on the deployments, though on Sunday the New York Times reported that the U.S. was sending to the region F-16 fighter jets from Germany and stealthy F-35 jets from Britain.

For observers, those moves signal that Trump is falling into an escalation trap.

“From Trump’s perspective, the easiest way to demonstrate resolve and power is by just bombing Iran and seeing what that brings about,” said Andreas Boehm, a Middle East expert and lecturer on international law at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Although those strikes seem tactically impressive, they have not helped him strategically, he said.

“In reality, it doesn’t change the situation because the Iranians won’t budge. And if you confuse tactical and strategic success, then you’re not going anywhere in any kind of war,” Boehm said.

An escalation on Washington’s part is also certain to spark a similar reaction from Tehran, said Vali Nasr, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

“Iran gets a vote here,” Nasr said, adding Iran could up the ante by closing Bab al Mandab, the vital strait connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. It could also widen attacks on infrastructure in Persian Gulf countries — moves that would trigger an even bigger ripple effect across global markets.

“Trump thought wars in the Middle East would be like Venezuela: a big in-and-out without a prolonged war,” Nasr said, referring to the Trump administration’s strike that saw U.S. forces abduct Venezuelan leader Nicholás Maduro and force the remaining members of his government to submit to U.S. control.

“And the reality is that it’s backfired,” he said.

Trump is not the first American president to think a foreign engagement wouldn’t last long. Whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, U.S. leaders dispatched troops on operations they thought would last weeks or months, dismissing warnings that they would be bogged down in years-long occupations.

Iran would be an especially sticky quagmire if Trump were to commit ground troops.

The country’s area — about 636,000 square miles — is more than double the size of Afghanistan, almost four times the size of Iraq, and five times the size of Vietnam — all nations where the U.S. struggled to prevail against adversaries not as well equipped and arguably less ideologically motivated than its adversaries in Iran.

Meanwhile, for a president whose central foreign policy campaign promise was no more wars, the growing number of casualties, along with the escalating damage inflicted by Iran on U.S. assets and allies, has exposed cracks in the support the Teflon-like Trump has enjoyed from his advocates.

Onetime MAGA acolytes, including flagship conservative figures such as Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones, have already turned on the president over the war and other issues. And Republican figures who had tied their star to Trump fear a drubbing in the midterms so long as the war continues.

If negotiations were to resume, it’s unclear whether Trump and his coterie of negotiators have the stamina or the foreign service expertise to bring about an accord.

After all, the 2015 Obama-era deal aimed at reining in Tehran’s nuclear program took 600 days and hundreds of diplomats and technical experts to negotiate.

With Trump relying on unconventional fixers such as his son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate investor Steve Witkoff, not to mention his evisceration of the diplomatic corps, an agreement of that scale appears unlikely.

“Everything is dependent on the mood of one man,” Nasr said.

“It’s not the system that’s making the decision; it’s not the country making the decision,” he said. “It’s one man, and it depends how he feels like at one particular point in time.”

Tehran too may be less amenable to negotiations with Trump, given his history: During his first term, he pulled out of the nuclear deal and ordered the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, a leading Iranian general.

In his second term, he launched bombing campaigns on Iran during negotiations — twice. And Iran accused the U.S. of repeatedly violating the April ceasefire and the memorandum of understanding signed in June.

Asked on NewsNation on Sunday about Iran’s announcement that it would no longer abide by the memorandum, Trump said, “I couldn’t care less.”

Such factors, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, lead to a formula for prolonged conflict.

“It’s a forever war in the making, and the reason why is that Trump has proven he’s impossible to negotiate with,” Vaez said.

If an agreement as superficial as the memorandum of understanding — which deferred thornier issues for late negotiations — was derailed, then there’s little option other than repeated cycles of violence.

“Once you’ve proven that diplomacy doesn’t work,” he said, “then there’s only war.”

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — This summer’s World Cup was so good, nobody wanted it to end.

So Spain and Argentina played on and on in Sunday’s final, through 90 minutes of regulation time and then through a 15-minute extra period before Ferran Torres gave Spain the only goal it needed to claim the title with a 1-0 victory over the defending champion at a sold-out MetLife Stadium.

It was an epic finish to an epic tournament, one that set records for everything from attendance and TV viewers to games played and goals scored. And it was almost certainly the last World Cup for Argentine captain Lionel Messi, 39, who finished his record-setting sixth tournament as the all-time leader in games (34), assists (12) and goal contributions (33).

His parting gift was a silver medal, a handshake from President Trump and a hug from the King of Spain. But none of those were the prize he wanted most, so when he left the stage after receiving his medal, he broke down in tears.

A swarming Spanish defense made him little more than a spectator for most of the match. So while Argentina came into the final leading the tournament in goals per game, it also became the first team to go 90 minutes without a shot in a World Cup final. It was outshot 20-2 for the game, and Spanish keeper Unai Simón, who gave up just one goal in eight matches, was not forced to make a save in registering his seventh clean sheet.

He was named the outstanding keeper of the tournament.

That allowed Torres, who started just once in the tournament, to become the hero.

“Honestly, I can’t believe it. I just am trying to enjoy it, but I don’t know what’s happening,” Torres said. “I didn’t think too much. I just saw the ball coming to me and I just shot with the power of all the Spanish people.”

Spain’s Ferran Torres celebrates after scoring in extra time against Argentina in the World Cup final Sunday.

(Julio Cortez / Associated Press)

Rodri, Spain’s captain and the anchor of the team’s smothering defense during its unbeaten World Cup run, won the Golden Ball award as the outstanding player of the tournament. He was equally stunned.

“I’m in shock,” he said. “I cannot express [my feelings] in words. I’m like in a cloud.”

For Rodri, who also led Spain to a European Championship two years ago, Sunday’s victory capped a personal two-year struggle to return from a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament he sustained in 2024, a month before he hobbled onstage with crutches to receive the Ballon d’Or award as the world’s best player.

“It’s been a really tough time,” said the midfielder, who broke the World Cup record for completed passes in the tournament with 747. “I just want new generations to see my example as an opportunity to when you go down, you can rise again. This is my philosophy my entire life.

“Sometimes things go well, things go wrong. But always the positive.”

Highlights from Spain’s 1-0 win over Argentina in the World Cup final on Sunday.

The only goal came seconds into the second extra-time period, with defender Pedro Porro sending a long cross to the left post for Nico Williams, who headed it back into the center of the box for Torres, a second-half substitute who buried the left-footed volley that would give Spain its second World Cup title.

Torres, who entered the game just past the hour mark, is the fifth man to come off the bench and score in a World Cup final and the first since Germany’s Mario Gotze, whose extra-time goal beat Argentina in 2014. Williams, who got the assist, was also a late-game substitute.

“We are world champions. I am very proud,” Luis de la Fuente, Spain’s coach, said through an interpreter after his team ran its unbeaten streak to a record 38 games.

“I’m very happy for my players. We’ve won in all the categories. We’ve grown together. We reached this stage today thanks to their talent, to their attitude, to their comportment, to their values and to the huge footballing talent.”

The goal ruined a superhuman effort by Argentine keeper Emiliano Martínez, who made 11 saves while playing with a fractured right ring finger that will require surgery. That’s two more saves than he had over the rest of the tournament.

But the moment that may have sealed Argentina’s fate came in the final minutes of second-half stoppage time when Enzo Fernández clattered into Spanish center back Pau Cubarsí at midfield, flipping him head over heels. Fernández had been booked minutes earlier for dissent, and the second yellow card led to his expulsion, forcing Argentina to finish shorthanded.

Spain wasted little time exploiting the advantage and appeared to have scored six minutes into extra time when Williams banged in the rebound of a Martínez save, only to have Slovakian referee Slavko Vincic wave it off, ruling that Spain’s Mikel Merino had fouled Argentine defender Nicolás Otamendi in the buildup to the goal.

Spain star Lamine Yamal in congratulated by FIFA President Gianni Infantino, left, and receives his medal from President Trump following Spain’s win over Argentina in the World Cup final Sunday.

(Justin Setterfield / Getty Images)

The capacity crowd of 80,663, matching the second-largest of the tournament’s 104 games, booed Trump when he appeared on a videoboard during the national anthem and again when he walked onto the pitch for the postgame awards ceremony.

During the victory ceremony after the final of last summer’s Club World Cup, played at the same stadium, Trump remained on the podium to celebrate with Chelsea’s players and was seen on TV pocketing one of the winners’ medals. On Sunday, after Trump joined FIFA President Gianni Infantino presenting the World Cup trophy to Rodri, the Spanish captain motioned to Trump to move to the left side of the stage. As Spain lifted the trophy, Infantino escorted the president off the podium and away from the celebration.

When Argentina gave the trophy back to Spain, it likely marked a passing of the torch. Argentina has played in three of the last four World Cup finals, but the average age of its starting lineup Sunday was more than 30, making it the second-oldest to play in a final behind the 11 Brazil used to win in 1962. And it got a bit older when Otamendi, 38, came on for 28-year-old Lisandro Martínez, who left with an apparent injury just before the end of the first half.

Argentina star Lionel Messi reacts after losing to Spain in the World Cup final.

(Pamela Smith / Associated Press)

Spain, meanwhile, had the sixth-youngest roster of the 48 teams. Two of La Roja’s starters — teenagers Cubarsí and wunderkind Lamine Yamal — hadn’t even been born when Messi made his World Cup debut in 2006.

“The way this team has matured, it built every day,” said Rodri, the third-oldest starter on the team despite being just 30. “We faced different opponents. Of course, lots of European opponents. But different moments and different types of games and we managed to play all of them.

“We grew in this sense and this generation is making history for our country.”

A history that de la Fuente said is just beginning.

“This team has a long way to go,” he said. “We are already thinking to what is next, what is coming up.”

Sports Editor Iliana Limón Romero and staff writers Jad El Reda and Eduard Cauich contributed to this report.

Spain players celebrate after defeating Argentina for the World Cup title on Sunday.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice civil rights division was created in 1957 with an initial focus on combating racial inequality and protecting voting rights.

But in the first two years of President Trump’s second term, its mission has been reimagined.

Now, the division is focused on combating diversity initiatives, rolling back pro-transgender policies and rooting out allegations of election fraud.

It had for decades investigated police departments for using excessive force. Now it investigates police departments with excessive delays in approving gun permits.

California has served as the division’s laboratory for all of these changes, or, as one former civil rights staffer put it, its “punching bag.”

The civil rights division has been involved in twice as many cases in California as in any other state, according to a Times analysis of cases brought by the Justice Department.

And an examination of press statements by the civil rights division shows that California has accounted for a higher proportion of actions in the second Trump administration than during the same time period in the Biden administration.

The division is led by Harmeet Dhillon, a Californian and a conservative legal crusader, who made her name bringing legal challenges against many of the state’s institutions and once served as the chair of the San Francisco Republican Party.

More recently, she was a leading legal figure in challenges to COVID-19 mandates and has shown steadfast support for Trump; her firm represented him in his successful 2024 fight to remain on the ballot in Colorado.

The Times spoke with a dozen former attorneys in the division, nearly all of whom said that the division has taken on a more partisan approach under Dhillon’s leadership and that the changes in the second Trump administration are far more dramatic than anything that occurred during Trump’s first term.

“It is an ideological civil rights division in a way that we’ve never seen before,” said Regan Rush, the former chief of the division’s special litigation section, which largely focused on investigations into police departments and prisons.

Rush is now director of the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward, a nonprofit group that tracks the division’s activities.

In response to questions from The Times, Dhillon wrote that the division’s actions aren’t political.

“This Department speaks plainly and directly when we identify violations of federal law. Being clear about violations of federal civil rights law isn’t political or combative — it’s transparent,” Dhillon said. “I stand behind the work we’ve done since I took over the Civil Rights Division.”

While California produced President Reagan — a hero on the right who as governor frequently sparred with UC Berkeley, as Dillon does today — the state has now become, in conservative circles, a symbol of everything wrong in America.

“If there’s any state that is the antithesis of the Trump administration, it’s California,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley.

Dhillon said the division brings cases wherever it sees violations of federal law.

“California is where some of the most significant violations of federal civil rights law have occurred, as our enforcement actions demonstrate,” she said.

Former attorneys in the division said the desire to target California was obvious to them.

As one example, the division has announced more than a dozen actions involving universities in California, largely focused on allegations of antisemitism — the subject of an earlier Trump executive order — at University of California campuses and alleged racial preferences in hiring in the UC system and in the admissions practices at several medical schools in the state.

The division concluded that the medical schools at UC Davis and UCLA racially discriminated against white and Asian applicants and that UCLA failed to adequately respond to complaints of antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. Other investigations are ongoing.

A pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in 2024.

(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)

“We were never explicitly told that California institutions are of a particular interest, but it was something that was very easy to notice,” said Ejaz Baluch, a former Justice Department attorney who worked on the employment litigation team that looked into allegations that antisemitism at UC campuses had created a hostile work environment.

Trump’s priorities

Dhillon told podcast host Michael Malice in May that she was in “constant contact” with the White House on a “daily, sometimes several-times-a-day basis.”

That represents a major shift from how the division previously operated, said her predecessor, Kristen Clarke, who was the assistant attorney general overseeing the division during the Biden administration.

“There was a fairly sturdy and necessary wall between the Justice Department and the White House,” Clarke said. “This is a complete 180.”

Dhillon has said she sees her job as enforcing civil rights law through the lens of Trump’s executive orders, which took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, immigration and pro-transgender policies, among other conservative priorities.

She said that while the division “operates within the administration’s law enforcement priorities … investigative and prosecutorial decisions, including which matters to pursue and how, are made by the Division based on the law and the facts.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said that the division’s changes under Dhillon represent a stark shift from how it operated in the past.

“It is now very much the anti-civil rights department,” Schiff said. “We’re living in this upside-down world where departments that were set up for one purpose are acting in a way that’s antithetical to the purpose of the department.”

Dhillon said that under her leadership, the division “enforces federal civil rights laws evenhandedly, on behalf of all Americans.

“That includes protecting religious liberty, Second Amendment rights, and women’s and girls’ spaces, standing against illegal race-based policymaking and DEI, and defending parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education.”

Her reorientation of the division led to a mass exodus of career staff — nearly three-quarters of the roughly 400 attorneys who were there at the beginning of 2025, by Dhillon’s telling.

That’s far more departures than in the first Trump administration.

“I said, ‘My way or the highway,’ and my way isn’t my way, it’s President Trump’s way,” Dhillon told Malice.

Dhillon told The Times that the division has added 100 new lawyers and staff in the last 15 months and plans to hire 100 more.

Prisons and police

As the division has shifted its focus to align with the priorities laid out in Trump’s executive orders, it has shut down a number of cases brought during prior administrations.

Former attorneys in the division worry that other preexisting cases are languishing.

In March, the division opened an investigation into two women’s prisons in California — California Institution for Women in Chino and the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, 35 miles northwest of Fresno — over whether they had violated the rights of other female inmates by housing transgender women in the facilities.

“There have been allegations of sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation due to the presence of males in the women’s prison,” the Justice Department said in announcing the investigation, misgendering transgender inmates.

Former attorneys in the division said that leadership also sought to open an investigation into the impact of transgender housing policies on juvenile institutions in California, but didn’t find sufficient evidence to warrant opening an investigation.

The investigation into transgender inmates at the women’s prisons came as a prior investigation into the same two prisons remains unresolved over reports from hundreds of women that they had been sexually abused by guards, even as evidence supporting the allegations mounts.

Separate from the civil rights investigation, one of the former guards at the Chowchilla facility was found guilty in January 2025 of more than 60 counts of sexual abuse of inmates and sentenced to 224 years in prison.

“We haven’t seen any kind of relief,” said Megan Marks, former deputy chief in the division’s special litigation section and the deputy director and managing editor for the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward.

Dhillon said both investigations into the two women’s prisons are “being pursued vigorously and simultaneously.”

For the last three decades, the division has investigated allegations of police misconduct, authority it was granted by Congress after the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers.

But in the second Trump administration, the division has closed a number of active police investigations and moved away from what Dhillon characterized to Malice as a “standing order to persecute police departments and impose nonsense restrictions on them.”

Instead, the division has brought actions against law enforcement agencies deemed to have failed to protect the rights of gun owners.

California was the first target.

The division filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in September 2025, alleging that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had systemically denied people their 2nd Amendment rights because of long delays in approving concealed carry permits.

Last month, it filed a second gun rights lawsuit in California, this time against the state and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, over the state’s ban on Glock pistols, which acting U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche characterized as a “blatant trampling of our rights by the California government.”

Changing tone

Former attorneys in the civil rights division say the pugnacious tone in press releases, such as the one announcing the lawsuit opposing the Glock ban, and in numerous social media posts by Dhillon announcing her intent to open investigations, represents a major shift from how the department has operated in the past.

“What really stands out more than any other civil rights division is how much they demonize and personalize,” said Christy Lopez, a former attorney in the division who is now a professor at Georgetown Law. “We tried to build rapport with the jurisdiction.”

Dhillon defended the approach she and the division have taken.

“Our job is to enforce the law and ensure compliance,” Dhillon said. “That includes public messaging to ensure the public is both aware of what the law requires and knows when others violate the law. We’ve designed our messaging strategy with this goal in mind, and we are pleased with the effect it’s had.”

Numerous former lawyers in the division also said that the current leadership has put its thumb on the scale at the outset of investigations.

“We were basically fed an answer before we conducted an investigation, which is the total antithesis of how these investigations are supposed to be conducted,” said one former Justice Department attorney who worked on the investigation into allegations of antisemitism in the UC system and requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Attorneys visited UC Berkeley and UC Davis, but found enough evidence only at UCLA to bring a lawsuit on claims that antisemitism created a hostile work environment.

One of Dhillon’s early top deputies, former Huntington Beach City Atty. Michael Gates, denied that politics played a role in decision-making in his time in the division.

“We evaluated every case on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “There was nothing about politics that influenced any of that.”

Gates, who left the department in November, is now the Republican candidate challenging Bonta to be state attorney general.

Dhillon said to The Times that she is “proud of the record we’ve built” and believes the division has been “active and effective.”

But its former leaders worry that with the exodus of attorneys and the changing nature of the division’s approach, it has lost the ability to fulfill its mission.

“Where does it leave the division today?” said Clarke, its former leader. “It’s a broken agency not able to adequately stand up and defend the civil rights of all Americans.”

It is difficult to find words to express my disgust for the coming White House visit. Like the man they are going to see, the Dodgers are without honor.

Rico Gardiner
San Diego

Sports do not transcend or evade association with politics, especially in the current period of America’s decline under President Trump. It’s disgraceful that the Dodgers would again honor a rank authoritarian, a brazenly corrupt kleptocrat, criminal, malignant narcissist and wrecker of our democracy and rule of law.

Trump is not honoring the Dodgers; he’s using their presence to honor him and give him a bit more gaslight glory. The organization has smeared itself with the dishonor, serving the PR agenda of our vainglorious tyrant. If they cared about the optics, their civic duty and the good of the country, they would decline.

T.R. Jahns
Hemet

Dodgers, you are out. Out of our house. In normal times, a White House visit is a grand honor for a championship club. I get that. These are NOT normal times. For you to pretend they are and honor this man with your presence is unforgivable. Spineless. A statement that makes the wrong statement. We will not be watching or rooting for you this season. You are out at home. Our home.

William Lewis
Burbank

Ever since the Dodgers accepted their World Series visit to the White House, they’ve been error-prone on the field, and losing most games. In the All-Star Game, the players were hitless and the pitcher served up the only home run. To add more insult, their former player received the MVP award! Most importantly, is the disappointment and loss of respect from the fans. Karma has a way to haunt.

Robert Torres
Torrance

Your letters to the editor section regarding the Dodgers’ planned visit to the White House continues the left bias of the L.A. Times. Four letters were published praising the article and one was published critical of the article. I doubt that the 4-to-1 ratio reflects the opinions of the L.A. population, but it may reflect the opinions of readers that your left-leaning paper attracts. I read the paper only to see what the lefties are up to.

Larry Hart
Tarzana

Thirty years ago this fall, a Republican politician cried electoral fraud after losing a close race.

Orange County Rep. Bob Dornan couldn’t accept the most logical explanations for why Loretta Sanchez beat him in a historic upset: that voters had tired of his polarizing politics. That his Latino-majority district wanted one of their own to represent them. That he was an ideologue who never brought anything back from D.C. for his constituents.

Instead, Dornan and his supporters settled on the craziest excuse of them all: Illegal immigrants.

California voters were passing anti-immigrant laws by the boatful, so Dornan’s fevered tales about nonprofits registering noncitizens to vote and take him down landed with Republicans. A compliant Congress investigated Dornan’s claims, while local lawmakers proposed bills that would force voters to show government-issued identification every time they cast a ballot — a voter suppression tactic going back to the segregationist South.

The congressional investigation flopped like a soccer player fishing to draw a red card, finally concluding in 1998. Yes, noncitizens did vote for Sanchez, but only an infinitesimal number — less than 1% of the total votes tallied and not enough to overturn the results. No one was charged for illegally voting on purpose or improperly registering noncitizens to vote.

When Dornan ran again in 1998, with volunteers vowing to pursue any election irregularities, Sanchez walloped him, and he was swept into the dustbin of political history.

I teach this episode in my O.C. history college classes as a case study in what happens when political parties succumb to the spell of a vindictive demagogue who blames everyone for their failures except themselves. I also point out that Dornan had the last laugh: the idea that illegal immigrants regularly vote in elections, throwing them toward Democrats, has become gospel for many Republicans.

And here we are.

Republican U.S. Congressional candidate Bob Dornan speaks to a group of young adults at the Orange County Conservation Corps. in Anaheim, California in 1998. He was seeking to regain his old seat from Democratic incumbent Loretta Sanchez, who beat him in a historic 1996 upset.

(John Hayes/Associated Press)

On Thursday, President Trump’s obsession over losing to Joe Biden in 2020 reached a phlegmatic nadir with a speech on debunked election fraud theories that weaved in everything from communist China to deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to — who else? — alleged noncitizen voters.

The tirade was so pathetic and noneventful that most networks didn’t bother to air it. Even Fox News host Sean Hannity — whose tongue is probably two parts shoe polish after spending the last decade as Trump’s personal spit shine — moved on just minutes after Trump finished.

The president insisted that the U.S. Senate pass a bill ahead of this November’s midterms, mandating in the name of election integrity that voters show proof of citizenship before casting a ballot.

In California, a clown car of MAGA loyalists — state Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, state Senator Tony Strickland, wannabe Southern California U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — are pushing something similar. Proposition 39 would require California election officials to verify the citizenship of registered voters and require voters to show government-issued identification when they cast a ballot.

By law, voters in federal elections must be U.S. citizens. Only a handful of municipalities allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Despite Trump’s trumpeting of supposed evidence that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada, actual instances of them casting a ballot are as rare today as in Dornan’s time.

That hasn’t stopped Trump and his lackeys from claiming, as Dornan and his supporters did, that they are trying to restore faith in a system corrupted by liberals and their undocumented puppets. But, just like back then, this amounts to a dog whistle for people freaked out about changing demographics and massive GOP midterm losses.

It’s the last, most dangerous gasp of a wheezing political movement whose supporters are clinging to power at all costs and just can’t understand why more and more voters are tired of Trump’s flailing foreign policy and failing economy.

These people are so delusional that they point to last month’s California primaries as proof of election fraud, arguing that the results in two prominent races should have been different.

No Republican has won a statewide election in 20 years, so it’s not surprising that Republican Steve Hilton finished second to Democrat Xavier Becerra in the gubernatorial primary, with both advancing to the general election. Nor was it a shock that in the primary for Los Angeles mayor, progressive incumbent Karen Bass and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman finished first and second over Republican reality television star Spencer Pratt.

That didn’t stop Trump from insisting that both Republicans should have won outright and crying conspiracy when they didn’t. The president continued his laughable tune in his White House speech.

“Took a month to count the votes,” he whined about California’s sloth-like approach to counting ballots. “I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.”

Actually, many third world countries elect despots like Trump — but that’s neither here nor there.

A May poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Prop. 39 was in a statistical dead heat, with 49% of voters favoring it and 51% opposed. All Prop. 39’s opponents have to do is cite Trump’s stark-raving mad comments about electoral fraud, and support for the ballot initiative will melt faster than the Sierra snowpack.

The Republican crusade against imaginary noncitizen voters may pay off in the short run but will inevitably, spectacularly backfire.

Look at what happened in my native Orange County. Sanchez’s victory was the first ripple in a blue wave that eventually turned O.C. purple. Our once-mighty GOP is now increasingly isolated to wealthier pockets of the county and no longer commands national attention — hell, they couldn’t even deliver O.C. to Trump in any of his elections.

The crazy thing is, when Republicans put in the work to appeal to immigrant and Latino voters instead of obsessing about how they’re supposedly anti-democracy invaders, it pays off. Just look at 2024, when a record number of Latino GOP legislators won seats in California and Trump won a larger share of the national Latino electorate than any Republican presidential candidate ever had.

That happened because the party largely stayed quiet on noncitizen voting and focused on what swing voters wanted to hear: a promise to clamp down on unchecked migration and too much wokeness, while fattening average Americans’ pocketbooks.

Trump’s success with Latino voters seemed to represent a tectonic shift in American politics. Now, it feels like an aberration.

Trump still doesn’t seem to get how desperate the situation is for Republicans, just four months before Election Day, and how much of it is of his own making.

Near the end of his speech, he sputtered, “The only reason you wouldn’t do [mandated voter ID] is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad, and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.”

Paging Bob Dornan …

The tight timeline to replace former Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner has left Democratic hopefuls scrambling to woo his progressive base while trying to turn the focus from the disgraced oysterman to defeating Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.

It’s a delicate balance for the candidates, who are vying to face Collins in a contest that could decide control of the Senate as Platner’s shadow hangs over the race. In their first debate Thursday night, one of the first questions candidates were asked was: What was Graham Platner’s best idea?

Moving past Platner is just one of the challenges facing Democrats. The never-before-used process to pick a new nominee means candidates have less than three weeks to pull off what typically takes campaigns months or years, from organizing volunteers to raising money and preparing for debates.

The whiplash many of the candidates are facing was on display Thursday.

Asked by debate moderators about President Trump’s decision to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this year, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows gave inaccurate information about Collins not pushing back against Trump, a Republican. When a moderator called her on it, Bellows said she was on vacation on the Kennebec River last week after previously focusing on her unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign and hadn’t expected to be running for the Senate.

“When I need to know the facts, I will. I’ll do my homework,” said Bellows, who lost to Collins in 2014.

The field of 12 candidates also includes former public health leader Nirav Shah and union-backed logger Troy Jackson, who campaigned alongside Platner in a failed bid for governor.

Platner’s exit means the clock is ticking

Platner quit the Senate race last week after he was accused of rape, which he denies, and his campaign quickly imploded as supporters revoked their endorsements and resources.

Democrats have until July 27 to choose a new nominee, according to state law. The Maine Democratic Party’s succession plan calls for a state party convention at which 601 delegates will meet on July 25 and vote for Platner’s replacement. The majority of the convention delegates will be selected this weekend from each of the state’s 16 counties.

Candidates hoping to replace Platner have been recruiting delegates who will vote for them at the convention. The candidates also must collect 500 voter signatures needed to qualify for the convention vote.

“I don’t think anyone’s happy that we’re in this situation,” said Dan Jenkins, a Maine Democrat who has applied to be a delegate. “We would have preferred that this had broken many, many months ago and then Graham had exited the race when there was a time for a democratic process. But it’s where we are.”

Some candidates might see a boost from prior campaigns

Jackson is among the handful of candidates pivoting to the Senate race after running for other political offices, likely giving them a leg up in not having to launch from scratch.

Our Revolution, a progressive organization founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont that had originally backed Platner, has thrown its support behind Jackson, the former Maine Senate president. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, has not endorsed in the race.

Shah, former director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, also unsuccessfully ran in this year’s Maine Democratic governor’s primary. He has been pitching Platner’s supporters that he’s also an outsider who can unify a fractured Democratic Party.

“You have an important place in this campaign, and we welcome your voices,” Shah said earlier this month speaking to Platner’s base.

Bellows also ran for governor. She’s hoping that her previous battles with Trump will bolster her argument that she’ll be an advocate for the working class.

Bellows previously attempted to run against Collins in 2014 as the Senate Democratic nominee and lost in a landslide. She later went on to win a seat as a state senator before becoming Maine’s secretary of state. She’s since downplayed her prior loss to Collins by pointing to the Democratic establishment’s unwillingness to take on the Republican in 2014.

Another candidate, Jordan Wood, initially announced his intent to run in the Maine Democratic Senate primary. He dropped out last fall to run in the state’s 2nd District but lost that race.

Candidates seize on recent ICE shooting

The fatal shooting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Maine this week has been top of mind among the potential Senate nominees.

The Embassy of Colombia has identified the man killed Monday in Biddeford, roughly 15 miles southwest of Portland, as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national. The Department of Homeland Security has since said an ICE officer fired his weapon when the man officers were pursuing attempted to flee the scene, threatening “public safety.”

Many have rushed to connect Collins to the embattled federal agency.

All the candidates who debated Thursday said they agreed with the call to “abolish ICE,” though Wood stopped short of saying the agency should be completely dissolved.

“I believe that when I say we have to abolish it, what I mean is that we need a new law enforcement agency that has the trust of the people,” Wood said.

Jackson disagreed, calling ICE a “rogue agency that goes around doing things that they’re being told to on high.”

Candidates asked about Platner’s best ideas

Platner attracted more than 150,000 votes during the June 9 primary, an eye-opening number that signaled a progressive base eager to support a candidate known for his promise to defend the working class and ability to rally large crowds.

With little more than a week until the state convention to find Platner’s replacement, it still remains unknown just who will be able to capture that same excitement seen among Platner’s base.

When pressed during Thursday’s debate about Platner’s best idea on the campaign trail, Jackson pointed to his commitment to “Medicare for All.” As a gubernatorial candidate, Jackson also voiced support for replacing job-based and individual private health insurance with a government-run plan that guarantees coverage for all with no premiums, no deductibles and only minimal copays for certain services.

Bellows said that she agreed with Platner’s description that democracy in the U.S. has been corrupted by those in power.

Shah said he would take up Platner’s commitment to “abolish ICE,” while Wood said he admired Platner’s decision to say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, something Israel denies.

“Graham got into this race saying, ‘this is genocide.’ And I learned that it is so important in these moments to draw those moral lines,” Wood said.

Kruesi writes for the Associated Press.

In a speech to the nation Thursday evening, President Trump said Americans deserve secure elections, and he claimed to be using federal authority to prevent them from being “stolen.”

In fact, one of the strongest security features of U.S. elections is the fact that they aren’t conducted at the federal level. America votes in more than 10,000 different election jurisdictions, each with different rules set by state and sometimes local governments.

That structure makes the nation’s elections extraordinarily complicated — and also safe from widespread fraud. And when misconduct does happen — rarely — security protocols frequently catch it.

Decentralized elections date back to the nation’s founding

America’s highly decentralized system of voting exists because the nation’s Founding Fathers gave authority over elections to the states, rather than the federal government. While Congress has the power to regulate elections — and has used that authority to pass such laws as the Voting Rights Act — the Constitution makes clear that states have primary authority to set the “times, places and manner” for elections.

There also is no national election agency that administers the presidential contest, something that’s different from many other countries. And when it comes to doing the day-to-day work of running an election, the responsibility falls to officials at the local level — usually a clerk or election supervisor — with help from staff and volunteers.

While differences in election laws can get confusing, election security experts say this structure is a strength. That’s because to pull off stealing a presidential election — as Trump falsely claims was done to him in 2020 — it would require large numbers of election workers in the most competitive counties across the country who are willing to risk prosecution, prison time and fines while working with officials from both parties willing to look the other way. And everyone somehow would have to keep quiet — a highly unlikely scenario.

There are also shared practices and security measures in place across the country that together work to ensure that only eligible voters can cast a ballot and only one ballot is counted for each.

Voter fraud can happen, but it’s rare and there are safeguards to catch it

Most Americans by now have probably heard stories about someone casting multiple ballots, or voting in the name of dead relatives, or stealing mail ballots from mailboxes.

When these incidents happen, they are often caught and prosecuted.

Voting more than once, tampering with ballots, lying about your residence to vote somewhere else or casting someone else’s ballot are crimes that can be punished with hefty fines and prison time. Non-U.S. citizens who break election laws can be deported.

For anyone still motivated to cheat, election systems in the United States are designed with multiple layers of protection and transparency intended to stand in the way.

For example, for in-person voting, most states either require or request voters provide some sort of identification at the polls. Others require voters to verify who they are in another way, such as stating their name and address, signing a poll book or signing an affidavit.

For absentee voting, all states require a voter’s signature, and many states have further precautions, such as having bipartisan teams compare the signature with other signatures on file, requiring the signature to be notarized or requiring a witness to sign.

That means even if a ballot is erroneously sent to someone’s past address and the current resident mails it in, there are checks to alert election workers to the foul play.

AP review found there was too little voter fraud to tip the 2020 election

Trump has spent six years insisting he won the 2020 election, a campaign he lost to former President Joe Biden.

An Associated Press review in 2021 dug into every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states that Trump disputed. It found fewer than 475 cases — a number that would have made no difference in that race.

Allegations from Trump of massive voting fraud have been refuted by a variety of judges, state election officials and an arm of his own administration’s Homeland Security Department. In 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr, a Trump appointee, told the AP that no proof of widespread voter fraud had been uncovered. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” he said at the time.

Swenson writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump used a rare prime-time address Thursday night to renew his attacks on the security of U.S. elections, telling Americans that the nation’s voting system is “so broken” that “no one can possibly defend it,” an unprecedented effort by a sitting president to undermine public confidence in domestic elections.

Many of the claims he made, which echo those he made after he lost the 2020 election, have been debunked by investigations, audits and court proceedings. Trump did not claim that vote counts were changed or election systems were hacked, and his warnings that the nation’s elections could be vulnerable to foreign influence have long been made by members of both parties.

But the president amplified those claims and others in an effort to cast fresh doubt over what he said was a “stolen” and “rigged” election and renew calls to pass a federal voting law ahead of the November election.

“Addressing this crisis of elections security demands that Congress will pass the SAVE America Act,” Trump said. “How easy is that to do? Unless you want to cheat.”

Trump said he directed the White House to release a tranche of heavily redacted documents that purport to show “vulnerabilities” in the nation’s voting system, with the goal of “correcting them very, very quickly.”

The 26-minute address to the nation — a platform traditionally reserved for rare moments of national importance — was the latest effort by Trump to attempt to assert more federal control over state elections.

Major broadcast networks declined to air Trump’s speech in full, instead reporting on it. Trump complained about NBC and ABC as he spoke, saying they should lose their broadcasting licenses. He falsely claimed that “they and others in the media are part of a plot” to “continue this fraud.”

In his remarks, Trump alleged China carried out what is believed to be the “largest compromise of election data history” starting during the 2020 election cycle and claimed that “members of the deep state” in the American intelligence community covered it up.

He directed the FBI, the director of national intelligence and other agencies led by some of his loyalists to investigate and prosecute the people responsible for the cover up.

Democrats swiftly condemned Trump’s claims as baseless and rehashed ideas that have little to do with actual election administration.

“Donald Trump is releasing unverified, meaningless documents to appease his own delusions about an election he lost resoundingly, all while continuing to withhold 3 million pages of the Epstein files,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on X.

Multiple reviews of the 2020 election have concluded that Democrat Joe Biden won legitimately, and election experts say there is no evidence that widespread fraud affected the outcome of the election.

“It’s been more than half a decade, with numerous audits, recounts, and more than 60 court cases, each finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Clearly, this is no longer about an election Donald Trump lost six years ago. It’s about him laying the groundwork to try to ‘take over the voting’ in the upcoming midterm elections.”

Ahead of the speech, elections and democracy experts had cautioned that the president may attempt to sow doubt in the security of the nation’s election system or bolster debunked fraud claims.

Trump has taken a series of steps since retaking office aimed at exerting control over elections. Some experts said Thursday’s address could be interpreted as a sign that Trump is running out of moves in the lead up to the midterm elections, where Republican control of the House is at stake.

“The fact that they’re throwing everything up on the walls at this point demonstrates panic,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “They are not operating from strength right now. They are operating from weakness.”

Trump delivered the address with his approval rating stagnating at 37%, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Thursday, with weakening enthusiasm among Republicans.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

WASHINGTON — When Markwayne Mullin took over as Homeland Security secretary from fired Kristi Noem, he pledged to get the department responsible for carrying out the Trump administration’s mass deportations policy out of the headlines.

But just months into Mullin’s time in office, the department is squarely in the center of controversy again after three people were killed in encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the span of less than a week.

The events are the first major test for Mullin, who promised a steady hand for a department roiled by his predecessor’s conduct and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

As he navigates the uptick in violence, he is being forced into a balancing act that has him juggling pressures from a White House eager to carry out mass deportations and his former colleagues in Congress seeking answers — all while attempting to ease tensions in American cities over the deaths.

“When he took his position, Secretary Mullin said that his goal was to get the department off the front page of the news,” Democratic Rep. Seth Magaziner said on the House floor Tuesday. Then, waving a newspaper, he said: “Well, you’re back on the goddamn front page now.”

Mullin’s approach is a marked change from his predecessor, Kristi Noem

Mullin, a former senator from Oklahoma, was a surprise pick to run the sprawling department after Noem was fired in the wake of two deadly shootings of American protesters at the hands of federal immigration officers in Minneapolis earlier this year.

As the secretary in charge of carrying out the administration’s mass deportations vision, Noem pushed an aggressive style of immigration enforcement where she was front and center, including most famously, a visit to a Salvadoran detention center. She was quick to speak publicly on controversial events, weighing in on both Minneapolis shootings with statements accusing the killed protesters of being agitators.

President Trump, who made mass deportations a central promise of his second administration, ultimately soured on Noem over a $200 million ad campaign and her handling of the Minneapolis operation.

Mullin promised a different approach, while still pledging to deliver on the president’s priorities. His first trip as secretary was not to promote immigration enforcement but to observe hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. Noem frequently went out on immigration raids with her officers — Mullin has not.

Since he became secretary and in the aftermath of the Minneapolis violence, the administration has also moved away from high-profile and unpopular immigration operations in American cities to a quieter approach to enforcement that has largely shifted media attention away from the crackdown. Under Mullin, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is also retreating from a plan to use warehouses to detain migrants.

But immigration arrests continue under Mullin and often with little fanfare: ICE arrested 10,000 people over a five-day period in late June, averaging out to about to 2,000 arrests per day. And legal pathways to immigration have also faced new restrictions.

Trump, during Mullin’s tenure, has hailed the secretary as “so incredible,” and “amazing,” lauding him for giving up his Senate seat to run DHS.

For months, it appeared as though Mullin’s change in approach was taking hold. While advocates and civil rights activists accused the department of mistreating immigrants under his leadership, Mullin’s less confrontational approach seemed to keep the department out of the spotlight.

But the events of the past week have posed a new challenge for Mullin as he walks a tightrope between his softer approach and the president’s demands.

“Trying to deal with competing policy objectives is a challenge for any Cabinet secretary, but Mullin has this worse than most,” said Tom Warrick, a former counterterrorism official at Homeland Security who’s now at the Atlantic Council.

“In the case of Homeland Security, the White House wants both to meet their immigration quotas at the same time that they keep public trust, and how you do that — even with the funding that Mullin has — is a really difficult challenge.”

ICE officers in Houston and Maine shot and killed individuals in their cars during immigration operations. In Florida, a man fleeing ICE officers was killed in a car crash.

Mullin has not spoken publicly about the deaths while the department’s public affairs office has released only brief statements following each.

Behind the scenes, Mullin, who frequently talks about how he shares his cellphone number with members of Congress and encourages them to call him directly, has talked with lawmakers and shared information, including talking with both senators from Maine.

And after the second shooting death in Maine, as criticism surged from both protesters and Mullin’s former colleagues in Congress, ICE was ordered to suspend most vehicle stops.

Trump heaps pressure on Mullin over vehicle stop order

That decision infuriated Trump’s supporters.

Conservative influencer Nick Sorter called it a “TOTAL CAPITULATION to the left,” in a post on X. Conservative activist Mike Davis accused Mullin of heeding the advice of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who said she’d suggested the vehicle stop pause to the secretary.

A day later, Trump appeared to contradict the guidance to ICE, saying in a social media post “we must be strong, tough and smart and we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

Mullin then reposted Trump’s words, adding that people in the country would be “arrested and deported wherever they are.” He later said on X that he and the president are “on the same page.”

It was not immediately clear whether vehicle stops were back on.

But it showed the friction between Mullin’s attempts to maintain calm and the president’s demands that illegal immigrants, which the administration has in many instances portrayed as criminals, be arrested in large numbers.

Democrats have slammed the new secretary, saying that they see little change at the department.

“Secretary Mullin, if he wants to, and if he has the backing of the White House, he has the ability to get ICE under control and make them follow the law,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas. “So either he has no interest in doing that, or the White House is not backing him up, or the agents are simply out of control.”

Republican lawmakers have come to Mullin’s defense.

“I think the Secretary has lived up to what he’s wanted to do to try to change the atmosphere over there,” said Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York, who as chair of the congressional Homeland Security Committee has requested a bipartisan briefing on ICE’s use of force policies from DHS.

“I don’t think anybody is celebrating that ICE is back in the headlines,” Garbarino said.

Santana writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

MIAMI — The Trump administration is reviving a rule that could deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits that could include food stamps, Medicaid, housing vouchers and others.

The policy, known as “public charge,” appeared on Thursday in the Federal Register and will be formally published on Monday.

The policy was first implemented in February 2020 as one of President Trump’s moves to limit legal immigration during his first administration, but it was reversed after Democratic President Biden came to power.

Its return comes when the Republican administration is implementing a hard-line policy to curb both illegal and legal immigration, and when the cost of healthcare and food is rising.

The federal government “is reaffirming the requirement of self-reliance, protecting public resources and ending policies that encouraged dependency on the backs of hard-working American taxpayers,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a post published on its X account.

“Under President Trump, USCIS is restoring the basic principle that immigrants must be able to support themselves,” the post said.

Under the policy, applicants for green cards have to show they wouldn’t be burdens to the country or “public charges.”

SEATTLE — President Trump fired the new top U.S. prosecutor in Seattle on Wednesday less than an hour after the attorney was unanimously appointed by the federal judges in the district, highlighting tensions between the courts and the president over the powerful positions.

Roger Rogoff, a former judge and veteran state and federal prosecutor, was sworn in as U.S. attorney before 8 a.m. at the U.S. courthouse in downtown Seattle. In a phone interview, he said he then went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and asked to meet with Charles Neil Floyd, whose 120-day interim term in the position ended in February.

As he waited in a lobby, Rogoff said, he received an email from the Trump administration informing him he’d been removed. He is consulting with other lawyers about suing over his firing, he said.

Presidents normally appoint U.S. attorneys, the top federal prosecutor in each judicial district. The positions require Senate confirmation, except in temporary appointments. When temporary appointments expire before a nominee is confirmed, the judges in a judicial district can name a U.S. attorney.

But under Trump, the Justice Department has sought to leave unconfirmed prosecutors in their positions indefinitely, often through novel personnel maneuvers.

“District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and POTUS can fire them,” Acting U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche said in a social media post Wednesday. He added that the judges who appointed Rogoff “abandoned the time-honored process of consultation with the administration so that the selected U.S. Attorney is qualified to serve in the administration.”

Trump named Floyd, who previously served as an immigration judge, interim U.S. attorney last October but never forwarded his nomination to the Senate. When Floyd’s time as interim U.S. attorney expired, Trump simply shifted his title, a tactic the administration has also tried in other federal judicial districts: It named him first assistant U.S. attorney, while leaving the top post empty.

In May, a U.S. appeals court panel expressed skepticism that the maneuver was legal. The federal judges in the city decided to take applications for the position, and it appointed a bipartisan panel to review the applications.

On Wednesday morning the court — comprising 17 active and senior judges appointed by five presidents — issued its unanimous order naming Rogoff the U.S. attorney for western Washington.

Democratic Washington U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who had opposed Floyd for the U.S. attorney job, blasted Rogoff’s quick firing.

“Throughout his career, he has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to public service, and he was appointed legally by the federal judges in the Western District of Washington,” the senator said in a written statement. “This administration doesn’t want to deal with advice and consent—they just want to install cronies to carry out a corrupt political agenda.”

In December, Alina Habbaresigned as the top federal prosecutor for New Jersey after an appeals court said she had been serving in the post unlawfully.

Lindsey Halligan, who pursued indictments against a pair of Trump’s adversaries, left her position as an acting U.S. attorney in Virginia after a judge concluded her appointment was unlawful and that indictments she brought against James and former FBI Director James Comey must be dismissed.

The judges there named James Hundley, who had handled criminal and civil cases for more than 30 years, but the administration fired him. It also fired a court-appointed U.S. attorney in northern New York.

Rogoff, who spent 20 years as a state prosecutor and six as a federal prosecutor before becoming a state judge, said he knew the administration might fire him immediately. But he said he had no qualms about the potential conflict he was walking into. Being U.S. attorney is “the best job there is” for a prosecutor, he said.

“I’m really proud of my career,” Rogoff said. “The fact that the judges of this district — most of whom I’ve spent my career appearing in front of, or trying cases against, or working with — believed that I was the right person to do this work is just really humbling and amazing.”

Johnson writes for the Associated Press.