President Trump

JD Vance, it seems, is everywhere.

Berating Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Eulogizing Charlie Kirk. Babysitting the Middle East peace accord. Profanely defending the aquatic obliteration of (possible) drug smugglers.

He’s loud, he’s obnoxious and, in a very short time, he’s broken unprecedented ground with his smash-face, turn-it-to-11 approach to the vice presidency. Unlike most White House understudies, who effectively disappear like a protected witness, Vance has become the highest-profile, most pugnacious politician in America who is not named Donald J. Trump.

It’s quite the contrast with his predecessor.

Kamala Harris made her own kind of history, as the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to serve as vice president. As such, she entered office bearing great — and vastly unrealistic — expectations about her prominence and the public role she would play in the Biden administration. When Harris acted the way that vice presidents normally do — subservient, self-effacing, careful never to poach the spotlight from the chief executive — it was seen as a failing.

By the end of her first year in office, “whatever happened to Kamala Harris?” had become a political buzz phrase.

No one’s asking that about JD Vance.

Why is that? Because that’s how President Trump wants it.

“Rule No.1 about the vice presidency is that vice presidents are only as active as their presidents want them to be,” said Jody Baumgartner, an East Carolina University expert on the office. “They themselves are irrelevant.”

Consider Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, who had the presence and pizzazz of day-old mashed potatoes.

“He was not a very powerful vice president, but that’s because Donald Trump didn’t want him to be,” said Christopher Devine, a University of Dayton professor who’s published four books on the vice presidency. “He wanted him to have very little influence and to be more of a background figure, to kind of reassure quietly the conservatives of the party that Trump was on the right track. With JD Vance, I think he wants him to be a very active, visible figure.”

In fact, Trump seems to be grooming Vance as a successor in a way that Joe Biden never did with Harris. The 46th president practically had to be bludgeoned into standing aside after the Democratic freakout over his wretched, career-ending debate performance. (Things might be different with Vance if Trump could override the Constitution and fulfill his fantasy of seeking a third term in the White House.)

There were other circumstances that kept Harris under wraps, particularly in the early part of Biden’s presidency.

One was the COVID-19 lockdown. “It meant she wasn’t traveling. She wasn’t doing public events,” said Joel K. Goldstein, another author and expert on the vice presidency. “A lot of stuff was being done virtually and so that tended to be constraining.”

The Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate also required Harris to stick close to Washington so she could cast a number of tie-breaking votes. (Under the Constitution, the vice president provides the deciding vote when the Senate is equally divided. Harris set a record in the third year of her vice presidency for casting the most tie-breakers in history.)

The personality of their bosses also explains why Harris and Vance approached the vice presidency in different ways.

Biden had spent nearly half a century in Washington, as a senator and vice president under Barack Obama. He was, foremost, a creature of the legislative process and saw Harris, who’d served nearly two decades in elected office, as a (junior) partner in governing.

Trump came to politics through celebrity. He is, foremost, a pitchman and promoter. He saw Vance as a way to turn up the volume.

Ohio’s senator had served barely 18 months in his one and only political position when Trump chose Vance as his running mate. He’d “really made his mark as a media and cultural figure,” Devine noted, with Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” regarded as a kind of Rosetta Stone for the anger and resentment that fueled the MAGA movement.

Trump “wanted someone who was going to be aggressive in advancing the MAGA narrative,” Devine said, “being very present in media, including in some newer media spaces, on podcasts, social media. Vance was someone who could hammer home Trump’s message every day.”

The contrast continued once Harris and Vance took office.

Biden handed his vice president a portfolio of tough and weighty issues, among them addressing the root causes of illegal migration from Central America. (They were “impossible, s— jobs,” in the blunt assessment that Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, offered in her recent campaign memoir.)

Trump has treated Vance as a sort of heat-seeking rhetorical missile, turning him loose against his critics and acting as though the presidential campaign never ended.

Vance seems gladly submissive. Harris, who was her own boss for nearly two decades, had a hard time adjusting as Biden’s No. 2.

“Vance is very effective at playing the role of backup singer who gets to have a solo from time to time,” said Jamal Simmons, who spent a year as Harris’ vice presidential communications chief. “I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever as comfortable in the role as Vance has proven himself to be.”

Will Vance’s pugilistic approach pay off in 2028? It’s way too soon to say. Turning the conventions of the vice presidency to a shambles, the way Trump did with the presidency, has delighted many in the Republican base. But polls show Vance, like Trump, is deeply unpopular with a great number of voters.

As for Harris, all she can do is look on from her exile in Brentwood, pondering what might have been.

LONDON — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to say Wednesday whether he would urge President Trump to drop his threat to sue the BBC for a billion dollars over the broadcaster’s edit of a speech he made after losing the 2020 presidential election.

During his weekly questioning in the House of Commons, Starmer was asked by Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, whether he would intervene in the row between Trump and the British public broadcaster, and to rule out the idea that the British people would hand over money to the U.S. president.

Instead of responding directly, Starmer reiterated the government’s line since the BBC’s director-general, Tim Davie, announced his resignation on Sunday because of the scandal.

“I believe in a strong and independent BBC,” he said. “Some would rather BBC didn’t exist, I’m not one of them.”

However, he added that “where mistakes are made, they do need to get their house in order.”

In an interview that aired Tuesday on Fox News, Trump said he intended to go through with his threat to sue the BBC, a century-old institution under growing pressure in an era of polarized politics and changing media viewing habits.

“I guess I have to,” he said. “Because I think they defrauded the public and they’ve admitted it.”

The president’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, sent the threat to the BBC over the way a documentary edited his Jan. 6, 2021, speech before a mob of his followers stormed the U.S. Capitol. The letter demanded an apology to the president and a “full and fair” retraction of the documentary along with other “false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading or inflammatory statements” about Trump.

If the BBC does not comply with the demands by 5 p.m. EST Friday, then Trump will enforce his legal rights, the letter said.

The row centers on an edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs series “Panorama,” titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The third-party production company that made the film spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.”

Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

BBC Chairman Samir Shah apologized Monday for the misleading edit that he said gave “the impression of a direct call for violent action.”

In addition to Davie’s resignation, the news chief Deborah Turness quit Sunday over accusations of bias and misleading editing.

Pylas writes for the Associated Press.

BELÉM, Brazil — The expansive halls of the Amazon’s newly built climate summit hub echoed with the hum of air conditioners and the footsteps of delegates from around the world — scientists, diplomats, Indigenous leaders and energy executives, all converging for two frenetic weeks of negotiations.

Then Gov. Gavin Newsom rounded the corner, flanked by staff and security. They moved in tandem through the corridors on Tuesday as media swarmed and cellphone cameras rose into the air.

“Hero!” one woman shouted. “Stay safe — we need you,” another attendee said. Others didn’t hide their confusion at who the man with slicked-back graying hair causing such a commotion was.

“I’m here because I don’t want the United States of America to be a footnote at this conference,” Newsom said when he reached a packed news conference on his first day at the United Nations climate policy summit known as COP30.

In less than a year, the United States has shifted from rallying nations on combating climate change to rejecting the science altogether under President Trump, whose brash governing style spawned in part from his reality-show roots.

Newsom has engineered his own evolution when coping with Trump — moving from sharp but reasoned criticism to name-calling and theatrical attacks on the president and his Republican allies. Newsom’s approach adds fire to America’s political spectacle — part governance, part made-for-TV drama. But on climate, it’s not all performance.

California’s carbon market and zero-emission mandates have given the state outsize influence at summits such as COP30, where its policies are seen as both durable and exportable. The state has invested billions in renewables, battery storage and electrifying buildings and vehicles and has cut greenhouse gas emissions by 21% since 2000 — even as its economy grew 81%.

“Absolutely,” he said when asked whether the state is in effect standing in for the United States at climate talks. “And I think the world sees us in that light, as a stable partner, a historic partner … in the absence of American leadership. And not just absence of leadership, the doubling down of stupid in terms of global leadership on clean energy.”

Newsom has honed a combative presence online — trading barbs with Trump and leaning into satire, especially on social media, tactics that mirror the president’s. Critics have argued that it’s contributing to a lowering of the bar when it comes to political discourse, but Newsom said he doesn’t see it that way.

“I’m trying to call that out,” Newsom said, adding that in a normal political climate, leaders should model civility and respect. “But right now, we have an invasive species — in the vernacular of climate — by the name of Donald Trump, and we got to call that out.”

At home, Newsom recently scored a political win with Proposition 50, the ballot measure he championed to counter Trump’s effort to redraw congressional maps in Republican-led states. On his way to Brazil, he celebrated the victory with a swing through Houston, where a rally featuring Texas Democrats looked more like a presidential campaign stop than a policy event — one of several moments in recent months that have invited speculation about a White House run that he insists he hasn’t launched.

Those questions followed him to Brazil. It was the first topic posed from a cluster of Brazilian journalists in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city and financial hub, where Newsom had flown to speak Monday with climate investors in what he conceded sounded more like a campaign speech.

“I think it has to,” said Newson, his talking points scribbled on yellow index cards still in his pocket from an earlier meeting. “I think people have to understand what’s going on, because otherwise you’re wasting everyone’s time.”

In a low-lit luxury hotel adorned with Brazilian artwork and deep-seated chairs, Newsom showcased the well-practiced pivot of a politician avoiding questions about his future. His most direct answer about his presidential prospects came in a recent interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning,” on which Newsom was asked whether he would give serious thought after the 2026 midterm elections to a White House bid. Newsom responded: “Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise.”

He laughed when asked by The Times how often he has fielded questions about his plans in 2028 in recent days, and quickly deflected.

“It’s not about me,” he said before fishing a malaria pill out of his suit pocket and chasing it with borrowed coffee from a nearby carafe. “It’s about this moment and people’s anxiety and concern about this moment.”

Ann Carlson, a UCLA environmental law professor, said Newsom’s appearance in Brazil is symbolically important as the federal government targets Californa’s decades-old authority to enforce its own environmental standards.

“California has continued to signal that it will play a leadership role,” she said.

The Trump administration confirmed to The Times that no high-level federal representative will attend COP30.

“President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said.

For his own part, Trump told world leaders at the United Nations in September that climate change is a “hoax” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

Since Trump returned to office for a second term, he’s canceled funding for major clean energy projects such as California’s hydrogen hub and moved to revoke the state’s long-held authority to set stricter vehicle emissions standards than those of the federal government. He’s also withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, a seminal treaty signed a decade ago in which world leaders established the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels and preferably below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). That move is seen as pivotal in preventing the worst effects of climate change.

Leaders from Chile and Colombia called Trump a liar for rejecting climate science, while Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva broadly warned that extremist forces are fabricating fake news and “condemning future generations to life on a planet altered forever by global warming.”

Terry Tamminen, former California Environmental Protection Agency secretary under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, contended that with the Trump administration’s absence, Newsom’s attendance at COP30 thrusts even more spotlight on the governor.

“If the governor of Delaware goes, it may not matter,” Tamminen said. “But if our governor goes, it does. It sends a message to the world that we’re still in this.”

The U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of state leaders, said three governors from the United States attended COP30-related events in Brazil: Newsom, Wisconsin’s Tony Evers and New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Despite the warm reception Newsom has received in Belém, environmentalists in California have recently questioned his commitment.

In September, Newsom signed a package of bills that extended the state’s signature cap-and-trade program through 2045. That program, rebranded as cap-and-invest, limits greenhouse gas emissions and raises billions of dollars for the state’s climate priorities. But, at the same time, he also gave final approval to a bill that will allow oil and gas companies to drill as many as 2,000 new wells per year through 2036 in Kern County. Environmentalists called that backsliding; Newsom called it realism, given the impending refinery closures in the state that threaten to drive up gas prices.

“It’s not an ideological exercise,” he said. “It’s a very pragmatic one.”

Leah Stokes, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist, called his record “pretty complex.”

“In many ways, he is one of the leaders,” she said. “But some of the decisions that he’s made, especially recently, don’t move us in as good a direction on climate.”

Newsom is expected to return to the climate summit Wednesday before traveling deeper into the Amazon, where he plans to visit reforestation projects. The governor said he wanted to see firsthand the region often referred to as “the lungs of the world.”

“It’s not just to admire the absorption of carbon from the rainforest,” Newsom said. “But to absorb a deeper spiritual connection to this issue that connects all of us. … I think that really matters in a world that can use a little more of that.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump and Republican lawmakers took a victory lap on Tuesday after securing bipartisan support to reopen the government, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history without ceding ground to any core Democratic demands.

House members were converging on Washington for a final vote expected as early as Wednesday, after 60 senators — including seven Democrats and an independent — advanced the measure on Monday night. Most Democratic lawmakers in the House are expected to oppose the continuing resolution, which does not include an extension of Affordable Care Act tax credits that had been a central demand during the shutdown negotiations.

The result, according to independent analysts, is that premiums will more than double on average for more than 20 million Americans who use the healthcare marketplace, rising from an average of $888 to $1,904 for out-of-pocket payments annually, according to KFF.

Democrats in the Senate who voted to reopen the government said they had secured a promise from Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, that they would get a vote on extending the tax credits next month.

But the vote is likely to fail down party lines. And even if it earned some Republican support, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, has made no promises he would give the measure a vote in the lower chamber.

An end to the shutdown comes at a crucial time for the U.S. aviation industry ahead of one of the busiest travel seasons around the Thanksgiving holiday. The prolonged closure of the federal government led federal employees in the sector to call out sick in large numbers, prompting an unprecedented directive from the Federation Aviation Administration that slowed operations at the nation’s biggest airports.

Lawmakers are racing to vote before federal employees working in aviation safety miss yet another paycheck this week, potentially extending frustration within their ranks and causing further delays at airports entering the upcoming holiday week.

It will be the first time the House conducts legislative work in over 50 days, a marathon stretch that has resulted in a backlog of work for lawmakers on a wide range of issues, from appropriations and stock trading regulations to a discharge petition calling for the release of files in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

“We look forward to the government reopening this week so Congress can get back to our regular legislative session,” Johnson told reporters Monday. “There will be long days and long nights here for the foreseeable future to make up for all this lost time that was imposed upon us.”

To reopen the government, the spending package needs to pass the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority and Democrats have vowed to vote against a deal that does not address healthcare costs.

Still, Trump and Republican leaders believe they have enough votes to push it through the chamber and reopen the government later in the week.

Trump has called the spending package a “very good” deal and has indicated that he will sign it once it gets to his desk.

At a Veterans Day event on Tuesday, Trump thanked Thune and Johnson for their work on their work to reopen the government. Johnson was in the crowd listening to Trump’s remarks.

“Congratulations to you and to John and to everybody on a very big victory,” Trump said in a speech at Arlington National Cemetery. “We are opening back our country. It should’ve never been closed.”

While Trump lauded the measure as a done deal, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the chamber, said his party would still try to delay or tank the legislation with whatever tools it had left.

“House Democrats will strongly oppose any legislation that does not decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis,” Jeffries said in a CNN interview Tuesday morning.

Just like in the Senate, California Democrats in the House are expected to vote against the shutdown deal because it does not address the expiring healthcare subsidies.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi said the shutdown deal reached in the Senate “fails to meet the needs of America’s working families” and said she stood with House Democratic leaders in opposing the legislation.

“We must continue to fight for a responsible, bipartisan path forward that reopens the government and keeps healthcare affordable for the American people,” Pelosi said in a social media post.

California Republicans in the House, meanwhile, have criticized Democrats for trying to stop the funding agreement from passing.

“These extremists only care about their radical base regardless of the impact to America,” Rep. Ken Calvert of Corona said in a social media post.

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) publicly called on Johnson to negotiate with Democrats on healthcare during the shutdown. He said in an interview last month that he thought there was “a lot of room” to address concerns on both sides of the aisle on how to address the rising costs of healthcare.

Kiley said Monday that he was proposing legislation with Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-San José) that proposed extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits for another two years.

He said the bill would “stop massive increase in healthcare costs for 22 million Americans whose premium tax credits are about to expire.”

“Importantly, the extension is temporary and fully paid for, so it can’t increase the deficit,” Kiley said in reference to a frequent concern cited by Republicans that extending the credits would contribute to the national debt.

The International Olympic Committee pumped the brakes on a report Monday that the body was poised to ban athletes born male from competing in women’s Olympic events, saying that “no decisions have been taken yet.”

A report in The Times of London stated that the ban on transgender women in female competition would be implemented early in 2026 “after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.”

The IOC insisted the report was premature but did not refute that a new policy was forthcoming.

A spokesperson confirmed that medical and scientific director Dr. Jane Thornton updated IOC members last week at a meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the initial findings of a working group studying the issue. However, the spokesperson said in a statement that “the working group is continuing its discussions on this topic and no decisions have been taken yet. Further information will be provided in due course.”

New IOC president Kirsty Coventry succeeded Thomas Bach in June and three months later formed the Protection of the Female Category working group made up of experts as well as representatives of international federation to study the issue.

The findings and a new policy could be announced as soon as the IOC session, scheduled in February ahead of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics.

Under Bach, the IOC declined to apply a universal rule on transgender participation in the Olympics, and transgender athletes remain eligible to participate. Each sport’s international federation is allowed to set its own rules.

However, Coventry said in her first news conference after becoming IOC president that she believes Olympic sports should do away with the current piecemeal approach to setting rules on transgender inclusion and instead implement a policy that applies to most or all sports.

“We understand that there will be differences depending on the sport,” she said. “But it was very clear from the members that we have to protect the female category, first and foremost to ensure fairness.

“We have to do it with a scientific approach and with the inclusion of the international federations who have done a lot of work in that area.”

President Trump signed an executive order early this year banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports in U.S. schools and said he intends to apply the policy at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. The order directs the Secretary of State to attempt to change IOC rules on transgender participation and also directs immigration officials to refuse admission to transgender women from other countries for the purposes of sports participation.

California Department of Education officials refused to comply with the order. However, Trump’s announcement prompted the U.S Olympic and Paralympic Committee to change their rules and ban transgender athletes from taking part in women’s sports.

The most recent Olympics controversy over gender eligibility occurred at the Paris Games last summer when boxer Imane Khelif of Algeria won the women’s welterweight gold medal a year after being disqualified from the World Championships for reportedly failing a gender eligibility test.

The IOC allowed Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting to compete in the women’s division because their passports identified them as female. Yu-ting had been banned by the suspended International Boxing Assn. (IBA).

In an attempt to identify athletes raised as female but who sometimes carry physical advantages of males — called Differences of Sexual Development (DSD) — international boxing this year introduced mandatory tests for athletes in the female category to detect a gene on the Y chromosome that triggers the development of male characteristics.

Other sports have created a range of thresholds to ban or allow transgender athletes to compete as women. World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field, bans transgender athletes who have undergone male puberty. World Rugby forbids transgender athletes from competing at the highest level. And World Aquatics allows transgender athletes who transitioned before the age of 12 to compete as women.

Very few transgender athletes have taken part in the Games. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard became the first openly transgender athlete to compete in a different gender category in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.

“I don’t think we need to redo all the work that’s been done — we can learn from the international federations and set up a task force that will look at this constantly and consistently,” Coventry said. “The overarching principle must be to protect the female category.”

A judge on Monday allowed the continued deployment of more than 300 West Virginia National Guard members to patrol the streets of Washington, D.C., as part of President Trump’s push to send the military into Democratic-run cities.

Kanawha County Circuit Judge Richard D. Lindsay made the ruling after hearing arguments in a lawsuit by a civic organization that argued Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey exceeded his authority when he authorized the Guard’s deployment in August.

“The question before this court is whether or not state law allows West Virginia to do this,” Lindsay said. “… This court believes that the federal law allows for the request made by the president to the governor.”

West Virginia is among several states that sent National Guard members to the nation’s capital. While the state National Guard has said its deployment could last until the end of November, it is consulting with the governor’s office and others on the possibility of extending the stay.

Formal orders were issued last week extending the deployment of the District of Columbia’s National Guard in the city through the end of February.

“We are pleased with the judge’s decision,” Jace Goins, the state’s chief deputy attorney general, said outside the court in Charleston. “The National Guard are going nowhere. They’re staying in D.C. They’re not going to be redeployed to West Virginia.

“The judge made the determination that the governor made a lawful decision deploying the National Guard to D.C. by a lawful request of the president.”

The West Virginia Citizen Action Group, which filed the lawsuit, argued that under state law, the governor could deploy the National Guard out of state only for certain purposes, such as responding to a natural disaster or another state’s emergency request.

The civic group claimed that it was harmed by the deployment by being forced to refocus its resources away from government accountability and transparency. The state attorney general’s office sought to reject the case, saying the group has not been harmed and lacked standing to challenge Morrisey’s decision.

“It was a simple issue of a broad, lawful request by the president and a lawful deployment by the governor. That’s all,” Goins said.

Aubrey Sparks, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s West Virginia chapter, said she didn’t believe it was the correct decision.

“I think that West Virginia law is clear,” Sparks said. “I think what the state was permitted to do here is to skirt past West Virginia law simply because Trump asked them to. And that’s not how the law works. We remain deeply concerned about it.”

Trump issued an executive order in August declaring a crime emergency in the nation’s capital, although the Department of Justice itself says violent crime there is at a 30-year low.

Within a month, more than 2,300 Guard troops from eight states and the District of Columbia were patrolling under the Army secretary’s command. Trump also deployed hundreds of federal agents to assist them.

Separately, a federal judge heard arguments Oct. 24 on District of Columbia Atty. Gen. Brian Schwalb ’s request for an order that would remove National Guard members from Washington streets. U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, an appointee of former President Biden, did not rule from the bench.

Raby writes for the Associated Press.

PALM DESERT — Joy Miedecke, who runs the largest Republican club in the Coachella Valley, handed out scores of “No on Prop. 50” lawn signs before election day.

But Tuesday morning, she knew the ballot measure would pass.

Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to challenge President Trump, easily prevailed last week. The ballot measure, created to level the playing field with Republican gerrymandering efforts in Texas and other GOP states, reconfigured California congressional districts to favor Democrats as they try to take back the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterms.

As a consequence, Coachella Valley’s Republicans could soon be represented by anti-Trump Democrats in Washington.

California Republicans, far outnumbered by those on the left, for years have felt ignored in a state where Democrats reign, and the passage of Proposition 50 only adds to the sense of political hopelessness.

“The Democrats get their way because we don’t have enough people,” said Miedecke, of her party’s struggles in California.

Bordered by the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains, the desert basin has long been a magnet for conservative retirees and vacationers, including former Republican presidents.

A cluster of palm trees light the evening landscape on Frank Sinatra Drive in Rancho Mirage.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

The local hospital is named after President Eisenhower. President Ford enjoyed the many emerald golf courses in his later years and his wife, former first lady Betty Ford, founded her namesake addiction treatment center in the desert valley.

Voters in Indian Wells, parts of La Quinta and Cahuilla Hills backed Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Under Prop. 50, some or all of those areas will move to a congressional district led by Democrat Raul Ruiz, an emergency room physician raised in the Coachella Valley, or join with left-leaning San Diego County suburbs in a new meandering district specifically crafted to favor Democratic candidates.

Joy Miedecke of Indio is president of the East Valley Republican Women Patriots. She blames the California GOP for failing to adequately fund opposition to Proposition 50.

“The party is at the bottom,” said Miedecke, 80. “It’s at the very bottom. We have nowhere to go but up.”

Sitting in her club’s retail store on Wednesday, Miedecke blamed the California Republican Party and its allies, saying they failed to raise enough money to blunt Prop. 50’s anti-Trump message.

A life-sized cardboard cutout of California Republican gubernatorial candidate and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco stood near stacks of red MAGA hats and “Alligator Alcatraz” T-shirts. A President Reagan cardboard cutout also greeted visitors.

Volunteer Chris Mahr checks signatures on petitions at the East Valley Republican Women Patriots on Nov. 6 in Palm Desert. Republicans fear Proposition 50’s passage will weaken representation in the Coachella Valley.

Republican voters in the Coachella Valley spent the days after the Nov. 4 special election criticizing the Republican Party and California’s Democratic leadership. In Facebook chat groups, in bars and on neighborhood walks, locals weighed in on the new congressional district lines and the proxy battle between Trump and Newsom.

On Wednesday, gleaming Lincoln Navigators and Cadillac Escalades cruised down a main drag, past tidy green lawns before disappearing into residential communities hidden behind sand-colored gates.

Kay Hillery, 89, who lives in an Indian Wells neighborhood known for its architecturally significant Midcentury Modern homes, is bracing for more bad news.

She anticipates that GOP congressional candidates will have a harder time raising money because the new districts marginalize Republicans.

“I am ashamed of the Republicans for not getting out the vote,” said Hillery, who moved to the desert from Arcadia in 1989.

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1. A ceramic figurine of Trump is on display at the East Valley Republican Women Patriots store in Palm Desert. 2. A Trump key chain dangles on top of a large God Bless America button which hangs next to a hair dryer and a Bible inside “Just Marylou” hair salon. 3. Inside the “Just Marylou” hair salon is decorated in Republican posters and slogans.

Voters who backed Prop. 50, however, were reenergized.

“It’s important to take a position when we need to, and we needed to take a position as a state,” said Linda Blank, president of the Indian Wells Preservation Foundation.

Indian Wells is best known for its premiere tennis tournament, top-level golf courses and palm tree-lined roadways. Eisenhower, who lived in Indian Wells part time, is memorialized with a statue outside City Hall.

The heavily Republican city for years hosted the state’s Republican Party convention and donor retreats organized by right-wing libertarians David and Charles Koch. (David Koch died in 2019.)

Following Tuesday’s election, Indian Wells will lose its Republican representative, Ken Calvert, and become part of the newly drawn district that reaches into San Diego County.

That area is represented by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall), but Democrats are trying to oust him by extending his district into bluer neighborhoods.

Michael Ford, left, Sonny Bono, center, and John Gardner Ford, right of Bono, attend the third day of the 1976 Republican National Convention at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Mo.

(Guy DeLort/Penske Media via Getty Images)

A major portion of the Riverside County desert region once was represented by Rep. Sonny Bono, the singer, who was a Republican. After he was killed in a ski accident in 1998, his wife, Mary Bono, also a Republican, ran for his seat and served in Congress until 2013.

The Coachella Valley is now a political patchwork, home also to the Democratic havens of Palm Springs and Cathedral City and divided towns of Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert.

Today, the region is split into congressional districts held by Calvert, a Republican who lives in far-off Corona, and Democrat Ruiz.

Calvert announced last week that he’ll run in a new district in Orange and Riverside counties. The good news for Calvert is that it’s a heavily Republican district. The bad news is Republican Rep. Young Kim of Anaheim Hills is also running in that district.

Calvert, in an emailed statement, blamed Newsom for disenfranchising Republicans throughout California — who account for 5.7 million of the 22.9 million voters in the state.

“Conservatives deserve to have their voices heard, not be drowned out by partisan moves to advance a one-sided political agenda,” said Calvert. His office didn’t respond when asked about the congressman’s views on Texas’ redistricting actions.

Indian Wells Mayor Bruce Whitman said Calvert was instrumental in directing millions of dollars to a wash project that will help development.

U.S. flags adorn El Paseo Shopping District on Nov. 6 in Palm Desert.

In nearby liberal Palm Springs, city leaders passed a resolution supporting immigrants and celebrated an all-LGBTQ+ city council in 2017.

Indian Wells’ political leadership remains apolitical, Whitman said.

“National issues like sanctuary city resolutions, or resolutions supporting Israel or Palestinians — it’s just not our thing,” he said.

At the Nest bar in Indian Wells, tourists from Canada and Oregon on Wednesday night mingled with silver-haired locals.

As Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” played, 60-something resident John — who declined to give his last name— predicted the redistricting wars would end as a “wash” between California and Texas.

“It’s just a game,” he said, sounding dismissive.

Sandra Schulz of Palm Desert, executive vice president of the East Valley Republican Women Patriots, stands in front of a wall covered with Trump photographs and paintings on Nov. 6 in Palm Desert.

Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at USC and UC Berkeley, sees another outcome. Taking away congressional representation from the party’s last remaining conservative bastions leaves the party even less relevant, he said.

The California Republican Party hasn’t done meaningful statewide work since then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger left office, Schnur said.

“They decided many years ago that they just weren’t going to engage seriously in state politics anymore,” said Schnur. “If you’re a California Republican, you focus on national politics and you work on local races.”

Tourists look at the Republican items in the store window at the East Valley Republican Women Patriots store on Nov. 6 in Palm Desert.

In 2007, then-Gov. Schwarzenegger spoke at a GOP state party convention in Indian Wells and warned his fellow Republicans that they needed to pivot to the political center and attract more moderates.

Schwarzenegger drew a parallel to the film industry, telling the convention crowd: “We are dying at the box office. We are not filling the seats.”

The former governor opposed Prop. 50, but limited his involvement with Republicans in the campaign to defeat the measure.

Indian Wells resident Peter Rammer, 69, a retired tech executive, described himself as a Republican who didn’t always vote along party lines. He is increasingly frustrated with Democrats’ handling of homelessness in California.

He voted against Prop. 50, but predicted the Democratic wins in New Jersey and Virginia would force the Republican Party to pay more attention to regional issues.

“I’m just not happy with how everything is going on the country right now,” said Rammer, standing outside Indian Wells City Hall. “There’s just so much turmoil, it’s crazy. But Trump — the guy I voted for — causes a lot of it.”

American flags adorn El Paseo Shopping District in staunchly Republican Palm Desert.

Back in Palm Desert, Republican club president Miedecke was focused on the next campaign: Getting the word out about a ballot measure by Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego).

It would require voter ID and proof of citizenship in California elections — another polarizing issue.

BBC Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News Chief Executive Deborah Turness announced Sunday they are resigning from their positions.

The departures come as the British public broadcaster has faced criticism for its editing of President Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech before the Capitol riot and insurrection.

The BBC investigative series “Panorama,” in a broadcast a week ahead of the U.S. presidential election last year, featured an edited video of Trump’s speech.

Critics said that the way the speech was edited was misleading in that it cut out a section in which Trump said that he expected his supporters would demonstrate peacefully.

“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump said in the speech, during which he also urged his supporters to “fight like hell.”

In a statement, Turness acknowledged the controversy around the “Panorama” broadcast, noting, “In public life leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down. While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”

In a separate news release, Davie said, “In these increasingly polarized times, the BBC is of unique value and speaks to the very best of us. It helps make the UK a special place; overwhelmingly kind, tolerant and curious. Like all public organizations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent and accountable.

“While not being the only reason, the current debate around BBC News has understandably contributed to my decision. Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as Director-General I have to take ultimate responsibility.”

Trump was impeached and criminally indicted over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and insurrection. The felony charges were dropped after he won the 2024 election, as U.S. Justice Department policy holds that a sitting president may not be criminally prosecuted.

Pressure on the broadcaster’s top executives has been growing since the Daily Telegraph newspaper published parts of a dossier complied by Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and guidelines.

As well as the Trump edit, it criticized the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues and raised concerns of anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s Arabic service.

The 103-year-old BBC faces greater scrutiny than other broadcasters — and criticism from its commercial rivals — because of its status as a national institution funded through an annual license fee of $230 paid by all households with a television.

The BBC airs vast reams of entertainment and sports programming across multiple television and radio stations and online platforms — but it’s the BBC’s news output that is most often under scrutiny.

The broadcaster is bound by the terms of its charter to be impartial in its output, and critics are quick to point out when they think it has failed. It’s frequently a political football, with conservatives seeing a leftist slant in its news output and some liberals accusing it of having a conservative bias.

It has also been criticized from all angles over its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. In February, the BBC removed a documentary about Gaza from its streaming service after it emerged that the child narrator was the son of an official in the Hamas-led government.

The BBC shakeup comes as Trump has been extremely aggressive in pursuing lawsuits against U.S. media companies. Paramount Global forked over $16 million this summer after Trump complained about the editing of a Kamala Harris interview on CBS’ “60 minutes.” Last year, ABC News paid $16 million to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit against anchor George Stephanopoulos.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

LONDON — The head of the BBC resigned Sunday after criticism of the broadcaster’s editing of a speech by President Trump.

The BBC said that Director-General Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness both announced their resignations Sunday.

Britain’s public broadcaster had been criticized for its editing of a speech Trump made on Jan. 6, 2021, before a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn his election defeat.

Critics said that the way the speech was edited for a BBC documentary was misleading in that it cut out a section in which Trump said that he expected his supporters would demonstrate peacefully.

“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump said in the speech, during which he also urged his supporters to “fight like hell.”

Trump was impeached and criminally indicted over his role in the ensuing Jan. 6 riot and insurrection. The felony charges were dropped after he won the 2024 election, as U.S. Justice Department policy holds that a sitting president may not be criminally prosecuted.

In a letter to staff, Davie said quitting the job after five years “is entirely my decision.”

“Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility,” Davie said.

He said that he was “working through exact timings with the Board to allow for an orderly transition to a successor over the coming months.”

Turness said that the controversy about the Trump documentary “has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC — an institution that I love. As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.”

Pressure on the broadcaster’s top executives has been growing since the Daily Telegraph newspaper published parts of a dossier complied by Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and guidelines.

As well as the Trump edit, it criticized the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues and raised concerns of alleged anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s Arabic service.

Proposition 50 has passed, and with it goes the warm spotlight of never-ending press coverage that aspiring presidential contender Gavin Newsom has enjoyed. What’s an ambitious governor to do?

My vote? Take inspiration from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who not only pulled America through the Depression, but rebuilt trust in democracy with a truly big-tent government that offered concrete benefits to a wide and diverse swath of society.

It’s time to once again embrace the values — inclusiveness, equity, dignity for all — that too many Democrats have expeditiously dropped to appease MAGA.

Not only did FDR make good on helping the average person, he put a sign on it (literally — think of all those Work Projects Administration logos that still grace our manhole covers and sidewalks) to make sure everyone knew that big, bold government wasn’t the problem, but the solution — despite what rich men wanted the public to believe.

As he was sworn in for his second term (of four, take that President Trump!), FDR said he was “determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern,” because the “test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Roosevelt created jobs paid for by government; he created Social Security; he created a coalition that improbably managed to include both Black Americans everywhere and white Southerners, northern industrialists and rural farmers. In the end, he created a United States where people could try, fail and have the helping hand to get back up again — the real underpinning of the American dream.

The similarities between Roosevelt’s day and now aren’t perfect, but they share a shoe size. FDR took office in 1933, when the Great Depression was in full swing. Then, like now, right-wing authoritarianism was cuddled up with the oligarchs. Income inequality was undeniable (and worse, unemployment was around 25%) and daily life was just plain hard.

That discontent, then and now, led to political polarization as need sowed division, and leaders with selfish agendas channeled fear into anger and anger into power.

Like then, the public today is desperate for security, and unselfish, service leadership — not that of “economic royalists,” as FDR described them. He warned then, in words sadly timeless, that “new kingdoms” were being “built upon concentration of control over material things.”

“They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction,” FDR said when accepting the presidential nomination for the second time.

“We’re in a similar moment now,” said New Deal expert Eric Rauchway, a distinguished professor of history at UC Davis.

But Roosevelt wasn’t just fighting what was wrong, he pointed out. He “wanted to show people that he was going to not put things back the way they were, but actually make things better.”

Like then, America today isn’t just looking to overcome.

Despite the relentless focus on cost of living, there is also hunger for a return to fairness. Even cowed by our personal needs, there is still in most of us that belief that Ronald Reagan articulated well: We aspire to be the “shining city upon a hill … teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”

Washington, D.C., resident Sean Dunn distilled that sentiment for the modern moment recently, standing outside a courthouse after being found not guilty of a misdemeanor for throwing a turkey sandwich at an immigration officer.

“Every life matters, no matter where you came from, no matter how you got here, no matter how you identify,” Dunn said. “You have the right to live a life that is free.”

But America needs to pay the bills and affordability is fairly the top concern for many. Voters want a concrete plan for personal financial stability — like FDR offered with the New Deal — grounded in tangible benefits such as healthcare, housing, jobs and affordable Thanksgiving turkeys that do not require lining up at a food bank.

The Republicans understand only part of this complicated mix — the affordability angle. Though, like the robber barons of the Roaring ‘20s, MAGA elite are finding it increasingly difficult to dismantle government and strip the American people of their wealth while simultaneously pretending they care.

Trump made a big to-do about the price of Walmart’s Thanksgiving meal this year, about $40 to serve 10 people (though it comes with fewer items than last year, and mostly Walmart house brand instead of name brands).

Walmart “came out and they said Trump’s Thanksgiving dinner, same things, is 25% less than Biden’s,” he said. “But we just lost an election, they said, based on affordability.”

Billionaire-adjacent Vice President JD Vance summed up that Republican frustration on social media after Democrats won not just Proposition 50, but elections in New Jersey, Virginia and even Mississippi.

“We need to focus on the home front,” Vance said, using weirdly coded right-wing nationalist language. “We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.”

Vance is partially right, but FDR ultimately succeeded because he understood that the stability of American democracy depends not just on paying the bills, but on equality and equity — of everyone having a fair shake at paying them.

Despite all the up-by-the-bootstraps rhetoric of our rich, the truth is healthy capitalist societies require “automatic stabilizers,” such as unemployment insurance, access to medical care and that Social Security FDR invented, said Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at the New School and another expert on the New Deal.

Left or right, Republican or Democrat, Americans want to know that they won’t be left out in the cold, literally, if life deals them a bad hand.

Of course, Newsom isn’t president so all he can do is give us a vision of what that would look like, the way FDR did as governor of New York in the early years of the Great Depression, before moving to the Oval Office.

There’s the evergreen refrain that as governor Newsom should stay in his lane and focus on the state, instead of his ambitions. To which I say, that’s like shaking your fist at the rear of a bolting horse. Newsom is running for president like Secretariat for the Triple Crown. And since we do in fact need a president, why shouldn’t he?

Next is the equally tired, “Republicans can’t wait for him to run because everyone hates California. Wait until Newsom hits Iowa!” But regular people hate despair, poverty and Nazis far more than they hate California. And the people who actually hate California more than they hate despair, poverty and Nazis are never going to vote for any Democrat.

For once, thanks to MAGA’s fascination with California as the symbol of failure and evil, the Golden State is the perfect place to make an argument for a new vision of America, FDR-style. In fact, we already are.

At a time of increasing hunger in our country, California is one of a handful of states that provides no-questions-asked free school lunches to all children, a proven way to combat food insecurity.

With Trump not only destroying the scientific institutions that study and control environmental and health safety, California is setting its own standards to protect people and the planet.

California has fought to expand access to affordable healthcare; stop the military on our streets and push back against masked police; and it leads our country in livable wages, safety nets, social equality and opportunities for social mobility. The state is doing as much as one state can to offer a new deal to solve old problems.

What if Newsom built off those successes with plans for Day One executive orders? Expansion of trade apprenticeships into every high school? A pathway for “Dreamers” to become citizens?

How about an order requiring nonpartisan election maps? Or declaring firearm violence a public health emergency? Heck, I’d love an executive order releasing the Epstein files, which may be America’s most bipartisan issue.

But, Rauchway warns, Newsom needs to be more like FDR and “put a sign on it” when he puts values into action.

“That investment has to be conspicuous, positive and very clear where it came from,” he said.

We are not a nation of subtlety or patience.

If Newsom wants to stay relevant, he has to do more than fight against Trump. He needs to make all Americans believe he’s fighting for them as FDR did — loudly and boldly — and that if he wins, they will, too, on Day One.

Gov. Gavin Newsom strode onstage in Houston on Saturday to a cheering crowd of Texas Democrats, saying Proposition 50’s victory in California on election day was a win for the nation and a firm repudiation of President Trump.

Newsom possessed the air of a politician running for president at the boisterous rally, a possibility the California governor says he is considering — and the location he chose was not happenstance.

Newsom accused Trump of pressuring Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to rejigger the state’s congressional districts with the goal of sending more Republicans to Congress, an action that triggered California’s Proposition 50. Newsom successfully pushed for a special election on the ballot measure to counter the efforts in Texas, which the governor said wasan attempt by Trump and the Republicans to “rig” the 2026 midterm election.

Cheers erupted from the friendly, union-hall crowd when Newsom belittled Trump as an “invasive species” and a “historically unpopular president.”

“On every issue, on the economy, on terrorists, on immigration, on healthcare, [he’s a] historically unpopular president, and he knows it, and he knows it,” Newsom said. “Why else did he make that call to your governor? Why else did he feel the need to rig the election before even one vote was cast? That’s just weakness, weakness masquerading as strength. That’s Donald Trump, and he had a very bad night on Tuesday.”

Newsom was the main political force behind Proposition 50, which California voters overwhelmingly approved in Tuesday’s special election. The statewide ballot measure was an attempt to counter Trump’s push to get Republican-led states, most notably Texas, to redraw their electoral maps to keep Democrats from gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms and upending his agenda. Newsom and California Democrats hope the change will net an additional five Democrats in California’s congressional delegation, canceling out any gains in Texas.

Newsom thanked Texas Democrats for putting up a fight against the redistricting effort in their state, saying it inspired an uprising.

“It’s dawning on people, all across the United States of America, what’s at stake,” Newsom told the crowd. “And you put a stake in the ground. People are showing up. I don’t believe in crowns, thrones. No kings.”

Newsom’s trip to Texas comes as the former San Francisco mayor has been openly flirting with a 2028 run for president. In a recent interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning,” Newsom was asked whether he would give “serious thought” after the 2026 midterms to a White House bid.

“Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise,” Newsom replied. “I’d just be lying. And I’m not — I can’t do that.”

In July, Newsom flew to South Carolina, a state that traditionally hosts the South’s first presidential primary. He said he wanted to help his party win back the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026. But South Carolina is a solidly conservative state and did not appear to have a single competitive race.

During that trip, South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress and renowned Democratic kingmaker, told The Times that Newsom would be “a hell of a candidate.” Newsom received similar praise — and encouragement — when he was introduced at the “Take It Back” rally in Houston.

Newsom now heads to Belém, Brazil, where representatives from 200 nations are gathering to kick off the annual United Nations climate policy summit. For Newsom, it’s a golden opportunity to appear on a world stage and sell himself and California as the antidote to Trump and his attacks on climate change policy.

The Trump administration this year canceled funding for major clean energy projects such as California’s hydrogen hub and moved to revoke the state’s long-held authority to set stricter vehicle emissions standards than the federal government.

PORTLAND, Ore. — A federal judge in Oregon ruled Friday that President Trump’s administration failed to meet the legal requirements for deploying the National Guard to Portland after the city and state sued in September to block the deployment.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, followed a three-day trial last week in which both sides argued over whether protests at the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building met the conditions for using the military domestically under federal law.

The administration said the troops were needed to protect federal personnel and property in a city that Trump described as “war ravaged” with “fires all over the place.”

In a 106-page opinion, Immergut found that even though the president is entitled to “great deference” in his decision on whether to call up the Guard, he did not have a legal basis for doing so because he did not establish that there was a rebellion or danger of rebellion, or that he was unable to enforce the law with regular forces.

“The trial record showed that although protests outside the Portland ICE building occurred nightly between June and October 2025, ever since a few particularly disruptive days in mid-June, protests have remained peaceful with only isolated and sporadic instances of violence,” Immergut wrote. “The occasional interference to federal officers has been minimal, and there is no evidence that these small-scale protests have significantly impeded the execution of any immigration laws.”

The Trump administration criticized the judge’s ruling.

“The facts haven’t changed. Amidst ongoing violent riots and lawlessness, that local leaders have refused to step in to quell, President Trump has exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets. President Trump will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities and we expect to be vindicated by a higher court,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman.

“The courts are holding this administration accountable to the truth and the rule of law,” Oregon Atty. Gen. Dan Rayfield said in an e-mailed statement. “From the beginning, this case has been about making sure that facts, not political whims, guide how the law is applied. Today’s decision protects that principle.”

Democratic cities targeted by Trump for military involvement — including Chicago, which has filed a separate lawsuit on the issue — have been pushing back. They argue the president has not satisfied the legal threshold for deploying troops and that doing so would violate states’ sovereignty.

Immergut issued two orders in early October that had blocked the deployment of the troops leading up to the trial. The first order blocked Trump from deploying 200 members of the Oregon National Guard; the second, issued a day later, blocked him from deploying members of any state’s National Guard to Oregon, after he tried to evade the first order by sending California troops instead.

Immergut has called Trump’s apocalyptic descriptions of Portland “simply untethered to the facts.”

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has already ordered that the troops not be deployed pending further action by the appeals court. The trial Immergut held further developed the factual record in the case, which could serve as the basis for further appellate rulings.

Witnesses including local police and federal officials were questioned about the law enforcement response to the nightly protests at the city’s ICE building. The demonstrations peaked in June, when Portland police declared one a riot. The demonstrations typically drew a couple dozen people in the weeks leading up to the president’s National Guard announcement.

The Trump administration said it has had to shuffle federal agents around the country to respond to the Portland protests, which it has characterized as a “rebellion” or “danger of rebellion.”

Federal officials working in the region testified about staffing shortages and requests for more personnel that have yet to be fulfilled. Among them was an official with the Federal Protective Service, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that provides security at federal buildings, whom the judge allowed to be sworn in as a witness under his initials, R.C., because of safety concerns.

R.C., who said he would be one of the most knowledgeable people in Homeland Security about security at Portland’s ICE building, testified that a troop deployment would alleviate the strain on staff. When cross-examined, however, he said he did not request troops and that he was not consulted on the matter by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or Trump. He also said he was “surprised” to learn about the deployment and that he did not agree with statements about Portland burning down.

Attorneys for Portland and Oregon said city police have been able to respond to the protests. After the Police Department declared a riot on June 14, it changed its strategy to direct officers to intervene when person and property crime occurs, and crowd numbers have largely diminished since the end of that month, police officials testified.

The ICE building closed for three weeks over the summer because of property damage, according to court documents and testimony. The regional field office director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, Cammilla Wamsley, said her employees worked from another building during that period. The plaintiffs argued that was evidence that they were able to continue their work functions.

Rush and Johnson write for the Associated Press. Johnson reported from Seattle. AP staff writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report from Palm Beach, Fla.

NEW YORK — U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a close Republican ally of President Trump, announced Friday that she’s running for governor of New York, a place she depicted in a campaign launch video as being “in ashes” because of lawlessness and a high cost of living.

In her video, a narrator declares “The Empire State has fallen” as it paints a grim picture of urban, liberal leadership and life in New York City, though the message appeared to be aimed at audiences in other, more conservative parts of the state.

Her candidacy sets up a potential battle with Gov. Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat, though both candidates would have to first clear the field of any intraparty rivals before next November’s election.

Stefanik, 41, has teased a run for months, often castigating Hochul, 67, as the “worst governor in America.” She’s also assailed Hochul for endorsing the ascendent, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor-elect of New York City.

In a written statement, Stefanik said she is running to make “New York affordable and safe for families all across our great state.”

“Our campaign will unify Republicans, Democrats, and Independents to Fire Kathy Hochul once and for all to Save New York,” she said.

Hochul’s campaign released its own attack ad Friday against the Republican, dubbing her “Sellout Stefanik,” and blamed her for enabling Trump’s tariffs and federal funding cuts to education and health care.

“Apparently, screwing over New Yorkers in Congress wasn’t enough — now she’s trying to bring Trump’s chaos and skyrocketing costs to our state,” said Hochul campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika.

Representing a conservative congressional district in northern New York, Stefanik had once been a pragmatic and moderate Republican who would avoid uttering Trump’s name, simply calling him “my party’s presidential nominee.”

But in recent years she has reshaped herself into a brash disciple and ardent defender of Trump’s MAGA movement, rising through the ranks of the Republican Party’s congressional hierarchy as it molded to Trump’s political style.

Last year, Stefanik was tapped to become the president’s ambassador to the United Nations, though her nomination was later pulled over concerns about her party’s tight margins in the House. She then began to angle toward a run for governor, and very quickly got a public nod of support from Trump.

Her announcement video, which was titled “From the Ashes,” casts New York as a dangerous place plagued by “migrant crime” and economic crisis, placing the blame on “Kathy Hochul’s failed policies,” as urgent, ominous music plays in the background.

New York City police officials have long touted drops in crime and this week said the city is in its eighth consecutive quarter of major crime decline.

The Republican primary field remains unclear ahead of the 2026 race.

On Long Island, Republican Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman has said he’s weighing a run for governor. In a statement Friday, he said he has “tremendous respect” for Stefanik but that the GOP needs to nominate a candidate who has “broad based appeal with independents and common sense Democrats.”

“The party must nominate the candidate with the best chance to defeat Kathy Hochul and I have been urged by business, community and political leaders across the state to make the run and I am seriously considering it,” said Blakeman, who handily won reelection to another four-year term on Tuesday.

U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler had been contemplating a run but instead decided to seek reelection in his battleground House district in the Hudson Valley.

Hochul faces a contested primary, with her own lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, running against her.

Democrats have a major voter registration edge in New York. The state’s last Republican governor was former Gov. George Pataki, who left office about two decades ago.

Still, Republican Lee Zeldin, a former Long Island congressman and current head of the Environmental Protection Agency, made a serious run for the office in 2022, coming within striking distance of upsetting Hochul.

Izaguirre writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Philip Marcelo contributed to this report.

BOSTON — President Trump ’s administration asked a federal appeals court Friday to block a judge’s order that it distribute November’s full monthly SNAP food benefits amid a U.S. government shutdown, even as at least some states said they were moving quickly to get the money to people.

The judge gave the Trump administration until Friday to make the payments through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But the administration asked the appeals court to suspend any court orders requiring it to spend more money than is available in a contingency fund, and instead allow it to continue with planned partial SNAP payments for the month.

The court filing came even as Wisconsin said Friday that some SNAP recipients in the state already got their full November payments overnight on Thursday.

“We’ve received confirmation that payments went through, including members reporting they can now see their balances,” said Britt Cudaback, a spokesperson for Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Uncertainty remains for many SNAP recipients

The court wrangling prolonged weeks of uncertainty for the food program that serves about 1 in 8 Americans, mostly with lower incomes.

An individual can receive a monthly maximum food benefit of nearly $300 and a family of four up to nearly $1,000, although many receive less than that under a formula that takes into consideration their income. For many SNAP participants, it remains unclear exactly how much they will receive this month, and when they will receive it.

Jasmen Youngbey of Newark, N.J., waited in line Friday at a food pantry in the state’s largest city. As a single mom attending college, Youngbey said she relies on SNAP to help feed her 7-month-old and 4-year-old sons. But she said her account balance was at $0.

“Not everybody has cash to pull out and say, ‘OK, I’m going to go and get this,’ especially with the cost of food right now,” she said.

Tihinna Franklin, a school bus guard who was waiting in the same line outside the United Community Corp. food pantry, said her SNAP account balance was at 9 cents and she was down to three items in her freezer. She typically relies on the roughly $290 a month in SNAP benefits to help feed her grandchildren.

“If I don’t get it, I won’t be eating,” she said. “My money I get paid for, that goes to the bills, rent, electricity, personal items. That is not fair to us as mothers and caregivers.”

The legal battle over SNAP takes another twist

Because of the federal government shutdown, the Trump administration originally had said SNAP benefits would not be available in November. However, two judges ruled last week that the administration could not skip November’s benefits entirely because of the shutdown. One of those judges was U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr., who ordered the full payments Thursday.

In both cases, the judges ordered the government to use one emergency reserve fund containing more than $4.6 billion to pay for SNAP for November but gave it leeway to tap other money to make the full payments, which cost between $8.5 billion and $9 billion each month.

On Monday, the administration said it would not use additional money, saying it was up to Congress to appropriate the funds for the program and that the other money was needed to shore up other child hunger programs.

Thursday’s federal court order rejected the Trump administration’s decision to cover only 65% of the maximum monthly benefit, a decision that could have left some recipients getting nothing for this month.

In its court filing Friday, Trump’s administration contended that Thursday’s directive to fund full SNAP benefits runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution.

“This unprecedented injunction makes a mockery of the separation of powers. Courts hold neither the power to appropriate nor the power to spend,” the U.S. Department of Justice wrote in its request to the court.

In response, attorneys for the cities and nonprofits challenging Trump’s administration said the government has plenty of available money and the court should “not allow them to further delay getting vital food assistance to individuals and families who need it now.”

States are taking different approaches to food aid

Some states said they stood ready to distribute SNAP money as quickly as possible.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said it directed a vendor servicing its SNAP electronic benefit cards to issue full SNAP benefits soon after the federal funding is received.

Benefits are provided to individuals on different days of the month. Those who normally receive benefits on the third, fifth or seventh of the month should receive their full SNAP allotment within 48 hours of funds becoming available, the Michigan agency said, and others should receive their full benefits on their regularly scheduled dates.

Meanwhile, North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services said that partial SNAP benefits were distributed Friday, based on the Trump administration’s previous decision. Officials in Illinois and North Dakota also said they were distributing partial November payments, starting as soon as Friday for some recipients.

In Missouri, where officials had been working on partial distribution, the latest court jostling raised new questions. A spokesperson for the state Department of Social Services said Friday that it is awaiting further guidance about how to proceed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP.

Amid the federal uncertainty, Delaware’s Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer said the state used its own funds Friday to provide the first of could be a weekly relief payment to SNAP recipients.

On Thursday, Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen downplayed the effect of paused SNAP benefits on families in his state, saying, “Nobody’s going to go hungry.” The multimillionaire said food pantries, churches and other charitable services would fill the gap.

Lieb, Casey and Bauer write for the Associated Press. Lieb reported from Jefferson City, Mo., and Bauer from Madison, Wisc. AP writers Margery Beck in Omaha; Mike Catalini in Newark, N.J.; Jack Dura in Bismarck, N.D.; Mingson Lau in Claymont, Del.; John O’Connor, in Springfield, Ill.; and Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO — Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a trailblazing San Francisco Democrat who leveraged decades of power in the U.S. House to become one of the most influential political leaders of her generation, will not run for reelection in 2026, she said Thursday.

The former House speaker, 85, who has been in Congress since 1987 and oversaw both of President Trump’s first-term impeachments, had been pushing off her 2026 decision until after Tuesday’s vote on Proposition 50, a ballot measure she backed and helped bankroll to redraw California’s congressional maps in her party’s favor.

With the measure’s resounding passage, Pelosi said it was time to start clearing the path for another Democrat to represent San Francisco — one of the nation’s most liberal bastions — in Congress, as some are already vying to do.

“With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative,” Pelosi said in a nearly six-minute video she posted online Thursday morning, in which she also recounted major achievements from her long career.

Pelosi did not immediately endorse a would-be successor, but challenged her constituents to stay engaged.

“As we go forward, my message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she said. “We have made history, we have made progress, we have always led the way — and now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy, and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

Pelosi’s announcement drew immediate reaction across the political world, with Democrats lauding her dedication and accomplishments and President Trump, a frequent target and critic of hers, ridiculing her as a “highly overrated politician.”

Pelosi has not faced a serious challenge for her seat since President Reagan was in office, and has won recent elections by wide margins. Just a year ago, she won reelection with 81% of the vote.

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However, Pelosi was facing two hard-to-ignore challengers from her own party in next year’s Democratic primary: state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), 55, a prolific and ambitious lawmaker with a strong base of support in the city, and Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, a Democratic political operative and tech millionaire who is infusing his campaign with personal cash.

Their challenges come amid a shifting tide against gerontocracy in Democratic politics more broadly, as many in the party’s base have increasingly questioned the ability of its longtime leaders — especially those in their 70s and 80s — to sustain an energetic and effective resistance to President Trump and his MAGA agenda.

In announcing his candidacy for Pelosi’s seat last month after years of deferring to her, Wiener said he simply couldn’t wait any longer. “The world is changing, the Democratic Party is changing, and it’s time,” he said.

Chakrabarti — who helped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) topple another older Democratic incumbent with a message of generational change in 2018 — said voters in San Francisco “need a whole different approach” to governing after years of longtime party leaders failing to deliver.

In an interview Thursday, Wiener called Pelosi an “icon” who delivered for San Francisco in more ways than most people can comprehend, with whom he shared a “deep love” for the city. He also recounted, in particular, Pelosi’s early advocacy for AIDS treatment and care in the 1980s, and the impact it had on him personally.

“I remember vividly what it felt like as a closeted gay teenager, having a sense that the country had abandoned people like me, and that the country didn’t care if people like me died. I was 17, and that was my perception of my place in the world,” Wiener said. “Nancy Pelosi showed that that wasn’t true, that there were people in positions of power who gave a damn about gay men and LGBTQ people and people living with HIV and those of us at risk for HIV — and that was really powerful.”

Chakrabarti, in a statement Thursday, thanked Pelosi for her “decades of service that defined a generation of politics” and for “doing something truly rare in Washington: making room for the next one.”

While anticipated by many, Pelosi’s decision nonetheless reverberated through political circles, including as yet another major sign that a new political era is dawning for the political left — as also evidenced by the stunning rise of Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist elected Tuesday as New York City’s next mayor.

Known as a relentless and savvy party tactician, Pelosi had fought off concerns about her age in the past, including when she chose to run again last year. The first woman ever elected speaker in 2007, Pelosi has long cultivated and maintained a spry image belying her age by walking the halls of Congress in signature four-inch stilettos, and by keeping up a rigorous schedule of flying between work in Washington and constituent events in her home district.

However, that veneer has worn down in recent years, including when she broke her hip during a fall in Europe in December.

That occurred just after fellow octogenarian President Biden sparked intense speculation about his age and cognitive abilities with his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June of last year. The performance led to Biden being pushed to drop out of the race — in part by Pelosi — and to Vice President Kamala Harris moving to the top of the ticket and losing badly to Trump in November.

Democrats have also watched other older liberal leaders age and die in power in recent years, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, another San Francisco power player in Washington. When Ginsburg died in office at 87, it handed Trump a third Supreme Court appointment. When Feinstein died in office ill at 90, it was amid swirling questions about her competency to serve.

By bowing out of the 2026 race, Pelosi — who stepped down from party leadership in 2022 — diminished her own potential for an ungraceful last chapter in office. But she did not concede that her current effectiveness has diminished one bit.

Pelosi was one of the most vocal and early proponents of Proposition 50, which amends the state constitution to give state Democrats the power through 2030 to redraw California’s congressional districts in their favor.

The measure was in response to Republicans in red states such as Texas redrawing maps in their favor, at Trump’s direction. Pelosi championed it as critical to preserving Democrats’ chances of winning back the House next year and checking Trump through the second half of his second term, something she and others suggested will be vital for the survival of American democracy.

On Tuesday, California voters resoundingly approved Proposition 50.

In her video, Pelosi noted a litany of accomplishments during her time in office, crediting them not to herself but to her constituents, to labor groups, to nonprofits and private entrepreneurs, to the city’s vibrant diversity and flair for innovation.

She noted bringing federal resources to the city to recover after the Loma Prieta earthquake, and San Francisco’s leading role in tackling the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis through partnerships with UC San Francisco and San Francisco General, which “pioneered comprehensive community based care, prevention and research” still used today.

She mentioned passing the Ryan White CARE Act and the Affordable Care Act, building out various San Francisco and California public transportation systems, building affordable housing and protecting the environment — all using federal dollars her position helped her to secure.

“It seems prophetic now that the slogan of my very first campaign in 1987 was, ‘A voice that will be heard,’ and it was you who made those words come true. It was the faith that you had placed in me, and the latitude that you have given me, that enabled me to shatter the marble ceiling and be the first woman speaker of the House, whose voice would certainly be heard,” Pelosi said. “It was an historic moment for our country, and it was momentous for our community — empowering me to bring home billions of dollars for our city and our state.”

After her announcement, Trump ridiculed her, telling Fox News that her decision not to seek reelection was “a great thing for America” and calling her “evil, corrupt, and only focused on bad things for our country.”

“She was rapidly losing control of her party and it was never coming back,” Trump told the outlet, according to a segment shared by the White House. “I’m very honored she impeached me twice, and failed miserably twice.”

The House succeeded in impeaching Trump twice, but the Senate acquitted him both times.

Pelosi’s fellow Democrats, by contrast, heaped praise on her as a one-of-a-kind force in U.S. politics — a savvy tactician, a prolific legislator and a mentor to an entire generation of fellow Democrats.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a longtime Pelosi ally who helped her impeach Trump, called Pelosi “the greatest Speaker in American history” as a result of “her tenacity, intellect, strategic acumen and fierce advocacy.”

“She has been an indelible part of every major progressive accomplishment in the 21st Century — her work in Congress delivered affordable health care to millions, created countless jobs, raised families out of poverty, cleaned up pollution, brought LGBTQ+ rights into the mainstream, and pulled our economy back from the brink of destruction not once, but twice,” Schiff said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Pelosi “has inspired generations,” that her “courage and conviction to San Francisco, California, and our nation has set the standard for what public service should be,” and that her impact on the country was “unmatched.”

“Wishing you the best in this new chapter — you’ve more than earned it,” Newsom wrote above Pelosi’s online video.

President Trump has long acknowledged that he doesn’t read books, so perhaps he’s never cracked the spine of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” But hasn’t he seen one of the several movies? Does he really not know that Gatsby is a tragedy about class, excess and hubris?

It seems not. On Halloween, there was Trump, dressed as himself, hosting a Gatsby-themed party at his Gatsby-era Mar-a-Lago estate. The president was fresh from a diplomatic tour of Asia during which he’d swept up an array of golden gifts (a crown!) from heads of state paying tribute in hopes of not paying tariffs.

Trump’s arriving guests, costumed as Roaring ’20s flappers, bootleggers and pre-crash tycoons, passed a scantily clad woman seductively writhing in a giant Champagne glass, then entered his gilded ballroom beneath a sign in Art Deco script pronouncing the night’s theme: “A little party never killed nobody.”

That’s the title of a song from the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film take on Gatsby, the most recent. Perhaps Trump is unaware that in the wake of the fictional Gatsby’s own debauched party, three people died, including Gatsby.

The tone-deaf Trump faced a comeuppance far short of tragedy after his party, but painful nonetheless: a blue wave in Tuesday’s elections. Revulsion at his imperial presidency swamped Republican candidates and causes.

The apparent ignorance of Mr. Make America Great Again about one of the great American novels, now in its centennial year, wasn’t the worst of Trump’s weekend show of excess. This was: The president of the United States held court at Mar-a-Lago, amid free-flowing liquor and tables laden with food, hours before federal food aid would end for 42 million Americans. Meanwhile, more than 1 million federal employees were furloughed or worked without pay amid a five-week-old government shutdown, some of them joining previously fired public servants at food banks. The online People magazine juxtaposed a photo of Trump surveying his Palm Beach party with a shot of nearby Miamians in a food line.

The president, who for nearly 10 months has seized powers he doesn’t have under federal law and the Constitution, professed to be all but powerless to avert the nutrition assistance cutoff, despite two federal judges’ rulings that he do so. And, characteristically, he claimed to be blameless about the shutdown that provoked the nutrition crisis.

“It’s their fault,” Trump said of congressional Democrats as he flew to Mar-a-Lago for the fete. “Everything is their fault. It’s so easily solved.”

How? Why, Democrats have to bend the knee, of course. They must abandon their quest to get Trump and Republicans to reverse their Medicaid cuts and to extend Obamacare subsidies for the working poor. Even as Mr. Art of the Deal claims (falsely) to have settled eight wars, bargaining even with Hamas, he’s refused to negotiate with Democrats. The shutdown is now the longest ever, on Tuesday surpassing the 35-day record Trump set in his first term.

There’s more.

En route to Florida aboard Air Force One, the presidential plane that Trump is replacing with a truly royal jet, a gift from Qatar, and having left behind the ruins of the East Wing where his $300-million ballroom will rise, Trump took to social media to boast of his latest project in the Mar-a-Lago-fication of the White House: an all-marble and gold do-over of the bathroom adjoining the Lincoln Bedroom. “Highly polished, Statuary marble!” he crowed, sending two dozen photos in a series of posts. Trump wrote that the previous 1940s-era bathroom “was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era,” but his changes fixed that.

“Art Deco doesn’t go with, you know, 1850 and civil wars and all of the problems,” he’d told wealthy donors last month. “But what does is statuary marble. So I ripped it apart and we built the bathroom. It’s absolutely gorgeous and totally in keeping with that time.”

And with that, Trump again showed his ignorance of America’s history as well as its literature. That said, the new bathroom is more attractive than the one at Mar-a-Lago in which Trump stashed boxes of government documents, including top-secret papers, after his first term.

Trump’s lust for power and its trappings seems to have made him blind to bad optics and deaf to the dissonance of his utterances. The politician who’s gotten so much credit — and won two of three presidential elections — for speaking to working-class Americans’ grievances now seems completely out of touch. There’s also his family’s open accrual of wealth, especially in crypto, and Trump’s recent demand for $230 million from the ever-accommodating Justice Department, to compensate him for the past legal cases against him for keeping government documents and attempting to reverse his 2020 defeat.

All of this while Americans’ costs of living remain high, people are out of jobs thanks to his policies and longtime residents, including some citizens, are swept up in his immigrant detentions and deportations, sundering families.

This week’s election results aren’t the only thing that suggests Trump is finally paying a price. So did the release of several polls timed for the first anniversary of his reelection. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, his job approval ratings are the lowest since the ignominious end of his first term. Majorities oppose his handling of most issues, including the ones — the economy and immigration — that helped elect him.

The narrator in “The Great Gatsby” famously says of two central characters, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

I’m looking forward to the day when the careless Trump is gone and his mess can be cleaned up — including all that gold defiling the People’s House.

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NEW YORK — At the top of his victory speech at a Brooklyn theater late Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani — the 34-year-old democratic socialist just elected New York’s next mayor — spoke of power being gripped by the bruised and calloused hands of working Americans, away from the wealthy elite.

“Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it,” he said. “The future is in our hands.”

The imagery was apropos of the night more broadly — when a beaten-down Democratic Party, still nursing its wounds from a wipeout by President Trump a year ago, forcefully took back what some had worried was lost to them for good: momentum.

From coast to coast Tuesday night, American voters delivered a sharp rebuke to Trump and his MAGA movement, electing Democrats in important state and local races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia and passing a major California ballot measure designed to put more Democrats in Congress in 2026.

The results — a reversal of the party’s fortunes in last year’s presidential election, when Trump swept the nation’s swing states — arrived amid deep political division and entrenched Republican power in Washington. Many voters cited Trump’s agenda, and related economic woes, as motivating their choices at the ballot box.

The wins hardly reflected a unified Democratic Party nationally, or even a shared left-wing vision for a future beyond Trump. If anything, Mamdani’s win was a challenge to the Democratic Party establishment as much as a rejection of Trump.

His vision for the future is decidedly different than that of other, more moderate Democrats who won elsewhere in the country, such as Abigail Spanberger, the 46-year-old former CIA officer whom Virginians elected as their first female governor, or Mikie Sherrill, the 53-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who won the race for New Jersey governor.

Still, the cascade of victories did evoke for many Democrats and progressives a political hope that they hadn’t felt in a while: a sense of optimism that Trump and his MAGA movement aren’t unstoppable after all, and that their own party’s ability to resist isn’t just alive and well but gaining speed.

“Let me underscore, it’s been a good evening — for everybody, not just the Democratic Party. But what a night for the Democratic Party,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said during his own remarks on the national wins. “A party that is in its ascendancy, a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels.”

“I hope it’s the first of many dominoes that are going to happen across this country,” Noah Gotlib, 29, of Bushwick said late Tuesday at a victory party for Mamdani. “I hope there’s a hundred more Zohrans at a local, state, federal level.”

On a night of big wins, Mamdani’s nonetheless stood out as a thunderbolt from the progressive left — a full-throated rejection not just of Trump but of Mamdani’s mainstream Democratic opponent in the race: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Mamdani — a Muslim, Ugandan-born state assemblyman of Indian descent — beat Cuomo first in the Democratic ranked-choice primary in June. Cuomo, bolstered by many of New York’s moneyed interests afraid of Mamdani’s ideas for taxing the rich and spending for the poor, reentered the race as an independent.

Trump attacked Mamdani time and again as a threat. He said Monday that he would cut off federal funding to New York if Mamdani won. He even took the dramatic step of endorsing Cuomo over Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in the race, in a last-ditch effort to block Mamdani’s stunning political ascent.

Instead, city voters surged to the polls and delivered Mamdani a resounding win.

“To see him rise above all of these odds to actually deliver a vision of something that could be better, that was what really attracted me to the [Democratic Socialists of America] in the first place,” said Aminata Hughes, 31, of Harlem, who was dancing at an election-night party when Mamdani was announced the winner.

“A better world is possible,” the native New Yorker said, “and we’re not used to hearing that from our politicians.”

In trademark Trump fashion, the president dismissed the wins by his rival party, suggesting they were a result of two factors: the ongoing federal shutdown, which he has blamed on Democrats, and the fact that he wasn’t personally on people’s ballots.

Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s chief advisors, posted a paragraph to social media outlining the high number of mixed-status immigrant families in New York being impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and mass deportation campaign, which Miller has helped lead.

Democrats in some ways agreed. They pointed to the shutdown and other disruptions to Americans’ safety and financial security as motivating the vote. They pointed to Trump’s immigration tactics as being an affront to hard-working families. And they pointed to Trump himself — not on the ballot but definitely a factor for voters, especially after he threatened to cut off funds to New York if the city voted for Mamdani again.

“President Trump has threatened New York City if we dare stand up to him. The people of New York came together and we said, ‘You don’t threaten New York,’” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “We’re going to stand up to bullies and thugs in the White House.”

“Today we said ‘no’ to Donald Trump and ‘yes’ to democracy,” New Jersey Democratic Chair LeRoy J. Jones Jr. told a happy crowd at Sherrill’s watch party.

“Congratulations to all the Democratic candidates who won tonight. It’s a reminder that when we come together around strong, forward-looking leaders who care about the issues that matter, we can win,” former President Obama wrote on social media. “We’ve still got plenty of work to do, but the future looks a little bit brighter.”

In addition to winning the New York mayoral and New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, Democrats outperformed Republicans in races across the country. They held several seats on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and won the Virginia attorney general’s race. In California, voters passed Proposition 50, a ballot measure giving state Democrats the power to redraw congressional districts in their favor ahead of next year’s midterms.

Newsom and other Democrats had made Proposition 50 all about Trump from the beginning, framing it as a direct response to Trump trying to steal power by convincing red states such as Texas to redraw their own congressional lines in favor of Republicans.

Trump has been direct about trying to shore up Republicans’ slim majority in the House, to help ensure they retain power and are able to block Democrats from thwarting his agenda. And yet, he has suggested California’s own redistricting effort was illegal and a “GIANT SCAM” under “very serious legal and criminal review.”

Trump had also gone after several of the Democrats who won on Tuesday directly. In addition to Mamdani, Trump tried to paint Spanberger and Sherrill as out-of-touch liberals too, attacking them over some of his favorite wedge issues such as transgender rights, crime and energy costs. Similar messaging was deployed by the candidates’ Republican opponents.

In some ways, Trump was going out on a political limb, trying to sway elections in blue states where his grip on the electorate is smaller and his influence is often a major motivator for people to get out and vote against him and his allies.

His weighing in on the races only added to the sense that the Democrats’ wins marked something bigger — a broader repudiation of Trump, and a good sign for Democrats heading into next year’s midterms.

Marcus LaCroix, 42, who voted for Proposition 50 at a polling site in Lomita on Tuesday evening, described it as “a counterpunch” to what he sees as the excesses and overreach of the Trump administration, and Trump’s pressure on red states to redraw their lines.

“A lot of people are very concerned about the redistricting in Texas,” he said. “But we can actually fight back.”

Ed Razine, 27, a student who lives in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, was in class when he heard Mamdani won. Soon, he was celebrating with friends at Nowadays, a Bushwick dance club hosting an election watch party.

Razine said Mamdani’s win represented a “new dawn” in American politics that he hopes will spread to other cities and states across the country.

“For me, he does represent the future of the Democratic Party — the fact that billionaires can’t just buy our election, that if someone really cares to truly represent the everyday person, people will rise up and that money will not talk,” Razine said. “At the end of the day, people talk.”

The Associated Press and Times staff writer Connor Sheets contributed to this report.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Political stars often rise and fall but few have had a more dramatic trajectory than Dick Cheney in his home state of Wyoming.

Hours after Cheney died Tuesday at 84, the state lowered flags at the Republican governor’s order. Some politicians in the state offered at times measured praise of the former vice president.

But among a large majority of voters in Wyoming, Cheney has been persona non grata for more than five years now, his reputation brought down amid President Trump’s withering politics.

Trump has criticized Cheney for the drawn-out and costly Iraq war, and his daughter, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, for saying Trump should never be allowed back in the White House after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

This resonated with many residents, including Jeanine Stebbing, of Cheyenne, whose last straw was the idea that Trump shouldn’t be reelected.

“There was no open-mindedness. Nothing about how, ‘We understand that our neighbors here are supportive of Trump.’ Just the idea that we were all stupid, is what it felt like,” Stebbing said Tuesday.

The final blow for the Cheney family in Wyoming came in 2022, when Trump supported ranching attorney Harriet Hageman to oppose Liz Cheney for a fourth term as the state’s U.S. representative.

Hageman got two-thirds of the vote in the Republican primary, a decisive win in a state with so few Democrats that the general election is considered inconsequential for major races.

Trump’s biggest gripe, ultimately, was that Liz Cheney voted to impeach him, then co-led the congressional investigation into his role in the attack. In Wyoming, a prevailing belief was Liz Cheney seemed more focused on taking down Trump than on representing the state.

“I was very disappointed that, you know, somebody who came from this state would be so adamantly blind to anything other than what she wanted to do. And he joined in as well,” Stebbing said.

Not even Dick Cheney’s endorsement of his daughter over Hageman — and of Kamala Harris over Trump last year — made a difference, as Trump’s appeal in Wyoming only grew. Trump won Wyoming by more than any other state in 2016, 2020 and 2024, the year of his biggest margin in the state.

Some expressed sadness that George W. Bush’s vice president would not be remembered well by so many in the state.

“On the 16th anniversary of my own father’s death today, I can appreciate a father who stood by his daughter, which he did loyally and truthfully,” said Republican state Sen. Tara Nethercott, who is Senate majority floor leader. “He stood by his daughter during those difficult times.”

Nethercott wouldn’t speculate if Liz Cheney might yet have a political future. Wyoming’s support of Trump “speaks volumes,” she said.

Liz Cheney has continued to live in Jackson Hole, near her parents, while traveling back and forth to Charlottesville to teach at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

For Brian Farmer — who, like Dick Cheney, grew up in Casper and went to the University of Wyoming — Cheney’s legacy will be his service to the state, no matter where people stand on issues.

“He was always somebody whose path I looked at, sought to follow. Very quiet, soft-spoken at times, Very bombastic and loud at others,” said Farmer, executive director of the Wyoming School Boards Association.

Cheney had a 30-year career in politics, from serving as President Gerald Ford’s young chief of staff to representing Wyoming in Congress in the 1980s. He rose to a top GOP leadership role in Congress — one his daughter, too, would later fill — before being named President George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary.

After his time in office, the CEO of oilfield services company Halliburton kept active in state politics, voicing support and even stumping for Republican candidates.

And yet Cheney was so low-key and unassuming, his mere presence was the whole point — not the nice things he had to say, for example, about former Gov. Jim Geringer, who handily won reelection in 1998.

“You talk about people walking into a room and commanding it. That man did it without even speaking a word,” said state Rep. Landon Brown, a Cheyenne Republican who met him several times including at University of Wyoming football games.

“He’s going to be sincerely missed in this state,” he said. “Maybe not by everybody.”

Gruver writes for the Associated Press.

NEW YORK — With the Pentagon’s press room largely cleared of mainstream reporters, conservative activist and presidential ally Laura Loomer says she has been granted a credential to work there.

Loomer has an influential social media presence and the ear of President Trump, frequently campaigning for the firings of government officials she deems insufficiently loyal to his administration. Some targets have been in the field of national security, including Dan Driscoll, secretary of the Army.

Pentagon officials did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Tuesday. The Washington Post first reported the news of her attaining credentials.

Virtually all Pentagon reporters for legacy media outlets walked out last month rather than agree to a new policy they say would restrict their ability to report news not given approval for release by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Several right-wing outlets have taken their place, although the banned journalists are continuing to work on stories related to the Pentagon.

“I’m excited to announce that after a year of breaking the most impactful stories that pertain to our national security and rooting out deceptive and disloyal bad actors” from the Defense Department, she was ready to join the press corps, Loomer said on X, formerly Twitter. She did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Earlier this year, she criticized Driscoll for publicly honoring a Medal of Honor recipient who had previously spoken at a Democratic National Convention. Separately, Driscoll rescinded the appointment of a former Biden administration official to teach at West Point after Loomer attacked him for it.

Although Trump later downplayed Loomer’s influence, the president last spring fired a handful of National Security Council officials after she had presented him with evidence of their supposed disloyalty.

Still, she’s been a polarizing force among some in the administration, wary of her influence, which has included riding on Air Force One with Trump. Although granted space in the Pentagon press room, Loomer has not received reporting credentials at the White House. Loomer has also been criticized for entertaining conspiracy theories and making anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim posts.

“There is no denying that my investigative reporting has had a massive impact on the landscape of personnel decisions within the Executive Branch, our intelligence agencies and the Pentagon,” Loomer wrote on X. “I look forward to covering the Pentagon and breaking more stories that impact our country and our national security.”

In her social media post, she also reached out to people to alert her to news through “the Loomered Tip Line, the most influential Tip Line in all of DC.”

Phil Stewart, a national security reporter for Reuters, noted on a social media post Tuesday that Hegseth’s new media policy would make reporters subject to having their access revoked for seeking out information from Defense Department personnel that had not been authorized for release.

However, Loomer’s appeal for tips did not explicitly target people who work at the Defense Department.

Bauder writes for the Associated Press.

NEW YORK — Fresh off winning New York City’s mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani announced Wednesday that a team including former city and federal officials — all women — would steer his transition to City Hall, and that he would “work every day to honor the trust that I now hold.”

“I and my team will build a City Hall capable of delivering on the promises of this campaign,” the mayor-elect said at a news conference, vowing that his administration would be both compassionate and capable.

He named political strategist Elana Leopold as executive director of the transition team. She will work with United Way of New York City President Grace Bonilla; former Deputy Mayor Melanie Hartzog, who was also a city budget official; former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan; and former First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer.

With his win over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa, the 34-year-old democratic socialist will soon become the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first of South Asian heritage, the first born in Africa and the youngest mayor in more than a century.

He now faces the task of following through on his ambitious affordability agenda while navigating the bureaucratic challenges of City Hall and a hostile Trump administration.

“I’m confident in delivering these same policies that we ran on for the last year,” he said in an interview earlier Wednesday on cable news channel NY1.

More than 2 million New Yorkers cast ballots in the contest, the largest turnout in a mayoral race in more than 50 years, according to the city’s Board of Elections. With roughly 90% of the votes counted, Mamdani held an approximately 9 percentage point lead over Cuomo.

Mamdani, who was criticized throughout the campaign for his thin resume, will now have to begin staffing his incoming administration and planning how to accomplish the ambitious but polarizing agenda that drove him to victory.

Among the campaign’s promises are free child care, free city bus service, city-run grocery stores and a new Department of Community Safety that would expand on an existing city initiative that sends mental health care workers, rather than police, to handle certain emergency calls. It is unclear how Mamdani will pay for such initiatives, given Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s steadfast opposition to his calls to raise taxes on wealthy people.

On Wednesday, he touted his support from Hochul and other state leaders as “endorsements of an agenda of affordability.”

His decisions around the leadership of the New York Police Department will also be closely watched. Mamdani was a fierce critic of the department in 2020, calling for “this rogue agency” to be defunded and slamming it as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.” He has since apologized for those comments and has said he will ask the current NYPD commissioner to stay on the job.

Mamdani has already faced scrutiny from national Republicans, including President Trump, who have eagerly cast him as a threat and the face of a more radical Democratic Party that is out of step with mainstream America. Trump has repeatedly threatened to cut federal funding to the city — and even take it over — if Mamdani won.

”…AND SO IT BEGINS!” the president posted late Tuesday to his Truth Social site.

Mamdani, for his part, said at his news conference that “New Yorkers are facing twin crises in this moment: an authoritarian administration and an affordability crisis,” and that he would tackle both.

While saying he was committed to “Trump-proofing” the city — to protect poor residents against “the man who has the most power in this country,” as he explained — the mayor-elect also reiterated that he was interested in talking to the president about ”ways that we can work together to serve New Yorkers.” That could mean discussing the cost of living or the effect of cuts to the SNAP food aid program amid the federal government shutdown, Mamdani suggested.

“I will not mince my words when it comes to President Trump … and I will also always do so while leaving a door open to have that conversation,” Mamdani added.

Mamdani also said during his news conference and interviews that he had not heard from Cuomo or the city’s outgoing mayor, Eric Adams. He did speak with Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.

A spokesperson for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, said he would “let their respective speeches be the measuring stick for grace and leave it at that.”

In his victory speech to supporters, Mamdani wished Cuomo the best in private life, before adding: “Let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.”

Asked about the comments Wednesday on NY1, Mamdani said he was “quite disappointed in the nature of the bigotry and the racism we saw in the final weeks.” He noted the millions of dollars in attack ads that were spent against him, some of which played into Islamophobic tropes.

Izaguirre and Colvin write for the Associated Press. AP writers Jake Offenhartz and Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.