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Trump promotes voter ID act, dismisses concerns about gas prices and falling stock market
As his war on Iran sends the stock market plunging and gasoline prices rising, Donald Trump paused en route to his Florida beach club to shout familiar taking points about how very well things are going, a reporters strained to hear him over the din of construction on the White House ballroom on Friday afternoon.
Speaking about the war, the president again implied, falsely, that Iran was on the verge of creating a nuclear weapons, which his director of national intelligence contradicted this week in testimony to Congress.
“We’re not giving a nuclear weapon to terrorist thugs,” Trump said, nonetheless.
He also cast doubt on the prospect of a quick end to the war, saying: “We can have dialogue, but I don’t want to do a ceasefire… You don’t do a ceasefire when you’re literally obliterating the other side.”
Asked if he was concerned about rising fuel costs for Americans, after Iran responded to the the joint US and Israeli attack by closing the strait of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas supply, Trump said: “No, I expected worse. I really thought oil prices would go much higher when I did this.”
“We just set every record, every record in the book, with Dow, with the S&P,” the president continued, apparently suggesting that the US stock market was in such good shape before the attack that the sharp drops this week, with the Dow hovering around 45,500 on Friday was not a concern. “Dow at 50,000, S&P at 8,000, 7,000, at levels, at speed that nobody’s ever seen before,” the president said, with a note of instant nostalgia for the levels the stock market hit just before his attack on Iran.
Just one month ago, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, sought to deflect questions about the Epstein files by repeatedly telling lawmakers: “The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. That’s what we should be talking about.”
“But I said I have to go off that path and I have to take a little journey,” Trump said Friday. “But we had to go off on a circuitous path and take care of business, and we are in the process of doing it and I’ll tell you I think we’re weeks ahead of schedule.”
The president then went on to advocate for the voter suppression legislation, the Save America act, Republican are struggling to pass in the Senate.
“I hear it’s going- look, it should be an easy pass, but we need Democrat votes,” Trump also said, referring to the 60-vote threshold to push the legislation to make it harder for US citizens to register to vote, and restrict vote-by-mail, through the Senate.
“They don’t want to approve voter ID because they cheat,” Trump aid of Democrats who are concerned that the measure, supposedly aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting, a problem that appears not to exist, would make it much harder for citizens to cast ballots. “They want to cheat, Peter!” the president shouted at his favorite Fox News correspondent, Peter Doocy.
Despite Trump’s effort to blame Democrats for refusing to pass the legislation, Senate Republicans have voiced their opposition to killing the filibuster to force the legislation through.
On Thursday, Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, announced that he would not support removing the 60-vote threshold, and criticized the crackdown on vote-by-mail, which is used by several Republican-run states, including Utah, Florida, Alaska, and Montana.
“Now, speaking of something that’s more pleasant,” Trump added as he changed the subject without skipping a beat, “you hear that? It’s going to be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world, nothing like it.”
Given the loud helicopter noise it was hard to say if anyone could hear the construction noise Trump seemed to be talking about. “They just started today one of the biggest pours of concrete that’s ever been seen in Washington.”
“I love the sound of concrete,” the president added.
Key events
Federal judge says Pentagon restrictions on reporters are illegal, says press needs freedom to press military on lies
A senior federal judge has blocked the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that bars reporters who refused to sign a pledge to only publish authorized information from the US military’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
The ruling, that the new Pentagon credentialing policy violates the journalists’ constitutional First Amendment rights, came from a US district judge, Paul L. Friedman, who was appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, but previously served as an assistant US attorney during the Nixon administration, and as an associate independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation during the presidency of George H W Bush.
Friedman’s 40-page ruling on Friday came in response to a New York Times lawsuit against the Pentagon and defense secretary Pete Hegseth
The current Pentagon press corps is comprised manly of correspondents for far-right outlets that agreed to the policy.
The senior judge made his position clear in the first paragraph of the opinion, which read:
A primary purpose of the First Amendment is to enable the press to publish what it will and the public to read what it chooses, free of any official proscription. Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.
Friedman, who just turned 82, said during oral argument in the case: “We’ve been through, in my lifetime… the Vietnam War, where the public, I think it’s fair to say, was lied to about a lot of things. We’ve been through 9/11. We’ve been through the Kuwait situation, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay. A lot of things need to be held tightly and secure… but openness and transparency allows members of the public to know what their government is doing in times of peace and more important, in times of war”.
That, he added, is “what the First Amendment is all about.”
“I think the public has a right to know a lot of things as [elections] approach and think about what their elected leaders in the legislative branch and the executive branch are doing,” the judge said.
At the end of his opinion, Friedman noted that there have to be limits of sharing classified information during war time, but the ongoing war in Iran makes it even more vital that the public has information about what the military is doing. The judge wrote:
The Court recognizes that national security must be protected, the security of our troops must be protected, and war plans must be protected. But especially in light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing—so that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election.
Pentagon bombs another suspected drug smuggling boat, leaving two dead
US Southern Command announced on Friday that US forces carried out another “ lethal kinetic strike” on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Friday.
After the strike, the military said that there were three survivors and it “immediately notified U.S. Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivors.”
The Coast Guard said in a statement that made no mention of the attack that one of its ships had recovered two dead bodies and one survivor, and transferred them to the Costa Rican Coast Guard.
The strikes on suspected drug traffickers, by a military command headquartered across the street from Donald Trump’s Doral, Florida golf course, have been described as illegal by experts in international law, but the Pentagon appears to have changed strategy since the first attack in September when it ordered a follow-on strike to kill survivors.
Killing survivors has been considered a textbook example of a war crime since 1945, when the victorious allies in the second world war prosecuted a Nazi U-boat crew for killing shipwreck survivors.
Trump promotes voter ID act, dismisses concerns about gas prices and falling stock market
As his war on Iran sends the stock market plunging and gasoline prices rising, Donald Trump paused en route to his Florida beach club to shout familiar taking points about how very well things are going, a reporters strained to hear him over the din of construction on the White House ballroom on Friday afternoon.
Speaking about the war, the president again implied, falsely, that Iran was on the verge of creating a nuclear weapons, which his director of national intelligence contradicted this week in testimony to Congress.
“We’re not giving a nuclear weapon to terrorist thugs,” Trump said, nonetheless.
He also cast doubt on the prospect of a quick end to the war, saying: “We can have dialogue, but I don’t want to do a ceasefire… You don’t do a ceasefire when you’re literally obliterating the other side.”
Asked if he was concerned about rising fuel costs for Americans, after Iran responded to the the joint US and Israeli attack by closing the strait of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas supply, Trump said: “No, I expected worse. I really thought oil prices would go much higher when I did this.”
“We just set every record, every record in the book, with Dow, with the S&P,” the president continued, apparently suggesting that the US stock market was in such good shape before the attack that the sharp drops this week, with the Dow hovering around 45,500 on Friday was not a concern. “Dow at 50,000, S&P at 8,000, 7,000, at levels, at speed that nobody’s ever seen before,” the president said, with a note of instant nostalgia for the levels the stock market hit just before his attack on Iran.
Just one month ago, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, sought to deflect questions about the Epstein files by repeatedly telling lawmakers: “The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. That’s what we should be talking about.”
“But I said I have to go off that path and I have to take a little journey,” Trump said Friday. “But we had to go off on a circuitous path and take care of business, and we are in the process of doing it and I’ll tell you I think we’re weeks ahead of schedule.”
The president then went on to advocate for the voter suppression legislation, the Save America act, Republican are struggling to pass in the Senate.
“I hear it’s going- look, it should be an easy pass, but we need Democrat votes,” Trump also said, referring to the 60-vote threshold to push the legislation to make it harder for US citizens to register to vote, and restrict vote-by-mail, through the Senate.
“They don’t want to approve voter ID because they cheat,” Trump aid of Democrats who are concerned that the measure, supposedly aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting, a problem that appears not to exist, would make it much harder for citizens to cast ballots. “They want to cheat, Peter!” the president shouted at his favorite Fox News correspondent, Peter Doocy.
Despite Trump’s effort to blame Democrats for refusing to pass the legislation, Senate Republicans have voiced their opposition to killing the filibuster to force the legislation through.
On Thursday, Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, announced that he would not support removing the 60-vote threshold, and criticized the crackdown on vote-by-mail, which is used by several Republican-run states, including Utah, Florida, Alaska, and Montana.
“Now, speaking of something that’s more pleasant,” Trump added as he changed the subject without skipping a beat, “you hear that? It’s going to be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world, nothing like it.”
Given the loud helicopter noise it was hard to say if anyone could hear the construction noise Trump seemed to be talking about. “They just started today one of the biggest pours of concrete that’s ever been seen in Washington.”
“I love the sound of concrete,” the president added.
Summary of the day so far
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Donald Trump spent the morning putting pressure on Congress to pass his bills by posting on his Truth Social platform, emphasizing that there is “nothing more important” for the US at the moment than voter ID.
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The Trump administration is considering occupying or blockading Iran’s Kharg Island to pressure Iran into reopening the strait of Hormuz, according to a report in Axios. The report cited four sources who all spoke under the condition of anonymity.
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The US state department established a new bureau to oversee responses to natural disasters and humanitarian crises around the world, capping the Trump administration’s dramatic overhaul of foreign aid, a senior department official told the Associated Press.
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Trump’s presidential transition team repeatedly intervened in UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, Politico reported. The president’s aides reportedly told Starmer’s national security adviser and former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney that they wished for Mandelson’s predecessor Karen Pierce to remain in the post.
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The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said that it is investigating 13 states that require state-regulated health insurance plans to cover abortion services. While HHS did not list the states, the Associated Press reported that the 13 states with the coverage requirements are California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.
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The White House released a broad framework for Congress to “pre-empt state AI laws” that would slow down development, after significant lobbying from Silicon Valley to curtail liability and instate an industry-friendly national standard for the regulation of the fast-moving technology.
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Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a far-right political figure who stepped down from his position on Tuesday in protest of the war in Iran, spoke about his resignation and the ongoing investigation into him over an alleged leak of classified information, saying he has a “mission” to stop the Iran war.
Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, signed a legislative package on Friday to suspend the state’s fuel taxes for 60 days, making Georgia the first state to take direct action against the soaring pump prices triggered by the ongoing war with Iran.
The measure provides immediate relief by temporarily waiving the state’s 33-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax and 37-cent-per-gallon diesel tax. The move was part of a duo of financial relief bills fast-tracked through the state legislature this week to offset rising costs currently affecting Georgia households and businesses.
“Today is just the latest step we’re taking and it’s one that will help all Georgians as they work to make ends meet,” Kemp said at the state capitol before signing the bill into law.
Clergy will be allowed to minister to immigrants in a holding facility at the headquarters of the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Minnesota after US district judge Jerry Blackwell granted an injunction requested on Friday by Minnesota branches of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ and a Catholic priest who had sued the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Associated Press.
Under his ruling, clergy will be allowed in-person pastoral visits to all detainees at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building south of Minneapolis, the site of frequent protests over the roughly 3,000 federal officers who were brought into the state during the crackdown.
The government says the enforcement surge officially ended in February and restrictions have eased since. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) called the building a short-term holding facility, and not the kind of long-term detention center where clergy visits are normally allowed.
A Nevada judge on Friday temporarily blocked prediction market operator Kalshi from offering events contracts that would allow the state’s residents to place financial bets on its platform related to sports entertainment, and elections.
The Carson City district court judge Jason Woodbury issued a temporary restraining order at the behest of the Nevada gaming control board that will prevent Kalshi from continuing to operate in the state without a license.
Joe Kent, former counter-terrorism chief, says he has a ‘mission’ to stop Iran war
Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counter-terrorism Center and a far-right political figure who stepped down from his position on Tuesday in protest of the war in Iran, spoke about his resignation and the ongoing investigation into him over an alleged leak of classified information.
In an interview on Friday with journalist Megyn Kelly, Kent said he feels “very confident in what I’m doing right now. I think I have a mission. I think it is to do everything I can to stop this war.”
Regarding the investigation into him, he said he is “not concerned because I know I did nothing wrong. Of course, I am concerned because we’ve all seen the FBI and the full weight of the government come down on individuals,” adding: “That has me a little bit concerned, but I know the truth, and the facts are on my side.”
Kent went on to say that the investigation “does anger” him, but “it’s all just to be expected. I knew this was going to happen. I know their playbook. I think we’re all very familiar with their playbook.”
The Chicago transit agency on Friday sued the Trump administration after the White House in October froze $3.1bn in funding for major Chicago subway projects, saying it was an act of political retaliation, Reuters reported.
The suit, filed in the US district court in Chicago, said the federal government is attempting “to hold hostage billions of dollars in federal grants for crucial infrastructure projects in the City of Chicago”.
The suit says the frozen grants, which were approved during the administration of former president Joe Biden, are crucial to modernize and expand the “L”, Chicago’s system of elevated and underground trains.
Donald Trump has reinstated his endorsement of Jeff Hurd, a Republican House representative of Colorado, nearly a month after the president rescinded his support in response to Hurd’s vote to repeal the administration’s tariffs on Canada.
To resolve the primary conflict in Colorado’s third congressional district, Trump revealed that Hurd’s GOP challenger, Hope Scheppelman, has agreed to suspend her campaign. In exchange, both Scheppelman and her husband have been offered positions within the Trump administration.
“Together with them, we decided that Congressman Jeff Hurd, of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, should in no way, shape, or form, be impeded from winning the District in that the Democrat alternative is a DISASTER for our Country,” Trump wrote. “Therefore, I will be fully supporting Jeff’s Re-Election to the House of Representatives, giving him my Complete and Total Endorsement!”
Absences among Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security officers fell slightly on Thursday to 9.8% nationwide, but were much higher at some major airports, the government said on Friday.
The absenteeism rate among the 50,000 TSA officers fell from 10.2% on Wednesday but was significantly higher at major airports on Thursday, including 29% at New York’s JFK, 27% at New Orleans, Baltimore Washington at 23%, 32% at Atlanta and over 30% at both Houston airports, the Department of Homeland Security said.
The justice department filed a new lawsuit on Friday against Harvard University, saying its leadership failed to address antisemitism on campus, creating grounds for the government to freeze existing grants and seek repayment for grants already paid.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, is another missive in a protracted battle between the Trump administration and the elite university.
“The United States cannot and will not tolerate these failures,” the justice department wrote in the lawsuit. It asked the court to compel Harvard to comply with federal civil rights law and to help it “recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution”.
The lawsuit also asks a judge to require that Harvard call police to arrest protesters blocking parts of campus and to appoint an “independent outside monitor”, approved by the government, to ensure it complies with court orders.
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