ABC is ‘right to stand up to pressure tactics’ from Trump administration, say media advocacy organizations – US politics live

in Miami

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Republican voters in Florida appeared to heed Donald Trump’s advice to eschew mail-in ballots for today’s primaries, with one notable exception: the president himself.

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Figures released by the state’s department of elections on Sunday, the last day of early voting, showed that only about 422,000 registered Republicans opted to make their choices in senate, governor and congressional races by mail. For contrast, more than 621,000 did so in 2018, the last year Florida got to choose a new Republican candidate for governor.

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Among those who did, however, was Trump, who cast his vote in Palm Beach county by mail, according to voting records analyzed by Politico. He requested the ballot in June, and returned it on 13 August, Politico said.

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The president also voted earlier this year by mail in a special election in which a Democrat was elected to represent the district that includes his Mar-a-Lago waterfront mansion. Days later he decried casting a postal ballot as “mail-in cheating”.

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Trump also voted by mail in 2020.

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This is all despite Trump baselessly insisting for years that mail-in voting is fraudulent and a way to cheat. Since returning to office, he has pushed the SAVE America act that severely limits who can vote by mail and when.

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But the White House defended the president’s mail-in vote.

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“As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act ⁠has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, ​disability, military, or ‌travel – but universal ‌mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly ‌susceptible to fraud,” Olivia Wales, a Trump spokesperson, told Reuters today.

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“As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida ‌elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington DC.”

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The drop-off in Republicans voting by mail in Florida appears to have been mostly made up by early in-person voting, which climbed from 300,000 in 2018 to about 450,000 this year, the state figures show.

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Here’s our report:

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Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison has sued Texas governor Greg Abbott, seeking to compel the extradition of an ICE agent to stand trial for assault and falsely reporting a crime in the wounding of a man during the agency’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

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The Associatd Press reports that Ellison said he would request a temporary restraining order barring the Cameron county sheriff’s office in Texas from releasing ICE agent Christian Castro and requiring Abbott to sign the extradition warrant allowing Minnesota law enforcement agents to take custody of him.

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Castro was arrested 11 days after Minneapolis prosecutors charged him with assault and falsely reporting a crime in the non-fatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis on 14 January.

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The criminal complaint alleges that Castro fired a gun at the front door of a home in Minneapolis, striking a victim in the leg before lodging in a child’s bedroom wall, and then knowingly provided false information to an officer about it.

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Ellison said at a news conference that Castro faces release from jail next week – 90 days since he was detained – under Texas law unless he’s extradited to Minnesota.

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“Christian Castro has been charged with breaking the law in Minnesota,” Ellison said. “He must face justice in Minnesota. Gov. Abbott should have granted Gov. Walz’s extradition request long ago and is required to do so now.”

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“Christian Castro is not above the law and Greg Abbott isn’t either,” Ellison added.

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Hennepin county attorney Mary Moriarty said the legal action taken today to compel Castro’s extradition “should be a completely unnecessary lawsuit.”

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Officials at the jail and local prosecutors in Texas have been “very cooperative,” she said — “it is not supposed to be controversial.”

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She said that since Castro’s arrest, Texas has extradited three unrelated criminal defendants without incident to Minnesota at the request of state authorities.

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Abbott has received communication with us on an ongoing basis, including recently,” Ellison said. “We have to take the position that they are refusing to honor the extradition request.”

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Mark Carney has held urgent talks with Donald Trump in an effort to avoid fresh US tariffs on Canadian goods as a midnight deadline fast approaches, AFP reports.

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Trump signed orders for the steep 50% duties last month, with the White House alleging “discriminatory treatment” by Canada against US alcohol, automobile and dairy products.

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With the tariffs set to take effect tomorrow, covering products such as wine, hockey sticks and cement, efforts to avoid the levies being implemented are going down to the wire.

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The Canadian PM spoke by phone with Trump yesterday afternoon about the trade negotiations, a spokesperson for the Canadian leader told AFP.

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Yesterday, Carney said that talks to avert the duties were at an “intense and delicate” stage.

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Overall, Trump’s incoming tariffs target around 5.5% of Canada’s exports to the United States, worth about $20bn, Oxford Economics estimates.

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While this only poses a “modest” negative risk to Canada’s economy, Oxford Economics said in a recent report that the duties would “affect central Canada’s manufacturing sector much more severely”, particularly those in the cement, paper, printing, wood, clothing and electronics equipment sectors.

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Canadian negotiators have been in Washington to push for a deal to avoid the new tariffs and also secure relief on Trump’s sector-specific duties – which have battered Canada’s auto, steel, lumber and aluminium industries.

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Ottawa has reportedly offered concessions such as pressuring provinces to put US alcohol and wine back on their shelves, Canadian media said. But it remains unclear if a deal is imminent.

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The US Trade Representative’s office did not respond to AFP’s queries on the matter.

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Federal judges Tuesday gave the Department of Homeland Security leave to begin deporting citizens of African countries who had been residing in the United States under Temporary Protected Status.

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The orders from US District Court Judges Allison Burroughs and Brian Murphy in Massachusetts denied an emergency request for a preliminary injunction by a group of immigrant advocacy organizations and lifted a brief administrative stay, allowing immigration officials to begin deporting people from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan.

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Temporary Protected Status permits a foreign national from a country facing extreme crisis like a war or natural disaster to remain in the United States and obtain work authorization. It does not provide a path to permanent residency.

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Advocates have argued that the president’s attacks on immigrants, particularly those from Somalia, whom he has called “garbage” and “low IQ people” who “contribute nothing”, amounted to racial animus driving the decision to end TPS for those foreign nationals.

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The Department of Homeland Security has been rolling announcements of the end of TPS status for 13 countries over the last month, with the end of protections for Haitian nationals beginning a wave of deportation enforcement. The litany of recent TPS terminations includes Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Myanmar.

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“ALL TPS terminations are now IN EFFECT,” DHS posted Tuesday on X. “Those with terminated TPS should leave NOW. If they don’t, we will DEPORT them.”

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Advocates are appealing the decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Media advocacy organizations are weighing in on a lawsuit that the Walt Disney Corporation and ABC has brought against the FCC over political interference and first amendment rights.

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Disney and ABC filed the federal lawsuit in the DC Circuit Court on Tuesday, alleging that the FCC’s demand for an early license renewal process is political retaliation against it for ABC News reporting and shows like Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night comedy that upsets President Donald Trump.

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“The day of reckoning for Brendan Carr is finally here,” wrote the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in a post on social media. “Carr has repeatedly shown he won’t hesitate to weaponize the FCC against outlets the Trump administration dislikes.

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“Snarky tweets and the president petting him on the back is not going to help him any longer. ABC is right to stand up to Carr’s pressure tactics. In America, government officials cannot abuse their regulatory power to threaten the first amendment.”

n “It’s about time for someone to take Carr and his FCC to court over their endless campaign of intimidation and retaliation against journalism that displeases Carr’s thin-skinned boss,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

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“No matter what pretexts he asserts, Carr’s modus operandi is clear: to serve as Trump’s censorship czar and abuse his office to repeatedly and exclusively target Trump’s perceived adversaries in the media, whether through sham proceedings or threatening letters and X posts.

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“Carr knows the FCC is not the journalism police and said so regularly himself before he decided to throw away any integrity he once had to kiss up to Trump. Countless others whose first amendment rights have been chilled by Carr’s antics should follow Disney’s lead.”

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“The current FCC has repeatedly used its power over broadcast speech to jawbone, punish, and threaten censorship of its political opponents,” wrote David Inserra, a fellow for free expression and technology at the Cato Institute, in a statement.

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“Today’s lawsuit by ABC Disney against the FCC directly challenges the broad and abusive powers that Congress and prior court decisions gave the FCC. No government agency should ever be empowered to restrict free expression based on what it thinks is fair, equal, or in the best interest of the public.

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“In a world where the American people and press can speak through print, broadcast, cable, satellite, internet, and other forms of media, there is no justification for the FCC to continue to wield such significant power over broadcast speech.”

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President Donald Trump posted an image of a map of the strait of Hormuz on his social media platform Truth Social, with a circle around the strait and the words “New US Territory” as the title on Tuesday morning.

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This follows comments made on Friday at a speech at a police academy on Long Island, New York, where Trump said “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz strait a territory of the United States. … Essentially, that’s what it is. We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to.”

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About a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the strait of Hormuz. At its narrowest point, 21 nautical miles across, the strait flows in the territorial waters of both Oman and Iran. The strait itself is international waters under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The convention grants foreign commercial and military vessels the right to freely navigate the strait.

n The United States is not a signatory to the convention, however. Treaty ratification has been blocked primarily by Republicans in the US Senate for decades due to concerns about legal liability and the erosion of national sovereignty. Nonetheless, the US has customarily treated the convention as binding customary international law.

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Trump has threatened to bomb Oman, a longstanding US ally, if it interferes in negotiations with Iran to end the war.

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Trump could not unilaterally seize the strait by executive fiat; the US constitution’s plain language in Article IV, Section 3 of the US constitution grants Congress the exclusive power to acquire and govern US territories.

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If primary elections elsewhere this summer were tussles between progressives and moderates for the direction of the Democratic party’s political future, Tuesday’s contests in Florida could not be more different.

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In a former swing state that has in recent years become reliably red, moderate Democratic candidates Alex Vindman and David Jolly are heavily favored to become the party’s nominees for November’s Senate and governor’s race, respectively.

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Analysts say the brand of progressive liberalism that worked so well for Democratic candidates in Minnesota, Michigan and New York, won’t cut it with voters in conservative Florida, and neither are Vindman, frontrunner for the Senate nomination to challenge Republican incumbent Ashley Moody, or Jolly, vying to succeed Ron DeSantis as governor, trying to sell it.

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“There is a lot of curiosity about me from more traditional, pre-Trump-era Republicans that feel homeless,” Vindman said in March as he weighed the broad coalition of voters he will need to topple Moody, appointed by Republican DeSantis in January 2025 to replace Marco Rubio after his elevation to secretary of state.

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“I’m running here as a kind of a different kind of Democrat, I’ve got my handguns, a concealed carry permit, not the standard fare.”

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Florida has closed primaries, meaning only those voters who have declared party affiliation can choose its nominees. But Vindman and Jolly are already looking to court independents and disgruntled Republicans beyond Tuesday.

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Donald Trump has downplayed reports about conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln to reporters in the Oval Office.

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The aircraft carrier has been the subject of escalating concern over mental health and supply issues for American sailors enduring nearly nine months at sea.

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Trump called it a “good period of time” but added that “over the years, we’ve had them out there much longer.”

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The carrier has had a record-setting uninterrupted time at sea of more than 240 days, AP reported.

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But Trump said he spoke with a retired admiral over the weekend who recounted being on ships for “much longer.” Trump said the admiral assured him that the Lincoln is “beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of.”

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Trump did not name the admiral.

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Abraham Lincoln supports Operation Epic Fury.”,”caption”:”USS Abraham Lincoln supports Operation Epic Fury.”,”credit”:”Photograph: US Navy/Reuters”}}],”attributes”:{“pinned”:false,”keyEvent”:true,”summary”:false},”blockCreatedOn”:1787049095000,”blockCreatedOnDisplay”:”06.31 EDT”,”blockLastUpdated”:1787052850000,”blockLastUpdatedDisplay”:”07.34 EDT”,”blockFirstPublished”:1787052850000,”blockFirstPublishedDisplay”:”07.34 EDT”,”blockFirstPublishedDisplayNoTimezone”:”07.34″,”title”:”Trump says concerns about conditions on USS Lincoln are ‘fake’”,”contributors”:[],”primaryDateLine”:”Tue 18 Aug 2026 14.59 EDT”,”secondaryDateLine”:”First published on Tue 18 Aug 2026 06.31 EDT”},{“id”:”6a8426988f08ca724d3b667a”,”elements”:[{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

Today is the deadline for plaintiffs in the White House ballroom case to lay out their case on blocking the project.

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The Trump administration has asked ⁠the ⁠US supreme court to allow construction of the president’s controversial $400m ⁠White House ballroom to proceed after ​an ‌appeals ‌court ordered work to halt.

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In a case testing Donald Trump’s presidential authority, the Washington-based US ⁠court of ​appeals for the District of Columbia circuit ruled last week that the controversial ‌project lacked the necessary approval from US Congress.

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The US president, who demolished the historic East Wing of the White House last year to make way for the planned ballroom, has repeatedly touted it as “a gift” to the US people. He and his aides have repeatedly cited national security as a benefit of its construction, too.

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In a filing, Trump’s administration ‌asked the supreme court justices to keep the ​decision by the US court of appeals for ⁠the District of Columbia ​circuit ​on hold ​while it ​prepares ‌a full ​appeal.

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“This case involves an extraordinary and unlawful injunction that will halt the ongoing construction of the integrated military complex including a totally secure ballroom space, at the East Wing of the White House, which is vitally required by national security,” D John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote in the filing.

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Chief Justice John Roberts set a deadline of today for the plaintiffs challenging the project to respond.

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Donald Trump is up early today, weighing into the Alaska primary and urging voters to back the “real Dan Sullivan”. In typical capital-letter-laden style, he posted on Truth Social:

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n

ALASKA: Be careful, VOTE FOR THE REAL DAN SULLIVAN TODAY. Through me, he’s brought HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS BACK TO YOUR STATE. The Dumocrats know how good he is and have put up an imposter of the same name. Vote for the “INCUMBENT SENATOR.” Don’t let these Fraudsters get away with this HOAX. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP

n

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CNN defended its journalist Kristen Holmes in a statement, calling her “one of the most respected and accomplished journalists covering the White House”.

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The White House’s “rapid response” social media account posted a clip of the exchange and tagged Holmes, calling her a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession”.

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White House Correspondent Kristen Holmes”,”caption”:”CNN White House Correspondent Kristen Holmes “,”credit”:”Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images”}},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

The White House later sent out another post criticizing Holmes, writing: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

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In response, the network said:

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n

This afternoon, she did her job and asked the president of the United States a tough, relevant and newsworthy question on behalf of the American people.

n

Public officials are free to challenge reporting they disagree with, but personal attacks on journalists for asking questions are beneath the office and inconsistent with the principles of a free press.

n

We stand firmly behind Kristen and reject these attacks in the strongest possible terms.

n

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Trump has a long history of aggressively attacking and insulting women in the press corps who ask tough questions, including saying, “Quiet, piggy” to a Bloomberg reporter, calling another CNN journalist “corrupt”, and storming out of NBC’s Meet the Press after calling the moderator “crooked or stupid”.

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Other journalists condemned the White House’s personal attack against Holmes, with one of her colleagues at CNN saying: “Kristen is an incredible reporter, person and, above all, mother. I don’t understand such a reaction to a journalist asking the president for his response to something a Democratic senator has leveled against him.”

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The White House launched a personal attack against a CNN reporter on Monday with a social media post that mentioned her children and accused her of asking a “disgusting and inhumane question”.

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A White House post targeted Kristen Holmes, a senior White House correspondent for the network, after she asked Donald Trump to respond to a widely shared comment by Democratic senator Jon Ossoff in a speech on Sunday.

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The Georgia senator told a crowd that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” and instead “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar”.

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The comment was an apparent reference to Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant, fueling scrutiny of her perceived closeness to Trump.

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When Holmes asked Trump in the Oval Office to respond to Ossoff’s remark, the president dismissed her, calling the senator a “Pee-wee Herman lookalike”.

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The White House’s “rapid response” social media account posted a clip of the exchange and tagged Holmes, calling her a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession”.

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The post went on to criticize her for taking a “cheap shot” at a staffer, adding: “These scumbags are the lowest of the low.”

“,”elementId”:”acaba9f2-95b1-4c15-b623-464edec6dd9a”},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement”,”prefix”:”Related: “,”text”:”White House launches personal attack on CNN reporter over question to Trump”,”elementId”:”dc220cad-ccdc-4b13-a3f7-889a448ef127″,”role”:”thumbnail”,”url”:”https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/17/white-house-personal-attack-cnn-reporter-trump”}],”attributes”:{“pinned”:false,”keyEvent”:true,”summary”:false},”blockCreatedOn”:1787049095000,”blockCreatedOnDisplay”:”06.31 EDT”,”blockLastUpdated”:1787049555000,”blockLastUpdatedDisplay”:”06.39 EDT”,”blockFirstPublished”:1787049556000,”blockFirstPublishedDisplay”:”06.39 EDT”,”blockFirstPublishedDisplayNoTimezone”:”06.39″,”title”:”White House launches personal attack on CNN reporter over question to Trump”,”contributors”:[{“name”:”Sam Levin”,”imageUrl”:”https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2023/05/18/Sam_Levin.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=b32d22a2b1b8b34a13bb52495191720e”,”largeImageUrl”:”https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2023/05/18/Sam_Levin.png?width=300&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=83ae056fa0ab0fcad68f8499d1f8fcbb”}],”primaryDateLine”:”Tue 18 Aug 2026 14.59 EDT”,”secondaryDateLine”:”First published on Tue 18 Aug 2026 06.31 EDT”},{“id”:”6a841fde8f08d002b566cf5e”,”elements”:[{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

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Attention turns to Florida and Alaska, where primaries later on Tuesday will highlight Republican-led redistricting efforts that have scrambled congressional maps.

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Today’s contests will also help shape the fiercely contested midterms this fall to determine control of Congress, where Republicans retain a narrow edge, and offer a referendum on president Donald Trump’s second term, AFP reported.

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In the Alaska Senate race, incumbent Republican senator Dan Sullivan, a Trump ally seeking a third term, is facing another candidate, curiously also named Dan Sullivan.

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Republicans have argued the second Sullivan, who’ll be appearing on the ballot as “Daniel J Sullivan Jr,” is a sham candidate running at the behest of Democrats to cause confusion. Dan J Sullivan Jr, a retired teacher, has denied the charge.

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J Sullivan Jr, the second Republican candidate for Alaska”,”caption”:”Dan J Sullivan Jr, the second Republican candidate for Alaska”,”credit”:”Photograph: Sullivan for Senate”}},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

Also in the race is former US representative Mary Peltola. She was the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress, and she would become the first Alaska Native senator if she wins in November.

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Meanwhile, in Florida, a GOP-led redrawing scrambled the congressional map, which has created some awkward matchups.

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Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, first elected to Congress in 2004, is running for a new seat in Florida’s 20th congressional district, centered in Broward ‌County, after her existing seat was redrawn to favor Republicans.

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Wasserman Schultz, who is white, has faced some criticism for running in the historically Black district from activists who are already worried about losing Black representation in Congress following a Supreme Court decision that weakened a landmark civil rights law. She faces several Black candidates, including rapper Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell, who found fame with the 1989 hit “Me So Horny,” and former Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who faces criminal charges of stealing $5m in disaster relief funds. Cherfilus-McCormick, who has denied wrongdoing, resigned from Congress in April ahead of a possible expulsion.

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In other developments:

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  Donald Trump voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary, Politico reports, citing Palm Beach County voting records. The White House has confirmed the president’s mail-in vote, according to the New York Times, which added that this is at least the third time the president has mailed his ballot.

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  A northern California county plans to hire Tina Peters, the prominent Colorado election denier recently released from prison, to work on elections. Shasta county, a conservative region home to 182,000 people, has emerged as a center of the US election denialism movement in recent years. California governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the state is investigating Peters’ hiring.

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  CNN has said it stands behind reporter Kristen Holmes after Trump repeatedly told the CNN reporter to “be quiet” and accused her of being “a fake reporter” during questioning over conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Shortly after the president reprimanded Holmes, the White House invoked her children in a social media post further attacking the reporter when she asked about comments from Democratic senator Jon Ossoff in a speech on Sunday. He had told a crowd that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” and instead “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar”. It was an apparent reference to Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant.

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  Trump again threatened to bomb Oman if it “gets in the way” of his effort to end the US-Israel war on Iran, as the two-month window to negotiate peace with Iran expired on Monday with no end to the conflict in sight. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump told Fox News.

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  Trump ⁠said that ​North Korean leader ⁠Kim Jong-un ⁠had ​responded ‌to his overtures ‌after he ‌ordered the US to scale back military ‌exercises with South ​Korea. Speaking ‌to reporters in the Oval ‌Office, Trump was asked why Kim had not responded to his overtures.

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Key events

E-Rate, a 30-year-old federal program that sends money to local school districts to subsidize Internet connectivity, may be eliminated under a proposed change to federal policy posted Tuesday by the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC published proposed rule changes to the federal register, seeking public comment. The proposal argues that the ubiquity of broadband access in public schools today calls the necessity of the program into question.

“At what point should policymakers conclude that the program’s core objective has been achieved?” the proposal asks. “We seek comment on whether Congress intended E-Rate to operate indefinitely, regardless of the extent to which schools and libraries have achieved universal connectivity.”

One proposed change would eliminate the program entirely for districts with the lowest National School Lunch Program poverty metrics.. A second, narrower proposal would limit spending to rural school districts or areas served by only a single internet provider.

Additionally, the commission is asking for comment on policy changes that would tie E-Rate funding to screen limits for students and require schools to offer parents a mechanism to opt out of instruction through screens. It also seeks to apply the network-level content filtering requirements of the Children’s Internet Protection Act for any device that connects to the E-Rate-funded network, regardless of who owns it.

The agency is also considering reversing a 2011 determination that classified social networking sites as categorically “harmful to minors” under CIPA.

Advocates note that E-Rate is the only federal technology program for schools and represents the fifth-largest stream of federal funding to schools. It supports connectivity to more than 100,000 schools and 11,000 libraries across the country each year, spending about US$2.6b to do so.

The president of the international criminal court (ICC) has been sanctioned by the United States government for its criminal investigation of Israeli officials for crimes committed during its war on Gaza.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio called the Hague-based ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”, in a statement and announced that the US would sanction Tomoko Akane of Japan, the ICC president, and Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal, an ICC senior trial lawyer.

Israeli media have reported that Seye is overseeing the investigation into Israeli funding for illegal settlements and the disbursal of weapons to settlers in the West Bank. Israeli officials warned local media in May that the ICC may seek five more arrest warrants for ministers and senior military officials involved in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Here’s our report:

Even though a federal judge had decided that human smuggling charges brought by the Trump Administration against Kilmar Ábrego García were “vindictive,” the justice department is now insisting on having them reinstated.

In a filing to the US sixth circuit court of appeals, the DoJ argues that the charges were genuine and not retaliation for his successful challenge to a wrongful deportation that sent the Salvadoran to be jailed without trial with hundreds of others at the notorious Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center – or CECOT – in El Salvador in March 2025.

A US Supreme Court order returned him to the United States three months later, but only after prosecutors obtained an indictment against him on federal charges of human trafficking stemming from a traffic stop by the Tennessee State Patrol in 2022. Nashville-based federal district court judge Waverly David Crenshaw Jr dismissed that indictment in May, calling it “presumptive vindictiveness”.

The justice department is challenging that ruling in appeal. Though Garcia had never been charged with a crime, administration officials have regularly described Garcia as a “gang member” connected to MS-13.

“The decision to seek an indictment against Ábrego García for human smuggling was made by career prosecutors based on the evidence, the law, and their firm belief that there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Ábrego García had committed the offenses charged,” the justice department said in a statement describing its brief and posted online on Monday.

Here’s our report:

Steve Bannon, rightwing media host and stalwart ally of Donald Trump, has again called for an emergency declaration by the president to take control of the 2026 election in November, and to send ICE agents to polling places.

Speaking Tuesday on his podcast The War Room to alt-right political activist Jack Posobiac, Bannon said the Trump Administration had been laying the groundwork for such a declaration.

“We’ve got to stop yammering about the SAVE America Act. It’s not going to happen,” Trump’s former chief strategist said. “You know why it’s not going to happen? Because John Thune and the donors don’t want it to happen. They think it’s racist. They think it’s nativist.

Bannon’s call for a national emergency proclamation for the upcoming elections would create a “forcing function” to get valid ID to vote and eliminate “phony mail-in ballots.

“You’re going to have to have a forcing function, Jack Posobiec to have a up-armored — yes, a up-armored ICE presence at these polling booths,” Bannon said. “And they say, well, that’s going to be intimidation. Well, it ain’t intimidation if you’re a United States citizen. It’s an intimidation if you’re a foreigner and here illegally and not eligible to vote. It should be intimidating. We don’t want you there. We don’t want you near a voting booth. We certainly don’t want your votes, Posobiec.”

Bannon served in the first Trump administration for less than a year as a chief strategist, but has become a strident voice for Trump partisans and election conspiracy theorists pressing claims of foreign election interference and the illegitimacy of the 2020 election.

Bannon was convicted by a jury in DC federal court of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to submit to a subpoena to testify before the US House of Representatives committee that focused on the January 6 insurrection, and served four months in prison in 2024. The Trump Administration is seeking to set aside that conviction.

This is not the first time Bannon has called for an emergency order or ICE agents at the polls. In July, ahead of Trump’s address discussing previous elections, Bannon predicted that Trump would use claims of foreign interference as a national security “predicate” to attempt to seize control of state-level election machinery sometime near the end of August.

Trump votes by mail for second time this year in his home state of Florida

Richard Luscombe

in Miami

Republican voters in Florida appeared to heed Donald Trump’s advice to eschew mail-in ballots for today’s primaries, with one notable exception: the president himself.

Figures released by the state’s department of elections on Sunday, the last day of early voting, showed that only about 422,000 registered Republicans opted to make their choices in senate, governor and congressional races by mail. For contrast, more than 621,000 did so in 2018, the last year Florida got to choose a new Republican candidate for governor.

Among those who did, however, was Trump, who cast his vote in Palm Beach county by mail, according to voting records analyzed by Politico. He requested the ballot in June, and returned it on 13 August, Politico said.

The president also voted earlier this year by mail in a special election in which a Democrat was elected to represent the district that includes his Mar-a-Lago waterfront mansion. Days later he decried casting a postal ballot as “mail-in cheating”.

Trump also voted by mail in 2020.

This is all despite Trump baselessly insisting for years that mail-in voting is fraudulent and a way to cheat. Since returning to office, he has pushed the SAVE America act that severely limits who can vote by mail and when.

But the White House defended the president’s mail-in vote.

“As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act ⁠has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, ​disability, military, or ‌travel – but universal ‌mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly ‌susceptible to fraud,” Olivia Wales, a Trump spokesperson, told Reuters today.

“As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida ‌elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington DC.”

The drop-off in Republicans voting by mail in Florida appears to have been mostly made up by early in-person voting, which climbed from 300,000 in 2018 to about 450,000 this year, the state figures show.

Here’s our report:

Minnesota attorney general sues Texas governor to compel extradition of ICE agent charged in nonfatal shooting

Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison has sued Texas governor Greg Abbott, seeking to compel the extradition of an ICE agent to stand trial for assault and falsely reporting a crime in the wounding of a man during the agency’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

The Associatd Press reports that Ellison said he would request a temporary restraining order barring the Cameron county sheriff’s office in Texas from releasing ICE agent Christian Castro and requiring Abbott to sign the extradition warrant allowing Minnesota law enforcement agents to take custody of him.

Castro was arrested 11 days after Minneapolis prosecutors charged him with assault and falsely reporting a crime in the non-fatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis on 14 January.

The criminal complaint alleges that Castro fired a gun at the front door of a home in Minneapolis, striking a victim in the leg before lodging in a child’s bedroom wall, and then knowingly provided false information to an officer about it.

Ellison said at a news conference that Castro faces release from jail next week – 90 days since he was detained – under Texas law unless he’s extradited to Minnesota.

“Christian Castro has been charged with breaking the law in Minnesota,” Ellison said. “He must face justice in Minnesota. Gov. Abbott should have granted Gov. Walz’s extradition request long ago and is required to do so now.”

“Christian Castro is not above the law and Greg Abbott isn’t either,” Ellison added.

Hennepin county attorney Mary Moriarty said the legal action taken today to compel Castro’s extradition “should be a completely unnecessary lawsuit.”

Officials at the jail and local prosecutors in Texas have been “very cooperative,” she said — “it is not supposed to be controversial.”

She said that since Castro’s arrest, Texas has extradited three unrelated criminal defendants without incident to Minnesota at the request of state authorities.

Abbott has received communication with us on an ongoing basis, including recently,” Ellison said. “We have to take the position that they are refusing to honor the extradition request.”

Carney and Trump hold urgent talks as new US tariffs on Canada loom

Mark Carney has held urgent talks with Donald Trump in an effort to avoid fresh US tariffs on Canadian goods as a midnight deadline fast approaches, AFP reports.

Trump signed orders for the steep 50% duties last month, with the White House alleging “discriminatory treatment” by Canada against US alcohol, automobile and dairy products.

With the tariffs set to take effect tomorrow, covering products such as wine, hockey sticks and cement, efforts to avoid the levies being implemented are going down to the wire.

The Canadian PM spoke by phone with Trump yesterday afternoon about the trade negotiations, a spokesperson for the Canadian leader told AFP.

Yesterday, Carney said that talks to avert the duties were at an “intense and delicate” stage.

Overall, Trump’s incoming tariffs target around 5.5% of Canada’s exports to the United States, worth about $20bn, Oxford Economics estimates.

While this only poses a “modest” negative risk to Canada’s economy, Oxford Economics said in a recent report that the duties would “affect central Canada’s manufacturing sector much more severely”, particularly those in the cement, paper, printing, wood, clothing and electronics equipment sectors.

Canadian negotiators have been in Washington to push for a deal to avoid the new tariffs and also secure relief on Trump’s sector-specific duties – which have battered Canada’s auto, steel, lumber and aluminium industries.

Ottawa has reportedly offered concessions such as pressuring provinces to put US alcohol and wine back on their shelves, Canadian media said. But it remains unclear if a deal is imminent.

The US Trade Representative’s office did not respond to AFP’s queries on the matter.

The sole Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission, Anna Gomez, has commended ABC and Disney for pushing back against the FCC’s actions. She said in a statement:

For months, the FCC has waged a campaign of censorship and control against Disney’s ABC stations, using the threat of broadcast license revocations to punish a company for speech this administration doesn’t like.

I have long called on companies to push back against this kind of government intimidation, and I’m glad Disney has shown courage and stepped up. This should be a welcome sign for every broadcaster who has felt the weight of this overreaching government pressure in silence.

As we’ve been reporting, ABC has sued the FCC, arguing that it is being retaliated against for content the Trump administration disproves of, in a move it warns threatens the independence of the press.

DHS can start deporting residents from some African countries as judges’ rulings terminate their Temporary Protected Status

Federal judges Tuesday gave the Department of Homeland Security leave to begin deporting citizens of African countries who had been residing in the United States under Temporary Protected Status.

The orders from US District Court Judges Allison Burroughs and Brian Murphy in Massachusetts denied an emergency request for a preliminary injunction by a group of immigrant advocacy organizations and lifted a brief administrative stay, allowing immigration officials to begin deporting people from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan.

Temporary Protected Status permits a foreign national from a country facing extreme crisis like a war or natural disaster to remain in the United States and obtain work authorization. It does not provide a path to permanent residency.

Advocates have argued that the president’s attacks on immigrants, particularly those from Somalia, whom he has called “garbage” and “low IQ people” who “contribute nothing”, amounted to racial animus driving the decision to end TPS for those foreign nationals.

The Department of Homeland Security has been rolling announcements of the end of TPS status for 13 countries over the last month, with the end of protections for Haitian nationals beginning a wave of deportation enforcement. The litany of recent TPS terminations includes Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Myanmar.

“ALL TPS terminations are now IN EFFECT,” DHS posted Tuesday on X. “Those with terminated TPS should leave NOW. If they don’t, we will DEPORT them.”

Advocates are appealing the decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

The release by a federal judge of a woman accused of defacing the second world war memorial in Washington DC has drawn a complaint from Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

In a motion to reconsider the ruling by magistrate Judge Matthew J. Sharbaugh, Pirro argues that Melissa L Farris posed a high risk of flight.

“Defendant was defiant and outspoken before, during, and immediately after committing her crimes,” the motion contends. “Her attitude only changed after she did not receive the attention she so desperately craved, demonstrating that any expressed remorse is insincere.”

The US attorney’s office charged Farris, 41, of Elizabethtown, Ky. with defacing the wall of the Atlantic Theatre Pavilion at the memorial on Thursday by spray painting the words “Clean Hands Dirty $” while filling the fountain with detergent causing it to foam. The park service briefly closed the memorial to remove the graffiti and the foam. The government alleges that she livestreamed the event from her phone in a bid for attention and donations from an online audience.

She had been arrested three days earlier for unlawfully camping on federal property near the park.

The incident attracted the attention of President Donald Trump, who commented on the incident on social media. “Our beautiful World War II Memorial was just hit by Spray Painting Vandals,” he wrote on Truth Social. “THERE CAN BE NO GREATER INSULT TO THOSE AMERICAN HEROES WHO DIED IN WORLD WAR II. First the Reflecting Pool, now this. We are on their trail! Where do these animals come from???”

Pirro has been under fire from Trump for withdrawing the high-profile prosecution of a former Olympian initially accused of vandalizing the reflecting pool.

‘Brendan Carr has shown he won’t hesitate to weaponize FCC against outlets Trump administration dislikes,’ say media advocacy organizations

Media advocacy organizations are weighing in on a lawsuit that the Walt Disney Corporation and ABC has brought against the FCC over political interference and first amendment rights.

Disney and ABC filed the federal lawsuit in the DC Circuit Court on Tuesday, alleging that the FCC’s demand for an early license renewal process is political retaliation against it for ABC News reporting and shows like Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night comedy that upsets President Donald Trump.

“The day of reckoning for Brendan Carr is finally here,” wrote the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in a post on social media. “Carr has repeatedly shown he won’t hesitate to weaponize the FCC against outlets the Trump administration dislikes.

“Snarky tweets and the president petting him on the back is not going to help him any longer. ABC is right to stand up to Carr’s pressure tactics. In America, government officials cannot abuse their regulatory power to threaten the first amendment.”

“It’s about time for someone to take Carr and his FCC to court over their endless campaign of intimidation and retaliation against journalism that displeases Carr’s thin-skinned boss,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“No matter what pretexts he asserts, Carr’s modus operandi is clear: to serve as Trump’s censorship czar and abuse his office to repeatedly and exclusively target Trump’s perceived adversaries in the media, whether through sham proceedings or threatening letters and X posts.

“Carr knows the FCC is not the journalism police and said so regularly himself before he decided to throw away any integrity he once had to kiss up to Trump. Countless others whose first amendment rights have been chilled by Carr’s antics should follow Disney’s lead.”

“The current FCC has repeatedly used its power over broadcast speech to jawbone, punish, and threaten censorship of its political opponents,” wrote David Inserra, a fellow for free expression and technology at the Cato Institute, in a statement.

“Today’s lawsuit by ABC Disney against the FCC directly challenges the broad and abusive powers that Congress and prior court decisions gave the FCC. No government agency should ever be empowered to restrict free expression based on what it thinks is fair, equal, or in the best interest of the public.

“In a world where the American people and press can speak through print, broadcast, cable, satellite, internet, and other forms of media, there is no justification for the FCC to continue to wield such significant power over broadcast speech.”

The Walt Disney Company, ABC and a number of its affiliated stations filed a federal suit against the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday to block the government’s demand for an early broadcast license renewal process that the companies describe as motivated by political hostility and an attack on press freedom.

As reported by Deadline, the suit argues that the commission is being used by the Trump Administration to wage “a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts.”

The FCC ordered Disney’s eight owned-and-operated ABC television stations to file broadcast license renewals ahead of schedule, adding to a line of actions targeting the broadcaster, from calls to fire Jimmy Kimmel from his late-night television show – which briefly led to his suspension – as well as a probe into ABC’s “The View” program and an investigation into diversity, equity and inclusion practices at Disney.

Disney and ABC argue in the suit that the commission could not renew licenses at all at this stage of the process, only revoke them, and that the demand for early renewal submissions is meant to mire the network in costly litigation.