Trump says US is ‘looking at land’ strikes in Venezuela after lethal strikes on boats
Asked in the Oval Office if the US is considering strikes on suspected drug cartels inside Venezuela, after lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers at sea, Donald Trump just said that the administration is “looking at land”.
The president also claimed, without citing evidence, that every strike on a suspected drug smuggling speedboat saves thousands of lives in the US. “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 lives,” Trump said.
Key events
Maduro denounces ‘regime change’ war after Trump’s threat to strike Venezuela
Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, denounced what he called “coups d’etat orchestrated by the CIA” shortly after Donald Trump said he was considering strikes against Venezuelan cartels inside the country.
“No to war in the Caribbean … No to regime change … No to coups d’etat orchestrated by the CIA,” the leftist leader said in an address to a committee set up after Washington deployed warships in the Caribbean for what it said was an anti-drug operation.
Maduro had himself declared the winner of an election last year, despite voting tally sheets gathered by the opposition that showed what the US called “overwhelming evidence” that the opposition candidate Edmundo González won more votes.
Trump said on Wednesday he might expand a military campaign against suspected drug smugglers after a series of lethal strikes at sea sunk Venezuelan boats alleged to be transporting narcotics.
At least 27 people have been killed in the US strikes in the Caribbean.
After another boat was struck, Maduro on Wednesday ordered military exercises in the country’s biggest shantytowns and said he was mobilizing the military, police and a civilian militia to defend Venezuela’s “mountains, coasts, schools, hospitals, factories and markets”.
Pro-Trump billionaire Bill Ackman donates $1m to campaign against Zohran Mamdani
Bill Ackman, a billionaire Trump supporter, donated $1m this week to Defend NYC, a Super Pac set up by a former Trump campaign adviser to oppose Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, state campaign finance records show.
While some billionaires are coming to terms with Mamdani’s likely victory, including former mayor Michael Bloomberg, who met with the frontrunner recently, the mega-donor Ackman is apparently not ready to concede defeat, even with the Democratic nominee leading former governor Andrew Cuomo 46-33 in a poll released last week.
Ackman’s political acumen is in some doubt, however, since he also donated $1m last year to a Super Pac supporting the doomed presidential campaign of Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who tried to defeat the sitting president, Joe Biden, in the 2024 Democratic primary.
A week before the 2024 Michigan primary, Ackman told the podcaster Lex Fridman that Phillips had a path to the nomination.
“He could beat Biden in Michigan. Biden’s doing very poorly in Michigan. His polls are terrible, the Muslim community’s not happy with him and he really has spent no time there. So, if he’s embarrassed in Michigan, it would be a catalyst for him withdrawing,” Ackman said.
“Then Dean will get funding,” he added. “He’ll attract from the center. He’ll attract from Republicans who won’t vote for Trump, of which there’s a big percentage, it could be 60% or more, it could be 70% won’t vote for Trump, and also from the Democrats.”
One week later, Biden won the Democratic primary in Michigan with 81% of the vote. The Uncommitted movement, supported by Arab-Americans opposed to Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza, finished second with 13%. Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who had withdrawn from the race, got 3%. Ackman’s candidate Dean Phillips finished fourth, with 2.7% of the vote.
Trump administration withholds $40m from California for not enforcing truck driver English proficiency rules
Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said on Wednesday that he is withholding $40.6m in federal transportation funding for California for failing to enforce English proficiency rules for commercial truck drivers.
“I put states on notice this summer: enforce the Trump Administration’s English language requirements or the checks stop coming. California is the only state in the nation that refuses to ensure big rig drivers can read our road signs and communicate with law enforcement. This is a fundamental safety issue that impacts you and your family on America’s road,” Duffy said in a statement.
To get a commercial driver’s license, Truck drivers are required to pass a written test in English, and be able to name the parts of a bus or truck in English as they check tire inflation, tread depth, lug nuts and coolants.
The Trump administration is reversing guidance issued during the Obama administration, in a 2016 memo which noted that the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, made up of commercial motor vehicle safety officials and industry representatives, “could not substantiate the safety impacts” of drivers not being proficient in English.
The 2016 guidance said that drivers whose English skills were found lacking should not be placed on “out-of-service status” as long as they could communicate sufficiently, in another language or through an interpreter or smartphone app.
As the Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano explained in May, “Conservatives have long tied that Obama-era action and the rise of immigrant truckers – they now make up 18% of the profession, according to census figures – to a marked increase in fatal accidents over the last decade.” But, he added, “the rate of fatal crashes is three times less than in the late 1970s”.
Federal judge in Oregon extends orders blocking deployment of national guard in Portland
A federal judge in Oregon on Wednesday extended two temporary restraining orders that block the Trump administration from federalizing and deploying national guard troops to Portland.
The US district court judge, Karin Immergut, extended by 14 days the orders which had been set to expire later this week, as a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals considers a government request to lift her first order, which said the president did not have the legal authority to take control of the Oregon national guard.
The extension maintains the status quo on the ground as Donald Trump’s administration and the state of Oregon wait for a ruling from the appeals court panel. Two judges on the panel were nominated by the president.
Immergut, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in his first term, ruled earlier this month that Trump’s false claims about conditions in Portland resembling those in a war zone due to a small protest against immigration raids were “simply untethered to the facts”.
After Trump responded to the judge’s first order, blocking his attempt to deploy 200 federalized Oregon national guard troops to Portland, by sending federalized national guard troops from California to Oregon, Immergut issued a second order that barred the deployment of any national guard troops to the city.
Immergut has scheduled a non-jury trial to start on 29 October to determine whether to impose a longer-term block on the deployment of national guard troops to Portland, where protesters have rallied in their dozens outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office since June.
Immergut said on Wednesday the “most important thing here is what’s going on on the ground and whether it warrants the deployment that was ordered”.
A lawyer with the justice department during Wednesday’s hearing opposed Immergut extending her temporary restraining orders.
The government lawyer reportedly responded to the state of Oregon’s request for records of internal White House discussions that helped the president decide to send in troops to Portland by saying that Trump’s “deliberation” was carried out in public, in comments to reporters and on his social media platform.
Jeremy Barr
Pentagon reporters who declined to sign a new set of policies that press advocates and news organizations denounced as incompatible with the tenets of journalism were set to return their press badges by 5pm on Wednesday, ending decades of history of robust in-house coverage at the world’s largest military headquarters.
In the hours leading up to the deadline, journalists worked furiously to pack up their workspaces in two media rooms, with hallways filled to the brim with boxes and books and other souvenirs of decades of daily coverage.
One veteran Pentagon correspondent – who was not authorized to comment on the record – spoke to the Guardian as they headed to the complex to collect their belongings. They said they normally take the subway to work but drove today “because we have so much crap that we need to take back”.
Those who raced to pack up their belongings also began thinking about how they would now cover the Pentagon without the direct access that many have relied upon for years.
Voting Rights Act on the line: key takeaways from supreme court hearing
Sam Levine
The US supreme court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in Callais v Louisiana, a high-stakes voting rights case in which the court’s conservative majority appears poised to gut one of the most powerful provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
At the heart of the case is section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits electoral maps that dilute the voting power of minority groups. Lawyers for the state of Louisiana, a group of “non-African American voters” and the Trump administration say that the court needs to do away with the 2024 map. If the court agrees, it would ultimately set a precedent that makes it considerably harder to bring redistricting lawsuits on the basis of race, and undercut section 2.
Here are six key takeaways from the hearing:
Lauren Gambino
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, on Wednesday urged the Republican-led House oversight committee to launch an investigation into the “vile and offensive” text messages exchanged between leaders of Young Republican groups.
The request follows a report in Politico that revealed more than 28,000 Telegram messages sent between Young Republican leaders over the course of seven months, in which they refer to Black people as monkeys, praise Hitler, and repeatedly make glib remarks about gas chambers, slavery and rape.
“Calling for gas chambers. Expressing love for Hitler. Endorsing rape. Using racist slurs. This is not a ‘joke’, and it is not fringe,” Newsom said in a statement. “If Congress can investigate universities for failing to stop antisemitism, it must also investigate politicians’ own allies who are openly celebrating it.”
With Republicans in control of the House, the oversight committee is unlikely to act.
In the letter addressed to James Comer, the Republican committee chair and an ally of the president, Newsom notes that while House Republicans have made combating antisemitism a priority, few party leaders have publicly condemned the messages revealed in the report.
Democrats such as the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, expressed outrage over the messages, and some GOP groups, like the Young Republican National Federation, have called for resignations.
But the vice-president, JD Vance, said that he refused to “join the pearl clutching” over what he inaccurately described as “a college group chat”. Members of the Young Republicans range in age from 18 to 40.
Vance recently expressed support for the effort to track down, intimidate and harass people who voiced criticism of Charlie Kirk after his assassination.
Trump says he might go to supreme court hearing to determine if most of his tariffs are illegal
Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that he might go to the supreme court next month when it hears his administration’s appeal of two prior court rulings against his imposition of sweeping tariffs under an economic emergency that appears to exist only in his mind.
A trade court and an appeals court have both found that Trump exceeded his authority by imposing global tariffs citing provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
On Wednesday, Trump also claimed that he had used the threat of tariffs to stop the escalation of fighting this year between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed nations.
Indian officials have said that Trump’s intervention had nothing to do with the end of hostilities.
Trump confirms that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela
Donald Trump has finished speaking in the Oval Office. After he recited a long series of previously aired grievances, he confirmed, for the first time, that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in the administration’s apparent effort to drive the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, from power.
‘We, meaning Israel’, Trump says, ‘killed probably 70,000’ Hamas fighters
Donald Trump just claimed that the number of Hamas fighters killed by Israel, with US support, exceeds the entire estimated death toll in the Gaza Strip in the past two years.
“We, meaning Israel, but I knew everything they were doing, pretty much, I knew most of the things they were doing,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “they’ve killed probably 70,000 of these people, Hamas.”
As the United Nations reported last week, there have been 67,183 fatalities and 169,841 injuries reported to the Gaza ministry of health since 7 October 2023.
The dead included 20,179 children, 10,427 women, 4,813 elderly people and 31,754 adult men.
In May of this year, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found that Israel’s military intelligence database of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters had 47,653 names. Of them, 8,900 were marked as killed or probably killed.
Trump went on to claim that Hamas had agreed to surrender its weapons, but, while Hamas leaders said earlier this year that they would consider giving up the group’s heavy weapons, such as rockets and missiles, on Saturday a senior Hamas official told Agence France-Presse that disarmament was “out of the question”, adding: “The demand that we hand over our weapons is not up for negotiation.”
Nevertheless, Trump said on Wednesday: “We want the weapons to be given up, sacrificed, and they’ve agreed to do it. Now they have to do it, and if they don’t do it, we’ll do it.”
Asked by a reporter if that meant the US military might be directly involved in disarming the Palestinian militants, Trump replied, again apparently referring to US support for Israel’s military: “We won’t need the US military … because we’re very much involved.”
Trump repeats baseless claim that Venezuela ’emptied their prisons’ into the US
To defend lethal US military strikes on suspected drug smugglers, Donald Trump just repeated his familiar but baseless claim that Venezuela “emptied” its prisons and “insane asylums” by sending incarcerated people into the United States as undocumented immigrants during the Biden administration.
“Many countries have done it,” Trump claimed.
As the Marshall Project reported a year ago, before the 2024 election, Trump had already made this claim more than 500 times without a shred of evidence.
Trump says US is ‘looking at land’ strikes in Venezuela after lethal strikes on boats
Asked in the Oval Office if the US is considering strikes on suspected drug cartels inside Venezuela, after lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers at sea, Donald Trump just said that the administration is “looking at land”.
The president also claimed, without citing evidence, that every strike on a suspected drug smuggling speedboat saves thousands of lives in the US. “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 lives,” Trump said.
