Jeffries says Trump ‘intentionally' inflaming unrest in Los Angeles
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is hammering President Trump over the clashes in Los Angeles, saying the president is purposefully escalating tensions to distract the country from a volatile economy.
Speaking to reporters in the Capitol, Jeffries railed against Trump's aggressive deportation policies and defended the rights of Americans to protest such government actions — if it's done peacefully.
He accused Trump of 'fanning flames and inciting things on the ground' to distract from a domestic policy agenda that Jeffries has dubbed 'a failure.'
'Donald Trump is clearly trying to distract from the fact that he has a failed administration,' Jeffries said.
The Democratic leader also dismissed Trump's argument that, by intervening in the L.A. immigration protests, he's simply bringing law and order to a city where local officials have failed to do so.
Jeffries noted that Trump, for hours, had declined to intervene on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked law enforcers at the U.S. Capitol in an effort to block the certification of Trump's election defeat a few months earlier. In January, Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 of the rioters — a move that, according to Jeffries, gives Trump and his supporters 'zero credibility' to claim the mantle of law and order.
'Donald Trump wasn't a leader on Jan. 6. He didn't send the National Guard to stop the violent mob that was brutally beating police officers in plain view for every single American to see,' Jeffries said. 'And this guy, who likely withheld the National Guard — he certainly didn't send them forward — is lecturing the country about law and order?'
'Give me a break. We're not feeling you — particularly as it relates to this issue,' he continued. 'Donald Trump and all of these minions who support him — the sycophants, the extremists — have zero credibility on this issue. Republicans have become the party of lawlessness and disorder.'
Amid the unrest in L.A., Trump over the weekend activated members of the National Guard, drawing criticisms from California officials — notably Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) — who said local law enforcement agencies are sufficiently equipped to handle the situation without the involvement of federal troops. Newsom announced Monday that he is suing the administration over the federal intervention.
'This is a manufactured crisis,' Newsom posted on X. 'He is creating fear and terror to take over a state militia and violate the U.S. constitution.'
Jeffries is standing squarely behind Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass (D), a former member of the House, who have both argued that local and state law enforcers in California have the faculties and manpower to protect both First Amendment rights and public safety.
'The LAPD, the L.A. Sheriff's Department, other local law enforcement, and the California Highway Patrol, seem to have the capacity to make sure that the situation is addressed — that peaceful protests are allowed to occur, and that law-breakers are held accountable,' Jeffries said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
House-Senate conference committee on budget formed
Legislative leaders have named the eight budget writers they want to resolve the seismic split between competing versions of a two-year spending plan that cleared each house of the New Hampshire Legislature. Senate President Sharon Carson and House Speaker Sherman Packard, both R-Londonderry, acted quickly in a sign that it could take some time for the two sides to find common ground. 'There are differences between the House and Senate-approved versions of the state budget. We look forward to working through them over the next two weeks and remain committed to delivering a balanced budget that protects New Hampshire taxpayers while serving all Granite Staters,' Packard and Carson said in a joint statement. As the first-named House member, Rep. Kenneth Weyler, R-Kingston, is likely to become chairman of the conference committee. Weyler chaired the House Finance Committee. The other four House members, who also serve on Weyler's committee, are Vice Chairman Dan McGuire, R-Kingston, House Deputy Majority Leader Joe Sweeney, R-Salem, Rep. Jose Cambrils, R-Loudon and Rep. Mary Jane Wallner, D-Concord and the ranking Democrat. Packard decided to name some alternates who had other experiences beyond writing the budget. The potential stand-ins are House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, House Executive Departments and Administration Committee Vice Chairman Erica Layon, R-Derry, House Ways and Means Chairman John Janigian, R-Salem, Rep. Keith Erf, R-Weare, and Rep. Jess Edwards, R-Auburn. Erf and Edwards each co-chair subcommittees on the House Finance Committee. Carson names herself to commitee Carson chose to name herself as the first senator on the panel along with Senate Finance Chairman James Gray, R-Rochester, and Senate Deputy Democratic Leader Cindy Rosenwald of Nashua, the ranking Democratic Senate budget writer. The only Senate alternate is Majority Leader Regina Birdsell, R-Hampstead. Most House speakers don't get involved directly in state budget negotiations. It's not unusual for Senate presidents to get into the fray, however. Carson's predecessor, former Senate President Chuck Morse, took the gavel after serving as Senate finance chairman for many years. The House and Senate meet Thursday to complete the naming of all conference committees that will try and forge compromise on other bills. They have until June 19 to reach agreements and then the House and Senate have to vote on all of them by June 26. The $15.4 billion House-passed budget relied on conservative revenue estimates, which meant their budget writers had to make deep cuts in spending. The House plan would lay off 100 workers in the state prison system and do away with the Office of the Child Advocate, the state Division on the Arts, the Commission on Aging and the Housing Appeals Board. The Senate updated the predictions for revenue, which meant it could spend about $250 million more in state dollars than the House plan did. The Senate budget pared the layoffs down to about 25 in the Department of Corrections. It kept the child advocate office in the running while erasing four of nine jobs, revived support for the arts by proposing a new business tax credit for companies that donate to the program and restoring groups on aging and housing appeals, though with smaller budgets than the ones that Gov. Kelly Ayotte proposed last February. The Senate plan also increased by nearly $70 million the level of state aid to the University System of New Hampshire compared to the House budget. USNH would receive in the Senate proposal $85 million a year, about a 10% cut from its support in the current state budget that ends June 30. klandrigan@
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Tesla Is Launching Robotaxis in Austin. Safety Advocates Are Concerned
Elon Musk's ugly public spat with former bestie Donald Trump is sure to cause more headaches for the Silicon Valley mogul down the line. Not only has he sacrificed any influence he might have with the White House by blasting the president for his association with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, but some in the administration have floated the idea of reviving regulatory investigations into Musk's corporate empire. The timing of such a threat could hardly be worse. That's because Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle manufacturer, is about to face a make-or-break test of self-driving technology that the CEO believes is key to its future value — yet has been the subject of a years-long probe by the Justice Department into potential securities and wire fraud. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is meanwhile conducting multiple investigations into the possible risks posed by the same tech. More from Rolling Stone The Biggest Boondoggles in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill 'Dejected' Trump Says Relationship With Musk Is Over; Calls Him a 'Big-Time Drug Addict': Report Vance Says 'Trump Didn't Do Anything Wrong With Jeffrey Epstein' Last fall, at a carefully staged event on the Warner Bros. Discovery studio lot in Burbank, California, Musk unveiled what he called a 'Cybercab,' a sleek, two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel. This was the long-awaited prototype of Tesla's robotaxi, or a fully autonomous, driverless passenger vehicle. Back in 2019, Musk had predicted that existing Tesla models would become capable of driving themselves without human oversight once their 'Full Self-Driving' (FSD) driver-assistance software had been adequately updated. Now he was demoing a different, built-to-purpose model, seeming to signal that Teslas already on the road would not be upgraded to robotaxi capability. Then, in a January earnings call, Musk offered one of his typically optimistic predictions about a timetable for a paid robotaxi service, similar Amazon's Zoox, or Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet. 'Teslas will be in the wild, with no one in them, in June, in Austin,' Musk said, referring to the Texas city that has been a base of operations for his businesses in recent years. Investors were skeptical. After all, Musk has a history of overpromising, and the Cybercab unveiled barely three months earlier was essentially a glorified movie prop. By late May, however, Musk was declaring significant progress on a robotaxi launch. 'For the past several days, Tesla has been testing self-driving Model Y cars (no one in driver's seat) on Austin public streets with no incidents,' he posted on X on May 28. 'A month ahead of schedule. Next month, first self-delivery from factory to customer.' It would appear, in this case, that Tesla had defaulted to the original idea of modifying its commercially available models to make them autonomous rather than holding off until it had a fleet of Cybercabs. Aside from stray comments like these, little is known about what Tesla's initial robotaxi program will look like. The company is reportedly targeting a launch date of June 12, with just 10-20 vehicles to start. A Morgan Stanley analyst — not Tesla itself — has claimed that rides will be available by invite only, not to the general public, and that the cars will be remotely supervised by operators prepared to take manual control if needed. That the automaker is keeping most details under wraps has left plenty of room for questions, doubts, and concerns — particularly as Waymo and other competitors tend to collect data and conduct local testing for far longer periods before welcoming passengers aboard. Dan O'Dowd, a software entrepreneur and founder of the tech safety group the Dawn Project, which has routinely showcased the shortcomings of Tesla's FSD tech, predicts that the robotaxi rollout will amount to lackluster stunt. 'Musk's upcoming robotaxi launch will still be nothing more than a bigger version of the 1950s Disneyland ride that Tesla demonstrated at [the Cybercab] event last year, if it even takes place at all,' he says. 'Despite Elon Musk claiming that Tesla was less than a year away from solving autonomy for nearly a decade and decrying the real robotaxi companies for geo-fencing and remote supervision, Tesla plans for its so-called robotaxis to only be able to drive around certain parts of Austin, avoiding intersections that are difficult,' while being remotely supervised,' O'Dowd notes. (Musk admitted in a recent interview that the robotaxis would be 'geo-fenced,' or restricted from certain parts of the city.) 'Tesla has also shown itself incapable of developing a working Cybercab, instead leaning on its Model Y in another backtrack on Elon's many false promises about solving autonomy,' O'Dowd adds. 'The golden Model 3 mules that Tesla is using to develop the Cybercab's software clearly demonstrate that Tesla has put the cart before the horse with the Cybercab.' On June 2, an X user posted a video of a Model 3 in a Tesla lot in San Diego that had seemingly been modified to resemble the Cybercab design, with its side mirrors removed and the rear windshield painted gold along with the body panels. The clip was taken by many Tesla observers as evidence that it was also using Model 3s to run autonomous driving experiments ahead of the robotaxi pilot program. Brett Schreiber, a partner at the San Diego law firm Singleton Schreiber who is currently pursuing multiple injury and wrongful death suits against Tesla over accidents involving its driver-assistance features, agrees that the company is backing down from the Cybercab concept Musk presented last year. 'It is a retreat on the idea that they are going to build out a new vehicle that is capable of autonomy,' he says, though 'a repeat of the continued lies and misrepresentations' from the CEO — namely, that existing Teslas can be turned into robotaxis. 'There is nothing about the vehicle today, whether you slap some lipstick on the pig of a Model Y, or any other vehicle in their production fleet, that [makes it] capable of level four or level five autonomy without driver intervention. They simply haven't gotten there, and just because they keep saying so doesn't make it true.' Levels four and five of driving automation refer to systems in which 'a human driver is not needed,' per NHTSA guidelines. Tesla's FSD is currently classified as level two, meaning that a human driver 'is fully responsible' for operating the vehicle even while assistance features are engaged. Schreiber believes that Tesla brought the robotaxi project to Texas for 'a more lax environment with respect to enforcement,' saying that 'in many states, California being one of them, they would not be allowed to do this in the way that they are doing it. They fled California for a lot of reasons, the least of which was the fact that they felt more constrained by their ability to roll out and continue to use the public roadways as their own personal test track, and use the members of the public as the guinea pigs in the grand experiment.' Indeed, the Texas Department of Transportation does not require any special permits for operating autonomous vehicles — only that these meet the same safety and insurance requirements as other vehicles. In California, by contrast, the Department of Motor Vehicles 'issues permits to manufacturers that test and deploy autonomous vehicles on California public roads.' Tesla, which does not have a press department, did not reply to a request for comment on details of the robotaxi launch or why Austin was chosen as the site. As for regulatory enforcement by NHTSA, it would largely come after the fact, since autonomous vehicle permitting is a state matter, not a federal one. 'Under U.S. law, NHTSA does not pre-approve new technologies or vehicle systems — rather, manufacturers certify that each vehicle meets NHTSA's rigorous safety standards, and the agency investigates incidents involving potential safety defects,' a sposkesperson for the agency tells Rolling Stone. 'Following an assessment of those reports and other relevant information, NHTSA will take any necessary actions to protect road safety.' NHTSA, as it happens, was one of a handful of regulators scrutinizing Musk's businesses to face cuts imposed by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with at least four percent of staff dismissed. In Schreiber's estimation, the agency's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) 'has been completely gutted,' hampering its ability to go after Tesla. Even so, the ODI did send a letter to Tesla's director of field quality in May, requesting extensive information about the proposed automated driving system for its robotaxis in order 'to understand Tesla's technologies and operational use cases further, including to assess the ability of Tesla's system to react appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions.' NHTSA's probe into Tesla's FSD involves several accidents in which the system faced conditions such as fog or sun glare, including a 2023 collision in Arizona in which a Model Y struck and killed a pedestrian while driving into direct sunlight. That investigation 'remains open,' the agency spokesperson says. Meanwhile, if Tesla doesn't answer NHTSA's questions about how its robotaxis work and what steps it is taking to ensure their safe operation by a deadline of June 19, or secure a filing extension, it could be subject to civil penalties. By that time, of course, people may already be hailing driverless Teslas in Texas, with passengers, other motorists, and bystanders all at the mercy of a supposed breakthrough in vehicle autonomy. That's what has safety advocates like O'Dowd so alarmed. 'The people of Austin did not sign up to be crash-test dummies for Musk's reckless deployment of Tesla's defective and dangerous Full Self-Driving software,' he says. If the thought has ever bothered Musk, he hasn't said so. Upon stepping down from DOGE, he wrote on X that he would return to a '24/7' focus on his companies, Tesla in particular, as 'we have critical technologies rolling out.' Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump Is Deploying the Marines Against U.S. Citizens
President Trump is sending 500 Marines to Los Angeles, allegedly to help police—who have not asked for it—with protests that have occurred in downtown Los Angeles. This is an extreme escalation from the Trump administration, an aggressive demonstration of force by the against its own citizens. The troops are set to arrive on Monday evening, and without rules of engagement—which puts the lives of countless demonstrators at risk. 'The rules of engagement here, we are told, are still being finalized,' said CNN's Natasha Bertrand. 'And defense department lawyers are also looking at the kinds of rules of engagement these Marines will have as they encounter protesters, possibly on the streets of Los Angeles.' Hundreds of Marines in a city on edge from the impact of ICE's indiscriminate deportation raids is a recipe for a devastating tragedy. The deployment, moreover, almost certainly is illegal. No leader in Los Angeles or California has said that it's necessary—the situation is not out of control, and it certainly does not need hundreds of Marines and National Guard soldiers to maintain order. Instead, this is a blanket display of force, meant to intimidate protesters and municipalities that dare to stand up to an administration that is sweeping thousands of people off the street.
