Barack Obama tells Democrats to 'toughen up' as they look at the future
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Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump signs executive order making it easier to remove homeless people from streets
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday making it easier for local jurisdictions to remove homeless people from the streets. The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to 'reverse judicial precedents and end consent decrees' that limit jurisdictions' abilities to relocate homeless people. It also redirects federal resources so that affected homeless people are transferred to rehabilitation and substance misuse facilities. It also directs Bondi to work with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to fast-track federal funding to states and municipalities that crack down on 'open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting, and track the location of sex offenders.' 'President Trump is delivering on his commitment to Make America Safe Again and end homelessness across America,' Leavitt said in a statement Thursday. 'By removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump Administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need.' Advocates for the homeless condemned the executive orders with some saying that it will make homelessness worse for communities. 'These executive orders ignore decades of evidence-based housing and support services in practice. They represent a punitive approach that has consistently failed to resolve homelessness and instead exacerbates the challenges faced by vulnerable individuals,' said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, in a press release. The National Homelessness Law Center said the order 'deprives people of their basic rights and makes it harder to solve homelessness' in a statement on Thursday. The group said the order will expand the use of police and institutionalization in response to homelessness, while increasing the number of people living in tents, cars and on the streets. Order follows high court decision The order comes a month after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an Oregon city that ticketed homeless people for sleeping outside. Justices rejected arguments that such 'anti-camping' ordinances violate the Constitution's ban on 'cruel and unusual' punishment. The case had been watched closely by city and state officials who have struggled to respond to a surge in homelessness and encampments that have cropped up under bridges and in city parks across the nation. It was also followed by people who live in those encampments and are alarmed by efforts to criminalize the population rather than build shelters and affordable housing. Homelessness in the US soared to the highest level on record last year, driven by a lack of affordable housing, a rise in migrants seeking shelter and natural disasters, which caused some people to be displaced from their homes, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. More than 770,000 people experienced homelessness in 2024, an 18% increase from 2023. It was the largest annual increase since HUD began collecting the data in 2007 (excluding the jump from 2021 to 2022, when the agency didn't conduct a full count due to the Covid-19 pandemic). As a candidate, Trump railed against the nation's homeless crisis, telling supporters during a September campaign rally it was 'destroying our cities.' 'The homeless encampments will be gone,' Trump said in remarks from North Carolina. 'They're going to be gone. Oh, you have to see, you have to – some of these encampments, what they've done to our cities, and we've got to take care of the people.' CNN's Shania Shelton contributed to this report. Solve the daily Crossword
The Hill
27 minutes ago
- The Hill
Tulsi Gabbard is setting Trump's base up for the next Epstein disappointment
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is sowing the seeds for MAGAs next Jeffrey Epstein moment and perpetuating a dangerous retaliatory cycle. She has accused former senior government officials of directing a treasonous conspiracy to undermine President Trump's 2016 campaign. Nothing Gabbard has released proves that assertion, including the 2017 House Intelligence Committee report questioning the intelligence community assessment that Russia wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. That 2017 conclusion is at odds with the unanimous and bipartisan findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that found Russia did in fact try to influence the campaign in Trump's favor but those efforts did not affect the outcome. Gabbard's claims reinforce a long-standing narrative prevalent among MAGA supporters that Democrats sought to destroy Trump's candidacy, and then undermine his presidency, by manipulating information about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Gabbard's unsubstantiated conclusions will come back to bite the Trump administration the same way Attorney General Pam Bondi's inability to release the Epstein client list has upset the president's supporters. Unless the Trump administration is prepared to fabricate evidence, it's unlikely enough new information will ever be discovered to prove a conspiracy of the magnitude suggested by Gabbard. MAGA supporters will be waiting for the mass arrest and imprisonment of Obama administration officials that never comes. Gabbard, and ultimately Trump, will be left to weakly explain why the conspirators aren't coming to justice. Gabbard's powerful assertions came at a delicate moment for a Trump administration already caught in the middle of a similar storm of their own making about Epstein. From the start, the investigations and public communications about Russian interference in the 2016 election were mishandled. It's important to acknowledge that fact upfront. President Obama didn't have to release the government's conclusions about Russian interference a month before the 2016 election, conclusions that lent an air of legitimacy to accusations against Trump being discussed publicly by supporters of Hillary Clinton. The FBI's probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was itself predicated on flimsy information. Even if Gabbard's wild assertions aren't true, and there's no evidence so far to suggest they are, the judgement exercised by parts of the government during and after the 2016 campaign still left a lot to be desired. The Trump campaign had been the primary victim of the government's poor judgement, but former FBI Director James Comey evened the score a bit when he announced the opening of an FBI probe into Clinton's use of an unclassified email server days before the 2016 election. Democrats botched the messaging around Russia's interference with the 2016 election, either accidentally or intentionally inflating its role and falsely insinuating the Trump campaign had been involved. But Gabbard is now recreating their mistakes with her reckless accusations. Now that both sides have weaponized intelligence for political purposes, what matters is to restore trust in the intelligence community. Gabbard would say she's doing that by leveling her accusations in the name of transparency, but her aggressive assertions go beyond where the facts are leading and perpetuate an overblown narrative of government conspiracy. Already, Democrats aren't inclined to believe what she's saying, just as most Republicans never bought into the Steele dossier or the assertions about Trump's collusion with Russia. Beyond the trust gap with Democrats, Gabbard is setting the conditions for a major falling out with the MAGA faithful. After Epstein, this will be the second time that Trump administration officials allege a massive conspiracy but aren't able to produce evidence to support their claims. Trump's core supporters believe these conspiracies are real because their leaders, officials like Bondi and Gabbard, keep telling them that proof exists. They'll demand action over Gabbard's accusations, the way they are with Epstein, then be left with no choice but to assume the Trump administration is complicit in the coverup when no action comes. This is a distraction Trump doesn't need. He would do well to direct Gabbard to tone down her assertions rather than egg her on. Going forward, the intelligence community, elected officials, the Justice Department and the government in general should take a lesson from former President Gerald Ford. Ford understood that prosecuting President Richard Nixon would divide the country and create more problems than it solved. He made the hard decision to allow what was probably criminal conduct to go unpunished to allow the nation to heal. Except in cases of the most egregious crimes supported by the strongest evidence, the U.S. government should take a break from seeking to prosecute former government officials. Democrats spent years rooting for Trump to go to jail or actively trying to put Trump in jail for perceived crimes. Gabbard seems intent on doing the same in reverse. This is a bad place for the country to be, with the intelligence community being used against former officials and sensitive information being declassified when it suits a political purpose. This type of behavior will have a chilling effect on everything the intelligence community does and further divide our country. The Trump administration should be the grown-up in the room and break this dangerous cycle now.
CNN
29 minutes ago
- CNN
Protests expected as Trump arrives in Scotland for five-day visit
Donald Trump UKFacebookTweetLink Follow Protesters in Scotland say they will mount a wave of resistance as US President Donald Trump prepares to travel to the country on Friday for a five-day private visit. Trump is traveling to his golf resort in the small village of Turnberry, on the west coast, where he will meet UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday, before going to his other resort near Aberdeen, on the other side of Scotland, and open an 18-hole course dedicated to his Scottish-born mother Mary. Several protest groups, ranging from trade unions and climate justice campaigners to sections of the American diaspora and Palestinian and Ukrainian advocacy groups, are planning to demonstrate against the US president under the umbrella of the 'Stop Trump Coalition.' Protests are scheduled for Saturday in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dumfries. Police Scotland are expected to deploy thousands of officers during Trump's visit, according to PA Media. Assistant Chief Constable Emma Bond told CNN in a statement that the visit 'will require a significant police operation using local, national and specialist resources from across Police Scotland, supported by colleagues from other UK police forces.' Trump himself is expected to stay at his golf resorts, away from the public. Scotland, ruled for decades by a left-of-center devolved government, has a long history of protesting against Trump. When he visited his Scottish golf courses during his first presidential term, police estimated that 5,000 people marched through Edinburgh in protest. On Tuesday, Scottish pro-independence newspaper The National printed a front page with the headline 'Convicted US felon to arrive in Scotland.' 'I don't think many Scottish people would feel he's welcome,' one Scottish resident Anna Acquroff told Reuters in Glasgow. 'I think it's an embarrassment that he is coming here at all. Personally.' Not everyone is so opposed to the Trump visit, however. Another Glaswegian, Keith Bean, told Reuters he thought Trump was 'welcome to come' because 'talking is always good. To divide and keep people separate from one another without discussing, it tends to create more problems than conversation.' While in Scotland, Trump will also meet its First Minister John Swinney, who said he will 'raise global and humanitarian issues of significant importance, including the unimaginable suffering we are witnessing in Gaza, and ensure Scotland's voice is heard at the highest levels of government across the world,' according to PA. This visit to Scotland marks a distraction from Trump's current domestic political troubles over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein – an accused sex trafficker and disgraced financier who died by suicide in 2019. Already, however, that ongoing turmoil has seeped into Trump's visit. The White House removed the Wall Street Journal from the trip's press pool after the publication ran a story which described a collection of letters gifted to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003, including a note bearing Trump's name and an outline of a naked woman. Trump filed a lawsuit the next day claiming defamation 'because no authentic letter or drawing exists.' Trump will return to the UK in September for an 'unprecedented' second state visit at the invitation of King Charles, which is unlikely to have any public-facing events. Typically, second-term US presidents are not invited for a second state visit. In keeping with tradition, former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush were offered lunch or tea with the monarch during their second administrations.
