Smithsonian revises museum exhibit text of Trump's two impeachments
The description of Trump's second impeachment for inciting insurrection now states it was 'based on his challenge of the 2020 election results and on his speech on January 6,' removing direct quotes from the Senate's articles of impeachment.
Text about Trump's first impeachment trial in 2020 was modified to include the word 'alleged' before 'solicitation of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election.'
These alterations follow a period when Trump signed an executive order seeking to purge 'anti-American ideology' from the Smithsonian and attempted to dismiss the head of the National Portrait Gallery.
Museum officials stated the changes were part of a routine replacement of temporary material, claiming the original placard did not meet presentation standards, though an inside source reportedly linked it to a content review for political bias.
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Reuters
6 minutes ago
- Reuters
Ukraine, sidelined in Trump-Putin summit, fights Russian grab for more territory
MOSCOW/BRUSSELS, Aug 12 (Reuters) - Small bands of Russian soldiers thrust deeper into eastern Ukraine on Tuesday before a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, which European leaders fear could end in peace terms imposed on an unlawfully shrunken Ukraine. In one of the most extensive incursions so far this year, Russian troops advanced near the coal-mining town of Dobropillia, part of Putin's campaign to take full control of Ukraine's Donetsk region. Ukraine's military dispatched reserve troops, saying they were in difficult combat against Russian soldiers. Trump has said any peace deal would involve "some swapping of territories to the betterment of both" Russia and Ukraine, which has up to now depended on the U.S. as its main arms supplier. But because all the areas being contested lie within Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his European Union allies fear that he will face pressure to give up far more than Russia does. Trump's administration tempered expectations on Tuesday for major progress toward a ceasefire, calling his meeting on Friday with Putin in Alaska a "listening exercise." Zelenskiy and most of his European counterparts have said a lasting peace cannot be secured without Ukraine at the negotiating table, and a deal must comply with international law, Ukraine's sovereignty and its territorial integrity. They will hold a virtual meeting with Trump on Wednesday to underscore those concerns before the Putin summit, the first U.S.-Russia summit since 2021. "An imitated rather than genuine peace will not hold for long and will only encourage Russia to seize even more territory," Zelenskiy said in a statement on Tuesday. Zelenskiy said Russia must agree to a ceasefire before territorial issues are discussed. He would reject any Russian proposal that Ukraine pull its troops from the eastern Donbas region and cede its defensive lines. Asked why Zelenskiy was not joining the U.S. and Russian leaders at the Alaska summit, a White House spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the bilateral meeting had been proposed by Putin, and that Trump accepted to get a "better understanding" of how to end the war. "Only one party that's involved in this war is going to be present, and so this is for the president to go and to get a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end," press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. "You need both countries to agree to a deal." Trump is open to a trilateral meeting with Putin and Zelenskiy later, Leavitt said. Ukraine faces a shortage of soldiers after Russia invaded more than three years ago, easing the path for the latest Russian advances. "This breakthrough is like a gift to Putin and Trump during the negotiations," said Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, suggesting it could increase pressure on Ukraine to yield territory under any deal. Ukraine's military meanwhile said it had retaken two villages in the eastern region of Sumy on Monday, part of a small reversal in more than a year of slow, attritional Russian gains in the southeast. Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has mounted a new offensive this year in Sumy after Putin demanded a "buffer zone" there. Ukraine and its European allies fear that Trump, keen to claim credit for making peace and seal new business deals with Russia's government, will end up rewarding Putin for his 11 years spent in efforts to seize Ukrainian territory, the last three in open warfare. European leaders have said Ukraine must be capable of defending itself if peace and security is to be guaranteed on the continent, and that they are ready to contribute further. "Ukraine cannot lose this war and nobody has the right to pressure Ukraine into making territorial or other concessions, or making decisions that smack of capitulation," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a government meeting. "I hope we can convince President Trump about the European position." Zelenskiy has said he and European leaders "all support President Trump's determination." Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Putin's principal ally in Europe, was the only leader not to join the EU's statement of unity. He mocked his counterparts as "sidelined" and said Russia had already defeated Ukraine. "The Ukrainians have lost the war. Russia has won this war," Orban told the "Patriot" YouTube channel in an interview. Trump had been recently hardening his stance towards Russia, agreeing to send more U.S. weapons to Ukraine and threatening hefty trade tariffs on buyers of Russian oil in an ultimatum that has now lapsed.
The Independent
8 minutes ago
- The Independent
Andrew Cuomo swipes at Zohran Mamdani over a classic New York topic: rent
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The Independent
8 minutes ago
- The Independent
After D.C., Trump wants to ‘takeover' New York and Chicago. Can he?
Donald Trump completed his goal of 'sending in the troops' this week as he announced that the D.C. National Guard would be mobilized to fight crime in the District of Columbia, where federal officials would also be taking over the local police force. But will he stop there, or will other cities be next? After reportedly spending months debating how best to achieve the humiliation and cowing of a liberal-run urban center, the president's second go at it appears on track for greater success. Trump previously ordered National Guard troops to begin protection duties in Los Angeles and the surrounding area following unrest in January over ICE deportation raids. That deployment, once thousands of troops, is now down to less than 300 as federal officials squabble with local leaders in the courts over whether the whole thing was a political stunt. That dynamic playing out on the West Coast is a sign that Trump will likely be less successful at duplicating his takeover of the nation's capital in blue states around the U.S., even as he pledged to do so during his Monday press conference at the White House. "We're not going to lose our cities over this. This will go further. We're starting very strongly with D.C., and we're going to clean it up real quick," Trump told reporters. "We're going to take back our capital. And then we'll look at other cities also. But other cities are studying what we're doing." In D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has meekly pushed back against the image of her city being 'war-torn' and drug-infested as being shared by the White House. Aside from refusing to sign on to that characterization, she's painstakingly avoided direct confrontation with Trump, clearly fearful that the president (with the backing of a GOP House and Senate) could pursue a full federalization of D.C. city government by asking Congress to revoke the Home Rule Act. The reality is simple: Trump can't deputize federal troops, including state National Guard detachments, to conduct crime-control activities without the cooperation of state leaders and some kind of actual rationalization for doing so. Pointing at crime trends and graphs won't cut it. Especially in states with uncooperative leaders, his deployment of National Guard troops is limited to his administration's ability to come up with rationalizations for their use; in California, Guardsmen were dispatched in response to large-scale protests around federal buildings housing detained undocumented immigrants. In Chicago, Baltimore, New York and other cities, Trump lacks even the minimal standards that the administration would need to defend such deployments. So what can Trump do? The answer may still end up being more than Democratic state and local leaders would like to see from the White House. This week, federal attorneys battled with California in court over whether National Guard troops deployed to the state in June overstepped their constitutional authority by providing support to ICE agents during raids and other enforcement actions, where National Guard troops served to protect law enforcement personnel but were directed not to participate directly in arrests of migrants. The director of the Los Angeles field office testified that the support provided by the Guard on these raids was critical for preventing assaults against officers: "We still had officer assault situations, but they did reduce drastically." That's the loophole Trump and his team will use, should it be upheld as legal. Democratic state leaders can force the Guard to operate under solely federal authority, known as 'Title 10,' which bars troops from performing law enforcement activities and forces them to operate solely with federal funding and oversight. In California's case, this was used; and it severely restricted the usage of the Guard to support roles for enforcement operations. But Trump simply could use further demonstrations against ICE agents as the impetus for launching similar operations in Democrat-run cities such as Chicago or New York. The president needs no additional authority to ramp up immigration raids in those areas, and now has the funding to do it, thanks to the GOP's budget reconciliation package containing money for tens of thousands of new ICE agents and detention centers. It's the question of whether he would be able to sustain a supporting guardsman presence for any extended amount of time, or whether court challenges in those states would force him to close up shop that's still uncertain. Trump could find more leeway in red states, where state governors could cooperate with the Trump administration and change the game. If Guardsmen were activated under 'Title 32' authority, which shares oversight and funding for the deployment between state and federal officials, those deployed troops would not be subject to the same restrictions on carrying out law enforcement activities. It was under this authority that the president is calling in the Guard to Washington D.C., which falls constitutionally under federal jurisdiction and likely can't block the president from wielding that power. Federal officials haven't said that National Guard troops in D.C. will directly conduct law enforcement operations, however. The Guard is currently slated to provide support roles to assist the newly federalized Metropolitan Police Department, the city's primary law enforcement agency. It's a sign that even under the broadest authority Trump is willing to grant U.S. troops operating on American soil, the White House is still hesitant to lean into the full militarization of American cities. As midterm season approaches, Democratic state leaders can likely breathe a sigh of relief knowing that blue states remain shielded from Trump's ambitions of bringing local police forces under his control, and from seeing troops on city streets putting down dissent or conducting law enforcement in an attempt to smear the president's critics as pro-crime. Voters in red states, however, could be in for a ride if the president decides that leaning into immigration raids is his party's ticket to protecting congressional majorities next year.
