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France 24
an hour ago
- France 24
Trump's federal takeover begins as National Guard troops arrive in Washington
Some of the 800 National Guard members deployed by Trump began arriving in the nation's capital on Tuesday, ramping up after the White House ordered federal forces to take over the city's police department and reduce crime in what the president called – without substantiation – a lawless city. The influx came the morning after Trump announced he would be activating the guard members and taking over the department. He cited a crime emergency – but referred to the same crime that city officials stress is already falling noticeably. The president holds the legal right to make such moves – to a point. The law lets Trump control the police department for a month, but how aggressive the federal presence will be and how it could play out remained open questions as the city's mayor and police chief went to the Justice Department to meet with the attorney general. The meeting comes a day after Mayor Muriel Bowser said Trump's freshly announced plan to take over the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and call in the National Guard was not a productive step. She calmly laid out the city's case that crime has been dropping steadily and said Trump's perceived state of emergency simply doesn't match the numbers. She also flatly stated that the capital city's hands are tied and that her administration has little choice but to comply. 'We could contest that," she said of Trump's definition of a crime emergency, "but his authority is pretty broad'. Bowser made a reference to Trump's 'so-called emergency' and concluded: 'I'm going to work every day to make sure it's not a complete disaster.' While Trump invokes his plan by saying that 'we're going to take our capital back,' Bowser and the MPD maintain that violent crime overall in Washington has decreased to a 30-year low after a sharp rise in 2023. Carjackings, for example, dropped about 50 percent in 2024 and are down again this year. More than half of those arrested, however, are juveniles, and the extent of those punishments is a point of contention for the Trump administration. 08:54 Bowser, a Democrat, spent much of Trump's first term in office openly sparring with the Republican president. She fended off his initial plans for a military parade through the streets and stood in public opposition when he called in a multi-agency flood of federal law enforcement to confront anti-police brutality protesters in summer 2020. She later had the words 'Black Lives Matter' painted in giant yellow letters on the street about a block from the White House. In Trump's second term, backed by Republican control of both houses of Congress, Bowser has walked a public tightrope for months, emphasising common ground with the Trump administration on issues such as the successful effort to bring the NFL's Washington Commanders back to the District of Columbia. She watched with open concern for the city streets as Trump finally got his military parade this summer. Her decision to dismantle Black Lives Matter Plaza earlier this year served as a neat metaphor for just how much the power dynamics between the two executives had evolved. Now that fraught relationship enters uncharted territory as Trump has followed through on months of what many DC officials had quietly hoped were empty threats. The new standoff has cast Bowser in a sympathetic light, even among her longtime critics. 'It's a power play and we're an easy target,' said Clinique Chapman, CEO of the DC Justice Lab. A frequent critic of Bowser, whom she accuses of 'over policing our youth' with the recent expansions of Washington's youth curfew, Chapman said Trump's latest move 'is not about creating a safer DC. It's just about power.' Bowser contends that all the power resides with Trump and that her administration can do little other than comply and make the best of it. The native Washingtonian spent much of Monday's press conference tying Trump's takeover to the larger issue of statehood for the District of Columbia. As long as Washington remains a federal enclave with limited autonomy under the 1973 Home Rule Act, she said, it will remain vulnerable to such takeovers. 'We know that access to our democracy is tenuous," Bowser said. "That is why you have heard me, and many many Washingtonians before me, advocate for full statehood for the District of Columbia.' Section 740 of the Home Rule Act allows the president to take over Washington's police for 48 hours, with possible extensions to 30 days, during times of emergencies. No president has done so before, said Monica Hopkins, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's DC chapter. 'That should alarm everyone,' she said, 'not just in Washington'. For Trump, the effort to take over public safety in Washington reflects an escalation of his aggressive approach to law enforcement. The District of Columbia's status as a congressionally established federal district gives him a unique opportunity to push his tough-on-crime agenda, though he has not proposed solutions to the root causes of homelessness or crime. 'Let me be crystal clear," Attorney General Pam Bondi said during Trump's announcement news conference. 'Crime in DC is ending and ending today.' Trump's declaration of a state of emergency fits the general pattern of his second term in office: He has declared states of emergency on issues ranging from border protection to economic tariffs, enabling him to essentially rule via executive order. In many cases, he has moved forward while the courts sorted them out. Bowser's claims about successfully driving down violent crime rates received backing earlier this year from an unlikely source. Ed Martin, Trump's original choice for US attorney for the District of Columbia, issued a press release in April hailing a 25 percent drop in violent crime rates from the previous year. 'Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and the efforts of our 'Make DC Safe Again' initiative, the District has seen a significant decline in violent crime,' Martin said. 'We are proving that strong enforcement, and smart policies can make our communities safer." In May, Trump abandoned his efforts to get Martin confirmed for the post in the face of opposition in Congress. His replacement candidate, former judge and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, was recently confirmed. On Monday, Pirro – standing next to Trump – called his takeover 'the step that we need right now to make criminals understand that they are not going to get away with it anymore".
LeMonde
2 hours ago
- LeMonde
Trump says may allow lawsuit against Fed chair over renovations
President Donald Trump said Tuesday, August 12 he might allow "a major lawsuit against" the US central bank chief to proceed, as he complained again about renovations to the Federal Reserve headquarters and renewed pressure to lower interest rates. "The damage he has done by always being Too Late is incalculable," Trump wrote of Fed Chair Jerome Powell on his Truth Social platform. He added that he is thinking of allowing a lawsuit taking aim at Powell's oversight on the renovations in Washington, but did not offer more details. Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Powell this year over the Fed's decisions to keep interest rates steady since its last cut in December. Policymakers have been cautiously monitoring the effects of Trump's wide-ranging tariffs on the world's biggest economy, as they mulled the right time to lower rates further. This is because it takes time for levies to filter through to consumer prices. The jury is still out on whether Trump's latest tariffs will have a one-off or longer-term impact on inflation, but the president has regularly pointed to benign data to urge for rate reductions to boost the economy. Shortly after government data was released Tuesday, showing that consumer inflation stayed unchanged at 2.7% in July, Trump wrote on social media that Powell "must now lower the rate." He also called the Fed's leadership "complacent." Trump has openly floated the idea of ousting Powell over cost overruns for the renovation. While the US leader says the price of the makeover was $3.1 billion, reiterating this figure in his social media post on Tuesday, Powell has been quick to correct Trump in the past. The cost has been put at $2.5 billion, but Trump's higher number includes work on another building that Powell maintains was completed previously. On Tuesday, Trump said Powell was doing a "horrible" job in managing the Fed's revamp.
Euronews
3 hours ago
- Euronews
US inflation shows limited tariff impact, but prices still rise
US consumer prices rose 0.2% in July and 2.7% over the past year, coming in slightly below the expected tariff-induced spike. Core inflation hit 3.1% — its highest level since February — as shelter and service costs edged higher but tariff impacts remained modest. The figures suggest that slowing rent increases and cheaper gas are offsetting some impacts of US President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs. Still, stubbornly high inflation puts the Federal Reserve in a difficult spot. Hiring slowed sharply in the spring, after Trump announced tariffs in April. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has warned that worsening inflation could pause rate cuts — a stance that has enraged Trump, who has defied traditional norms of central bank independence and demanded that the Federal Reserve lower borrowing costs. Gas prices fell 2.2% from June to July and have plunged 9.5% from a year earlier, the government's report said. Grocery prices slipped 0.1% last month, though they are still 2.2% higher than a year ago. Restaurant meals continued to get more expensive, however, rising 0.3% in July and 3.9% from a year earlier. Tariffs appeared to raise the cost of some imported items. Shoe prices jumped 1.4% from June to July, though they are still just 0.9% more expensive than a year ago. The cost of furniture leapt 0.9% in July and is 3.2% higher than a year earlier. Clothing prices ticked up 0.1% in July, after a larger rise in June, though they are still slightly cheaper than a year ago. Trouble for the government's chief inflation tracker Tuesday's data arrives at a highly-charged moment for the Labour Department's Bureau of Labour Statistics, which collects and publishes the inflation data. Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, then the head of BLS, after the 1 August jobs report also showed sharply lower hiring for May and June than had previously been reported. The president posted on social media Monday that he has picked E.J. Antoni, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a frequent critic of the jobs report, to replace McEntarfer. 'E.J. will ensure that the numbers released are honest and accurate,' Trump said on Truth Social. Adding to the BLS's turmoil is a government-wide hiring freeze that has forced it to cut back on the amount of data it collects for each inflation report, the agency has said. UBS economist Alan Detmeister estimates that BLS is now collecting about 18% fewer price quotes for the inflation report than it did a few months ago. He thinks the report will produce more volatile results, though averaged out over time, still reliable. Prices likely to rise later in the year as tariffs set in Americans are likely to absorb more trade-war costs in the coming months as Trump begins to finalise tariffs. Once businesses know what they will be paying, they are more likely to pass those costs to customers, economists say. Trump has insisted that overseas manufacturers will pay the tariffs by reducing their prices to offset the duties. Yet the pre-tariff prices of imports haven't fallen much since the levies were put in place. Economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that foreign manufacturers have absorbed just 14% of the duties through June, while 22% has been paid by consumers and 64% by US companies. Based on previous patterns, however — such as Trump's 2018 duties on washing machines — the economists expect that by this fall consumers will bear 67% of the burden, while foreign exporters pay 25% and US companies handle just 8%. Many large US companies are raising prices in response to the tariffs, including apparel makers Ralph Lauren and Under Armour, and eyewear company Warby Parker. Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, maker of Crest toothpaste, Tide detergent and Charmin toilet paper, said late last month that it would lift prices on about a quarter of its products by mid-single-digit percentages. And cosmetics maker e.l.f. Beauty, which makes a majority of its products in China, said on Wednesday that it had raised prices by a dollar on its entire product assortment as of 1 August because of tariff costs, the third price hike in its 21-year history. 'We tend to lead and then we will see how many more kind of follow us,' CEO Tarang Amin said on an earnings call Wednesday. Matt Pavich, senior director of strategy and innovation at Revionics, a company that provides AI tools to large retailers to help them evaluate pricing decisions, says many companies are raising prices selectively to offset tariffs, rather than across the board. 'Up until now we haven't seen a massive hit to consumers in retail prices,' Pavich said. 'Now, they are going up, we've seen that.'
