Patience thins among MAGA loyalists for Trump to release any Epstein files
Among those attending the Vance event, some put their faith in Trump."When he's ready, he'll let them out," Ed DeLucca, 72, told the BBC, saying he hoped Trump would bring the documents to light. For Mr DeLucca, the rumoured files would ultimately be delivered much like any other Trump promise, such as closing the border or mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.Epstein was charged by federal prosecutors for sex trafficking of minors and other crimes in 2019. He died by suicide in jail later that year, sparking continued rumors and conspiracies about his death and - most recently - about possible "clients" named in government files.Yet, according to the president and his top law enforcement officials, the documents may not be forthcoming - and some may not exist at all. That concession has thrown Trump's Make America Great Again movement into chaos, with even staunch supporters calling for the removal of Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino. The resulting online storm also has threatened to overshadow the budget bill, a major legislative win Trump just clawed from Congress.Trump's Epstein strategy could pit him against loyal supportersProsecutor in Diddy and Epstein cases fired by justice department"We put you in office, you ran on this platform," Steven Taylor, a local truck driver and Trump supporter who was in West Pittson on Wednesday, told CBS News, BBC's US partner. "We didn't ask for it. And now we want it. We demand it.""There needs to be accountability. There needs to be justice," he said.But others like Mr DeLucca were more sanguine. "There's a reason for it. They'll come out," he said."They got to make peace," he said of the MAGA factions warring over Epstein."They can't exist without Pam, or Dan Bongino," he said of the administration. "It's like the Avengers assembled, the Justice League of America."
But voters in the eastern Pennsylvania town, who have slowly and steadily united behind Republicans during the Trump era, may split over whether to accept the president's strategy on Epstein.Trump has tried to quell the storm, posting on Truth Social that the alleged hidden Epstein files were actually a "hoax" concocted by Democrats."Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this [expletive] hook, line, and sinker," he wrote on Wednesday.Trump says US attorney general should release any 'credible' information on EpsteinChrissy Matticks echoed Trump's assessment, pinning the blame for the Epstein debacle on Democrats."I don't care. Democrats should have released it when Biden was president," she told BBC on Wednesday. "Democrats are just using it as a political football."She was far more focused on Trump's performance in passing the budget bill and deporting undocumented immigrants in a sweeping crackdown."I'd say, to our MAGA base: Have faith in President Trump."
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The Guardian
2 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Pete Hegseth is skirting law by bringing back Confederate names of army bases
Since Donald Trump returned to office this year, his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has ripped the new names off a series of US army bases and brought back their old traitorous Confederate names. His actions have angered Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress, prompting a rare rebuke of the Trump administration by the Republican-controlled Congress last Tuesday. The GOP-led House of Representatives Armed Services Committee voted on 15 July to block Hegseth from renaming the bases after Confederates. Two Republicans voted with the Democrats on the committee to pass the measure, which was an amendment to the Pentagon's budget bill. 'What this administration is doing, particularly this secretary of defense, is sticking his finger in the eye of Congress,' said Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican representative who voted to stop Hegseth. Hegseth's move elicited bipartisan anger because it flouted the law; Congress passed legislation in January 2021 to create a commission to choose new names for the bases named for Confederates and mandated that its recommendations be implemented by the Pentagon. That law was passed over a veto by Trump in the final days of his first term, and the name changes were later implemented by the Pentagon during the Biden administration. The law is still on the books, and so in order to return to the old Confederate names, Hegseth has openly played games with their namesakes. The secretary claims he has renamed the bases after American soldiers from throughout US history who were not Confederates. But they all conveniently have the same last names as the original Confederate namesakes of the bases. For example, Fort Bragg is now supposedly named for Roland Bragg, who was an army paratrooper in the second world war; Fort Benning is now supposedly named for Fred Benning, a soldier who served in the army in the first world war. Before the House vote, Hegseth's efforts to skirt the law were also challenged in the Senate. In a hearing in June, Angus King, a senator from Maine, told Hegseth that he was returning the bases to the names of 'people who took up arms against their country on behalf of slavery'. Hegseth insisted that the Pentagon had found non-Confederates with the same names to stay within 'the limits of what Congress allowed us to do'. But during the same hearing, Hegseth briefly dropped the pretense that he wasn't returning to the original Confederate names. He argued that 'there is a legacy, a connection' for veterans with the old names. King replied that Hegseth's actions were 'an insult to the people of the United States'. Above all, Hegseth's actions show a troubling ignorance of the lives of the original Confederate namesakes; their easily-researched backgrounds reveal what terrible role models they make for modern American military personnel. Braxton Bragg was one of the most incompetent Confederate generals of the civil war. His subordinates repeatedly and clandestinely tried to get him fired, with one writing to the Confederate secretary of war that 'nothing but the hand of God can save us or help us as long as we have our present commander'. Bragg finally lost his command after he was out-generaled by Union General Ulysses S Grant and his army was routed at the Battle of Chattanooga in 1863. One of the few biographies written about him is entitled Braxton Bragg, the Most Hated Man in the Confederacy. And yet Bragg lives on today as the namesake of the largest and most important military base in the United States Army. Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, North Carolina was originally built in 1918, as part of a rushed effort by the army to construct new bases after the United States entered the first world war. The site offered the army cheap and abundant land, and it quickly built a base and surrounding military reservation totaling 251 sq miles. Eager to win local white support, the army agreed to name the new base after a Confederate; Bragg was chosen because he was originally from North Carolina. By the time the base was built, the civil war had been over for more than 50 years, yet the south was still in the grips of the 'the Lost Cause' theory of the war, which romanticized the civil war and held that the south had fought for state's rights, not slavery, and that the Confederacy had fielded better officers and men and had only lost because of the overwhelming resources of the north. By 1918, when Bragg's name was attached to the base, the generation of Confederate officers who hated him were gone, along with the memory of his military blunders. That pattern held for a series of major bases built throughout the south during the first and second world wars. Fort Benning was also built in 1918 near Columbus, Georgia. At the request of the Columbus Rotary Club, the army named it for Henry Lewis Benning, who was best known as a pro-slavery political firebrand from Columbus who helped draft Georgia's ordinance of secession. Benning was one of the pre-eminent white supremacists of his day, and he openly admitted that his state seceded because of slavery, not states rights. In one speech, he said that his state seceded because of a 'deep conviction on the part of Georgia that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery … If things are allowed to go on as they are … we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it supposed that the white race will stand for that?' Benning served in the Confederate army, but it was his political role as a proponent of a southern slavocracy that first brought him fame and prominence. By the 21st century, there were still 10 army bases that were named for Confederates, and the Pentagon repeatedly resisted efforts to change their names, arguing that tradition outweighed the fact that the bases were named for traitors who had fought to preserve slavery. The Confederate base names were finally changed after the 2020 George Floyd protests; Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty, while Fort Benning became Fort Moore, named for Vietnam War hero Hal Moore and his wife, Julia Moore. (Mel Gibson played Hal Moore and Madeleine Stowe played Julia Moore in the 2002 movie We Were Soldiers.) But those new names didn't survive Trump's return to office. Hegseth hasn't stopped with army bases. The Pentagon has announced it will strip the name off the US navy ship Harvey Milk, which was named for the gay rights pioneer who was assassinated in 1978, and rename it for Oscar V Peterson, a sailor who won the Congressional Medal of Honor during the second world war. But one thing is certain: Braxton Bragg's civil war contemporaries would be shocked to discover that a man so widely derided as a loser and a martinet during his lifetime is still at the center of a national debate 160 years after the war ended. During the war, one Confederate newspaper editor described him as a man with 'an iron hand and a wooden head'. Grant, the man who so badly beat Bragg during the war, took great pleasure in making fun of Bragg and his ridiculous behavior when he later wrote his memoirs. Grant recounted one infamous episode involving Bragg from the time before the civil war when both men served in the small, pre-war US army. 'On one occasion, when stationed at a post … (Bragg) was commanding one of the companies and at the same time acting as post quartermaster … As commander of the company he made a requisition upon the quartermaster – himself – for something he wanted. As quartermaster he declined to fill the requisition and endorsed on the back of it his reasons for so doing. As company commander he responded to this, urging that his requisition called for nothing but what he was entitled to, and that it was the duty of the quartermaster to fill it. As quartermaster he still persisted that he was right … Bragg referred the whole matter to the commanding officer of the post. The latter exclaimed: 'My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarrelling with yourself!' In his memoirs, Grant wrote that Bragg was 'naturally disputatious'. So maybe Braxton Bragg would fit in perfectly with Donald Trump after all.
The Guardian
2 minutes ago
- The Guardian
If you don't understand Oklahoma, you can't understand America
In a moment, I will tell you how I learned to love Oklahoma, a state I have had to point out on a map more times than I can count to Americans and foreigners alike. One with 77 crimson red counties and a license plate that once simply read: 'OKLAHOMA IS OK.' But first, it is important to tell you about my first Oklahoma school history lesson – one I learned when I was eight years old, after my parents moved our family cross-country. Tulsa's reputation as a haven for the devout held deep appeal for my Jamaican parents, whose lives were steeped in Christian faith. The city's predictable rhythms, its flatness, even its so-called boringness – it all offered a reprieve from what they saw as the chaos and moral drift of our old home in New York. One day, my new school gathered every fourth grader and led us to the backlot. We were lined up across the lawn and equipped with wagons, protractors and dulled stakes to drive into the ground. We waited for a teacher's voice to yell, 'Go!' We were to take off quickly, racing each other to find a plot we wanted to take for ourselves. We measured, as well as fourth graders could, the land we wanted to be ours. The entire affair was raucous as us newly minted 'pioneers' yelled, laughed and named our plots whatever our imaginations would allow. We were re-enacting a land run – one of seven held between 1889 and 1895 – that marked the opening of lands once deeded to Indigenous nations, only to be seized again as part of their forced removal across what we now call the American west. It may be hard to believe, but Oklahoma City's public schools didn't get around to banning the practice from history lessons until 2014. In its place came a sanitized, feelgood version of state history – one that, like many civil war re-enactments, recasts the fight to preserve slavery as a story of bravery and idealism. During those history lessons, the ugliness was not even hiding in plain sight. The disregard for the lives on which the state was built was – and still is – a point of pride. Today, the University of Oklahoma – my alma mater and the state's flagship university – leads every game, welcome event and recruiting fair with its famous chant: 'Boomer!' followed by an echoed 'Sooner!' It's a rallying cry repeated across all its athletic programs, which, like many state schools, are funded far more robustly than classrooms. Boomers were settlers, mostly white, who agitated in the late 1800s to open land in Indian territory (present-day Oklahoma) for white homesteaders. Led by pugnacious figures such as David Lewis Payne (the putative 'Father of Oklahoma'), they staged illegal incursions before the land was officially opened. The Sooners entered the land before the legal start time of a land run, cheating to claim the best plots. These rule-breakers are now mythologized in Oklahoma culture. The university's mascot is not an animal or a person, but a covered wagon: an emblem of the pioneering spirit that carved a life from theft and violence. For much of my life, I struggled to feel pride in a place like this – not just because of its history, but because of the lie we told about it. The real story was buried beneath a more palatable narrative, where horrors were treated as little more than pit stops on the way to celebrating homesteaders. Land theft from Native nations, the displacement of Black families, the racial terror that shadowed statehood – these were footnotes, if they were mentioned at all. But over time, it was precisely those harder truths that gave me something solid to stand on. That reckoning – naming the harm, sitting with its consequences – is not just about the past. It's a tool we need now, in 2025, when the country is suspended between two impulses: nostalgia and denial. Across the nation, the fight over whose history counts is really a fight over who gets to claim America. The violence that birthed Oklahoma was not incidental, it was foundational. And unless we confront that, there's no building anything real. Misunderstand Oklahoma, and you misunderstand the country. Growing up in Tulsa, the north star for me and my friends was college, followed by a job that could take us anywhere but Oklahoma. Dallas and Houston seemed almost idyllic: more affordable than New York or Los Angeles while still offering an upgraded version of a lifestyle we were already familiar with. Nothing made me want to stay. Downtown Tulsa felt frozen in amber, a relic of its 'oil capital of the world' heyday, long faded. The place felt ghostly. To me, its nightlife, diversity, direct flights and appetite for progress were all but nonexistent. Until recently, Oklahoma had not had a major-league sports team – though the Oklahoma City Thunder recently broke through, winning the 2025 NBA finals. What professional sports teams we had were literally and colloquially minor, baseball teams with stadiums that left much to be desired. This is a story of haunting familiarity to people whose home towns are seen as flyovers, rarely seen as worth a stop. And then, everything changed. In the decade since I left, Oklahoma has been refashioning its cities, courting new talent, and, according to the Kansas City Federal Reserve, beginning to reverse its long-running brain drain. College graduates like me once left in droves. Now, it seems that the tide is shifting. If you are an artist, Tulsa will subsidize your loft or studio. If Teach for America has whet your appetite, Tulsa will help with your housing costs. If you have a startup that might struggle with raising venture capital on the coasts, you will find that Tulsa will offer it to you. Even remote workers with no ties to the state can receive $10,000 or help with a down payment, just for showing up and staying for a year. Convenient, when the airport now offers direct flights to places my younger self could only dream about: New York, Miami, Los Angeles. These are all points of pride for many. But for all the praise, concerns do remain: rising housing costs, shallow community ties, and whether programs such as Tulsa Remote offer lasting benefits to longtime residents, especially since those efforts are not government-led efforts but philanthropic ones, and rely entirely on the continued generosity of a few wealthy individuals. Reinvention has always been part of Oklahoma's playbook. Again and again, the state has tried to become something new by recruiting outsiders, whether settlers in the land runs or now digital nomads with graduate degrees, while asking far less of itself when it comes to honoring the people and histories already here. That strategy may bring headlines, but it rarely brings healing. No matter how overjoyed I was to see my home state in the headlines for the NBA championship – rather than for being ranked 49th in education or 49th in healthcare – my pride doesn't come from Oklahoma's polished reinvention. It lies in the hard work of seeing my state clearly, in all its contradictions: the violence and the love, the buried history and the stubborn hope. And to do that, we need to go back nearly 140 years. I have spent the past five years combing through archives and crisscrossing Oklahoma and the Great Plains, chasing the story of Edward McCabe: the visionary who tried to create a Black state within the US, a figure who stood at the epicenter of some of America's most volatile collisions. In the 1880s, McCabe, the first Black statewide elected official in the old west, came to the Oklahoma territory with a vision so bold it startled both Black allies and white detractors: a state colonized by Black people, governed by their own hands, and as McCabe promised, 'unmolested by the selfish greed of the white man'. It was a dream not of mere survival, but of sovereignty – and it's why a reporter traveling from Minnesota dubbed him 'The One Who Would Be Moses'. That dream, like so many others on that soil, was paved over by the very forces it tried to escape: anti-Black violence, white economic opportunism and settler colonialism's endless appetite. McCabe did not ask for a utopia without contradiction. His ride to Langston – one of the all-Black towns he helped found – from his post in the territorial capital of Guthrie, where he served as county treasurer during the 1891 land run, was anything but safe. White cowboys stopped him on the road, ordered him to turn back, to stop where he stood. He refused, more than once. Then they opened fire. He lived to tell the story, but just barely. It was a warning: dreams built on contested ground do not go unchallenged, and Black ambition could be answered with bullets. His story, in all its promise and peril, was not that of a perfect man with a clean mission. He promoted colonization while ignoring the fact that the land he hoped to reclaim for Black people had already been promised, stolen, and promised again to Indigenous nations. He stood at the nexus of Black aspiration and Native dispossession. And in doing so, he reflected the central American dilemma: that ambition will never be clean because the ground itself is stolen. McCabe's dream of a Black-governed state was mocked, sabotaged and eventually erased from civic memory. But in the erasures, we find the outlines of what was feared: not just Black people having land, but Black people on their own terms. That was always the deeper threat. Not a land grab, but a claim to belong. A declaration of autonomy. That is why I return to him: not because he got it right, but because he tried. His efforts, and those of his peers, can still be seen in the 13 all-Black towns in Oklahoma (down from the 50 that once stood tall). These towns were founded as havens – places where Black Americans could govern themselves, own land and live free from white oversight. Many who built and settled these towns were just one generation removed from slavery, carrying the memory – often their own or that of their parents – of what it meant to be owned, uprooted and denied the right to belong. Their movement westward was not merely an act of escape; it was an act of creation. They were not just fleeing the violence of Reconstruction's collapse; they were imagining something freer, fuller and governed by their own hands. Today, those towns are no longer exclusively Black, nor are they legally restricted to Black residents. Anyone can move there, marry there, build a life there. But their founding spirit endures. McCabe spoke in what newspapers would call 'nigger talk' – a term of derision meant to dismiss any Black person who dared to articulate sovereignty, self-governance or the audacious idea of belonging on their own terms. But McCabe wore the insult as armor. He turned the slur into strategy, the scorn into a blueprint. And they tried to kill him for it. But what they didn't realize is that this was not just talk, it was a creed. A blueprint. A framework for building a world not yet born. That is the lesson Oklahoma teaches. Oklahoma has always been a place America used to test its next chapter. After Reconstruction failed, and the US government abandoned its promises to Native nations, parts of the territory were branded 'no man's land' – as if no person of value had ever lived there. But it was not empty; it was further removed. Oklahoma could have been a blueprint for belonging, a place carved out for those most marginalized: Black people fleeing racial terror, Native nations pushed from their homelands, immigrants seeking a foothold. Instead, it became a proving ground for the ugly zero-sum politics that plague America today, pitting groups against each other. Today, Oklahoma remains at the forefront of deciding what counts as American – whether in its classrooms, its public religion or its laws. Just look at how it is redrawing church-state boundaries in public education, and even forcing social studies textbooks to convey 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact. If we are serious about holding this country together, we have to reckon with the real American inheritance, where ambition and betrayal, dreaming and dispossession, are not opposite. They are co-tenants. What McCabe knew is that place matters. Not just as geography, but as some kind of theology. It matters that this particular expression of Black belonging emerged not in areas with longstanding, high concentrations of Black people – but in a place where white America was still shaping into its newest frontier. And it was in this place being reinvented that McCabe thought he could be most successful. My parents left New York searching for moral clarity in the middle of the country, but found none of this history in any brochure. For me, a child of migrants raised on the rules of holiness, I learned the unholy truth in reverse: that even sanctified ground can be built atop stolen land. That even the righteous can inherit the sins of the empire. Oklahoma is a map of America's legacies. It doesn't pretend to be a blank slate. Instead, its history offers a truer, unvarnished portrait of America, with its ambitions, its erasures, its stubborn beauty and its almost devotional violence. It's not the place where dreams go to die. It has long been the place where dreams go to collide. Caleb Gayle is the author of Black Moses, a Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, out 12 August (Riverhead books)
The Independent
31 minutes ago
- The Independent
Volunteers flock to immigration courts to support migrants arrested in the hallways
After a Seattle immigration judge dismissed the deportation case against a Colombian man — exposing him to expedited removal — three people sat with him in the back of the courtroom, taking his car keys for safe-keeping, helping him memorize phone numbers and gathering the names of family members who needed to be notified. When Judge Brett Parchert asked why they were doing that in court, the volunteers said Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers were outside the door, waiting to take the man into custody, so this was their only chance to help him get his things in order. "ICE is in the waiting room?" the judge asked. As the mass deportation campaign of President Donald Trump focuses on cities and states led by Democrats and unleashes fear among asylum-seekers and immigrants, their legal defenders sued this week, seeking class-action protections against the arrests outside immigration court hearings. Meanwhile, these volunteers are taking action. A diverse group — faith leaders, college students, grandmothers, retired lawyers and professors — has been showing up at immigration courts across the nation to escort immigrants at risk of being detained for deportation by masked ICE officials. They're giving families moral and logistical support, and bearing witness as the people are taken away. The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project was inundated by so many community members wanting to help that they made a volunteer training video, created 'Know Your Rights' sheets in several languages and started a Google sheet where people sign up for shifts, said Stephanie Gai, a staff attorney with the Seattle-based legal services non-profit. 'We could not do it without them," Gai said. 'Some volunteers request time off work so they can come in and help.' Robby Rohr, a retired non-profit director said she volunteers regularly. 'Being here makes people feel they are remembered and recognized,' she said 'It's such a bureaucratic and confusing process. We try to help them through it.' Recording videos of detentions to post online online Volunteers and legal aid groups have long provided free legal orientation in immigration court but the arrests have posed new challenges. Since May, the government has been asking judges to dismiss deportation cases. Once the judge agrees, ICE officials arrest them in the hallways and put them in fast-track deportation proceedings, no matter which legal immigration pathway they may have been pursuing. Once in custody, it's often harder to find or afford a lawyer. Immigration judges are executive branch employees, and while some have resisted Homeland Security lawyers' dismissal orders in some cases, many are granted. Masked ICE agents grabbed the Colombian man and led him into the hallway. A volunteer took his backpack to give to his family as he was taken away. Other cases on the day's docket involved immigrants who didn't show up. Parchert granted 'removal in absentia' orders, enabling ICE to arrest them later. When asked about these arrests and the volunteers at immigration courts, a senior spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security said ICE is once again implementing the rule of law by reversing 'Biden's catch and release policy that allowed millions of unvetted illegal aliens to be let loose on American streets." Some volunteers have recorded arrests in courtroom hallways, traumatic scenes that are proliferating online. How many similar scenes are happening nationwide remains unclear. The Executive Office for Immigration Review has not released numbers of cases dismissed or arrests made at or near immigration courts. While most volunteers have done this work without incident, some have been arrested for interfering with ICE agents. New York City Comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested after locking arms with a person in a failed attempt to prevent his detention. Lander's wife, attorney Meg Barnette, had just joined him in walking migrants from a courtroom to the elevator. Helping families find their relatives as they disappear The volunteers' act of witnessing has proven to be important as people disappear into a detention system that can seem chaotic, leaving families without any information about their whereabouts for days on end. In a waiting room serving New York City immigration courtrooms, a Spanish-speaking woman with long dark curly hair was sitting anxiously with her daughter after she and her husband had separate hearings. Now he was nowhere to be found. The Rev. Fabián Arias, a volunteer court observer, said the woman whose first name is Alva approached him asking 'Where is my husband?' She showed him his photo. 'ICE detained him,' Arias told her, and tried to comfort her as she trembled, later welling up with tears. A judge had not dismissed the husband's case, giving him until October to find a lawyer. But that didn't stop ICE agents from handcuffing him and taking him away as soon as he stepped out of court. The news sparked an outcry by immigration advocates, city officials and a congressman. At a news conference, she gave only her first name and asked that her daughter's be withheld. Brianna Garcia, a college student in El Paso, Texas, said she's been attending immigration court hearings for weeks where she informs people of their rights and then records ICE agents taking people into custody. 'We escort people so they're not harassed and help people memorize important phone numbers, since their belongings are confiscated by ICE," she said. Paris Thomas began volunteering at the Denver immigration court after hearing about the effort through a network of churches. Wearing a straw hat, he recently waited in the midday heat for people to arrive for afternoon hearings. Thomas handed people a small paper flyer listing their rights in Spanish on one side and English on the other. One man walking with a woman told him 'thank you. Thank you.' Another man gave him a hug. Denver volunteer Don Marsh said they offer to walk people to their cars after court appearances, so they can contact attorneys and family if ICE arrests them. Marsh said he's never done anything like this before, but wants to do something to preserve the nation's 'rule of law' now that unidentifiable government agents are 'snatching' people off the streets. 'If we're not all safe, no one's safe,' he said. Attanasio reported from New York City and Slevin from Denver.
