‘Get off our streets’: DC residents protest federal law enforcement installed by Trump – live updates | Trump administration

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) also announced that, beginning Friday 15 August, groups of nine or more young people – under the age of 17 – will not be allowed to gather in the popular Navy Yard area after 8pm. This particular curfew will be in effect until August 18.

The citywide curfew (from 11pm-6am) for anyone under the age of 17 remains lasts until August 31.

A number of DC locals protested the increased presence of federal law enforcement on Wednesday night.

Protesters also encouraged drivers to avoid the 14th street area, where dozens of authorities had set up a traffic checkpoint to stop cars for alleged traffic violations. A CNN report noted that they saw at least one person being handcuffed and taken away by law enforcement.

According to various reports, several people chanted at officers telling them to “go home, fascists”. Those protesting in the busy 14th st area of the city – where several popular restaurants and bars are located – also noted that some of the officers assisting the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) were Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Other local reports shared video of residents shouting “get off our streets”, “go home pigs”, and “shame on you” as they filled pavements, surrounding police cars.

I’m waiting to hear back from the White House and the MPD about Wednesday night’s arrest numbers, and I’ll make sure to provide an update.

While secretary of defense Pete Hegseth’s links to an extremist church and crusader tattoos caused a stir during his confirmation hearings, the former Fox & Friends host is now openly bringing his ultra-conservative brand of christianity to the Pentagon.

Veterans tell the Guardian that Hegseth’s religiosity – rubbing off in new recruitment ads and official US Department of Defense social media activities – is dividing the ranks and doing untold damage to the future of the US military.

In one of the Pentagon’s latest videos that it posted on X – with the message: “We Are One Nation Under God” – paratroopers are seen dropping from the back of airplanes as soldiers in full tactical gear aim assault rifles at an unknown enemy somewhere in the whirling sands of what looks like the Middle East.

“I pursued my enemies and overtook them,” text from the book of Psalms appears across the screen as the scene unfolds in a desert resembling where medieval crusaders once fought. “I did not turn back till they were destroyed.”

Days before the ad was posted, Hegseth, on his personal account, reposted a CNN segment about pastor Doug Wilson – Hegseth is a congregant at one of Wilson’s churches – with the quote “All of Christ for All of Life,” a slogan for embracing christianity in every facet of society (including government). In the original report, Wilson contends that women should not have the right to vote. Many critics saw the post as showcasing Hegseth’s own pitiful track record with feminism and undermining promises he made to Senator Joni Ernst to champion women in uniform.

We can expect to hear from the president at 1pm ET today. He’ll deliver remarks from the Oval Office, according to his daily schedule.

We don’t now yet what those remarks will focus on. It could end up covering a number of topics, like his Kennedy Center appearance yesterday which touched on several ongoing stories: his Friday meeting with Putin, National guard troops in DC, the federal takeover of the city’s police, and replacing Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.

Melania Trump has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and has threatened to sue if he does not.

Biden, the son of the former president Joe Biden, alleged in an interview this month that Epstein introduced the first lady to Donald Trump.

The statements were false, defamatory and “extremely salacious,” Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, said in a letter to Biden. Biden’s remarks were widely disseminated on social media and reported by media outlets around the world, causing the first lady “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” he added.

Biden made the Epstein comments during a sprawling interview with the British journalist Andrew Callaghan in which he lashed out at “elites” and others in the Democratic party who he said undermined his father before he dropped out of last year’s presidential campaign.

“Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep,” Biden said in one of the comments that the first lady disputes. Biden attributed the claim to the author Michael Wolff. Donald Trump has accused Wolff of making up stories to sell books.

Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s police department and decision to deploy the national guard was sparked by the assault of a former Doge staffer who nicknamed himself “Big Balls”.

Thirty-three years ago, a fatal attack on a congressional staffer also provoked an effort by the federal government to impose law and order on the nation’s capital – but in that case, it came from Capitol Hill.

On Monday, Trump said he was taking “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC and we’re going to take our capital back.”

In 1992, it was the death of 25-year-old Tom Barnes, a staffer for Senator Richard Shelby, a Democrat of Alabama, that prompted the senator to introduce legislation to legalize the death penalty in the district.

Shelby, a conservative Democrat who would become a Republican two years later, acknowledged that many DC community leaders had historically been opposed to the death penalty, but argued that the tide had changed – using similar dystopian language as Trump.

Read Fred Frommer’s piece on how a violent event in 1992 prompted a response – not from the president, but Congress – with similarly dystopian language here:

Pjotr Sauer

When Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meet in Alaska, the Russian president will set out to woo his US counterpart and dangle financial incentives for siding with Moscow over Ukraine.

The hastily arranged summit, organised at Putin’s request, will be his first invitation to meet a US president on American soil since he visited George W Bush in 2007.

The surprise announcement caught Kyiv and its European allies off guard but for Putin it signals a preliminary diplomatic victory: a face to face with Trump requiring no concessions, and a step towards his goal of deciding Ukraine’s future at the table with Washington.

Key to Putin’s message on Friday will be an appeal to Trump’s business instincts. On Thursday, the Russian president’s adviser Yuri Ushakov said the leaders would discuss the “huge untapped potential” in Russia–US economic relations.

A senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.

Joseph Humire was appointed this summer to be the head of policy focusing on the western hemisphere within the office of the under secretary of defense for policy. He was previously the executive director of a conservative thinktank focused on global security. Humire’s appointment comes as the Trump administration is ramping up its aggressive strategy against organized crime in Latin America and the Venezuelan government, which it accuses of working with TdA.

Under Humire’s leadership, the Center for a Secure Free Society thinktank published the “TdA Activity Monitor”, tracking alleged crimes by accused members of the gang throughout the US. According to InSight Crime, at least five event entries in the tracker appeared to have been “completely fabricated”. InSight Crime found zero basis for the false entries, with local police departments telling researchers the purported crimes were nonexistent. InSight Crime analyzed more than 90 of the entries, finding many relied on unverified sources.

“Some incidents are included multiple times, inflating the gang’s perceived presence and activities,” researchers found.

The monitor is no longer available online following InSight Crime’s reporting.

“The TdA Monitor is an aggregator, not a primary source of information about Tren de Aragua’s activities,” a statement from the Center for a Secure Free Society said, adding that it “reflects the media reporting”.

The Department of Defense declined to comment.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the US administration was making “sincere efforts” to resolve the Ukraine conflict and suggested Moscow and Washington could reach a deal on nuclear arms control that could strengthen peace.

Putin held a meeting with top officials and representatives of Russia’s leadership ahead of a summit with US president Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday.

Donald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.

The move by the Republican US president further unwinds a signature initiative by his predecessor, a Democrat, to crack down on anti-competitive practices in sectors from agriculture to drugs and labor.

The justice department welcomed Trump’s revocation of the order, saying it was pursuing an “America first antitrust” approach focused on free markets instead of what it called the “overly prescriptive and burdensome approach” of the Biden administration.

It said it was also making progress on streamlining the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (HSR) review process of mergers and reinstating more frequent use of targeted and well-crafted consent decrees.

Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.

The initiative, which was very popular with Americans, was championed by top Biden economic officials, many of whom had previously worked for or with the senator Elizabeth Warren, who played a key role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Barack Obama.

Russian president Vladimir Putin and US president Donald Trump will hold a joint press conference at their Alaska summit on Friday after meeting one-on-one and with delegations, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said.

The media event will undoubtedly evoke memories of the two leaders’ previous presser at their Helsinki summit in 2018, where Putin presented Trump with a football ahead of that year’s World Cup event in Russia.

Political commentators at the time were critical of Trump’s approach, with many saying he allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by Putin. The pair appeared friendly as the US president even sided with the Russian leader over his own intelligence agencies on election interference.

Trump flies to a meeting in Alaska with Putin on Friday in a different public mood – impatient with the Russian’s unwillingness to negotiate an end to his war in Ukraine and angry over missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.

The world is waiting to see if it will be this tougher version of Trump who shows up in Anchorage or if it will be the former real estate tycoon who has sought to ingratiate himself with the wily former KGB agent in the past.

Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will host the Kennedy Center honors this year and said he had been heavily involved in choosing who to nominate, rejecting people he thought were too liberal.

The US president named actor Sylvester Stallone, singer Gloria Gaynor, the rock band Kiss, country music star George Strait and actor and singer Michael Crawford among the first batch of Kennedy Center honors nominees since he took over as the Washington-based arts center’s chairman upon returning to the White House this year.

The president typically attends the annual honors event each December but sits in the audience as a VIP and hosts a reception for awardees at the White House. Trump’s announcement that he will host the event is a break from tradition, although no details were released on what form that would take.

His announcement continues his push to exert authority over US cultural institutions, such as the Smithsonian, and Democratic-led cities and came on the first full day that federalized national guard troops were on duty on the streets of Washington by order of the president. Trump has cited a crisis of crime and homelessness in the nation’s capital to sharp criticism from opponents.

In an appearance at the arts center on Wednesday morning, Trump also said that he intends to “fully renovate” the entire infrastructure of the Kennedy Center to make it a “crown jewel” of arts and culture in the US.

Patrick Wintour

Vladimir Putin will face “very severe consequences” if he does not agree a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine at his summit with Donald Trump in Alaska, the US president said on Wednesday.

Speaking after a call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Trump also suggested he would push for a second summit if his meeting with Putin goes well – this time including his Ukrainian counterpart.

“If the first one goes OK, we’ll have a quick second one,” Trump told reporters in Washington. “I would like to do it almost immediately, and we’ll have a quick second meeting between President Putin and President Zelenskyy and myself, if they’d like to have me there.”

Trump did not provide a timeframe for a second meeting. He is to meet Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday. The meeting will reportedly be held at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson, a military facility crucial to countering the Soviet Union during the height of the cold war.

Asked if Russia would face consequences if Putin did not agree to stop the war after the Alaska meeting, Trump said: “Yes, they will … very severe consequences.”

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with news that Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would ask Congress for “long-term” control of Washington DC’s police department and signaled he expected other Democratic-led cities to change their laws in response to his deployment of national guard troops and federal agents into the capital.

The president’s comments came as the White House took credit for dozens of arrests overnight in Washington as part of Trump’s campaign to fight a “crime crisis”, which the city’s leaders say does not exist.

Trump earlier this week invoked a never-before-used clause of the law that sets out the federal district’s governance structure to take temporary control of the police department, but will need Congress’s permission to extend it beyond the 30 days allowed under the statute.

It comes as the New York Times reported that protesters last night gathered around law enforcement officers, including homeland security agents, who set up a police checkpoint in the busy U Street corridor in north-west Washington.

Crowds chanted ‘go home fascists’ and told drivers to turn away from the checkpoint on 14th Street, warning that they could be stopped for reasons including not wearing seat belts or broken taillights. The checkpoint was closed just before 11 pm.

Read our full report here:

In other developments:

• Trump promised ‘very severe consequences’ if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to ceasefire at their Friday meeting in Alaska. He didn’t, however, elaborate on what those penalties will be.

• Trump took part in a virtual meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders ahead of his summit in Alaska with Putin which the German chancellor described as “constructive”. Zelenskyy confirmed that Trump said he would call him right after the meeting with Putin.

• At the Kennedy Center, Trump announced that he would host this year’s honors himself.

• California governor Gavin Newsom, who revels in trolling Trump on social media, used the president’s bizarre writing style to promote a news conference on his state’s plan to counter Texas gerrymandering, scheduled for Thursday at 11.30 am Pacific Time.

• The White House announced that Trump revoked an executive order issued by his predecessor, Joe Biden, which made it government policy to promote competition throughout the US economy. Unlike many of Trump’s orders, this one, which ended 72 federal initiatives to fight corporate monopolies and aid workers and consumers, was released without any publicity at all.

• Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, EJ Antoni, was in the crowd outside the Capitol on 6 January 2021 when Trump supporters rioted in a failed effort to keep him in office.