Trump doubles down again on pledge of $5,000 payments to US adult citizens if GOP retains control of Congress
Donald Trump has doubled down – again – on his pledge to give a “Trump dividend” of $5,000 to every US citizen if Republicans win November’s midterm elections.
The promise has sparked incredulity and accusations of bribery, with a huge question mark still hanging over its legality – not to mention it comes at a time of extreme concern over the national debt, which exceeded $40tn for the first time last month.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said: “When I say something, I mean it! The $5,000 Dividend will happen because the People of our Country deserve it.”
Here’s the president’s post:
The $5,000 Trump Dividend, given to all Adults in the United States due to the fact that our Country is taking in Trillions of Dollars of Economic Development, Investment, and Pure SUCCESS, is being criticized by “Dumocrats” who are hoping that it never happens — But it will! As an example, the Dumocrats said THE GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL, one of the largest ever approved by Congress, or signed into Law by a President happened, despite the Dumocrats saying it would be impossible to get approved — Or the Gift of $1776 that I gave last year to our Military, was an almost guaranteed Non Starter, everyone said it could not be done, but it was, our Military Patriots got the money, and loved it. When I say something, I mean it! The $5,000 Dividend will happen because the People of our Country deserve it. VOTE REPUBLICAN — MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Speaking to Politico yesterday, Chip Roy, the Republican US representative from Texas, openly questioned how the government would pay for it. “Well – I would like to know how they would plan to pay for … back of envelope … well over $1tn,” he said.
Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch Trump ally turned critic, said on X: “$5,000 for the peasants will be in the mail after the election only if you vote Republican, along with those DOGE and tariff money checks.”
Key events
Republican senator fires aide who used Nazi profile picture
Ohio senator Jon Husted has fired his political director after the aide was found to have used a photo of Nazi SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture. The campaign for Husted, a Republican, told The Washington Post that the senator had decided to “part ways” with 25-year-old Stephen Woytek after the photo was discovered.
“While he denies negative intent, his social media activity displays a complete lack of judgement and disregard for its impact on others,” Husted’s campaign spokesperson told the Washington Post regarding Woytek.
The incident is one of several recent cases where young Republican staffers have been discovered affiliating with pro-Nazi content online.
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Maria Bartiromo has pledged “to be back soon w[ith] my next moves” in her first comments since her abrupt departure from Fox News on 3 September.
In a social media post on Thursday, Bartiromo – who had anchored at Fox for more than 12 years – said: “I want to thank all of my friends, followers, and supporters for all the kind words.
“I am so grateful for the outpouring of love this past week on social media & through texts. I love you all and I promise to be back soon w[ith] my next moves.”
The post contained a picture of a rainbow emerging from clouds over water.
Media reports on 4 September said Fox dismissed avid Donald Trump supporter Bartiromo for divulging the conservative network’s editorial guidance to the president’s administration. But her lawyer quickly and sharply denied that Bartiromo was fired by Fox, issuing a statement dismissing reports that the network had terminated her “irresponsible” and “absolutely and unequivocally false”.
A Republican political action committee affiliated with Donald Trump has reserved $74m in advertising this week, Reuters reported. The No Going Back Pac plans to pour money into close House and Senate races in battleground states, including in Michigan, where Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed is in a tight contest with Republican Mike Rogers.
The president has vowed to spend heavily on midterms as his approval rating sinks to record lows and Republicans face the prospect of losing key races.
Trump reposts January 6 video message containing election conspiracies
Donald Trump posted a video message on Truth Social that he originally issued on January 6, 2021, as his supporters stormed the US Capitol building. The message includes the president falsely stating that the 2020 election was “stolen from us” while instructing those at the Capitol to “go home in peace”.
It’s unclear why Trump posted the video, which included no caption and came during a day of somber remembrances to mark the 25th anniversary of September 11.
Trump doubles down again on pledge of $5,000 payments to US adult citizens if GOP retains control of Congress
Donald Trump has doubled down – again – on his pledge to give a “Trump dividend” of $5,000 to every US citizen if Republicans win November’s midterm elections.
The promise has sparked incredulity and accusations of bribery, with a huge question mark still hanging over its legality – not to mention it comes at a time of extreme concern over the national debt, which exceeded $40tn for the first time last month.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said: “When I say something, I mean it! The $5,000 Dividend will happen because the People of our Country deserve it.”
Here’s the president’s post:
The $5,000 Trump Dividend, given to all Adults in the United States due to the fact that our Country is taking in Trillions of Dollars of Economic Development, Investment, and Pure SUCCESS, is being criticized by “Dumocrats” who are hoping that it never happens — But it will! As an example, the Dumocrats said THE GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL, one of the largest ever approved by Congress, or signed into Law by a President happened, despite the Dumocrats saying it would be impossible to get approved — Or the Gift of $1776 that I gave last year to our Military, was an almost guaranteed Non Starter, everyone said it could not be done, but it was, our Military Patriots got the money, and loved it. When I say something, I mean it! The $5,000 Dividend will happen because the People of our Country deserve it. VOTE REPUBLICAN — MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Speaking to Politico yesterday, Chip Roy, the Republican US representative from Texas, openly questioned how the government would pay for it. “Well – I would like to know how they would plan to pay for … back of envelope … well over $1tn,” he said.
Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch Trump ally turned critic, said on X: “$5,000 for the peasants will be in the mail after the election only if you vote Republican, along with those DOGE and tariff money checks.”
Rory Carroll
Ireland’s president, Catherine Connolly, has called Donald Trump abhorrent and an abuser of power. In his sole previous comment on Connolly, the US president seemed to think she was a man. Now that they are about to meet, Ireland is holding its breath.
Trump is to fly into Dublin tomorrow morning for a two-day visit centred on golf. But before making it to his beloved greens, protocol obliges him to meet a woman who has given every impression of loathing him.
A courtesy call to Áras an Uachtaráin, the Irish president’s official residence and workplace in the city’s Phoenix Park, has left the government anxious and the media reaching for popcorn. “What could possibly go wrong?” headlines ask.
Many in Ireland are rooting for Connolly to let rip at Trump for his policies and rhetoric on immigrants and the Middle East. Others hope she will stifle any criticisms to avoid provoking a visitor who could upend Ireland’s economy.
The taoiseach, Micheál Martin, said he had no concerns “at all” about the encounter, but one senior official said the government was on tenterhooks. “We need to get him [Trump] in the Áras, then out of the Áras. We’ll breathe easier after,” they said.
Rory has the story:
Patrick Wintour
Yemen’s rampant Houthi forces have captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait, expanding their control of the narrow waterway, one of the world’s vital shipping routes.
The Iran-aligned group took control of the volcanic island after forces allied to the UN-backed, Aden-based government left in the latest of a dramatic series of reverses along Yemen’s west coast in recent days, including the loss of the port city of Mocha on Thursday.
Saudi Arabia, which supports and bankrolls the official Yemen government, mounted air raids on Houthi positions in Mocha on Friday.
The Bab al-Mandab strait links Asia to Europe via the Red Sea and Suez canal. Perim island, also known as Mayun, divides the waterway in two, close to its narrowest point. The United Arab Emirates, a former Saudi ally in the anti-Houthi coalition, had been building an airbase on the island before ending its active involvement in the conflict in January.
Saudi Arabia has increasingly relied on the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab to export its crude since Iran has been targeting vessels in the strait of Hormuz. About 12% of the world’s goods are typically shipped through the strait.
Full Houthi control of shipping in the strait, alongside Iranian control of the strait of Hormuz, would strengthen the chokeholds of anti-western forces over global energy shipments. Oil prices have risen to more than $100 a barrel as the fighting in Yemen has escalated.
Iran hailed the Houthi advances in an official statement on Friday, its first extended comment on the renewed fighting inside Yemen. Iran and the Houthis have been allied since the Houthis rose to power inside Yemen in 2014.
British diplomatic sources said they did not at present expect Donald Trump to sanction any US bombing of Houthi positions in Yemen, despite requests to do so from Saudi Arabia. The pace of the Houthi advance, and political divisions in the Yemen governorates not controlled by the Houthis, have left western capitals fearful that even the Yemen government capital, Aden, could fall to the Houthis.
Here’s Patrick’s full report.
‘You’d never have Donald Trump as president without 9/11’: the dark legacy of mistakes, mistrust and misdirection after September 11
David Smith
On September 10, 2001, America seemed unassailable. It had won the cold war and enjoyed a relatively peaceful 1990s as “the indispensable nation”, in secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s framing. From fiscal years 1998 to 2001, the federal government recorded four consecutive budget surpluses.
But what had been dubbed “the American century” came to an apocalyptic end on the next morning.
“9/11 is when things began to go wrong for the United States,” suggested Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton.
The United States was at the apogee of its post-cold war power on September 10 and then, through a series of missteps and misjudgments on both the foreign and domestic front, we have thrown away a great deal of not only our power but our credibility.
In my judgment, 9/11 set off a quarter-century of misgovernment in the United States and we’ll pay the price for that for a very long time.
Did Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader who masterminded the attacks, win after all? If the metric of victory is measured by Bin Laden’s immediate, messianic desire to establish a global caliphate and expel all western presence from the Middle East, he evidently failed.
But if the terrorist’s success is measured by the magnitude of the self-inflicted wounds they provoke from their target, Bin Laden’s legacy is a slow, autoimmune decay within the US, it may have exceeded his darkest fantasies.
Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, said: “Bin Laden in some ways failed in his intentions. He wanted the United States out of the Middle East. He wanted to topple certain governments in the Middle East. But in other ways 9/11 is the most successful terrorist attack in history insofar as it prompted such an overreach from the United States that we hastened our own decline, division and betrayal of our own story.”
He regards the cost of 25 years of “forever wars” as incalculable. They placed a huge burden on the Americans who fought them and had to deal with problems ranging from war wounds to the opioids crisis. They also contributed to the destruction of the rules-based order, paving the way for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and others to reject the rules and use the language of counter-terrorism to justify stringent crackdowns.
Then, there is the domestic sphere. Rhodes says the typical Fox News viewer during the Bush years was promised great victories over foreign enemies. “When nations don’t keep those types of promises, when you unleash that kind of nationalism and xenophobia and you don’t succeed on the battlefield, history tells you that people start to look for enemies within to blame,” he explained.
My experience in the Obama years is very much that ‘the other’ that had been constructed around terrorists morphed into the Black president or the immigrants crossing the southern border or LGBT people. The segments were the same but the enemy had changed to an enemy within.
Donald Trump launched his first bid for the presidency, a decade ago, against the backdrop of this search for blame. Promoting the lie that Obama is a Muslim, demonising immigrants, and promising to build a border wall, he cut through by railing – in a clear break from Bush and Republican orthodoxy – against political elites for waging forever wars that he claimed he would stop (he has called the invasion of Iraq “the single worst decision ever made” in US history).
“You’d never have Donald Trump as president without 9/11 because he basically stepped into that slipstream of othering people and captured the ugly xenophobia and nationalism that had been unleashed and the anger that people, particularly on the right, felt at being gaslit by the Bush administration for eight years,” said Rhodes.
“It’s no coincidence that Trump’s ascent was marked by the destruction of Jeb Bush, who symbolised all those broken promises.”
Now, Rhodes argues, the war on terror has come home. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are “basically running counter-insurgency strategies in American cities, with the same military equipment that we used to fight wars now in the hands of law enforcement”, he said. “Some of the same people have signed up to do it, and the same surveillance technologies that we use against terrorists abroad are now used against Americans. We are now living in the theatre of the war on terror and it’s obviously a source of growing discomfort to many Americans.”
CIA declassifies briefs about al-Qaida on 9/11 anniversary
On that subject, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) today released more than 70 presidential intelligence briefs related to al-Qaida and its leader Osama bin Laden.
The release provides “unprecedented transparency on America’s most sensitive intelligence publication from the years before and the day after one of the darkest moments in our history”, the CIA said in a statement.
“The products trace the story of CIA analysts’ evolving understanding of Al-Qaeda and efforts to highlight and warn of Osama bin Laden’s attack plotting despite sparse, vague, and imperfect information,” it said.
Agence France-Presse reports that the briefs cover a period starting during Bill Clinton’s presidency and continue into that of George W Bush.
A September 10, 1998 brief – parts of which were redacted – said that al-Qaida “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city”.
Another dated December 4, 1998, which also contained redactions, said bin Laden “and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking.”
One legacy of September 11, was the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004, to ensure that information was shared across the sprawling US intelligence community in hope that spy agencies would never again fail to “connect the dots”.
But 25 years on, some former officials and experts question whether it’s fulfilled its intended goals and if a different approach is required for modern threats such as China and AI, NBC News reports. Amid the growing debate in Washington, some even ask whether the agency should be scrapped altogether.
My colleague Jason Burke also wrote about this yesterday.
How 9/11 changed the world – podcast
A quarter century on from the terror attacks that killed almost 3,000 people in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, the dark legacy of September 11 continues to unfold in the United States and across the world. A through-line can be drawn from that day in 2001 to much of the geopolitics and conflicts of today.
In today’s edition of The Latest podcast, Annie Kelly speaks to the Guardian’s international security correspondent, Jason Burke, about how 9/11 changed the world.
9/11 victim’s son urges people not to use tragedy ‘to spread hate’
At the ceremony in New York, the final reader of the names of people who died in 9/11 urged people around the country not to use the tragedy “to spread hate”.
Michael Massaroli Jr, the son of Michael Massaroli, who was an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald, told the crowd at the ground zero memorial:
I think the one parting thing I want to leave everyone with is that you do my dad’s legacy and the legacy of all these victims no honor by using this tragedy to spread hate.
We have seen a medley of people come up today, of all races, all religions, all creeds, and this tragedy is just that – it’s a tragedy.
I’ve had to grow up and spend the past 25 years seeing people use it to hate on our Muslim brothers and sisters, to hate on people who don’t look like them, and that’s wrong, and that does no honor to the victims here.
I want to use the little platform I have to ask for that to please stop.
There is a clip here.
As we reported earlier, in stark contrast, the president used his memorial speech at the Pentagon to defend his unresolved war against Iran.
My colleagues on the picture desk have collated this gallery of photographs from the day that changed the world. (Some readers may find the images distressing.)
House to vote on Russia sanctions backed by late senator Lindsey Graham
Looking forward to next week, the House is set to begin consideration of a sweeping Russia sanctions bill championed by the late Republican senator Lindsey Graham, which has passed the Senate but faces stiff opposition from House Democrats.
The House rules committee said it scheduled a meeting to consider the measure for Monday afternoon. Approval by the Republican-majority committee would pave the way for a vote in the full chamber later in the week.
Graham, who died in July, was among Ukraine’s most outspoken allies in Congress and spent the final days of his life trying to advance the bill in Congress.
The legislation aims to increase economic pressure on Moscow over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine by sanctioning Russian officials and authorizing stiff tariffs on China, India and other countries to reduce their dependence on Russian oil and gas.
The bill would impose new sanctions and visa bans on Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and top military commanders, as well as put tariffs of up to 500% on the country’s exports. It would also allow Donald Trump to impose levies of up to 100% on goods from countries that are the top five importers of Russian oil and gas.
The Senate voted 86-11 last month to pass it. However, the support from both Republicans and Democrats that propelled the bill through the Senate might not be enough to secure House passage.
Some lawmakers and industries worry that new tariff powers for Trump could raise costs for US importers and consumers. Some Republican lawmakers are also concerned about political blowback ahead of November’s crucial midterm elections.
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