Mamdani plans ‘major address’ on America’s 250th anniversary, ‘surrounded by recently naturalized citizens’
The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, plans to deliver what his office calls a “major address” on Friday to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, “reflecting on New York City’s role in our national history and its position as the nation’s symbolic gateway.”
Mamdani is scheduled to speak at 10am local time, meaning that his remarks will come hours before Donald Trump marks the anniversary in a speech at Mount Rushmore.
The city’s immigrant mayor will deliver his remarks “surrounded by recently naturalized citizens,” from a desk used by George Washington in 1789, when he was inaugurated as the country’s first president in New York.
“This desk is older than the Resolute Desk and was used by Washington when it was located in Federal Hall, the first capitol building for the United States,” Mamdani’s aides point out, noting that the desk currently used in the Oval Office lacks the same connection to the country’s original, New York-based administration.
Mamdani’s remarks on the country’s founding are likely to differ widely from those of the president, if they are at all influenced by his father Mahmood Mamdani’s book, Neither Settler Nor Native, which argues that the modern nation-state began in 1492 with “the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas by the same Castilian monarchy that spearheaded ethnic cleansing.”
The first chapter of the book is about the ethnic cleansing of North America by European settlers and the role of slavery in the formation of the United States.
“This is a book about the United States as a founding experience in modern colonialism” the mayor’s father, a professor at Columbia, said in an online lecture in 2024. “The first chapter explores the Indian reservation as the site where core institutions of modern colonialism were forged. It is also a book about extreme violence as a consequence of modern nation-state building”.
“By taking the US as a case”, Mahmood Mamdani explained, “I seek to compare the conquest of Indians and the domination of Africans to distinguish between colonial conquest and racial domination as two different modern ways of subjugation, each with a radical consequence.”
Key events
Trump uses speech about Teddy Roosevelt to praise himself and recite familiar boasts and grievances
Donald Trump just concluded an hour-plus-long speech in North Dakota, ostensibly in honor of Theodore Roosevelt, ahead of the opening of a new library dedicated to the career of the 26th US president, but more often in praise of himself.
“I refuse to tell you – my son said, ‘Dad don’t say that,’ so I won’t – I refuse to tell you who got more votes, me or the legendary – and he was great – Theodore Roosevelt,” Trump said at one point in remarks filled with the same boasts and grievances he delivers to his own supporters at political rallies. “I refuse to say, because you’ll say: ‘He’s a braggart! He’s a terrible human being! He’s a horrible person!’ So I refuse to say. I told my son, ‘I will not say!’ Thank you, thank you for giving me some good advice, Eric Trump.”
The president made this odd boast before a stand filled with Spanish-American war reenactors, without noting that only about 20 million Americans were eligible to vote at the time of the 1904 presidential election in which Roosevelt won with 7.6m votes.
At another point in the speech, Trump noted that Roosevelt had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service in the US invasion of Cuba during the 1898 Spanish-American war. Although Roosevelt was initially denied the medal, it was awarded more than a century later, in the final week of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
In Trump’s remarks, he explained that Roosevelt’s son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr, was also awarded the Medal of Honor for his role in the D-day invasion of France in 1944.
While reciting this history, Trump pointed to his to adult sons in the crowd and said, as he has many times before, that he might give himself the Medal of Honor. This time, however, the president added a twist.
Roosevelt and his son, Trump noted, were just one of two father-and-son pairs “to receive our nation’s highest military award for courage above and beyond the call of duty”.
“Now, as I see my two beautiful sons sitting there, I think I’m going to give one to myself, one to them, and we’ll have a threesome,” he added.
As the crowd laughed, Trump continued to riff on his idea, suggesting that he would give his sons the award for military valor “for their genius at hunting”, and then award one to himself for having survived the special counsel investigation into the Russian government’s efforts to help him win the 2016 presidential election.
Trump, who evaded service in the Vietnam war as a young man by obtaining a medical exemption for a foot ailment diagnosed by a doctor who rented an office from Trump’s father, once described his own struggle to avoid sexually transmitted diseases as “my personal Vietnam”.
Trump also suggested in a cryptic way that the bravery of Roosevelt and his son in battle proved what he called “the racehorse theory”, which refers to Trump’s long-held belief in eugenics, and the claim that he is the product of superior breeding that makes him genetically superior to other humans in the same way that horses are bred to be fast runners.
In a 2020 speech at a Ford Motor Company plant in Michigan, Trump similarly praised what he called the “good bloodlines” of the family descended from the firm’s founder, Henry Ford, a notorious antisemite and favorite of Adolf Hitler.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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While fielding questions from reporters ahead of his flight to North Dakota today, Donald Trump batted down questions about the $1.2bn he earned from crypto businesses, according to his latest annual financial disclosures. “We have funds that run my money well. I’ve made a lot of money before I became president,” Trump said after it was disclosed that he recorded about $1.2bn in income from his family’s cryptocurrency activities. Trump went on to say that “everybody is profiting” from the presidency, “because the stock market’s going up”.
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Also today, Trump refused to renew the North American trade pact he once championed as his signature deal, opting instead to keep it alive on a short leash of annual reviews rather than committing to another 16 years. Wednesday was the deadline built into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) for the three countries to jointly decide its fate, which is set to expire in 2036. After virtual talks between officials from all three governments, the US trade representative’s office confirmed that Washington had walked away from renewing the deal on its existing terms, pointing to persistent US trade deficits with both neighbors.
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While traveling to North Dakota today, the president took his first flight on the new Air Force One, which is a plane donated by the government of Qatar last year, and costs $400m. Boarding the jet, Trump called it “maybe the greatest commercial plane ever built”. The body of the Boeing aircraft has a white top and a blue bottom with a horizontal red stripe around the middle, with an American flag on the tail.
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The democratic socialist Melat Kiros unseated long-serving US representative Diana DeGette in Colorado’s primary elections held on Tuesday, the latest in a string of high-profile victories for the party’s insurgent left. Anti-Washington sentiment coursed through a number of Colorado’s Democratic primaries. The state’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, edged out the US senator Michael Bennet. Weiser scuppered Bennet’s campaign, despite Bennet serving in the Senate since 2009, by accusing him of not taking a hard enough line against Trump’s cabinet nominees. And in the state’s most competitive House district, the progressive state representative Manny Rutinel defeated a more moderate Democrat.
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The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Wednesday that federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers will focus on combatting so-called “birth tourism” – the practice of tourists, temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants traveling to the US and giving birth. This comes after the supreme court upheld the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship in a 6-3 opinion on Tuesday. However, according to the limited studies available, birth tourism is rare.
Donald Trump spoke after touring the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library today in Medora, North Dakota. Here are a few pictures of the president, alongside interior secretary, and former North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum.
Todd Blanche says DoJ will focus on ‘birth tourism’ schemes after supreme court upholds birthright citizenship
The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Wednesday that federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers will focus on combatting so-called “birth tourism” – the process of tourists, temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants traveling to the US and giving birth. This comes after the supreme court upheld the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship in a 6-3 opinion on Tuesday.
“There’s other things that [Department if Homeland Security] can do, and the federal government can do in the visa process, and the application process, to try to minimize or limit the opportunity of folks coming here not to visit, and not to do what they’re saying they’re doing on the tourist visa, but just to have a baby that can then be a US citizen,” Blanche told reporters. “What we have to do as Department of Justice is make sure our agents, our [Homeland Security Investigations] agents that we work with, and the FBI are focused on stopping that.”
Shortly after the court’s last ruling of its current term, the assistant attorney general for the national fraud division directed justice department staff to bring fraud charges in alleged cases of birth tourism in an office-wide memo.
“The Department of Justice will zealously protect the sanctity of United States citizenship by investigating and prosecuting those who fraudulently exploit our immigration system,” Colin McDonald wrote.
During the oral arguments in the Trump v Barbara case in April, the government’s lawyer John D Sauer conceded that “no one knows for sure” how significant a problem so-called birth tourism actually is. The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration thinktank, said that there are between 20,000 to 26,000 births by women on tourist visas annually. This is less than 1% of all babies born in the US each year.
Nonetheless, the practice has been the bedrock of the Trump administration’s argument against birthright citizenship. Many Republicans and allies of the president have repeated concerns, with limited evidence, that birth tourism is a sizable problem.
“I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said at a press conference on Tuesday, shortly after the court announced its decision. “You just come on to the soil and have your child, and then they’re they’re able to avail themselves of the welfare state and everything else.”
Donald Trump’s executive order sought to redefine the meaning of the 14th amendment based on the claim that children born to non-citizen parents who are either unlawfully in the country or who possess temporary legal status, such as tourists or foreign students, are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US and therefore ineligible for birthright citizenship.
However, a majority of the supreme court proved unconvinced, with the chief justice of the US, John Roberts, writing that the administration provided “scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view”.
Trump is now pushing for lawmakers to create new legislation that establish exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to parents who do not have permanent legal status in the US.
But any legislation would need to overcome the 60-vote filibuster, which has proven to be frequently insurmountable on extremely divisive bills during Trump’s second term.
The New York journalist E Jean Carroll asked a judge on Tuesday to mandate that Donald Trump pay her the $5m she is owed from a jury verdict that found the US president liable for sexually abusing her in the 1990s and defaming her after she publicly described in 2019 being attacked by him in a city department store.
Lawyers for Carroll filed papers in a federal court in Manhattan one day after the US supreme court refused to hear Trump’s appeal of the civil case verdict in 2023.
The author and advice columnist argues in the filing that Trump is unjustly trying to delay even further releasing the funds to her, after he has made repeated challenges to the civil jury’s decision.
The amount Carroll is due has grown to nearly $5.8m with interest since the verdict, and her lawyers wrote that the court should require the sum to be disbursed by the Republican president.
They argued that Trump has continued assailing Carroll, 82, and made further defamatory remarks while asking the supreme court to reconsider its decision, announced on Monday.
Trump reacted to the court’s decision by writing on Truth Social: “Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me.”
US opts out of renewing trade pact with Canada and Mexico in its ‘current form’
Trade representative Jamieson Greer said on Wednesday that the US would not renew the country’s trade pact with Canada and Mexico in its “current form” – which would include an extension for the next 16 years. Instead, the US will hold annual reviews on the deal.
“The United States will continue to engage with Mexico and Canada to address the Agreement’s shortcomings and our trade deficits with these countries,” Greer said in a statement.
Donald Trump has routinely criticized the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) of late. Last month he threatened to abandon it. “We don’t need anything that Canada has. We don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have. And they have to treat us better,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
However, Trump struck the deal himself in 2020, as an updated version of the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement. The president even described the USMCA as the “fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law”.
The decision to shift to annual reviews, would now endanger businesses that rely on the North American trade agreement, and could limit investments across the continent. The deal currently governs roughly $2tn annually in goods and services between the three countries, according to CNBC.
If the countries do not agree to renew the agreement by 2036, the pact will automatically expire.
Donald Trump is en route to Medora, North Dakota. According to a White House official, the president is taking the Freedom250 train, marking the first time he has traveled by rail while in office.
Trump’s 2019 visit also marks the last time a sitting US president visited the state of North Dakota.
‘We’re going to try to correct that mistake,’ says Vance on supreme court birthright citizenship ruling
Speaking to reporters earlier, JD Vance was asked if he was angry with supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett over yesterday’s blockbuster decision to uphold birthright citizenship, dealing a major blow to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
The vice-president replied:
Well look, do I think she made a mistake in the ruling? I do.
I don’t know how anybody can say that if a person who is an illegal alien, or a person for example who’s pregnant and comes to the United States on a vacation, they have a baby and all of a sudden their entire family gets the benefits of American citizenship, I don’t think that’s what the framers of the 14th amendment had in mind.
He added that the Trump administration intends to try to get the landmark ruling changed. Trump signalled yesterday that he’ll now turn his attention to Congress in order to try to get new legislation passed to establish exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to parents who do not have permanent legal status in the US.
Vance told reporters:
Sometimes the supreme court makes mistakes. We’re going to try to correct that mistake, but nobody’s perfect, including the supreme court.
You can watch the clip here.
Vance’s comments come after he also told Fox News yesterday that the ruling “preposterous” and said it was a “major mistake”.
“This was a very disappointing ruling from the supreme court. We respect it, but we also think that it was a major, major mistake,” he said. “One of the things that it might invite is people to come here quite literally on a vacation, give birth, and then all of a sudden the child and their family have the full benefits of American citizenship.
“It’s just a preposterous ruling, and the absurdity of that outcome suggests why the supreme court should have went the other way,” he added.
As Shrai reported yesterday regarding so-called birth tourism, the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration thinktank, said that there are between 20,000 to 26,000 births by women on tourist visas annually. That is less than 1% of all babies born in the US each year.
Donald Trump’s money-making ventures enriched him by more than $2bn last year, according to newly released financial disclosures.
The revenue was supercharged by the Trump family’s crypto projects, with the documents showing the president made more than $1bn (£0.76bn) from crypto – an industry he has sought to deregulate.
Here my colleague Oliver Holmes explains five key takeaways from close to 1,000 pages of Trump’s financial disclosures:
And the Associated Press also has some more details about the Boeing 747 Trump received from Qatar, which had its maiden voyage today.
The refurbished airplane boasts luxury features the president believes a commander-in-chief’s entourage should have – plush carpets, lie-flat seats, wood paneling and a presidential seal on the seatbelts, according to reported tours of the plane.
Trump told reporters that he was proud of the new Air Force One.
You can do two things: you can low-key it, or you can show it.
White House communications director Steven Cheung posted a photo on X of aides gathered around a circular table that had off-white placemats and leather captain’s chairs. Monica Crowley, the chief of US protocol, posted a picture of herself perched on a leather couch between a pair of Air Force One throw pillows. Mounted on the wall behind her is a framed photo of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.
Some details from the reporters travelling with the president today, about the new Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar that Trump is flying on for the first time today.
The press section of the plane includes seven spaced-out pairs of seats. Chairs were equipped with recline and massage functions, as well as charging equipment.
Monitors at each seat allowed passengers to view things like different camera angles from the outside the plane or Apple TV, which directed passengers to Fox News.
Boarding the new Air Force One earlier, Trump called it “maybe the greatest commercial plane ever built”. The body of the jet has a white top and a blue bottom with a horizontal red stripe around the middle, with an American flag on the tail.
Trump has landed at Bismarck regional airport in North Dakota. But the press pool travelling with the president noted that he did not gaggle with them onboard. He is set to be greeted by the Republican senator John Hoeven upon arrival.
In response to the latest financial disclosures released on Tuesday, which show that Donald Trump earned more than $1bn in crypto businesses since he returned to the White House, several Democrats have decried the news, and called for further investigation into his investments.
As my colleague Joseph Gedeon reports, Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, said the figures showed why US Congress needed to act. “The crypto legislation heading to the Senate floor must prevent the president, vicepresident, senior administration officials, members of Congress and their families from profiting off the crypto industry,” she said. “If it does not, it will only turbocharge Donald Trump’s brazen crypto corruption.”
Juliana Stratton, the Illinois lieutenant governor and a Democratic Senate candidate, wrote on social media that Trump’s “infinite greed is disgusting”, adding: “Donald Trump uses the office of the president to make billions while American families struggle to afford their basic needs.”
The crypto figures in the 927-page disclosure stood out. World Liberty Financial, a joint venture between the Trump family and that of Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, brought in more than $500m from sales of “governance tokens”, while CIC Digital LLC took in more than $600m from Trump-branded meme coins, launched days before his second inauguration.
Congressional Democrats want a fuller reckoning. Warren’s staff reported last week that officials linked to the United Arab Emirates invested roughly $500m in World Liberty Financial, after which the administration took at least 10 actions benefiting the UAE, including on AI chip exports – an arrangement Warren has called a potential “pay-to-play” scheme.
She and four other senators wrote to Senate committees on 23 June demanding hearings into the deal, under which associates of an Abu Dhabi royal bought a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for roughly half a billion dollars four days before Trump’s inauguration. Separately, Adam Schiff, a US senator, is leading an inquiry into the crypto exchange Binance over reports it evaded US sanctions on Iran, citing Binance’s ties to World Liberty Financial.
New polling shows Democrats have uphill battle ahead of competitive Senate races
New polls from the New York Times/Siena, show that of the six Senate races that Democrats are targeting to regain control of the upper chamber, only one – North Carolina – shows the Democratic nominee leading outside the margin of error.
In order for Democrats to take control of the Senate they need to flip at least four Republican-held seats.
Right now, the key battlegrounds – Alaska, Iowa Maine, Ohio and Texas – show the Democratic nominee either trailing behind their challenger, or ahead by just a few points.
In North Carolina, former Democratic governor Roy Cooper, is ahead of his opponent Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chairman, by seven points. They are both vying to fill a Senate seat by the outgoing GOP lawmaker Thom Tillis.
The new polls also show Donald Trump’s average overall approval rating at 43%, with 54 % disapproving. In an increasingly nationalized midterm cycle, the executive’s performance could have an impact down ballot, particularly for Republican incumbents.
Colorado Democratic primaries show rise in anti-Washington sentiment
Chris Stein
Anti-Washington sentiment coursed through Colorado’s elections on Tuesday. In the race to replace term-limited Democratic governor, Jared Polis, Colorado’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, edged out the US senator Michael Bennet, according to results reported by the Associated Press. Though Bennet, who has represented Colorado in the Senate since 2009, had entered the race an early favorite, Weiser scuppered his campaign by accusing him of not taking a hard enough line against Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.
In the state’s most competitive House district, the progressive state representative Manny Rutinel defeated a more moderate Democrat, according to the Associated Press, to face Republican congressman Gabe Evans in November. Evans is considered vulnerable and the seat is among a handful of congressional districts across the country that could determine control of the House.
Meanwhile, the incumbent senator John Hickenlooper fended off a progressive challenge from state senator Julie Gonzalesto win renomination. He will face the Republican nominee, Mark Baisley, a state senator who ran unopposed.
Ahead of taking off for North Dakota, Trump also said that he told Bill Pulte – his controversial pick as acting director of national intelligence – to “declassify whatever you want”. A reminder that Pulte is set to be replaced by Jay Clayton provided that he clears the confirmation process in the Senate.
Some Republicans balked at Trump’s decision to install Pulte – who has no background in intelligence – to temporarily replace Tulsi Gabbard.
Trump abruptly called off a Senate confirmation hearing for Clayton last month, and directed him not to appear in front of Senate lawmakers. Instead, Clayton – who currently serves as US attorney for the Southern District of New York – will sit before lawmakers later in July.
