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
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers will focus on keeping pregnant non-citizens from giving birth in the US to acquire birthright citizenship. He did not mention that Donald Trump’s father was born in New York to a non-citizen mother who arrived six months pregnant.
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Trump batted down questions about the $1.2bn he earned from crypto businesses, according to his latest annual financial disclosures.
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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.
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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, “surrounded by recently naturalized citizens.”
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A federal judge blocked a proposed restriction on mail-in voting across the US, challenging a crackdown on elections ordered by Donald Trump.
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During a visit to a new museum dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, Trump asked an AI rendition of the 26th president about the Panama canal. Trump then lied to supporters about the exchange.
Trump asks AI Teddy Roosevelt about Panama canal, then lies about what he said
As our colleague David Smith reports from North Dakota, Donald Trump’s tour of a new museum honoring Theodore Roosevelt included a brief conversation between the current president and an AI rendering of his predecessor, which began with Trump asking the hologram installed as an exhibit: “Do you consider the Panama canal your greatest achievement?”
Perhaps surprisingly, given that the museum was overseen by Trump’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum, AI TR refused to simply agree with Trump and indeed pushed back a bit on the idea that greatness can be measured by building projects.
“Right then, yes,” the AI Roosevelt replied in an exchange recorded on video by Trump’s loyal aide Margo Martin. As Trump tried to end the conversation there, saying, “Good answer”, the hologram pushed back and revealed that it had a different set of priorities than the man now in the arena.
“The canal stands as one of my proudest battles, no question, but greatness is a strange thing,” AI TR interrupted Trump to add. “It isn’t always the biggest or boldest job that matters most. The Panama canal showed what America could achieve … That said, I measure my greatest work by the lives improved, parks set aside, food and drugs made safe, the square deal given to all, not just to a few.”
“Still, when I stood in the mud watching those steam shovels, knowing ships would pass through changing the world’s map forever, I felt I had left a mark that would last,” the hologram concluded.
“Okay, you did, thank you,” Trump said, ending the chat and walking away from the exhibit.
Just a few minutes later, however, during a speech praising the museum, Roosevelt and himself, Trump recounted this conversation for supporters, and lied to them about how it went.
In a line that no doubt baffled listeners, since he failed to explain that he had interacted with an AI Roosevelt exhibit, Trump said: “I even had a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt. I had a– I said: ‘What did you think about the Panama canal? Do you consider that your greatest achievement? How do you feel about the fact that the Democrats gave the Panama canal away to Panama for one dollar?’” Trump said, falsely claiming that he had asked the hologram to comment on his equally false claim that Jimmy Carter sold the canal for $1.
Trump then went on to add more fiction to his account of the canal’s history by repeating his debunked claim that 38,000 Americans were killed in the construction of the canal.
When Trump made this same false claim in his 2025 inaugural address, the author of a history of the canal’s construction, Matthew Parker, told the BBC that while about 25,000 people died in the initial failed attempt to build the canal by France in the 1880s, “virtually none” was American.
About 6,000 workers, “almost all of whom were from Barbados”, and around 300 Americans, died in the US-led construction of the final canal that began during Roosevelt’s presidency in 1904, Parker added.
George Chidi
A federal judge blocked a proposed restriction on mail-in voting across the US, challenging a crackdown on elections ordered by Donald Trump.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the US district court for the District of Columbia ruled that a US Postal Service (USPS) plan to deny ballots to voters in states that do not turn over their voter rolls to the federal government should not proceed.
It was the second time in recent weeks that the US president’s plan to restrict mail-in-voting has suffered a setback in court.
The decision by Sullivan bars the postal service from enforcing an executive order issued by Trump in March that called for sweeping changes to the administration of elections nationwide.
In accordance with the order, the postal service issued a proposed rule on 2 June that would require states to give the US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies access to lists of voters and to adopt new balloting procedures before the mail agency would make deliveries. If states did not comply, USPS would refuse to deliver the ballots.
Sullivan, who was appointed to the bench by the Democratic former president Bill Clinton, sided with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) civil rights group, which argued that the new rule would run afoul of a 2021 legal settlement which forced USPS officials to take “extraordinary measures” to ensure timely delivery of ballot mail.
Colorado governor Jared Polis reportedly fires clemency board members who denounced his decision to free election denier Tina Peters
Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has fired two members of his clemency board, the New York Times reports, after they denounced his decision to commute the prison sentence of Tina Peters, a county official who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in an effort to prove the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
The two board members, Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi, revealed in a Denver Post opinion article last month the clemency review board had voted unanimously to deny a request for commutation from Peters. “Peters recounted events ‘through her eyes’ and sought to justify conduct that twelve jurors had deemed criminal,” they wrote.
“Clemency is not an accelerated appeal. It is not a pressure release valve for politically inconvenient sentences. It exists for the people the legal system cannot reach, not for the people who simply prefer not to wait for it. Using it this way, for this person, at this moment, doesn’t just dishonor the process. It degrades the remedy for everyone else who is waiting their turn at the only door they have left,” the two women, both former public defenders, added.
They added that Peters was unrepentant and used her freedom to continue to falsely claim election fraud had denied Trump victory in a state he lost by nearly half a million votes in 2020. In the op-ed, they wrote:
Within hours of her release, Peters appeared on a podcast and immediately resumed her attacks on the integrity of U.S. elections. On Steve Bannon’s podcast, she repeated the debunked conspiracy theory that voting machines cheated Donald Trump out of reelection in 2020 and portrayed herself as a martyr to the effort to expose it. She called her release a miracle.
She expressed no contrition. She offered no acknowledgment of the harm her conduct caused to the clerks who were threatened, to the election workers whose lives were upended, to the democratic institutions she exploited from a position of public trust. The governor said he was moved by her admission that she made a mistake. She walked out of prison and told the world she made no mistake at all.
The governor’s review board normally operates in secret, but the two members argued that staying silent was not an option in this case.
“Azra Taslimi and I chose to come forward and co-author this piece for The Denver Post because we believe silence equals complicity”, Proff wrote on LinkedIn.
“We thought about staying silent, but silence isn’t neutral, its a choice and it has a cost,” Taslimi wrote on the same platform. “Injustice doesn’t usually need permission to keep happening. It just needs everyone in the room to stay quiet. For people to decide it’s not their fight. And the thing just keeps going, unchallenged, because silence is so much easier than being the one who points at it.”
On Tuesday, Trump posted a photograph of Peters with him in the Oval Office on social media, along with a raft of false claims about her and the 2020 election.
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.”
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.
