Trump tries to move on amid Epstein files backlash as speaker calls for their release – US politics live

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US health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has abruptly fired two of his top aides - chief of staff Heather Flick Melanson and deputy chief of staff for policy Hannah Anderson - CNN is reporting citing two people familiar with the matter.

The decision came after Kennedy lost confidence in the two aides as part of his leadership team, one of the people familiar with the matter told CNN, although it was unclear whether there was a single triggering event that prompted the firings.

In a statement provided to CNN, an HHS spokesman confirmed the moves and said the department’s White House liaison, Matt Buckham, would serve as acting chief of staff.

He brings valuable experience in personnel strategy and organizational management to this new role. Secretary Kennedy thanks the outgoing leadership for their service and looks forward to working closely with Mr. Buckham as the Department continues advancing its mission to Make America Healthy Again.

Kennedy has not yet decided on permanent replacements for Flick and Anderson, the people familiar told CNN.

As Democrats reckon with a deep inter-party divide that threatens their ability to repair the party’s image and win back voters, Ken Martin said he was not focused on “internal bullshit” because “most people could care less about the internal drama and soap opera of the Democratic party”.

Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, told the Guardian that he knows Democrats have to earn back trust from communities across the country before the midterms.

But, as part of his job leading the party, he has to manage dissenting voices who are trying to chart a way forward for the Democrats after the bruising 2024 loss to Donald Trump. So far, the left is unified in its opposition to Trump – but not on their vision for their own party.

Trump’s spending plan will serve as the uniting force behind the Democratic party’s push toward the midterms. To that end, the DNC launched an effort to organize at events such as book clubs and county fairs to ring the alarm about Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” and tell voters what Democrats stand for, well ahead of the next elections.

Dubbed “organizing summer”, the party is engaging volunteers well before the midterms for on-the-ground meetups with voters. It has sent more money to local and state parties to use in key 2025-26 battlegrounds and is recruiting new leaders in these areas. The party will also restart its partisan voter registration programs, which have been done by third-party nonpartisan groups in recent years.

Martin said one reason voters have lost trust is because the party has only been showing up in the months before an election to ask for a vote, Martin said. Democrats have to put in the work and the face time to re-earn that trust.

“The first conversation that you should have with voters is just listening to them and hearing their hopes and aspirations, and eventually building a relationship of trust around shared values,” he said. “One of the ways we re-earn it is by actually showing them that we give a damn about their community, about their family, being present and having conversations when it’s not a transaction, where we’re asking them to do something for me.”

Donald Trump dismisses inquiry into Jeffrey Epstein as ‘boring’

Donald Trump has dismissed a secretive inquiry into the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as “boring” and of interest only to “bad people”, but said he backed the release of any “credible” files, as he sought to stamp out a conspiracy-fuelled uproar among his supporters.

The US president is facing a political crisis within his usually loyal Republican “Make America great again” (Maga) base over suspicion that the administration is hiding details of Epstein’s crimes to protect the rich elite he associated with, which included Trump.

One of the most dramatic theories circulating among supporters is that Epstein – who killed himself in 2019 while in federal custody – was murdered by powerful figures to cover up their roles in his sex crimes against children.

The Trump administration and its allies are trying to obtain voter data from states and inspect voting equipment, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, in moves it said had caused concern among state and local election officials.

The Post said “the most unusual activity” was taking place in Colorado, where it said a consultant who was working with the White House had asked county clerks whether they would let federal officials or a third party examine voting machines.

“That’s a hard stop for me,” it quoted Carly Koppes, a Republican clerk in Colorado’s Weld county, as saying. “Nobody gets access to my voting equipment, for security reasons.”

The newspaper said the justice department had separately asked at least nine states for copies of their voter rolls, and that at least two have turned them over.

Reuters could not immediately confirm details of the Washington Post report. The White House and the justice department did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

The Trump administration said it would scale down its military operation in Los Angeles with the removal of half of the national guard troops that were deployed to the area last month amid protests over the federal government’s mass immigration sweeps.

Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, ordered the release of 2,000 national guard troops, the Pentagon announced on Tuesday, significantly reducing the military presence in the city.

“Thanks to our troops who stepped up to answer the call, the lawlessness in Los Angeles is subsiding,” Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement. “As such, the Secretary has ordered the release of 2,000 California National Guardsmen from the federal protection mission.”

The deployment, which drew widespread outrage and condemnation, was initiated against the wishes of city leaders, including Karen Bass, the mayor, and Gavin Newsom, California’s governor.

The president deployed the California national guard troops to Los Angeles in June to quell protests triggered by the administration’s large-scale immigration crackdown. In late May, demonstrators took to the streets in response to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents that had flooded the city, raiding workplaces and arresting people off the street.

JD Vance on Wednesday will head to the swing political turf of north-eastern Pennsylvania to begin selling Donald Trump’s sweeping budget-and-policy package in a working-class district that could see a ferocious congressional campaign next year.

The vice-president, whose tie-breaking vote got the bill through the Senate, has promoted the bill’s passage as another example of the Trump administration’s mantra of “promises made, promises kept” and a measure that will cut taxes, increase take-home pay for American families and strengthen border security, the Associated Press reports.

The historic legislation, which Trump signed into law earlier this month with near unanimous Republican support, includes key campaign pledges such as no tax on tips but also cuts Medicaid and food stamps by $1.2tn.

Democrats have vowed to make the law a major issue in the midterm elections and recently held a town hall in House speaker Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana to denounce the legislation as a “reverse Robin Hood – stealing from the poor to give to the rich”.

The battle for control of the messaging on the bill could be critical to how well the measure is ultimately received, as some of the most divisive parts of the law, including Medicaid and food assistance cuts, are timed to take effect only after the midterm elections.

The bill was generally unpopular before its passage, polls showed, although some individual provisions are popular, like boosting the annual child tax credit and eliminating taxes on tips.

Adelita Grijalva won the Democratic House primary in Arizona to succeed her father, beating a young social media activist in a closely watched election seen as a test of the party’s generational divide.

Raúl Grijalva, a longtime congressman in southern Arizona, died from cancer earlier this year and left a vacancy in the state’s seventh district. The younger Grijalva, a 54-year-old who served for 20 years on a Tucson school board, has been a Pima county supervisor since 2020.

Grijalva, a progressive, has said upholding democracy, standing up for immigrant rights and protecting access to Medicaid and Medicare are among her top priorities.

“This is a victory not for me, but for our community and the progressive movement my dad started in Southern Arizona more than 50 years ago,” Grijalva said in a statement.

She faced an insurgent challenger in Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old social media influencer and activist whose campaign focused on her personal story of using the kinds of government programs the Trump administration has attacked. Foxx also called out Grijalva for her “legacy last name” and said political roles shouldn’t be inherited.

The district, which includes parts of Tucson and Arizona’s borderlands, is strongly blue, meaning the winner of the primary is the likely victor of the general. But three Republicans ran in their party’s primary; Daniel Butierez will face Adelita Grijalva in the general on 23 September.

Trump to meet Qatar's PM to discuss Gaza ceasefire deal, Axios reports

President Donald Trump will meet with Qatar’s prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani on Wednesday to discuss negotiations over a Gaza ceasefire deal, Axios reporter Barak Ravid posted on X.

Israeli and Hamas negotiators have been taking part in the latest round of ceasefire talks in Doha since 6 July, discussing a US-backed proposal for a 60-day ceasefire that envisages a phased release of hostages, Israeli troop withdrawals from parts of Gaza and discussions on ending the conflict.

Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff had said on Sunday that he was “hopeful” on the ceasefire negotiations underway in Qatar, a key mediator between the two sides.

US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators have been working to secure an agreement, however, Israel and Hamas are divided over the extent of an eventual Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian enclave.

Trump threatens to impose drug and chip tariffs as soon as 1 August

Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on pharmaceutical products and semiconductors as soon as 1 August, the latest deadline for the introduction of his “reciprocal” levies on individual countries.

The US president told reporters late on Tuesday the taxes on drug imports could be announced “probably at the end of the month, and we’re going to start off with a low tariff and give the pharmaceutical companies a year or so to build, and then we’re going to make it a very high tariff”.

He added he had a similar timeline for imposing levies on semiconductors, as he believed it was “less complicated” to implement tariffs on the chips required by all electronic devices, but did not provide further details.

Earlier in the month, Trump told a meeting of his cabinet that he expected to raise tariffs on pharmaceuticals as high as 200%, once he had given drug companies a year to a year and a half to bring their manufacturing to the US. He also threatened a 50% tariff on imported copper in an effort to increase US production of the metal.

The Trump administration began investigations in April into imports of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors into the US under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, as part of an attempt to impose tariffs on both sectors on national security grounds.

US sends migrants to Eswatini after ban lifted on third-country deportations

A flight carrying immigrants deported from the US has landed in Eswatini, the homeland security department announced, in a move that follows the supreme court lifting limits on deporting migrants to third countries.

In a post online, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin named five deportees from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Cuba and Yemen and said they were convicted of crimes ranging from child rape to murder.

“A safe third country deportation flight to Eswatini in Southern Africa has landed. This flight took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” McLaughlin said late on Tuesday.

In late June, the US supreme court cleared the way for president Donald Trump’s administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face. The decision handed the government a win in its aggressive pursuit of mass deportations.

On 4 July, the US completed deportation of eight other migrants to conflict-plagued South Sudan. The men had been put on a flight in May bound for South Sudan, which was diverted to a base in Djibouti, where they had been held in a converted shipping container.

US House speaker calls for release of Epstein files amid Maga backlash

Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics as the furor over the Epstein files continues to grip the country with the unusual public spectacle of normally-loyal House speaker Mike Johnson breaking with Donald Trump with his calls to make the files public.

It was a rare moment of friction between Trump and the speaker, a top ally on Capitol Hill, and came as the president faces growing backlash from conservatives who had expected him to make public everything known about Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 while in federal custody as he faced sex-trafficking charges.

Read the full story here:

The president has continued with his efforts to move from the issue, last night attempting to both downplay it and deflect it on to his opponents.

Stay with us for all today’s developments. In other news:

• Vice-president JD Vance on Wednesday will head to the swing political turf of northeastern Pennsylvania to begin selling president Donald Trump’s sweeping budget-and-policy package in a working-class district that could see a ferocious congressional campaign next year.

• Adelita Grijalva won the Democratic House primary in Arizona to succeed her father, beating a young social media activist in a closely watched election seen as a test of the party’s generational divide. Businessman Daniel Butierez has secured the Republican nomination.

• The Trump administration decided to withdraw half of the 4,000 national guard troops it dispatched to Los Angeles chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed to the Guardian.

• A flight carrying immigrants deported from the US has landed in Eswatini, the homeland security department announced, in a move that follows the supreme court lifting limits on deporting migrants to third countries.

• In a rambling set of remarks at an AI and energy investment summit, Trump veered wildly off-topic to praise two partisan, conservative reporters in attendance and made false claims about China having just one wind farm and about his uncle having once taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

• Mike Waltz, who was ousted as national security adviser after mistakenly adding a journalist to a group chat on Signal about strikes on Yemen, had his confirmation hearing to become UN ambassador.

• The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, asked Israel to “aggressively” investigate the murder of a Palestinian American citizen who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.