Trump calls Elon Musk's new political party ‘ridiculous' and ‘confusing'
'Starting a third party just adds to the confusion,' Trump told reporters while traveling to the White House from his New Jersey golf club. 'They've never worked—he can have fun with it, but I think it's ridiculous.'
Musk announced on July 5 via X that he plans to bankroll a new political party called The America Party.
Trump appointed Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, but tensions flared in June after the billionaire publicly criticised Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill,' sparking an online dispute.
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Time Magazine
7 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Netanyahu Backs Trump's Vision for Redeveloping Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday backed a proposal by President Donald Trump to relocate Palestinians from Gaza and turn the war-ravaged coastal enclave into a luxury waterfront development—a plan that has drawn international condemnation and could further complicate fragile cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. 'It's called free choice,' Netanyahu told reporters before a private dinner with the President in the White House. 'If people want to stay, they can stay. But if they want to leave, they should be able to leave.' Netanyahu added that Israel was working 'very closely' with the United States to identify countries that would be willing to accept displaced Palestinians from Gaza, and suggested that discussions with several nations were already 'getting close' to fruition. Trump, seated across from the Israeli leader, said that 'we've had great cooperation' from countries surrounding Israel and added that 'something good will happen.' Netanyahu's comments marked the most explicit endorsement yet of a controversial idea Trump first floated earlier this year: that Gaza could be emptied of its Palestinian population and redeveloped into what he once called the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' The proposal was met with quick backlash from U.S. allies, Arab leaders, and human rights organizations, who said it amounted to ethnic cleansing under the guise of economic development. The White House later attempted to walk back elements of Trump's language. But Netanyahu's renewed support for the vision—paired with his insistence on rejecting the creation of a Palestinian state—offers a stark preview of the kind of 'peace' he and Trump may ultimately seek: one in which the Palestinian population is displaced or resettled abroad. It also represents a sharp break from decades of U.S. policy, which has long held that the path toward peace in the Middle East must include a two-state solution—an independent Palestinian state existing alongside Israel. Netanyahu made clear that any peace deal to end the war with Hamas should not include the recognition of a Palestinian state.x 'I think the Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers to threaten us,' Netanyahu said. 'And that means that certain powers like overall security will always remain in our hands.' 'We'll work out a peace with our Palestinian neighbors, those who don't want to destroy us,' he added, 'and we'll work out a peace in which our security, the sovereign power of security, always remains in our hands. Now, people will say, 'It's not a complete state, it's not a state. It's not that — we don't care.' Negotiators will meet in Doha later this week for cease-fire and hostage talks. Though Trump has said he believes a deal could be reached 'during the coming week,' Netanyahu's endorsement of mass relocation could deepen mistrust among Palestinian negotiators and potentially derail progress. 'It shouldn't be a prison,' Netanyahu said of Gaza, which had a pre-war population of 2 million. 'It should be an open place.' The war in Gaza, now in its 21st month, began after Hamas launched a terror attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. Since then, Israel's military campaign has killed over 57,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, and displaced more than 80% of the population. U.N. agencies warn that half a million people face imminent famine. The Prime Minister's remarks echoed a growing sentiment within his far-right coalition, where calls to permanently remove Palestinians from Gaza have become more open in recent months. The private dinner capped a day of closed-door diplomacy for Netanyahu, who also met earlier with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump's foreign envoy Steve Witkoff. Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday. The two leaders appeared to use the dinner to take a victory lap after the United States and Israel carried out coordinated airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities last month. Before taking questions from reporters, Netanyahu said that he had nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Who's Running American Defense Policy?
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Remember when the United States engaged in an act of war against a country of some 90 million people by sending its B-2 bombers into battle? No? Well, you can be forgiven for letting it slip your mind; after all, it was more than two weeks ago. Besides, you've probably been distracted by more recent news. The United States has halted some weapons shipments to Ukraine, despite the increased Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities as Moscow continues its campaign of mass murder. Fortunately, last Thursday Donald Trump got right on the horn to his friend in Russia, President Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, Putin apparently told Trump to pound sand. 'I didn't make any progress with him today at all,' Trump said to reporters before boarding Air Force One. Meanwhile, the president has decided to review AUKUS, the 2021 security pact between the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, a move that caught U.S. diplomats (and their colleagues in Canberra and London) off guard and has generated concern about the future of the arrangement. Technically, the president didn't decide to review it, but rather his handpicked secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, did. Well, it wasn't him, either; apparently, the review was ordered by someone you've likely never heard of: Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, a career-long Beltway denizen who initiated the process on his own. But at least someone's keeping an eye on Asia: CNN is reporting, based on a Ukrainian intelligence report, that North Korea is planning to send as many as 30,000 more soldiers to assist Russia in its war of conquest. Of course, this is largely based on a single source, but Pyongyang has already sent at least 10,000 troops into the European battlefield over the past nine months, and things are going poorly for Russia's hapless conscripts, so perhaps a deal really is in the works to provide the Kremlin with another shipment of foreign cannon fodder. All of this raises an obvious question: Who's running America's foreign and defense policies? It's not the president, at least not on most issues. Trump's interest in foreign policy, as with so many other topics, is capricious and episodic at best. He flits away from losing issues, leaving them to others. He promised to end the war in Ukraine in a day, but after conceding that making peace is 'more difficult than people would have any idea,' the president has since shrugged and given up. It's not Marco Rubio—you may remember that he is technically the secretary of state, but he seems to have little power in this White House. It's not Hegseth, who can't seem to stop talking about 'lethality' and trans people long enough to deliver a real briefing that isn't just a fawning performance for Trump. (As bad as Hegseth can be, he seems almost restrained next to the State Department's spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, whose comments about Trump—she thanks God for him from her podium and says he is 'saving this country and the world'—have an unsettling Pyongyang-newsreader lilt to them.) It's not the national security adviser. That's also Rubio. Apparently, American defense policy is being run by Bridge Colby, and perhaps a few other guys somewhere in the greater Washington metropolitan area. Their influence is not always obvious. The order to halt shipments, for example, came from Hegseth, but the original idea was reportedly driven by Colby, who backed the moves because, according to NBC, he has 'long advocated scaling back the U.S. commitment in Ukraine and shifting weapons and resources to the Pacific region to counter China.' (Per the NBC reporting, an analysis from the Joint Staff showed that Colby is wrong to think of this as an either-or situation; the Ukrainians need weapons that the U.S. wouldn't even be using in a conflict in the Pacific.) In this administration, the principals are either incompetent or detached from most of the policy making, and so decisions are being made at lower levels without much guidance from above. In Trump's first term, this kind of dysfunction was a lucky break, because the people at those lower levels were mostly career professionals who at least knew how to keep the lights on. In Trump's second term, though, many of those professionals have been either silenced or outright replaced by loyalists and inexperienced appointees. Ironically, allowing various lower offices to fill the policy void empowers the unknown appointees whom MAGA world claims to hate in other administrations. The Trump White House's policy process—insofar as it can be called a 'process'—is the type found in many authoritarian states, where the top levels of government tackle the one or two big things the leader wants done and everything else tumbles down to other functionaries, who can then drive certain issues according to their own preferences (which seems to be what Colby is doing), or who will do just enough to stay under the boss's radar and out of trouble (which seems to be what most other Trump appointees are doing). In such a system, no one is really in charge except Trump—which means that on most days, and regarding many issues, no one is in charge. In Trump's current administration, irrational tariffs and brutal immigration enforcement are the two big ideas. Both have foreign-policy ramifications, but they are being pursued by Trump and his team primarily as domestic political issues. Everything else is on the periphery of the White House's vision: Pakistan and India, nuclear weapons, the Middle East (or nuclear weapons and the Middle East), the Ukraine war. All of these get Trump's temporary attention in the form of a quick evaluation of their utility to Trump personally, and then they're dumped back outside the door of the Oval Office. Even the Iran strike—one of the most important military actions taken by the United States in years—has apparently lost its luster for the president. Trump said that Iran's nuclear program was 'obliterated'; other parts of the U.S. defense and intelligence communities said they weren't sure; Israel thanked America; Trump moved on. This might be because the political advantage of the bombings never materialized: The American public disapproved of Trump's actions, and so the president is now looking for some other shiny object. Today, that trinket seems to be in Gaza. Over the weekend, Trump claimed that he has a 'good chance' of making a deal, perhaps in the coming week, with Hamas for the release of more hostages. This is foreign policy in the Trump era: Announce deals, push their resolution out a week or two, and hope they happen. If they don't—move on and declare success, regardless of any actual outcomes. No one in Trump's administration has any incentive to fix this, because serious changes would be admissions of failure. Repopulating the National Security Council with people who know what they're doing means admitting they were needed in the first place. Hegseth or top people resigning would admit the enormity of the mistake that Trump made in hiring them. Reining in policy freelancers and curtailing the power of lower-level policy makers (as Rubio has at least tried to do with regard to diplomacy) is to admit that senior leaders have lost control of their departments. This administration was never directed or staffed with any coherent foreign policy in mind beyond Trump's empty 'America First' sloganeering. Less than a year into his second term, it's clear that the goals of Trump's 2024 run for the presidency were, in order of importance, to keep Trump out of prison, to exact revenge on Trump's enemies, and to allow Trump and his allies to enrich themselves by every possible means. No one had to think much about who would defend America or conduct its diplomacy; Trump's appointees were apparently chosen largely for shock value and trolling efficacy rather than competence. The rest of the world's most powerful nations, however, are led by grown-ups and professionals. Some of them are enemies of the United States and are quite dangerous. Undersecretary Colby has had some bad ideas, but Americans had better hope that he and the handful of other guys trying to run things know what they're doing. Related: A crisis is no time for amateurs. The one-and-done doctrine Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Political violence usually gets worse before it gets better. Anne Applebaum: The U.S. is switching sides. The man who thinks Medicaid cuts won't cut Medicaid Take off the mask, ICE. Today's News More than 100 people, including at least 27 campers and counselors from Camp Mystic in Kerr County, are dead after flash flooding hit central Texas over the weekend. President Donald Trump announced tariffs on at least 14 countries effective August 1, unless they can broker trade deals with the U.S. A man who opened fire and injured several people near a Border Patrol building in McAllen, Texas, was killed after exchanging fire with law enforcement, according to officials. Dispatches Work in Progress: Annie Lowrey on why the Medicaid work requirement is a terrible idea. Explore all of our newsletters here. More From The Atlantic Alexandra Petri: A day in the life of the Gen Z worker Trump's only-okay economy Peter Wehner: Why Evangelicals turned their back on PEPFAR What Schwarzenegger knows about George Washington Evening Read I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won. By Annie Lowrey I used to love my Teflon pans. I crisped tofu, fried latkes, and reduced sauces to sticky glazes in them, marveling at how cleanup never took more than a swipe of a sponge. Then I started to worry that my skillets might kill me. The lining on the inside of a nonstick pan is made of plastic. When heated, it can release toxic fumes; when scratched, it can chip off, blending in with tasty bits of char and grains of pepper. 'Data indicates that there are no health effects from the incidental ingestion of nonstick coating flakes,' the company that produces Teflon says, noting that the government has deemed the cookware 'safe for consumer use' … I tossed my nonstick pans into the trash, over my husband's objections. Read the full article. Culture Break Watch (or skip). Murderbot (streaming on Apple TV+) is a quirky show that suggests that AI might be interested in something other than humanity, Emma Stefansky writes. Read. 'Lamentations,' a short story by Nicole Krauss. 'For as long as I'd known him, Harold had been gnawing at me! How many things did I hold against him? Why not his death, too?' Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Outrage on social media over liberal figures politicizing Texas flood disaster
Some liberals may end up regretting their social media posts politicizing the disastrous flooding in Texas after getting major backlash this week. Multiple liberal figures on social media, along with major Democratic Party figures, took serious heat this week after blaming the damage and deaths caused by flooding in Texas this week on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Even some other prominent liberals condemned the political attacks over the flooding. "It takes a serious lack of humanity to see children die in a natural disaster and respond with something along the lines of 'that's what they voted for,'" former Bernie Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner said in response to one viral post. Texas Flood Survivors Share Harrowing Stories, Search Continues For Those Still Missing At least 91 people, including children and counselors at a girls' camp, were killed in central Texas in flash flooding that began early on the morning of the Fourth of July, the White House said on Monday. The toll is expected to rise with dozens more missing as of Monday. The National Weather Service sent several flash flood warnings early Friday morning, followed by several flash flood emergency notices. Read On The Fox News App Some critics of Trump wasted little time, saying his cuts to the federal government – namely staffing cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS) – hampered the state's natural disaster response preparedness and led to destruction and loss of life. In a post from over the weekend, editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski wrote, "The people in Texas voted for government services controlled by Donald Trump and Greg Abbott. That is exactly what they [are] getting." The commentator appeared to have deleted the post shortly after sharing it. Turner called Filipkowski's post "shameful." Texas pediatrician Christina Propst shared a social media post wishing that "MAGA" people affected by the flooding should reap the effects of what they voted for, while expressing hope that "non-MAGA voters and pets be safe and dry." "Kerr County MAGA voted to gut FEMA. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for," she said, adding, "Bless their hearts." Click2Houston reported Sunday that Propst's employer, Blue Fish Pediatrics, condemned the statement and announced she was no longer employed. Deadly Texas Flood Exposes 'Neglected' Weather Alert System Trump Aims To Modernize "The individual is no longer employed by Blue Fish Pediatrics. As we previously mentioned in our original statement, we strongly condemn the comments that were made in that post. That post does not reflect the values, standards, or mission of Blue Fish Pediatrics. We do not support or condone any statement that politicizes tragedy, diminishes human dignity, or fails to clearly uphold compassion for every child and family. We continue to extend our full support to the families and the surrounding communities who are grieving, recovering, and searching for hope," the post read. The official account for "The Democrats" shared a screenshot of a headline Sunday, which stated, "As Floods Hit, Key Roles Were Vacant at Weather Service Offices in Texas." The account commented, "Reminder: The staffing shortages at the National Weather Service's San Angelo and San Antonio offices doubled under the Trump administration. These jobs are meant to coordinate disaster response and save lives." Other social media users hammered the post. Meteorologist Chris Martz replied with an Associated Press report citing National Weather Service office meteorologist Jason Runyen's assessment that his office had extra staffers at the time of the flooding. "The National Weather Service office in New Braunfels, which delivers forecasts for Austin, San Antonio and the surrounding areas, had extra staff on duty during the storms, Runyen said. Where the office would typically have two forecasters on duty during clear weather, they had up to five on staff," the AP stated. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., pointed fingers at the GOP as well, posting on Saturday, "Accurate weather forecasting helps avoid fatal disasters. There are consequences to Trump's brainless attacks on public workers, like meteorologists." Conservative commentator Carmine Sabia trashed Murphy, stating, "As they are searching for the bodies of babies. You should be ashamed but you have no shame." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is calling for an investigation into whether NWS cuts played a role in the response to the catastrophic flooding. CBS Austin meteorologist Avery Tomasco insisted that the National Weather Service was functional at the time of the flooding. "All I'll say is this. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the catastrophic flood. A flash flood warning was issued for Hunt & Ingram 3 HOURS before the Guadalupe started to climb. They did their job and they did it well," he wrote on X on Friday. In another X post, Nina Turner provided some fact-checking of her own regarding Trump's budget cuts, stating, "The GOP's budget cuts to NOAA are set to take effect at the start of fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1, 2025. Anyone making the deaths of the children in Texas about partisan politics is morally bankrupt. Please reflect." "Multiple things can be true at the same time: 1. the funding cuts are bad. 2. the tragedy in Texas was a tragedy. Not being able to hold those two beliefs and jumping to 'they got what they voted for' will absolutely not move us towards any resolution." White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson ripped liberals blaming Trump's cuts. "It's shameful and disgusting that in the wake of tragedy, the left's first instinct is to lie and politicize a disaster to target their political opponents," she told Fox News Digital. "False claims about the NWS have been repeatedly debunked by meteorologists, experts, and other public reporting. The NWS did their job, even issuing a flood watch more than 12 hours in advance. The Trump Administration is grateful to the first responders who sprang into action to save hundreds lives during this catastrophe, and will continue to help the great state of Texas in their recovery efforts." At Monday's press briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt added that any media outlets or Democrats blaming Trump for the flooding should feel ashamed of article source: Outrage on social media over liberal figures politicizing Texas flood disaster
