Trump's DC military parade is upon us. Do you support it?
Opinion: Trump's military show of force in LA and DC camouflage his failing presidency
But now you get to tell us. Take part in the poll below if you want to be one of the cool kids. Full disclosure: USA TODAY Opinion may use your response as part of an upcoming column.
Louie Villalobos is the director of Opinion for Gannett. You'll find him driving around DC once the tanks clear out.
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Daily Mirror
30 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
Donald Trump made a major change to the White House and people are furious
During his first Presidency, Trump was reported to have complained that the White House is not to his taste - allegedly branding it "a real dump". Now he's decided to make some changes People are venting their fury at a major change Donald Trump has made to the White House. During his first Presidency, Trump was reported to have complained that the White House is not to his taste - allegedly branding it "a real dump". So this time around he's decided to make some changes. The first and most obvious change was the lashings of gold he applied to the Oval Office. He also added a pair of enormous mirrors to the walls of the most famous office in the world. But he's long threatened to make more permanent changes to the 'People's House'. And the first step of that renovation has been unveiled. He's paved over the world famous White House Rose Garden. The garden has remained more or less the same since 1961 when it was redesigned by Rachel Lambert Mellon during John F Kennedy's administration. Melania Trump made some tweaks to it in 2020, but nothing huge. But this time round it's a different story. Trump has replaced the entire lawn with a long, grey patio of paving stones. The corners of the patio are decorated with the Seal of the President. And someone thought it would be appropriate to make the drain holes in the shape of the American flag. It's fair to say the change has not been warmly received. Four Seasons Total Landscaping - where Rudy Giuliani held a deeply weird press conference by mistake the day Trump lost the 2020 election - is particularly unimpressed. The Republicans Against Trump Twitter account was similarly fuming. But Trump isn't going to stop there. New images have emerged of his plan to tack an enormous, gaudy ballroom onto the East Wing. And it looks remarkably like the one in his Mar A Lago club in Florida. Funny thing, Mar A Lago also has a patio, where Trump is very fond of holding court with guests and hangers on. Trump for months has been promising to build a ballroom, saying the White House doesn't have space big enough for large events and scoffing at the notion of hosting heads of state and other guests in tents on the lawn as past administrations have done for state dinners attended by hundreds of guests. The East Room, the largest room in the White House, can accommodate about 200 people. Trump said he's been planning the construction for some time. "They've wanted a ballroom at the White House for more than 150 years but there's never been a president that was good at ballrooms," Trump told reporters Thursday. "I'm good at building things and we're going to build quickly and on time. It'll be beautiful, top, top of the line." He said the new ballroom would not interfere with the mansion itself. "It'll be near it but not touching it and pays total respect to the existing building, which I'm the biggest fan of," he said of the White House. "It's my favorite. It's my favorite place. I love it." Trump said the ballroom will serve administrations to come. "It'll be a great legacy project," he said. "I think it will be really beautiful." The 90,000-square-foot ballroom will be built where the East Wing sits with a seated capacity of 650 people. The East Wing houses several offices, including the first lady's. Those offices will be temporarily relocated during construction and that wing of the building will be modernized and renovated, said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. "Nothing will be torn down," she said. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said the president and his White House are "fully committed" to working with the appropriate organizations to preserve the mansion's "special history." "President Trump is a builder at heart and has an extraordinary eye for detail," Wiles said in a statement. Get Donald Trump updates straight to your WhatsApp! As the world attempts to keep up with Trump's antics, the Mirror has launched its very own US Politics WhatsApp community where you'll get all the latest news from across the pond. We'll send you the latest breaking updates and exclusives all directly to your phone. Users must download or already have WhatsApp on their phones to join in. All you have to do to join is click on this link, select 'Join Chat' and you're in! We may also send you stories from other titles across the Reach group. We will also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose Exit group. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Leavitt said at her briefing Thursday that Trump and other donors have committed to raising the approximately $200 million in construction costs. She did not name any of the other donors. The president chose McCrery Architects, based in Washington, as lead architect on the project. The construction team will be led by Clark Construction. Engineering will be provided by AECOM. Trump also has another project in mind. He told NBC News in an interview that he intends to replace what he said was a "terribly" remodelled bathroom in the famous Lincoln Bedroom with one that is closer in style to the 19th century.
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Why did Trump move his nuclear deterrent? Not for strategic gain
President Trump announced on Friday that he had sent two nuclear submarines 'closer to Russia' in response to threatening rhetoric from the country's former president, Dmitry Medvedev. Whatever Trump's reason for the sabre-rattling deployment, strategic advantage is not one of them. Moving a pair of Ohio-class submarines equipped with nuclear missiles — 'boomers' in US military parlance, or 'bombers' in the UK — nearer to Russia would put them in shallower waters, making them easier to detect. And moving them anywhere quickly, which means making noise and disturbance in the water, would also increase their vulnerability. However, if Trump is referring to nuclear-powered attack submarines, rather than boomers, he can move them wherever he wants; it makes no difference to the nuclear relationship with Russia. America's boomers are far better off staying where they are, deep in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They move very slowly and very quietly, staying underwater for 70 days or more without surfacing — a deadly game of silent deterrence they have played with Moscow for the past 60 years. They do not need to go any nearer to Russia to maintain that threat. Each Ohio boat carries missiles with a range of more than 7,000 miles, so they could reach Moscow, or anywhere else in Russia, from underneath either of the oceans they patrol. Indeed, they could sit in their Pacific base at Kitsap-Bangor in Washington State, or at King's Bay Georgia on the Atlantic coast, and still launch against any target within Russia. The real deterrent threat of the boomers is not what they can do — that dreadful destructive power has been well understood for many years — but their ability to remain elusive and undetectable while they do it. On any given day, the US would aim to have perhaps four or five of its 12 operational boomers on patrol across the Atlantic and Pacific. Each submarine carries up to 20 Trident II D5 ballistic missiles, and each missile can carry up to 12 independently targeted warheads, although some of these would undoubtedly be decoys. Every Ohio boat could deliver to any part of the northern hemisphere a mixture of 240 nuclear warheads and decoys against a range of targets. Every US president knows they have the power on any day to unleash about 1,000 nuclear warheads from just this one component of the total nuclear force. Rushing extra boomers out to sea as a political signal would be hugely disruptive to the careful preparation and maintenance schedules for rotating boats and crews that 'continuous at-sea deterrence' requires. It would be contemplated only in the most dire circumstances and would simply add more overkill to America's already huge capabilities. Russia is outmatched by the destructive power of America's boomers, but nonetheless maintains a more than adequate deterrent in the form of its own nuclear submarine force. Moscow has been phasing out its Soviet-era Delta design in favour of newer Borei-class boomers. At present Russia is thought to keep maybe three of its older Delta boats and seven of its eight Borei submarines available for launching nuclear missiles. Each Borei-class boat can launch 16 Bulava missiles, with up to six independent warheads apiece, each of which has a 6,000-mile range. Unlike the extravagant American undersea presence across two oceans, Russia is believed to keep only one or two bombers on 'continuous at-sea deterrence' duties and relies instead on the ability to put other boats to sea rapidly in a time of crisis, offering a pretty loud signal to western intelligence agencies if they ever did it. Nevertheless, both the US and Russia have more than enough nuclear power prowling slowly through the deepest oceans to threaten each other with ultimate destruction. It's the most stable part of the strategic nuclear balance, part of the 'triad' of nuclear deterrence: heavy missiles launched from silos deep underground; air-launched glide bombs and missiles loaded with nuclear warheads; and submarine-launched ballistic missiles systems like Trident and Bulava. The sites of the underground silos are all known and might feasibly be hit before launching their missiles in a 'bolt from the blue' attack. Aircraft, too, can be detected and attacked before they release their armaments, or even while still on the ground. But the submarine out at sea can remain undetected, providing a guaranteed retaliatory weapon for both sides. Even in a massive, all-out first strike on the homeland, the boomers would still be intact — as would their threat of second-strike nuclear retaliation. The only hope for an aggressor would be simultaneously to cut into the firing chain that authorised a boomer to launch — a huge gamble for any attacker to take. This continuous, silent, shadow war has provided ample material for novelists and analysts alike. Tom Clancy was an obsessive amateur and in 1984 produced his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October, which contained astonishingly accurate technical information about the whole business. The Pentagon was alarmed at his independent powers of deduction. The secretary of the navy wanted to know 'who the hell cleared it?' When the nuclear missiles carried on Russian submarines only had a range of 1,500 miles, there were regular stories of Soviet boomers cruising around Bermuda, about 600 miles from the east coast of the US. That was true enough. But Nato's supreme commander (Atlantic) once remarked that he wished Russia would put more of its boomers so close: 'In the first hour of hostilities, we take them out,' he said. Operating near the enemy coast is always dangerous. In 1986 K-219, a Yankee-class Russian boomer, suffered an onboard explosion northeast of Bermuda. The Russians could not recover it. The CIA also secretly had a go. But the submarine was lost, taking all its nuclear weapons to the bottom with it. That catastrophe was turned into a realistic novel as well. In the world of submarines, the boomers are behemoths. The Ohio class weighs almost 19,000 tons, the Borei 24,000, and its Soviet-era predecessors were even bigger. The simple fact remains that these vessels can only perform their deterrent role properly by keeping very quiet, a long way out to sea and deep beneath it. Michael Clarke is visiting professor in defence studies at King's College London and a former director of the Royal United Services Institute
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Blow for Trump's ICE raids as court upholds ban on snatching people based on appearance or job
The Trump administration suffered another blow to its mass deportation agenda on Friday after an appeals court upheld a lower court's ruling that prevents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from detaining a person based on their appearance, native language, or job. A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles said the plaintiffs, a cohort of five individuals and three immigration advocacy organizations, were likely to succeed on their claim that ICE agents violated the Fourth Amendment by relying on four factors to form reasonable suspicion to support detention stops. Those four factors include apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, presence at a particular location such as a laborer pick-up site, and the type of work a person does. Three plaintiffs who are day laborers said in their original lawsuit against Trump administration officials that they were waiting to be picked up to go to a construction site job when ICE agents swooped in and intimidated them. The plaintiffs said the immigration law enforcement officers never identified themselves, stated they had arrest warrants, nor informed the plaintiffs of the bases for the arrests. The Ninth Circuit panel upheld a previous temporary injunction set by District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in June. In keeping with Trump's mass deportation agenda, immigration law enforcement officers were deployed throughout Southern California to begin conducting sweeping raids. Many of those raids, according to the lawsuit, were conducted at 'certain types of businesses' such as car washes, because immigration law enforcement officials determined those businesses were more likely to hire people without legal documentation. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit referred to those as 'roving patrols' and said they were being detained without reasonable suspicion. The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable search and seizures. The raids, which led to protests in downtown Los Angeles back in May, have been challenged by multiple individuals and immigration advocacy groups. One plaintiff, Jason Brian Gavidia, said ICE agents stopped him in June after he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California. Gavidia, who is an American citizen, identifies as Latino and said ICE agents pushed him up against a chain-link fence and interrogated him. Even after Gavidia gave ICE agents his Real ID, they seemingly did not believe him. In her earlier ruling, Frimpong said Gavidia and other plaintiffs were likely to succeed 'in proving that the federal government is indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.' Frimpong ordered immigration law enforcement not to rely solely on the four factors 'except as permitted by law.' While the appeals court panel upheld much of Frimpong's ruling, they did strike the 'except as permitted by law,' saying that language was too vague.
