Trump says he will move aggressively to undo nationwide blocks on his agenda
An emboldened Trump administration plans to move aggressively to challenge blocks on the president's top priorities, a White House official said, following a major Supreme Court ruling that limits the power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions.
Government attorneys will press judges to pare back the dozens of sweeping rulings thwarting the president's agenda 'as soon as possible,' said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
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Newsweek
5 minutes ago
- Newsweek
Donald Trump Notches His Best Week Yet
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. President Donald Trump is coming off what may be his most successful week in office — perhaps of both terms — with a string of victories that reinforced the speed at which his administration is moving to radically reshape American policy, both foreign and domestic, ahead of a critical summer stretch. A landmark Supreme Court ruling, a successful NATO summit, a ceasefire that appears to be holding in the Middle East, another peace deal in Africa, a stock market back to setting records, a key trade breakthrough with China — capped off with the surprise emergence of a new political foil — all combined to shift the narrative in his favor, even as polls show him underwater on some of his signature issues. In a pivotal decision Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the power of individual judges to issue nationwide injunctions, a ruling that Trump hailed as "a monumental victory" that clears the way for his administration to reintroduce contested policies such as ending automatic birthright citizenship. "We can now promptly file to proceed with these numerous policies," a jubilant Trump said from the White House. "Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard," he posted on Truth Social, describing citizenship by birth as "a scam" on the U.S. immigration system. U.S. President Donald Trump takes part in a press conference on recent Supreme Court rulings in the briefing room at the White House on June 27, 2025 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Donald Trump takes part in a press conference on recent Supreme Court rulings in the briefing room at the White House on June 27, 2025 in Washington, DC. AP The court's 6-3 ruling marks a significant shift in how legal challenges to executive power may proceed, reinforcing Trump's long-standing criticism that district judges were overstepping their roles. The ruling did not address the constitutionality of Trump's proposed order to end birthright citizenship, which remains blocked, but it opens the door for narrower challenges that could now proceed on a case-by-case basis. Following the Supreme Court ruling, Trump hosted leaders from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda at the White House to sign the framework of a peace deal between the African neighbors intended to end a long-running and bloody conflict. Iran-Israel Ceasefire Holds Amid Fallout From U.S. Strikes In the Middle East, the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, personally brokered by Trump, held through the week, and U.S. officials offered new details to support the president's claim that American strikes had crippled key parts of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. "This was a devastating attack, and it knocked them for a loop," Trump said at a NATO summit at The Hague, dismissing initial intelligence suggesting a limited impact. People run along the beach promenade on June 27, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel. As Israel's government touts its victory over Iran after 12 days of war, and a sense of normalcy returns to daily... People run along the beach promenade on June 27, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel. As Israel's government touts its victory over Iran after 12 days of war, and a sense of normalcy returns to daily life here, Israelis are also recovering from a wave of aerial attacks that killed 28 people, caused an estimated $3 billion in damage, and tested the limits of its air-defense systems. MoreDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe echoed Trump's confidence, with Ratcliffe claiming "several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years." Meanwhile, Iran's own foreign ministry acknowledged "significant damage," though observers warned that full assessments could take weeks. "The bombing rendered the enrichment facility inoperable," said a joint statement by the White House and the Israeli Prime Minister's Office. Although some lawmakers, like Democratic Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, criticized the administration for not consulting Congress, the ceasefire and lack of immediate retaliation gave Trump a short-term diplomatic win. Markets Surge as Trump Fiscal Agenda Gains Momentum Financial markets responded positively to Trump's string of policy wins and signs of economic stabilization. The S&P 500 closed at a new high on Friday, driven by investor optimism over the administration's trade and tax proposals. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted that negotiations over new reciprocal tariffs are proceeding and could stretch beyond Trump's July 8 deadline. He told Fox Business that talks with 10 to 12 major trading partners might wrap by Labor Day. UNITED STATES - JUNE 24: Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent speaks with reporters in U.S. Capitol after attending the the Republican Senate luncheon on Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP... UNITED STATES - JUNE 24: Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent speaks with reporters in U.S. Capitol after attending the the Republican Senate luncheon on Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images) More Tom Williams/AP "If you can't get to a deal," Bessent said, "Trump is happy to go back to the high April 2 tariffs." Meanwhile, the administration's fiscal package, which includes steep cuts to SNAP benefits and other government programs, gained traction in the Senate following overnight revisions, clearing procedural hurdles and staying on pace for a vote as soon as this week. Trump also announced that the U.S. had finalized a long-sought agreement with China to resume the export of rare earth minerals crucial to American technology manufacturing. "We just signed with China the other day," Trump said, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Bloomberg that the deal was "signed and sealed." Bessent elaborated on the agreement, saying that Trump had "set the table with a very important phone call" with Chinese President Xi Jinping which had led to the U.S. securing the deal. "In dealing with the world's second largest economy, we approached each other with mutual respect," he added, adding that part of the agreement was tariffs coming down and rare earth magnets starting to flow back to the U.S. "They formed the core of a lot of our industrial base," he said. The Chinese Commerce Ministry confirmed it would approve export applications for "controlled items" and in turn, the U.S. would remove several restrictive measures on Chinese technologies. The agreement is a step toward easing a two-year trade standoff that had disrupted global supply chains . Progressive Challenger Emerges as New Target Back home, the rapid ascent of Zohran Mamdani—a Democratic Socialist who upset Andrew Cuomo in New York City's mayoral primary—has given Trump a fresh political foil. Trump-allied media and political surrogates seized on Mamdani's win as a sign of rising extremism within the Democratic Party. "They're going to run the most radical candidate in the country in the biggest city in the country," Vice President JD Vance said in an interview Friday. "That contrast is perfect." New York mayoral candidate, State Representative Zohran Mamdani, speaks to supporters during an election night gathering at The Greats of Craft LIC on June 24, 2025, in the Long Island City neighborhood of the Queens... New York mayoral candidate, State Representative Zohran Mamdani, speaks to supporters during an election night gathering at The Greats of Craft LIC on June 24, 2025, in the Long Island City neighborhood of the Queens borough in New York City. More Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Conservative groups have already begun circulating clips of Mamdani's past remarks, and Trump hinted at plans to use the young lawmaker's views to frame Democrats nationally in 2026. "The Democrats now belong to the socialists and the scammers," Trump said at a rally in Ohio earlier in the week. "This guy Mamdani—he's like the AOC of mayors. If you like riots and sanctuary cities, you'll love him." NATO Commits to Spending Boost After Trump Pressure Trump spent part of the week jetting to and from a summit of NATO leaders in The Netherlands, where he claimed another major foreign policy victory as alliance members agreed to dramatically increase their defense spending targets. Under the deal, nearly all NATO countries committed to raising military investment from 2 to 5 percent of GDP by 2035 — an increase Trump has been calling for since he started his political career a decade ago. "Without the support and without the leadership of Donald Trump, it would be impossible," said Polish President Andrzej Duda, according to a White House statement summarizing reactions from leaders across Europe. President Donald Trump meets NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. President Donald Trump meets NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. AP Photo/Alex Brandon The agreement, hailed by analysts and politicians as a breakthrough in transatlantic burden-sharing, was described as a "rebirth of NATO" by Dutch media. Even some longtime skeptics praised the result, including Finnish President Alexander Stubb who called it "a big win for Trump" and for Europe. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch said: "NATO's commitment to raise defense spending to 5 percent is a tremendous achievement. New investments in defense and industrial cooperation will strengthen the core pillar of NATO." The summit closed with Trump declaring that America's allies had finally begun to shoulder their "fair share" of the burden. House Speaker Mike Johnson added, "No more free rides for the rest of the world. No more using the American taxpayer as their own personal piggy banks. THIS is the Trump effect." Legal Setbacks, Intelligence Leak, and Weak Polling Undercut Trump's Agenda While Trump marked a week of substantial wins on trade, his administration also faced sharp criticism and legal controversy on several domestic and foreign fronts. A federal judge in Newark released Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and legal U.S. resident, who had spent 104 days in detention. The Trump administration accused him of spreading antisemitism through pro-Palestinian activism and moved to deport him. Judge Michael E. Farbiarz granted bail, citing evidence that the detention was politically motivated. Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil speaking after his release from federal immigration detention on Friday, June 20, 2025. Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil speaking after his release from federal immigration detention on Friday, June 20, 2025. Matthew Hinton/AP In another courtroom loss, a Nashville judge ordered the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was wrongly deported back in March. Judge Barbara D. Holmes dismissed claims that Abrego was a gang member or trafficker, saying prosecutors had exaggerated their case. "Abrego has no reported criminal history of any kind," she wrote. A leaked U.S. intelligence report also contradicted Trump's public statements about the impact of recent airstrikes on Iran. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in a low-confidence initial assessment that the strikes caused only limited delays to Iran's nuclear program and failed to destroy key underground sites. Trump had described the attacks as having "obliterated" the country's nuclear capacity. Still, the IAEA acknowledged the centrifuges at the Fordow enrichment facility had been destroyed, and Israeli intelligence contradicted the claims that the strikes were only partially successful. Poll numbers from Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin added to the mounting pressure. Net approval for Trump on inflation is now at -22.6 percent, with trade at -14.7 percent and the economy at -13.4 percent. Immigration, once a Trump strength, has dropped to -3.7 percent, following backlash to aggressive ICE operations and high-profile deportation cases.
CNN
25 minutes ago
- CNN
Big Trump wins, boomerang appeals define Supreme Court term
President Donald Trump unquestionably secured a big win as the conservative Supreme Court wrapped up its term this past week, but there were signs that the administration's long-running feud with the federal judiciary is far from over. Immigrant rights groups raced into lower courts hours after the justices handed down their final decisions, seeking to block Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship through class-action lawsuits. The outcome of those cases will almost certainly wind up back before the Supreme Court in short order. Uncertainty is also swirling around the court's other blockbuster 6-3 decision, handed down a week earlier, that upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. While the ruling will protect similar gender-affirming care bans in other conservative states, it did little to address other transgender legal disputes involving sports teams and health insurance coverage. 'In the high-profile cases, you see the court departing from settled precedent, changing the rules of the road, but ultimately leaving a lot open to be decided in the future,' Cecillia Wang, national legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN. 'It leaves us room to fight another day.' In all, the Supreme Court issued 62 opinions over the course of its nine-month term that began in October, including many that have already faded from memory. Just before Trump was inaugurated in January, the court upheld a controversial ban on TikTok that the president has since bypassed. And in March, a majority upheld Biden-era federal regulations on 'ghost guns,' mail-order kits that allow people to build untraceable weapons at home. Here are some of the major themes from the Supreme Court's term. Since he returned to power in January, Trump and his allies have waged a rhetorical war on the federal judiciary. But in recent weeks, the Supreme Court has repeatedly given the White House reason to celebrate. The birthright citizenship decision was the most notable example, but the court has also sided with the White House in a series of less high-profile emergency docket cases as well. Earlier in the week, the Supreme Court granted Trump's emergency request to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their homeland, including places like war-torn South Sudan. Trump has secured clear victories in eight of the last 10 emergency cases the court has decided, including decisions that allowed him to end humanitarian parole for certain migrants, to grant the Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive Social Security data, and to bar transgender Americans from serving in the military. At times, the Supreme Court's language has looked strikingly similar to the points Trump and his allies have been making for months. 'No one disputes that the executive has a duty to follow the law. But the judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation,' Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the court's birthright opinion. 'When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.' While the Supreme Court's term is over, the controversies the justices grappled with for weeks will likely be back — soon. As the justices rose from their mahogany bench Friday for their summer recess, it was increasingly clear that the rulings in their two most important cases — on transgender care and birthright citizenship — are likely returning to them in short order. The fallout from the conservative court's 6-3 decision to uphold Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors will land as soon as Monday, when the justices will decide how to deal with half a dozen other cases involving transgender issues pending on the docket, including appeals involving trans athletes. The birthright citizenship decision gave Trump's opponents a wide berth to maneuver their way back to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks. That fight got underway just hours after the Supreme Court handed down its blockbuster opinion Friday curbing the use of nationwide court orders to block Trump's agenda. The ACLU and others raced into lower courts with new litigation that will almost certainly shut down Trump's ability to enforce birthright citizenship again — rulings that, no matter how they turn out, will quickly be appealed. 'Justice Barrett's opinion doesn't actually prevent lower courts from quickly putting nationwide blocks on the birthright citizenship executive order back into place,' said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. If lower courts side with the pregnant mothers in a class-action case or with 22 blue states that also sued over the executive order, that would have the effect of pausing Trump's executive order while courts consider its constitutionality. 'It's not hard to imagine, if that happens, that the Trump administration will come right back to the court, which will then have to settle what it quite deliberately ducked on Friday,' Vladeck said. Just over 9% of the court's decisions this term were split along ideological lines, compared with 14% over the past four terms, according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog. About 4 in 10 decisions were unanimous, the data showed, which is consistent with past terms. 'There's a lot of litigation still to come on these,' said Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network and a former clerk to conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. 'But that is, in fact, why we consider those the big cases, because they're going to have a lot of downstream effects,' she added. 'There's always a period of the lower courts working out how to apply them.' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most junior member of the Supreme Court, but after three years on the bench, she is making sure her voice is heard. A series of scathing dissents penned by Jackson have, in recent days, drawn nearly as much attention as the court's majority opinions. Barrett's majority opinion in the birthright case spent a considerable amount of ink pushing back on Jackson's dissent, which she registered with 'deep disillusionment.' The junior justice described the majority's opinion as an 'existential threat to the rule of law' and a 'smokescreen.' 'Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,' Jackson wrote in her dissent. 'But this court's complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.' Days earlier, dissenting from a decision that sided with fuel producers, Jackson wrote that court's opinion left the impression that 'moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens.' And in a case dealing with whether Planned Parenthood and one of its patients could sue South Carolina over the state's decision to pull the organization's Medicaid funding, Jackson entered into a sharp exchange with Thomas over the meaning of a Reconstruction-era law that allows people to sue the government in federal court for potential violations of their civil rights. Jackson said that the majority, which barred Planned Parenthood's suit, was weakening 'the landmark civil rights protections that Congress enacted during the Reconstruction Era' and said the court's ruling 'is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.' 'At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them,' she wrote. 'And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians — and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country — of a deeply personal freedom: the 'ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.'' The Supreme Court has in recent terms sought to roll back the power of federal agencies to make decisions without approval from Congress. That was particularly evident last term, when the court struck down the so-called Chevron doctrine, a 1984 precedent that required judges to defer to an agency's interpretation of a statute in circumstances in which the law in question is vaguely written. But this term, the court rebuffed efforts by conservative groups to keep that momentum going. In some of those disputes, the Trump officials embraced positions originally taken by former President Joe Biden, even though the two administrations are diametrically opposed on many policies. And that put the Trump administration, at times, in the awkward position of defending a policy that Biden had backed but that was being challenged by conservative groups at the Supreme Court. In one of those cases, decided Friday, a 6-3 majority upheld a task force that recommends preventive health care services that insurers must cover at no cost under Obamacare. The Trump administration defended the task force over a challenge from a Texas company, Braidwood Management. The company was represented by Jonathan Mitchell, a veteran conservative lawyer who successfully defended Trump last year from an effort in Colorado to remove him from that state's primary ballot. The court also let stand a series of decades-old government programs that reduce the price of broadband internet and telephone services for poor and rural communities. The Federal Communications Commission pays for those programs with fees applied to Americans' phone bills. Groups had used the case to try to revive a New Deal-era legal doctrine that bars Congress from delegating its authority to federal agencies — a doctrine the court has not relied on since the 1930s. In an opinion joined by both conservative and liberal justices, the court signaled it was unlikely to do so again anytime soon. 'For nearly three decades, the work of Congress and the Commission in establishing universal service programs has led to a more fully connected country,' liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote for a 6-3 court. 'It has done so while leaving fully intact the separation of powers integral to our Constitution.'
Fox News
26 minutes ago
- Fox News
From Washington: Inside Operation Midnight Hammer
Over the weekend, the United States carried out targeted airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities. Dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer, the attack made U.S. history as the largest B-2 operation ever conducted. Retired Army General Joseph Votel formerly served as the U.S. CENTCOM Commander. He explains the time and planning that went into the operation, and discusses why President Trump made the decision to attack now. Then, cybersecurity expert and American AI Logistics CEO John Cofrancesco explained the risks of Iranian hacker retaliation, and how the U.S. is prepared to respond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
