Trump news: Fox News to air advert blaming mass shooting on president 'stoking fire of racists'
Catch-up on events as they happened
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Donald Trump will face a shock on Wednesday morning when his favourite breakfast show Fox and Friends runs an attack advert paid for by 2020 Democratic presidential challenger Julian Castro in which the candidate accuses him of “stoking the fire of racists” and inspiring the El Paso mass shooting.
As the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to unfold, Donald Trump says he has “no idea” if Bill Clinton was involved in the disgraced financier’s death, accusing former President Bill Clinton of lying about his air travel on Epstein’s planes.
The president has been heavily criticised for promoting the unfounded theory that the Clintons were somehow involved in Epstein’s death.
Attorney General William Barr has expressed concern at the “serious irregularities” surrounding the death of the billionaire paedophile – a former friend of Mr Trump – in his Manhattan jail cell over the weekend.
The FBI conducted a raid on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, according to reports, as two guards assigned to watch the disgraced financier before his apparent suicide in prison were put on administrative leave.
Jeffrey Epstein: Controversies surrounding paedophile billionaire
Show all 9The president meanwhile took a break from his vacation to speak about energy investments at a Shell complex in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. During the speech Mr Trump launched a series of attacks, primarily focusing his sights on 2020 Democratic candidates. He criticised Elizabeth Warren, using his common slur of “Pocahontas”, before moving onto “sleepy” Joe Biden.
The president then went on to attack his home state of New York, in a rambling tirade about power outages and lawsuits. “They’re burdened with power outages,” he said. “New York energy rates are through the roof. All New York likes to do is sue me, they like to sue me, they’re always suing. They sue me for everything so they can try to stop us by any means possible.”
Donald Trump has meanwhile wrongly claimed that the US has “similar, more advanced” missile technology to that currently being experimented with in Russia, apparently alluding to the nuclear-powered cruise rockets developed under Project Pluto in the 1960s during the Cold War, an initiative that was ultimately dismissed as “too crazy” to be viable.
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Let's check on the Democratic 2020 candidates.
- Tulsi Gabbard, not shy of hammering on about her military experience like Danny Chung from Veep, has announced she is leaving the campaign trail for two weeks to go on active-duty training in Indonesia to fulfill her National Guard obligations.
"While some people are telling me, 'Gosh, this is a terrible time to leave the campaign. Can't you find a way out of it?' That's not what this is about," the Hawaii Democrat said in a press statement. "I look forward to joining my fellow soldiers for a joint-training exercise with the Indonesian military, focused on counter-terrorism and disaster response."
- Kamala Harris has been branded "ridiculous" by the National Rifle Association over her proposed gun reform legislation, which would introduce near universal background checks and end a number of prevailing loopholes.
She has also been attacked by an old lady in a care home parroting Fox News lines and been called out for hypocrisy after eating a pork chop at the Iowa State Fair.
- John Delaney, meanwhile, has been on a slide and demonstrated all the gleeful zest for life of a clothing store mannequin.
For Indy Voices, Nash Riggins cautions the UK against taking John Bolton's bait on Brexit.
A retweet from Your Favourite President (TM): 12 days old and utterly infantile.
Also for Voices, James B Stewart writes about his encounter with Jeffrey Epstein and the billionaire's boast that he knew the secrets of the rich and powerful.
A little analysis on Trump's latest approval ratings from CNN.
Yikes. Florida congressman and Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz outdoing himself here.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly set to ask Trump to formally withdraw his request for $5bn (£4bn) for the construction of the US-Mexico border wall and ask that the president instead use those funds to address gun violence and white supremacy, according to Politico.
Schumer will suggest the funding goes toward Homeland Security's counter-violent extremism programmes and bankroll FBI domestic terrorism investigations, as well as Centers for Disease Control gun violence research.
"The dual scourges of gun violence and violent white supremacist extremism in this country are a national security threat plain and simple, and it's time the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress start[ed] treating them as such,” Schumer said in a statement to the news outlet.
“Now Republicans and this administration need to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to addressing gun violence and stopping the rise of domestic terrorism, especially stemming from white supremacy,” he added.
Trump couldn't stay away long from Twitter for long, posting on baseball star Curt Schilling's shift into politics and his own golf game with the PGA Tour's John Daly, joining in the mockery of Chris Cuomo and slamming "Fake News" coverage of China.
Wow. 2020 candidate Julian Castro has bought advertising space on Fox and Friends tomorrow to address the president directly and blame him for the recent Texas mass shooting.
"As we saw in El Paso, Americans were killed because you stoked the fire of racists. Innocent people were shot down because they look different from you. Because they look like me. They look like my family,” he says in the video.
"Julian isn't afraid of Donald Trump or his bigoted agenda, and will continue to expose his racism and division until he defeats him next November," Maya Rupert, Castro's campaign manager, said in a statement.
Mass retailer Walmart - whose store at the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, Texas, was the scene of the mass shooting in which 22 people lost their lives and 24 more were injured on 3 August - has been criticised for selling pro-gun T-shirts (!) on its website.
That really does beggar belief.
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