Editor of military news outlet that first revealed US aircraft carrier crisis says he was fired over interview – live

Key events

Trump again denies that taxpayers will fund his ballroom, despite evidence it will drain hundreds of millions from US budget

Speaking to reporters on his way to a political rally in South Carolina, Donald Trump was asked if he could “guarantee that no tax money will be used in the construction of the ballroom?”

The president replied, as he has for over a year, by insisting that the project would be entirely paid for by private donations, despite multiple reports that the project will drain hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from federal agencies.

“We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the ballroom and it’s all from people like me and great companies that are putting it up. It’s going to be close to $400 million and it’s all paid for by patriots and patriotic companies,” Trump said. “No taxpayer money for the ballroom at all.”

But the Washington Post reported in June that Trump’s claim is simply untrue. A project summary prepared by the ballroom contractor obtained by the Post showed that the total construction was expected to cost $600m, with more than half of the funds coming from taxpayers.

Two days later, the New York Times revealed that the Trump administration had shifted over $350m from the Secret Service’s budget to White House to pay for a secure military bunker underneath the luxury ballroom.

Trump thanks supreme court for allowing work to proceed on his 'Military/Ballroom Complex'

In a social media post on Friday, Donald Trump thanked the supreme court for allowing work to proceed, for now, on what he has taken to calling his White House “Military/Ballroom Complex”.

The president’s brief post was packed with misleading or false claims about the order and the ballroom he razed the entire East Wing of the White House to start building.

“We are grateful for the Decision of the United States Supreme Court”, Trump wrote, mischaracterizing the single-sentence order from one justice, John Roberts, as a decision of the court. In fact, Roberts only lifted a preliminary injunction from a lower court that had blocked above-ground work on the ballroom to give the full supreme court time to reach a final decision on whether the president can complete the project.

“The Military/Ballroom Complex being built on the hallowed grounds of the White House, which is so vital for National Security, will be THE GREATEST OF ITS KIND!” Trump continued, continuing to cast the creation of a vast reception hall on the White House grounds as somehow motivated by a concern to increase security around the presidential residence.

A White House bunker beneath the East Wing, demolished by Trump in his rush to construct his ballroom, does need to be replaced, but he is simply solving a problem he created. Trump was reportedly rushed into the bunker by the Secret Service in 2020, as protesters rallied to decry police violence against Black Americans after the murder of George Floyd.

“It is something that Presidents have wanted for 150 years, and that the Military has been seeking for the last 100 years,” Trump continued, repeating an entirely unsourced claim he has been making for more than a year now.

“Their wish will soon be fulfilled! Construction is under budget and ahead of schedule,” he concluded. Although this is a claim Trump has been making about building projects since his days as a real estate developer, it is clearly not true that construction of the ballroom is “under budget” given that the White House first said the ballroom would cost approximately $200m when it was unveiled in July 2025, before the president started calling if a $400m project, and the contractor hired for the ballroom reportedly told the White House in March that the project cost had soared to $600m, according to a document obtained by the Washington Post.

Senator Chuck Schumer, who leads the Democratic minority in the Senate, denounced the supreme court order Trump hailed.

“The MAGA Supreme Court is rubber stamping Trump’s vanity-driven, gilded corruption,” Schumer posted in response to the news.

“As costs skyrocket, the administration is wasting money on an endless and illegal war, corporate giveaways, and Trump’s pet projects,” Schumer added. “We will continue to fight this flagrant waste of taxpayer money relentlessly in the courts.”

Stars and Stripes editor says he has been fired for insubordination after doing interview

In an update to my earlier post, the Pentagon is confirmed to have fired the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, Erik Slavin, as well as its publisher, Max Lederer, and a reporter, Slavin has told the Associated Press.

Slavin said he was dismissed for insubordination after an interview he gave that objected to any potential censorship by the US military.

He told the AP he was fired “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line”. He added that he stands by the principle “that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent”.

Earlier this week, Lederer announced his retirement effective at the end of September. He too received a separation notice, according to Slavin, as did the Middle East reporter Lara Korte.

Trump threatens think tank with $5bn lawsuit over report that found 'no evidence' that his national guard deployments had affected crime rate

The New York Times (paywall) reports that Donald Trump has threatened a prominent progressive think tank with a $5bn lawsuit over a report that found the president’s expensive deployment of the national guard and other federal agents has done little to reduce violent crime in Washington DC and other cities.

Trump regularly touts his supposed success in taking DC “from high crime to no crime”. For instance, a few weeks ago he told reporters in the Oval Office: “This was the crime capital, frankly, of the world. It was the most unsafe capital of any country in the world. Now, it’s one of the safest, and it’s one of the safest places in the United States.”

Last month, the Center for American Progress published findings that Trump’s deployments had failed to reduce violent crime despite its claims of success. The analysis highlighted that violent crime rates had already dropped before Trump took office again, and said his administration “is using these declines to justify expanding policies that are unpopular, ineffective, and costly”.

It’s summary reads:

Even though the data clearly show that violent crime and homicides were already dropping in American cities in 2023 and 2024, the Trump administration has continued to threaten city and state leaders and argue that its extreme actions, such as deploying the National Guard to support law enforcement operations, are improving public safety.

However, new Center for American Progress analysis finds no evidence that National Guard deployments have reduced violent crime. Moreover, if these deployments are extended and continue through the end of 2026, they could cost American taxpayers more than $1.7 billion.

This left the administration displeased. Per the NYT’s report:

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the suit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter, viewed by The New York Times, was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic official who served as a senior adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and to several of its board members.

Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump.

Tanden hit back, telling the Times in a statement that the center would “neither cower nor bend in the face” of legal action. She also defended the report, asserting that while its findings might have been “inconvenient to the Trump administration”, they were “grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis”.

She added:

This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless. A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that is contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us.

Pentagon moves to fire publisher and editor of Stars and Stripes - report

The Pentagon has moved to fire both the publisher and the editor in chief of Stars and Stripes, the leading US military news outlet partly funded by taxpayers, for alleged insubordination, CBS News reports.

Separation notices were delivered today, and give publisher Max Lederer and editor-in-chief Erik Slavin five days to appeal their dismissals, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to CBS News. The cause cited was insubordination, one of the people said. They did not elaborate on the details of the alleged insubordination.

Lederer, the publisher of the military daily for 19 years, had this week told colleagues he planned to retire on 30 September, citing fundamental differences with the Trump administration.

“It has become clear that my philosophy of leadership, and my understanding of value and mission of the Stars and Stripes, differ in fundamental ways from the direction of the leadership of the Department of Defense,” Lederer said in a letter to staff, which was posted on X.

CBS News reported on Wednesday that the Pentagon was considering firing him before then.

This comes days after the outlet revealed, along with the Navy Times, the deteriorating conditions and mental health crisis for service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which is on a record-breaking nine-month deployment in the Middle East as part of the US-Israel war on Iran.

To the dismay of family members, Donald Trump and his defence secretary Pete Hegseth have both downplayed concerns for those on the ship, which is finally heading home.

It is unclear whether that reporting is linked to the reported discussions inside the Pentagon. But Slavin has spoken publicly about disagreements with Pentagon leaders.

As my colleague Edward Helmore notes, Slavin hinted at tensions with the military brass just last month when he said the “foxhole” he would be willing to die in would be over editorial independence from the Pentagon, which provides about 65% of its funding.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, posted on X: “We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century. We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.”

Further to our earlier posts on the backlash over reports that a navy aircraft carrier set to honor a Black war hero may, instead, be named after Donald Trump, it seems worth noting that in Trump’s executive order last week, when he demanded that a new aircraft carrier under construction be redesigned to install steam catapults to launch fighter jets, there was no mention of the fact that the ship was to be named the USS Doris Miller, in honor of a Black hero of Pearl Harbor. The order did not refer to the ship at any point as the USS Miller, a name chosen by the navy during Trump’s first term, but instead used just the ship’s hull number, CVN-81.

Supreme court chief justice allows work on Trump’s $400m White House ballroom to continue for now

Chief Justice John Roberts is allowing the White House to continue construction on Donald Trump’s controversial $400m ballroom project for now, the Associated Press reports, as the supreme court considers the Trump administration’s emergency request to intervene in lawsuits over the project.

The brief, one-page document does not detail Roberts’ reasoning or lay out a timeline for a fuller decision from the high court.

Lower courts had ordered a halt to the project, finding that it must have congressional approval. That ruling was set to take effect today.

The administration has argued that the president has total authority to renovate the White House and other federal buildings as he sees fit and that the ballroom project must be completed due to national security concerns.

When Trump first announced the plans for a new ballroom, he did not emphasize national security.

He also said the project would be funded by private donations, including from himself. But in June it was revealed that the administration had quietly redirected $352m in federal funds designated for the Secret Service toward the project, after Congress explicitly refused to provide $1bn in funds for it.

Donald Trump speaks to the press at the construction site of the planned White House ballroom on 19 May. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Migrants reportedly flown to Equatorial Guinea after resisting Liberia deportation under Trump deal

Five people whom the US attempted to deport to Liberia this week resisted getting off the plane and were instead ⁠transported to Equatorial Guinea, another African ⁠country to which the ​Trump administration is removing migrants it cannot legally send home, two sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.

The incident represents an early snag in Washington’s plan to send up to 1,200 so-called third-country ⁠deportees to Liberia, one of the largest such deals it has struck in Africa despite criticism from immigrants’ rights advocates.

Third-country deportees have, in most cases, obtained legal protection against repatriation after US immigration judges ruled they risked torture ⁠or other abuses in their home countries.

Liberia announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to receive deportees and that the first group of 20 ​would arrive on Thursday. But a Liberian official, speaking on condition ‌of anonymity because of the sensitivity of ‌the matter, told Reuters today that only 15 deportees disembarked.

At least five others - three Cuban men, one Brazilian man and one Cameroonian ‌woman - refused to get off the plane in Liberia, according to three sources familiar with the incident, one of whom was a Honduran deportee on the flight.

Authorities then told them they would be flown to the US, but the plane instead headed to Malabo, in Equatorial Guinea, where the five were forced to disembark against their will, two of the sources said.

Liberia’s information ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on Friday.

The five are now being held with more than 30 other migrants whom the Trump ‌administration had previously sent to Equatorial Guinea under a deal that, like others in Africa, has been denounced by human rights groups and advocates who say many of the deportees are ultimately repatriated.

In May, human rights experts at the United Nations issued a rare public appeal to Equatorial Guinea, urging the country to halt its plans to return US deportees to their home countries, where they face political violence, torture and death.

The US state department said ​it remained “unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration and bolster America’s border security”.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said all the migrants “were deported to a safe third country”, adding: “If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.”

Doris Miller's family 'shocked' by Navy’s reported consideration of honoring Trump instead of black war hero

Further to CNN’s report that the US Navy is considering renaming an aircraft carrier set to honor WWII hero Doris Miller to potentially being named after Donald Trump instead, the outlet has interviewed the black Pearl Harbor hero’s great nephew.

Thomas Bledsoe told CNN the potential move is “quite a shock” and that the family were not notified beforehand. “Not only was it a shock, but it was also shocking that we found out from a new outlet [and not] from the Navy,” he said.

But this isn’t just about a name on a ship, he added.

It’s about an opportunity and a goal. It’s about what it means to be an American and it’s also about how we as a community can grow as one.

Less than three months to go until the midterms, voters are thinking about grocery prices, the Iran war and… datacenters.

This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to historian Jill Lepore about how this latest AI backlash could influence those all-important elections in November. Are we seeing the beginning of the end of the ‘artificial state’?