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Education secretary Linda McMahon looks on while Donald Trump speaks after signing executive orders in the Oval Office in April of this year Photograph: Samuel Corum/UPI/REX/Shutterstock
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US supreme court allows Trump to resume gutting education department
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics amid the news that “America’s students will be the best, brightest, and most highly educated anywhere in the world,” according to Donald Trump as he welcomed the supreme court’s decision to allow him to resume dismantling the Department of Education.
In a late night post on Truth Social, the president said:
The United States Supreme Court has handed a Major Victory to Parents and Students across the Country, by declaring the Trump Administration may proceed on returning the functions of the Department of Education BACK TO THE STATES.
Now, with this GREAT Supreme Court Decision, our Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, may begin this very important process. The Federal Government has been running our Education System into the ground, but we are going to turn it all around by giving the Power back to the PEOPLE.
America’s Students will be the best, brightest, and most Highly Educated anywhere in the World. Thank you to the United States Supreme Court!
The three liberal justices on the court dissented over the decision which will allow McMahon – a founder of World Wrestling Entertainment – to lay off nearly 1,400 staff.
Education secretary Linda McMahon said it’s a “shame” it took the Supreme Court’s intervention to let Trump’s plan move ahead.
“Today, the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious: the president of the United States, as the head of the executive branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies,” McMahon said in a statement.
A lawyer for the Massachusetts cities and education groups that sued over the plan said the lawsuit will continue, adding no court has yet ruled that what the administration wants to do is legal.
“Without explaining to the American people its reasoning, a majority of justices on the US Supreme Court have dealt a devastating blow to this nation’s promise of public education for all children. On its shadow docket, the Court has yet again ruled to overturn the decision of two lower courts without argument,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.
Read the full story here:
Also overnight, Trump said he was “disappointed but not done” with Vladimir Putin in comments to the BBC’s journalist Gary O’Donoghue. It followed yesterday’s Oval Office meeting with Nato’s chief, Mark Rutte, in which Trump promised a new weapons deal for Ukraine and threatened to impose “severe” sanctions on Russia if the war does not end within 50 days.
The interview also touched on the assassination attempt against him, how he is looking forward to his state visit to the UK and his immigration and tax policies and we will bring you some major lines shortly.
In other news:
-
Mike Waltz will face questioning from lawmakers for the first time since he was ousted as national security adviser. President Donald Trump has nominated him to be US ambassador to the United Nations, and he’s set to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing Tuesday.
-
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, thanked Donald Trump for saying that European nations, led by Germany and Norway, could purchase US-made Patriot missile air-defense systems on Ukraine’s behalf, to help defend the country against aerial bombardment by Russia.
-
Donald Trump sowed widespread confusion when said that the US “would be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days” to halt Russia’s war on Ukraiune. “Tariffs at about 100%,” Trump added, “you’d call them secondary tariffs, you know what that means.” No one knew what that meant.
-
A coalition of mostly Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit today challenging a move by Trump’s administration to withhold about $6.8bn in congressionally approved federal funding for K-12 schools.
-
Trump continued his attacks on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, calling the central banker a “stupid guy” and a “knucklehead” as the president called for interest rates to be lowered to 1% or less.
-
As Trump faced blowback from supporters over his administration’s decision to not release more information about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, more attention was being paid to the president’s evasive answer on the subject during a portion of an interview with Fox News last year that was not broadcast.
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Trump says he thinks about assassination attempt 'as little as possible'
Donald Trump also reflected on the attempted assassination of him, which the BBC journalist Gary O’Donoghue witnessed at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July.
Speaking to BBC News, he said:
We had 55,000 people, and it was dead silence. And so, you know, I assumed that they expected the worst.
And so I had to let them know I was OK, which is what I did. That’s why I tried to get up as quick as possible. They had a stretcher ready to go. I said: ‘No, thank you.’
I actually had a big argument with them. They wanted me on a stretcher. And I said: ‘Nope, I’m not doing that.’
Trump said he did not like to spend time thinking about that day – but acknowledged it could affect him deeply if he started to dwell on it.
He said:
I like to think about it as little as possible.
I don’t like dwelling on it, because if I did, it might be life changing. I don’t want it to be that.
In that BBC interview, president Donald Trump said that he was convinced the UK would come to the US’s aid if it were at war.
He said:
I think they would be, I don’t think a lot of the other countries would be.
It’s a special relationship. Look, that’s why I made a deal with them … for the most part in terms of your competitors and in terms of the European Union, I haven’t made a deal.
Now the UK is very special … they have been a really true ally.
Trump, who has previously been a key advocate of Brexit, also suggested he did not think the potential had been fulfilled – but said Starmer was making progress:
No, I think, I think it’s been on the sloppy side, but I think it’s getting straightened out. I really like the prime minister a lot even though he’s a liberal, I think he’s, you know, he did a good trade deal with us.
US supreme court allows Trump to resume gutting education department
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics amid the news that “America’s students will be the best, brightest, and most highly educated anywhere in the world,” according to Donald Trump as he welcomed the supreme court’s decision to allow him to resume dismantling the Department of Education.
In a late night post on Truth Social, the president said:
The United States Supreme Court has handed a Major Victory to Parents and Students across the Country, by declaring the Trump Administration may proceed on returning the functions of the Department of Education BACK TO THE STATES.
Now, with this GREAT Supreme Court Decision, our Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, may begin this very important process. The Federal Government has been running our Education System into the ground, but we are going to turn it all around by giving the Power back to the PEOPLE.
America’s Students will be the best, brightest, and most Highly Educated anywhere in the World. Thank you to the United States Supreme Court!
The three liberal justices on the court dissented over the decision which will allow McMahon – a founder of World Wrestling Entertainment – to lay off nearly 1,400 staff.
Education secretary Linda McMahon said it’s a “shame” it took the Supreme Court’s intervention to let Trump’s plan move ahead.
“Today, the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious: the president of the United States, as the head of the executive branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies,” McMahon said in a statement.
A lawyer for the Massachusetts cities and education groups that sued over the plan said the lawsuit will continue, adding no court has yet ruled that what the administration wants to do is legal.
“Without explaining to the American people its reasoning, a majority of justices on the US Supreme Court have dealt a devastating blow to this nation’s promise of public education for all children. On its shadow docket, the Court has yet again ruled to overturn the decision of two lower courts without argument,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.
Read the full story here:
Also overnight, Trump said he was “disappointed but not done” with Vladimir Putin in comments to the BBC’s journalist Gary O’Donoghue. It followed yesterday’s Oval Office meeting with Nato’s chief, Mark Rutte, in which Trump promised a new weapons deal for Ukraine and threatened to impose “severe” sanctions on Russia if the war does not end within 50 days.
The interview also touched on the assassination attempt against him, how he is looking forward to his state visit to the UK and his immigration and tax policies and we will bring you some major lines shortly.
In other news:
-
Mike Waltz will face questioning from lawmakers for the first time since he was ousted as national security adviser. President Donald Trump has nominated him to be US ambassador to the United Nations, and he’s set to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing Tuesday.
-
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, thanked Donald Trump for saying that European nations, led by Germany and Norway, could purchase US-made Patriot missile air-defense systems on Ukraine’s behalf, to help defend the country against aerial bombardment by Russia.
-
Donald Trump sowed widespread confusion when said that the US “would be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days” to halt Russia’s war on Ukraiune. “Tariffs at about 100%,” Trump added, “you’d call them secondary tariffs, you know what that means.” No one knew what that meant.
-
A coalition of mostly Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit today challenging a move by Trump’s administration to withhold about $6.8bn in congressionally approved federal funding for K-12 schools.
-
Trump continued his attacks on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, calling the central banker a “stupid guy” and a “knucklehead” as the president called for interest rates to be lowered to 1% or less.
-
As Trump faced blowback from supporters over his administration’s decision to not release more information about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, more attention was being paid to the president’s evasive answer on the subject during a portion of an interview with Fox News last year that was not broadcast.
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