Donald Trump is returning to Washington after his four-day trip to Asia for the G20, which culminated in his historic crossing of the Demilitarised Zone between North Korea and South Korea at the invitation of dictator Kim Jong-un.
In doing so, Mr Trump became the first US president to step over the dividing line between the enemy states but his detractors have been quick to denounce the gesture as amounting to little more than a “photo opportunity” serving to legitimise a rogue nuclear power notorious for oppressing its people.
His daughter Ivanka has also been the victim of ridicule, cruelly mocked online for her unnecessary presence in Japan and Korea with the hashtag #unwantedivanka trending on Twitter. “Being someone’s daughter actually isn’t a career qualification,” commented Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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An upcoming court battle between the House Judiciary Committee and the White House over the former’s subpoena issued to former Trump counsel Don McGahn is about to test the concept of “immunity” as applied to presidential advisers, reports The Hill.
The White House advised McGahn not to testify before Congress after he became a person of interest to the committee due to his frequent citations in the Mueller report, particularly in relation to instances of possible obstruction of justice involving the president.
Legal experts warn the debate could rumble on for years but ultimately have major ramifications for government.
“This long-standing principle is firmly rooted in the Constitution’s separation of powers and protects the core functions of the presidency, and we are adhering to this well-established precedent in order to ensure that future presidents can effectively execute the responsibilities of the office of the presidency,” White House lawyer Pat Cipollone wrote in a letter to Judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler in May.
But Democrats feel differently.
“It’s been pulled out of a hat,” says congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the Judiciary panel. “Presidential lawyers citing presidential lawyers from the past does not make judicial precedent. The kind of precedent we are willing to follow is precedent that comes from the courts.”
The opposition is keen to bring an end to the stonewalling tactic after White House lawyers made a farce of a the committee’s hearing with former Trump communication director Hope Hicks, who was stopped from answering some 150 questions relating to her tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
This was the response from The New York Times to John Bolton after the latter questioned its reporting on the Trump administration’s intentions towards North Korea.
Hilariously, . and Friends this morning celebrated Trump’s step into North Korea by playing DJ Khaled in the studio.
Brian Kilmeade: “Was this the music blasting at the DMZ?”
Ainsley Earhardt: “Yes it was.”
Here’s Greg Evans of Indy100 with the latest evidence to suggest the president of the United States actually thinks stealth bombers are invisible.
Trump claimed in South Korea that Barack Obama practically begged for the sort of meeting with Kim Jong-un he himself had just secured.
That’s not how former director of national intelligence James Clapper remembers it.
This was the scene outside the Elizabeth Detention Centre in New Jersey on Sunday as Jewish protesters gathered to demand the Trump administration “close the camps” after reports emerged of the appalling conditions prevailing within.
AOC was attacked by Republicans for calling these holding sites “concentration camps” but these demonstrators made their views on the matter abundantly clear.
Doing rather better is Trump challenger Pete Buttigieg, who raised a cool $24.8m (£19.6m) in campaign donations in the second quarter, up from $7.1m (£5.6m) in the first.
Joe Biden continues to find himself up against it and appears incapable of saying the right thing at the moment.
At a campaign fundraiser in Washington state on Saturday night, the candidate suggested that LGBT+ rights had come so far in America that, even five years ago, someone “making fun of a gay waiter” might have done so unchallenged.
“Not in Seattle!” the crowd cried back, according to Bioreports, accusing the former vice president of underestimating their city’s liberal credentials.
Biden was speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and just two days after his public image took a knock from Kamala Harris in Florida, forcing him to defend his record on civil rights.
Trump’s acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Kevin McAleenan is “not on solid ground”, according to The Hill, just 10 weeks after taking on the role from Kirstjen Nielsen, as the president’s inner circle demands the implementation of stricter immigration laws.
McAleenan was thought to be to a “tougher” appointment than Nielsen but was accused by incoming “border czar” Tom Homan on . last month of leaking news of mass deportations set to be carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to The Washington Post.
The Trump administration has been criticised for conducting a game of musical chairs at the border, after John Sanders abruptly left his position as head of Customs and Border Protection last week to be replaced by acting ICE boss Mark Morgan, who will now in turn be replaced by Matthew Albence.
Ken Cucinelli, an immigration hardliner and former Virginia attorney general, also recently came in as acting director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services office.
“I’ve made changes – very good changes,” Trump insisted this past week. “We’re moving some people around into different locations.”
A Canadian freelance political cartoonist has been fired from a number of broadsheet newspapers over his sketch of Donald Trump ignoring the bodies of dead migrants Oscar and Valeria Martinez – who drowned in the Rio Grande last week – to play golf.
Michael DeAdder has received support for his bold, confrontational work from fellow cartoonists across the world, with Martin Rowson of The Guardian tweeting the episode proves “once again that the greatest threat to Free Expression is & always has been newspaper editors & proprietors”.
Here’s Alessio Perrone with the full story.
The New York Times says this morning the Trump administration is considering agreeing a “nuclear freeze” with Pyongyang, allowing Kim Jong-un to retain his nuclear weapons so long as he doesn’t produce any more as part of “working level denuclearisation talks”.
Here’s an angry rebuttal from national security adviser John Bolton.
More on the always newsworthy AOC.
She has invited US Women’s World Cup star Megan Rapinoe for a tour of the House of Representatives given that the striker has said she won’t go to “the f***ing White House” so long as Donald Trump occupies it.
AOC has also hit back at odious Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan after he, inevitably, attacked her over her criticism of Ivanka Trump’s unwarranted schmoozing on the world stage.
In Washington, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has surged to third in a new Morning Consult poll after her impressive performance in the second party debate in Florida last week, where she took on front-runner Joe Biden in no uncertain terms.
She has since raised more than $2m (£1.6m) for her campaign in 24 hours through the sale of T-shirts featuring an old photograph of herself as a schoolgirl with the slogan “That little girl was me” – a reference to her line of attack during the debate over her experience of being “bussed” to a formerly segregated school in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s as a means of addressing its racial imbalance.
Here she is partying at San Francisco Pride over the weekend, celebrating as her popularity and profile continues to grow:
But Harris has also been the victim of a new “birther” conspiracy theory – like that which sought to discredit the 44th president Barack Obama – which was spread online by alt-right activist Ali Alexander and retweeted by the president’s eldest son Don Jr and questions whether she is an authentic “American black”.
Harris is of Jamaican and Indian descent but was born and raised in California.
“It won’t work,” says her campaign, while fellow 2020 contender Julian Castro called out Don Jr as a “coward” over the retweet.
TV presenter Meghan McCain, daughter of late Republican presidential candidate and Trump foe John McCain, likewise called the attack “disgusting and unquestionably racist”.
…To judges blocking the construction of his prized “big, beautiful” US-Mexico border wall.
Returning home, Trump has plenty of unresolved issues waiting for him that are unlikely to go away any time soon.
From protests over migrant detention centres…
This was Trump’s own assessment of his time in Asia.
Others took a more questioning view of his performance, in which he invited a tyrant into the international fold, criticised two former US presidents, failed to stand up to Vladimir Putin on election hacking and dodged a question on Saudi Arabia’s role in the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by praising the country’s monarchy.
Here’s Adam Forrest again on the president’s bond with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
. News anchor Tucker Carlson was also in South Korea to cover the trip and ended up tying himself in knots attempting to downplay Pyongyang’s atrocious human rights record.
“It’s a disgusting place obviously, so there’s no defending it. On the other hand, you know you’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country; it means killing people,” he told his parent network in a phone call home.
Here’s more from Zamira Rahim.
Another person who had a rough time of it at the hands of the media – quite literally so, in this case – was new White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who found herself bruised in a scrum with reporters at the DMZ in Panmunjom.
Here’s Maya Oppenheim’s report.
Ivanka was also present at her father’s meeting with Kim Jong-un, telling a reporter afterwards the experience was “surreal”.
On Monday morning, the hashtag #unwantedivanka was trending on Twitter, with the president’s daughter photoshopphed into seismic moments in history to superb effect.
Here’s more on that North Korean TV coverage of Freedom House from Tim Wyatt.
Before Sunday’s big moment on the Korean Peninsula, Trump had spent Friday and Saturday at the G20 summit of world leaders in Osaka, Japan, meeting with world leaders including Russian president Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping of China.
Naturally, he had some fairly big claims to make:
The presence of his daughter Ivanka at the summit was the source of much ridicule, not least after this excruciating clip of her trying and failing to interject in a conversation between Theresa May, French president Emmanuel Macron and Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund went viral.
The reaction on the faces of world leaders in this press shot, particularly Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and his Italian counterpart Guiseppe Conte, said it all.
Among the most withering responses came from Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Being someone’s daughter actually isn’t a career qualification,” she said.
