President Donald Trump abruptly ended his weekend interview with Meet the Press Moderator Kristen Welker after he was pressed for evidence to back up his baseless claims of election fraud in California’s primary races. The president also defended his administration’s controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. NBC’s Garrett Haake reports for TODAY.
Iran declared an end to its latest strikes against Israel, after tit-for-tat attacks that prompted President Donald Trump to call for a halt to fighting. The escalation followed renewed fighting between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, which remains a sticking point in peace negotiations. (Source: Bloomberg)
Former national security adviser John Bolton on Sunday warned that President Trump’s actions in the war against Iran could spark a nuclear arms race. “Whatever deal President Trump makes with Iran, his often-contradictory decisions during the conflict have laid the groundwork for more nuclear proliferation in the Middle East,” Bolton said in an opinion piece…
This Monday night, June 8, President Donald Trump is planning to attend an NBA Finals game at New York City's Madison Square Garden. But the Queens native is unpopular in his home town, which is predominantly Democratic. And according to the Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond, Trump is "widely expected to be showered with boos" at the NBA (National Basketball Association) game — where the New York Knicks will be competing with the San Antonio Spurs.Trump, Diamond reports, was invited by Knicks owner James Dolan."Some sports fans and analysts have urged Trump not to attend the game — commentator Stephen A. Smith said it would create an unnecessary spectacle — or pledged to jeer the president," Barrett explains in the Post. "Online betting services also predict Trump will be booed in his visit to deep-blue New York City and the Knicks' arena, Madison Square Garden. The team's fans are famously unforgiving — quick to taunt rival players, the team's own stars and recent New York mayor Eric Adams just days after his inauguration."Barrett continues, "As an added frustration, Trump's presence will create logistical hurdles for the roughly 20,000 other attendees, who have been told to arrive at least two hours before tip-off because of the enhanced security measures that follow the president."Dan Pfeiffer, who served as an adviser to former President Barack Obama, suggested that the high price of NBA Finals tickets could make Trump less likely to be booed at Madison Square Garden.Pfeiffer told the Post, "(A) typical Madison Square Garden crowd would boo the daylights out of Trump, but he might benefit from a crowd willing to spend $10,000 to sit in the rafters."Harrison Fields, a former White House deputy press secretary, told the Post, " New York City and an NBA audience might be considered hostile territory, but when has that ever stopped the president?"In a June 5 post on X, sportswriter Shea Serrano encouraged NBA Finals attendees at Madison Square Garden to "boo this m– – so thunderously when they show him on the jumbotron that my TV vibrates off the wall."Serrano told the Post, "His decision to attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals will do for the game what his participation in seemingly everything does: make it actively worse, in one way or another, for everyone else involved."Progressive New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an ally of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is also expected to attend the game and, according to Barrett, "has been embraced by some fans for his willingness to join them in the rafters."
Fans of the New York Knicks are telling President Donald Trump, who once called New York his home, to "stay home" instead of attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night, according to a new report. MS NOW's Laura Haefeli spoke with several Knicks fans in New York on Sunday after it was announced that the team's watch party was canceled because of Trump's attendance at the game. The Knicks, in conjunction with the New York Police Department and the Secret Service, decided to cancel the event, which was scheduled to be held near Madison Square Garden. Instead, the parties will be held in Central Park and in Brooklyn, miles away from the arena. Knicks fans who spoke with Haefeli expressed frustration and consternation over the decision to cancel the watch parties near MSG. "Please, Mr. Trump, stay home," one Knicks fan said. "Do not jinx my Knicks because no McDonagh in the next 100 years will vote Republican. Just like we haven't voted Republican since the 1950s.""Enjoy being in New York. Enjoy the stadium. Don't be too much of a distraction, and let's keep everything about what's important, and that's Knicks basketball," another fan said. "It's going to be impossible to get on this block," another fan told Haefeli outside of MSG. "It's going to be a long walk in for a lot of these fans. It's going to be hard for them to get in. But you know what? That's what's going to need to happen to keep everybody in there safe. You know, I get it. It's going to be a pain for a lot of people to get in there."The Knicks lead the series against the Spurs 2-0. Game 3 will tip off on Monday at 8:30 p.m. ET.
The New York Knicks return home to Madison Square Garden riding a historic 13-game playoff win streak and two wins from the NBA championship, but many fans worry that President Donald Trump could jinx them.The president will attend Game 3 back in his hometown, which is forcing the cancellation of some watch parties that have sprung up around New York City during his year's postseason, and panelists on MS NOW's "Morning Joe" wondered whether his injection of partisan politics will end the team's good fortunes."I think we close out by looking ahead to tonight, which was going to be a huge party," said co-host Mika Brzezinski. "I mean, people were going to party and then they were going to party outside Madison Square Garden. There were going to be post parties and pre-parties, and the streets were going to be filled with joy, and how is that still happening?""It'll still happening in New York City, but it's not going to happen near Madison [Square] Garden, which is where it's been the heart of this, these sort of organic fan gatherings – wild scenes, pretty funny stuff, frankly, and yet, because President Trump has chosen to attend tonight's game three of the NBA Finals, Knicks up 2-0 on the [San Antonio] Spurs. That stuff can't happen, and there – you're a Knicks fan. There are a lot of Knicks fans like yourself who are deeply apprehensive that, as the as the kids say, the vibes are immaculate around this team, but Trump might ruin it."Journalist Pablo Torre expressed trepidation about the president's attendance and its possible impact on the Knicks chasing their first title since 1973."They're careening into a a historic ditch if this is how this goes," Torre said, "and look, Knicks fans, I grew up one, born and raised blocks from the Garden. We're always waiting for the next shoe to drop, and if that shoe belongs to the president as he walks in through the VIP secret tunnel that no fan can afford to enter, right. I cannot help but think sports, like America, has an affordability crisis right now, and the most on-the-nose is just exemplar of this is this story. You can't even be outside. You can't even be outside, let alone inside, and so who's this for? What's it about?""I thought the Knicks were ours as a city, turns out none of it is ours," Torre added. "It belongs to the same guy that we've spent now, you guys have spent hours this morning taking us from the Middle East to private prisons and into, of course, the question of whose birthday is this again? It's all his birthday party, that's what we are learning."
With his grip on the South Carolina Republican primary suddenly less certain than anyone anticipated, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is calling in the biggest favor he has — President Donald Trump.Graham announced Monday that Trump has agreed to join a last-minute tele-rally Monday evening ahead of Tuesday's GOP primary, urging supporters to dial in at 5:30 p.m. "I'm proud to be endorsed by President Trump, and I'd be honored to have you join us for a Tele-Rally TONIGHT at 5:30 PM," Graham wrote on X.The move underscores an uncomfortable reality for the four-term incumbent: heading into Tuesday's vote, Graham cannot be certain he will clear the 50% threshold South Carolina requires to avoid a June 23 runoff.The most recent polling tells a mixed story. A late-May Citadel Poll of likely Republican primary voters had Graham at just 46% — four points short of the runoff barrier — with challenger Mark Lynch at 36%. A Trafalgar Group survey conducted around the same time showed a more comfortable 52%-28% edge, and a poll released Saturday by The Public Sentiment Institute put Graham at 51% to Lynch's 26%.The wild card is Graham's hawkish support for the U.S.-Israel war against Iran. Lynch has made it the centerpiece of his challenge, arguing Graham is focused on prolonging a conflict South Carolinians are growing tired of. "People are tired of him getting [the United States] into endless, needless wars," Lynch told the Christian Science Monitor in a piece published Monday.The TPSI poll found that among voters who believe Israel has too much influence in American politics — roughly 36% of the Republican electorate — Lynch actually led Graham, 37% to 33%.Graham has shown no sign of backing down. "If you're scared of losing your job, you cannot be a very good senator," he told the Post and Courier, according to the Christian Science Monitor.Trump formally endorsed Graham on June 4, urging South Carolina Republicans to vote for him, and Graham has leaned hard into that alliance. But with Lynch self-funding his campaign to the tune of $5 million and anti-establishment energy running high, Trump's voice on a phone line may be the deciding factor between a clean win and two more weeks of political headaches for the Palmetto State's senior senator.
After returning to the White House on January 20, 2021, President Donald Trump made a point of picking staunch MAGA loyalists for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI — including FBI Director Kash Patel, former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche (now acting AG) and federal prosecutor Jeanine Pirro. And according to New York Times reporter Devlin Barrett, the Trump-era DOJ relentlessly searched for evidence of a "deep state" conspiracy against the president."It was an investigation long sought by Kash Patel, the FBI director, and it was announced not in court papers, but through a haze of cigar smoke on Joe Rogan's podcast in early June of last year," Barrett explains in the Times. "Mr. Patel's prized criminal inquiry, known as 'the grand conspiracy case,' sought to tie together actions by a group of people that President Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and the criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump in 2023 and 2024."Barrett continues, "In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, there was a 'deep state' cabal that had sought across multiple administrations and agencies to bring him down. Mr. Patel told Mr. Rogan he had found a secret room of evidence inside FBI headquarters confirming his long-held suspicions."Patel, according to Barrett, believed that old DOJ files showed evidence of a conspiracy against Trump — and that obsession "became a defining feature of the Trump administration's politicization of the Justice Department." But DOJ veterans who weren't MAGA loyalists, Barrett reports, pushed back."Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Mr. Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James B. Comey, who was the FBI director at the time, and John O. Brennan, who had been the CIA director," Barrett notes. "Mr. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them…. The premise of the 'grand conspiracy' was that Mr. Comey and his allies had concocted the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Mr. Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him."Barrett adds, "To Mr. Patel, the case consolidated years of his complaints and accusations about Democrats and national security officials. To many career Justice Department veterans, the case looked more like Frankenstein's monster — a motley assortment of long-dead investigations that were now supposed to be stitched together and brought to life."
President Donald Trump expressed concern on Monday that the Los Angeles mayoral race was manipulated in favor of Democrats, after the leading Republican candidate saw his lead fall away, appearing to dash hopes of flipping the seat red. In Los Angeles, the top two vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election, regardless of […]