Trump says FBI ‘may have to’ get involved after Texas Democrats flee state to forestall gerrymandering vote – live updates | Republicans

A federal judge on Tuesday stopped the Trump administration from taking $4bn that was meant to help communities prepare for natural disasters.

The US district judge Richard G Stearns in Boston approved a request from 20 Democrat-led states to temporarily block the move while their lawsuit continues.

The states argue that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) does not have the power to shut down the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program and use its $4bn for other purposes. The program is designed to strengthen infrastructure across the country to protect against storms.

Fema announced it was ending the program, but later told the court it was still reviewing it.

“Although the Government equivocates about whether it has, in fact, ended the BRIC program, the States’ evidence of steps taken by FEMA to implement the announced termination portend the conclusion that a determination has in fact been made and that FEMA is inching towards a fait accompli,” Stearns wrote in his ruling.

“The agency has cancelled new funding opportunities and informed stakeholders that they should no longer expect to obtain any unobligated funds,” he added.

Donald Trump said he will “probably not” run for a third term during an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box.

Still, Trump said, he’d “like to run”, and he has “the best poll numbers” he’s ever had.

The 22nd amendment limits a person being elected to the office of president no more than twice. Trump has previously said that there are “methods” – if not “plans” – to circumvent the constitutional limit preventing US presidents from serving three terms.

Trump’s approval rating declined six percentage points compared with last week in a Morning Consult poll. His numbers are also down four points compared with April in a University of Massachusetts poll. Both polls were released Monday.

During a Q&A session with reporters on Tuesday, Trump said that JD Vance would “probably be favored at this point” to lead the Maga movement when he finishes his second term in office.

Trump was asked whether he agreed that the “heir apparent” to Maga is Vance.

“Well, I think most likely, in all fairness, he’s the vice-president. I think Marco [Rubio] is also somebody that maybe would get together with JD in some form,” Trump said.

“It’s too early, obviously, to talk about it, but certainly he’s doing a great job, and he would be probably favored at this point,” Trump said.

Donald Trump said the FBI “may have to” get involved with helping Texas Republicans arrest Democrats who left the state to block a plan to redraw electoral boundaries.

“The governor of Texas is demanding they come back,” Trump told reporters today. “A lot of people have demanded they come back. You can’t just sit it out. You have to go back. You have to fight it out. That’s what elections are all about.”

Senator John Cornyn of Texas sent a letter to FBI director Kash Patel, imploring him to take “any appropriate steps” to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who have fled the state.

Donald Trump said he plans to name his pick for an open seat on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors “before the end of the week” after the surprise resignation of governor Adriana Kugler.

“We have a couple of candidates,” Trump said during a Q&A session at the signing of an executive order. “Everybody wants it,” he said, “but we’ve narrowed it to a couple of candidates.”

Whomever Trump names to Kugler’s seat will need to be confirmed by the Senate, and the term would be shortened to only a few months and require another Senate vote for a full 14-year term early next year.

He also said that the nominations for the Fed chair are “down to four people right now”.

The nomination for chair of the Fed board would require a separate nomination and Senate confirmation process. Trump has been critical of the current chair of the Fed, Jerome Powell, for not cutting interest rates, even as Fed policymakers balance evidence of both a slowing economy and a weakening job market against the fact that inflation remains well above the central bank’s 2% target and is expected to move higher.

Trump just signed an executive order to establish a taskforce before the 2028 Olympic Games.

The bill is geared toward mobilizing the federal government to “ensure the games are safe, seamless and historically successful”, according to Trump.

Trump will serve as chair of the taskforce, with JD Vance as vice-chair. State department secretary Marco Rubio, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem and other members of the Trump administration will also be members of the taskforce.

“Some of the greatest brands in America have stepped up to support these Olympic Games as commercial partners, and now, with the creation of this taskforce, we’ve unlocked the opportunity to level up our planning and deliver the largest and, yes, greatest games for our nation ever,” said Casey Wasserman, the chair of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee.

The games will be held in LA, the first to be hosted in the United States since the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

Wasserman said he expects more than 150 heads of state to come to the games, and that the city will host about 11,000 Olympic and 4,500 Paralympic athletes. The athletes will participate in 800 competitions at 49 venues, according to Wasserman.

More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.

The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.

Additionally, the letter blasts Republicans in Congress who “collaborated” with the Trump administration to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “in order to silence PBS and NPR”. And it says the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chair Brendan Carr, “openly conditioned its approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger on assurances that CBS would make ‘significant changes’ to the purported ideological viewpoint of its journalism and entertainment programming.

“These are un-American attempts to restrict the kinds of stories and jokes that may be told, to silence criticism and dissent,” the letter reads. “We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news.”

Read the full story here:

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer said she met with President Donald Trump today at the White House.

“I’ve always said that I’ll work with anyone to get things done for Michigan,” Whitmer said in a statement provided to The Associated Press. “That’s why I’ve continued to go to Washington, D.C. to make sure that Michiganders are front and center.”

Whitmer, once one of Trump’s political adversaries, said she traveled to the White House to discuss the impact tariffs are having “on Michigan’s economy, especially our auto industry.”

They also discussed “the harm Michigan will face due to changes in the Medicaid program,” according to Whitmer, due to the tax and spending bill signed into law by Trump.

Whitmer, a Democrat whose name has been discussed as a potential leading candidate for the party’s nominee for president in 2028, faces increasing scrutiny over her record and her friendlier relationship with Trump.

The Trump administration is considering releasing the transcript of Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, according to a report by CNN.

“A final decision has not been made,” a senior administration official told CNN. The existence of the interview recording has not been previously reported.

Blanche interviewed Maxwell last month in Tallahassee, Florida, over a two-day period. Last week, Maxwell was moved from Florida to a lower-security federal prison in Texas.

This comes as the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Trump justice department today for records related to Epstein.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said that he will pursue a court ruling to declare the seats of Democrats who fled the state and denied quorum in the legislature, as vacant.

“Starting Friday, any rogue lawmakers refusing to return to the House will be held accountable for vacating their office. The people of Texas elected lawmakers, not jet-setting runaways looking for headlines. If you don’t show up to work, you get fired,” Paxton said in a statement.

Texas House speaker Dustin Burrows said the chamber would attempt to reach quorum again on Friday, after it failed for a second consecutive day on Tuesday,

Donald Trump met with his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Monday to discuss plans for the US to “significantly increase its role in providing humanitarian aid to Gaza”, Axios reports.

Sources told Axios that the Trump administration would take over management of the humanitarian effort in Gaza because Israel is not handling the situation adequately.

The White House did not respond to Axios’ request for comment.

This comes after Witkoff’s visit to Gaza last week to assess the worsening starvation crisis in the region.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas has sent a letter to FBI director Kash Patel, imploring him to take “any appropriate steps” to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who have fled the state.

“In a representative democracy, we resolve our differences by debating and voting, not by running away,” Cornyn writes of the quorum break, now in its second day. “These legislators have committed potential criminal acts in their rush to avoid their constitutional responsibilities and must be fully investigated and held accountable.”

The FBI declined the Guardian’s request for comment.

With only 94 lawmakers present, the Texas House failed again today to reach a quorum to conduct legislative business.

Speaker Dustin Burrows adjourned the House after it failed to meet its 100-member threshold to reach quorum.

He said that the House would try again on Friday at 1pm CT.

• Democratic legislators from Texas are still hunkered down in various blue states across the country, as they maintain their quorum break over a new congressional map proposed by state Republicans. At a press conference earlier today, Illinois governor JB Pritzker – who has welcomed several fleeing lawmakers – said that Texas Democrats are “leading the way in choosing courage and country over politics and party”.

• Meanwhile the Texas legislature will again try to reconvene today, after the Capitol failed to reach quorum yesterday. Governor Greg Abbott has ordered arrest warrants for the absent lawmakers, but these are civil warrants that only apply within state-lines.

• For his part, Donald Trump said that the Republican party is “entitled” to the five House seats they could pick up if the Texas map is approved. In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC earlier today, the president criticised blue states for accepting Texas Democrats. “You notice, they go to Illinois for safety, but that’s all gerrymandered. California is gerrymandered. We should have many more seats in Congress in California. It’s all gerrymandered,” he said.

• Texas’ redistricting battle has now turned into an “arms race”, Rep. Gina Hinojosa told me today. She’s one of the state lawmakers who decamped to a Chicago suburb. California governor Gavin Newsom has pledged to push for a special election that could reinstate his state legislature with the power to redraw congressional maps if the Texas map passes. Meanwhile, DNC chair Ken Martin described the quorum break, and in-kind redistricting from blue states as part of Democrats’ plan to “fight fire with fire”.

• Beyond Texas, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the justice department for “records related to Epstein”. The committee also issued deposition subpoenas to several high profile individuals, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.

• Meanwhile, the DOJ has ordered department officials to launch a probe into how Obama-era officials handled Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In another nugget from his CNBC interview today, Donald Trump confirmed his plan to raise the tariffs on India “very substantially” over the next 24 hours. This would be an increase on the 25% already in place.

“They’re fueling the war machine. And if they’re going to do that, then I’m not going to be happy,” he said, referring to India’s purchasing of Russian oil.

While Congress is on recess, members from both parties are hearing from their constituents. To get a taste of how Republicans are dealing with concerns back home, let’s turn to Lincoln, Nebraska.

This is in Republican congressman Mike Flood’s district. And yesterday scores of people turned up to his town hall to make their feelings known on a number of issues: from ICE raids, to the one big beautiful bill, to the Epstein files.

There were several points in the night were Flood was heckled by the crowd, with some even chanting “vote him out”.

Flood faced scrutiny about his decision to vote for Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill. Eventually the crowd erupted into chants of “tax the rich”.

Flood was one of the few GOP representatives who held a town hall this August recess, particularly since the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee advised lawmakers earlier this year to forgo holding in-person town halls, per Politico.

Here’s Donald Trump touring the roof of the White House with architects this morning. A few days ago he announced the $200m construction of a new 90,000 sq ft ballroom due to be ready before his term ends in 2029.