On ABC's THIS WEEK today, Martha Raddatz spoke with cry baby and liar Todd Blanche. The president's personal attorney now filling the spot as Attorney General was rude and dishonest.
RADDATZ: President Trump responding to questions the day he banned multiple press outlets from access to the White House, a move put on temporary hold by a federal judge this week. Attorney General Todd Blanche joins me now. Good morning, and thank you so much for joining us this morning. Let's get right to this. There was no TV pool coverage of the president's trip to Tennessee this weekend. It was supposed to be CNN. They said they were banned from Air Force One. What is the justification for denying access?
TODD BLANCHE, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well, the president hasn't denied access. That's not the right way to describe it. This is -- what the president has said is that he is sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news, and so -- look, it is a -- it is a privilege -- it is a privilege to be in the White House for anybody.
The privilege for anybody? That applies to the president. It is a privilege for him to live in our White House. As such, he needs to stop with all of his tear downs and builds up. He's refused to follow the process and he's done real damage. So until Toad is willing to discuss that aspect, he's probably better off keep his lying mouth shut on privilege.
It is not a privilege for the journalists to be in the White House. It is their job, it is their duty.
TOAD BLANCHE: And that -- and the president -- the president knows that it's the people's house, and what you saw play out over the past week was really not just not -- even after the judge -- even after the White House let the reporters back in, they still refuse to use pool coverage. They still refuse to, on their own, make a decision to start covering the president again with the video. But a lot of people saw the president. The president was not hidden from the American people at the -- at the football game in Tennessee yesterday.
Yes, he was in Tennessee yesterday. And he wasn't hidden at that football game. And the crowd reacted, didn't they, Toad?
Raven Brunner (PEOPLE) reported:
President Donald Trump made an appearance in Knoxville, Tenn., on Saturday, Sept. 26, when the Tennessee Volunteers hosted the top-ranked Texas Longhorns in a much-anticipated college football clash.
The president, 80, was loudly booed by some fans at Neyland Stadium when he appeared on the Jumbotron, as captured in video footage shared on social media. He could be seen sitting in a box next to Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn as he did several fist pumps for the crowd.
Danielle Campoamor (US) reported:
President Donald Trump received a not-so-warm welcome while attending the biggest college football game of the week. The commander-in-chief, 80, was loudly booed shortly after he was introduced at the highly-anticipated Saturday, September 26, matchup between No. 1 Texas and No. 14 Tennessee.
[. . .]
Trump’s Saturday appearance and subsequent reception was far from the first time the command-in-chief has received a cold shoulder from a large crowd.
Amid rising gas and diesel prices, rising inflation and an increase in the cost of living, the ongoing war in Iran and a historically low approval rating, Trump was also loudly booed while appearing at this year’s 2026 World Cup Final. After Jennifer Hudson performed a stunning rendition of the U.S. national anthem on July 19, Trump was shown clapping while standing from his section inside Metlife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
As the camera panned to him, Trump was audibly booed by the audience. He watched the match — where defending champs Argentina faced off against Spain — beside his wife, Melania Trump, and FIFA President Gianni Infantino. (Spain emerged victorious, winning 1-0.) Trump was also met by a loud chorus of boos while appearing at Game 3 of the 2026 NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs. (The Knicks lost 115-111, with many critics blaming the president’s appearance for the New York team’s only loss of the championship series.)
Toad left that information out of his narrative. He was one-sided -- as he accuses the press of being.
TOAD BLANCHE: And really, the unfortunate and sad thing here is that after years and years and years of one-sided media coverage of the president from certain outlets, the president finally said it's not fair to the American people that this is happening and did something about it.
[. . .]
BLANCHE: The president has every right to decide who gets to fly on his plane, and it is national security, especially on Air Force One, and especially at the White House. And so, it's not just -- it's not just the fact that they refuse to report anything accurately. By the way, that is what is a national security problem. When you have completely misinformation, complete misinformation coming out of the White House, that affects our relationship with our foreign partners, that affects our relationship with our foreign enemies. And so this is -- this is just not about the fact that they're refusing to report accurate news. It's all about the information that the American people have a right to hear coming out of our - what should be respected media outlets.
It's not "his plane." Air Force One is the people's plane. Just like the White House is the people's house. Media outlets are not supposed to just parrot what the government says. They are supposed to vet the claims. That's what they do. Chump is a well noted liar and that's long been documented. He can't stop lying so he's not get good press. It doesn't work that way.
RADDATZ: You clearly think you had a strong case, but the temporary restraining order was granted. The judge was skeptical of the argument the department made in court filings to defend this ban on the grounds of national security.
He wrote, "For one thing, nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of plaintiffs' hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was banning plaintiffs from the White House. Instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of plaintiffs' reporting.”
The president said nothing about national security when he announced this ban, and clearly, you are very interested in the fact of what the press says and how they say it.
BLANCHE: Well, I'm not going to get into what the judge says.
Okay, Blanche. The media is criticized all the time and deserves to be. Perfection will never be achieved by the media. For many practical reasons, it's not happening. And we criticize it for that reason and for the hope that it will do better. We also criticize it when it gets things wrong, when it omits things, etc, etc. That's part of free speech as well. We don't try to censor the media. Joseph Kishore has an excellent critical analysis of the media that just went up at WSWS:
In the space of one week this month, two of the most prominent figures of American “democratic socialism” have appeared alongside prominent fascists in the United States.
On September 15, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, an event on AI organized by the Future of Life Institute, which has relations with the far-right. Sanders spoke just prior to Steve Bannon, the fascist advisor to Donald Trump, who used the occasion to launch into a vicious anti-Chinese rant.
Six days after the assembly, on September 21, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the DSA, invited Donald Trump to Gracie Mansion, their third meeting since November. The two held a joint press conference on the lawn of the mayor’s residence, where Trump patted Mamdani, and the mayor presented Trump as a political ally in improving the conditions of New Yorkers.
Both events were reported prominently in the corporate media, which treated them as expressions of a supposedly “unlikely” coming together of political opposites. The various publications associated with the DSA and the organizations in and around it, however, have said nothing.
Jacobin’s picture without the caption
Jacobin, the most prominent magazine associated with the DSA, published three articles on AI in the week of the assembly but none on the assembly itself. The centerpiece, by Leigh Phillips on September 17, two days after, endorsed a bill presented by Sanders and what Phillips described as “the pro-human, carefully paced, AI development that Bernie Sanders and others have described.”
The article does not mention the Pro-Human Assembly, at which Sanders spoke, nor that the “others” with whom Sanders is aligning include Bannon, the fascist strategist of “America First”; Rep. Chip Roy of the Freedom Caucus; Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and January 6 coup conspirator Amy Kremer. The “pro-human” coalition Jacobin endorses is, in its actual composition, a bloc between the Sanders-DSA wing of the Democratic Party and the far right, united on a program of national-security control over technology and hostility to China.
The photograph accompanying Phillips’ piece, credited to Getty Images, shows Sanders speaking at the Pro-Human Assembly on September 15—that is, at the very event the article does not name, on the stage that Bannon would take minutes later. Jacobin ran the picture but did not publish the original caption, which notes that Sanders “joined former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon” at the event.
On the Trump-Mamdani meeting, Jacobin published a September 23 piece by Liza Featherstone praising the mayor’s “Commission on Government Efficiency” and his remarks that week to a summit of mayors. Trump’s visit to Gracie Mansion two days earlier does not appear. This is the same magazine that, after the first Oval Office meeting in November, ran a series of articles hailing Mamdani’s handling of Trump as a political masterstroke.
Sunkara’s The Nation crops Trump
Jacobin withheld a caption. The Nation, whose president since 2022 is Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder and publisher of Jacobin, went one step further. On September 23, The Nation published “Zohran Mamdani Hosts the World,” by Prajwal Bhat, an account of the mayor’s meetings during the week of the UN General Assembly.
Bhat records Mamdani’s meetings with the mayors of Helsinki, Barcelona, Rome and Mexico City, with Brazil’s Lula, with the prime minister of Norway and with a delegation from Germany’s Die Linke, and concludes that these exchanges “have placed Mamdani at the center of the international left.”
Every meeting of the week is recorded except one: The meeting with Trump.
Trump does not appear in the photograph either, though he was in it. The image The Nation ran is credited to Chip Somodevilla of Getty Images. Getty’s caption for the frame describes Trump and Mamdani holding a joint news conference after their meeting. In the original, Trump stands at Mamdani’s shoulder as the mayor speaks at the podium.
The Nation cropped the frame to Mamdani alone and captioned it as a news conference “after a meeting with Donald Trump.” The original caption from Getty reads as follows:
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hold a joint news conference after a meeting at Gracie Mansion on September 21, 2026, in New York City. The discussions appeared to have been warm, with the two chatting informally before approaching the lectern for the conference, according to observations from published reports.
Getty’s license permits cropping of photographs “provided that the editorial integrity of the content is not compromised.” Readers may judge whether removing the president from a picture of a joint press conference meets that standard.
In 1938, when The Nation was defending the Moscow Trials and its Moscow correspondent Louis Fischer was serving as a literary agent of Stalin and Vyshinsky, Trotsky wrote of its editors: “Thus, these people, living by half-truths, that is to say, the worst form of falsehood, have become a genuine brake upon truly progressive, i.e., revolutionary thought.” Two years later, writing somewhat more sharply, he referred to the “infamous reptile breed of The Nation.”
The Stalinist regime, which The Nation was then excusing, perfected the practice of cutting inconvenient men out of photographs. Eighty-eight years later, the magazine has taken up the scissors itself, producing its “half-truths” in the form of half-photographs.
That's the opening, use the link to read in full.
And let me be honest here. I've noted this before. We are in a lead up to a major election that could determine whether or not we remain a democracy. If there's someone running on the Democratic Party side that's disappointing or that I don't like who is running on the ballot in the Democrats spot? I'm not noting them until after the election, if then. I'll just hold my tongue because we need both houses. We may have to settle for only one but we need both to save democracy. And I'm not interested in doing anything to harm the outcome of the elections. I've never done this before but I announced that I was doing it this year.
Didn't hide it, didn't try to act like it wasn't happening.
If you're not up for re-election? I'll gladly call you out. But if you're on the Democractic Party ticket and you're up for re-election, anything that I need to say can wait 36 days.
Sharon Zang (TRUTHOUT) reports:
House Democrat has filed articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, calling him the “most impeachable president” in U.S. history and accusing him of high crimes and misdemeanors ranging from his war on Iran to his schemes to enrich himself and his allies while in office.
House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Steve Cohen, of Tennessee, introduced 26 impeachment articles on Thursday, covering a broad range of actions from the president since his return to office last year.
Two of the articles focus on Trump’s military aggression, in Iran and in his “extrajudicial killings in the international waters of Venezuela.” Numerous articles are focused on the administration’s actions relating to his mass deportation and anti-immigration agenda, including the administration’s defiance of court orders, imprisonment of immigrants in a notorious torture camp in El Salvador, and deployment of the National Guard to U.S. cities.
Other articles focus on Trump’s attempts to punish his political enemies; his attacks on the press; his alleged misappropriations of federal funds; and his various corruption schemes, including his “profiting personally and directly from the presidency.”
“Trump is clearly the most impeachable President our country has ever endured. His continued presence in office is a danger to our democracy. That the sycophantic Republican majority in Congress is derelict in its duty does not mean that I must abandon my responsibilities,” said Cohen in a statement on the articles. “When historians write about this period, and our constituents ask who stood up to President Trump’s lawlessness, this resolution is the answer.”
Let's wind down with this from Senator Adam Schiff's office:
Today, Senate Republicans again blocked a measure that would have confirmed Congress has not authorized the ongoing deployment of U.S. troops for Trump’s Iran War
Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) took to the Senate floor to urge Senate Republicans to pass a War Powers Resolution to end President Trump’s illegal war in Iran. Schiff highlighted constituent stories from servicemembers’ families detailing the abysmal conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, contrasting their sacrifices against the President’s downplaying of the war’s impact and obsessions with his vanity projects.
Senate Republicans’ blocking of this resolution follows a series of similar resolutions led by Democrats in Congress, including by Senator Schiff and colleagues in the Senate, to confirm that Congress has not authorized this use of the U.S. military and require the President to end the war. The resolution failed today in a 49 to 50 vote.
“In fact, the Lincoln set a modern-day record for consecutive days at sea without a port visit. And a record away from its home port of San Diego. And even now, just recently after stopping in Thailand for its first regular port call in nearly nine months — hull rusted, paint peeling — the Lincoln and its crew were still a long way from home,” said Senator Schiff on the Senate floor.
Schiff emphasized how the prolonged deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln has sent shockwaves throughout the San Diego community and continued his call for an end to this war.
Watch the full speech HERE. Download the remarks HERE.
Read the full transcript of his remarks as delivered below:
Ever since the USS Abraham Lincoln was commissioned in the waning days of the Cold War, it has been known for many things.
After a volcano erupted in the Philippines in 1991, the Lincoln led the largest peacetime evacuation of U.S. military personnel and their families. A baby was even born onboard during the evacuation — and named Abraham Lincoln.
In 1993, the Lincoln became the first carrier in the Pacific Fleet to integrate female aviators.
But today, as a result of the President’s war with Iran, the Lincoln has achieved another distinction — one it neither sought nor wished to claim.
And that is for more than 300 days, over 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard the Lincoln were at sea.
Without visits to their family.
Or other loved ones.
Without visits to friends apart from their fellow servicemembers.
In fact, the Lincoln set a modern-day record for consecutive days at sea without a port visit.
And a record away from its home port of San Diego.
And even now, just recently after stopping in Thailand for its first regular port call in nearly nine months — hull rusted, paint peeling — the Lincoln and its crew were still a long way from home.
As the President’s senseless war has dragged on, it has taken a heavy toll on the lives and well-being of our servicemembers and their families, many of whom are in California.
So how does the Commander-in-Chief respond?
When asked last month if carriers like the Lincoln had been deployed too long, Donald Trump said — and this is a direct quote — “No, no, no, not nearly long enough.”
Not nearly long enough?
It was long enough that our sailors have been working 12 to 16 hour shifts — at times facing the danger of enemy missiles.
It was long enough that they were forced to ration food and water — shortages that have reportedly caused severe weight loss and health impacts.
It was long enough that crew members have had severe mental health crises, which created significant distress for their families as well. To the point where some servicemembers sought to jump off the carrier into the sea.
It was long enough that servicemembers had to deal with black mold that drips, as one servicemember described, “onto your face, shoulders, arms or head” while “standing in line for a meal or even walking out of the shower.”
Doug, a constituent from California, wrote a letter to me expressing his deep concerns over his son’s service on the Lincoln. His son had to be medically evacuated from the ship after suffering a collapsed lung — which Doug believes was connected to malnutrition and overexertion.
“The crew went about four weeks without hot water or laundry. They were on rations for two to three months while working 12 to 16 hour days. During that time, his family spent thousands of dollars sending him food, but only about half of it arrived.”
Doug went on: “After time in the ICU [abroad], he returned home to us as a shell of the son who had left. He is 6’5″ and left weighing 210 pounds; and he returned closer to 180 pounds. He resembled a starved prisoner of war. What he told me as a father and veteran turns my stomach and must be brought to light.”
Another constituent of mine, Annabelle from San Diego, shared her story about her husband attempting to jump overboard from the Lincoln during his deployment.
“He’s scared,” she said. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year-old career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not what he should be worrying about right now.” But this, is what Annabelle and her three kids are now living with.
Shelby, a high schooler whose mom is deployed on the Lincoln, spoke about how hard it is to start her senior year without her mom. She asked, “Will she be back before homecoming? My birthday? Christmas? I have no idea, and that’s all that I think about.”
This week, we learned from the Acting Secretary of the Navy that eight U.S. Navy personnel assigned to the Lincoln’s carrier strike group attempted suicide during the prolonged time at sea. The navy also confirmed that one sailor went overboard from the ship this summer, while another attempted to go overboard. After months of denials, the Defense Department confirmed what has been reported for months, and that is, deteriorating mental health aboard the Lincoln and multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard.
These are just some of the alarming, dangerous, and shameful conditions our sailors and Marines have endured aboard the Lincoln — and also what our families are going through — while Pete Hegseth posts workout videos and Donald Trump renames lakes and pours over blueprints for the gilded ballroom.
For Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies — events in black tie.
For our servicemembers aboard the Lincoln — showers and meals with black mold.
Could there be a clearer encapsulation of this administration’s misplaced priorities?
So, the American people were told that the war would be over “very soon.”
That was March 9th. Ten days after the war started.
Now, the U.S. is more than six months into the disastrous war.
Months of negotiations to end the conflict have failed. But the President promises us that the war will soon come to an end — after the election.
And what have we achieved in this war that has cost the lives of 19 U.S. servicemembers?
Prices at the pump and grocery checkout have skyrocketed. Diesel prices, fertilizer prices are crushing farmers while the resultant food prices are crushing the rest of America.
Utility bills and medical bills, out of control.
Everyone but the President and his buddies are painfully aware that we’re experiencing an affordability crisis in America.
While the President says… “Not long enough.”
In the closing days of the Mexican-American War, our sixteenth president — whose name the Lincoln proudly carries — was a freshman here in Congress. He wrote to his law partner.
“The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons,” Lincoln wrote.
“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.”
“This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”
“But your view,” Lincoln wrote, “destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.”
We need to take Lincoln’s words to heart. This Congress is not a royal court, to do the bidding and bow and scrape before an all-powerful sovereign. We are a coequal branch of government and two hundred and fifty years into this experiment in self-governance, we should show Lincoln’s resolve.
Will we continue to place the president where kings have stood?
Or will we say, at long last, “enough?”
Will we make it clear that this war, illegal from the start, has gone on too long?
Will we insist on the removal and return of our troops?
I pray that we will, and I urge support of this resolution.
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The following sites updated:
