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It was perhaps the most awaited economic moment of his presidency: the signing of a partial trade deal with China.So why, 30 minutes into his speech, was President Donald Trump expounding upon sneakers he found on eBay and questioning environmental concerns that prevent fireworks at Mount Rushmore?

Trump was eager to dismiss the impeachment saga as a "hoax" during his signing. As he vamped at length about the various players in the China deal's completion -- some more tangential than others -- the President seemed intent on seizing whatever spotlight was his before attention inevitably turned to the proceedings on the Hill.

Even as Trump touted what is undeniably a strong economy and a trade deal that eases for now the trade war he ignited, Democrats were insisting the President is unfit for office and must be removed. It's the contrast all but certain to underpin this year's presidential campaign, distilled into a 90-minute midday slice of Washington.

President Donald Trump just slammed Apple for refusing to allow the US government access to the iPhones "used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements."

Trump's tweet came hours after Apple declined requests from US Attorney General William Barr and the FBI to unlock two iPhones believed to have been used by a 21-year-old man who killed three sailors in a shooting last month at a Pensacola, Florida, Air Force base.

Apple's commitment to protecting the privacy of its users is well known. The iPhone maker has hammered on privacy as a marketing pitch in recent years, with CEO Tim Cook repeatedly calling privacy a fundamental human right. Cook told CNN in 2018 that he wants governments around the world to restrict how much data companies can collect from their customers.

US President Donald Trump's legal team has issued its first formal response to the impeachment charges against him, describing them as a "dangerous attack" on democracy.

Mr Trump is only the third US president in history to face an impeachment trial. He is accused of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He has denied wrongdoing and branded the case against him as a "hoax".

A two-thirds majority of 67 votes in the 100-seat Senate is required to convict and oust Mr Trump. But because there are only 45 Democrats (along with 53 Republicans and two Independents), the president is widely expected to be cleared.

The US Capitol is once again secured but a woman is dead after supporters of President Donald Trump breached one of the most iconic American buildings

About 90 minutes later, police said demonstrators got into the building and the doors to the House and Senate were being locked. Shortly after, the House floor was evacuated by police. Vice President Mike Pence was also evacuated, where he was to perform his role in the counting of electoral votes.

In the Trump era, the Journal’s editorial board has betrayed its readers. It has trimmed and hemmed and to-be-sured its way through the most sustained assault on truth and the American political order of our lifetime

For the most part, it has retreated into anti-anti-Trumpism, averting its gaze from the president and focusing disproportionately on his opponents. Some columnists have become outright cheerleaders for the Russia hoax narrative.

the Journal’s editorial page gives its imprimatur to the lies that are the basis for the current crisis—a crisis they do not recognize.

That was when Trump supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and chanting, “Four more years!”This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

Republicans are planning to have tens of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace.

bragged to Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

On a day when Democratic nominee Joe Biden branded him a "climate arsonist" and global warming burst to the center of the campaign, Trump again ditched research and data for his own wild hunches and odd theories about California's wildfires.

Trump abruptly shut down an official who warned that climate change was fueling the flames -- by saying the weather would soon start "getting cooler." Even by his own standards, it was one of the President's most shocking comments on global warming -- which he has previously referred to as a "hoax."

Trump continued to flout epidemiological guidelines by cramming people into indoor events that risked spreading Covid-19, exacerbating disbelief and extreme frustration among medical experts.

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William B. Crews is, by day, a public affairs specialist for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But for years he has been writing for RedState under the streiff pseudonym. And in that capacity he has been contributing to the very same disinformation campaign that his superiors at the NIAID say is a major challenge to widespread efforts to control a pandemic that has claimed roughly 200,000 U.S. lives.

Under his pseudonym, Crews has derided his own colleagues as part of a left-wing anti-Trump conspiracy and vehemently criticized the man who leads his agency, whom he described as the “attention-grubbing and media-whoring Anthony Fauci.” He has gone after other public health officials at the state and federal levels, as well—“the public health Karenwaffen,'' as he’s called them—over measures such as the closures of businesses and other public establishments and the promotion of social distancing and mask-wearing. Those policies, Crews insists, have no basis in science and are simply surreptitious efforts to usurp Americans’ rights, destroy the U.S. economy, and damage President Donald Trump’s reelection effort.

“I think we’re at the point where it is safe to say that the entire Wuhan virus scare was nothing more or less than a massive fraud perpetrated upon the American people by ‘experts’ who were determined to fundamentally change the way the country lives and is organized and governed,” Crews wrote in a June post on RedState.

On March 30, the COVID death toll in America eclipsed the toll of 9/11. Here is what I wrote:   When all is said and done, the novel coronavirus will be the equivalent of multiple 9/11’s. Maybe two of them. Maybe five. Maybe thirty. We’ll see. God help us, we’re going to see.

People on the internet made fun of me for being alarmist, because “only” 2,977 Americans had died from the virus. Turns out I wasn’t being dark enough. We are closing in on the equivalent of 67 September 11’s.

Think about how you felt on that day, which was the greatest intelligence failure in American history. And imagine angry you would have been if 66 more of them had followed. Imagine what sort of accountability you would have demanded for the people in charge.

The training puts a spotlight on the unexpected challenges that store workers have been forced to grapple with during the pandemic.

Susan Driscoll, president of the Crisis Prevention Institute, said the online training program and accompanying Covid-19 Customer Conflict Prevention credential are “really focused on how to engage your thinking brain over your emotional brain.

Intensifying the mistrust, experts said, are the power and reach of social media. They said the quest to turn minor irregularities into signs of political malintent — enabled by an information ecosystem that rewards outrage and partisan groupthink — poses among the greatest threats to the integrity of the Nov. 3 election.

“The amplification of these kinds of stories can have, in and of itself, a suppressive effect,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The events in Utah, she said, show the ripple effects of attacks by Trump and his allies on “legal, safe, secure voting methods.”

. But the most lasting consequence of the false and misleading narratives coursing through the Internet, often using real examples but exaggerating them to create the appearance of an alarming trend, could be a form of democratic backsliding in parts of the country where the widespread adoption of mail balloting has been shown to expand electoral participation.

Many House Republicans have been freaking out, no exaggeration, over the installation of metal detectors along their paths to the House floor

Apparently, if you can’t pack heat in proximity to Nancy Pelosi, you’re living in a totalitarian state.

Lesko, an Arizona Republican, tweeted that the new security screening was proof that lawmakers “now live in Pelosi’s communist America.”

If the administration’s initial response to the coronavirus was denial, its failure to control the pandemic since then was driven by dysfunction and resulted in a lost summer, according to the portrait that emerges from interviews with 41 senior administration officials and other people directly involved in or briefed on the response efforts.

Right now, we’re flying blind,” said Thomas Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Public health is not getting in the way of economic recovery and schools reopening. Public health is the means to economic recovery and schools reopening. You don’t have to believe me. Look all over the world. The U.S. is a laggard.”

the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across the country. A senior administration official said there was a desire to focus on the economy in June.

It begins with dramatic music and slick graphics – skyscrapers, clouds, big screens, the roar of a helicopter and chants of “Four more years!” Then come clips of Donald Trump Jr mocking Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and hurling red “Keep America Great” caps into a crowd at a rally. A fireball darts across the screen, trailing the word “Triggered”.

Welcome to the virtual Trump campaign starring his three children, Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka, and their partners, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Lara Trump and Jared Kushner. The six are among the president’s most important surrogates and strategists, constantly pushing his cause, rallying his base, trashing his opponents and earning a reputation as a modern political mafia.

“And guess what?” he said on Fox News. “After 3 November [election day], coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen. They’re trying to deprive him of his greatest asset.”

President Donald Trump's loyalists in the administration and on Capitol Hill have opened up an all-out assault against the Obama administration and former Vice President Joe Biden, using committee investigations and declassified documents to try to paint the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in an unflattering light.

The Republicans leading the investigations say they're about accountability and oversight, not politics. But the investigations are being openly cheered on by Trump, who told Republicans they need to get "tough" on issues like "unmasking," one of the areas where Grenell has provided newly declassified documents. The probes have also been endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, as he fights to keep the Senate majority in GOP hands in the 2020 election where the fate of Senate Republicans will be closely tied to Trump's.

So far, there's little dissent within the Senate GOP Conference about the pursuit of investigations against Trump's opponent -- even as many Republicans denounced House Democrats for mounting what they said were overtly political investigations and impeachment proceedings aimed at hurting the President's reelection chances.

The Dakotas are a horror story that didn’t have to be, a theater of American disgrace. Want to understand the tendencies — pathologies might be the better word — that made America’s dance with the coronavirus so deadly? Visit the Dakotas.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Jamie Smith, the leader of the Democratic minority in South Dakota’s House of Representatives, told me. He was referring primarily to how politicized such basic safety measures as social distancing and masks became, but also to many South Dakotans’ distrust of science and unshakable belief that the virus wouldn’t come for them.

the most stubborn, he said, have been the loudest. Throughout the pandemic, he said, he was deluged with communications from constituents adamantly opposed to any mask-wearing requirement, which North Dakota didn’t even have. He heard almost nothing from the other side.

President Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so much of what he’s done in office, shocking but not surprising.

According to a survey by The Washington Post, only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won. Despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, two-thirds of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.

Most obviously, Republican refusal to accept the election results follows months of refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the coronavirus, even as Covid-19 has become the nation’s leading cause of death, and even as a startling number of people in Trump’s orbit have been infected.

In 2017, after a meeting with then president-elect Mr. Trump in New York, Mr. Kennedy Jr. announced that he had been asked to chair a commission to review vaccine safety. The move alarmed doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts, who pointed out that Mr. Trump had previously raised concerns that vaccines cause autism.

Even though the commission never materialized, to Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s bitter disappointment, the fact that the meeting took place at all signals how closely conspiracy theories and misinformation have been interwoven in everyday politics.

“To some extent, conspiracy theories rule the day,” Prof. Offit told us.

"I WON THE ELECTION!" President Donald Trump tweeted just before midnight on Sunday night. Trump did not win the election. So this was a fitting conclusion to his lie-filled weekend barrage of tweets, in which he continued to invent imaginary evidence in support of his attempt to deny Joe Biden's victory.

Almost nothing Trump is saying about the election is true

Twitter affixed a fact check label to more than 30 of his election-related tweets and retweets between Friday and Monday morning