Trump news: Fox News to air advert blaming mass shooting on president 'stoking fire of racists'

Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.

Donald Trump’s administration has hinted it will relocate American troops from Germany to Poland as a punishment for Berlin failing to meet its NATO funding commitments, according to a tweet by the US embassy in Warsaw.

NATO members agreed to pay 2 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) towards the alliance’s defence budget at a meeting in Newport, Wales, in September 2014, pledging to reach that target by 2024.

The failure of major European states to meet this commitment has been a continued source of annoyance to Trump - he was particularly belligerent on the subject at a two-day summit in Brussels last July - who believes the military alliance represents a "bad deal" for America and has been "obsolete" since the end of the Cold War.

Here's some background to that particular spat and his continued frustration with the defence collective the US joined under Harry Truman in 1949.

Trump has been golfing at his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, over the last few days...

...Which has, naturally, given him even more time to carry out his customary flurry of misleading and highly partisan retweets, unmoved by the outcry accusing him of peddling dangerous conspiracy theories concerning the death of Jeffrey Epstein (more on whom shortly). 

In addition to the usual waffle from Republican Party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Diamond and Silk and his son's girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump also wrongly claimed that the US has "similar, more advanced" missile technology to that currently being experimented with in Russia, apparently alluding to the nuclear-powered cruise rockets developed under Project Pluto in the 1960s during the Cold War, an initiative that was ultimately dismissed as "too crazy" to be viable.

Trump was commenting after thousands of people attended the funerals of five Russian nuclear scientists killed while testing a nuclear-powered engine in the Arkhangelsk region four days earlier.

Nuclear agency Rosatom said the explosion occurred while the engineers were testing a "nuclear isotope power source" for a rocket engine. Authorities in nearby Severodvinsk, a city of 183,000, reported a brief spike in radiation levels after the explosion.

Russian media speculated that the device being tested was the Petrel nuclear-powered cruise missile announced by Vladimir Putin in March 2018.

The redoubtable Jon Sharman has more.

Trumps attorney general William Barr has meanwhile expressed concern at the "serious irregularities" emerging following the death of the aforementioned billionaire paedophile – a former friend of the president - in his Manhattan jail cell over the weekend.

Speaking at a policing conference in New Orleans, Barr said: "This case was very important to the department. It was important to the dedicated prosecutors and agents who investigated the case and were preparing it for trial... Most importantly, this case was important to the victims who had the courage to come forward and deserved the opportunity to confront the accused in court."

Details continue to emerge about Epstein's final hours at the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center, including the fact that his cellmate had been recently moved, the guards watching him were exhausted after several days of overtime shifts and at least one of them had not been properly trained.

In DC, Jerrold Nadler and Doug Collins - the Democratic chair and ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee - have meanwhile written to Hugh Hurwitz, the acting director of the Bureau of Prisons, demanding answers.

Here's Chris Riotta on Barr's Epstein comments.

On Monday, the Trump administration announced its new "public charge" rules on immigration.

In the latest effort by the president to place a tough immigration policy at the centre of his 2020 re-election campaign (another brainchild of "zero tolerance" mastermind Stephen Miller), the new rules will reject applicants for temporary or permanent visas for failing to meet income standards or for receiving public assistance such as welfare, food stamps, public housing or Medicaid.

Migrants seeking a new life in the US must already be "self-sufficient" in the eyes of the White House, under the new guidelines.

Here's acting Customs and Immigration Services director Ken Cuccinelli attempting to explain himself yesterday:

Responding, California congresswoman Norma Torres told CNN: "Rather than looking at them through the lens of this is what every other citizen in the country is suffering because we have not raised the federal minimum wage in a long time and because the cost of doing business keeps rising, and everything is costing more - rather than looking at it through that lens, he wants to punish them," she said.

"But punishing them is just an excuse to rid the country of people who look like me."

Meanwhile in New York, attorney general Letitia James reacted by declaring her intention to sue the administration.

"President Trump’s new public charge rule is yet one more example of his administration turning its back on people fighting to make a better life for them and their families,” she said in a statement.

“Under this rule, children will go hungry; families will go without medical care. I am committed to defending all of New York’s communities, which is why I intend to sue the Trump Administration over this egregious rule.” 

Here's Andrew Buncombe's report on the draconian new laws.

Trump's latest Twitter beef - this time with short-lived press secretary Anthony Scaramucci - shows no sign of going away.

The president again attacked The Mooch for turning his brief tenure at the White House into TV talking head gold last night, prompting this response and another to his successor in the job, Stephanie Grisham.

The Mooch also tweeted this attack on unquestioning Trump acolytes like Kris Kobach from the account of CNN anchor Chris Cuomo (currently trending for hitting back at a man who likened him to Fredo from The Godfather).

Trump's hawkish national security adviser John Bolton is in London to meet with Boris Johnson and is pushing us to opt for a no-deal Brexit, promising the UK will be "first in line" for a trade deal with the US after abandoning the European community.

Zamira Rahim has more.

Trump’s threat to escalate his trade war with China and add an additional 25 per cent tariff on to $300bn (£248bn) of Chinese goods could trigger global recession, warns Morgan Stanley.

Uncertainty about the consequences of the trade war have prompted Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to cut interest rates to instill confidence within the business community, a move that has angered Trump and caused him to break with presidential precedent by repeatedly attacking Powell on Twitter and in interviews.

The president has threatened to impose a 10 per cent tariff on those goods - including shoes, clothes and children's toys - in September, which could climb further. That’s regrettable but sustainable, argues the investment bank, but assuming those tariffs are kept for longer than four or five months, global growth will remain weak in the range of 2.8 per cent to 3 percent, despite the interest rate cuts from central banks.

Once global growth falls below 2.5 per cent, Morgan Stanley considers the world to be in recession.

The specific items targeted would mean consumers would also bear the immediate brunt this time around.

“I know this sounds like the plan of a cartoon villain and not the president of the United States but that’s what we’re dealing with today.”

This brilliant line comes form Maura Healey, Massachusetts attorney general, taking Trump to the cleaners after the Interior Department announced a series of changes to environmental regulations that includes the dismantling of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which exists to protect wild animals.

That department is headed up by David Bernhardt, you will recall, a career oil lobbyist whose nomination was protested by women dressed as the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Healy's California counterpart, Xavier Becerra, said the power to change the ESA lies with Congress and the administration doing so in turn violates the Administrative Procedure Act.

“This administration is trying to change the law by breaking the law and that’s not going to stand,” Becerra said. 

The Interior Department said its changes are “designed to increase transparency and effectiveness and bring the administration of the Act into the 21st century."

“For more than 40 years, the ESA has been a pillar of environmental protection in this nation,” said Democratic senator Tom Udall of New  Mexico. “Its success - and its support among the American people - are undeniable. But this administration’s determination to dismantle bedrock environmental laws, turn a blind eye to science, and roll over for special interests apparently knows no bounds.”

In a further blow to the environment from a man who considers climate change a "hoax", he's travelling to Monaca, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday to tour Shell's soon-to-be completed Petrochemicals Complex, a facility dedicated to turning natural gas into plastics. It will convert ethane to approximately 1.6 million tonnes of polyethylene a year.

Stephen Biegun, the diplomat who has been leading efforts to revive stalled US denuclearisation talks with North Korea, is reportedly under consideration to be Trump's next ambassador to Russia.

If Biegun, a Russia specialist, was to get the Moscow post, it would leave a significant hole in the US effort to resume talks aim at persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, a policy priority for Trump.

Biegun led US working-level negotiations with North Korea in the run-up to a failed second summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi in February.

Trump and Kim met again at the end of June and agreed to resume working-level talks but this has yet to happen.

Trump said on Saturday Kim had told him he was ready to resume talks and would stop his recent missile testing as soon as US-South Korea military exercises being held this month end.

The allies kicked off the largely computer-simulated exercises on Saturday for a 10-day run, as an alternative to previous large-scale annual drills that were halted to expedite nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington.

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday he was hopeful working-level talks would resume in the coming weeks and said the American side was planning for negotiations in a couple of weeks.

Stephen Biegun (Jonathan Ernst/AFP)

Biegun gave up a job at Ford as head of international government relations to take on his current role, which many consider a near impossible job. He previously had worked for decades as a congressional staffer and as a White House foreign policy aide under President George W Bush.

Biegun, 56, studied political science and Russian language at the University of Michigan and was resident director for the International Republican Institute in Moscow from 1992-1994. He has also as served on the board of the non-profit US-Russia Foundation for Economic Development and the Rule of Law.

Additional reporting by Reuters