Former U.S. President Donald Trump made headlines over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend after it was revealed he hosted two men known for making virulently antisemitic statements for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.

In the meeting, Trump reportedly sat down with the rapper and fashion designer Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, as well as Nick Fuentes, a far-right activist who has promoted people with white nationalist views and has denied the reality of the Holocaust.

Trump later claimed he was not aware that Ye was planning to bring Fuentes to the meeting, but he can hardly have been unaware of the recent antisemitic comments by the rapper that caused major companies, including sporting goods giant Adidas, to sever ties with him.

The meeting took place scarcely a week after Trump officially declared himself a candidate for president in 2024 and harked back to his 2016 campaign when his willingness to associate with fringe figures on the far right made the Republican establishment hesitant to embrace him.

Fringe candidates

Republicans are still stinging from the results of the midterm elections in which they failed to capture the Senate and only eked out a slim majority in their takeover of the House of Representatives. Many blamed the poor showing largely on Trump, whose hand-picked candidates — usually chosen for their willingness to repeat his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen from him — performed poorly.

On Monday, the deadline for counties in the state of Arizona to certify the results of the November 8 election, Trump was still posting false claims of widespread fraud and election irregularities, which he has blamed for his favored candidates’ losses in that state.

Some county-level officials who supported Trump’s claims on Monday refused to certify the election results, though they are expected to be compelled to do so by court challenges, given the lack of evidence of malfeasance.

Now, with Trump seeking the party’s backing for another run at the White House, experts wonder whether his continued association with extremist figures, combined with another unsuccessful election, will finally be too much for the broader GOP.

While the most prominent members of the party have avoided discussing Trump’s association with Ye and Fuentes, others are speaking out.

“President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites,” Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy wrote on Twitter Monday. “These attitudes are immoral and should not be entertained. This is not the Republican Party.”

In an appearance on CNN Sunday, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that’s setting an example for the country or the party to meet with (an) avowed racist or antisemite. And so, it’s very troubling and it shouldn’t happen, and we need to avoid … empowering the extremes.”

Not all Republicans came down hard on Trump. Politico reported that South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said he wouldn’t “condemn anybody” even though Fuentes is “not somebody that I would have a meeting with.”

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley told Politico, “It’s a free country, [Trump] can do whatever he wants.”

Another political ‘fumble’

“Trump has long played footsie with people who espouse horrifying, bigoted beliefs,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told VOA. “This dinner is only the latest incidence of what is a very familiar trend. Trump is now a candidate seeking a third straight Republican presidential nomination. We’ll just have to see if enough Republicans are tired of him and prefer to go with a different option.”

“The private dinner with [Ye] West could have generated attention in the mainstream press and lots of likes from the trollish quarters of the nationalist right, even if it would have further alienated some Jewish supporters,” Chris Stirewalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told VOA.

Stirewalt, the former political editor of Fox News Channel, added, “But even if it was just because of indifferent or sloppy staff work, hosting Fuentes at exactly the moment that mainstream Republicans are reconsidering their relationship with Trump following the bad turn he gave the GOP in midterms was yet another in a series of fumbles by the former president.”

Blaming Ye

On Sunday, Trump was still dealing with the fallout from the meeting and used a post on his social networking site, Truth Social, to point the finger at Ye for bringing Fuentes to his home unannounced.

Accounts of what went on in the meeting included Ye asking Trump to consider running with him, in the role of vice-presidential candidate in 2024.

“So, I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice,'” Trump wrote.

“He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!”

Easy access

Taking Trump at his word that he didn’t expect Ye to bring Fuentes, analysts still see the fact that a known Holocaust denier made it in to see the former president as indicative of the kind of organization Trump tends to run, whether in office or out of it.

“It reflects the fact that at Mar-a-Lago, as in the Oval Office, there’s virtually no screening process to determine who gets in to see the ‘great man,'” William A. Galston, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program, told VOA. “And that is by design, because Donald Trump mistrusts people who try to manage him or screen the people he meets with or talks with.”

Galston said Trump might be willing to continue associating with Ye out of a belief that the relationship will eventually benefit him.

“He has a long history of not deserting people that he thinks may be helpful to him down the road,” Galston said.

In the case of Ye, he said, that might be in Trump’s search for a larger share of the African American vote.

“Trump has this persistent fantasy that he’s enormously popular among Black men,” Galston said. “And that the Black men he anoints are influencers and thought leaders within that group.”
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U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday called on Congress to intervene to avert a potential rail strike that could occur as early as December 9, warning of a catastrophic economic impact if railroad service ground to a halt.

Biden asked lawmakers to adopt the tentative deal announced in September “without any modifications or delay – to avert a potentially crippling national rail shutdown” and added that up to 765,000 Americans “could be put out of work in the first two weeks alone.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said lawmakers would take up legislation this week “to prevent a catastrophic nationwide rail strike, which would grind our economy to a halt.”

On Monday, more than 400 groups called on Congress to intervene in the railroad labor standoff that threatens to idle shipments of food and fuel and strand travelers while inflicting billions of dollars of economic damage.

A rail traffic stoppage could freeze almost 30% of U.S. cargo shipments by weight, stoke inflation and cost the American economy as much as $2 billion per day by unleashing a cascade of transport woes affecting U.S. energy, agriculture, manufacturing, health care and retail sectors.

“A rail shutdown would devastate our economy,” Biden said. “Without freight rail, many U.S. industries would shut down … Communities could lose access to chemicals necessary to ensure clean drinking water. Farms and ranches across the country could be unable to feed their livestock.”

Biden hailed the contract deal that includes a 24% compounded wage increase over a five-year period from 2020 through 2024 and five annual $1,000 lump-sum payments.

Workers in four unions have rejected the tentative deal, while workers in eight unions have approved it.

Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have been involved in discussions with the rail industry, unions and agriculture industry stakeholders.

Senator Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, praised Biden’s call to Congress to act and said no one side was fully happy with the compromise contract deal “but the responsible thing to do is avoid the strike.”

The Association of American Railroads said “congressional action to prevent a work stoppage in this manner is appropriate … No one benefits from a rail work stoppage – not our customers, not rail employees and not the American economy.”

In a letter on Monday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, National Retail Federation, American Petroleum Institute, National Restaurant Association, American Trucking Associations and other groups warned that impacts of a potential strike could be felt as soon as December 5.

Biden said Congress “should set aside politics and partisan division and deliver for the American people. Congress should get this bill to my desk well in advance of December 9th so we can avoid disruption.”

“The risks to our nation’s economy and communities simply make a national rail strike unacceptable,” says the letter to congressional leaders first reported by Reuters, warning a strike could halt passenger railroad Amtrak and commuter rail services that “would disrupt up to 7 million travelers a day.”

Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board in August released the framework for the tentative deal forged in September between major railroads and a dozen unions representing 115,000 workers. Those carriers include Union Pacific, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Kansas City Southern.

Unions and railroads have until December 9 to resolve differences. If they do not, workers could strike or railroads could lock out employees — unless Congress intervenes. But railroads would halt hazardous materials shipments at least four days ahead of a strike deadline.
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More than 2 million people in the Houston area were under a boil order notice Monday after a power outage at a purification plant caused water pressure to drop, and the mayor of the nation’s fourth-largest city ordered a full review of the system.

The notice tells customers to boil water before it’s used for cooking, bathing or drinking. Multiple Houston-area public and private schools, as well as some local colleges, were closed Monday as a result of the notice, while others made adjustments to provide affected campuses with bottled water and sanitizer.

The notice was issued Sunday, hours after two transformers failed, causing power outages at the water plant, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a press conference Monday. There was no indication the water system had been contaminated.

Water quality testing was underway, Turner said. He said he expects the notice to be lifted by early Tuesday at the latest, once the state’s environmental agency gives an all-clear after analyzing test results.

According to Turner, the city issued a notice, which affects all of Houston and multiple adjacent areas, in an “abundance of caution” after the two transformers — a main one and its backup — “uniquely and coincidentally” failed. The problem affected the plant’s ability to treat water and pump water into the transmission system, resulting in low water pressure.

The power system at the water plant undergoes regular maintenance, Turner said, but he did not give a timeline for how often. The mayor said he has ordered a diagnostic review of the system to understand how this was possible and how it can be prevented. He said because the issue was within the plant’s system, backup power generators would not have made a difference.

Sixteen sensors marked dips under the minimum pressure levels required by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — 14 of them for only 2 minutes and two of them for nearly 30 minutes, Turner said.

Untreated groundwater can enter a water system through cracked pipes when water pressure drops. Customers are told to boil water to kill bacteria that could be harmful.

“We are optimistic the results will come back clean,” Turner said.

Turner defended the decision to warn residents about the water quality several hours after the issue first occurred and apologized for the disruptions to businesses, schools and elective surgeries. He said the dip in pressure did not automatically trigger a water boil notice, but a decision was made to issue one based on the data once the city consulted with and was instructed to do so by TCEQ.

Water infrastructure and quality has been a prominent issue in cities large and small throughout the U.S., including Baltimore; Honolulu; Jackson, Mississippi; and Flint, Michigan.
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The white gunman who massacred 10 Black shoppers and workers at a Buffalo supermarket pleaded guilty Monday to murder and hate-motivated terrorism charges, guaranteeing he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Payton Gendron, 19, entered the plea Monday in a courthouse roughly two miles from the grocery store where he used a semiautomatic rifle and body armor to carry out a racist assault he hoped would help preserve white power in the U.S.

Gendron, who was handcuffed and wore an orange jumpsuit, occasionally licked and clenched his lips as he pleaded guilty to all of the most serious charges in the grand jury indictment, including murder, murder as a hate crime and hate-motivated domestic terrorism, which carries an automatic sentence of life without parole.

He answered “yes” and “guilty” as Judge Susan Eagan referred to each victim by name and asked whether he killed them because of their race. Gendron also pleaded guilty to wounding three people who survived the May attack.

Many of the relatives of those victims sat and watched, some dabbing their eyes and sniffling. Speaking to reporters later, several said the plea left them cold. It didn’t address the bigger problem, which they said was racism in America.

“His voice made me feel sick, but it showed me I was right,” said Zeneta Everhart, whose 20-year-old son was shot in the neck but survived. “This country has a problem. This country is inherently violent. It is racist. And his voice showed that to me.”

After the roughly 45-minute proceeding ended, Gendron’s lawyers suggested that he now regrets his crimes, but they didn’t elaborate or take questions.

“This critical step represents a condemnation of the racist ideology that fueled his horrific actions on May 14,” said Gendron’s lawyer, Brian Parker. “It is our hope that a final resolution of the state charges will help in some small way to keep the focus on the needs of the victims and the community.”

Gendron has pleaded not guilty to separate federal hate crime charges that could result in a death sentence if he is convicted. The U.S. Justice Department has not said whether it will seek capital punishment. Acknowledgement of guilt and a claim of repentance could potentially help Gendron in a penalty phase of a death penalty trial.

The plea comes at a time when many Americans have become nearly desensitized to mass shootings. In recent weeks, there have been deadly attacks at a Walmart in Virginia, at a gay club in Colorado and at the University of Virginia.

Just days after Gendron’s rampage in Buffalo, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

Gendron wore body armor and used a legally purchased AR-15 style rifle in his attack on the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo. Those killed ranged in age from 32 to 86 and included an armed security guard died trying to protect customers, a church deacon and the mother of a former Buffalo fire commissioner. Gendron surrendered when police confronted him as he emerged from the store.

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who was in the courtroom for Gendron’s guilty plea, told reporters afterwards that “It was important to hear why these precious lives were snatched from us for no other reason than the color of their skin.”

The mayor, a Democrat, called for a ban on assault weapons, as did Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Relatives of the victims reiterated their calls for Congress and the FBI to address white supremacy and gun violence.

“We are literally begging for those in power to do something about it,” said Garnell Whitfield, whose 86-year-old mother, Ruth Whitfield, was killed.

White supremacy was Gendron’s motive. He said in documents posted online just before the attack that he’d picked the store, about a three-hour drive from his home in Conklin, New York, because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He said he was motivated by a belief in a massive conspiracy to dilute the power of white people by “replacing” them in the U.S. with people of color.

Zeneta Everhart, the mother of Zaire Goodman, who survived being shot in the neck, and Mark Talley, the son of Geraldine Talley, who was killed, said they were offended by Gendron’s tone and cleaned-up appearance in court.

“He’s a thug,” Talley said.

“We show them in a way that doesn’t make them threatening, and it’s disgusting,” Everhart said.

“Am I happy he’s going to jail for life?” Tally said. “What would make me happy is if America acknowledged its history of racism.”
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Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, has started to erupt, prompting volcanic ash and debris to fall nearby, authorities said Monday.

The eruption began late Sunday night in the summit caldera of the volcano on the Big Island, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Early Monday, it said lava flows were contained within the summit area and weren’t threatening nearby communities.

“However, lava flows in the summit region are visible from Kona. There is currently no indication of any migration of the eruption into a rift zone,” the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said in a statement. A rift zone is where the mountain is splitting apart, the rock is cracked and relatively weak and it’s easier for magma to emerge.

The USGS warned residents at risk from Mauna Loa lava flows should review their eruption preparations. Scientists had been on alert because of a recent spike in earthquakes at the summit of the volcano, which last erupted in 1984.

Portions of the Big Island were under an ashfall advisory issued by the National Weather Service in Honolulu, which said up to a quarter-inch (0.6 centimeters) of ash could accumulate in some areas.

Mauna Loa is one of five volcanoes that together make up the Big Island of Hawaii, which is the southernmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago.

Mauna Loa, rising 13,679 feet (4,169 meters) above sea level, is the much larger neighbor to Kilauea volcano, which erupted in a residential neighborhood and destroyed 700 homes in 2018. Some of its slopes are much steeper than Kilauea’s so when it erupts, its lava can flow much faster.

During a 1950 eruption, the mountain’s lava traveled 15 miles (24 kilometers) to the ocean in less than three hours.
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