Trump says US is considering abolishing birthright citizenship – live

Trump has now finished his long chat with reporters outside the White House. Several things stood out – including Trump’s claim that the current birthright citizenship law was “frankly ridiculous” and that he wanted to abolish it.

“We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby – congratulations, the baby is now a US citizen,” Trump said – mischaracterizing how most such citizenships are granted.

“It’s frankly ridiculous.”

Trump had told Axios in October 2018 that he would end “birthright citizenship” through an executive order. But experts have said such a move would not be legal under the US constitution.

“Few immigration and constitutional scholars believe it is within the president’s power to change birthright citizenship,” Axios reported at the time.

The constituion’s 14th amendment, which grants US citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States”, has been routinely been interpreted to grant citizenship to most people born in the United States, whether or not their parents are American citizens or legally living in the United States.

Donald Trump has said the government is weighing whether to abolish birth right citizenship, calling the constitutional right “ridiculous”.

Currently a child born in the US is entitled to a US passport. The constitution’s 14th amendment, passed after the civil war to ensure that black Americans had full citizenship rights, grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States”.

Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Wednesday, Trump said: “We are looking at birthright citizenship very seriously. It’s frankly ridiculous.”

Donald Trump attacked Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen on Wednesday, saying he cancelled his planned trip to Denmark after Frederiksen had been “nasty” towards him.

“I looked forward to going but I thought the prime minister’s statement that [Trump’s plan to buy Greenland] was ‘absurd’ […] I thought it was nasty,” Trump said.

“I thought it was a very not nice way of saying something. They could have told me no.”

Trump added: “It was not a very nice statement the way she blew me off.”

Frederiksen had indeed referred to Trump’s apparently impromptu attempt to buy Greenland from Denmark as absurd. Trump was criticized by a raft of Danish politicians for his bid.

Trump said: “We treat countries with respect she shouldn’t treat the United States that way.”

Donald Trump has just been speaking as he left the White House en route to Kentucky.

Asked about his remarks that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats were showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty” – a longstanding antisemitic trope – Trump doubled down on his statement.

“If you vote for a Democrat you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel,” Trump told reporters.

Trump also repeated his earlier slurs against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of ‘the squad’. The four women are “anti-Semites” who are “against Israel”, Trump said.

Half of all Trump voters would at least partially blame him if the economy goes south, according to a new poll.

Morning Consult found that 42% of Trump’s 2016 voters would hold the president “partially responsible” for a recession, while 7% would find Trump “solely responsible”.

Of all voters, 69% said they would hold Trump at least partially responsible for a recession, and 28% said he would be solely responsible.

It’s not good news for Trump as the economy continues to look shaky. A number of economists have warned that the chances of a recession are growing. The ominous sounding “yield curve” has inverted, which has proceeded every recession in the past 60 years.

Here’s an explainer on the economy, yield curves, and recessions by my colleague Dominic Rushe.

In some big breaking political news: former White House press secretary Sean Spicer is going on Dancing With the Stars.

Spicer’s presence on the new season of the show was announced by ABC on Wednesday. The former press secretary will appear alongside such luminaries as Ally Brooke, from the band Fifth Harmony, and Hannah Brown, who was in season 15 of the Bachelorette.

Dancing With the Stars begins on September 16. Spicer does have something of a background in the arts, having portrayed the role of ‘Easter Bunny’ during the George W Bush administration.

In depressing news: Idaho has been forced to change signage on children’s buses after angry drivers began following vehicles full of migrant children.

According to the Idaho Statesman: “The Community Council of Idaho plans to remove and conceal signage on buses they use to transport local children of farmworkers and Head Start participants, after repeated experiences of harassment from motorists across the state, including the Treasure Valley.”

The buses are used to transport children to the Community Council, where they can take part in non-profit programs. The vehicles are labelled “Migrant and Seasonal Head Start”, and staff say drivers are harassing the buses because they “assume that migrant means undocumented”.

“Migrant doesn’t necessarily mean ‘illegal,’” Alvarez told the Statesman. “Migrant means people move in search of work, which is what our program is. We have people who might move from East Idaho to Caldwell because of the work that they’re in.”

The federal deficit is expected to balloon to a higher than expected level over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while Donald Trump’s tariffs are projected to shrink gross domestic product by 2020.

It’s another headache for Trump as concerns continue to grow over the economy, with serious fears about a looming recession.

The non-partisan CBO said the deficit will soar by $800bn more than expected over 10 years. According to CNBC the US budget deficit “is expected to hit $960 billion in 2019, and average a whopping $1.2 trillion per year between 2020 and 2029”:

The new deficit projection for 2019 rose $63 billion from the last report, which came out in May. The CBO says this is mainly because of the massive new budget deal, which passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by Trump on Aug. 2.

“The nation’s fiscal outlook is challenging,” CBO director Phillip Swagel said in the report. “Federal debt, which is already high by historical standards, is on an unsustainable course.”

Swagel said that the debt is projected to rise even higher after 2029, due to the aging of the U.S. population, growth in health care spending and rising interest costs.

Eighteen (!) of the 23 (!!) prominent Democratic candidates for president are speaking at the Iowa Federation Labor Convention today.

The presidential hopefuls will address union members in Altoona, beginning at 10am ET and running, presumably, for a long time.

“[Union members] want to know that there’s job security for them and that if you are a building trades-member you want to know that there’s gonna be a good economy and that they are going to be able to continue to do work,” Charlie Wishman, Iowa Federation of Labor Secretary-Treasurer, told 13WHOTV.

“If you are somebody who works at the postal service, you want to know that the postal service is protected and that it is not going to be privatized.”

It’s another illustration – if one were needed – of the importance candidates are placing on Iowa ahead of the state’s February caucuses. In no particular order, the speakers are:

John Delaney, Elizabeth Warren, Jay Inslee, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Bill De Blasio, Joe Biden, Tulsi Gabbard, Julian Castro, Steve Bullock, Tim Ryan, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Benet, Beto O’Rourke, John Hickenlooper, Joe Sestak and Ben Gleib.

Some reaction to the Trump administration rule on indefinitely detaining immigrant families:

The Trump rule change on detaining immigrant families will be published this week in the Federal Register, and would take effect 60 days later, the New York Times reports: “though administration officials concede that the expected court challenge will probably delay it”.

From the Times:

Under the new rule, the administration would be free to send families who are caught crossing the border illegally to a family residential center to be held for as long as it takes for their immigration cases to be decided. Officials said families cases could be resolved within three months, though many could drag on much longer.

Trump administration officials — who briefed reporters on Tuesday night on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans — said that many of the families would be detained until they were either released after being awarded asylum or they were deported to their home countries. Some families might be awarded parole to leave the facilities while the courts decide their fate.

Currently the government may not detain children for more than 20 days unless they are detained in a state facility. The Wall Street Journal reported that the two largest facilities designed to house families, both in Texas, aren’t licensed to house children beyond 20 days.

“To circumvent that requirement,” the Journal wrote: “The new set of rules would enable the Department of Homeland Security to create its own licensing system, effectively allowing the government to house families in any of its detention facilities through their court proceedings, until they are either granted asylum, paroled into the US or deported.”

A new Trump administration regulation would allow the government to detain families crossing the border indefinitely.

The new rule would abolish the current 20-day limit on how long families can be held in custody. It would effectively replace the decades old Flores agreement, which provided oversight on immigrant children being detained by the government.

The rule is expected to be challenged in court, but adds to the raft of anti-immigration measures Trump is attempting to enforce.

So what do people in Denmark think about Trump’s decision to call off his trip to the country?

Not much, it seems – with one former Danish foreign minister comparing Trump to “a clown in a circus”.

“There are already many good reasons to think that the man is a fool, and now he has given another good reason,” Eva Flyvholm, the foreign policy chair for Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance, told Danish media.

The Guardian’s Sean Walker reported that former Denmark foreign minister Villy Søvndal said the decision “confirms that Donald Trump is a narcissistic fool”.

“If he had been a clown in a circus, you could probably say that there is considerable entertainment value. The problem is that he is the president of the most powerful nation in the world,” Søvndal said.

Trump’s cancellation came, of course, after Denmark refused to sell Greenland to the US.

Donald Trump here, quoting right-wing conspiracy theorist Wayne Allen Root’s comments describing Trump as the “King of Israel” and “the second coming of god”.

Root is a far right crank who has a radio show. He was an early proponent of the racist Obama ‘birther’ campaign – which Trump jumped onto. Root also believed Obama was Muslim, and insisted the president was gay, and claimed 2017 Las Vegas shooting was a “muslim terror attack”.

Good morning and welcome to live coverage of the day’s political news.

•A number of prominent Republicans are preparing to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency. Former Ohio governor John Kasich, former Arizona senator Jeff Flake, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford and former congressman Joe Walsh are each in various stages of weighing a run against Trump in the GOP primaries, according to the Washington Post, while former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld launched his own challenge to Trump in April.

•Flake and Kasich told the Post they had received a number of approaches from GOP donors encouraging them to run. The hastily convened surge for a non-Trump candidate has been prompted in part by fears over the economy. But despite the excitement over Trump being potentially ousted by a member of his own party, most of the mooted candidates acknowledge they are very unlikely to win.

•Jewish leaders have responded furiously to Donald Trump using an antisemitic trope to describe Jewish people who vote for Democrats. Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said the comments were “yet another example of Donald Trump continuing to weaponize and politicize antisemitism”, CNN reported, while the Jewish organization J Street called Trump’s remarks “dangerous and shameful”. On Tuesday Trump said Jewish Americans who for Democrats were guilty of “great disloyalty”, apparently suggesting Jewish Americans have dual loyalty to the US and Israel – a perception widely considered antisemitic.

•A Politico/Morning Consult poll has found Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as the only candidates beating Trump in 2020. Biden leads Trump by 7% in the survey, with Sanders 5% ahead. Elizabeth Warren was tied with Trump, with most other Democrats trailing. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2%.