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President Donald Trump’s launch of a nationwide “affordability tour” this week may look to some like an admission that Americans are struggling under the weight of the administration’s tariffs and rising utility and grocery costs—but Trump assured one reporter on Tuesday that he would acknowledge no such thing.

A new US National Security Strategy and a series of comments from US officials, presidential proxies and Trump himself, have culminated in what could be one of the most profound crises for Atlanticism, the security doctrine that has sustained peace and democracy in Europe since the end of the second world war.

Where Trump’s point of departure was once the failure of Europe to contribute sufficiently to its own security, he has now embraced a more alarming vision.

Coloured both by racism and a staggering contempt for Europe’s political institutions and leaders, he has warned of the risk of civilisational collapse on a continent he barely knows, and that he has viewed more often from the window of an armoured sedan.

A senior Democratic senator is calling for an investigation into potential insider trading by fossil-fuel billionaires close to the Trump administration, after a Guardian investigation raised questions about an unusual share buying spree.

Republican lawmakers have unveiled a bill to authorize $901 billion in military spending for the next fiscal year. House Speaker Mike Johnson says the National Defense Authorization Act would “ensure our military forces remain the most lethal in the world.”

Former Honduras president Juan Orlando Hernández recently thanked God and Donald Trump – in that order – for being pardoned by the latter of a drug trafficking conviction won by federal US prosecutors less than two years earlier.

The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has developed a go-to response when asked about something controversial Donald Trump or members of his administration said or did.

It’s some version of “I don’t know anything about that.”

A leaked memo written by US Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Department of Justice to compile a list of potential “domestic terrorism” organizations that espouse “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.”

In its latest attempt to prove the patently false assertion that immigrants are causing widespread voter fraud, the Trump administration sued Washington state after Secretary of State Steve Hobbs refused to give them voter information.

[Washington state] Governor Bob Ferguson warned Tuesday that the budget proposal he’ll release this month will rely solely on spending cuts and not higher taxes to overcome what he says is a multi-billion dollar shortfall.

“That’s the plan,” Ferguson told reporters at the state Capitol. “I don’t plan on balancing the budget with revenue.”

Immigrant rights advocate Murad Awawdeh joins us to discuss Donald Trump’s nationwide anti-immigrant crackdown and how it’s manifested in Trump’s hometown of New York City, where hundreds of New Yorkers recently blocked a federal immigration raid targeting street vendors from West Africa before it even started. “This has never been about vetting. This has never been about security and safety. It’s about cruelty,” says Awawdeh about the Trump administration’s persecution of immigrants. “His war on immigrants and his mass deportation agenda is all to lead to making America white again.”

Economists on Wednesday expressed significant concerns after new data from global payroll processing firm ADP estimated that the US economy lost 32,000 jobs last month.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is attempting to distance himself from the first U.S. airstrike on September 2 that targeted two shipwrecked men who had survived an earlier U.S. strike on a boat the Pentagon says was carrying drugs, without providing evidence