Trump says decision on Fed chair will be out soon
WASHINGTON, June 6 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Friday that a decision on the next Federal Reserve chair will be coming out soon, adding that a good Fed chair would lower interest rates.
"It's coming out very soon," Trump told reporters on Air Force One.
When asked specifically about former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, Trump said, "he's very highly thought of." Warsh is considered a frontrunner to be Trump's pick to be the next Fed chair.
Earlier on Friday, Trump said the Federal Reserve should cut interest rates by a full percentage point and he reiterated his view that Chair Jerome Powell has been too slow to lower borrowing costs.
The president has repeatedly berated Powell for not cutting rates as he desires. The two men met face-to-face for the first time last week, with Trump telling Powell he was making a "mistake" by not lowering rates.
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New Statesman
30 minutes ago
- New Statesman
How Donald Trump plunged America into a blind war
Photo by Daniel Torok/The White House via Getty Images One minute after midnight on 21 June, a small group of US B-2 Spirit bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri heading west across the Pacific. They were picked up shortly afterwards by flight tracking accounts on social media, prompting breaking news alerts that multiple American bombers capable of carrying the type of heavy ordinance that would be needed to destroy Iran's nuclear sites were airborne as journalists frantically traced their trajectory. In fact, this was a decoy. The real strike group was flying east across the Atlantic, with seven B-2 bombers joined by US fighter jets as they reached the Middle East, which escorted them into Iranian airspace. In the early hours of 22 June local time, they dropped a total of 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), 30,000-pound guided bombs known as 'bunker busters', on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordo and Natanz. A US Navy submarine fired more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles at a third site in Isfahan as part of what the Pentagon called 'Operation Midnight Hammer'. By now, most people will have seen Donald Trump's address to the nation in the hours that followed, flanked by his distinctly uncomfortable-looking vice-president JD Vance along with secretary-of-state-turned-national-security-adviser Marco Rubio and defence secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump, predictably, pronounced the whole operation a 'spectacular military success', declaring that Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities had been 'completely and totally obliterated', which he could not possibly have known at the time and has yet to be confirmed. 'Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,' Trump intoned. 'If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.' Appearing to veer from his script towards the end, he added, 'I want to just say, we love you, God.' In the best-case scenario for those who support these strikes, Trump has acted decisively, ordering the use of military force where successive previous presidents had equivocated, and setting back the Iranian nuclear programme for years, perhaps even for good. He has finally neutered a regime that has long been defined by its rallying cry, 'Death to America', and delivered Israel from the existential threat that would have been posed by a nuclear-armed Iran, which one former Iranian president is said to have described as a 'one-bomb country'. According to this rendering, Trump has taken advantage of a moment of profound weakness for Tehran, whose most notorious proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, have been eviscerated by the Israeli military campaign over the last 18 months, and whose most senior military commanders and nuclear scientists have been assassinated. He has forced a reckoning for the Iranian regime – that will be quietly welcomed by many in the region and beyond – abandon your nuclear ambitions, or cease to exist. In the process, he has also proved the TACO theory (Trump Always Chickens Out) wrong. Perhaps some even see him delivering on his election campaign mantra that he would deliver 'peace through strength'. This is all, theoretically, possible. We should be clear, less than 24 hours at the time of writing from the US strikes, that nobody – not Trump, not the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and not Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei – knows for certain where this will lead, or how this war will end. (Trump has already called it a 'war' on social media.) But the history of recent US military campaigns in the region does not bode well. The exception often noted is the first Gulf War in 1991, where the coalition military effort known as Operation Desert Storm lasted than two months and succeeded in forcing Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops from Kuwait, although the Iraqi dictator was permitted to remain in power. The problem with the optimistic case this time is, to quote the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the subsequent invasion of Iraq, the 'known unknowns', and the 'unknown unknowns'. In the short term, the known unknowns include what capabilities Iran retains to retaliate, both in terms of its proxies abroad (including the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq), the remaining stockpiles of missiles and drones in Iran, which Israel has repeatedly targeted in recent days, and its ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, where almost a third of the world's seaborne oil transits. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Ayatollah Khamenei, who is 86 and said to be in faltering health, is reportedly sheltering in a bunker, according to the New York Times, avoiding electronic devices for fear of revealing his location and communicating only through a trusted aide, where he has listed several clerics who could replace him if he is killed, along with substitutes for the military chain of command. We do not yet know how Khamenei will respond to these attacks and whether he will assess – as many commentators have insisted – that he must now retaliate in some meaningful form if he hopes to restore Iran's deterrence and remain in power. We do not know whether Tehran can be induced to resume negotiations on a nuclear deal with Washington, as many European leaders have now urged. We do know, however, that Iran had previously negotiated a nuclear deal – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – with the United States, the UK, France, China, Russia, and the EU in 2015, which Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018. It is not clear that any Iranian government would entrust its future to a new deal that could be similarly torn up by the next US administration. (Trump has also launched trade wars against Canada, Mexico and China since returning to power despite signing much-hyped trade deals with them during his previous term.) Meanwhile, the example of the Kim dynasty in North Korea, which has pursued nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them despite the significant costs, and is not currently being bombed by the US, might well suggest to the Iranian regime that the surer course for survival would have been to race for a bomb while it still could, and, if it has the opportunity, to try again. We also know that despite the repeated messaging via US backchannels in the hours after the strike that this was a 'one-and-done' operation – a limited campaign to target the nuclear facilities and nothing more, certainly not the prelude to regime change – Trump and Netanyahu have delivered starkly contradictory signals. Netanyahu openly urged the Iranian people to 'stand up' against the regime after launching the Israeli military campaign on 13 June. Trump has demanded 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER' from Iran on social media and threatened to kill Khamenei. 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change???' Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on the evening of 22 June. 'MIGA!!!' Given these statements, it is not hard to see why the Iranian government might conclude that the US and Israel have, in fact, launched a war that aims to overthrow them, and, therefore, that this is not merely a negotiating ploy that could yet end in a new nuclear deal, but an existential fight that justifies any means. Then there are the unknown unknowns. We do not know, for instance, whether there could be other Iranian nuclear facilities that had not yet been identified, and what steps the regime might have taken to ensure the survival of key personnel, equipment and material. We do not know how secure the regime's grip on power is and whether Khamenei could yet be sidelined, or simply replaced, by hardliners from within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or former high-ranking officials. 'Tehran is now full of such plots,' one anonymous source, who claimed to be part of a plan to replace the ageing supreme leader, told The Atlantic after the strikes. 'Everybody knows Khamenei's days are numbered.' If the regime does fall, it is far from clear what type of government would take its place, and what that would mean for the region, and well beyond. Recent examples – such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria – suggest liberal democracy is an unlikely outcome. 'The US is now entangled in a new conflict, with prospects of a ground operation looming on the horizon,' taunted Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current deputy chair of the country's security council, who is now probably best known for his bellicose social media threats. He then claimed that a 'number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.' (It is worth bearing in mind that his main role these days seems to be garnering attention and provocative headlines.) With the Russian military tied down in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is unlikely to offer much in the way of meaningful help in the short term, but he will certainly capitalise on what appears to be a flagrant breach of international law and what he will present as yet more evidence of American hypocrisy. (Putin, too, claims to have attacked Ukraine in part to stop the country developing nuclear weapons and threatening Russia's national security.) Moscow also stands to benefit from a rise in the price of oil if Iran threatens the Strait of Hormuz or targets other oil-producing facilities in the region. Beijing has strongly condemned the US attack, which the foreign ministry said, 'seriously violate the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and international law'. China is Iran's largest trading partner, which supplied around 15 percent of the oil the country imported last year, and will not welcome the prospect of a massive spike in oil prices if the conflict escalates at a time when the Chinese economy is already slowing. But the prospect of the US getting drawn into another interminable war in the Middle East and deferring, yet again, the mythical 'pivot to Asia', with its focus on deterring a Chinese assault on Taiwan, offers other potential benefits to Beijing. The reverberations of Trump's gamble will be felt far beyond the borders of Iran. Flanked by Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as he delivered his speech in the hours after the attack, the impression was less a show of unity than a president who is keenly aware of the domestic political risk this involves – and the vehement opposition already emanating from parts of his Maga base – and determined to show that his top lieutenants were all on board. Perhaps that was why Vance in particular, who has built his political brand on his opposition to US military intervention overseas, looked so perturbed. Trump has plunged the US into a war with Iran, with no apparent strategy, and objectives that appear to be evolving, in real time, on social media. Maybe the best-case scenario will yet transpire, and the Middle East will emerge from this conflict more stable and prosperous, but recent history cautions against too much optimism. [See also: The British left will not follow Trump into war] Related
The Independent
33 minutes ago
- The Independent
Texas governor vetoes bill that would ban all THC products
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed a bill Sunday to ban all THC consumables, allowing the booming market flush with THC-infused vapes, gummies and other products to continue to be sold across the state. Abbott, a Republican, waited until the final moment to veto the bill in what would have been one of the most restrictive THC bans in the country and a significant blow to the state's billion-dollar industry. The law would have made it a misdemeanor to own, manufacture or sell consumable THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, products and was the latest push by states to regulate THC after a 2018 federal law allowed states to regulate hemp, a similar plant to marijuana that can be synthetically processed to produce THC, the compound giving marijuana its psychoactive properties. Loopholes in existing law have allowed many THC-infused goods to enter the market across the country, including states with strict marijuana laws. Texas has some of the strictest marijuana laws in the country, prohibiting all recreational use and providing a limited medical marijuana program. The consumables market has allowed residents to legally access goods giving a similar high to marijuana. Republican lawmakers have criticized the products as dangerous due to a lack of federal oversight in how the goods are manufactured. Texas' ban is one of the more far-reaching among states that have taken similar steps. Several states, including California, have imposed age limits and restrictions on the potency of THC products. Critics of the Texas bill say it allows people who cannot access marijuana through the state's medical marijuana program to acquire goods that can provide a similar relief. Many retailers across the state also pointed to the thousands of jobs and millions in revenue the industry brings each year. Last year, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have put age restrictions on THC consumables, claiming it would hurt small businesses. ___
Sky News
38 minutes ago
- Sky News
Israel-Iran live: 'Bullseye!!!' Trump claims Iran strikes caused 'monumental damage'
Donald Trump claims Iran's nuclear sites were "obliterated" by US strikes overnight on Saturday. The Iranian armed forces have threatened the US with a "decisive response". Follow the latest below and listen to The World podcast as you scroll.
