Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents will be present at the 2026 FIFA tournament, casting an ominous shadow of violent authoritarianism over the beloved event. Earlier this year, ICE head Todd Lyons announced that the agents would be present at the World Cup just for security, not enforcement. Now, Los Angeles’s World Cup hosting committee can’t even promise that—despite requests from FIFA President Gianni Infantino and strike threats from food and beverage workers, a group that is more likely to be subject to an ICE raid.“We are working very closely with them to make sure they’re just focused on us, providing us a safe and secure event and nothing else,” committee head Kathryn Schloessman said. “But having said that, I am not the ultimate decision-maker on that.”ICE’s presence and potential for raids may very well create an absolute nightmare for the U.S., host cities, international fans, and the countless migrant workers behind the scenes.
Even the president’s inner circle is tiring of his erratic, late-night social media binges—and the White House aide responsible for them.Donald Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp is the woman behind his overnight Truth Social sprees, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Through twilight-hour shifts, Harp has created the impression that the president never sleeps and is instead spending his should-be bedtime obsessively retweeting baseless conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election and Fox News headlines about his purported popularity among the American public.The 34-year-old aide supplies the president with stacks of printed-out drafts and awaits his approval before hitting post, sources told the Journal.Her work has included posts that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ. Trump took down both posts after they spurred immense public backlash. In the former instance, Trump claimed he did not see the section of the video that racistly mocked the former president and first lady. A White House official blamed the mistake on an editing error.The frustration lies partly in the perceived chain of command: Harp does not share her drafts with anyone else in the White House but the president, claiming that she works for him and only him, reported the Journal. That’s prompted tensions between Harp and some of the federal employees affected by her incendiary writing, such as the chief of staff’s office.In a statement, White House communications director Steven Cheung affirmed the president’s reliance on Truth Social as his primary mode of communication with the American people, yet declined to comment on how the office crafts them.“Truth Social has never been hotter, and it’s because President Trump offers his unfiltered and direct thoughts to the American people, without the biased media taking him out of context,” Cheung said. “We don’t discuss internal deliberations of how the process works, but no other social-media tool has been more effective than Truth.”
“It’s all of a piece of disguising what’s really at stake in communicating to women about pregnancy,” Emily Martin, chief program officer at the National Women’s Law Center, told Jezebel.
4pm ET / 1pm PT: Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes is challenging Trump's attempts to sway the midterms. He joins Swin for a LIVE Town Hall TODAY.