White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will leave the administration at the end of the month to spend more time with her family, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday.
Leavitt, 28, is the youngest person to hold the role. She was a press aide during Trump's first term and has been one of the most visible advocates of his “Make America Great Again” movement. Trump did not outline any plans for who might replace her.
Meanwhile, Trump said he slipped away from Air Force One after a trip last month in Turkey because the Secret Service and military wanted him on a “different plane” due to a threat he insisted did not scare him.
He downplayed the extraordinary nature of the subterfuge involved in his flight, which saw him stow away in an airport catering container to sneak onto another plane while Air Force One was sent into the sky, essentially as a decoy.
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2 people died in military helicopter crash near Fort Hood, officials say
An Army Apache helicopter crashed in a central Texas field on Wednesday, killing both people on board and sparking a wildfire that forced several homes to be evacuated, officials said.
Officials from nearby Fort Hood announced that the AH-64 Apache helicopter had crashed. Cliff Coleman, spokesperson for the Bell County Sheriff’s office confirmed that both occupants died.
No cause of the crash was immediately announced. Fort Hood’s criminal investigation division was leading the investigation, Coleman said.
The helicopter did not hit any homes or other structures when it crashed, Coleman said.
“Our immediate priority is securing the site and supporting the initial response efforts,” said Brig. Gen. Ethan Diven, acting commanding general. “Our thoughts are with the crew and their families as we await further information.”
Interior Department holds third oil lease sale in Gulf of Mexico
The Trump administration conducted another lease sale Wednesday for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Sixteen companies submitted 69 bids totaling nearly $100 million.
The sale was the third in the past year under Trump’s big tax and spending law adopted by congressional Republicans.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the sale underscores the administration’s commitment to “an active offshore energy strategy” and continues a tradition of offshore drilling helping to power transportation, manufacturing and small businesses.
An oil industry lobbying group hailed the sale as a “vote of confidence in American energy.”
Environmental groups denounced it as a giveaway to the oil and gas industry, which is already pulling in windfall profits due to the war in Iran.
US strikes targeting Houthis killed 153 civilians in Yemen last year, Pentagon review says
A Pentagon review has found that U.S. airstrikes targeting Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen last year killed more than 150 civilians.
The unclassified assessment was sent to Congress as part of an annual report on civilian casualties and was obtained by The Associated Press.
The Pentagon review focused on three airstrikes in April 2025 that were launched during the U.S. campaign against the Houthis. The militants were attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea as well as Israel. A total of 153 civilians were killed and 243 were injured.
The report comes as concerns rise over civilian casualties by military campaigns under the Trump administration, including a strike on an Iranian primary school in the opening days of this year’s war that killed up to 168 people.
Hegseth pushes Latin American nations to leave ICC
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is urging Latin American countries not to recognize the International Criminal Court as the U.S. military targets alleged drug traffickers in the region.
Speaking at a gathering in Panama of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, Hegseth argued that those efforts “are 100% lawful under the laws of armed conflict.” He faces questions at home about the legality of carrying out deadly strikes on small boats accused of trafficking drugs.
It’s not clear from Hegseth’s remarks what, if anything, the ICC has done to stymie U.S. operations in the region. He encouraged the nearly 20 countries assembled “to leave the ICC and reject their attempts to rob your governments and your courts of your sovereignty.”
The Trump administration is pushing a campaign to “dismantle” the world tribunal in retaliation for warrants the court has issued for top Israeli officials over the war in Gaza and investigations into U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.
Leavitt calls the decision to depart the White House ‘bittersweet’
Leavitt recently returned to work after taking a short leave following the birth in May of her second child, Viviana.
She also has a 2-year-old son.
“The truth is since returning to the White House after the birth of my daughter, I have felt in my heart that I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary — and that is why I have ultimately made the bittersweet decision to depart the White House and embark on a new chapter in my life,” Leavitt said in a social media post.
Leavitt leaving job as White House press secretary
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the youngest person to hold the role, will leave the administration at the end of the month, Trump announced Wednesday.
Leavitt, who served Trump as a press aide during his first term in the White House, has been one of the most visible advocates of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. The Republican president described her as one of his “most trusted aides” in a social media post announcing her departure.
He said Leavitt “will be departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect! Karoline will now be one of my top outside advisors, and an influential voice within the Republican Party, as we work to defy History, and conclusively win the Midterm Elections.”
Lawsuit seeks to stop Trump from making money off early access to his posts on US policy
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court alleges that Trump’s deal with his media company to post first on his Truth Social platform violates the Constitution.
The suit brought by two media groups comes after Truth Social started charging Wall Street firms as much as $100,000 a month for a new service allowing early access to the president’s posts so they can trade off them.
Truth Social says the lawsuit is an attempt by left wing activists to silence the president.
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The duel over the National Guard in DC has entered its second year
The latest volley was a letter coming from the Justice Department to the district council challenging their view that the use of the military is unnecessary because crime was already falling.
That letter counters letters the council sent last month to governors who have troops in town supporting Trump’s 2025 surge. The June letter asked governors to bring their people home, citing $3 million a day costs and the lack of a crime emergency.
Wednesday’s missive disputed that: “D.C. is a much safer place no matter what you say.”
The president activated the guard and pulled in federal law enforcement with a crime emergency declaration on Aug. 11, 2025. The deployment was recently extended until January 2029 and will cost an estimated $1.4 billion.
Trump-supporting pastor warns immigration enforcement risks Latino vote
The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez is warning Republicans that deporting vulnerable people who don’t have a criminal record could lose them the Latino vote in the midterm elections.
Rodriguez is a conservative pastor from California and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.
In an op-ed for the Christian Post on Wednesday, he said that not everyone the administration is arresting and deporting is a criminal. Many, he said, are “construction workers, healthcare professionals and Sunday school teachers who have been rooted in this country for 20 years or more.”
“This does not mean open borders,” he said. “It means the mechanisms of enforcement must be proportional, just, and morally defensible.”
Rodriguez said there is “still time to course correct.”
“When indiscriminate enforcement becomes the story, it hands the moral high ground to the progressive Left and confirms their most damaging narrative about the Right.”
Forget left vs. center
Primary results in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Connecticut have reiterated that Democratic voters are hungry for change, even as they remain divided over the party’s ideological future.
Progressives secured a major victory in Minnesota but fell short in Wisconsin, while a longtime Connecticut congressman was ousted by a younger challenger.
The results followed similar outcomes this year in places such as Michigan that showed an appetite for turnover that cuts across the party’s ideological divisions.
They also highlighted the growing influence of younger voters, who have been particularly drawn to progressive candidates.
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US resumes leadership role in anti-abortion group abandoned during Biden administration
The Trump administration says it will resume a leadership role in an international bloc opposed to abortion that had been established in Trump’s first term but then abandoned by President Joe Biden.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday the U.S. would serve as the “secretariat” for the Geneva Consensus Declaration. The Geneva consensus was created in 2020 with great fanfare from then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to secure meaningful health and development gains for women; to protect life at all stages; to defend the family as the fundamental unit of society.”
Critics, however, saw it as a way for the U.S. to further push Trump administration goals to limit family planning initiatives and ban abortion.
Participation in Geneva Consensus was one of the first Trump administration actions rescinded by Biden when he took office in early 2021.
Wisconsin gubernatorial primary winner David Crowley ties opponent to Trump
The winner of Wisconsin’s Democratic primary race for governor immediately tied his Republican opponent to President Trump in his first public comments since his razor-thin victory.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley told supporters Wednesday he intends to build a broad coalition to defeat Republican Tom Tiffany, who’s voted 100% in line with Trump.
“The biggest difference between me and the congressman is I’m loyal to the people of Wisconsin. I’m not loyal to MAGA,” Crowley said referring to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
Tiffany began the general election campaign with a message connecting Crowley to Francesca Hong, a the democratic socialist Crowley narrowly defeated.
“I’ve said all along that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between these Democrat candidates,” Tiffany said in a statement.
Sen. Tim Scott says he voted for Sen. Darline Graham and endorses her in runoff
Scott, who also serves as chair of the chamber’s political arm, said on social media Wednesday morning that he’d voted for Darline Graham in Tuesday’s special Republican Senate primary.
Graham has been serving in an interim role since her brother Sen. Lindsey Graham’s death last month. Scott called his fellow South Carolinian “a conservative stalwart” who “represents our beloved state with class, humility, and dignity.”
Graham and Rep. Ralph Norman will go head to head in an Aug. 25 GOP runoff. The winner of that contest faces Democrat Annie Andrews in November.
Rubio sets up task force to combat ‘birth tourism’ as Trump fights birthright citizenship
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced the creation of a State Department task force to combat “birth tourism,” a Trump administration phrase for foreign women coming to the United States with the intention of giving birth to a child on U.S. soil in order to secure their child’s American citizenship.
Trump and his administration have fought unsuccessfully in courts to end “birthright citizenship,” which gives U.S. citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. Despite those legal setbacks, Trump has continued the fight to end the practice.
In a social media post Wednesday, Rubio said the new task force would “review the activity of visa holders, dismantle illegal birth tourism networks, and put an end to this heinous abuse of our nation’s laws.”
He said that since the task force was created last month, it had already taken action to revoke the visas of more than 600 people suspected of being involved in birth tourism schemes.
Many details about what happened remain unknown
Presidents have regularly tested the confines of their office, pushing their security advisers to visit war zones as a show of American presence and their own leadership. Usually, this happens in the form of trips that aren’t announced until the president is deemed to be out of harm’s way.
What’s different this time is that Trump was covertly separated from the rest of his travelers — including the press pool meant to provide independent coverage of the president — and, instead of informing the public about what occurred once the risk had passed, the White House still hasn’t fully revealed what took place.
Presidents often take secret trips — but not like this
Commanders in chief have sometimes kept overseas trips covert for security reasons, with schedules and logistics kept classified until after for safety reasons. But the fact that Trump’s whereabouts were concealed at the time and for weeks afterward is believed to be unprecedented.
“We have absolutely seen the president fly on unmarked or decoy planes before, into Iraq, Afghanistan, other war-zone-like places,” said Garrett M. Graff, author of “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die.”
“But this was an ongoing secret that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.”
After hiding in the catering vehicle and being moved to the other plane, Trump stopped in Britain, sneaked back aboard the presidential plane undetected, and even later scoffed when asked about potential danger.
“If I go, you go. Right?” he told reporters then — gliding past the fact that if the plane had been shot down, the president wouldn’t have been aboard.
Inflation paused, but higher costs remain an issue for Americans
U.S. inflation slowed last month and a measure of underlying price pressures also cooled, suggesting higher oil and gas prices from the Iran war are only having a limited impact on broader costs in the economy.
Consumer prices rose 3.4% in July from a year ago, down slightly from 3.5% in June, the Labor Department said Wednesday. But inflation is still higher than before the Iran war began in February, when it was 2.4%. On a monthly basis, prices rose just 0.1% from June to July.
Inflation has been pushed higher by a series of shocks to the economy, including President Trump’s tariffs imposed last spring, higher gas prices stemming from the Iran war, and a surge in investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure that has boosted computer chip prices. The key question for the inflation-fighters at the Fed — not to mention for consumers struggling with high gas and grocery prices — is how quickly those one-time effects will fade.
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Trump’s vaccine order hands some MAHA voters a win. It also gives Democrats an attack line
President Trump pivoted the nation’s attention back to vaccines this week with an executive order that aims to scale back the childhood immunization schedule and space out shots into separate visits.
After acting to overhaul the nation’s vaccine policy and guidance, the Trump administration had recently largely stepped back from additional changes to focus on less controversial subjects, raising questions over the political impetus behind and implications of the Republican president’s renewed focus on vaccines.
For well over a decade, Trump has expressed his view — against medical groups’ guidance — that childhood vaccines should be administered in smaller doses over a long period of time. The executive order sought to bear out that discredited theory.
While the move could endear Trump to some “Make America Healthy Again” voters who want more flexibility on immunizations, it’s also already attracting attacks designed to hurt Trump’s aligned candidates in November’s midterm elections.
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Progressive Democrats get another win in Minnesota US Senate primary
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan won the Minnesota Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday in the latest victory for an insurgent progressive over the party’s establishment.
Flanagan defeated centrist U.S. Rep. Angie Craig with a pledge to fight the influence of corporations and confront Trump.
“For months now, I have been telling you that this campaign was about the many versus the money,” Flanagan said as she celebrated her victory in Minneapolis. “Well guess what? The many just won.”
The outcome was another sign of progressive energy among Democratic primary voters. It comes a week after Abdul El-Sayed won a bitter and divisive primary in Michigan that fired up the left and fueled anxiety among party leaders that Democrats will alienate moderate swing voters.
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Trump says Secret Service and the military wanted him off Air Force One in Turkey due to threat
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he slipped away from Air Force One after a trip last month in Turkey because the Secret Service and military wanted him on a “different plane” due to a threat he insisted didn’t scare him.
Trump downplayed the extraordinary nature of the subterfuge involved in his flight, which saw him stow away in an airport catering container to sneak onto another plane while Air Force One was sent into the sky, essentially as a decoy.
He also downplayed the risk to the people — White House officials, security and support staff, and reporters — he left on the plane.
“They wanted me to go on a different flight, different plane,” Trump told reporters after returning from an event in Ohio, saying he had little choice in the matter.
“I guess there was a threat out there. I didn’t really ask too much about it,” he said. “I get a lot of threats.”
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