The enormous US debt under Trump will hobble the next Democratic administration – just as the GOP planned

• Why is the Trump administration causing turmoil in the bond markets?

You could pin the US’s staggering $40tn in government debt to Donald Trump’s Keystone Cops-style governance. Tariffs he sold as a new source of revenue were struck down by the supreme court, forcing the government to return tens of billions of dollars to importers. Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), ostensibly created to stop wasteful government spending, decimated federal programs and probably killed millions of children, but did nothing to close the budget deficit. The burst of inflation following Trump’s misguided adventure in Iran sharply raised the cost of serving the government’s obligations.

Yet as the federal debt hits an all-time high, up from about $35tn when Trump took office less than two years ago, it is worth noting that the US’s gargantuan indebtedness is in fact the product of a longstanding Republican strategy that took shape well before Trump could even dream about gold-plating the White House. It was called “starve the beast”.

Despite previously comparing him to a ‘mobster’, Trump’s former personal lawyer showers him with praise. This blog is now closed.

• Trump administration faces questions over top aide Natalie Harp’s security clearance

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An FBI team seized electronic devices from former US representative Eric Swalwell at the San Francisco airport on Saturday, then raided his home in Washington, DC, the next day, CNN reported Thursday.

The raid is part of a federal investigation into the sexual assault allegations which ultimately drove the Bay Area Democrat to resign from office in April, sources familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department subsequently opened criminal investigations on Swalwell.

The former Sunday Night Football stalwart is now one step from a seat in the US Senate. And she could cause a shock in liberal Minnesota

As the third leg of NBC’s Sunday Night Football crew alongside play-by-play man Al Michaels and the tart-tongued analyst Cris Collinsworth, Michele Tafoya was a paragon of deference and neutrality for 11 years as an NFL sideline reporter, dutifully relating boilerplate tactics, talking points and injury updates when she wasn’t nodding along to softball interviews or fumbling through hammy production gimmicks for viewers who might have been too offline to get the bit. She was almost pathologically committed to not doing anything to draw attention to herself or her gender in an era when sideline reporting was a fast track to national celebrity. Even her football takes hewed to the middle. (“New Orleans doesn’t want to lose to Atlanta twice in a season …”) Anyone who says they saw the 61-year-old emerging as a rightwing firebrand was watching a different game.

And yet here we are. Last week, Tafoya was the decisive winner of Minnesota’s US Senate Republican primary, earning the party’s nomination for November’s general election. Even more striking: she beat back eight challengers, not least Adam Schwarze, the party-endorsed pro-gun, pro-military ex-Navy SEAL, and Royce White, the anti-leftist, anti-trans NBA flameout currently testing WNBA gender norms.