FBI Director Christopher Wray has never given a full explanation to the American people about how the state and national FBI offices failed so profoundly on the Jan. 6 attack.
"Christopher Wray is leading the FBI at a time when the threat environment is as dramatically different from those post-9/11 years as at any other point," MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said to New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt. "What is your sense of how he has transformed the bureau to deal with the threat?"
Schmidt said that there is a question about how much counterterrorism is focused on foreign issues over domestic threats, which was the norm after Sept. 11. Now that there are a heightened number of threats from within the U.S., but no real understanding of what the FBI is doing to deal with such a threat.
Andrew Weissmann, who previously served as the FBI's general counsel under Director Robert Mueller, recalled a story of a conversation with former President George W. Bush who said he didn't care about bringing the terrorists to justice as much as he cared about preventing the next attack. It was the "marching order," he said, that changed the FBI.
"Many people say that one of the reasons that the FBI and other agencies really dropped the ball on Jan. 6th and were very slow to react is because they weren't thinking and correctly evaluating the problem of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers," Weissmann continued. "The internal text messages and communications. And the Secret Service is an example of that. These were white supremacy groups where they have not been traditionally viewed as posing the same kind of threat. And I think that was obviously wrong. I think there was a tinge of racism in that. And certainly comparing it to how they responded to Antifa."
He went on to say that the FBI must evolve, but also be held accountable.
"I would say Chris Wray still has a lot more work to do," Weissmann closed. "You know, he still has not actually given a very public, candid account of what exactly happened on Jan. 6th and the intelligence failures and the inaction with respect to the intelligence they did have. And so it's very hard to move forward without that kind of very public accounting, which I think would have happened under -- certainly under Robert Mueller. He sort of beat that into us, of being super candid about failures and how we're going to deal with them going forward."
President Donald Trump on Friday angrily lashed out after the European Commission slapped tech giant Google with a $3.45 billion fine for violating antitrust laws.
The European Commission ordered Google to end its anticompetitive practices, such as its payments to ensure its search engine receives preferential treatment on internet browsers and mobile phones. The commission also demanded that Google "implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain."
EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said that the decision demonstrated that "Google abused its dominant position in adtech harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers" and that it must "must now come forward with a serious remedy to address its conflicts of interest, and if it fails to do so, we will not hesitate to impose strong remedies."
Shortly after the ruling, Trump took to Truth Social to blast Europe for enforcing its antitrust laws.
"Europe today 'hit' another great American company, Google, with a $3.5 billion fine, effectively taking money that would otherwise go to American investments and jobs," Trump wrote. "Very unfair, and the American taxpayer will not stand for it! As I have said before, my administration will NOT allow these discriminatory actions to stand. Apple, as an example, was forced to pay $17 billion in a fine that, in my opinion, should not have been charged—they should get their money back!"
Trump added that "we cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these taxpaying American companies."
Max von Thun, Europe director for anti-monopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, had a decidedly different take from the president, and praised the European Commission for taking an "important first step in breaking Google's chokehold over the underlying architecture not merely of the internet, but of the free press in the 21st century."
"It is only right that Google pays the price for its blatant and long-standing lawbreaking," he added. "More importantly however, the commission has given Google two months to end its illegal practices and resolve the profound conflicts of interest which arise from its control of every layer of the adtech stack."
The European Commission's decision stood in stark contrast to a decision issued earlier this week from Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, who declined to force Google to sell off its Chrome web browser or share all requested data with its competitors despite finding that the company had violated American antitrust laws.
President Donald Trump's tariff policies, imposing levies as high as 50% on the United States' trading partners, have not proven compatible with his campaign promise to turn the U.S. back into a "manufacturing powerhouse," as Friday's jobs report showed.
The overall analysis was grim, with the economy adding just 22,000 jobs last month, but manufacturing employment in particular has declined since Trump made his April 2 "Liberation Day" announcement of tariffs on countries including Canada and Mexico.
Since then, the president has introduced new rounds of tariffs on imports from countries he claims have treated the U.S. unfairly, and all the while, manufacturers have tightened their belts to cope with the higher cost of supplies and materials.
Overall manufacturing employment has plummeted by 42,000 jobs, while job openings and new hires have declined by 76,000 and 18,000, respectively, according to the Center for American Progress (CAP), which released a jobs report analysis titled "Trump's Trade War Squeezes Middle-Class Manufacturing Employment"on Friday.
"The manufacturing sector is struggling more than the rest of the labor market under Trump's tariffs, and manufacturing workers' wage growth is stagnating," said CAP.
Last month, the sector lost 12,000 jobs, while wages for manufacturing workers stagnated.
In line with other private employees, workers in the sector saw their wages go up just 10 cents from July, earning an average of $35.50 per hour.
"Despite Trump's claims that his policies will reignite the manufacturing industry in the United States, his policies have achieved the opposite," wrote policy analyst Kennedy Andara and economist Sara Estep at CAP.
The findings are in line with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas' Texas Manufacturing Survey, which was taken from August 12-20 and found that 72% of manufacturing firms say the tariffs have had a negative impact on their business.
"The argument is: We're all meant to sacrifice a bit, so that tariffs can help rebuild American manufacturing. Let's ask American manufacturers whether they're helping," said University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers on social media, sharing a graph that showed the survey's findings.
The argument is: We're all meant to sacrifice a bit, so that tariffs can help rebuild American manufacturing. Let's ask American manufacturers whether they're helping. pic.twitter.com/UWWmjKcWXe — Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) September 2, 2025
As Philip Luck, a former deputy chief economist with the US State Department, told the CBC last month, Trump has been promising "millions and millions of jobs" will result from his tariff regime, but those promises are out of step with the reality of manufacturing in 2025.
"We do [manufacturing] now with very few workers, we do it in a very automated way," Luck told the CBC. "Even if we do increase manufacturing I don't know that we're going to increase jobs along with it."
The outlet noted that while the number of Americans employed in manufacturing peaked in 1979, the value of manufacturing production has continuously trended up since then.
Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, told the CBC that "no treasure trove of jobs" is likely to come out of Trump's tariffs.
The president "walked into an economy that was seeing the largest manufacturing production in American history," Hicks said. "That is really a testament to how productive American workers are, the quality of the technology, and capital investment in manufacturing."
But the rate of hiring at manufacturing firms is far below its 2024 level, said CAP, revealing the negative impact of Trump's tariff regime.
US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed to nearly 800 workers who lost their jobs in the manufacturing sector this week, including 120 whose company's sawmill closed in Darlington, South Carolina; 101 who worked at an electronics assembly plant for Intervala in Manchester, New Hampshire; and 170 whose sawmill positions were eliminated in Estill, South Carolina.
The US Supreme Court is expected to soon review Trump's tariffs after the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled last week that many of them are illegal.
Donald Trump’s niece, the clinical psychologist and bestselling author Mary Trump, sees “similarities” between the 79-year-old president’s increasingly erratic behavior, which has stoked questions about his physical and mental health, and that of his father, the New York property magnate Fred Trump, who suffered from Alzheimer’s before dying in 1999 at the age of 93.
"I think the most important thing to know about Donald's health is that this is a person who has had very serious, severe psychiatric disorders that have gone undiagnosed and they have worsened because they've never been treated," Mary Trump said. "So much of what we're seeing is the result of those undiagnosed, untreated psychiatric disorders. On top of that … there are clearly some physical health issues, and often it seems that … it's not just that he's forgetting things. He doesn't seem to be oriented to space and time or place and time.
"And I'm not a neuropsychologist or neurologist of any kind. I used to do neuropsychological testing, but that aside, I think the best frame of reference is, as you said, my experience with my grandfather and I do see similarities again. That occasional confusion, ‘where am I, who's around me,’ the forgetting of people who were right in front of him.
"And that was one very interesting experience with my grandfather. The least important people in his life were the people he forgot first. So you could sort of gauge your importance to him by how quickly he forgot you or how long it took for him to forget you.
“He ended up forgetting my grandmother. He never forgot Donald. So that was always fascinating to me, and he’d been married for over 60 years.”
Mary Trump was speaking to the Court of History podcast, hosted by the Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal and the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz.
An author herself, Mary Trump has published three books since her uncle became president: "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man" (2020), "The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal" (2021), and "Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir" (2024). All achieved bestseller status.
Continuing to ponder her uncle and his father — her grandfather — Mary Trump said: “I think that there are a few differences."
“My grandfather was a sociopath. He was a born sociopath. He was not made one. And Donald’s psychology is much more complex, and a lot of what we're seeing now isn't new. It's actually just previous conditions that are worsening and just becoming more obvious to people who haven't been paying attention.
“So I think that sort of complicates our sense of, ‘Is this the psychiatric disorders? Is this some kind of dementia? Does he have Alzheimer's?' Is it some physical ailment that is having an impact on his memory, etc, and we don't know, and I think it's likely we never will.
“I sort of believe that we're at the point it doesn't matter. We know it's very, very bad. It's only going to get worse, as everything does with him, whether it's his outrageous cruelty, incompetence, vindictiveness.
“What I say about Donald, and I think this is true whether we're talking about his psychological, emotional, physical health or his behavior, there's no such thing as worst. He will always get worse.”
Trump is the oldest man ever to take the presidential oath — in succession to the previous record holder, Joe Biden. As Biden was plagued by questions over his fitness for office, before withdrawing from last year’s election, so Trump’s rambling public pronouncements and erratic behavior stoked questions even before he recently exhibited signs of physical deterioration and spent a rare week out of public view.
The White House vehemently denies that anything is wrong with Trump, and he reappeared this week to dismiss social media speculation that he might be dead or dying.
In one appearance, Trump angrily dismissed questions about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal even as victims of the late financier and sex offender, a longtime Trump friend, spoke on Capitol Hill.
Mary Trump told the Court of History: “He's always been an angry person, or maybe I should put it this way: he's always been somebody who uses threats and performative rage to get his way.
“So how do you distinguish between what is performative and what is a sincere reaction to his inability to control the narrative, which is clearly what we're seeing, certainly in regards to the Epstein files most prominently right now?”
The United States, Mary Trump added, is “at a particularly dangerous inflection point” regarding the president’s health.
“Because the more he understands who he is, what's happening to him, the more scared he gets, and the more cruel he's going to become, the more desperate he's going to become.
“As with anybody, people who start having dementia, Alzheimer's, there are moments of insight. They recognize what's going on, and it's actually one of the cruelest things about that disease ….
“Like my grandfather, for example, he was fine. Once he stopped remembering who people were, and he thought that he was still running the world, he was fine. But it's those early-on moments of insight into what's happening to you, that really have a negative impact. And this is starting to happen to Donald with increasing frequency, and it is freaking him out.”
Asked if she saw signs of anger and lashing out, as exhibited by her grandfather, in her uncle, Mary Trump said: “It's so hard to say because Donald has always been paranoid and vindictive and angry.
“… There are looks of confusion on his face at times, which are very reminiscent of when we would be out in public with my grandfather, for example … and he would get this startled like a deer in the headlights look. Like, 'Where am I? Who are these people? I don't want to be here.’"
