Politics

By David Hood-Nuño and Julio-Cesar Chavez

WASHINGTON, May 17 (Reuters) – A Trump administration-backed celebration of U.S. religious heritage on Sunday is highlighting conservative Christian leaders’ ties to the president as critics say the gathering does not reflect the country’s diverse faith landscape.  

The nine-hour program, called “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” mostly features speakers from two Christian traditions — evangelical Christianity and conservative Catholicism.

President Donald Trump is scheduled to appear in a video message while senior Republicans including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will speak on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. According to organizers, the event is meant to “prepare for the nation’s 250th birthday with Scripture, testimony, prayer, and rededication of our country as One Nation to God.”

The gathering is organized by Freedom 250, a public-private partnership created by the White House to coordinate 250th anniversary celebrations alongside federal agencies.

Advocates of church-state separation say the event blurs government and religion.

“This government-sponsored prayer fest is the epitome of exactly what our secular Constitution forbids our government from doing,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in a statement.

“It is a fusion not only of church and state, but also of our federal government with Christian nationalism,” said Gaylor, whose organization advocates for the separation of church and state.

Some critics have pointed to the absence of religious groups such as mainline Protestant churches including Lutherans, Methodists and Episcopalians. Also not represented are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

More than a quarter of all U.S. adults identify as religiously unaffiliated, according to figures from the Pew Research Center. About 23% and 19% identify as evangelical Protestant and Catholic, respectively, and about 11% identify as mainline Protestant.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, urged the organizers to include speakers from other religious groups. Muslims arrived in North America before U.S. independence, said Corey Saylor, research and advocacy director at the organization.

“The reality is that the religious landscape in the United States was more diverse than many people think of, and it certainly means today we have a religious landscape that deserves to be looked at and respected,” Saylor told Reuters.

‘SCREENSHOT’ OF EARLY AMERICA

Faith leaders slated to speak include Bishop Robert Barron, from the Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester; Jonathan Falwell, chancellor of Liberty University, a school established by Christian evangelicals; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City.

Among the political speakers are Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican Senator Tim Scott. No prominent Democrats are due to appear.

One of Sunday’s speakers, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference leader Samuel Rodriguez, said in an interview that the mostly Christian speaker list reflects what the American colonies looked like after the Great Awakening religious revival of the 18th century.

“It’s pretty much a depiction, a screenshot of our foundation,” Rodriguez told Reuters.

The event is one of 16 planned by the administration for the 250th anniversary of the United States, and the first in 2026. According to the event’s website, it is meant to give “praise to God for 250 years of His Providence for the United States, in praying that God Bless and Protect America for the next 250 years, and in solemnly rededicating our country as One Nation under God.”

Critics say the Freedom 250 events downplay or ignore troubling elements of the nation’s past such as slavery and violence toward Indigenous people.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, have criticized Pope Leo and other faith leaders who disagree with the administration’s policies. After feuding with the pope, Trump briefly posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure before deleting it following criticism from some administration supporters.

(Reporting by David Hood-Nuño and Julio-Cesar Chavez; Editing by Sergio Non and Cynthia Osterman)

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NEW YORK (AP) — The shutdown of the Long Island Rail Road, North America’s largest commuter rail system, continued into a second day on Sunday after unionized workers went on strike for the first time in three decades a day earlier.

The railroad, which serves New York City and its eastern suburbs, ceased operations just after midnight Friday after five unions representing about half its workforce walked off the job.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has urged commuters to work from home, planned a news conference for late Sunday morning.

The unions and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the public agency that runs the railroad, have been negotiating for months on a new contract, with talks stalled over the question of workers’ salaries and healthcare premiums. President Donald Trump’s administration tried to broker a deal, but the unions were legally allowed to strike starting at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.

Kevin Sexton, national vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, has said no new negotiations have been scheduled.

“We’re far apart at this point,” Sexton said early Saturday. “We are truly sorry that we are in this situation.”

MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said the agency “gave the union everything they said they wanted in terms of pay” and that to him it was apparent the unions always intended to walk out.

The MTA was not expected to provide an update on the strike before the governor’s news conference, which was scheduled for 11 a.m.

The walkout, the first for the LIRR since a two-day strike in 1994, promises to cause headaches for sports fans planning to see the Yankees and Mets battle this weekend or to watch the Knicks’ playoff run at Madison Square Garden, which is located directly above the railroad’s Penn Station hub in Manhattan.

The station was devoid of its usual weekend bustle in the afternoon Saturday. Only a few dozen people were seen traversing the main concourse, many dragging rolling luggage from departing or arriving Amtrak trains, which are not affected by the strike.

Departure boards normally showing upcoming trains by destination instead listed ghost trains marked “No Passengers.” A few signs affixed to customer service windows explained that the railroad was shut down because of a strike.

Access to platforms was blocked off with bicycle-rack style barricades and roll-down gates as MTA police officers stood sentry, directing people to alternative transportation.

If the stoppage continues into the workweek, the roughly 250,000 people who ride the system each weekday will be forced to find other routes to the city from its Long Island suburbs. For many that likely means navigating the region’s notoriously congested roads.

Hochul, a Democrat, blamed the Trump administration for cutting mediation short and pushing the negotiations toward a strike. Trump, a Republican, responded on his Truth Social platform, saying he had nothing to do with the strike and “never even heard about it until this morning.”

“No, Kathy, it’s your fault, and now looking over the facts, you should not have allowed this to happen,” Trump said, renewing his endorsement of Long Island politician Bruce Blakeman, who is challenging Hochul’s reelection bid. “If you can’t solve it, let me know, and I’ll show you how to properly get things done.”

The MTA has said it would provide limited shuttle buses to New York City subway stations, but that contingency plan was not envisioned to handle all the riders the system normally carries on a workday.

And while remote work options greatly expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people still need to show up in person, said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, a commuter advocacy group.

“You work in construction, you work in the healthcare industry, you work at a school or you’re about to graduate from school, that’s not always possible,” she said. “People need to get where they need to go.”

Dave Sumner, a locomotive engineer of 32 years, said he anticipates that Trump or Congress will step in before the strike goes on much longer.

“We’re pretty vital to this area,” he said.

The MTA has said the unions’ initial demands to raise salaries would have led to fare increases and impacted contract negotiations with other unionized workers.

The unions, which represent locomotive engineers, machinists, signalmen and other train workers, have said more substantial raises were warranted to help workers keep up with inflation and rising living costs.

Duane O’Connor, who picketed Saturday morning at Penn Station, said that while he regrets the impact on commuters, workers are simply asking for fair pay.

“I feel terrible. Terrible. This is going to hurt. This is going to hurt the island, this is going to hurt the city. … All we are asking for is fair wages,” he said.

“We’re pretty much three years without a contract,” said Karl Bischoff, a locomotive engineer with LIRR for 29 years. “If they did their contracts for their construction stuff like that, this place would be in worse condition.”

If the unions get the pay increases they are looking for, “it will come at the expense of our riders who will see next year’s 4% fare increase doubled to 8%,” Gerard Bringmann, chair of the rider advocacy group LIRR Commuter Council, said in a statement. “Like the union workers, we too are burdened by the increase in the cost of living here on Long Island.”

With Hochul running for reelection, the pressure might be on the MTA to strike a deal to end the shutdown, said William Dwyer, a labor relations expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where commuter rail workers staged a three-day strike last year.

“She’s up for reelection, and Long Island is a critical vote for her,” Dwyer said. “So if there’s a significant fare hike, that does not bode well for her on Election Day.”

___

Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Even as Democratic officials fight the effort in court, the Trump administration has run millions of voter registrations through government databases to determine their eligibility in a process that critics worry could end up purging valid voters from the rolls before the November elections.

At least 67 million registrations, primarily from Republican-controlled states, have gone through a beefed-up verification program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and tens of thousands of those have been flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died. Some states allow only a month for people to prove their eligibility and others suspend it immediately.

The scanning of state voter rolls at the national level is part of a broader effort by Republican President Donald Trump to federalize certain election functions and promote his messaging that elections are marred by noncitizen voting, even though instances of that are rare. Voting and civil rights advocates say the DHS system is error-prone and can mistakenly flag people who are eligible to vote.

“If a voter is wrongly removed, by the time they learn about it and correct it, they may miss their opportunity to vote in that election,” said Freda Levenson, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The group is challenging an Ohio law requiring monthly checks with the DHS system.

Voters such as 29-year-old Anthony Nel have been caught in the middle.

The native of South Africa, who became a citizen more than a decade ago, was flagged as a potential noncitizen when Texas ran its voter file through the DHS verification system. Nel’s local election office in Denton, north of Dallas, temporarily canceled his registration last fall while he was waiting for a new passport to replace an expired one.

“I’m like, ‘You should know that I’m a citizen, that the passport exists,’” he said in an interview.

Trump has been trying to overhaul U.S. elections, including calling for a federal list of verified voters, and his Department of Justice has pushed states to hand over unredacted voter information for mass checks through the DHS program known as SAVE.

The Justice Department has sued states that refuse, saying the government is trying to ensure that they are complying with federal law and have accurate voter lists. States already take a number of steps to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls.

SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of DHS, said more than 1,300 agencies use it.

At least 25 states have used SAVE to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities, and 60 million registrations were checked in a year’s time, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services. That figure does not include an additional 7.4 million registrations from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state election board, that were recently run through the system.

Citizenship and Immigration Services said in an emailed statement that it is “committed to helping eliminate voter fraud” to restore Americans’ trust in their elections.

“SAVE is one of the most important tools states have to verify voter information,” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, recently told a U.S. House committee examining how states keep voter rolls clean.

Schwab’s endorsement is notable because he once was publicly skeptical that noncitizens represented a significant voter fraud threat.

Citizenship and Immigration Services said the 60 million voter registration checks identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said during a recent Fox News interview that those checks also identified about 350,000 people who appear to have died.

North Carolina’s State Board of Elections said its check had identified another 34,000 registered voters who are potentially deceased.

Even if all those eventually were verified as ineligible, they would represent small percentages of total registered voters. The figure for noncitizens would be about 400 for every 1 million registrations. Some 384,000 people identified as potentially deceased in about 67 million registrations is a fraction of 1%.

Some voters have been mistakenly flagged.

In Dallas, election officials recently canceled the registration of Domingo Garcia, a 68-year-old lawyer and voting rights activist, without explanation. He has been voting regularly for 50 years, most recently in the state’s March 3 primary, and suspects that officials concluded he was deceased.

“I should not have been on any lists,” he said.

Voting rights advocates have filed at least six federal lawsuits over SAVE checks, either against the Trump administration or states using the program.

Nel, a 29-year-old college administrator, is a plaintiff in one of them, filed recently in the District of Columbia against the Justice Department. It alleges an “illegal and unprecedented quest” by the administration for “millions of Americans’ confidential voter data.”

Lawyers also argue that eligible voters will be disenfranchised by hits from outdated or incomplete data.

Nel came to the United States from South Africa with his parents at age 8. His parents became citizens when he was 16, making him a citizen, as well. He said he has voted regularly since he was 18.

Yet he received a letter in October in a white envelope that looked to him like junk mail. It told him he had been identified as a potential noncitizen through a SAVE check of Texas’ 18 million voter registrations. He had 30 days to prove otherwise — a deadline he missed because of the time it took to get a new passport.

“It’s clear that this process that they’ve put into place for this doesn’t work,” he said.

Republican officials said the administration does not portray SAVE searches as foolproof. Instead, it identifies registrations that should be further investigated, they said.

In Kansas, Schwab’s office is still investigating its list of flagged registrations and has yet to disclose the number of hits of potentially ineligible voters from a SAVE check of the state’s 2 million registrations.

Once his office forwards flagged names to county officials, a state law enacted this year requires them to list the registrations as “in suspense” or “pending” until the cases are resolved. A flagged person still can vote, but the ballot is set aside for further review and might not be counted.

Texas is supposed to give people with flagged registrations 30 days to prove they are properly registered. North Carolina will require county elections boards to give people whose registrations are challenged a hearing before they can be canceled.

A new Ohio law requires local election boards to “promptly” cancel the registrations of people whom the secretary of state identifies as noncitizens during registration checks that the official is required to make at least monthly.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an email that people’s voting rights are not in danger because “all they need to do to immediately restore their registration status is show proof of citizenship.”

But Levenson, the ACLU lawyer, described the approach differently.

“Shoot first and ask questions later,” she said.

___

Associated Press writers Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Gary Robertson, in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) – President Donald Trump has dismissed Iran’s latest formal proposal as “garbage.” While Iran was said to include some nuclear concessions, Mr. Trump has said he wants to remove highly enriched uranium from the country and prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

With talks between Iran and the U.S. at a standstill during the shaky ceasefire, tensions remain high and threaten to tip the Middle East back into open warfare and prolong the worldwide energy crisis sparked by the conflict.  

Meantime, President Trump says the U.S. is closely monitoring Iran’s nuclear material, highlighting Space Force surveillance that can identify individual approaching storage in real time. He called securing the material at top priority and warned of decisive military action if Iranian forces try to access it, urging Tehran to comply with nuclear agreements. 

That statement comes a bit, stalled negotiations, ongoing Iranian provocations, and US efforts to block Iran’s aggressive maritime activities. 

All of this comes as President Trump has just returned to Washington after meeting the Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

China claims it is actively involved in mediating the conflict in Iran. It is collaborating with Pakistan to propose a peace plan that aims to achieve a ceasefire and reopen critical waterways, particularly the Strait of Hormuz. This initiative reflects China’s desire to play a more prominent role in Middle Eastern diplomacy. 

Iran still has a chokehold on the Streit of our moves, a vital waterway, where a fifth of the world’s oil passed through before the war, and America is blocking Iranian ports.

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WASHINGTON, May 16 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump threatened a primary challenge on Saturday for hardline conservative Representative Lauren Boebert, until now a staunch Trump ally, after she campaigned for maverick Representative Thomas Massie in his Kentucky district.

• “Boebert is campaigning for the Worst ‘Republican’ Congressman in the History of our Country, Thomas Massie, of the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky, and anybody who can be that dumb deserves a good Primary fight!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

• Boebert, a Colorado congresswoman, responded with a post on X: “Yes, I saw the President’s post. No, I’m not mad or offended. I knew the risks when I agreed to stand by my friend Thomas Massie. I was, and will be, America First, America Always, and MAGA.”

• Trump has vowed to unseat Massie, a Republican who has defied the president in Congress over major legislation and the Iran war and led his party’s drive to release government files on the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

• The president’s quest to unseat Massie poses a test for his hold on the Republican Party.

• Trump’s social media post came hours after Boebert made campaign appearances for Massie, who faces Trump-endorsed challenger Ed Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL, in Tuesday’s Republican primary in Kentucky.

• “Is anyone interested in running against Weak Minded Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District?” Trump posted. “Just let me know, or announce your Candidacy, and I will be there for you!”

(Reporting by David MorganEditing by Rod Nickel)

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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow advanced to a runoff in Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary Saturday, capitalizing on the power of President Donald Trump’s endorsement in another attempt to purge his party of people he views as disloyal. State Treasurer John Fleming came in second to join her in the next round of voting.

Trump supported Letlow over incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, one of the few Republican senators who voted to convict him during his second impeachment trial over the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Cassidy, a doctor, has also clashed with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy, though he provided crucial support to help Kennedy get confirmed.

By receiving less than 50% of the vote, Letlow and Fleming, a former U.S. House member and Trump administration official, were unable to avoid the runoff, which will take place June 27. The GOP winner will almost certainly take the November general election because of the state’s Republican leanings.

Trump has been trying to dislodge Cassidy, one of the few Republican senators who voted to convict him during his second impeachment trial over the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Louisiana primary comes in the middle of a month of campaigns by Trump to exact retribution on politicians who have crossed him. On May 5 he helped dislodge five of seven Indiana state senators who rejected his redistricting plan.

Next Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky will face a Trump-backed challenger, Ed Gallrein, in another Republican primary. Massie angered Trump by opposing his signature tax legislation over concerns about the national debt, pushing for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and opposing his decision to go to war with Iran.

The president unloaded on Cassidy on Saturday morning, calling him “a disloyal disaster” and “a terrible guy” on social media. In the evening he followed up with: “Congratulations to Congresswoman Julia Letlow on a fantastic race, beating an Incumbent Senator by Record Setting Numbers.”

Jeanelle Chachere, a 66-year-old nurse, said she considers Cassidy “a phony” and voted for Letlow solely because Trump endorsed her.

“I’m going by what he says, because I like what he does,” she said.

The election was scrambled by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting a part of the Voting Rights Act that affects how congressional maps are drawn. Although the Senate primary is moving forward, Louisiana leaders decided to delay House primaries until a future date to allow them to redo district lines ahead of time, a shift that threatened to cause confusion for voters on Saturday.

Mary-Patricia Wray, who has consulted for Republican and Democratic candidates in Louisiana, said the change could weigh against Cassidy by dampening turnout among voters who are less fervently pro-Trump.

“Suspending the congressional primaries hurts Cassidy,” she said. “Some people believe the Senate primary is canceled.”

Cassidy also complained that a new primary system enacted last year confused voters by requiring them to ask for a partisan ballot instead of the all-party primary previously in place. He said some called his office to say they had been unable to vote for him.

“The process that was set up was destined to be confusing,” Cassidy told reporters Friday.

Dadrius Lanus, executive director of the state Democratic Party, said his team fielded hundreds of calls from voters statewide who said the changes undermined their ability vote as they planned.

“A lot of the information should have gotten to voters well in advance,” Lanus said. “It’s literally been a whirlwind of confusion.”

Cassidy waged an aggressive campaign to convince voters he should not be counted out.

The senator’s campaign was expected to have spent roughly $9.6 million on advertising through May 16, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. And Louisiana Freedom Fund, a super PAC supporting him, was on track to spend $12.3 million.

By comparison Letlow’s campaign, which launched Jan. 20, spent roughly $3.9 million, while a super PAC backing her, the Accountability Project, spent about $6 million.

Fleming’s campaign spent about $1.5 million.

Cassidy and Louisiana Freedom Fund ran ads attacking Letlow within days of her entering the race for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which Trump has tried to root out of the federal government.

Letlow, a college administrator before her election to the House, said she supported DEI while interviewing for the position of president of University of Louisiana-Monroe in 2020.

The ads, an attempt to characterize Letlow as a progressive trying to pass as a conservative, were one way Cassidy tried to flip the script in a race where he was on the outs with Trump.

The senator’s vote in favor of convicting the president after his 2021 impeachment has shadowed Cassidy throughout his second Senate term.

John Martin, a 68-year-old retired engineer in south Louisiana, said he would vote for Letlow because he was still upset by Cassidy’s decision. He waved a flyer from Letlow’s campaign showing her standing alongside the president.

“I know a lot more about Cassidy than I do about her,” Martin said. “But if she’s endorsed by Trump, I’m going to believe that.”

Cassidy steered clear of Trump’s ire last year, supporting Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services despite his public reservations about the nominee’s anti-vaccine views.

As chair of the Senate health committee, Cassidy has been more publicly critical of Kennedy, including over funding cuts for vaccine development.

Trump blamed Cassidy for the failed nomination of his second choice for surgeon general, Casey Means, who raised doubts about vaccinating newborns for hepatitis B, a practice Cassidy supports. Trump withdrew the Means nomination and blasted Cassidy.

Letlow considered running last year but only entered the race after Trump announced his endorsement in January.

By that time Fleming, a former House member and Trump administration official who was elected state treasurer in 2023, was already in the race as a Trump devotee. But Landry was looking for a better-known challenger, and he suggested Letlow to the president.

Letlow had an unconventional and tragic entry into politics.

In 2020, while she was a college administrator, her husband Luke was elected to the U.S. House but died of COVID-19 before he could be sworn in. Letlow ran for and won the seat in a March 2021 special election and was reelected in 2022 and 2024.

___

Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa.

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By Brad Brooks

WIGGINS, Colorado, May 16 (Reuters) – Perched behind the cash register at Stubs liquor store, Amy Van Duyn gazed out the window at a red-and-green gasoline price sign, which she said seemed to tick up daily.

The price was $4.34 per gallon – about 50% higher than it was in these parts when President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.

“I used to fill my tank for $36,” said Van Duyn, 42. “Now $36 gets me half a tank.”

Her co-worker Tonyah Bruyette said when it’s time to buy groceries, she’s left wondering where all her money went: “We’re putting it in the tank rather than on our table.” 

Like most people in and around Wiggins, a farming town of 1,400 people in northeast Colorado, Van Duyn and Bruyette remain ardent supporters of the president, who won surrounding Morgan County by 49 percentage points in 2024.  

Nationally, Trump’s political fortunes appear to be waning. His war with Iran has sent fuel prices soaring past $4.50 a gallon nationwide, and a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found nearly 8 in 10 Americans hold the president responsible for higher gasoline prices.   

Trump was asked this week if people’s economic woes were motivating him to reach a deal with Tehran. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he responded. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

Democrats seized on the comments as evidence of an administration losing touch with an anxious public. Only 30% of U.S. adults approved of Trump’s handling of the economy as of a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, an issue that had long been one of his political strengths.

But in two dozen recent interviews along Colorado’s Highway 52 — a two-lane blacktop road punctuated by grain elevators, feedlots and oil pumpjacks — Trump voters echoed the president’s logic. 

Across Morgan and Weld counties, which haven’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1964, voters were willing to pay more for gas if it meant eliminating a possible Iranian nuclear threat. Energy prices had also spiked under President Joe Biden, many said.

Some begrudgingly stood by Trump because of their distaste for Democrats; others expressed faith the president had a plan to bring costs down. It was a testament to the durable, personal bond Trump has built with his base, allowing him to weather multiple crises across his two terms.

“It feels like he hears us,” said Bruyette, “that he is fighting for us.” 

‘WILLING TO SACRIFICE’

About 25 miles southwest of Wiggins, Jim Miller was elbows-deep in the engine of his ailing Dodge pickup.

A 65-year-old retired commodities broker raised in the liberal city of Boulder who now lives in tiny Prospect Valley, Miller considers himself “half-hippie, half-cowboy.” 

He said enduring the momentary pain of high gas prices was worth preventing Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon. 

Miller recalled stories of American resilience during World War II, when goods were rationed and households lived with less. 

“I struggle, like everybody else does, but I’m willing to sacrifice a little,” Miller said. “That’s been totally lost in this country, people’s willingness to sacrifice.”

In the unincorporated town of Roggen was Mike Urbanowicz, a 66-year-old trader with multiple college degrees whose farming cooperative moves 150 truckloads of grain each day.  

He voted three times for Trump, but like many interviewed by Reuters, he considers himself a political independent, saying he distrusts the Republican Party nearly as much as their Democratic foes.

Gas prices were hurting his industry, he said, and Trump was “naive” to think he could quickly solve the issue. He expected prices would remain high into the fall, even if there was a breakthrough in stalled U.S.-Iran peace talks.  

But he preferred the status quo to Democrats, whom he saw as moving towards “full-blown socialism.”

“I voted for Trump because the alternative is so bad,” he said. 

‘ALL ON BOARD’

In Fort Morgan, Lexys Siebrands, 22, lay prone on a table inside the Bad Medicine Inkporium tattoo parlor, smiling through the pain in her left calf, where there were images of a wanted poster, a stagecoach and other Western-themed designs. 

A gay woman who recently found Christianity, Siebrands once considered herself a Democrat, but started to think of herself as a Republican around 2022 — citing what she called the hypocrisy of liberals around identity politics — and voted for Trump. 

She saw war with Iran as inevitable. “Something was going to happen eventually, whether it was Iran doing something to us or us doing it to them.” 

Sitting next to her daughter was 49-year-old Jyl Siebrands. She grew up as a political independent but later gravitated towards Republicans. 

She said she hated high gas prices, but feared the prospect of a nuclear-armed Tehran even more. “It’s just where we are with this war,” she said. “People just have to give it time.” 

Did she have any red lines? Anything that might shake her faith in Trump’s handling of the war or the economy?

“No,” she said. “I’m all on board.”

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and David Gaffen;)

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By Ahmed Aboulenein

WASHINGTON, May 15 (Reuters) – The Trump administration moved on Friday to strip hundreds of senior U.S. Department of Health and Human Services employees of civil service job protections, according to an email reviewed by Reuters.

HHS employees at several agencies received the email, which said members of their teams would have their jobs reclassified. The change means they can be fired at will. Previously, they could only be fired for cause and had appeal rights.

The move is in line with an overhaul announced by the administration in February of the government’s civil service system.

The overhaul gives the president more power to hire and fire up to 50,000 career federal employees who are being reclassified from Schedule F to Schedule Policy/Career.

An HHS official confirmed the email’s authenticity but did not respond to questions about how many staff would be affected and their agencies and positions. The category of employees involved, GS-15, usually consists of senior technical experts, managers, high-level policy staff and supervisors.

The email said that initially “a relatively modest number…on the order of hundreds not thousands” of HHS personnel in that category would be affected by the reclassification.

The email said “additional tranches” of conversions would follow. The official said there would be no mass layoffs at the department beyond those previously announced.

Trump pledged in his campaign to strip job protections from federal workers deemed by his team to be “influencing” government policy. Governance experts say the change will make it easier to carry out more mass layoffs.

Unions representing federal workers have challenged the move in federal court.

The Trump administration has sought to shrink ​the federal workforce and make civil servants and historically independent boards and commissions more accountable to the White House.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by David Gregorio and Cynthia Osterman)

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By David Morgan

May 16 (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican moderate targeted for retribution by President Donald Trump, will find out whether he can survive a primary election in Louisiana on Saturday against two popular rivals, including a Trump-backed challenger, or become the first elected Senate incumbent to lose renomination in more than a decade. 

Cassidy, a physician who first earned the president’s ire by voting for his conviction in Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial in 2021, entered the Republican primary in third place behind Trump-backed U.S. Representative Julia Letlow and Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming, a former congressman who served in Trump’s first administration, according to polling data compiled by the website RealClearPolitics.com.

Trump, in a Truth Social post on Saturday, called Cassidy a “disloyal disaster.”

“Bill Cassidy is a sleazebag, a terrible guy, who is BAD FOR LOUISIANA,” Trump wrote. “Now he’s going to get CLOBBERED, hopefully, in today’s BIG election, by two great people!!!”

Cassidy’s chances of victory seem narrow in a state where Trump received more than 60% of the vote during the 2024 presidential election. But in a closely fought three-way battle that is likely to end in a June 27 runoff election, Trump could also risk embarrassment if Letlow, whom Cassidy has sought to brand as a “liberal,” is ultimately bested by Fleming, a former Navy physician who has strong backing within the state Republican Party.

“Dr John Fleming is the only conservative candidate in the race,” said Christy Haik, a member of the powerful Republican State Central Committee and president of the conservative group Louisiana State Republican Assembly.

TRUMP RETRIBUTION CAMPAIGN

The Louisiana primary is the latest venue for an ongoing Trump retribution campaign that delivered primary defeats this month against at least five of seven Republican state legislators in Indiana, who opposed the president’s push for a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan to protect the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Next week, Trump’s campaign moves to Kentucky, where the president hopes to see his hand-picked primary challenger Ed Gallrein defeat Republican U.S. Representative Thomas Massie, a Trump critic and leading voice in the campaign to release government files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, an erstwhile friend of the president. 

In Louisiana, Letlow, 45, won Trump’s Senate endorsement before she had even announced her candidacy. She entered Congress after her husband Luke died of a COVID infection after being elected to the House in 2020. She ran to replace him in a special election and succeeded with Trump’s endorsement. Cassidy has targeted her support for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives when she worked for the University of Louisiana at Monroe. She has responded with ads calling Cassidy and Fleming “Never Trumpers” and emphasizing her presidential endorsement. 

Cassidy, a 68-year-old doctor who specialized in the treatment of liver disease and helped found a Baton Rouge clinic that serves low-income patients, served in the Louisiana Senate and the U.S. House before unseating former Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu in 2014 to become the first Republican to capture the seat since 1883. He now chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. He was reelected in 2020 with nearly 60% of the vote. 

With backing from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he entered the final phase of the primary campaign with $5.5 million in cash, compared with $1.6 million for Letlow, according to documents filed to the Federal Election Commission. Fleming, 74, had nearly $1.4 million in cash left from a campaign that he has largely self-financed.

CASSIDY VOTED TO IMPEACH TRUMP

But that financial firepower has not propelled his campaign after a series of conflicts with Trump beginning with his role in 2021 as one of seven Republicans who supported Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. He is now one of only three still in office. 

Cassidy later called on Trump to drop out of the 2024 presidential race after his indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents and declined to endorse Trump after he won the Republican nomination.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, Cassidy has tried to work his way back into the president’s good graces by supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for U.S. health secretary. 

But Cassidy’s support for Trump health policy has been short-lived, with him expressing open skepticism for Kennedy’s bid to overhaul U.S. vaccine policy and joining fellow Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to slow the health secretary’s agenda in Congress. 

 The most recent break came last month when Trump accused Cassidy of blocking the nomination of Casey Means as U.S. surgeon general, forcing the president to name radiologist and Fox News contributor Nicole Saphier as his third pick for the job.

Independent political analysts say Cassidy could still emerge from Saturday’s primary to face either Letlow or Fleming in a run-off. Whoever ultimately emerges as the victor, the seat is expected to remain in Republican hands.

Former Republican Senator Richard Lugar was the last elected incumbent to lose his bid for renomination in 2012.  

(Reporting by David Morgan. Additional reporting by David Hood-Nuño and Blake Brittain. Editing by Michael Learmonth, Alistair Bell and Mark Potter)

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By John Kruzel

WASHINGTON, May 15 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday rejected a bid by Virginia Democrats to revive a voting map designed to help their party wrest control of the U.S. House of Representatives from President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans in November’s midterm elections.

The justices declined to halt a ruling by Virginia’s top court that blocked a voter-approved pro-Democratic map for the midterms, denying a request by Democrats in the state. The court’s action came in a brief and unsigned order that provided no rationale. No justice publicly dissented.

Democrats pursued the revised electoral map – crafted to flip four Republican-held U.S. House of Representatives seats to Democrats – as part of a nationwide political battle initiated last year by Trump to redraw the boundaries of U.S. electoral districts for partisan benefit.

The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court acted in the Virginia case after clearing the way on Monday for Alabama Republicans to pursue a congressional voting map more favorable to their party ahead of the midterms.

Control of Congress is at stake in the midterms, with Republicans holding slim majorities in the House and Senate. Virginia has 11 seats in the 435-member House.

The Virginia Supreme Court in a 4-3 decision on May 8 threw out the state’s voter-approved map, ruling in favor of Republicans who challenged it. The court found that Democratic lawmakers had not followed proper procedures last year when they rushed to approve the referendum in the state legislature in time to put the ballot initiative before voters ahead of the midterms.

Don Scott, the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, and other Democratic legislators asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to halt the ruling by the state’s top court, saying it had “deprived voters, candidates and the Commonwealth (Virginia) of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts.”

They cited a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that stated that state courts “may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”

The Virginia referendum was the final step in a complicated legislative maneuver to sidestep a state constitutional amendment that was passed by voters in 2020 to put redistricting in the hands of a bipartisan commission.

Virginia Senate Republican Leader Ryan McDougle, one of the plaintiffs in the case, welcomed the court’s ruling on Friday.

“The Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed what we always knew: you cannot violate the Constitution to change the Constitution,” McDougle said.

Virginia voters approved the Democratic-backed electoral map in an April 21 special election by a 51.7% to 48.3% margin, with about 3.1 million votes cast. 

In a process called redistricting, the boundaries of legislative districts across the United States are reconfigured to reflect population changes as measured by the national U.S. census every 10 years. Redistricting traditionally has been carried out by state legislatures at the start of each new decade. 

In the unusual mid-decade redistricting fight now unfolding, Republicans hold a clear advantage. 

At Trump’s urging, Republican-governed Texas redrew its electoral map last year in a bid to flip five Democratic-held U.S. House seats, prompting Democratic-led California to reconfigure its congressional map to target five Republican-held seats. Multiple other states have joined the fray.

Democrats suffered a blow when the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority in April gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, opening the door for Republican-led Southern states to dismantle Democratic-held majority-Black and majority-Latino districts ahead of the November elections. Black and Latino voters tend to support Democratic candidates.

Underscoring the stakes of the Virginia redistricting effort, Democratic- and Republican-affiliated groups spent close to $100 million on the referendum campaign.

The ​referendum has faced multiple legal challenges. In addition to the dispute before the U.S. Supreme Court, a judge in a separate case on April 22 also blocked the pro-Democratic map, acting in a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee.

(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)

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