Trump news: President calls disgraced commando a 'great fighter' and says he doesn't know what 'insurance' Giuliani has against him

Donald Trump Jr called out for 'despicable' HIV comments

Donald Trump Jr strikes again with a comment about HIV labelled “despicable” and “ignorant”.

The US president’s son appeared to joke about the risks of having sex with people who have the virus, while sharing an article from an LGBT+ website.

Here's Peter Stubley with more detail:

ICYMI: Michael Bloomberg enters presidential race 'to defeat Trump and rebuild America'

Billionaire former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has formally announced that he is joining the race for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential election, Phil Thomas reports.

The 77-year-old businessman issued a statement on his campaign website under the slogan: “A new choice for Democrats, proven leadership for America.”

He said: “I’m running for president to defeat Donald Trump and rebuild America.

Today is the deadline a federal judge set to decide on whether former White House attorney Donald McGahn must comply with a congressional subpoena and testify before a House committee investigating the president in its impeachment inquiry.

Here's some background on the president's tense relationship with the former White House counsel from a story I wrote in June about Mr McGahn's explosive testimony to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller:

ICYMI: Another 2020 hopeful (and billionaire) threw his hat in the ring over the weekend as one of the latest Democrats to announce a bid for the White House.

Donald Trump is tweeting about the stock market, claiming another victory and telling his supporters to "enjoy!" -

To be clear, there is no evident to support Donald Trump's claim that support for impeachment has plunged to 20-something per cent. In fact, the latest polling from Emerson last week on impeachment has public support at about 43 per cent. This is a complete and total falsity on the part of the president -

Donald Trump's right-hand man asked White House officials if there were legal grounds to withhold military aid from Ukraine in the month after the president had made the decision - according to an internal investigation uncovered by US media.

The withholding of $391m of aid - and whether the move was used to pressure Ukrainian officials into launching an investigation into Mr Trump's political rival Joe Biden - has become the centrepiece of the impeachment investigation against the president.

Now an internal investigation by the White House's legal department has reportedly uncovered hundreds of documents that reveal the extent of the Trump administration's attempts to justify the delay of the financial support.

This is pretty rich: a new report alleges Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani was seeking a role representing a Ukrainian bank while simultaneously digging up dirt on Hunter Biden for working at a Ukrainian energy company as his father served in the White House:

Lindsey Graham revealed he blocked a resolution officially recognising Turkey’s genocide of the Armenian people following a request from the White House, because Turkish President Recep Tayyip was visiting at the time of the vote.

The South Carolina Republican said he was asked by senior White House staff earlier this month to block the resolution after a meeting he attended in the Oval Office that was hosted by Donald Trump and included the Turkish president. 

Mr Graham was one of five Republican senators present at the White House meeting who had publicly denounced Turkey’s recent invasion of northeastern Syria after Mr Trump announced his decision to pull US troops out of the region. The senator castigated Mr Erdogan as Mr Trump “sat back and watched,” Axios reported, decrying the Syrian invasion and rejecting Mr Erdogan’s claims that Kurdish forces in the region — who are allied with the US — are part of a terrorist group. 

Still, Mr Graham went on later that day to vote against the measure that surely would have upset the Turkish president, telling the news outlet he was asked by a White House legislative affairs official to “please object” the resolution.

“After the meeting, we kind of huddled up and talked about what happened," he said. “The only reason I did it is because he [Erdoğan] was still in town. ... That would've been poor timing. I'm trying to salvage the relationship if possible."

Story to come...

ICYMI: Here's The Independent's latest issue of the weekly 2020 series Polarized, featuring a 19-year-old voter from Texas who used to support Donald Trump and is now vying for Andrew Yang.