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Trump to Visit North Carolina and California, With Disaster Aid an Open Question
President Trump on Friday began his first trip since returning to the White House to storm-ravaged North Carolina and California, which is facing some of the most deadly and destructive blazes in the state’s history.
The trip comes as the president has left the question of additional disaster aid for California unsettled.
Mr. Trump is expected to make his first stop in Asheville, N.C., which had devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene last fall. The president then plans on traveling to the Los Angeles area, where he will observe the damage from wildfires that have killed more than two dozen people, destroyed entire neighborhoods and forced desperate evacuations.
But Mr. Trump has struck very different tones on the likelihood of additional federal aid for each state. While he has expressed support for North Carolina, Mr. Trump has criticized California’s Democratic leaders for the disaster response and threatened to withhold federal aid if they did not make changes to unrelated environmental policies in the state.
“It’s been a horrible thing the way that’s been allowed to fester, and we’re going to get it fixed up,” Mr. Trump told reporters of the previous administration’s disaster recovery effort. “North Carolina’s been treated very badly, so we’re stopping there.”
For the Los Angeles stop, Mr. Trump said he wanted “to take a look at a fire that could have been put out if they let the water flow, but they didn’t let the water flow, and they still haven’t.”
“We’re going to have a very interesting time,” he said.
Presidents have typically visited areas recovering from natural disasters to show personal support and assure community members of federal aid for emergency medical workers and local leaders. Mr. Trump, however, has often used natural disasters as a vehicle to unleash political grievances, threatening to withhold money from political opponents, making false statements about disaster responses by Democrats and promising support for political allies.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, he told aides he wanted to stop money from reaching Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, claiming that the island’s leadership was corrupt. After wildfires erupted in California in 2018, Mr. Trump said on social media that he had ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “send no more money” unless the state changed its approach to forest management.
Before traveling on Friday, Mr. Trump had already displayed different approaches to California and Republican-led North Carolina.
“We’re going to get that thing straightened out because they’re still suffering from a hurricane from months ago,” Mr. Trump said in a taped interview with Fox News that aired on Wednesday night.
Since the early days of the hurricane response, Mr. Trump has made a number of accusations about the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene that were debunked by the local, state and federal authorities in the disaster areas.
The false statements included claims that FEMA had spent huge sums on housing for migrants and that it had told victims of the storms they would receive only $750. The string of false claims prompted President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to accuse Mr. Trump of spreading “outright lies.”
In the same interview with Fox News, Mr. Trump issued broadsides against Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor — whom the president has called “Newscum” — for his management. He also threatened to withhold disaster aid for wildfires unless the state changed environmental policies that he claimed had prevented enough water from going to Southern California.
“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down,” Mr. Trump added.
State and fire experts have said those policies have no connection to the fires in the Los Angeles area.
During a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Newsom expressed confidence that the Trump administration would still reimburse California for the disaster-related funds. He added that he planned to be at the airport to greet Mr. Trump, even though he did not know whether he would be invited to accompany the president during his tour of the Los Angeles area.
While Mr. Newsom was left in the dark, Mr. Trump appeared to extend last-minute invitations to Senators Adam B. Schiff and Alex Padilla, Democrats of California, to join him in his visit to the state, days after calling Mr. Schiff “scum” on Inauguration Day.
A spokesperson for Mr. Schiff, with whom Mr. Trump has long had an acrimonious relationship, said on Thursday that the senator would not be able to make the trip because of expected Senate votes on cabinet nominees.
“Senator Schiff greatly appreciates the president’s visit to see the devastation of these wildfires firsthand and the invitation to accompany him,” the spokesperson said in a statement. The statement added that Mr. Schiff would work with Mr. Trump’s team and other officials “to ensure that California gets the aid and support it needs.”
Mr. Padilla will also not join Mr. Trump because of the Senate vote schedule, his spokeswoman said, but he welcomed Mr. Trump’s support “for federal disaster aid to assist the thousands of families and businesses impacted by these devastating fires.”
Annie Karni contributed reporting.
new video loaded: How Trump Is Prioritizing White People as Refugees
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Gilad Thaler, Stephanie Swart, Jon Miller and Whitney Shefte
May 8, 2026
An image recorded on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 shows the shadows of astronauts, along with a highlighted area above the horizon showing “unidentified phenomena,” according to the Defense Department.
NASA/via Defense Department
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NASA/via Defense Department
Cold War reports of mysterious rotating saucers; recent sightings of metallic elliptical objects floating in mid-air. Those and other reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs — the military’s term for UFOs — are described in a trove of documents released by the Department of Defense on Friday.
In all, the Pentagon released more than 160 records, citing President Trump’s call for unprecedented transparency in giving the public access to federal and military records related to unexplained encounters with strange phenomena.
President Trump said via Truth Social that with the documents and other records available to the public, “the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”
The records are posted to a specialized web portal, war.gov/info, which will house additional files as they’re released on a rolling basis.
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Defense Department posting on Facebook as it made the files public.
Friday’s action “is the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said.
One document cites unusual phenomena arising during the debriefing of the Apollo 11 technical crew in July of 1969, attributing three observations to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, from that lunar mission: “one, an object on the way out to the Moon; two, flashes of light inside the cabin; and three, a sighting on the return trip of a bright light tentatively assumed by the crew to be a laser.”
One of the oldest files dates from November 1948. The report from the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence is marked Top Secret, and it notes recurring instances of unidentified objects spotted in the skies over Europe.
“They have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded,” the report states, “and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking.”
The report goes on to say that U.S. officers consulted their peers in Sweden’s intelligence service about the objects, and they were told, “these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth.”
That document is seemingly free of redactions. But many details in a more recent entry are obscured, as it relays the account of a woman with deep experience with U.S. military aircraft and drones who reported an inexplicable sighting in September of 2023, in an area where airspace had been closed for testing purposes.
Materials related to that incident include a composite sketch of an ovaloid metallic object floating above a treeline, with a bright light at one end of the object.
“They watched the object for five to ten seconds and then the object just disappeared,” the report states.
Several people in at least two cars corroborated the sighting, according to the report. It states that the unidentified woman who spoke to the FBI ” would not have reported the object if she had seen it by herself.”
And hinting at the stigma that is seen as a prevalent challenge to collecting and discussing such eyewitness accounts, the report states, “Several of her co-workers subsequently made fun of her due to her report.”
Some records include venerable witnesses — such as a well-known case in 1955, when a group led by then-Sen. Richard Russell, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time, reported that they saw two strange objects from the window of a train in the former Soviet Union. The group, which included U.S. Army Lt. Col. E. U. Hathaway, reported seeing what looked to be “flying disc aircraft.”
The U.S. Air Attache who prepared the report describes the witnesses as “excellent sources.”
That 1955 sighting was described in records previously released by the CIA. But that report, based on a cable received from the U.S. Air Force, seems to have been partially redacted.
The report of the unidentified object isn’t the only bit of intelligence that the American visitors brought back: the folder also includes descriptions and a diagram of a jet bomber, and accounts of a railroad switching system designed to resolve the differing widths of Russian and Czech train tracks.
A coalition of voters and Democratic candidates sued Tennessee officials in federal court late Thursday over its new congressional map, arguing that it was unconstitutional to implement new district lines this close to the state’s August primary.
It was the latest twist in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling last week on the Voting Rights Act that declared congressional districts in Louisiana to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The ruling set off a frenetic scramble in Tennessee and several other Republican-led states to redraw their districts for partisan advantage on the assumption that they are no longer required to preserve Black majority districts.
The Republican supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly muscled through a new congressional map on Thursday that carves up the majority-Black city of Memphis, home to the state’s lone Democratic-held seat.
The lawsuit and its outcome took on heightened stakes after the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved map that created four Democratic-leaning districts in the state. If Tennessee’s map holds — and if other Southern states approve new maps that dilute majority-Black seats held by Democrats — Republicans will have established a structural advantage across multiple districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“Changing the rules midstream will create chaos for voters and throw communities into upheaval,” Rachel Campbell, the chairwoman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, which is also part of the lawsuit, said in a statement. “We will fight these racially gerrymandered maps tooth and nail because the future of democracy in Tennessee, across the South, and throughout this nation depends on it.”
The lawsuit centers on the constitutional right to vote under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and it argues that both the voters’ and candidates’ constitutional rights were harmed by changes to the congressional map that undermined months of campaigning and voter education based on the old map.
The lawsuit also references a legal doctrine known as the Purcell principle. That principle, stemming from a contested 2006 Supreme Court ruling in Purcell v. Gonzalez, discourages changes to voting rules and procedures close to elections.
The lawsuit was filed overnight by a cluster of voters, as well as four Democratic candidates: Representative Steve Cohen of Memphis, whose district was divided up among three new Republican-leaning districts; State Representative Justin J. Pearson, who had challenged Mr. Cohen for the Memphis seat; Mayor Chaz Molder of Columbia, a lead challenger to Representative Andy Ogles in what was once a solely Middle Tennessee seat; and Chaney Mosely, a candidate for a Nashville-area seat.
A second lawsuit is already underway in state court, filed Thursday afternoon by the NAACP Tennessee State Conference.
Spokeswomen for Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, and Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit also names Tre Hargett, the secretary of state, and Mark Goins, the Tennessee coordinator of elections, in their official positions. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
In their brief filed before the district court for the Middle District of Tennessee, the candidates and voters argue that the sudden shift of the congressional districts just months before the primary “will wreak chaos on the electorate, will cause significant voter confusion” and will affect election officials’ ability to administer the election. They asked the court to stop the implementation of the map before the 2026 election.
Tennessee was the first state to draft and approve a map after the Supreme Court’s ruling raised the bar for challenging district lines under the Voting Rights Act. Within a week, Mr. Lee summoned lawmakers to Nashville for a special session, and Republican leaders had drawn and approved a new map that gives the party an advantage toward electing an entirely Republican congressional delegation.
The map carved up the Ninth Congressional District, where two-thirds of the voting-age population is Black, into thirds, most likely eliminating the state’s lone Democrat-leaning district. It also moved district lines around the Nashville area in an apparent bid to shore up Mr. Ogles.
Candidates now have until noon on May 15 to file papers with the secretary of state’s office. Those who already qualified may remain in the new district with the same number. At least one Republican, State Senator Brent Taylor, has already announced his candidacy for the new Ninth Congressional District.
All four congressional candidates on the suit warned that they would have to “to expend more resources identifying, associating with, and campaigning to voters who live in the newly-enacted district.”
They also pointed to litigation filed in February 2022 after a new map of State House and State Senate districts that year was challenged, prompting a push to delay the qualifying date from April to May. At the time, Tennessee officials argued against moving the qualifying date. The State Supreme Court agreed.
Seamus Hughes and Katherine Chui contributed research.
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