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Thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Sunday for "Rededicate 250," a taxpayer-funded Christian evangelical service backed by President Trump. The eight-hour lineup featured songs, prayers and remarks by top government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The event included religious leaders like evangelist Franklin Graham and Cardinal Timothy Dolan.
"Nothing was Christian about what we saw yesterday," says Bishop William J. Barber II. "This is idolatry. This is heresy. This is a form of religious nationalism. This is Trump worship. This is trying to make someone a messiah figure." Barber, the president of Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, took part in a counter-event on Sunday called Redirect 250.
"This is really a battle for the soul of America," says Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. The Supreme Court has eroded the separation of church and state in recent decades, particularly under President Trump, adds Posner. She also notes that "evangelicals, for decades, have been marinating in Christian Zionist theology and ideology, which holds that, in their view, America has a biblical duty to defend Israel, and in particular defend Israel from aggression, both nuclear and otherwise, from Iran."
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He was defeated in the Republican primary in Louisiana on Saturday. Representative Julia Letlow and State Treasurer John Fleming are now in a runoff for the party's nomination.
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Republican Senator Bill Cassidy lost his Louisiana primary on Saturday after President Trump targeted him for voting to impeach him in 2021. The two-term senator took veiled swipes at the president in his concession speech.
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The defeat showed the president's dominance in his party, even as a broader range of views about Mr. Trump could be a major Republican liability in the midterms.
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Senator Bill Cassidy, a two-term Republican who voted to convict President Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, could not muster enough votes to continue to a runoff next month.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is in Beijing for a highly anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. It is the first U.S. state visit to China since 2017, during Trump's first administration. Trade, the Iran war, artificial intelligence and the fate of Taiwan are some of the issues being discussed, although it's not clear if any new agreements are likely. Trump traveled to China with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with a delegation of top U.S. executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk of Tesla and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
The summit comes after years of rising hostility between the two superpowers, but leaders recognize the importance of improving the bilateral relationship, says Zhao Hai, director of international political studies at the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Beijing. "This is a very critical historical moment [at] a crossroad, and both sides now are working together to establish a stable relationship that will have a global ramification," he says.
We also speak with Jake Werner, a historian of modern China and director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He says the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the resulting economic chaos have strengthened China's position.
"China has ties to all the countries in the region. It has acted in the past to help broker the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran," says Werner. "So it has some experience in this realm, sort of acting as a broker towards peace."
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We speak with Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, about growing threats to democracy in the United States following the Supreme Court's gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Republican lawmakers across the South are responding to the ruling by racing to redraw their congressional maps, which is expected to lead to a historic drop in the number of Black representatives in Congress.
"The Supreme Court's devastating decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case has really turned our country upside down," says Clarke, who previously served as assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department in the Biden administration. She says that given the history of racial discrimination in the United States, particularly in the Deep South, "it is unsurprising" to see lawmakers "race at lightning speed to eradicate the gains that have been made over the decades."
Clarke also discusses President Trump's efforts to take federal control of elections in at least eight states, which Clarke says is part of his administration's goal to "lock out certain voters" and commit "mass disenfranchisement."
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More than 70 vessels and over 1,000 participants from all over the world have joined a second Global Sumud Flotilla en route to Gaza in order to challenge Israel's ongoing maritime blockade of aid. We speak to two participants aboard the Greenpeace ship, the Arctic Sunrise, which is providing technical support and accompanying the flotilla for part of the voyage in a show of solidarity. "When the system fails, civil society needs to step in," says Palestinian activist Saif Abukeshek, citing a history of nonviolent direct action within the Palestinian national struggle. The Arctic Sunrise's project lead, Pujarini Sen, explains the participation of Greenpeace as an extension of their work for the environment and holding companies that profit from climate change and pollution accountable. "Fossil fuel companies also benefit from wars, from genocide," says Sen. "We don't view these issues as separate." They also speak about how over a dozen vessels from the flotilla encircled and disrupted the MSC Maya, one of the largest cargo ships in the world, for several hours. They say the cargo ship was delivering raw materials for weapons to Israel. They say the action was inspired by protests by dockworkers.
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