PBS News Hour - Full Show - June 24, 2026 - PBS News Hour full episode

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Wednesday on the News Hour, President Trump ratchets up tensions with Senate Republicans after abruptly canceling plans to sign a landmark housing affordability bill. The Democratic Party's progressive wing wins a series of high-profile primaries, signaling the mood of some voters ahead of the midterms. Plus, we speak to Walter Isaacson about what he calls "The Greatest Sentence Ever Written." PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Good evening. I'm Jeff Bennett. And I'm Amna Navaz on the news hour tonight. President Trump ratchets up tensions with Senate Republicans after abruptly canceling plans to sign a landmark housing affordability bill. The Democratic Party's progressive wing wins a series of high-profile primaries, signaling the mood of some Democratic voters ahead of the midterms. And as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, we speak to author Walter Isaacson about what he calls the greatest sentence ever written. There's a deep contradiction in this sentence and a contradiction in the way America was founded, and our narrative is how we resolve that contradiction. Welcome to the News Hour.

President Trump has upended Congress's plans for a major housing bill, refusing to sign legislation that passed with veto-proof majorities as he tries to force action on his voting reform agenda. The tactic is familiar. Earlier this year, the president derailed a bipartisan deal on intelligence and surveillance legislation while pressing lawmakers to adopt that controversial voting bill known as the Save Act. Now he's using a housing package that many lawmakers expected would be signed into law today as a new point of leverage. Andrew Desiderio covers the Senate for Punch Bull News and joins us now.

Andrew, always great to see you. So the White House had prepared for this signing ceremony. Lawmakers were gathered there on Capitol Hill. And then President Trump says via social media that he's not going to sign the bill after all. You have the tweet up on the screen right there. You were there when the news broke. How did Republican senators react? They were shocked.

I mean, dumbfounded. You know, as you mentioned, the president has done this a lot lately where he is blindsided Republican leaders. But, you know, a signing ceremony usually happens at the White House. This one was set up in the Capitol building itself here in what's known as Statuary Hall. They had a stage set up. They had the presidential emblem there, a desk for him to sign it. And just about an hour before he was supposed to leave for the Capitol, he put this message on True Social saying that he wasn't going to sign it into law until the Senate and the House

send him, as you mentioned, the Save America Act, which is legislation that has virtually no chance of passing, either chamber, frankly, at this point, but especially in the Senate where the filibuster exists. And what's fascinating about this particular rift between the Senate. Senate Republicans and the president is that the president was already scheduled to attend a lunch meeting with Senate Republicans right after the signing ceremony, which he came to anyway. And the conversation ended up devolving into mostly an argument between himself and Senator Bill Cassidy over the Iran war.

And the president really didn't open it up for Q&A at all about this Save America Act issue, and the fact that he's blocking now the bipartisan housing affordability bill, which, by the way, He got 85 votes in the Senate and nearly 400 votes in the House. Right. Bipartisan veto-proof majority. What leverage does the president really have at this point as it relates to this bill? Well, he has leverage in the sense that he could just hold out in not signing it. But there is a 10-day clock that starts to run, but only when the Speaker of the House officially transmits the bill to the White House.

Speaker Johnson, of course, a close ally of President Trump, has not officially done that yet. So if he doesn't actually transmit this bill to the White House, that 10-day clock doesn't start to run. And if he does, then the 10-day clock runs. And at the end of it, the bill automatically becomes law without the president's signature. Now, if the president were to get the bill eventually and then veto it, Congress could vote on overriding that veto. But it takes two-thirds in both chambers.

You know, if you take into consideration the fact that it got huge margins in both chambers to begin with, you would think that they would be able to easily override this veto. But veto override votes tend to be very interesting in the sense that a lot of members back off of their initial support for a piece of legislation when it comes to a veto override because they don't want to be seen as crossing the president. So who knows, honestly, what's going to happen with this bipartisan housing affordability bill, which Republicans really, really want to focus on because they know that affordability is the number one issue for voters in the midterms.

Well, yeah, let's talk more about that, because the president dismissed this house. as being of minor importance, that was the phrase that he used, but housing costs, affordability remain a top issue for voters heading into November. So how much of a political vulnerability does this open up for Republicans? It's a major political vulnerability. The president's poll numbers are already at historic lows. Voters are already saying that they, in these surveys, are very dissatisfied with the state of the U.S. economy, the cost of living, again, affordability concerns, and they want to see Congress and the President

addressing that. And instead, what we're seeing is, of course, the president having this fixation, this obsession on the Save America Act, which, as I mentioned before, has virtually no chance of actually becoming law. And it's something that Republican leaders think they can use against Democrats to show that they're against voter ID, for example, which is usually an 80-20 issue in this country, right? So what the president is also doing is he's preventing Republicans from even seeking political benefit from that issue on its face. And so it really, it really, is not just blindsiding them, but dumbfounding the Republican leadership up here. So the point where I have Republican senators coming to me and openly questioning whether this president is

intentionally, deliberately trying to blow up their congressional majorities. Wow. Andrew Desiderio covers the Senate for Punch Bowl News. Andrew, thanks again for your time this evening. Thanks, Jeff. All right, let's turn now to the substance of that landmark bipartisan housing bill. The new legislation, the biggest overhaul of federal housing policy in decades. contains no new spending, but it does seek to boost supply by making it cheaper and easier to build across the country. That includes, among other things, new provisions that would streamline environmental reviews, remove restrictions for the construction of manufactured homes, increase access to small dollar mortgages, and moving forward, bar large institutional investors like private equity firms from owning more than 350 single-family homes.

To break down the potential impact, we're joined now by Sean Donovan. He served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama. He's currently the president and CEO of Enterprise Community Partners. That's a housing nonprofit. Secretary Donovan, welcome to the show. Thanks for being with us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. So it's clear reform is needed when it comes to housing.

When you look at the numbers, home prices are up 54 percent since 2020. The median cost of a mortgage has nearly doubled. By some estimates, we have a housing shortage of nearly 7 million units. You called this bill the most important, most comprehensive housing bill of this century. Why? What would it change? Well, we'd need the entire news hour to get through all of the prisons. There are literally dozens of them in this bill. But you got it exactly right.

The core of this bill is to say, for decades now, we have not been building enough housing in this country. That is at the center of what is the greatest housing. affordability crisis we've ever recorded in the U.S., and that is really what this does. It unleashes local communities and the private sector to do more to build housing. And it gets regulations and other steps out of the way to help do that. One of the provisions that got a lot of attention was this ban on institutional investors buying single-family homes. How significant is that? Would that really move the needle? Well, I think what's really important here about the provision is that as it was originally drafted, it actually would have had unintended consequences. It might have stood in the way in some ways of building more affordable housing. And so through good bipartisan negotiations, those unintended consequences were fixed. But I think stepping back, there is no single silver bullet in this bill. It is really the sum.

total of the pieces that make it the most comprehensive legislation that we've seen. And I do think those are provisions that are a wide range, but will really take local implementation to have an impact on families' lives in this country. So let's talk about that implementation because the reforms, as you mentioned, range from environmental reviews to zoning restrictions, single stair buildings. They seem very specific and niche taken one by one. But But the timing has to be an issue, right? It's going to take years, if not decades, for some of these new rules, have a real impact on the housing market. So can the bill have enough of a change fast enough for it to make a difference in American's lives?

Look, I think you've put your finger on a really important point here. We didn't get into this crisis overnight. And to solve the housing supply challenge, we're not going to get out of it overnight. And my organization, Enterprise Community Partners, was central to helping to shape some of the provisions. But we're now gearing up. In some ways, we've been saying here, Congress did its job. Now it's time for all the rest of us to do our jobs. And it really is going to take mayors and governors and local councils, state legislatures, to get onto this.

The good news is that they know this is the number one economic issue. for most American families. Affordability is at the center of our politics, as you've just said. And housing is the single most expensive thing in people's American families' lives. And so I'm seeing real urgency on the ground, and that's what it's going to take to move this

as quickly as possible. I'm sure you've seen some of the criticism that says this is sort of a collection of reforms around the edges that won't really truly combat sky-high housing prices. And we also heard from the president today, who sort of dismiss the bill of minor importance, as he put it. He focused on interest rates. He said it's all about interest rates if you want to cut into this problem.

What's your response to those concerns? Look, it's very clear that interest rates have a big impact on housing, but that impact waxes and wanes, right? It goes up and down with interest rates. We have a long-term building crisis in that crisis. And what I would also say is that there are, key provisions in here that could be transformational. It will depend on how they're implemented. Just to take one, you know, we build housing in this country in a very similar way that we did

50 years ago before the computer was invented. And there are other countries in this world that are leading on manufactured and modular housing that is dramatically reducing the cost. The problem is we have thousands of different building codes in this country. And so just one piece of this bill, The changes to manufactured housing, if implemented correctly, could be transformational. And so I disagree with the idea that none of these provisions could have a real impact. But again, Congress did its job. It is time for the rest of us to get on this at the local level, in the private sector, in the nonprofit sector, and make the promise real. That is former HUD Secretary Sean Donovan joining us tonight.

Secretary Donovan, thank you for your time. It's good to speak with you. My pleasure, and thanks for covering this. Progressive Democrats dominated last night's midterm primary elections in New York in a resounding show of strength for the Democratic Socialist mayor of New York City. All three candidates endorsed by Mayor Zoran Mamdani won their races, two of them ousting sitting congressmen. Darya Liza Avila Chevalier, a Democratic Socialist, beat five-term incumbent Adriano Espayat in New York's 13th Congressional. District. Claire Valdez, another Democratic Socialist, won the open-seat primary in New York's

7th Congressional District, and Brad Lander, best at incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman in New York's 10th Congressional District. Lander won by some 30 points in a race that heavily focused on the candidate's differences over Israel policy. Democrats are painfully divided by our differences over the U.S. relationship to Israel and Palestine, and we have to face up to it squarely. Our party needs to admit that Joe Biden's hug-Bee-B-stratory was a catastrophic failure. The enemy to all that we want and all that we hope for

is in the White House, not in our own party. President Trump, for his part, responded to the results in several social media posts, one saying, quote, America the Beautiful will never be a communist country. To break it all down, we're joined by Bridget Bergann, senior politics reporter for New York Public Radio. Bridget, thanks for being with us. Great to join you. So the mayor of New York City, Mayor Mamdani, he spoke at one of the victory parties last night.

Here's a bit of what he had to say. We are showing that last June, a year ago tomorrow, was not an anomaly. So how much of what we saw last night is unique to New York City politics? It's demographics, it's active. networks, its political culture, and how much should Democrats elsewhere view as a signal of what might come in the November midterms? Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say that democratic politics in the country have their roots right here in New York City.

It's where Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries represents a district in Brooklyn, and it's also where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is from, also in Brooklyn. And so I think part of what we're seeing here is when we talk about a challenge to the establishment, that challenge lands right at the footsteps of the leaders of the Democratic Party. I think it is likely, as we are seeing in elections and other parts of the country. I think of the mayor of Washington, D.C. as a recent example, an increased number of Democratic Socialist candidates running for office and potentially challenging incumbents. And as in the case of New York City, they may be successful. These Democratic Socialists, how do they define themselves? What are their policy goals?

What distinguishes them from mainstream Democrats? So they center working class New Yorkers in this case, and they center the needs of those individuals. They are definitely more pro-Palestinian and take a lot of objection to the current position of the Democratic Party or its traditional position when it comes to Israel and being an ally of Israel without question. They also take a strong stand on things like Medicare for all,

making sure there's universal child care, essentially talking about making more accessible benefits that would make the lives of working people easier. And how significant was the Gaza issue and the outcomes last night? I mean, that was a big issue in multiple races. It certainly was at play in the... the 7th Congressional District, where we saw Assembly Member Claire Valdez defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Randoso.

You know, both of them have called what has happened in Gaza a genocide. But the issue there was that Valdez has been someone who has been outspoken on that issue sooner. Similarly, we saw in the 13th Congressional District where Daryalisa Avila Chevalier defeated incumbent representative, Adrian Esbayat, one of her main lines of attack was that they needed to support more in the district to pay for babies, not bombs, was her line. And in particular, she went after Esbayat for not doing more to help Mahmoud Khalil. He is a Palestinian activist who she worked with as part of their pro-Palestinian anti-Israel encampments at Columbia University. Mamut Khalil was arrested by ICE in the district, and when they reached out to Espayat's office for help, they say they did not

get the help that they needed from their representative. Khalil and his wife went on to make an ad that was paid for by a super PAC that supported Avila Chaviliere. So I think you see that that was an issue that was certainly animating voters in that district as well. In the 30 seconds we have left, what do these results say about Mamdani's influence right now in New York City politics? There was a get-out-the-vote rally in Brooklyn

just before primary day with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. And at that rally, Mom Dani said he's often asked about the state of the Democratic Party. He said it needs to change. And he's also asked, when does 2028 begin? And he said it begins now. It begins on primary day. And I think he and the Democratic Socialists of America

are looking to have a big influence going forward specifically in 2028. New York Public Radio, senior politics reporter Bridget Bergen. Bridget, thanks as always. Thanks, Jeff. The Trump administration has made multiple efforts to reshape how elections are run with just months before the midterms. And the debate over election security has led to tension between the White House and election administrators, as the president falsely claimed voter fraud is rampant

nationwide. Our Llanders has more. The Trump administration has taken broad efforts over the last several months to assert control over elections. Today alone, a federal judge blocked the administration from using a revamped immigration database to check voter rolls. And the Postmaster General told the Senate the Postal Service won't deliver mail ballots in states that refuse to hand over their voter lists. For perspective on what all this means, heading into November, I'm joined by Gabe Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State's Office. Gabe, thank you so much for joining NewsHour. How would be here.

So we mentioned this testimony today that the Postmaster General had on Capitol Hill, saying, that they will not deliver these mail ballots if states don't comply with this demand to provide a list of names of who is voting in that state. If the Postal Service denies this kind of service, how many people in your state would be impacted by that? Well, it's interesting. Vote by mail is really big out west. They really, because the large land masses and everything, it would really affect people in Alaska and California and Washington and Utah. I mean, the irony, and Florida is the biggest one in the east of Mississippi who uses it. So you're talking about millions of voters being affected by this potentially, but I don't understand the legal mechanism hook that would allow them to say, if you don't do this,

then we will do that. Congress has been silent on this. I cannot see any legal way that will actually come to fruition because we are 132 days away from the election. Yeah, we're close. You're certainly right about that. The president canceled a bill signing ceremony earlier today on how. housing legislation saying that he was canceling it until the Save America Act has passed. That legislation would require voters to show proof of citizenship when they're registering to vote

and photo ID at the time of voting. It's already illegal to vote in this country if you're not a citizen. So is that legislation necessary in your view? Look, I think as a public policy, it's good to have guardrails in place to prevent non-citizen voting. The reality is it is might. microscopically small in existence right now. But this adds a lot of layers of problematic issues for lots of voters. I'm not sure where my birth certificate is, but in Georgia, we already have all these kind of systems in place.

But there are other states, the reality is it would take millions, if not billions of dollars, and two to three years of planning and thought and execution so you would make sure you're not disenfranchising voters. You can't just pass a law and all of a sudden these things happen. This would cause chaos. Again, there's a normally in federal lawsuits, we have the Purcell doctrine which basically says, you can't change the rule so close to an election. We've already been through the primaries and a lot of the states that will be wrapping up in September. Trying to do massive changes like this would just cause chaos.

And what sort of precedent does it set when the federal government uses federal resources as a leverage over decisions that the Constitution has assigned to states? states are the body that implements elections in this country. Time, place, and manner. It's very clear. Now, the Congress can pass laws. They can legitimately put what they want to have in there. But one of the great systems of security we have in this country is the fact there's 10,000 separate jurisdictions running these things,

not running them under the same rules. And as a Republican, I think the idea of a centralized national database of voters is a horrifically bad idea because at some point, A Democrat will take this over as the president, and they could wave a magic wand and say, I am now saying all these people are now eligible to vote, despite any state laws. We have to make sure we protect the federal rules and laws to say, the states do this, the states empower this, and then even the states, the localities run the elections. Final question for you.

You ran in the Republican primary for Secretary of State, and you lost in that contest recently. You were the only candidate to defend the 2020 election and the... administration of that election. What does that say about the Republican Party in Georgia and across the country right now? There's still a massive belief that the president is right. But just because he says it doesn't make it true. There's people who are undermining people's faith in the elections and it's not good for either party to this thing. In Georgia in 2018, Stacey Abrams said it was stolen in 2020. In 2020 we had Donald Trump. The only thing stolen in 2020 was

Stacy Abrams playbook and the reality is there's a grifting community that will always talk about this. And there's an entire industrial complex that gets money and power and prestige from saying the election stolen. Every court case, every single one is shown it hasn't been, and that's how you're supposed to do this in this country. And every two years, you come back and fight again. If you lose an election, you concede. I call the two people I lost to win the runoff and concede it because that's the right thing to do because we need the losers' consent. That's how the system works. Gabe Sterling, thank you for your time.

Thank you. We start the day's other headlines with the latest conflicts stemming from the interim U.S.-Iran agreement. An Iranian diplomat says inspectors won't visit the country's nuclear enrichment sites until a final deal with the U.S. is reached. However... There's a word of words here. Some say yes, the other say no. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, says that inspections will take place in cooperation with Iran. The meantime, U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is holding meetings across three Gulf nations.

Speaking to reporters in Kuwait, Rubio stressed that the Strait of Hormoz must be open to maritime traffic and toll-free. When we mean open the straits, we mean open the straits free in international waterways. I know of no country on the planet that supports tolling or a fee for the use of the straits. That's not going to happen. The president has been abundantly clear. Earlier, Rubio met with the president of the UAE, and the secretary posted this photo, which includes Donald Trump's son-in-law, Michael Bulos, sitting next to Rubio. The husband of the president's daughter, Tiffany Trump, has no official role in these talks,

and when asked about his presence, Rubio said, he's a friend, and, quote, we had a chance to catch up. In Texas, Camp Mystic filed for bankruptcy protection today. Nearly one year after flooding killed 28 people there, most of them campers, the majority, just eight years old. The filing follows a scathing report from state investigators earlier this month that found the camp lacked detailed emergency plans and did not respond quickly enough to the disaster. The operators of the all-girls Christian camp says its debts range from $10 million to $50 million.

They had intended to reopen this summer but reversed course amid public backlash. A federal judge in California is banning federal officials from making arrests at immigration courts nationwide in a setback for the Trump administration's crackdown. Judge Casey Pitts ruled the policy was, quote, arbitrary and capricious and said, quote, the chilling effect of courthouse arrests could undermine the proper enforcement of immigration laws. An official that Department of Homeland Security fired back calling the ruling, quote, naked judicial activism.

It is the second such action on court. courthouse arrests after a judge banned them in New York City last month. Federal prosecutors have charged Chief of Staff to former New York Mayor Eric Adams with bribery, money laundering and fraud. Frank Corone, his brother and two others were arrested earlier today. They're accused of accepting more than $100,000 in bribes to steer a city contract from migrant housing to a hotel in Queens. They each face up to 20 years in prison, if convicted, and they've pleaded not guilty.

Adams himself has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the case, though he has been previously indicted on bribery and other charges that were later dismissed. In Colombia, progressive candidate Ivan Cepeda conceded the presidential election today to Trump-backed political outsider Amelardo de la Spreya. Election officials confirmed today that the business owner and lawyer beat Cepeda by about one percentage point. Cepeda and the current president, Gustavo Petro, had initially... said they would challenge the results. But in remarks today, Sepeda said that while he plans

to put up a vigilant and constructive opposition, he would indeed concede. I do so as an act of democratic responsibility. I do so because we deeply believe in democracy, and because we are convinced that political differences should be resolved through citizen participation, respect for institutions, and public deliberation. The President Trump for his support of Delazprea, calling Trump's social media posts, quote, improper foreign interference in Colombia's internal affairs. Turning now to the World Cup, Switzerland and Canada are heading to the knockout round. Playing in front of a sea of red and white jerseys in Vancouver, the co-host nation lost two to one, but has performed well enough in the tournament to advance for the first time ever. In the meantime, Bosnia and Herzegovina helped their chances of advancing after a three-to-one

win over Qatar in Seattle today. If they do move forward, it would also be the first time for that country. Notably absent today was Qatar's midfielder Assi Madibo, who was handed a five-match ban after a tackle that broke a Canadian player's leg last week. Madibo can appeal FIFA's decision. On Wall Street today, stocks ended mixed amid ongoing weakness in big tech. shares. The Dow Jones Industrial average gained nearly 200 points

by the close, but the NASDAQ fell about 100 points, nearly half a percent. The S&P 500 posted a modest loss of just seven points. Still to come, on the news hour. Another top military commander resigns following a clash with the Secretary of Defense. Millions

across Europe face extreme temperatures amid record-breaking heat wave. And anti-ice protesters are sentenced to decades in prison in the latest crackdown on dissent. This is the PBS News Hour from the David M. Rubinstein studio at WETA in Washington, headquarters of PBS News. Today, the Army confirmed that one of its most prominent generals would soon be retiring, ending his career and leaving his current job long before expected.

It's just the latest example of senior officers leaving the military early or being fired under Secretary Pete Hegsef. Nick Schiffran has that story. When the U.S. military needed to respond to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it deployed General Chris Donahue and the unit he commanded to Europe to coordinate U.S. assistance. When the year before, the military needed to withdraw quickly from Afghanistan, it also turned to Donahue and his unit, and it became the last American soldier to leave Kabul after 20 years of war.

For years before that, Donahue led the Army's most elite troops during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, the Army said he would be retiring and leaving his current job as the top Army officer in Europe early. The Sixth Army three-and-four star officer to announce early retirement just in the last year and a half. To talk about this, I'm joined by Jim McPherson, the Undersecretary of the Army during the First Trump administration. Jim McPherson, thanks very much. Welcome back to the News Hour. What's your response to CD Donahue as he was known announcing this early retirement? It's a continuation of a very distressing pattern where senior officers are asked to resign or they are fired or they are reassigned to a command that would require them to be a lower rank and they tender their resignation. And we don't know why.

There's no explanation. And so we're left to conjecture is why these officers were let go. And unfortunately, that conjecture turns to politics. Maybe they were let go because they weren't in line with the current administration's politics, which is a sad commentary. But doesn't the secretary, doesn't his staff have the authority to reject officer candidates to choose their own military leaders? They do. By law, they review the promotional list that comes out and they can remove names from that promotional list. But historically, that's never been done for just pure political reasons. An individual would be removed from a promotionalist for cause, and they would be notified as to what that cause is and have an opportunity to respond to it.

it's alleged misconduct or whatever it may be. This administration seems to have departed from that historical perspective and is just firing people, and we don't know why. Again, there's no explanation given whatsoever. I think we go back to February of last year, in which four former Secretaries of Defense wrote to Congress and expressed their concern over what they saw as the beginning of this when the president fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CNO, and others. And they said it was reckless. They said it undermined the all-volunteer force, and it put at peril our national security. Here we are 16 months later, and that trend is continuing. I want to put a point on something you've been saying, which is the lack of explanation. I asked the Pentagon for an explanation

for why General Donahue was leaving early, and the office of the secretary referred me to the army whose statement did not provide any reason. So just again, what is the impact of a lack of public explanation, especially when it comes to someone who internally was so respected like General Donahehan. You're absolutely right. Internally so respected. I mean, one of the things that Secretary Hankseth has said many times is he wants to make us more warrior-like. He wants to make warriors. Well, there's no more warrior than there was General Donahue, as you outlined in the introduction. I think this goes to two things. One is the morale of the senior officers. They don't know what's in store for them. Is the administration going to go back and look at the

is something they said or did when they were much lower rank years ago. That seems to be what's happening. But there's also one aspect here that is very concerning, and that's civil-military relations. That's the relationship that the civilian community has with their military. And the foundation of that relationship is the military is apolitical. They don't get involved in politics at all. Well, now we see this administration involving senior officers in politics, And that erodes the trust that the civilian community has in their military. It impacts that civilian military relationship. I talked to a lot of former senior officials today who weren't willing to speak for the record.

But one of them said this, a former three-star. The three-star said to me, it would be okay if generals were being relieved for cause, but relief without cause only leads to speculation about the secretary's motives and undermines trust within the officer. core. Does that sound right to you? I couldn't agree more. And I was part of the process when I was on active duty in the Navy that reviewed promotionalists and those names to determine, or any of those names, have there's been alleged misconduct in their past? We don't even get that explanation

from this administration now. It just happens, and we are left to speculate as to why, and that speculation turns to political reasons. And one former four-star who knew Donahue for decades told me this, that when all of those Army officers have been fired over the last year and a half. He received calls from colonels, from lieutenant colonels, and they questioned whether they should stay in the military, and quote, this person told me, the military is losing talent left and right. What message does his removal send to the next generation of officers? It sends just that message, Nick. It sends the message that you can't trust the civilian leadership of this administration, because they're going to want to have

individuals promoted who think like them, who believe as they believe, which is not what the military is all about. And I'm sure that there are a number of captains and colonels now who are wondering whether or not they should remain in or take advantage of that job offer they just receive for more money and they get to spend more time with their families. Tough decision. Jim McPherson, thank you very much.

Thank you. A major heat wave is shattering records across Europe, leaving tens of millions of people under sweltering conditions. France topped a record for the country's hottest day ever for the second consecutive day. And the UK and Spain both hit record highs for the month of June. Stephanie Sy has our report. In London today, the temperature hit 96 degrees and outdoor workers felt it. Awful to be honest. It's horrible to say.

These kids didn't seem to mind the heat much. was also in order for this crowd, waiting in line to attend a concert in Milan, Italy. At the Vatican, the faithful fluttered their fans, while Pope Leo held his weekly audience. And while the beer may still be cold in Munich, in the kitchens the chickens weren't the only ones roasting. Just run quickly to the sink and splash your face with cold water, then drink loads of water. That's our little secret. Today, more than a dozen countries in Europe were under high heat alerts in the second major heat wave for the continent in two months.

A heat dome, a high pressure system trapping hot air, is covering the region, says Claire Barnes, an extreme weather and climate researcher at Imperial College in London. It means that it's drawing warm air up from North Africa, from the Sahara, and that's why we have this really intense heat. and it's very slow moving and it means there's kind of no wind, no breeze for respite. With temperatures reaching more than 110 degrees, France has been on the front line. Heat-related deaths are climbing, including 40 drownings in recent days, that authorities attribute to people seeking relief in rivers and lakes. My friend who lives here says there's no way she's going to be swimming in here because it's so dirty, but it's hot. I'm going to risk it.

Earlier this week, police in Paris tried to stop young people from turning a footbridge into a diving board. The Eiffel Tower and the Louvre were shut down early. And the classic grey zinc roofs that cover much of the skyline are making things unbearable for those living in attic units. It's been the worst week that we've had in this apartment. Air conditioning is a rarity across Europe, making fans a hot commodity. It's pure coincidence that I have this electric fan because someone left it aside. Everything was gone in less than 30 minutes. For decades, many European countries didn't need air conditioning since extreme heat was relatively

rare. But more recently, environmental concerns, energy costs and health worries have all been part of the resistance to AC. Oscar Bruce works on urban climate and health at the University College London. Adding air conditioning on the energy grid would require basically more energy to be produced when during cooling hours, which is something that the EU has been trying to prevent to not have to rely, for example, on fossil fuels to cope with this energy demand. Europe is the world's fastest warming continent.

Temperatures have been increasing at twice the speed of the global average since. the 1980s. There has been heat waves, of course, in the past already, but their intensity and their frequency has become really problematic due to global climate change and especially supran regional or would I say continental climate change that we experienced in Europe. More than 200,000 people have died from heat-related causes in the past four years across Europe. Many countries are taking care to engage elderly populations who are more vulnerable to heat-related illnesses. These Italian seniors had their morning workout move to an air-conditioned space.

And movie theaters in Geneva are offering free daytime screenings for the elderly. The hotter it gets, the more the cinema becomes a place of refuge. So we'll also have a few more people, I imagine, in the coming days. In Madrid, the city reopened its climate shelter in City Hall for the third year in a row, offering cool air, food, water, and a place to shower for the homeless. On Saturday, one person came. Yesterday, three came. Our experience from previous years is that as the days go by, many more people start coming. I seem to recall that last year, we had around 170 people. Experts say this is likely just the start of this summer's heat across,

Europe and the globe. In the UK we have broken records nearly every year now. These are things that we don't see usually and that we know are related to global climate changes. So we could expect future summers to become warmer and more regularly so. For the PBS News Hour, I'm Stephanie Sy. In two federal courts yesterday, a group of protesters received unusually long sentences after the Justice Department accused them of being members of the far-left movement Antifa.

The sentences range from 30 to 100 years in prison, longer than the harshest sentence handed down to any of the convicted rioters in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. All of those people have since received pardons or commutations from President Trump. Our justice correspondent, Ali Rogan, has more. These nine protesters were arrested after they demonstrated outside a migrant detention facility in Texas last year. During the protest, a police officer was shot in the neck. He survived. Their case is the first to incorporate new guidance from a presidential declaration last year that labels Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

That's despite the fact that Antifa is a decentralized movement, not a single organization, and that there is no federal charge of domestic terrorism under existing U.S. law. To discuss the implications of this sentencing, I'm joined by Georgetown Law Professor and former federal prosecutor, Paul Butler. Paul, good to see you. Welcome back to the News Hour. It's great to be here. I'd like to ask first about these decades-long sentences that were passed down. The longest was 100 years in prison. Most of the others received sentences of 50 to 70 years.

You're familiar with the allegations against these defendants. Are these sentences typical? No, they're not. The sentences are extremely harsh. They're sentences that are more typical for people who have committed murder or stolen millions of dollars. Compare these defendants to two other sets of defendants. One, they're co-defendants who were accused of the same conduct but pled guilty. They're going to be sentenced next month.

and they're looking at around 15 years. We can also think of the 1,500 people who were prosecuted in connection with the attack of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The most any of those defendants received was 22 years compared with the 30 to 70 years that these defendants received. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche released a statement in which he said in part, the sentences handed down today make clear

that the Antifa terrorists who attack law, enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice. Calling them Antifa terrorists, what do we know about Antifa and whether or not this terrorism label is really accurate? Antifa is not a formal organization. It doesn't have a leadership structure or a list of members. It's more of a network of people on the far left who are opposed to fascism. President Trump has labeled it a domestic terrorist. Now, there is such a thing as a foreign terrorist organization, but the law doesn't provide any classification for domestic terrorist organizations.

More significantly, five of the alleged Antifa members pled guilty, and they supported the prosecution. But on the stand, they deny that they and any of the co-defendants were members of Antifa. They said what brought them together is that they were a member of a book group of the Emma Goldman Reading Society that read books by revolutionary authors. Named after a famous anti-fascist protester, what sort of message do you think the Department of Justice was sending in pursuing these sentences? And do you think we're going to see this in future cases against protesters, especially those who are protesting administration policies like the immigration crisis? down. Last year after the murder of Charlie Kirk, President Trump signed the National Security Presidential Memo 7.

It's a directive that says that the government should use as law enforcement resources to focus on domestic terrorist organizations. And he said domestic terrorist ideology could include anti-capitalist views, people who have extreme views on race and gender and immigration, and even people who are opposed to what the directive described as traditional teachings on marriage and the family. The concern is that prosecutions based on this directive, chill, free speech, people who demonstrate, even people who are resisting the administration have First Amendment rights, to free speech and freedom of assembly.

Now, when they cross the line, as these defendants did with acts of vandalism, of course, they should be brought to justice. The concern is when people are labeled terrorists based on their political views, that chills free speech. Professor Paul Butler, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. Ahead of America's 250th anniversary,

author Walter Isaacson has turned his attention to a single sentence in one of the nation's founding documents. Judy Woodruff speaks with Isaacson now about the enduring power of those words for her series. Crossroads, America at 250. People line up to see it, the Declaration of Independence, protected behind bulletproof glass inside the National Archives, the faded nearly 250-year-old document that is America's defining statement of purpose. For Walter Isaacson, one line stands out.

He calls it the greatest sentence ever written, the title of his most recent book. That sentence? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Maybe I shouldn't write a really big long book. I should just do the most important sentence, and I should explain it very succinctly how we should all rally around it. Isaacson and I recently discussed the many meanings behind those words at the Lars

Anderson House in Washington, D.C., home to the Society of the Cincinnati, the nation's oldest patriotic organization, formed just after the Revolutionary War. Do you truly believe it is the greatest sentence ever written? If you look at that sentence, It creates something new on the face of the earth. A country that's power comes from the consent of the government that respects individual freedom, but also respects the idea of having common values and common ground and diversity. And the world had not seen a place like that.

And it becomes a mission statement around the world as more and more countries sort of embrace the idea of democratic freedom. But it's also full of contradiction. because for them saying all men are created equal, there was an inherent contradiction there because all people living at that time were not equal. There's a deep contradiction in the sentence and a contradiction in the way America was founded, and our narrative is how we resolve that contradiction. When they wrote that sentence, it clearly was aspirational, because one-fifth of the people

living in the colonies were enslaved. And even Thomas Jefferson, when he's drafting this sentence, His valet, he's enslaved. So Jefferson has to get over these contradictions, and so do we, as a country, as over the course of generations, we've lived up to the promise in fits and starts. Do you believe the founders understood at the time what a big contradiction it was? The founders fully understood that slavery was a contradiction. Jefferson writes denunciations of slavery in his first draft of the Declaration. And then they have to take some of them out because the South Carolina delegation won't

put up with it. And certainly Franklin, John Adams, they all understand that there's this contradiction. But they're setting the nation on a course, a course that has this definite problem from the very beginning, and each new generation has to wrestle with it. Did they have an inkling at the time of the consequences of what they were doing when they drafted this? They absolutely knew they were creating two great ideals for a nation. One is a nation based on individual liberty, but in which you share common ground and

the rights of everybody. Secondly, a diverse nation where you don't impose a religion or a creed or a way of thinking. You have to remember, every nation up until then pretty much had either been ruled because of the divine right of kings or the sword of conquerors. They attended to be ethnic nationalist nations. But in Philadelphia, you have a great diversity. You have, you know, Anglicans and Quakers and Moravians and Jews and slaves and freed slaves and Presbyterians.

And they're saying we're a new type of nation in which diversity can be part of our strength. You use the word or the term common ground just now, although the word common is hardly in the document. Where did that notion of common ground come from? Common ground comes from John Locke, who says we can all have private property, but when you have disparities of wealth, sometimes people who own property should put things in the common. That's where you have Clapham Common or here you have Boston Common and Cambridge Common, is where

people without property, known as commoners, could graze their sheep, bury their dead, plant their gardens. But it becomes a symbol for larger things where we put schools in the common. We put the fire department in the common, we put police in the common, libraries in the common. They're writing the declaration to say, here's our common values. But they also say we're creating a nation where everybody has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So we have to create the type of society that allows a land of opportunity, that allows

some common ground in which we can all flourish. And that became known as the American dream. And as you write, over time, though, this is changed. Nowadays, we've lost the notion of a common ground of information. We all go to our different ends of the talk radio, dial or down different rabbit holes on the internet. Likewise, we sometimes lose that notion that in order to have an American opportunity, an American dream, we need to have things in common.

If you look at the idea that all men are created equal, and you realize it doesn't really describe the way it was in 1776. But you think of it as a forcing mechanism. Fourscore and seven years later, Lincoln invokes it, as he's burying 7,058 young men who have died to make the sentence more equal. At the Seneca Falls Declaration, they invoke it. Dr. King invokes it in one of his last speeches. Lyndon Johnson invokes it when he signs a civil rights law. So it's a sentence that keeps pushing us forward, even though our progress comes and fits and starts. As you look at what the founders ultimately wrote in this sentence, was there something you would change?

I'm an editor. I love editing. What if I had been in the room? And I went word through word, even words like self-evident, which seemed a bit inflated to me. And then I realized Franklin is talking about a very specific type of truth. All of those words are carefully chosen. I can't see it. I'd change any one of them. Even coming from an editor. Even coming from a longtime editor. Walter Isaacson, thank you for talking with us. Judy, great, thanks. And that's the NewsHour for tonight.

I'm Jeff Bennett. And I'm Omna Navaz. On behalf of the entire NewsHour team, thank you for joining us.