How Trump won the legal fight over his White House ballroom

0:00Good morning. President Trump notches a victory in his ongoing ballroom battle. What you need to know about mail-in ballots ahead of the midterm elections. Mail voting is just as secure as voting in person. It's been used for over a century in the US. There's rarely any major issues with it. And a conviction in the murder of two-boxer corps, 30 years later. It's Tuesday, September 1st. I'm Gideon Resnick. This is Apple News today. President Trump can continue with his construction of the White House ballroom after a Supreme Court ruling yesterday. In a 5-4 decision, the court effectively brushed aside the views of two lower courts that the president was probably violating the law. Justin Juvenile is the Supreme Court reporter for the Washington Post. He explained why the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued and ultimately lost.

1:00They did not have what's known as standing, which in legal terms means you have to have suffered a real-world injury before you can bring a lawsuit to challenge something. A trust board member had said that she would suffer professional and personal injuries if construction continued. The court didn't agree, saying that, quote, mere offense is not enough to constitute injury. And there was a somewhat unlikely coalition that disagreed with the majority here, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the Liberal Justices in dissent. Robert said, in effect, that it was probably illegal what Trump was doing with bulldozing the East Wing of the White House and trying to build this ballroom, and that it was a bad day for the separation of powers and that what Trump was doing was most likely not within his authority as president. Roberts wrote that Congress has explicitly prohibited building on grounds of the federal government and hadn't approved of this construction. The Trump administration had argued that it was too late to stop the building as the project was about 65% done, and that halting it could put the president's life at risk after multiple assassination attempts.

2:09Even as the court didn't rule on the legality of the construction without congressional approval, it does seem unlikely that another challenge could stop the building before it's completed. The National Trust's lawsuit is all but dead, and the project is going to steam forward unless someone else comes forward who can show that they might have legal standing or suffered a real-world legal harm. When the project was first announced in July last year, the White House said it would cost $200 million, but that price estimate has since ballooned to at least double that. The construction has been a major focus for President Trump even amid the war in Iran, economic impacts in the U.S., and sinking approval numbers in some polling. Trump said yesterday that the project is set to be completed in the summer of 2028. The first mail-in ballots for this year's midterms are expected to start going out at the end of the week, and recently there's been a lot of confusion and legal wrangling, as the White House has been working for months to change the way Americans vote by mail.

3:16First, in March, the President signed an executive order that sought to make lists of U.S. citizens that were verified eligible voters, and to task the United States Postal Service with doing it, and also not sending absentee ballots to people missing from each state's approved list. The Postal Service is essentially being asked to create a national database of mail voters, and to essentially hand check every single mail ballot that goes out. Now, this is tens of millions of ballots and hundreds of millions of potentially eligible mail voters, so it's not a small undertaking. Nick Racardi is a reporter with the Associated Press. Voting law experts saw the order as unconstitutional, charging that it was attempting to take away states' power to run elections. In a recent lawsuit, more than 20 Democratic state attorneys general said that U.S.P.S. did not have the authority to try and carry this out. They allege similar things in each of these lawsuits, which is essentially that the President doesn't have the power to do this under the Constitution.

4:19The Postal Service doesn't have the power to pick and choose what mail it delivers and what mail it doesn't deliver. The Postal Service hasn't been given directed and by Congress to do any of this. The rule has now been put on hold with a judge saying that plaintiff states did not have enough time to implement changes before the midterms. It would require the state and local election offices, which there are more than 8,000 nationwide, to completely revamp the way they run things in some cases just days before the election formally starts. Close to a third of Americans vote by mail, and a number of states send all registered voters mail in ballots. President Trump is vocally opposed voting by mail for years, despite the fact that it's how he often casts his own ballot. He's heightened his criticism since he lost the 2020 election. He immediately began claiming with that evidence that it would lead to mass fraud. It did not lead to mass fraud. He lost the 2020 election, but he continued to claim that it's just because of the mail voting mass fraud. The next hearing in this case is scheduled for Thursday, September 3rd.

5:25It's been the worst fire season in a decade in the Western United States. Millions of acres have burned, hundreds of homes have been destroyed. And some of the people responsible for managing that land say changes made at the federal level to how the US responds to fires is making their work more difficult. In June last year, just a few months after wildfires ripped through Los Angeles, President Trump signed an executive order that urged faster and more aggressive federal responses to fires. The President, along with Tom Schultz, the US Forest Service Chief, endorsed a tactic known as full suppression in fighting fires, meaning that every single fire on public land gets a response with the goal of fully containing them. That presents a couple of problems. Robert Cheney is a senior reporter with the Montana Free Press. He's been investigating how federal policy changes have impacted this fire season. He worked with journalists from news outlets, including Cal Matters, the Colorado Sun, the Nevada Independent, and more. They spoke with federal and state officials, former leaders of the Forest Service, and firefighters.

6:28And they found that this full suppression tactic presents some issues. One being the US government simply doesn't have enough resources to fully fight each and every fire. There can be literally thousands of new fires starts when a thunderstorm passes through a wide area. So it's somewhat unrealistic on its face to say we are going to have a full suppression for every fire that happens. Schultz has said that the service would consider a lot of factors when approaching fires, including topography and firefighter safety. Still at least one firefighting veteran told Cheney that federal agencies would need tens of thousands more firefighters to handle a wider suppression tactic. And there have been questions as to whether the approach makes sense. The second problem with that is there has been a long back and forth over decades about whether or not we need to respond to every fire and put it out. For one, most wildfires go out on their own, and the vast majority don't grow to be very big. And public land managers have pointed out that science shows occasional fires help the ecosystem.

7:32Most of the West has what's known as a fire adapted ecosystem. That means that the trees and plants need fire to function. They need to be burned off every so often. They need to dispose of leftover fuel that comes from dropped litter, leaves, branches, what not. Some trees actually need fire in order for their seedlings to sprout. The Trump administration is not the first to try this full suppression approach. The US has gone back and forth on this policy over the last century or so, which has allowed more debris to collect in our forests and potentially fuel future fires. Adding to that factor, the forests are full of many other hazards. Since what's known as the fire paradox, we have a situation where all of these forests desperately need fire. But we have now introduced so many homes, so many power lines, so many other, what the firefighters call values at risk, intermixed in these forests and grasslands.

8:37That you can't just set a prescribed fire and walk away assuming that everything's going to be fine. Beyond embracing full suppression, the Trump administration has reorganized the federal agencies responsible for responding to fires. The government is now studying what it would look like to consolidate all of these resources under this new US wild land fire service, with results expected next year. Here are a few other stories we're following today. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned on Monday, after months of reported clashes with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. One of his main issues was the outsting of a number of Army leaders at Hegseth's direction, including General Randy George, who had been the Army Chief of Staff. Some Republicans, according to the Wall Street Journal, have pushed back on Hegseth's preferred replacement, which would need Senate confirmation. A White House spokesperson praised Driscoll in a statement and said the Army is more powerful than ever, thanks in part to his work.

9:41A man was convicted in the killing of rapper Tupac Shakur, almost 30 years after his death. Dwayne Davis, a former leader of the Southside Compton Crips, was found guilty of orchestrating the shooting, even as authority said he did not pull the trigger. The prosecution relied on Davis's own words in interviews and a memoir, in which he said that he was seeking revenge on Shakur, after the rapper and associates beat up his nephew. Davis faces the potential of life in prison, and said in court yesterday that he wants to appeal. And finally, after 21 years and six World Cups, the legendary soccer superstar, Lionel Messi, announced his retirement from Argentina's national team. He said he had decided just days after the team came up short in his World Cup title defense this year, but waited to announce it as his father was dealing with health issues that led to his death. Messi was briefly the all-time leading scorer in World Cup history of the summer, and his Argentina's all-time leading scorer. While he's stepping away from the international team that brought him so much glory, Messi will continue to play MLS for Inter Miami.

10:42He said he won't fully retire until he can quote no longer perform the game he loves. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, and if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. New York Magazine examines how youth sports in the US turned into such an expensive and exhausting commitment, and the investors who are making a killing on it. If you're listening in the podcast app, you can follow Apple News Plus narrated to find that story, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.