Here’s a recap of the day so far
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In a cabinet meeting that lasted for more than two hours, defense secretary Pete Hegseth gave more details about the decision to re-strike an alleged drug trafficking boat off the coast of Venezuela on 2 September. He said that he “watched that first strike” but ultimately did not “stick around for the hour or two hours” after. “So I moved on to my next meeting,” the defense secretary said. “A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the which he had the complete authority to do.” Hegseth went on to say that decorated US Navy admiral Frank Bradley made the “right call” as he described the unfolding events to reporters.
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For his part, Donald Trump said that countries manufacturing and selling drugs to the US are “subject to attack”, adding that strikes wouldn’t be limited to Venezuela. The president also said that the administration is “going to start doing those strikes on land,” after defending his crackdown on alleged narcotics smugglers, which has largely been contained to the sea.
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Democrats have come out swinging against the administration over the much-scrutinized second boat strike. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called Hegseth “spineless” and “a national embarrassment” and called for the defense secretary to release the full unedited tape of the deadly strikes on the alleged drug boat.
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In his ninth cabinet meeting since returning to office, Trump also said that the national guard will soon deploy to New Orleans. He added that the Republican governor (and staunch ally of the president) of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, had called him and asked for help. “We’re going there in a couple of weeks,” Trump said.
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The president noted early on in the meeting that he would be announcing his selection for the next chair of the Federal Reserve early next year. He repeated that he talked to treasury secretary Scott Bessent about taking over the Fed but Bessent didn’t want the job.
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Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back at it on Wednesday. Here are the latest developments:
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US defense secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that he was not present when a special operations commander decided to launch a second strike on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean on 2 September in order to kill two survivors. Hegseth, who boasted of having watched the attack “live” the day after it took place, said at a televised cabinet meeting that he did not “stick around” for the second strike.
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Donald Trump, who struggled to keep his eyes open during his cabinet meeting, ended it with a racist attack on Somali Americans in Minnesota, calling the entire community “garbage” and again singled out Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman, for vitriol.
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Elected officials in Minnesota voiced outrage over Trump’s comments, and the reported plan to deploy federal immigration offices to target Somalis in the state. “Everyone knows that our president is racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic – and we are going to fight that,” Somali American Minneapolis city council member Jamal Osman said. “America has a history of fighting and stopping those kinds of individuals.”
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Trump once again claimed in a social media post on Tuesday that he has canceled “all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts” signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden, with an “autopen” – a mechanical device that uses a robotic arm with a pen attached to replicate a person’s signature.
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Republican Matt Van Epps won a special election in Tennessee for a seat in the US House, but by a single-digit margin in a district Donald Trump won by 22 percentage points last year.
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Updated at 22.07 EST
Republican Matt Van Epps wins Tennessee special election, but by far narrower margin than predecessor
Republican Matt Van Epps has won a nationally watched special election in Tennessee for a seat in the US House, maintaining his party’s grip on the district Donald Trump won by 22 percentage points last year.
A military veteran and former state general services commissioner from Nashville, Van Epps defeated Democratic state lawmaker Aftyn Behn to represent the seventh congressional district.
Epps was leading by about 7.5% with about 98% of the vote counted.
Van Epps benefited from more than $1m in spending from Maga Inc. It was the first time the Trump-supporting Super Pac spent money on a campaign since last year’s presidential race, a reflection of the special election’s outsize importance.
Republican state lawmakers redrew the seventh district and two others in 2022 to help prevent liberal-voting Nashville from electing another Democrat to Congress. Only about one in five voters in the district, which spans 14 counties, are in the city.
Republican former representative Mark Green, who retired this summer, opening the vacancy, was re-elected by 21 percentage points in 2024, when Trump won by a similar margin.
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Updated at 21.59 EST
Investigation of former Honduran president Trump pardoned was started by lawyer who later defended Trump
Donald Trump dismissed concerns about his decision to pardon the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in federal court of drug trafficking by telling reporters on Tuesday the prosecution was “a Biden-inspired witch-hunt”.
One obvious flaw in Trump’s logic is that the investigation into Hernández began with the prosecution of his brother, Tony Hernández, in 2019, when Trump himself was president. That investigation was led by a federal prosecutor, Emil Bove, who later served as Trump’s personal lawyer and was recently appointed by Trump to the federal bench.
At the trial of Tony Hernández, Bove described a massive criminal scheme of “state-sponsored drug trafficking”. In his summation, Bove said:
Beginning in 2010 the defendant worked on massive cocaine shipments sent to the United States on a monthly basis. The president of Honduras deployed the military to the border with Guatemala to protect the defendant’s drug turf. The defendant used the National Police to murder one of his drug rivals. And the ring leader in that murder was later promoted to become the chief of the entire police force. Chapo Guzmán came to Honduras in 2013. Twice. You remember that defense counsel referred to Chapo as the most wanted man in the world at the time. He was still able to get to Honduras safely for those meetings with the defendant. And during the second meeting he handed the defendant a million dollars in cash, drug money, to help the defendant’s brother, Juan Orlando, get elected president so he could keep protecting them. …
in 2005 the defendant’s National Party lost the presidential election and they vowed to never let that happen again. To increase his own power and the power of his family, the defendant helped funnel millions of dollars in drug money into National Party campaigns. They did that for elections in 2009, 2013, and 2017. These weren’t campaign contributions. We’re not talking about donations. These were bribes and it came with strings. The traffickers who gave that money expected protection, protection from arrest, protection from investigation, protection from extradition, protection so that they could continue to work with the defendant to make millions of dollars distributing cocaine toward the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, this plan worked for a while. The defendant’s coconspirators, they won those elections. They infiltrated the Honduran government and they controlled it. They turned the government against its people. And they used the government for state-sponsored drug trafficking.
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Updated at 21.58 EST
Elected officials in Minnesota stand up for Somali community in face of Trump’s racist attacks
Elected officials in Minnesota spoke out in defense of the state’s large Somali American community on Tuesday, hours after a racist tirade against them by the president of the United States, Donald Trump.
“Minneapolis is proud to be home to the largest Somali community in the entire country,” the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, said. “They are our neighbors, our friends, and our family – and they are welcome in our city. Nothing Donald Trump does will ever change that.”
At a news conference with other elected officials, Frey also addressed the Somali community briefly in their own language, as he did during his last election campaign, leading to a wave of outrage in the rightwing media.
“We in St Paul celebrate our large Somali community,” the mayor of St Paul, Melvin Carter, said at the news conference.
“The Twin Cities is not a place that tolerates or embraces hate,” Carter added. “The hateful and damaging rhetoric that we’re hearing from Washington DC right now is reprehensible.”
Carter was followed by the Minneapolis city council member Jamal Osman. “I am proud to say I’m a Somali American. This country welcomed me and my family 26 years ago,” Osman said. “We came here and we are thankful.”
Jamal Osman, a Somali American Minneapolis city council member, spoke on Tuesday at news conference about Donald Trump’s targeting of Somali immigrants. He was flanked by Melvin Carter, the mayor of St Paul, left, and Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. Photograph: Tim Evans/Reuters
“I know many families are fearful tonight, they are, but I want you to know that the city of Minneapolis stands behind you,” Osman said. “Our community has lived through fear in the past.”
“Obviously, everyone knows that our president is racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic – and we are going to fight that,” Osman added. “America has a history of fighting and stopping those kinds of individuals.”
Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman who came to the US as a refugee from Somalia, responded to video of Trump attacking her, again, as he has obsessively for years, with the comment: “His obsession with me is creepy. I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.”
“Somali Americans are a valued part of our community,” Betty McCollum, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota wrote on social media. “President Trump calling fellow human beings ‘garbage’ is not only beneath the office but calls into question his capacity to serve all Americans. His ugly attacks on the Somali community do not reflect the views of our state, nor the reality of the contributions Somalis make every day. They are elected officials at the federal, state and local levels. They are business leaders, teachers, nurses, ride share drivers, neighbors, and friends. We will not be divided. We are One Minnesota.”
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Updated at 21.55 EST
Trump claims, once again, to have ‘terminated’ orders and pardons signed by Biden using autopen
Donald Trump once again claimed in a social media post on Tuesday that he has canceled “all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts” signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden, with an “autopen” – a mechanical device that uses a robotic arm with a pen attached to replicate a person’s signature.
Trump has been making this claim, that he has the power to declare all such documents signed by Biden using the device “null, void, and of no further force or effect”, for months, in a series of social media posts laced with legalistic language, despite the fact that the president does not have authority to overturn his predecessor’s pardons, and there is no evidence that Biden did not approve the affixing of his signature to the documents, which does have the force of law, and has been standard practice for decades in administrations including Trump’s own.
Trump appears to be aware of the fact that his declarations on social media do not have the force of law, since he first claimed to have overturned Biden’s orders in March, when he wrote, on his social media platform:
The “Pardons” that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!
In June, Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing “an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Biden’s purported execution of the numerous executive actions during his final years in office, examining policy documents signed with an autopen, who authorized its use, and the validity of the resulting Presidential policy decisions”.
But in an interview with the New York Times in July, Biden insisted that he “made every single one” of the decisions to grant pardons and commutations in his name. “The autopen is, you know, is legal,” Biden added. “As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump.”
Last week, Trump declared again that every document signed by Biden “is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect”.
“I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally,” Trump wrote on his social media platform on Friday. “Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury.”
In his latest post, Trump asserted that his own social media posts have the full force of law, while Biden’s presidential orders have none.
“Anyone receiving ‘Pardons,’ ‘Commutations,’ or any other Legal Document so signed, please be advised that said Document has been fully and completely terminated, and is of no Legal effect,” the president wrote.
The latest Trump post came one day after he posted dozens of false accusations about Democrats on his social media platform.
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Updated at 20.51 EST
The US defense department on Tuesday held its first press briefing since implementing restrictive new policies that prompted dozens of reporters to turn over their press badges in October.
In attendance were members of what the Pentagon has described as the “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” including dozens of journalists from ultra-conservative outlets as well as the former representative Matt Gaetz and the Trump ally and self-described “white advocate” Laura Loomer.
The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon’s press secretary heavily criticized legacy media outlets and called the newspaper the “epitome of fake news” in response to a report that defense secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to “kill everybody” during a boat strike in the Caribbean.
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Updated at 20.54 EST
The investigation into Pete Hegseth’s use of messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information about military operations in Yemen has come to a close, NBC News reported on Tuesday.
The inspector general of the Department of Defense began its investigation in April after intelligence on upcoming US airstrikes were shared in a group chat on the app that included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic.
The inquiry intended to “determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business”, according to a memo from the acting Pentagon inspector general. The defense secretary has said he did not share classified information.
Hegseth received a copy of the investigation’s findings, NBC News reported, and the report was expected to be made public as soon as this week. The sources cited by the outlet did not provide information about the conclusions of the investigation, according to NBC News.
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Updated at 21.01 EST
The Trump administration has threatened to withhold Snap food assistance funds to several Democratic-led states if they don’t provide data on recipients to the federal government.
Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said the information, which includes details about immigration status and social security numbers, would “root out” fraud and “make sure that those who really need food stamps are getting them, but also to ensure that the American taxpayer is protected”.
Democratic senators have said the administration’s effort to build a database on federal food aid recipients is an “unlawful privacy violation”.
More on this development from the Guardian’s Maya Yang:
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The Associated Press is also reporting that US immigration officials are preparing for a targeted enforcement operation in Minnesota focused on Somali immigrants as Donald Trump becomes increasingly hostile toward the community.
The president on Tuesday called immigrants from the east African country “garbage” and said they “contribute nothing.”
The New York Times reported that the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area, which has a large Somali immigrant population, would see increased deportation efforts. A source told the AP that the operation could start in the coming days and that immigration agents would spread across the region, primarily targeting people with final orders of deportation.
The Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, said Trump’s rhetoric “violates the moral fabric of what we stand by in this country as Americans”, and that Somali immigrants have started businesses and created jobs and added to the city’s “cultural fabric”.
City police officers will not work with federal agents overseeing immigration enforcement, Frey said.
“Targeting Somali people means that due process will be violated, mistakes will be made, and let’s be clear, it means that American citizens will be detained for no other reason than the fact that they look like they are Somali,” he said.
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Here’s a recap of the day so far
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In a cabinet meeting that lasted for more than two hours, defense secretary Pete Hegseth gave more details about the decision to re-strike an alleged drug trafficking boat off the coast of Venezuela on 2 September. He said that he “watched that first strike” but ultimately did not “stick around for the hour or two hours” after. “So I moved on to my next meeting,” the defense secretary said. “A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the which he had the complete authority to do.” Hegseth went on to say that decorated US Navy admiral Frank Bradley made the “right call” as he described the unfolding events to reporters.
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For his part, Donald Trump said that countries manufacturing and selling drugs to the US are “subject to attack”, adding that strikes wouldn’t be limited to Venezuela. The president also said that the administration is “going to start doing those strikes on land,” after defending his crackdown on alleged narcotics smugglers, which has largely been contained to the sea.
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Democrats have come out swinging against the administration over the much-scrutinized second boat strike. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called Hegseth “spineless” and “a national embarrassment” and called for the defense secretary to release the full unedited tape of the deadly strikes on the alleged drug boat.
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In his ninth cabinet meeting since returning to office, Trump also said that the national guard will soon deploy to New Orleans. He added that the Republican governor (and staunch ally of the president) of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, had called him and asked for help. “We’re going there in a couple of weeks,” Trump said.
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The president noted early on in the meeting that he would be announcing his selection for the next chair of the Federal Reserve early next year. He repeated that he talked to treasury secretary Scott Bessent about taking over the Fed but Bessent didn’t want the job.
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‘I don’t want them in our country’: Trump ends cabinet meeting with xenophobic rant on Somalis in US
As he ended a cabinet meeting that lasted for more than two hours, the president launched into a xenophobic rant against the Somali community in the US.
A reminder that he recently ended Temporary Protected Status from Somali nationals living in Minnesota, and has frequently disparaged Ilhan Omar – the Democratic representative who was born in Somalia but has been a US citizen since 2000, after arriving in the country as a refugee. He continued these kinds of vitriolic remarks today. Calling the Minnesota congresswoman “garbage”.
“I don’t want them in our country,” Trump said of Somali people living in the US. “Somebody said, ‘oh that’s not politically correct’, I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.”
As the president continued denigrating the Somali community, members of his cabinet appeared to bang the table in agreement. “These are people that do nothing but complain,” Trump said. “When they come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but bitch. We don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”
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‘Real trust funds for every American child’: Trump announces new investment accounts for children
The president announced the so-called “Trump accounts” program today. These are tax-deferred savings accounts for American children.
“Trump accounts will be the first, I guess, you could say, real trust funds for every American child,” the president said, adding that the federal government will also automatically be making a one time seed contribution of $1,000 into accounts for “every newborn US citizen”.
Earlier, I reported that billionaires Michael and Susan Dell are contributing about $6.25bn dollars to the program– amounting to $250 per account for children under 10 years old, who live in zip codes where the median household income is $150,000 or less.
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A reminder that this is the video of the first strike on 2 September that defense secretary Pete Hegseth posted to social media.
However, this footage doesn’t show the second strike (which reportedly killed two survivors) or has been cut to only show the first.
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‘We know the routes they take’: Trump threatens land strikes to combat drug cartels
During his cabinet meeting today, Donald Trump said that countries manufacturing and selling drugs to the US are “subject to attack”, adding that strikes wouldn’t be limited to Venezuela.
Trump also said that the administration is “going to start doing those strikes on land,” after defending his crackdown on alleged narcotics smugglers, which has largely been contained to the sea.
“You know, the land is much easier, much easier. And we know the routes they take. We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live, and we’re going to start that very soon too,” the president said. “When we start that, we’re going to drive those numbers down so low.”
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Updated at 15.11 EST
Hegseth says that he watched first strike but ‘didn’t stick around’ for the hours following, as he defends admiral’s decision to re-strike alleged drug trafficking boat
In today’s cabinet meeting, Pete Hegseth gave more details about the decision to re-strike an alleged drug trafficking boat off the coast of Venezuela on 2 September.
He said that he “watched that first strike” but ultimately did not “stick around for the hour or two hours” after.
“So I moved on to my next meeting,” the defense secretary said. “A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the [decision], which he had the complete authority to do.”
Hegseth went on to back Adm Frank Bradley’s call as he described the unfolding events to reporters. “[Bradley] sunk the boat, sunk the boat and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back, and the American people are safer, because Narco terrorists know you can’t bring drugs through the water and eventually on land,” Hegseth added.
His retelling today appears at odds with the version of events that he described to his former colleagues at Fox News, a day after the much-scrutinized second strike on 2 September. As my colleague, Robert Mackey, reported, on 3 September the defense secretary said that he watched the operation in real time.
“I can tell you that was definitely not artificial intelligence: I watched it live,” Hegseth said in an interview.
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Updated at 17.03 EST
Trump says Hegseth ‘didn’t know’ about ‘second attack having to do with two people’
Taking questions from reporters at his cabinet meeting today, Donald Trump defended his Pentagon chief about reports that Pete Hegseth ordered an US Navy admiral to re-strike an alleged drug boat with two survivors.
“Pete didn’t know about second attack having to do with two people,” Trump said. “I can say this. I want those boats taken out.”
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Rubio heaps praise on Trump’s foreign policy moves, says he is ‘only leader’ who can help end war in Ukraine
Rounding out comments today, secretary of state Marco Rubio said that Donald Trump is the “only leader in the world” that can help end the war in Ukraine as he praised the president’s foreign policy efforts.
“Even as we speak to you now, Steve Witkoff is in Moscow trying to find a way to end this war,” Rubio added, referring to the ongoing summit between Putin and the US delegation that’s been going on for more than two hours.
“More people are dying a week in that war than have died in the entirety of the US is involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq,” Rubio said.
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My colleague, Joseph Gedeon, reports that a DC national guard spokesperson confirmed that members supporting Donald Trump’s operation in the nation’s capital “have been armed with their assigned duty weapons since August 2025, in support of civil authorities and at the request of the lead federal agency”.
The spokesperson added that “every service member is trained and qualified on their assigned weapon in accordance with Department of War standards”.
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This is Trump’s ninth cabinet meeting since he returned to office earlier this year. It’s been going on for over an hour and a half. In many ways, it’s similar to roundtables past. Most cabinet secretaries and agency heads have heaped praise on the administration’s policies and thanked their colleagues.
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Updated at 13.34 EST
