Speaking in Alaska, Donald Trump is once again airing a list of familiar boasts and grievances, many of which are based on claims that are entirely untrue.
Trump repeated his false claim that he had to start his war on Iran because, “they were two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon”.
In fact, two months into Trump’s second term, US intelligence agencies reported to Congress in 2025 that Iran had suspended its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003.
Despite that assessment, in the summer of 2025, Trump ordered the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities which he later claimed had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program.
Eight months later, in February 2026, Trump announced that a full-scale war on Iran was necessary to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
The president also claimed, as he has previously, that the media unfairly blamed him for high prices less than 24 hours into his second term.
“We had the worst, literally the worst inflation in history,” Trump said, incorrectly.
He then told an imaginary story he has repeated frequently in recent weeks.
“Then I came into office on January 20th,” Trump said. “And I had a news conference on January 21st, a day after, and they started screaming, ‘Affordability! What about affordability?’ I said, ‘I’ve only been here for one day.’ It’s not even a day, because it was a little less than the 24 hours. No, ‘I’ve only been here for a short period of time. What are you talking about?’ ‘Prices are high!’ they said.”
In fact, no such exchange took place at Trump’s first news conference with reporters on 21 January 2025 during which he announced AI infrastructure investments and was mainly pressed on the pardons he signed the day before for Capitol rioters convicted of violence against police officers on January 6 2021, in support of his attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election.
A review of transcripts reveals that the president was not confronted about persistent high prices for months after he took office.
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
In Alaska, Donald Trump repeated his false claim that he had to start his war on Iran because, “they were two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon”. In fact, US intelligence agencies reported to Congress in 2025 that Iran had suspended its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003. Despite that assessment, in the summer of 2025, Trump ordered the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities which he later claimed had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program. Eight months after that, he launched a full-scale war on Iran justified, he now says, by Iran being just weeks away from getting the bomb.
Aboard Air Force One on his way to Alaska for a campaign rally, the president of the United States posted video of a British man who was fatally mauled by a tiger last week on his social media platform with the mocking caption: “Don’t ever mess with nature!”
The new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, passed on an opportunity to set the record straight on whether she is licensed to practice law anywhere in the United States. Asked “Where did you pass the bar exam?” Zacharia just said: “I moved to China.”
Donald Trump has just wrapped up his campaign rally for Republican candidates in a Wasilla, Alaska sports center by promising to give voters cash payments and favors if his party wins.
In yet another remarkable breach of protocol, and likely the Hatch Act, a federal law that bars government officials from partisan campaigning, Trump invited his Federal Communications Chair, Brendan Carr, to the stage and promised that the FCC would vote “to invest an additional $162 million to expand high speed internet in Alaska.”
Then, Trump ended his speech with a more direct appeal.
“So in conclusion, if you elect a Republican House and a Republican Senate November 3rd, you get $5,000,” the president said.
Speaking in Wasilla on Tuesday, Donald Trump repeated his claim that South Korea has agreed to spend $50bn to build a liquefied natural gas pipeline in Alaska, just days after Alaska Public Media reported that Korean officials told state lawmakers in Anchorage that the country had not agreed to invest in the pipeline and would consider investing in the project if it’s commercially reasonable.
In an Oval Office announcement last month, Trump, flanked by senator Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican facing a tough re-election battle, said that South Korea had agreed to pay for an 807-mile (1,299km) pipeline to carry natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to a liquefaction facility on Alaska’s southern coast.
The Korean investment, Trump said, was part of a $200bn package of US projects that South Korea agreed to in 2025 as part of a trade deal in exchange for lower US tariffs on South Korean cars, auto parts and other products.
The next day, however, South Korean officials insisted that they did not “agree to a specific dollar figure—or even to invest at all.”
South Korea’s industry ministry said that the government had only agreed to “initiate a review” of the pipeline deal.
South Korea’s industry minister, Kim Jung-kwan, took issue with to Trump’s characterization of the country’s Alaska LNG investment. “Putting out figures, or using definitive language, goes far beyond what was agreed,” he said at a briefing for reporters.
In his remarks to supporters in Wasilla, Alaska, Donald Trump is boasting about his own record in office by repeating a large number of false claims.
Perhaps the most important lie is his imaginary claim that he has secured $21tn in foreign investment during his second term. As CNN has reported, the figure, which he keeps inflating, is fictional.
A detailed CNN review in October found the White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges, pledges that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the US, and vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges.
The White House figure includes pledges from US-based companies as well as foreign entities. Federal data published last month shows that new foreign direct investment in the US was about $232 billion in 2025.
Trump also claimed that “just recently I gave all members of our military $1,776,” which he called “a bonus”.
“We’re doing well, we’re kicking ass in Iran. And I said, ‘You know, let’s give them some money. What can we do?’”
In fact, the money was not a bonus to service members but a planned housing benefit included in previously appropriated congressional funding.
The president also told his admiring supporters another fictional tale that has become a fixture of his speeches, about how he Saudi king had praised him for almost instantly turning around the US economy during his visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2025.
“Less than two years ago- they would tell me, king of Saudi Arabia, many of the leaders, they’d say, ‘You know, just a short time ago, your country was dead. We never thought it had a chance.’ They never did. They disrespected us. They laughed at us. They don’t laugh anymore,” Trump said. “Now they said, ‘‘Sir, you’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.’ We’re the hottest country in the world.”
As the Guardian has reported previously, Trump did not meet the Saudi king, who is elderly and not often seen in public, during his visit last year. Instead, he was hosted by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. There is also no evidence that the Saudi prince made this statement to Trump, but there is video of Trump making a version of that claim to bin Salman during an address to a US-Saudi investment event in Riyadh on 13 May 2025.
“The days of economic misery under the last administration are rapidly giving way to the greatest economy in the history of the world,” Trump said before directly addressing the crown prince in the audience. “We are rocking. The United States is the hottest country, with the exception of your country, I have to say, right? … No Mohammed… You’re hotter. At least as long as I’m up here, you’re hotter. But groceries, gasoline, energy and all other prices are down with no inflation. We have no inflation.”
Two weeks after his return to the US, Trump began saying that this observation had been made not by him, but to him. “I went to Saudi Arabia,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on 28 May 2025. “The king told me, he said, ‘you got the hottest com-’ we have the hottest country in the world right now.,” Trump said. “Six months ago this country was stone cold dead. We had a dead country.”
As he repeated the story, again and again, Trump began to also attribute his own claim, that the US was “dead” under Joe Biden, to the Saudi king as well. In remarks at the Nato summit in the Hague in June 2025, Trump insisted that the Saudi king had told him: “A year ago, your country was dead. You had a deadhead running it. You had a country that was dead”.
Since then, Trump has repeated the tale dozens of times.
Speaking in Alaska, Donald Trump is once again airing a list of familiar boasts and grievances, many of which are based on claims that are entirely untrue.
Trump repeated his false claim that he had to start his war on Iran because, “they were two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon”.
In fact, two months into Trump’s second term, US intelligence agencies reported to Congress in 2025 that Iran had suspended its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003.
Despite that assessment, in the summer of 2025, Trump ordered the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities which he later claimed had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program.
Eight months later, in February 2026, Trump announced that a full-scale war on Iran was necessary to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
The president also claimed, as he has previously, that the media unfairly blamed him for high prices less than 24 hours into his second term.
“We had the worst, literally the worst inflation in history,” Trump said, incorrectly.
He then told an imaginary story he has repeated frequently in recent weeks.
“Then I came into office on January 20th,” Trump said. “And I had a news conference on January 21st, a day after, and they started screaming, ‘Affordability! What about affordability?’ I said, ‘I’ve only been here for one day.’ It’s not even a day, because it was a little less than the 24 hours. No, ‘I’ve only been here for a short period of time. What are you talking about?’ ‘Prices are high!’ they said.”
In fact, no such exchange took place at Trump’s first news conference with reporters on 21 January 2025 during which he announced AI infrastructure investments and was mainly pressed on the pardons he signed the day before for Capitol rioters convicted of violence against police officers on January 6 2021, in support of his attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election.
A review of transcripts reveals that the president was not confronted about persistent high prices for months after he took office.
Speaking in a sports center in Wasilla, Alaska that the town’s former mayor, Sarah Palin, helped build, Donald Trump just urged his supporters in Alaska to vote to repeal ranked-choice voting in a ballot initiative.
“All it is is a way to cheat,” the president claimed, without a shred of evidence. “You got some guys sitting behind the table, I guess, just picking a winner.”
“Any place you have ranked choice, you have damn bad cheating,” Trump said.
Donald Trump has just taken the stage at the 3,500-person capacity Curtis D. Menard Memorial sports center in Wasilla, Alaska.
Donald Trump is rethinking defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, after learning that the convicted attacker is paralyzed from the waist down, CNN reports.
The president “was not aware” that Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, planned to announce, in an interview with a far-right conspiracy theorist, that the firing squad execution would be livestreamed, sources told the broadcaster.
Hasan has been wheelchair-bound since he was shot by a police officer during the attack he carried out to avenge fellow Muslims killed by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to CNN’s reporting, the idea of killing a man in a wheelchair has “made showing the execution publicly less palatable to the president.”
Donald Trump arrived in Alaska a short time ago, and boarded a helicopter at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage about 30 minutes ago for the short flight to Wasilla, where he is now about 30 minutes late for a rally in support of Republican candidates, including senator Dan Sullivan, who is locked in a tight race with Democrat Mary Peltola.
The BBC is asking a federal judge in Florida to force Donald Trump to sit for a deposition as part of the president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster.
According to a Tuesday filing, the BBC and Trump’s legal team had agreed for him to be deposed on Friday. The BBC’s lawyers wrote to the judge that they have spent months trying to secure a location for the deposition from Trump’s team.
On 28 September, Trump’s lawyers told the BBC’s counsel that the president “is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance”.
While Trump’s lawyers said they would follow up quickly with a replacement date, they did not, ultimately suggesting that he would be available in the second or third week of January, well after the deadline to complete the discovery portion of the case. Lawyers for the BBC had pledged to keep the location of the deposition confidential.
As such, the BBC’s lawyers are now asking the judge to require Trump’s team to schedule the deposition.
“Plaintiff chose to file this lawsuit and, in doing so, he accepted the obligations of civil litigation,” the BBC’s motion reads. “The BBC therefore asks the Court to compel Plaintiff to confirm a date for his deposition, notify the BBC of a secure location where such deposition is possible and any other logistics required to ensure Plaintiff’s safety, and sit for the deposition, as the core rules of discovery require.”
Aboard Air Force One on his way to Alaska for a campaign rally, the president of the United States posted video of a British man who was fatally mauled by a tiger last week on his social media platform with the mocking caption: “Don’t ever mess with nature!”
The post was signed “President DJT”.
Trump post, with the 41-second clip of the man, identified as William Chapman, being attacked by the tiger inside its enclosure at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park on Saturday was later shared on an official White House social media account.
Witnesses said Chapman, who “suffered from significant mental illness” according to his family, had climbed into the enclosure on Saturday before being killed by the tiger.
“The family are utterly devastated by their loss and are struggling to come to terms with what has happened,” Chapman’s family said in a statement. “The publication and circulation of deeply offensive media content is causing them severe distress at an exceptionally vulnerable time. We ask people to stop doing this.”
Lisa Cook, the US Federal Reserve governor Donald Trump has been trying to fire with the persistence of a cartoon coyote, informed the White House on Tuesday that she would not attend a hearing scheduled for next month by a committee the president created to investigate her.
The US supreme court ruled in June that Trump could not fire Cook, who was appointed by Joe Biden, over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud put forward by Bill Pulte, a Republican political operative Trump put in charge of federal mortgage agencies.
In the letter to the White House seen by Reuters, Cook’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, questioned the objectivity of the presidential committee and said she would not be able to attend a hearing scheduled for 5 November because she would be in Europe “at financial and monetary policy meetings”, related to her work as a governor of the independent US central bank.
Lowell said the earliest that any hearing could take place was after the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting on 9 December.
As she left the White House on Tuesday to accompany Donald Trump to Alaska, the new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, passed on an opportunity to set the record straight on whether she is licensed to practice law anywhere in the United States.
When a reporter asked Trump how he thought Zacharia had done in her first press briefing, during which the self-described attorney delivered an impassioned defense of his record and took only three questions, all from partisan, rightwing outlets, the president replied: “I thought she was very good.”
The White House social media team quickly clipped that answer from the president and posted it online – but left out the rest of the exchange, which began with a reporter asking, “What state did she pass the bar exam in?”
When Trump looked puzzled and stepped closer to the reporter to hear him better over the din of a waiting helicopter, the reporter explained: “You said she’s an attorney. Where did she pass the bar exam? Which state?”
Trump turned to Zacharia and repeated the question: “Which state?”
She stepped forward and said: “I moved to China”.
Two reporters then repeated the question: “Where did you pass the bar exam?”
“I moved to China,” Zacharia repeated, possibly suggesting that when she took a job at a law firm in China in 2011, shortly after she graduated from the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, she did so instead of taking the bar exam.
On Friday morning, Judd Legum, an independent journalist and a former research director for Hillary Clinton with a law degree from Georgetown, reported that while the new press secretary has described herself as an attorney on cable news shows and podcasts, “there is no evidence that Zacharia ever passed a bar exam or has been admitted to practice law in any state.”
Hannah Brandt, a correspondent for the conservative outlet NewsNation, reported that Zacharia told her on Friday: “I practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials,” when she held what she called a position as “an associate” at the Zhong Lun Law Firm in Beijing, from 2011-2013.
En route to a political rally in Wasilla, Alaska – the town made famous by its former mayor, Sarah Palin – the president of the United States is passing his time posting disturbing video clips of people being mauled by lions, set to jaunty music, on his social media platform.
It is not clear why, but one of the taxpayer funded ads the Trump administration prepared for broadcast was reportedly titled King of the Jungle and compared Donald Trump to a lion and included section of Christopher Walken’s lion speech from the film, Poolhall Junkies. The same audio was used in a fan-made video comparing him to a lion that Trump shared on social media in late 2020, as he was fighting to have the results of the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden overturned.
A racist fan-made video Trump shared earlier this year, also titled King of the Jingle, depicted him as an animated lion and Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
And for a view from the briefing room – my colleague David Smith reports from the White House – on Zacharia’s 14-minute debut that was all “stilted delivery, nervous tics and lack of eye contact”.
Read more here:
While Katie Zacharia’s very short briefing was certainly a surprise for many in the press corps, the view – at least publicly – from White House officials is that the new press secretary met the moment.
“A tremendous start,” wrote White House communications director Steven Cheung. “She commanded the room and effectively reminded the American people of all the great work President Trump and his Administration has done thus far.”
Kimberly Guilfoyle, denied allegations of engaging in misconduct in a statement announcing her resignation as US ambassador to Greece. A reminder that Guilfoyle was under immense scrutiny to step down after the Wall Street Journal reported on a series of questionable acts prior to securing her role in Athens. These included an alleged threat to a host country official, accepting improper gifts and offering to wield influence inside the administration in return for the payment of a $100,000 credit card bill.
Earlier, at her first media briefing, new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia revealed that the administration had asked Guilfoyle to resign. Overall, Zacharia kept her briefing short, and only took five questions from three reporters – all from conservative outlets: Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail. She said that she would travel with the president for his upcoming allies in Alaska, Arizona and Montana, in the final three-week sprint until the midterm elections, and repeated many familiar talking points touting the administration’s self-proclaimed achievements. However, she was unable to answer whether the US had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine, after Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy feuded over the US president’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian diesel imports.
Donald Trump, however, took the question when he left for a campaign rally in Wasilla, Alaska later in the day. “We are helping them, and we are sharing intel. We want the war to end. So we’re working with them and with Russia on getting the war to end,” the president told reporters outside the White House.
Six Republican senators have also condemned the Trump administration’s deal to lift sanctions on Russia’s diesel exports in a new letter to the president alongside Democrats. The lawmakers write that the “deal is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies” and call for it to be “rescinded”. Four of the GOP senators – Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John Curtis – joined some of their Democratic colleagues on the foreign relations committee to decry the move over the weekend. All of them, as well as John Cornyn, the outgoing Republican senator from Texas, and Mitch McConnell, the GOP senator who only recently returned to Capitol Hill after a months-long absence and will also leave Congress at the end of his term, signed on to the letter.
Vice-president JD Vance also said today that he “did not have advance notice” that Ilhan Omar’s Washington home was being raided by federal agents. “We try to let the law follow the facts rather than creating facts just to prosecute people we don’t like. And because of that, I think the president and I largely try to stay out of Department of Justice investigations and other prosecutions,” Vance told reporters ahead of holding a rally in Tyler, Texas.
Federal judge Ana Reyes issued a temporary restraining order on Tuesday to pause tree-cutting at the East Potomac Golf Course until 26 October. The tree-felling comes as Trump has moved to turn the course into a world-class golf venue – part of his grand vision for Washington DC, since the beginning of his second presidency.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
