‘We’ll probably have a shutdown,’ Trump says in Oval Office press conference
Donald Trump has just said that the government will “probably” shut down, while addressing reporters in the Oval Office.
“They want to give Cadillac Medicare to illegal aliens … at the cost to everyone else,” the president said. This is a false claim that Trump and congressional Republicans have repeated since lawmakers have failed to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. A reminder, this lapses tonight.
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in subsidized programs like Medicaid, Medicare or the Affordable Care Act.
Key events
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Federal judge says that Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian activists violates the First Amendment
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‘We’ll probably have a shutdown,’ Trump says in Oval Office press conference
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Democrats call out Republicans for postponing votes on Capitol Hill
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Trump announces agreement with Pfizer to lower medication prices
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What was in Trump and Hegseth’s astonishing speeches to US top military brass?
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Major reforms to military acquisitions and sales are coming, Trump says
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Trump suggets ‘dangerous cities’ should be used ‘as training grounds’ for the military and national guard
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Trump says ‘straightening out’ US cities will be ‘a major part for some of the people in this room’
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Trump tells military generals ‘we’re under invasion from within’
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Trump says he wants to get Putin and Zelenskyy together
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Trump says Hamas ‘has to agree’ to US proposal for Gaza, adding ‘if they don’t it’s going to be very tough on them’
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Trump says he’s never seen ‘a room so silent before’ as he address top military brass
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Hegseth tells generals if they do not agree with him, ‘do the honorable thing and resign’
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Hegseth says that if new military standards prevent women from serving in combat, ‘it is what it is’
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Pentagon will review its definitions of ‘toxic leadership’, ‘bullying’ and ‘hazing’, says Hegseth
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‘No more beardos,’ Hegseth tells military leaders they must look professional
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‘Fat troops are tiring to look at’: Hegseth orders top officers to focus on fitness
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Combat troops will have to meet ‘highest male standard’, Hegseth says
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‘We are done with that shit’: Hegseth says military is done with diversity efforts in extraordinary speech to generals
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‘You might say, we’re ending the war on warriors,’ says Pete Hegseth in speech to military leaders
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Trump and Hegseth to address unprecedented gathering of military leaders
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Trump gutting protected status for immigrants will strain US healthcare, Democrats warn
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Donald Trump to preside over gathering of US military’s top commanders in Quantico, Virginia
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US justice department sues Minnesota over sanctuary city policies
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Pentagon review reportedly confirms Aukus submarines pact is safe
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US deports planeload of Iranians after deal with Tehran, New York Times says
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US government to shut down within hours if no funding deal agreed
Federal judge says that Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian activists violates the First Amendment
A federal district court judge in Massachussets today ruled that the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the First Amendment.
Judge William Young said that today’s ruling was to decide whether noncitizens lawfully present in the US “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us”.
“The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do.’ ‘No law’ means ‘no law’,” he said.
The lawsuit, brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University after activist Mahmoud Khalil’s was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in March, alleged the Trump administration was conducting an “ideological deportation” that was unconstitutional. It resulted in a nine-day trial in July.
Richard Luscombe
Coming soon to Miami: the Donald J Trump presidential library.
Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and his cabinet voted Tuesday morning to hand over a lucrative parcel of land for the venture, the first formal step towards a building intended to honor the legacy of the 45th and 47th president.
The unanimous vote by DeSantis and three loyalists, including the unelected Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, conveys almost three acres of prime real estate in the shadow of the Miami Freedom Tower, the iconic and recently reopened “beacon of freedom” that saw tens of thousands of Cubans enter the US during its time as an immigration processing center.
On Monday, protestors at the site, currently a parking lot for Miami Dade College’s downtown campus, highlighted the juxtaposition with a building celebrating a president who has implemented the biggest crackdown on immigration in the nation’s history.
“I look forward to the patriotic stories the Trump Library Foundation will showcase for generations to come in the Free State of Florida,” Uthmeier said in a statement following the vote.
Eric Trump, the president’s son, celebrated the news in a post to X. “It will be the greatest Presidential Library ever built, honoring the greatest President our Nation has ever known,” he wrote.
Critics of the venture note that college trustees voted a week ago to transfer ownership of the land, estimated to be worth $67m, to the state without knowing what DeSantis intended to do with it.
On CNN today, Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, said that “sometimes you’ve got to stand and fight” in regard to the looming shutdown.
“A fight to protect Americans who can’t afford their healthcare, is a fight worth having,” she added.
The president said that he didn’t see Democrats “bend” at all when they discussed healthcare provisions in his meeting on Monday. He spoke with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.
But when asked to clarify what he means when he talks about Democrats fighting for undocumented immigrants’ access to federal healthcare programs, when they aren’t eligible to access them, Trump didn’t answer the question.
Instead he listed off, what he described as, several achievements by the administration to curb illegal migration.
‘We’ll probably have a shutdown,’ Trump says in Oval Office press conference
Donald Trump has just said that the government will “probably” shut down, while addressing reporters in the Oval Office.
“They want to give Cadillac Medicare to illegal aliens … at the cost to everyone else,” the president said. This is a false claim that Trump and congressional Republicans have repeated since lawmakers have failed to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. A reminder, this lapses tonight.
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in subsidized programs like Medicaid, Medicare or the Affordable Care Act.
In the Oval Office, Trump just said that today’s announcement with Pfizer is “one of the biggest news conferences from a medical standpoint, that I think has ever been had by any administration”.
He also noted that he discussed these lower costs with congressional Democratic leadership at the White House yesterday.
“You know, the cost of prescription medicine is a big, I guess, a very big, more than 50% the cost of what we’re talking about. So we might be able to do something like that,” the president said.
Democrats call out Republicans for postponing votes on Capitol Hill
As the government hurtles toward a shutdown, Democrats have called out Republican House leadership for cancelling votes that were scheduled for Monday and today – following last week’s congressional recess.
Lawmakers in the lower chamber were initially meant to return to work this week, but speaker Mike Johnson has pushed their return in order to jam Democrats from negotiating further, blaming them for failing to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded until 21 November.
Today, on the House floor, we’ve seen Democrats decry their colleagues across the aisle. “Shame on you,” they said, as they were gaveled out of their procedural session.
The Senate is back today, and will vote on two resolutions – both which previously failed. Earlier, the upper chamber’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said that Republicans were shirking responsibility and lying about their claims that Democrats are attempting to shutdown the government to provide healthcare for undocumented immigrants.
“That is utter bull and they know it,” the senator from New York said. “The law prohibits undocumented immigrants from getting payments from medicare, medicaid or the ACA. There is no money, not a penny of federal dollars that is going there. So why do they bring this up? Because they are afraid to talk about the real issue which is healthcare for the American citizens.”
Trump announces agreement with Pfizer to lower medication prices
Donald Trump has just announced that his administration has struck a deal with pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, to sell its medications for less.
“All new medications introduced by Pfizer to the American market will be sold at the reduced, most favored nation cost,” the president said. That means the US will pay a price tag no greater than other foreign countries.
Pfizer will also guarantee these prices for drugs covered by Medicaid and Medicare, according to Trump.
“I can’t tell you how big this is,” the president said today. “By taking this bold step we’re ending the year of global price gouging at the expense of American families.”
And just like that, Donald Trump is speaking again! This time from the Oval Office and he’s making an announcement on medicine costs. I’ll bring you more on that shortly.
What was in Trump and Hegseth’s astonishing speeches to US top military brass?
Here’s a roundup of what was in those astonishing speeches we just heard delivered to a mostly silent audience of top US military leaders by Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump.
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The defense secretary announced that the military will require combatants to meet the “highest male standard” in physical fitness tests. He acknowledged that this may exclude some women from serving. “Standards must be uniform, gender neutral, and high,” he said, and if that meant some women didn’t qualify, “it is what it is.”
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He ordered officers to focus on physical appearance and fitness, attacking what he called the “tiring” sight of “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals”. “It’s a bad look,” he said, adding that he was upping physical fitness testing to twice a year.
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He also said this was an end to the “era of unprofessional appearances” and announced that officers could no longer have beards.
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Hegseth vowed an end to diversity efforts and wanting to usher in a change to the “politically correct” culture of the military – which had made the Department of Defense (DOD) “the woke department” – and have a greater focus on “warrior ethos”. “We’re ending the war on warriors,” he said.
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Rallying against “woke”, he said they were “fixing decades of decay” by doing away with DEI programs, and ending the promotion of a “risk-averse” officer corps. He said troops had been distracted by political correctness, racial quotas, climate change, “gender delusions”, “woke garbage” and fears of being labeled as “toxic” leaders.
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He said the department would review its definitions of “toxic”, “bullying” and “hazing” “to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing”. “The era of politically correct, overly sensitive, don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings leadership ends right now,” the defense secretary said.
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He announced wider departmental changes including ending anonymous complaints procedures. He said the DOD’s Inspector General’s Office (which is investigating him over Signalgate) would be “overhauled” as it had created a culture of “walking on eggshells” and had been “weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver’s seat”. “No more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations, no more endless waiting, no more legal limbo, no more sidetracking careers, no more walking on eggshells,” he said.
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He justified his previous firing of senior commanders, saying that he went with “his gut” and got rid of those he believed wouldn’t shift away from policies set in previous administrations. He ominously added that he was certain more leadership changes would be made.
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He told leadership that if the new standards he has unveiled makes their “hearts sink” then they should “do the honorable thing and resign”.
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In an at times free-wheeling speech, Donald Trump commented on the remarkable silence in the room before picking up on a number of these points, saying: “We went through political correct where you had to have people who were totally unfit to be doing what you’re doing,” he said. “Now it’s all based on merit.”
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Trump told his top military leadership that the US faced “a war from within”. Repeating his criticisms of Democrat-led US cities, claiming “they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one”, he added that “this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room”.
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He said so-called “dangerous cities” should be used as “training grounds” for military troops and the national guard. He suggested they were “going into Chicago very soon” and said Portland, Oregon “looks like a war zone” [residents have said this is “entirely divorced from reality”].
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He said that Hegseth will soon announce “major reforms to streamline military acquisitions and expedite foreign military sales”, as many countries want to buy US military equipment but it needs to be made faster.
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Trump also said he’s contemplating making the military “larger” and his administration plans to make “more historic announcements” in the coming months to “fully embrace the identity of the Department of War”.
Well that was a lot. Stay tuned, I’ll post a summary of what we’ve just heard shortly.
He calls America “the most unstoppable force ever to walk the face of the Earth”.
He says his administration plans to make “more historic announcements” in the coming months to “fully embrace the identity of the Department of War”.
“I love the name. I think it’s so great. I think it stops wars,” Trump says. “The Department of War is going to stop wars.”
Trump says he’s debating making the military larger.
“We’re thinking about making it larger because we have so many people, and it’s nice to be able to cut people because of merit that aren’t really qualified for any reason, a physical reason, a mental reason, you don’t have to take them anymore, because you have, you have the pick of the litter, and they all want to be with you,” he says. “They all want your job. They want to be with you. They want to work with you. They’ll even take your job.”
Major reforms to military acquisitions and sales are coming, Trump says
Trump says Hegseth will soon announce “major reforms to streamline military acquisitions and expedite foreign military sales”.
“We have tremendous numbers of countries that want to buy our equipment, and you know, many cases, it takes too long. They’re backlogged,” Trump says.
He says that he told companies, “you better get your ass going,” because “we’re getting countries to buy your equipment”.
“We make the best equipment in the world, but they got to make it faster,” he adds.
