Trump announces rollback of methane regulations
Speaking in Lubbock, Texas on Tuesday, Donald Trump announced a rollback of federal rules issued by the Biden administration in 2023 to force oil and gas companies to cut their emissions of methane, a “super pollutant” gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
“Tonight, I’m officially terminating Biden’s expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers,” Trump said, lifting what he called “crippling regulations on methane that caused prices to skyrocket” for small oil and gas operators.
In a press release, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Lee Zeldin, priased what he called Trump’s move “to end the war on oil and natural gas” by revising oil and natural gas regulations under the Clean Air Act.
According to the EPA, the proposal is expected to save $45bn in costs to consumers and businesses, including small businesses operating marginal wells, and produce an estimated 210m additional barrels of oil and 1.41tn cubic feet of natural gas.
Key events
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Closing summary
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Democratic congressman demands to know if Trump administration helped Flávio Bolsonaro flee justice in Brazil
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Trump announces rollback of methane regulations
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Trump lies that gasoline prices are lower now than when Obama was president
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In Lubbock, Texas, Trump attacks Talarico for showing compassion for transgender children
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Apparently unaware of its origin, Trump once again uses the phrase ‘to the victor belong the spoils’ to claim Venezuela’s oil
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US will grant visas to defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro – report
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US Federal Election Commission’s website targeted by hackers – report
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In Texas, Trump repeats a stream of false claims and screens misleading edit of CNN polling data segment
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Trump flaunts Venezuelan oil shipments at campaign event in Corpus Christi, talks of making Venezuela ’51st state’
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Here’s where things stand this afternoon:
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In latest campaign attack, Vance connects Abdul El-Sayed to protests in Paris
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Trump administration boat strikes continue with attack in Eastern Pacific
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DoJ asks Washington state not to count ballots from possible noncitizens
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Trump’s cuts have exposed US to ‘cascade’ of El Niño dangers, experts warn
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Trump refers to oil tanker he’ll show off in Texas as a personal “gift” from Venezuela
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Trump says he’ll respect election results ‘if they’re honest’
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Trump-appointed CDC deputy director to resign after six months on the job
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Tom Phillips, chief justice of Texas supreme court, endorses James Talarico in Senate race
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Trump and Rubio descend on Texas to campaign for Paxton, and to tout Venezuelan oil
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US voters: tell us what issues will decide your vote in the midterm elections?
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Shadow from Trump’s Washington arch would land on Arlington Cemetery, Washington Post finds
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Strong early turnout in Israeli election, with Netanyahu’s political future in the balance
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‘I’m still innocent,’ says Comey as Trump calls him a ‘dirty cop’
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Faced with widespread voter discontent over the spike in oil prices since he attacked Iran, Donald Trump staged his rally in Corpus Christi, Texas on Tuesday alongside a vast oil tanker, the Angerona, which, the president said, had just arrived from Venezuela bearing a personal gift for him: a million barrels of oil.
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A senior State Department official told the Associated Press that the US will “will issue visas to Flávio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States.”
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In his remarks to supporters in Lubbock, Texas Trump attacked James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, for having shown compassion for transgender children who demonstrated for their rights at the Texas state capitol in 2023.
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Trump lied that “our gasoline prices are lower than when Barack Hussein Obama- our oil prices, gasoline, lower than they were with Obama”.
Democratic congressman demands to know if Trump administration helped Flávio Bolsonaro flee justice in Brazil
As we await confirmation of a BBC report that Flávio Bolsonaro, the far-right Brazilian senator who lost a presidential election on Sunday, has arrived in Florida, fleeing corruption investigations in Brazil, one Democratic lawmaker has rejected the idea of giving him asylum.
“Losing an election is not grounds for asylum,” congressman Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat posted. “Yet the Trump Administration is giving Flávio Bolsonaro safe haven in the United States. In Brazil, he is under investigation for alleged corruption, money laundering and currency evasion, and was ordered to surrender his passports. The Trump Administration owes Congress answers on its role helping Bolsonaro flee Brazil in contravention of Brazilian law.”
As the Brazilian journalist Octavio Guedes observed on Brazilian television on Tuesday, Bolsonaro “is not fleeing a dictatorship.”
“Flávio Bolsonaro is fleeing a country in which he ran for office freely—a country where his brother is a senator, another brother is a federal deputy, his party holds a majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, and his stepmother is a senator,” Guedes said.
“He is fleeing a country where 59 million people went to the polls and freely cast their votes for him. In short, he is fleeing a democracy. He is fleeing a reckoning with the justice system.”
Trump announces rollback of methane regulations
Speaking in Lubbock, Texas on Tuesday, Donald Trump announced a rollback of federal rules issued by the Biden administration in 2023 to force oil and gas companies to cut their emissions of methane, a “super pollutant” gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
“Tonight, I’m officially terminating Biden’s expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers,” Trump said, lifting what he called “crippling regulations on methane that caused prices to skyrocket” for small oil and gas operators.
In a press release, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Lee Zeldin, priased what he called Trump’s move “to end the war on oil and natural gas” by revising oil and natural gas regulations under the Clean Air Act.
According to the EPA, the proposal is expected to save $45bn in costs to consumers and businesses, including small businesses operating marginal wells, and produce an estimated 210m additional barrels of oil and 1.41tn cubic feet of natural gas.
Trump lies that gasoline prices are lower now than when Obama was president
Speaking in defense of his record as president in Lubbock, Texas on Tuesday, Donald Trump once again claimed that his war on Iran was necessary to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, despite a US intelligence finding that Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003.
The president then told a more blatant lie. “With all of this that we’re doing, our gasoline prices are lower than when Barack Hussein Obama- our oil prices, gasoline, lower than they were with Obama, and a guy named Crooked Joe Biden.”
In fact, the current national average for a gallon of regular gasoline in the US is now $4.27, up from $3.05 a year ago, before Trump started the war with Iran that has spiked fuel prices globally. A gallon of gasoline never rose above $4.17 during the Obama administration, and was under $2.50 for a quarter of his time in office, including his the last three years of his second term.
As Reuters reports, the price has now averaged $3.472 since Trump took office in January 2025, passing the $3.471-per-gallon average for Biden’s term, according to data from the AAA.
In Lubbock, Texas, Trump attacks Talarico for showing compassion for transgender children
In his remarks to supporters in Lubbock, Texas on Tuesday, Donald Trump attacked James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, for having shown compassion for transgender children who demonstrated for their rights at the Texas state capitol in 2023.
The president began by repeating a string of false claims about Talarico and then insisted, falsely, that the Democrat, who is Presbyterian seminarian, said that “God is transgender”.
In fact, as a selection of statements from Talarico that Trump played for his rally crowd showed, what the state lawmaker actually said, during an October 2021 debate on a Texas bill barring trans children from competing on school sports teams, was that “God is nonbinary”.
“The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis use two different Hebrew words to describe God – one is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity, the second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is non-binary,” Talarico said.
In Genesis 1:26 and 1:27, Talarico added, “God speaks of God’s self in the plural, saying ‘Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us’. That’s the infinite multitude of God, the masculine, the feminine and everything in between. Trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image, there’s nothing wrong with them nothing at all.”
Trump’s summary of those remarks was to claim this: “He actually said that if Jesus Christ himself came and visited the Texas legislature, Jesus would be promoting sex changes for little children.”
Trump also attacked Talarico for saying, “that he loves transgender children”.
This is a highly misleading reference to comments Talarico made on a podcast in 2023, when he told the host about how impressed he had been by a group of young trans activists and their parents who had come to the Texas legislature to protest a bill that would deny trans children life-saving health care. After they were removed from the gallery, Talarico said, “there was video of one of the law enforcement officers violently throwing down one of those trans activists outside the House chamber”.
At the end of the podcast, during a lightening round, when the host asked Talarico to name one thing he hates, he said: “I hate people who are not willing to change their mind”.
Asked then to name one thing that he loves, Talarico paused a moment and said: “Um, I love… and I just say this because it’s on my mind, the trans children who showed up yesterday at the state capitol to advocate for their humanity; they shouldn’t have to but it was an inspiration to watch.”
This is the statement that JD Vance, Trump’s vice-president, has used to suggest, mockingly, that Talarico’s internet search history must be obscene.
Apparently unaware of its origin, Trump once again uses the phrase ‘to the victor belong the spoils’ to claim Venezuela’s oil
Faced with widespread voter discontent over the spike in oil prices since he attacked Iran, Donald Trump staged his rally in Corpus Christi, Texas on Tuesday alongside a vast oil tanker, the Angerona, which, the president said, had just arrived from Venezuela bearing a personal gift for him: a million barrels of oil.
The president told reporters before the event that he intends to re-gift the oil, giving it to the people of the United States of America.
During his remarks, Trump pointed to the tanker, which can hold an estimated 800,000 barrels of oil, and said: “See that little ship out there? It’s got one million barrels of oil on it from Venezuela.”
“We’re celebrating the greatest oil victory in history,” Trump continued. “‘To the victor belong to spoils’, right?” he added, referring to a phrase he has used in the past to suggest the US has a rightful claim to Venezuela’s oil since US forces kidnapped its leader.
Trump first used the phrase in public during an April 2011 appearance on Fox News, when he told the host Bill O’Reilly that, if elected president, he would not withdraw US troops from Iraq but redeploy them to secure its oil fields.
“In the old days, when you had wars, you win, right? You win. ‘To the victor belong the spoils’. So when we go to Iraq, we spend $1.4 trillion so far and thousands of lives are lost … and we’re going to leave,” Trump said. “I like the old system better: You won a war, you stay there, and you keep the oil. And you know, then those people will not have died in vain.”
“You stay and protect the oil, and you take the oil and you take whatever is necessary for them and you take what’s necessary for us and we pay our self back $1.5 trillion or more,” Trump added.
Since the US military operation seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump has repeatedly used the same phrase to lay claim to the country’s oil, but the president appears to be unaware of its original meaning.
The phrase was first used in 1832 by New York senator William L. Marcy during a speech in defense of president Andrew Jackson’s right to reward his supporters with appointments to public office, arguing that “to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”
The phrase gave rise to describing the system of political patronage as “the spoils system”.
US will grant visas to defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro – report
A senior State Department official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the US will “will issue visas to Flávio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States.”
Bolsonaro, a rightwing Brazilian senator who lost a presidential election on Sunday to Brazil’s incumbent president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest for attempting a coup following his 2022 election loss to Lula.
As our colleagues Tiago Rogero and Tom Phillips report from Brazil:
A report by the news website Metrópoles, citing people close to the politician’s family, said he was en route to the US. The plane is in flight,” Metrópoles reported, without making clear where it had departed from.
Bolsonaro allies told Metrópoles that he would land in Florida on Tuesday afternoon and planned to request political asylum. “The Donald Trump administration has been informed,” the website added.
Allies also confirmed to the Folha de S Paulo newspaper that he was on his way to the US, and said the escape plan had been “organized and enabled by a lawyer close to the Bolsonaro clan”.
“They say the flight should land in a few hours,” the newspaper added.
The younger Bolsonaro, who had Donald Trump’s tacit support, had been under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in Brazil and had been ordered to surrender his passport.
Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who lives in Texas, had publicly encouraged him to leave Brazil if he lost the election.
Eduardo Bolsonaro was convicted in absentia in June of illegally lobbying the Trump administration and sentenced to four years in prison. A warrant was recently issued for his arrest.
Standing before a birthday cake on the day he turned 81, Lula called it “shameful” that his rival had fled the country.
‘This is what the Bolsonaro family is like,” the president said. “Brazil is their second country, the US is their first.”
US Federal Election Commission’s website targeted by hackers – report
Reuters reports that the US Federal Election Commission’s website has been targeted by a hacker or hackers, disrupting the agency’s electronic filings system to disclose campaign spending a week before the midterm elections.
In a statement to the news agency, the FEC said, “at this time, the FEC’s electronic filing system is currently offline and our IT staff are actively working to restore service.” The FEC, which tracks the spending of candidates and political committees, said users could still search the website for past reports. It declined further comment on the outage.
The FEC does not play a role in administering US elections and the outage should have no effect on voters’ ability to cast ballots, although it will keep information on how much political groups are spending on specific races from the public as they cast ballots.
“We have a bad actor attempting to breach FEC systems. As a result, we’ve had to temporarily shut down our web facing services,” an FEC electronic filings officer said in an email seen by Reuters.
In Texas, Trump repeats a stream of false claims and screens misleading edit of CNN polling data segment
Near the end of his speech to a Republican campaign rally in Corpus Christi, Texas, Donald Trump just screened two short clips, edited from longer CNN segments first broadcast in August and September, highlighting polling data that flatters him.
As we have reported previously, screening these brief clips has become a routine part of Trump’s argument as he tries to convince supporters, and perhaps himself, that he is far more popular than other polling suggests.
The clips, however, were created by editing out negative information the president does not want his supporters to hear.
The first clip is 43 seconds of CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, showing viewers in September that Trump remains very popular with self-described “Maga Republicans,” which is to say people who describe themselves as loyal to his Make America Great Again movement.
“Maga GOP on Trump. In the 2024 election versus Kamala Harris, he got 99% of the Maga GOP vote—perhaps surprisingly, I might have thought it’d be 100%, but it was 99% percent,” Enten said in the first part of the clip. “Compare that to his approval rating now with the Maga GOP. It’s 98%; that is, there’s been no real decline in Maga support.”
“Look, now in terms of the congressional vote, 98% of them say they’re going to be voting for House Republican candidates,” Enten added. “So, that support is actually really holding up strong. It’s really, really strong when it comes to Maga GOP and Republicans holding on to that vote.”
However, a look at the full 14-minute segment broadcast in late September shows that what the White House edited out was Enten carefully explaining that Trump’s approval rating among Republicans who do not describe themselves as Maga loyalists had suffered a sharp drop, plunging from +56 points in the 2024 election to just +7 points in September 2026.
“You know, when it comes to non-Maga, this is where we’ve absolutely seen Donald Trump’s numbers plummet into the ocean,” Enten said, in a part of the report Trump did not screen at the rally.
The president also screened for his supporters a portion of a prior CNN segment, from August of this year, in which Enten showed viewers that according to polling conducted in May, Trump was, at that time, called the president Republicans most admire by 53% of Republicans, ahead of Ronald Reagan at 18% and Abraham Lincoln at 8%.
Trump is so fond of these two cherry-picked pieces of data, from months ago, that he included both in his 1,300-word social-media tirade against the comedian Bill Maher on Sunday.
Trump cited the data as supposed proof that Maher was wrong to say that the president is unpopular. “I have High Ratings and, more importantly, he said that I’m losing the support and approval of the Republican Party when, in fact, CNN just came out with a Poll showing that I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” Trump wrote.
Given that the president has repeatedly screened the clip of Enten clearly saying these were his ratings with Maga Republicans, not the party as a whole, this is not the evidence that he seems to think it is.
Addressing the crowd in Corpus Christi, Trump said that he was expecting the price of oil to spike even higher than it has when he launched the war in Iran – and he was still willing to go ahead with it.
“I knew that oil would go up,” Trump told the crowd in Corpus Christi. “I actually thought it would go up two or three time higher, and I was still willing to do it.”
The stark rise in gas and diesel prices, a product of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the war’s opening days, has been a major source of grievance against Republicans going into the 2024 midterms.
During his address, Trump stated, as he has before, that gas prices were set to drop imminently, and that he views the temporary economic strain facing Americans as a worthwhile sacrifice to dismantle Iran’s military and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapons. A lasting deal to end the war and realize either of those goals long-term has, so far, remained elusive through months of fighting.
Trump flaunts Venezuelan oil shipments at campaign event in Corpus Christi, talks of making Venezuela ’51st state’
Trump has taken the stage in Corpus Christi, Texas, the first of two campaign events in the state he’ll be speaking at today.
He started off by gesturing to an oil tanker docked just outside the campaign event, filled, he said, with Venezuelan crude – a product of the deal his administration inked with Venezuela’s new, US-pliant leadership.
“The oil in the ships outside is being provided to the United States at zero cost to the American taxpayer,” Trump said.
US forces launched a surprise incursion into Venezuela to seize its former leader, Nicólas Maduro, in January, dragging him to the US to face criminal charges. Since his ouster, his former Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, ruling with the Trump administration’s blessing, has agreed to deals that would funnel vast shares of the nation’s oil wealth to US coffers.
Trump spoke of his relationship with Venezuela in unsparing terms, as a conqueror extracting resources from a defeated nation.
He described the oil as being the byproduct of “our big victory in our recent war with Venezuela,” and repeated a phrase he used while addressing the United Nations last month about his toppling of Maduro: “To the victor belong the spoils.”
Trump continued: “We’re bringing out a lot of oil for ourselves, a lot.”
He went on to say, repeatedly, that the US should make Venezuela the 51st US state.
“It will become a prosperous country, and who knows, maybe someday soon it will become a prosperous 51st state. That’s possible. Let’s make it the 51st state, and instead of a president, we’ll have an election for a governor.”
Trump’s remarks about Venezuela’s oil shipments come against the backdrop of surging oil prices downstream of the war in Iran. At several point in his remarks, Trump has vowed that gas prices are set to drop precipitously any day now.
Here’s where things stand this afternoon:
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Trump is campaigning in Texas alongside Marco Rubio and a tanker of Venezuelan oil. The President is making two stops in Texas, one in Corpus Christi and another in Lubbock, to try and rally voters behind Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. Paxton is fending off a stiff challenge from Democrat James Talarico, which risks putting one of the state’s Senate seats back in Democrat hands for the first time in decades.
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Vance attacked Abdul El-Sayed at a campaign rally in Michigan. While Trump was in Texas, his vice president returned to Michigan to stump for Republican Mike Rogers, and to bash his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed. Vance, who has traded words for months with El-Sayed online and at campaign rallies, connected the progressive candidate to recent mass protests in Paris, accusing El-Sayed of endorsing similar unrest in the United States.
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US Senator Chris Murphy condemned Republican attacks on Muslim Americans. Murphy, responding to a clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissing Arab contributions to art and science, said that remarks like those served to “delegimatize Muslim Americans – not just as citizens but as humans.” He continued: “these increasingly hysterical attacks are a prelude to Republicans bringing us to a very, very dark place after the election.”
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Trump said he would accept the midterm election results “if they’re honest.” The remark, given to reporters en route to Texas, seemed to allude to the possibility Trump might deem results of the midterms fraudulent if they aren’t in his favor. But he also said he saw a path to working with a Democratic majority in Congress, if Republicans were to lose control of the legislative branch in November.
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Voters in Israel are turning out for an election that will decide whether Benjamin Netanyahu will remain in charge of the country. Netanyahu is facing his first serious election test since the October 7 attacks and the start of the wars in Gaza and Iran. The results of that election will shape who, exactly, the Trump administration will be working with as it seeks to settle those conflicts.
