Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the week. We will be back on Monday, once Donald Trump has concluded another long weekend of golfing. Here are the latest developments:
US stocks slumped as Donald Trump unveiled new import tariffs on dozens of trading partners and a surprisingly weak jobs report spooked investors.
Trump responded to new data showing that there were 258,000 fewer jobs created since May than previously estimated by firing the commissioner of the bureau of labor statistics, Erika McEntarfer. He then defended his decision by inventing an entirely false accusation that the fired economist had released false job numbers days before the 2024 election. The president repeated this lie several times.
Bill Beach, a former Heritage foundation economist who was picked by Trump in 2018 to oversee labor statistics, denounced what he called the “totally groundless firing” of his successor.
En route to his New Jersey golf club for the eighth time in six months, Trump cut off a reporter as soon as he said the words “Jeffrey Epstein” and moved away.
Those who have not seen it, and are interested in the questions surrounding the death in federal custody of Epstein, the late sex offender who socialized with Trump for more than a decade, should watch this CBS News visual analysis of the jailhouse video released by Trump’s justice department.
Updated
Asked why he took so long to bar Jeffrey Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, Trump cuts off reporter and moves away
En route to another long weekend of golf on Friday, Donald Trump cut off a reporter as soon as he said the words “Jeffrey Epstein” and moved away from him.
The interaction was captured on video streamed by the White House on YouTube, as Trump took questions from reporters gathered outside to watch him depart by helicopter.
“Why did it take seven years, seven years”, the reporter began, “from the time that you learned that people were being stolen from Mar-a-Lago to the time that you kicked, that you took Jeffrey Epstein-”
“Yeah, I don’t understand your question,” Trump interjected as the reporter tried to finish asking it, saying “off the members”. The president by then had stepped away and called on a different reporter to ask him another question.
Although Trump has said on more than one occasion recently that he either could not hear or did not understand a question, he was surprisingly open to answering questions on his relationship with Epstein, the late sex offender, earlier in the week.
On a flight back to Washington on Tuesday, after a family trip to Scotland, where he opened a golf course that was to have been named for his late mother, but was instead dedicated to him, Trump even revealed, while standing next to two of his grandchildren, that Epstein “stole” a 16-year-old spa attendant, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, by hiring her away from Mar-Lago.
Court documents indicate that Giuffre was hired as Epstein’s personal masseuse by his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago spa in the summer of 2000. Giuffre, who died this year, alleged in court documents that she was first abused by Epstein and Maxwell together that year, and then “lent out to other powerful men”, including Prince Andrew.
Trump maintained on Tuesday that he banned Epstein from the club soon after that, when he learned that he had hired away Giuffre and another club employee.
But Sarah Blaskey, a Miami Herald investigative reporter, pointed out in her 2020 book on Mar-a-Lago that Epstein remained on the membership rolls of Mar-a-Lago until October 2007, more than a year after he had been arrested and charged with unlawful sex with a minor.
It was apparently this discrepancy in Trump’s timeline that the president was unwilling to discuss on Friday.
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