Closing summary
Our live coverage of Donald Trump’s second presidency is wrapping up. We’ll be back on Wednesday. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump has ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. The move comes amid an escalating campaign by the Trump administration against Maduro that has included a ramped-up military presence in the region and more than two dozen military strikes on vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea near Venezuela, which have killed dozens of people. Here’s more.
Trump signed a proclamation that further restricts and limits the entry of foreign nationals to the United States, the White House said. The US has imposed full restrictions and entry limitations on nationals from five countries – Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, and Syria – in addition to the initial list of 12 countries. Full restrictions have also been imposed on individuals holding Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents, the White House said. More here.
Trump believes “there’s nothing he can’t do, nothing, zero” as US president, the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said in a rare interview that shines an unvarnished spotlight on his second administration. Speaking to Vanity Fair, Wiles described Trump – who is teetotal – as having “an alcoholic’s personality”, an insight she ascribed to her relationship with her late father, the broadcaster and NFL star Pat Summerall, who had alcoholism. “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities,” Wiles said in a series of 11 interviews she gave to the author Chris Whipple. The Guardian’s Robert Tait brings us the full story.
The BBC is preparing to argue Trump’s $10bn court case against it should be dismissed, arguing it has no case to answer over the US president’s claims he was defamed by an episode of Panorama. The development comes after Trump filed a 33-page complaint to a Florida court on Monday, accusing the broadcaster of “a false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory and malicious depiction” of the president in the documentary. More here.
The Pentagon will not make public the full video of a September attack in the Caribbean that killed two individuals as they were clinging to the wreckage of a burning boat, Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday. The strike has been the most controversial development in Trump’s campaign against Venezuela, which has seen US forces blow up vessels alleged to be transporting narcotics from the South American country to the United States, seize an oil tanker and threaten further military action against the president, Nicolás Maduro. Legal experts have raised concerns that US forces may have committed a war crime by killing the survivors of an initial air strike on 2 September, and that the campaign is illegal. More here.
US congresswoman Ilhan Omar has warned that Trump’s repeated personal attacks and dehumanising rhetoric are fuelling a climate of political violence that could have dangerous consequences. Speaking days after the president called for her to be thrown out of the country, Omar said Trump’s incendiary language reaches “the worst humans possible” and encourages them to act. Here’s the full story by David Smith.
Venezuela’s government said it rejected Trump’s “grotesque threat,” responding to the US president's order to impose a blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, Reuters reports.
Texas congressman Joaquin Castro, a Democrat, called the blockade “unquestionably an act of war.”
“A war that the Congress never authorized and the American people do not want,” Castro said on the social media platform X.
