Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here’s the latest:
Amid questions about whether or not Cole Allen, who is accused of trying to storm the White House Correspondent’s dinner on Saturday to kill Donald Trump, fired his weapon before being subdued, the top federal prosecutor in Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro released edited security-camera video of the incident. While the video does show four muzzles flashes from the agent’s gun as he fired at Allen, it was not immediately clear that it does show Allen discharging his weapon after he pointed it at the agent.
Sean Curran, the director of the US Secret Service, told Pirro’s former employer, Fox News that Allen was stopped not by secret service gunfire, but by a box used to transport a metal detector, which he tripped over.
The US Congress has passed a 45-day extension of a law that grants US intelligence agencies warrantless spying powers.
US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to put a positive spin on the ongoing US war on Iran was immediately challenged, first by the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, senator Jack Reed, who lambasted his “dangerously exaggerated” claims, and then by a protester who shouted, “you’re a war criminal!”
Maga White House correspondents gush over Trump's new black granite walkway he claims will last for a million years
The impact of the Trump White House seizing control last year over which news outlets are allowed to cover his Oval Office open-mic sessions was on full display Thursday, when the president responded to a rightwing correspondent’s praise for the new black granite walkway he installed in the colonnade outside by stopping the press pack from leaving, so he could deliver a hymn of praise to his own design sense.
As the president wrapped up the event, after boasting about the strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility he ordered last year, Sarah Roderick-Fitch of the rightwing Center Square told him, “the tile looks beautiful, Mr President; the tile looks gorgeous.”
Trump immediately held up his hands to ask the rest of the reporters and Republican lawmakers in the room: “How do you like the new floor?”
He then launched into a lengthy monologue on his skills as a master builder.
“What I do best is build. That’s what I do best. I think, I say to people, ‘Am I a better builder or politician?’ And most of them say, ‘Politician’, but that’s okay. What I do best is I build. The ballroom will be just like that.
So I went out and I have a special black granite. Granite is the most powerful stone there is. Marble is much weaker than granite. I like marble more because marble can be more beautiful, but it’s a much weaker stone. When you look at gravesites and you look at a marble plaque a hundred years old, you’ll see oftentimes you can almost not read it. When you look at a granite plaque a hundred years old, it looks like it just got put there yesterday. You know that’s a test.
But we have the finest granite anyone’s ever seen. It’s called flawless granite. There’s very little of it, and I replaced broken slate that was put here many years ago. I saved the ramp because it’s in honor of FDR. FDR, right out there. He had that built as a ramp. They said, ‘Oh, sir, we’ll straighten it.’ I said, ‘No, you have to leave the ramp.’ It was built, that ramp was built for FDR with the wheelchair, because you know it’s not, it’s a pretty good slope. A lot of people say, ‘Why is it a ramp?’ I say, ‘because of FDR.’ They say, ‘Ah, I get it.’ But we saved that.
But we replaced the broken slate. And it’s slate, by the way, is meant for a roof, it’s not meant for a sidewalk. And we replaced it with granite, the highest grade granite, it’s valued at, you know, they value stones in terms of, that’s valued at 1 million plus. That means 1 million plus years. A marble will oftentimes be valued at 200 years, 300 years. This gives you a little lesson in stones. Somebody will say he went off on a tangent.”
The president then instructed his aides to have the reporters, many of whom were from partisan, pro-Trump outlets, leave through the colonnade outside, so they could see the granite.
That led to the spectacle of many of them filming themselves gushing over the granite, and repeating Trump’s claim that it was expected to last over a million years and he had not even walked on it yet.
“It’s rated to a million years” Peter Doocy of Fox News told his social media followers.
In the background, Brian Glenn, of the even more pro-Trump Real America’s Voice, could be heard shouting into his own phone that he had been granted “an exclusive look at this special flooring, this granite flooring that has a million year rating.”
Behind them, Roderick-Fitch, recorded her own gushing appraisal of the granite. “Wow!” she said. “We are the first to walk on this! This is historical!”
Daniel Baldwin of the fringe, far-right cable outlet One American News recorded his own inspection of the colonnade flooring, passing Glenn as the Maga correspondent told his social media followers: “we’re finding out that the president has not even walked on this floor yet!”
In fact, granite paving stones are expected to last more than 100 years, and, earlier on Thursday, Trump was photographed walking along the new granite floor of the colonnade to the Oval Office with an aide who was indicted along with him in the classified documents case that was dropped once he won reelection.
