Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration, but just for the day. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump nominated Erica Schwartz, former deputy surgeon general during his first administration, to lead the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Schwartz was under immediate pressure from critics of the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to oppose his anti-vaccine ideology. At a heated oversight hearing, House Democrats grilled Kennedy over his vaccine rollbacks.
Speaking in Las Vegas, Trump told supporters “the war in Iran is going along swimmingly, we can do whatever we want.” He did not explain why, then, the US military has been unable to stop Iran from closing the strait of Hormuz.
The US Department of Justice opened an investigation into Eric Swalwell following his resignation from Congress, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Police in Illinois responded Wednesday evening to the home of Pope Leo’s brother, John Prevost, after a bomb threat was made, NBC Chicago reported.
Trump calls it an early night in Las Vegas, after repeating familiar litany of false claims
Donald Trump just wrapped up a relatively brief, for him, 45-minute event in Las Vegas to celebrate what he terms the great success of his “no tax on tips” policy, which is actually just a temporary deduction of up to $25,000 in tips for eligible workers annually, which expires in two years.
Before he was done, however, the nearly 80-year-old president regaled the small crowd of supporters with a number of lies he tells at event after event.
In a rambling monologue at one stage, for instance, the president falsely claimed that the king of Saudi Arabia had told him last year the US was “dead” during the Biden administration and insisted that 25 million migrants had entered the US illegally during the four years between 2021 and 2025.
“The King of Saudi Arabia,” Trump began, in a story he has told again and again and again over the past year, “he said to me, a year and half ago, I was with him, he said, ‘You know, two year ago, you were a dead country’”.
In fact, during Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia 11 months ago, he did not meet the Saudi king, who is elderly and in poor health, but was hosted instead by the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
What’s more, it appears that Trump has misremembered something he said to the crown prince for something the crown prince said to him during his visit to the Saudi kingdom.
During a speech to a US-Saudi investment forum on Riyadh on 13 May 2025, Trump said: “the days of economic misery under the last administration are rapidly giving way to the greatest economy in the history of the world. We are rocking. The United States is the hottest country, with the exception of your country, I have to say, right? I’m not going to take that on. No Mohammed, I’m not going to take that on… You’re hotter. At least as long as I’m up here, you’re hotter. But groceries, gasoline, energy and all other prices are down with no inflation.”
But in the ensuing months, Trump has claimed, at event after event, that it was “the king of Saudi Arabia” who used this very Trumpian expression, that the US is “the hottest country”.
In his remarks on Thursday, Trump slid directly from what he described as the Saudi royal’s remarks into how own attack on his predecessor. “Everyone thought America was finished, we were a laughing stock, with a president that couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs, he was, no, he was so horrible, think, I mean it’s not even funny, it was horrible,” Trump said.
“But the king said, you know, ‘Two years ago, you were a dead country, and now you’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.’”
In the same monologue, Trump also claimed, falsely, that Biden “allowed 25 million people into the country, totally unvetted and unchecked… we’re still getting them out.” Among those migrants, Trump claimed, there were “11,888 murderers… let into our country”.
As the CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has reported, Trump’s figure is a vast exaggeration he has made repeatedly to cast the crackdown on undocumented migrants as vital to stopping crime. “Through December 2024, the last full month under the Biden administration,” Dale explained on Wednesday, after Trump used this imaginary figure in a Fox Business interview, “the federal government had recorded under 11 million nationwide ‘encounters’ with migrants during that administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in the so-called “gotaways” who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million”.
The figure 11,888 is also a lie, since that number refers to non-citizens who entered the US over several decades, including during the first Trump’s first administration, “not just under Biden,” and later committed murders, which they were jailed for.
