Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here’s the latest:
The Department of Justice announced an internal audit of its compliance with a law mandating the release files from the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender who socialized with Donald Trump for nearly two decades.
The Trump administration has moved to reclassify marijuana, more than four months after Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to move it from schedule I to schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act.
Trump, apparently abandoning his attempt to frighten Iran’s leaders into negotiating by channeling Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory, ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in his conflict with Iran.
Trump has decided to invite wanted war criminal Vladimir Putin to the G-20 summit in December at Trump’s Doral golf resort, the Washington Post reports.
Trump confirmed that the government is considering a plan to bail out or ‘“just buy” Spirit Airlines, but confused Barack Obama with Joe Biden, and Jet Blue with People Express, which has been defunct since 1987.
India’s foreign ministry denounced comments from the rightwing US commentator Michael Savage, posted on social media by Trump, which argued against awarding birthright citizenship to the US-born children of immigrants “from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet”.
Updated
Backlash in India to Trump amplifying screed against birthright citizenship that calls country a 'hellhole'
On Thursday, India’s foreign ministry denounced comments from the rightwing US commentator Michael Savage, posted on social media by Donald Trump, which argued against awarding birthright citizenship to the US-born children of immigrants “from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet”.
Trump also shared video of the monologue from Savage.
India’s foreign ministry spokesman, Randhir Jaiswal, called the Savage remarks Trump promoted, “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste”.
By endorsing Savage’s diatribe against the American-born children of Chinese or Indian immigrants, whom he claimed are “coming here by airplane in the ninth month of their pregnancy” and have “almost no loyalty to this country”, Trump appears to have ignored the claim to citizenship of several people close to him.
Trump’s father, for instance, was born to a non-citizen immigrant mother who arrived in New York five months pregnant only because her husband was denied permission to resettle in Bavaria, as she wished, because he was accused of dodging military service and the family was ordered deported.
Trump’s mother, an immigrant from Scotland, was also not yet a citizen when she gave birth in the US to his two older siblings.
More recently, the current second lady of the United States, Usha Vance, was born to Indian immigrant parents in San Diego, making her a citizen under the 14th Amendment to the US constitution, which Trump has challenged through an executive order currently before the US supreme court.
Although Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, argued before the court that the order would not be applied retroactively, if it was to be upheld by the court (as seems unlikely), the citizenship of children born to non-citizen parents, even those on visas that give them a legal right to live in the US, could be cast into doubt.
A strict application of that order to repeal birthright citizenship could potentially be used to strip citizenship from not just the vice-president’s wife but also Trump’s 2024 rival, Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland to parents on student visas.
