Closing summary
This brings our surreal-time coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day. We will be back soon, but in the meantime, here are the latest developments:
Hundreds of people were arrested in an immigration raid at a Hyundai battery factory in Georgia, most of them Korean nationals, despite the fact that a warrant said that just four people, with Spanish names, were targeted.
Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “Department of War”, as part of an attempt to formalize his rebranding effort without the legally required act of Congress.
Trump announced that the US will host the 2026 meeting of the G20 at his privately owned Doral golf course and spa in Miami.
Asked about Florida’s move to lift mandates on vaccinations for schoolchildren, Trump said that officials have to “be careful” in removing access to vaccines he described as “amazing” and “incredible”.
After watching a misleading report on small protests in Portland, Oregon over immigration, the president said that he might send troops there. A Fox News report on the protests used video recorded during a protest in 2020 and wrongly said it had been recorded in the city this summer.
CNN reported that Trump “is weighing options for carrying out military strikes targeting drug cartels operating inside Venezuela, including possible strikes within the country”.
The Pentagon made some immediate cosmetic changes to signage on Friday, after Donald Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
Two leading Republican lawmakers, the House speaker Mike Johnson and Nancy Mace, both claimed this week that Trump had acted as an FBI informant to take down Jeffrey Epstein. They offered no evidence, but if it existed it would be in the files Trump has fought to keep from the public.
Republican lawmakers push unsourced claim Trump was an 'FBI informant' against Epstein
As the Republican leadership in the House continues to block a bipartisan effort to force the full release of files from the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who was once Donald Trump’s friend, several of them have started to make the same unsourced claim: that Trump aided the federal effort to prosecute Epstein.
On Tuesday, Nancy Mace, the South Carolina congresswoman who has supported the petition to force the release of the files, told a reporter for the Independent that she had no reason to believe that Trump has opposed hte releae of the files because they might be embarrassing to him.
“Donald Trump is the one who banned Jeffrey Epstein from Mar-a-Lago”, she said. “He was an FBI informant, and he talked to the feds to get this guy turned over. So Donald Trump is a hero in this.”
Then on Thursday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, made the same claim in an interview with Manu Raju of CNN.
When the reporter said that Trump had called the effort to release the Epstein files “a hoax”, Johnson replied: “He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”
As the conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild noted: “This has been a supposition among QAnon believers for years. Maybe they could release the files and prove it!”
