Closing summary
We are wrapping up our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but will be back at it on Tuesday. In the meantime, here are the latest developments:
President Donald Trump has nominated conservative economist EJ Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that is responsible for collecting and publishing the country’s employment and inflation figures. The nomination comes after Trump fired the BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, earlier this month following the release of a weak jobs report which he claimed had been “rigged”.
Trump has ordered the national guard to Washington DC and seized control of the city’s police force, describing a “lawless” city in ways that are sharply at odds with official crime statistics. The US president’s move was swiftly condemned as a “disgusting, dangerous and derogatory” assault on the political independence of a racially diverse city. The federal takeover is expected to be in effect for 30 days.
Trump has once again delayed implementing sweeping tariffs on China, announcing another 90-day pause just hours before the last agreement between the world’s two largest economies was due to expire. On Monday, Trump signed an executive order extending the deadline for higher tariffs on China until 10 November.
A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday began hearing evidence and arguments on whether the Trump administration violated federal law when it deployed national guard soldiers and US marines to Los Angeles after protests over immigration raids this summer. The Trump administration federalized California national guard members and sent them to the second-largest US city over the objections of the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and city leaders.
Trump previewed his Friday meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, claiming he will know “probably in the first two minutes” whether a peace deal can be made. Trump confirmed that while Volodymyr Zelenskyy wouldn’t be a part of the summit, he would call him first as soon as he saw a “fair deal” for a ceasefire emerge. He also didn’t rule out the possibility of a future trading relationship with Russia.
A federal judge rejected on Monday a request from the justice department to unseal the grand jury transcripts relating to the criminal investigation of Ghislaine Maxwell – Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. The judge wrote that the transcripts could not be released publicly – “casually or promiscuously” – as Trump’s government had pushed for because it would risk “unraveling the foundations of secrecy upon which the grand jury is premised”.
A federal judge has barred the Trump administration from withholding federal funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit created by Congress to promote democracy worldwide, The New York Times reports.
In a 15-page ruling, judge Dabney L Friedrich of the US District Court for the District of Columbia found that the administration withheld the money “for impermissible policy reasons,” causing the nonprofit irreparable harm, including layoffs of staff and the suspension of several democracy-promoting programs.
“These harms to the endowment’s global reputation and to the ‘very existence of its programs’ are irreparable,” judge Friedrich wrote. She ordered the release of $95m in federal funds to the nonprofit, roughly 30 percent of its annual budget.
Updated
