Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Wednesday. Here are the latest developments:
Paul Ingrassia, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead a government ethics office, withdrew from consideration, after the publication of racist text messages caused Republican senators to say they would not vote to confirm him.
Arizona’s attorney general is suing the House speaker, Mike Johnson, over his refusal to swear in Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won a congressional special election in September.
Trump seemed to confirm a report that he is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the thwarted legal cases against him. “I guess they probably owe me a lot of money for that,” he told reporters.
Despite recently announcing a summit in Budapest, there are now no plans for Trump to meet with Vladmir Putin “in the immediate future”, a White House official told the Guardian.
Trump repeated his wildly false claim that the city of Portland, Oregon is beset by fires started by protesters. “I looked at Portland over the weekend. The place is burning down,” the president claimed, apparently referring to a chemical attack on protesters by federal officers.
JD Vance, on a visit to Israel, said that he would not “put an explicit deadline” on Hamas to comply with the key points of the Gaze ceasefire deal.
Graham Platner, the Maine oysterman and former US marine campaigning to be the Democrats’ candidate in next year’s US Senate race, “has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest” and “knows damn well what it means,” according to one of his close aides who resigned last week.
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Fox News fails to disclose that 'independent journalist' who mocked No Kings protests is daughter of Fox host
A Fox News guest who derided the No Kings protests and praised Donald Trump during an interview on Monday was identified to viewers only as “independent journalist Evita Duffy-Alfonso”.
What the network failed to disclose to viewers is that this “independent” guest, who writes for the far-right outlet The Federalist, is the daughter of a current Fox host, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and a former one, Sean Duffy, who is now Trump’s transportation secretary.
During the interview, on the Fox morning show her mother hosts on weekends, Duffy-Alfonso, 26, insisted that the president, who was a guest at her wedding, “is right: these protests were Soros-funded”. She cited no evidence for this false claim.
“If you looked around at these protests, everyone was old,” she added, as the network showed viewers images not of the massive No Kings rallies across the country, but of a small number of protesters getting doused in chemical agents by federal officers in Portland on Saturday night.
“I have never seen a movement where there’s energy and excitement and everybody’s 55 and older, it’s just impossible,” she said. “Everybody is elderly. There’s no youth and energy behind this, which means it’s pretty inorganic, which president Trump is right, it was inorganic.”
The Fox host, Todd Piro, then chimed in, again without citing evidence of any kind, to say: “And quite frankly, to your earlier point, a lot of those individual, we don’t have an exact number, but a lot of them were paid to be there.”
“Yes,” Duffy-Alfonso agreed.
The network’s decision to not identify Duffy-Alfonso as the daughter of an employee and a cabinet official appears intentional, given that she was previously identified that way in 2021, when she was interviewed by her parents about her firsthand experience of being in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the week that Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people at a racial justice protest there the year before.
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