Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back at it on Wednesday. Here are the latest developments:
US defense secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that he was not present when a special operations commander decided to launch a second strike on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean on 2 September in order to kill two survivors. Hegseth, who boasted of having watched the attack “live” the day after it took place, said at a televised cabinet meeting that he did not “stick around” for the second strike.
Donald Trump, who struggled to keep his eyes open during his cabinet meeting, ended it with a racist attack on Somali Americans in Minnesota, calling the entire community “garbage” and again singled out Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman, for vitriol.
Elected officials in Minnesota voiced outrage over Trump’s comments, and the reported plan to deploy federal immigration offices to target Somalis in the state. “Everyone knows that our president is racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic – and we are going to fight that,” Somali American Minneapolis city council member Jamal Osman said. “America has a history of fighting and stopping those kinds of individuals.”
Trump once again claimed in a social media post on Tuesday that he has canceled “all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts” signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden, with an “autopen” – a mechanical device that uses a robotic arm with a pen attached to replicate a person’s signature.
Republican Matt Van Epps won a special election in Tennessee for a seat in the US House, but by a single-digit margin in a district Donald Trump won by 22 percentage points last year.
Updated
Republican Matt Van Epps wins Tennessee special election, but by far narrower margin than predecessor
Republican Matt Van Epps has won a nationally watched special election in Tennessee for a seat in the US House, maintaining his party’s grip on the district Donald Trump won by 22 percentage points last year.
A military veteran and former state general services commissioner from Nashville, Van Epps defeated Democratic state lawmaker Aftyn Behn to represent the seventh congressional district.
Epps was leading by about 7.5% with about 98% of the vote counted.
Van Epps benefited from more than $1m in spending from Maga Inc. It was the first time the Trump-supporting Super Pac spent money on a campaign since last year’s presidential race, a reflection of the special election’s outsize importance.
Republican state lawmakers redrew the seventh district and two others in 2022 to help prevent liberal-voting Nashville from electing another Democrat to Congress. Only about one in five voters in the district, which spans 14 counties, are in the city.
Republican former representative Mark Green, who retired this summer, opening the vacancy, was re-elected by 21 percentage points in 2024, when Trump won by a similar margin.
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