Donald Trump

US President Donald Trump, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will hold their first trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China’s Shenzhen, the White House has confirmed.

On Friday, Washington also confirmed Trump’s attendance at the summit, which will take place from November 18-19.

Talks will focus on nuclear proliferation, the White House said. But they come amid significant global turbulence: Russia’s war in Ukraine, the US-Israeli war on Iran and ongoing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Not all the issues hold equal weight for the leaders, though. So what does each side want? Here’s what we know:

What’s on the agenda?

Each leader has his own priorities, but there are some issues all will want to discuss.

New nuclear treaty

A top issue for Russia and the US is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which lapsed in February. The treaty was first signed in 2010 and caps US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals.

Russia currently possesses the largest number of warheads, followed by the US and then China, which is rapidly building up its own arsenal.

Trump previously rejected Russia’s proposal to extend the treaty after it expired, demanding instead a “new, improved and modernised” deal that includes Beijing.

China is understood, however, to be reluctant to join an agreement it was not involved in forming.

A senior Trump administration official told Reuters this topic will start the conversation but that “we do not expect to get any kind of agreement”.

US-Israel war on Iran

Officials also say the world leaders will discuss the Iran war, which the US and Israel launched on February 28. While full-scale strikes have, for now, ceased, the conflict remains in a deadlock.

After more than 100 days, the critical Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and oil and gas prices are still volatile as ships in the strait continue to face Iranian strikes and seamines. One-third of China’s crude oil supply transited the strait before the war. The conflict is also hampering demand for Chinese exports.

Russia, meanwhile, has profited from rising energy prices and recent sanctions relief from Washington amid supply crunches – particularly of diesel.

China-US trade rivalry

Trade wars and the race to control microchips used to power artificial intelligence are straining relations between Beijing and Washington.

Trump hit China with a 145 percent tax hike last year, while Beijing retaliated by imposing 125 percent levies on US imports. Tensions mounted further over China’s restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals needed to manufacture advanced chips and other technology.

The two countries have since reduced tariffs and struck several deals following Trump and Xi’s meetings in South Korea and Washington However, the recent scandal at chip firm Nvidia has prompted the US to allege that China was spying on CEO Jensen Huang. Beijing denies this.

Will the Ukraine war be discussed?

It is very unlikely. A Trump administration official told reporters the US president will not bring up Russia’s war on Ukraine, although Kremlin officials previously suggested the conflict could be discussed.

China, an ally of Moscow’s, has said the Ukraine war is a European issue.

US officials also note that Washington is pursuing peace talks, with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visiting both Ukraine and Russia this week. “China is not really a part of that track, so it doesn’t seem appropriate to have the Ukraine discussion there,” an official told reporters.

President Trump has accused Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of “not wanting” to end the war, while Kyiv has reiterated allegations that the US has restricted its Starlink satellite connection that allows it to operate attack drones. Trump has also blamed Ukraine for soaring diesel prices because of its strikes on Russian oil facilities.

At the same time, Trump has feted Putin, agreed to allow Russian diesel into global and US markets, and lifted oil sanctions on Moscow.

What does each side want from this meeting?

Russia

For President Putin, the meeting could provide a positive photo opportunity and a platform to project power while sidelining the Ukraine conflict, analysts say.

It will give him a “first among equals” position that he can display at home to show that he can influence Europe’s security architecture following the Ukraine war, Alexander Bratersky, a Moscow-based journalist and political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

China

Beijing has already been pushing for a resolution to the US war on Iran, which has impacted its own energy supplies.

China will also want to avoid being pulled into a nuclear treaty it had no part in establishing.

Last month, China’s Foreign Ministry said it would be “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage”.

US

Trump’s priority is to include both China and Russia in a new nuclear proliferation treaty, according to administration officials. “The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world. This proliferation, President Trump believes, is very dangerous,” Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, told reporters.

The president could also use the meeting to project his administration’s diplomatic influence, as Iran refuses to capitulate to US demands for ending the war and hand Washington a win.

Trump has also sought closer ties with Xi, Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, all seen as “strongmen”, and is likely to be perceived as influential in such circles, analysts say.

However, his Republican Party’s crushing defeat in midterm elections last week could undermine his leverage, experts note, as a new Democrat-led Congress is likely to support Ukraine more staunchly.

Is this the start of a new Yalta?

Pyotr Tolstoy, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee said it could lead to a “new Yalta”.

The 1945 conference in Yalta, in the then Soviet Union, saw USSR President Joseph Stalin, the US’s Franklin D Roosevelt, and the United Kingdom’s Winston Churchill divide Germany and establish the United Nations in what was seen as the template for a new world order.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, called the trilateral meeting now taking place between the leaders of the US, China and Russia as “extremely significant” but pointed out that any agreements reached at the meeting cannot be imposed on other nations.

White House says Trump plans to discuss the Iran war and nuclear arms at a meeting on the sidelines of APEC next week.

Leaders of the United States, China and Russia are set to hold an unprecedented three-way meeting next week, the White House has said.

US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin will meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, China’s tech hub, the White House assistant press secretary confirmed in an announcement.

The talks will be held nine months after the last nuclear arms treaty between Washington and Moscow expired, leaving the world’s two countries with the largest atomic arsenals without caps for the first time in more than 50 years.

What’s on the agenda?

Trump has said the meeting is a chance for all three countries to reach a deal on nuclear stockpiles.

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) lapsed in February. Trump then rejected Russia’s proposal to extend it for another year and demanded a “new, improved and modernized” deal that includes China.

Expectations are low. “We do not expect to get to any kind of agreement,” a senior Trump administration official told the Reuters news agency, describing the meeting as the start of a conversation.

Russia holds the most nuclear warheads, followed by the US, then China, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Trump plans on discussing the Iran war with Xi and Putin, but will steer away from discussing Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to a senior US official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

Elon Musk will also travel with Trump to China but will not attend the meeting, the official added. Trump is also not expected to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the Asia trip.

Yalta Conference comparisons

The planned summit has drawn comparisons with the 1945 Yalta Conference, where the leaders of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union shaped the post-war order.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, however, dismissed the parallel, saying any agreements reached in Shenzhen cannot be imposed on others, but he still called the meeting “extremely significant”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has voiced concern that the meeting could become a platform to discuss a Ukraine deal behind Kyiv’s back.

Trump has pursued closer ties with both leaders despite a short-lived trade war with China last year and Russia’s continuing war in Ukraine, where Washington is seeking to mediate a solution.

Last week voters across the country rejected Republican politicians and the Trump administration’s agenda. Democrats gained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate — nabbing historic pickups in Republican strongholds such as Kansas, South Carolina and Texas.

Notably, Latino voters turned their back on Republicans after giving Donald Trump 48% of the vote in 2024. A New York Times voter analysis found that Latino voters shifted 29 points toward Democrats between 2024 and 2026, compared with a 15-point shift among voters overall.

After the monumental about-face, President Trump processed the defeat by blaming everyone around him for the blue tsunami.

After Trump-endorsed candidates lost pivotal Senate seats, the president posted on social media, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”

The resignation of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles last week was perhaps the most telling move about how Trump plans to deal with Republican losses nationwide. Wiles was promptly replaced with far-right advisor Stephen Miller, who previously served as the deputy chief of staff.

“I wanted to make a change,” Trump told reporters Nov. 6. “I think Susie’s done a very good job. … Stephen’s been great and we’ve got to make moves.”

Political observers now fear the appointment signals Trump will double down on an agenda that has alienated broad swaths of voters, including Latinos, who were among the most targeted demographic in the administration’s campaign of aggressive immigration enforcement spearheaded by Miller.

To better understand what Miller’s promotion will mean for the president’s future plans, The Times spoke with New York Times contributing writer and USC associate professor of journalism Jean Guerrero, who literally wrote the book on Miller.

Her 2020 book, “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda,” examined Miller’s upbringing, the political forces that shaped his ideologies and the origins of his anti-immigrant policies.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

With the big news of this election cycle being that Latinos turned their back on Trump, do you see the appointment of Stephen Miller as an act of revenge by Trump? What do you think he’s trying to signal for his agenda over the next two years with this promotion?

I think he’s trying to signal that he plans to double down on talking down on Latino and immigrant communities because [Trump and his allies] need the war on immigrants to continue their war on the working classes, which is what this is all about.

The general public is fed up with this administration because of how de-prioritized working families have been, and that’s across the board: white, Latino, Black, Asian. The war on immigrants is central to that de-prioritization because by criminalizing a sector of the population and keeping [them] in the shadows and in fear, they are able to suppress wages for the entire working class and they’re able to keep immigrants from being able to organize with their citizen co-workers in the workplace.

What do you think we can expect to happen to immigrant Latino communities specifically under this era of Stephen Miller?

I think what we’re going to see is an extreme expansion of the war on immigrant communities and their allies specifically. That is going to disproportionately target U.S. citizen Latinos — using what power and privilege they’ve been able to accumulate through the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents — who are at the front lines of defending their community members.

Your book discussed how Miller’s high school years helped shape his anti-immigrant, anti-Latino sentiment and how that seems to have stemmed a bit from going to a public school in Santa Monica. Can you talk a little bit about that?

A lot of people get surprised when they learn that Stephen Miller was from Santa Monica, because it’s a liberal enclave, but he is very much a product of the liberal hypocrisy that he witnessed growing up in California. What he witnessed remains true of establishment and corporate Democrats today, which is a professed concern for marginalized communities and performative support for social justice, while completely neglecting to pursue any concrete policies that would make the lives of marginalized communities any better.

One of the ways he exploited that fact to rise in power was by aligning himself with the conservative movement that was growing rapidly in California during the 1990s, led by David Horowitz — a conservative activist in Studio City — who became one of Stephen Miller’s main mentors and who groomed a generation of young conservatives to use the tools and terms of the civil rights movement against the gains of the civil rights movement. Miller learned to perceive multiculturalism and people of color as an existential threat to the U.S.

Do you think that putting Miller in the position of chief of staff is a way for Trump to reposition this war on immigrants as his main thing and to move away from the more economic and cost-of-living concerns that people also seem aggravated by?

They’re going to continue to try to frame immigrants as the enemies of the working classes, which is masterful gaslighting. By doing that, they are ensuring that citizen workers don’t organize alongside immigrants for higher wages, for economic equality. I think the immigration issue is actually at the heart of the economic issues that people are upset about. I say that because you saw the mass deportations affecting things like construction sites, which were left empty of workers, so people who were trying to build housing at a time of housing scarcity were being targeted. You saw farmworkers getting targeted in the fields, which led to higher food prices.

The war on immigrants is a war on the working classes. By doubling down on it, Trump is going to be trying desperately to confuse people into thinking that immigrants are to blame for the economic pain that everybody is feeling. When in reality, the economic pain that everybody is feeling is because of this war on immigrants which is pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into mass surveillance, mass incarceration of people based on their race and language. It is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.

Trump has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth on his immigration messaging. He recently acknowledged that people might have thought he was too tough on immigration, but this appointment of Miller signals that he will be going harder on the issue. What is the calculation there in your view?

He’s trying to exploit the echo chambers, which makes sense for a dear friend of the tech elites for him to know how to do that. He’s hoping that one piece of information will reach one audience and another piece of information will reach the other audience. So the people who are fed up with the war on immigrants will hear him say that he’s scaling it back and they’ll be happy and they’ll support him. The people who love the war on immigrants, which are fewer and fewer every day, will hear about Stephen Miller and get really excited about that. He’s just hoping that the [online] algorithm will work in his favor.

You’ve previously spoken about noticing a shift in Miller’s immigration mindset over the years, can you talk about that change?

During the first administration, he was focused entirely on strangling legal pathways into this country, such as gutting the asylum and refugee systems, and restricting green card access and separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border. All of this geared towards racially reengineering the demographics of this country. During the second administration, he’s done some of that with these mass deportations where he’s directed agents to round people up at worksites and where they’ve been racially profiling people and detaining people based on their skin color and language and blue-collar jobs as opposed to their criminal records.

At the same time, Miller has been one of the most vocal proponents of Trump’s foreign interventions and invasions, which have set the stage for the mass displacement of new refugees and immigrants. Watching Miller be so vocally supportive of these interventions, I realized he had shifted, and that he was no longer primarily motivated by restrictionist ideologies and white nationalist ideologies — it was about class.

Trump and Miller are using the war on immigrants to manufacture and maintain a permanent underclass in the United States, which is something that has been done by many administrations for many generations. But they’ve taken it to an astounding level that has caused an unprecedented amount of economic, spiritual and psychological pain across this country.

With Democrats gaining a bunch of seats in the Senate and the House, and taking control of a bunch of state legislatures, what can they do to potentially minimize Miller’s effect in the White House?

It is imperative that the Democrats use their majorities not only to investigate the crimes against humanity that this administration has been committing, but also to deliver on behalf of working families. At the center of that has to be ending the war on immigrants. They have to abolish ICE. They have to pass legislation to protect the longtime undocumented population — who Democrats have said that they’ve been going to protect for many administrations and have not prioritized, even when they previously had majorities in Congress.

If they do not deliver on behalf of working families by emancipating the subjugated classes, then they’re admitting they too are in alliance with the pillaging classes and that they are no different from Trump and Miller. The main thing they have to do is counter any maneuvers that Miller is going to be making from the White House. They can’t just be all talk. They have to deliver in concrete ways for working families and they’re not going to be able to do that if they ignore the immigrant community that has been at the center of the Trump administration’s persecution.

Nithya Raman’s win upends L.A. Latino politics

A few weeks back in this newsletter, I discussed how Latino voters would be the deciding factor in the L.A. mayoral race as the demographic helped carry Mayor Karen Bass in the primary, with her winning 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods in the June 2 election.

Five months, much campaigning and the botched response to a massive warehouse fire in heavily Latino Boyle Heights later, Bass’s competitor, Councilmember Nithya Raman, courted the Latino vote in last week’s election. A Times analysis of early election returns showed Raman won big in the heavily Latino neighborhoods such as Wilmington, South L.A. and Pico-Union.

My colleague and Latino voting expert Gustavo Arellano wrote about how Raman’s win was the death knell for L.A.’s Latino political establishment.

Arellano discussed how Bass consistently aligned herself with a cohort of moderate Latino politicians — such as City Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Imelda Padilla, Assemblymember Celeste Rodriguez and Rep. Luz Rivas — at reelection events. Conversely, Raman focused on activating younger, more progressive Latinos throughout her campaign.

The L.A. Latinos’ traditional political machine was in trouble before hitching its wagon to Bass’s failed reelection campaign, Arellano noted. It began in 2022 when three City Council members were embroiled in an audio leak scandal, which created an avenue for two democratic socialists to grab council seats. The Latino old guard also lost two more council members in 2024, and former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, bastion of that political class, ran a supremely unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign this year.

Raman’s grassroots approach met Latino voters where they were and not where she thought they were supposed to be — something Bass’ chief campaign strategist, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, could learn a lesson from.

“The mayor ran on a very institutional playbook of getting a bunch of Latino politicians together so they could tell Latinos how to vote,” Marco Santana, who ran for City Council earlier this year, told Arellano. “That doesn’t work anymore. Latinos want deeds.”

One actor’s pursuit to dub “The Lion King” in Quechua

Voice actor Fernando Valencia grew up in the Andean Peruvian town of Huanimpampa, where the Indigenous language of Quechua is still an integral part of everyday life. He noticed that the dialect is never represented in dubbed versions of Hollywood family hits, which creates a barrier for comprehension among children whose primary language is Quechua.

To point out this lack of availability and to show that an avenue for accessibility was possible, Valencia dubbed segments of Hollywood blockbusters such as “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” and “The Lion King” into the language spoken by nearly 10 million South Americans.

He has since dared to dub “The Lion King” — the first movie Valencia watched in its entirety as a child — fully into Quechua. Valencia’s attempts are documented in Peruvian filmmaker Augusto Zegarra’s debut feature, “Runa Simi,” which is the name of the Quechua language in Quechua and translates to ”language of the people.”

De Los contributor Carlos Aguilar recently spoke with Valencia and Zegarra about the film and the voice actor’s monumental undertaking.

“If I keep my language and culture in a fragile little jar, someone will come along and trample it, and it will disappear forever,” Valencia said. “But if I open this little jar and build bridges, it will be difficult to eliminate it because it will be integrated into the world.”

A similar linguistic venture to preserve a native language was completed by Tweedie Waititi, the sister of Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi, who partnered with Disney to dub multiple titles into te reo Māori.

Valencia’s mission was given a major bump after Peter and Benjamin Bratt, whose mother, Eldy Banda, is an Indigenous activist of Quechua descent, signed on to the project as executive producers.

“It felt like a statement to have someone who has never heard of the Quechua language, maybe someone in Europe or the U.S., ask what runa simi is and then being able to tell them: ‘You’re already speaking it! By saying the words runa simi, you’re already using the language,’” Zegarra said.

Stories we read this week that we think you should read

Unless otherwise noted, stories below were published by the Los Angeles Times.

Politics and immigration

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A day after the Democrats swept to victory in the midterms, online right-wing discourse in the aging corners of Facebook turned to calls for an armed conflict with Muslims and socialists.

“Vote from the rooftops” said the caption on an image of a sniper taking aim from a rooftop. The slogan is a euphemism in rightwing subculture that if voting fails, it’s time to take up arms.

Another post warned of a coming civil war with “no one left to protect Muslims and social democrats” if they defund the police.

“I got a feeling that Abdul El Sayid won’t be around too long,” said another post, referring to the Michigan senator-elect, who faced one of the ugliest islamophobic campaigns.

Hate speech and calls for violence online aren’t new. But the problem has grown worse in recent years, experts said, after social media platforms including Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram rolled back content moderation and fact-checking policies over fears of censorship and bias.

Anti-immigration rhetoric, election denialism and health skepticism are recurring themes for violent and false narratives in extreme right-wing online subcultures, weaponized by politicians. Incendiary speech has been further boosted by AI-powered slop that’s worsened an ailing information ecosystem.

In the runup to the midterms, wishes of harm and violent threats targeted at candidates running for office jumped fivefold on Elon Musk’s X, according to the Center for Countering Digital Harm, a non-profit based in Washington DC. The research analysed replies to posts from ten candidates in battleground races from Michigan to Texas, and found hundreds calling for violence.

A similar analysis in June found violent threats and hate against U.S. politicians on Facebook quadrupled after Meta cut its fact checking program in January 2025, according to CCDH. Hate and violent speech targeted at President Trump also doubled during that period.

“These findings point to a continued pattern of platforms’ safeguards failing to proactively remove content that contributes to our increasingly violent political culture,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, a nonprofit based in Washington.

A spokesperson for Meta said the company regularly issues “public reports tracking violating content on our platforms, and the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025.” Meta removed content it found to violate its policies, the spokesperson said.

Platforms have long struggled to strike a balance between free expression and censorship. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg began as a free speech absolutist, but had to beef up moderation and introduce third party fact checking after anti-minority hate speech on Facebook fueled real world violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia a decade ago.

The debate intensified during the COVID 19 pandemic over censoring speech that doubted or joked about the origins of the virus and anti-vaccine content, and culminated in the removal of Donald Trump’s account after inflammatory posts on the day of Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022 changed the moderation landscape even further. As the billionaire railed against “woke” culture, he fired the platform’s moderation and fact-checking teams. Musk replaced it with the crowdsource program known as Community Notes that enables users to fact-check and flag problematic posts.

When Trump returned as President in 2024, the pendulum had swung back. Accused of censoring conservative views, Zuckerberg in public hearings attributed the pandemic-era speech policing to government pressure, and expressed regret over not speaking sooner. In 2025, he said that across Instagram, Facebook and Threads, the company would remove content filters around immigration and gender.

“The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” Zuckerberg said in a video message. He described Trump’s 2024 victory as a “cultural tipping point” to correct the over-censorship, and replaced fact checking with Community Notes.

Now, explicit calls for civil war or posts calling to prepare for the coming fight are on the rise on social media, experts say, especially in the lead up to and days after the midterms.

“So are we wearing camo or what? Sorry, this will be my first ever civil war,” read a Facebook post. Another image with a rifle read: “If it’s time to hide them, then it’s time to use them.”

“Problematic content on Meta platforms, which is primarily Facebook and Instagram, has increased after Meta rolled back its kind of fact-checking and anti-hate speech policies,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, UC Davis professor of communication.

She pointed to an April study that found that Instagram failed to remove 93% of flagged hateful and extremist content by white supremacist and Nazi accounts.

Wojcieszak’s research showed that Meta’s stricter moderation before the 2020 election reduced misinformation exposure by 72%. However, contrary to popular belief, reducing exposure alone did not alter political attitudes or diminish polarization.

Meta has argued that the greater tolerance of offensive speech has resulted in fewer overall complaints about content takedowns.

“Should we prefer to catch 95% of hateful speech at the cost of mistakenly flagging 1% of unobjectionable content, or is it better to live in a world in which 99% of hateful speech is caught but 5% of unobjectionable content is taken down? There’s no right answer,” said Olivier Boutin, UC Berkeley PhD student, studying political misinformation.

Other platforms also have loosened their rules about policing content. Last year, YouTube also began encouraging its moderators to leave up videos that may break its policies, increasing the threshold for offensive content to half a video, from a quarter.

Zuckerberg had called for the Trump administration’s support to push back against governments in Europe and Latin America pressuring American platforms to censor. Meta has moved its U.S. content moderation teams to Texas out of California, and has taken the stance that it will wait for people to report content before taking it down to reduce censorship.

UC Davis’ Wojcieszak said lasting change is possible only with regulation and penalties for platforms spreading hate.

“Without stricter and overt regulation, I do not think that the ‘blue wave’ will change anything by itself,” Wojcieszak said, referring to the big win by Democrats in the midterms. “Like I cannot imagine that suddenly Musk or other platform CEOs would say, ‘Oh, you know, now the Democrats are my best buddies. Let me change back to stricter moderation policies.’”

Still, many believe the Democrats’ win has set the stage for tougher tech and platform regulation.

Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, reasserted his “progressive” credentials earlier this week after playing a key role in Trump’s deportation campaign. Meta’s Washington whisperer, Joel Kaplan, who helped Zuckerberg get close to Trump, will quit after a 15 year stint.

Some argue that there needs to be more consistency to avoid big swings between strict content moderation and free-for-all speech.

“We don’t want this ridiculous pendulum swinging where [tech CEOs are] sucking up to whoever’s in power,” said Ahmed of CCDH. “What the people want is transparency and accountability. So, if they [social media platforms] do contribute to causing real world harm, we should be able to hold them liable for it.”

Just hours before Iran claimed it hit the United States military’s early warning radar system in Bahrain early on Friday, US President Donald Trump said he had told his country’s lead negotiator, Vice President JD Vance, that, “We don’t need a deal with Iran.”

Instead, Trump said, he has told Vance to focus on unearthing what the president says is corruption and crime in Democratic-controlled cities and states – after Democrats stunningly took over Congress in the midterm elections.

Vance is a known critic of the US-Israeli war on Iran. He has blamed Trump’s military strikes on Iran and the subsequent energy crisis and inflation in the US for the Republicans’ losses in Congress.

Meanwhile, several commercial vessels trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz have hit naval mines, or were struck by the Iranian military, over the past week – but Trump continues to claim that Washington controls the critical waterway nonetheless.

So, where is the war headed – and is Vance being sidelined by Trump?

What did Trump tell Vance?

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he had asked Vice President Vance “to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S.”

“We don’t need a deal with Iran,” he added. “Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”

The Trump administration has appeared increasingly divided on the foregoing arc of war on Iran since the midterm losses.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Washington’s economic pressure campaign against Iran is proving effective, so a resumption of large-scale military operations is unnecessary.

“The economic pressure on Iran is going to get even worse,” he added.

Trump has given mixed messages about his plans for the war. Despite threatening that he might “destroy” Iran last week, this week Trump has said that further strikes against Iran are “quite unlikely”.

What role has Vance played in talks with Iran?

Vance favours a deal with Iran, which Trump believes is not possible currently.

Vance led the US negotiations in April in Islamabad, where he helped secure the June memorandum of understanding with Iran. That quickly collapsed over glaring gaps in each side’s understanding of what had been agreed, however – particularly in reference to control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The US vice president also led direct talks with Iran in Switzerland and is part of renewed diplomatic efforts, engaging Qatari and Pakistani mediators and seeking continued negotiations with Iranian officials.

On November 4, following sweeping Republican losses in the midterm elections, Vance publicly questioned whether the war had been worth the political and economic costs. In a post on X, he wrote: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” endorsing diplomatic resolution as sound advice.

He added: “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”

Political analysts say Vance’s rather blunt assessment is also an effort to distance himself from Trump’s war on Iran, when the president is facing his all-time low career approval ratings.

On June 17, speaking at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France – when both parties had just signed the Islamabad MoU – Trump told reporters: “This way, if it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD.”

The next day, Vance told reporters he believed the president was “joking”.

Where does the US-Iran war go from here?

It remains unclear.

On Friday morning, Tehran said it had attacked and destroyed an early-warning radar system belonging to the US military in Bahrain, in what it said was retaliation for an air attack on a telecommunications tower in southern Iran’s port city of Sirik.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Trump said Washington’s allies in the Middle East had asked him to hold off on renewed large-scale attacks against Iran. He added that the US could destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure, bridges and manufacturing facilities within three days, if it wanted to.

“Saudi Arabia has asked me to please just let it be the way it is now for a while,” he said at White House, adding that Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain preferred the current approach.

Asked whether he would have launched further attacks without those requests, Trump replied: “Yes, I would.”

Though Trump acknowledged that rising fuel prices caused by the war contributed to the Republicans’ defeat in the midterm elections, he defended his decision to attack Iran.

Meanwhile, Brigadier General Ali Reza Belaili, an adviser to the aerospace force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said an order by Iran’s supreme leader to strike “enemies” without geographical limits will be implemented “at the appropriate time”.

Iran’s Mehr news agency quoted him saying that “the more Americans persist, the more they will sink into this swamp they created themselves”.

What’s the latest on diplomatic efforts?

This week, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and top negotiator, told Al Jazeera that the Strait of Hormuz will “never return” to its status before the US-Israel war on Iran. That was when all commercial shipping was able to pass through the strait freely without having to pay tolls.

Iran in effect closed the strait, through which one-fifth of global oil supplies were shipped in peacetime, in early March following the start of US-Israeli strikes. That sent global energy markets into turmoil.

Ghalibaf said Tehran has sent a clear proposal for a ceasefire and for the reopening of the strait to Washington via Qatari mediators, laying out seven conditions, and added that Iran is now waiting for an official response from the US.

“The ball is now in the American court,” he said.

Iran’s conditions include an end to the US naval blockade of Iran’s ports, the lifting of economic sanctions, the release of Iranian frozen funds, ending fighting on all fronts, and an explicit announcement of an end to the war.

The US has previously refused to agree to these demands without an agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme in place first. Iran wants to negotiate that separately.

Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Chatham House think tank, told Al Jazeera: “We are still in a situation which is ‘no war, no peace’, and it’s unlikely to move for the time being.

“Major strikes are unlikely to happen in the imminent days, but things are likely to shift one way or the other in the next couple of weeks,” she said. “The Gulf countries are not necessarily endorsing this as a new normal, even if they prefer this to the prospect of a renewed war.”

What’s the latest on US strikes and ships hit in Hormuz?

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Ghalibaf said this week that “there are no ‘free waters’ [international waters] there, and the 1982 [UN Convention on the Law of the Sea] does not apply” to the Strait of Hormuz. The strait does, in fact, run solely through the territorial waters of Iran and Oman.

“The regulations within the Strait of Hormuz are governed by the laws of the two littoral states that border it,” he added, reiterating Iran’s position that it is tightly controlling the waterway.

Tehran has said that multiple “offending” vessels – which it says have used an “illegal” route, referring to the southern corridor of the strait – have caught fire during attempts to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has previously told approved ships to use a northern route which passes closer to its own coastline.

At least 12 tankers have been hit in the past 12 days, according to Iran.

The US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) says it has been “working round the clock” to keep the strait open.

On Wednesday, CENTCOM claimed that at least 4,000 ships had crossed the waterway with the US military’s assistance, carrying more than 1.7 billion barrels of crude oil.

However, all maritime agencies continue to advise against travelling through the strait, and insurers have raised prices sharply for such journeys, or are refusing cover at all.

Saying it’s ‘a failed nation’, the US president considers military intervention in Cuba before he leaves office.

US President Donald Trump has said he would “certainly consider” using military force against Cuba, adding that he wants to “get Cuba done” before he leaves office in 2029.

In a phone interview on Thursday with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, of Salem News Channel, Trump was asked whether he was considering “freeing Cuba” through a military intervention.

“I want to get Cuba done before I leave,” he said, adding that the administration was “watching it very closely”.

Trump called the island “essentially a failed … place, nation, whatever you wanna call it”.

Politico reported that it was the first time Trump had put a timeline on a possible operation.

Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents are from Cuba, “would love to do it”.

“I’d love to be able to do it for the people, for the Cubans that came and were treated really badly, and they came to America,” Trump said. He added that he won the Cuban vote in Florida by a wide margin.

Pressure campaign

Trump has repeatedly threatened to topple authorities in Cuba.

On Monday, he said Cuba “will fall fairly soon” and that the US would help it “on a humanitarian basis”.

In March, he said he believed he would have “the honour of taking Cuba”, making the remarks as the island’s power grid collapsed.

Trump put Cuba under a de facto oil blockade in January, after the US seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and cut off Venezuelan oil to the island.

He signed an executive order declaring Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US and threatened tariffs on any country that supplied it with fuel.

The blockade has caused repeated nationwide blackouts, fuel and food shortages, and a humanitarian crisis.

Cuban officials have called it “collective punishment”.

Washington has added sanctions, including on Cuba’s state oil company, President Miguel Diaz-Canel and relatives of former President Raul Castro, and announced a new round this month targeting 10 people and entities tied to the government, military and oil industry.

The US has also issued an arrest warrant for Castro. Officials from both sides have held talks on the blockade, but Cuba’s foreign minister said in June there had been “no progress”.

In March, the head of US Southern Command told senators that US troops were not rehearsing for an invasion of Cuba.

Cuban officials said the island was ready for any attack.

The report seeks to address concerns about the Trump administration’s handling of revenue held in trust for Venezuela.

The United States Department of State has released a report detailing what it says the US has done with more than $12bn in revenue from Venezuelan oil and mineral resources, nearly a year after it abducted the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro.

The disclosure is part of an effort to “promote transparency and accountability in the management of these funds”, says the 53-page report, released on Thursday.

In January, US forces conducted a raid on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, capturing Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York City, where they are currently facing charges related to drug trafficking and torture.

Venezuela’s then-vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, took over after Maduro’s abduction and has since made agreements with Washington that saw the US take a direct stake in profits earned from the export of oil and other mineral resources from the South American country.

Since removing Maduro from power, the Trump administration has sought to directly control who buys natural resources from Venezuela and who earns profits from those sales.

US President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January establishing special bank accounts that would hold revenue from those transactions, to be eventually distributed back to Venezuela in a controlled manner.

Trump has made Venezuela a central part of his political narrative, touting the revenue he said the US would receive from sales of the country’s oil during election campaigning in the run-up to the midterm elections that were held earlier this month. Venezuelan rights activists have expressed concern that Washington may give outsized importance to oil revenues and take little interest in backing democratic reforms after the removal of Maduro.

The report released on Thursday covers flows into and out of US-controlled accounts between January 3, 2026 and September 30, 2026. The State Department has also contracted private Washington, DC-based auditing firm KPMG to examine the transactions.

The US took in more than $12.26bn from “verified and approved entities engaging in authorized activities” in Venezuela during that time, according to the report. Most of that flow came from crude oil and petroleum-based revenue, but it also included deposits stemming from transactions involving gold, minerals, and fertilisers.

More than $12bn of that revenue has been disbursed as of September 30, with some $169m remaining in the account, according to the report.

The US initially set up an account in the Qatar National Bank in January to take in funds from entities looking to buy authorised oil and other minerals from Venezuela. Approximately $500m was initially deposited into that account, with almost all of it distributed back to Venezuelan entities by late January, when a separate, dedicated US Treasury-controlled account was set up to handle future transactions.

The current account, controlled directly by the US Department of the Treasury, has taken in more than $12bn in funds, from about 20 depositors, whose identities are redacted in the State Department’s report. Approximately 99 percent of those funds were related to the purchase of oil, according to the report.

By the end of September, the State Department report says, nearly all of those funds had been distributed to a set of Venezuelan banks, to be used in foreign exchange interventions, transactions where banks sell those dollars to reduce the amount of local currency floating around and prop up the currency’s value, in this case the Venezuelan bolivar.

The report is heavily redacted and does not provide details about the final recipients of the more than $12bn in funds that was distributed in Venezuela, although it does note that approximately $9.4bn went to “legal entities” and $2.9bn to “individuals”.

United States President Donald Trump travels to the Chinese city of Shenzhen next week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, where he is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The trip comes as Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s outgoing chief executive and one of Trump’s closest allies in Silicon Valley, faces mounting scrutiny over his relationship with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive whom US officials suspect of working for Chinese intelligence. China has denied the allegations.

On Thursday, Nvidia announced that Huang would step down as chief executive.

Huang accompanied Trump on his May visit to Beijing.

His presence mattered for Nvidia, which has struggled to secure approval to sell its H200 AI chips in China. Now, his place in the next delegation is in doubt.

So could Trump’s closeness to Huang push his administration towards a tougher line on China? Here’s what you need to know:

How did Huang shape the US-China chip thaw?

As founder and CEO of Nvidia, Huang pushed Washington to ease restrictions on the sale of advanced chips to China, arguing that wider use of US technology would help Washington hold onto its lead in AI development.

In December 2025, Trump did approve sales of the H200, Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip, to China, with 25 percent of proceeds to be paid to the US government.

He did so despite opposition from China hawks in both parties.

Huang was a surprise late addition to Trump’s delegation to Beijing in May, in hopes of unlocking stalled H200 sales. Despite Trump’s decision to allow the sales, shipments were low because of slow import approvals from the Chinese government in a bid to support domestic chipmakers.

No breakthrough was announced.

Trump has stood by Huang throughout his recent personal scandal, calling him an “honourable guy”.

Will the Nvidia scandal prompt Trump to take a tougher stance with China?

Not immediately.

Huang’s removal from Nvidia’s board and the scandal leading up to that are unlikely to significantly affect relations between Washington and Beijing, which Steve Okun, a Singapore-based geopolitical analyst, told Al Jazeera is “a stalemate at best”.

Instead, if the US continues to impose restrictions on AI product sales to China, AI diversion and diffusion – how products are traded around the world both formally and informally – would be much more likely to cause tension between the two nations.

Gabriel Wildau, managing director at the advisory firm Teneo, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that Trump “shows no sign that he intends to disrupt the current US-China rapprochement”.

But he warned that the president “may face new pressure from Congress and hawkish voices inside his administration”.

Carsten Holz, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said Trump “would not seem to have a coherent China policy and therefore his position in the upcoming talks in Shenzhen is hard to predict”.

Huang’s personal affairs “will be of little relevance” to China-US relations, he told Al Jazeera.

Where is the pressure to be tougher with China coming from?

Mostly from Congress, where control of both houses will pass to the Democrats in January.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the technology research group Omdia, said a tough US line on AI and China was not Trump’s alone, calling it “one of the rare political consensuses domestically across the aisle”.

Trump, he said, “will do whatever he can to protect his contribution and legacy on this matter”.

On Wednesday, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House chief of staff Stephen Miller to preserve all records on Nvidia’s chip exports to China.

“This incident raises significant concerns about the federal government’s ability to effectively enforce our export controls and protect our national security,” the senators wrote.

The news website Axios reported that Lutnick had held up a planned crackdown on firms suspected of funnelling Nvidia chips to China.

Meanwhile, procurement notices seen by the AFP news agency show that a Chinese university linked to the country’s defence establishment bought Nvidia H200 chips through a third party in September and October.

How has China responded?

Beijing has rejected the spy claims and accused Washington of using them as cover to impose stronger restrictions and semiconductor export controls on China.

“The US side should stop fabricating such ‘spy’ narratives as a pretext for imposing a technological blockade,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning said on Thursday.

But Mao also said China is willing to work with the US to implement the consensus reached by the two leaders.

Omdia’s Su said China “has no interest in not engaging with Trump, given substantial interest in Nvidia graphics processing units”.

Chinese chipmakers may also gain from better access to US technology.

Shares in Moore Threads, MetaX and Cambricon, China’s leading makers of graphics processors, jumped nearly 10 percent on Thursday.

What happens after Shenzhen?

Holz, the Chinese economy expert, noted that the use of advanced Nvidia chips in Singapore data centres to serve customers in mainland China was “not new information”.

Still, Okun expects the pressure to build next year.

He said Congress could pass the Remote Access Security Act, aimed at stopping Chinese firms from reaching advanced chips through the cloud.

The Department of Commerce, he added, could put export controls on Megaspeed or require licences for advanced chips sent to countries such as Singapore and Malaysia.

If that happens, it will strain the US-China relationship in 2027, he said, adding “but that’s not going to happen next week”.

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

Nvidia loses more than $600bn in market value as CEO Jensen Huang steps down amid espionage and affair allegations.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stepped down from the company following his reported affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and an Nvidia executive.

The $4.2 trillion tech giant has lost more than $600bn in market value this week as Huang’s scandals rocked the company, which supplies most of the chips powering advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The stock slid more than 10 percent in premarket trading on Thursday.

The company appointed Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, as interim CEO on Thursday.

Nvidia’s board met on Wednesday night to discuss ousting Huang, whose relationship with the alleged Chinese spy triggered investigations by the FBI, the United States Congress and the California-based tech giant. Nvidia is also facing a shareholder class-action lawsuit.

The alleged Chinese intelligence asset, Alice Huang, is a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, Nvidia’s primary business partner in Southeast Asia. Founded in 2023, Megaspeed has been investigated over whether it helped Chinese companies access its $4.8bn stock of powerful Nvidia chips.

The affair has raised national security concerns in the US, which restricts chip sales to China over concerns that the Chinese military, intelligence agencies or companies could use the advanced technology.

Huang, 63, is Nvidia’s co-founder, president and CEO. A close ally of United States President Donald Trump, he has pushed to ease US restrictions on chip exports to China. Trump said earlier this week that Huang told him he had “absolutely no idea” that he was in a relationship with an intelligence operative.

Huang owns about 3.6 percent of Nvidia’s stock, making him one of the richest people in the world. He is a powerful figure in the AI industry, which has driven record stock market and wider economic gains.

Nvidia’s board, which hired a law firm to investigate the affair with Alice Huang, met to decide Huang’s fate on Wednesday shortly after the New York Times reported that Huang also had an extramarital relationship with a Nvidia vice president who reports to him.

Nvidia’s stock has tumbled since the scandal erupted, falling to a 14-year low, the Reuters news agency reported.

The United States House ⁠of Representatives has blocked an attempt to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a surprise reprieve for President Donald Trump’s administration as Republicans reel from their midterm election defeat.

The impeachment articles were introduced by Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, but the effort was backed primarily by Democrats. They accuse Hegseth of abuses of power and conducting illegal military operations.

The Republican-led House voted 211-204 on Tuesday to refer the articles back to the House Judiciary Committee, where they could remain indefinitely. The procedural move in effect killed the impeachment drive for the duration of the current Congress’s term, which ends in eight weeks. On January 3, Democrats will take control of the House and Senate.

In a twist, the absence of 11 Democratic lawmakers during the vote proved decisive.

Here’s what to know about the vote to block Hegseth’s impeachment and what could happen next:

What was Tuesday’s vote about?

The vote was not on whether to impeach Hegseth. It was on whether to refer the articles of impeachment to the Judiciary Committee, where they may be further investigated or amended.

Such procedural moves are often used as stalling tactics. With the current Congress due to conclude soon, the resolution is unlikely to return to the House floor before its term ends.

Massie called the vote “a procedural motion to kill the resolution”.

What was the result of the vote?

It narrowly passed 211-204.

Massie was the sole Republican to oppose the measure. The remaining votes fell along party lines with Republicans supporting the measure and Democrats opposing it.

Eighteen representatives were absent from the vote – 11 Democrats and seven Republicans. Had the Democrats shown up and voted with their colleagues, they would have had the numbers to defeat the procedural move, forcing a full House vote on whether to impeach Hegseth as early as this week.

Trump cheered the result of Tuesday’s vote in a social media post, saying the Democrats’ impeachment effort had “miserably FAILED!”

Who were the 11 absent Democrats, and why did they miss the vote?

The Democrats absent from the vote were:

• Julia Brownley (California)
• Lou Correa (California)
• Nancy Pelosi (California)
• Laura Gillen (New York)
• Steven Horsford (Nevada)
• Jonathan Jackson (Illinois)
• Brittany Pettersen (Colorado)
• Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico)
• Haley Stevens (Michigan)
• Marilyn Strickland (Washington)
• Frederica Wilson (Florida)

The representatives have given varying explanations for why they did not show up.

Strickland, Jackson, Stansbury and Gillen all blamed a traffic delay in Washington, DC.

Pelosi said she was in her home state for a veterans event while Correa said he was in California before undergoing a health procedure. Horsford’s office cited a personal emergency.

Pettersen, who said she helped introduce articles of impeachment against Hegseth in April, said she had been “denied the ability to vote on this motion” without elaborating.

Jackson, Stansbury, Gillen, Strickland, Horsford, Pelosi and Pettersen all said they would have joined their Democratic colleagues in opposing the measure. Jackson and Stansbury also said they had formally recorded their opposition in the Congressional Record although this does not change the official vote count.

There was no immediate comment from Stevens, Brownley or Wilson on their absences.

Stevens previously criticised the Trump administration for launching the war on Iran with Israel and sought more congressional oversight. But days before the US midterm elections on November 3, the Michigan congresswoman, who had lost the Democratic primary for the state’s open Senate seat earlier to Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers against her own party’s nominee.

Wilson, 83, on Monday attended the groundbreaking for a housing project in Miami-Dade County. Wilson and Brownley, like Stevens, previously opposed Trump’s handling of the war on Iran and demanded the administration seek congressional approval for the fighting.

What has been the reaction?

Democratic politicians and progressive commentators have expressed outrage that poor attendance from Democrats impacted the outcome of the vote.

Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove from California said: “We knew that this vote was coming, so people should have gotten their raggedy selves up these steps to vote.”

“There is no reason why we should have lost this vote because of attendance issues,” she added.

Senator-elect El-Sayed, responding to a question about the absent Democrats, said: “You should show up and do your job.”

Some pundits pointed the finger at Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become the new speaker of the House in January. They accused him of failing to exert sufficient pressure on party members to defeat the measure.

Political commentator Krystal Ball called the vote “a major Hakeem Jeffries fail”.

“You could have impeached the war criminal Pete Hegseth but Dems didn’t show up to vote,” she said.

Progressive writer Laura Bassett said: “Jeffries didn’t even whip the vote. He told people to ‘vote their conscience’, and 11 members of his caucus didn’t show up. This is why people want a stronger leader.”

Could Hegseth still be impeached?

Yes. When the new Democratic-controlled Congress convenes in January, they could begin the process again and will be in a stronger position to advance impeachment articles.

Jeffries has said he will consult members about another potential bid to impeach Hegseth next year. “We’ll have that conversation at the appropriate time,” he said.

However, a vote to impeach Hegseth does not necessarily mean he will be removed from office. Impeachment itself means the House has formally brought charges against a federal official, similar to a criminal indictment.

A successful impeachment vote triggers a trial in Congress’s upper chamber, the Senate, on whether to convict.

A conviction, which immediately removes the official from office, requires at least two-thirds support in the Senate. That means Democrats, even with their incoming majority in the chamber next year, would likely need about a dozen Republicans to join them to secure Hegseth’s removal.

Only eight officials – all federal judges – have ever been convicted by the Senate. Trump has been impeached twice – in December ⁠2019 and January 2021 – but the Senate acquitted him on both occasions.

Kennedy dynasty has filed a motion to stop Trump’s arch from obscuring JFK Eternal Flame and slain family gravesites.

Members of the prominent Kennedy family have filed a legal motion to halt the construction of US President Donald Trump’s 76-metre (250ft) “triumphal arch” in Washington, DC, arguing it mars the area near the graves of the family’s famous forebears.

On Tuesday, the nine plaintiffs, children and grandchildren of former Senators Robert F Kennedy and Edward M Kennedy, filed a motion to intervene and an accompanying complaint in two existing federal lawsuits to block the arch’s construction.

The project would sit near the final resting places of the late senators, buried alongside their brother, former President John F Kennedy, and the Eternal Flame commemorating him at Arlington National Cemetery.

Plaintiffs argued the proposed arch would “fundamentally alter the experience of visiting the gravesites”, a site that draws millions of visitors each year.

The intervention motion was filed by veteran Washington lawyer Norm Eisen and Democracy Defenders Fund, a centre-left legal advocacy group.

It contends that the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior authorised the granite, gold-ornamented structure, dubbed the “Arc de Trump” by critics, without required congressional approval.

The plaintiffs also argue the megastructure would destroy the intentionally designed, century-old line of sight between the Lincoln Memorial and the cemetery’s Arlington House across the Memorial Bridge.

Many plaintiffs

The high-profile intervention adds to an already sprawling roster of plaintiffs who have launched legal challenges against the polarising monument, including Vietnam War veterans, a historian, and the governments of the District of Columbia, Virginia and Arlington County.

Last week, District Judge Tanya Chutkan prohibited the Trump administration from breaking ground on the structure for another 14 days following the string of lawsuits.

Building the arch would be a “permanent denigration” of the gravesites, and the Kennedy offspring “would never again be able to appreciate both sites as they always have before, and as the Kennedy family always intended”, lawyers for the relatives wrote on Tuesday.

The project is just one component of the president’s effort to remodel much of Washington, DC, alongside a historic golf course renovation and threats to demolish the Kennedy Center.

But with Democrats seizing control of Congress in last week’s midterm elections, the overhauls may be set for heightened scrutiny.

Speaking on behalf of the Kennedy family, Rory and Maxwell Kennedy, children of the late senator Robert F Kennedy, said the action is about “protecting sacred spaces that belong to the American people”. They said several members of their slain family are “among the more than 400,000 veterans and family members buried or honored on this hallowed ground”.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a Trump appointee who is estranged from much of his family,  did not join the litigation.

Announcement follows Trump administration crackdown on visa programs for skilled foreign workers.

United States technology giant IBM has said it will stop sponsoring US foreign worker visas and green cards for most roles in its largest division.

A company spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday that its consultancy unit had opted to end sponsorship for most roles.

The company said its participation in US high-skilled visa programmes had been declining for years, adding that the decision came “as skill availability and client needs have evolved”.

IBM Consulting employs more than 150,000 of IBM’s 264,300-strong global workforce.

IBM has become less reliant on so-called H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers in recent years. Only 1,611 H-1B petitions were approved for the company in fiscal year 2026, according to data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration has increased pressure on major companies to cut down on their highly skilled foreign workforce in the US. US President Donald Trump has claimed the programme is often subject to fraud and takes work away from skilled Americans and gives it to immigrants.

Last year, the administration announced it would require a one-time $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions.

The administration said in October it was suspending a number of tech companies from a programme that allows H-1B workers to apply for green cards, saying it was cracking down on fraud and ensuring American workers were not being laid off and replaced by foreigners.

The suspended companies included Adobe and top H-1B employers Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Microsoft.

The suspensions were announced within hours of Trump honouring Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

India-born Nadella was one of six business leaders honoured by Trump. Five were foreign-born US citizens, including Tesla boss Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who immigrated from Russia with his family as a child.

Trump administration awarded more than $60m each to St Louis, Missouri, and Jackson, Mississippi, in crime push.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has said that it will award the cities of St Louis, Missouri, and Jackson, Mississippi, more than $60m each to expand law enforcement resources as part of a bid to combat violent crime.

The White House stated in a social media post on Tuesday that the so-called “Model Cities Initiative” would help the municipalities increase their capacity for prosecutions and policing activities.

“The Model Cities Initiative reflects the Trump Administration’s commitment to reducing crime across the country and ensuring the safety of every American,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press release describing the programme last month.

The initiative has said that it will distribute nearly $300m for such efforts among the cities of St Louis and Jackson, along with Jacksonville, Florida, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The Trump administration has promoted a largely punitive approach to combatting crime in cities across the country, including controversial steps such as the deployment of the National Guard to large, Democrat-led cities that have drawn accusations of executive overreach, civil liberties violations and political intimidation.

While Trump and his supporters have credited their policies with a drop in violent crime, that trend predates his return to office and has taken place in cities with a wide variety of approaches towards criminal justice across the country.

Homicides in St Louis, for example, have been falling for several years after a brief surge during the COVID-19 pandemic, and hit their lowest levels in more than a decade during the first half of 2026.

While Democratic officials have denounced Trump’s crackdowns, some Republican-led states have embraced them.

The government deployed members of several federal agencies to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, governed by Democrats at the local level but located in a Republican-led state.

The Trump administration has touted that effort as an inspiration for the Model Cities Initiative along with other cases, such as Washington, DC.

The government has hailed the Memphis deployment as a success, but some residents and civil liberties groups have accused the task force of widespread civil rights violations and excessive force.

A video released earlier this month as part of an investigation into a shooting by a member of the Tennessee National Guard, deployed in Memphis as part of Trump’s task force, showed the soldiers aiming their guns at a man as he lay dying on the street after being shot in the back.

United States President Donald Trump has said the US plans to seek compensation from countries it “protected” during its war on Iran.

In an interview with CBS News correspondent Ross Douthat that aired Sunday, Trump said such countries would “pay us any and all costs we had for the war”.

“We’re going to get all that money back,” Trump said. “They’re going to do it, 100 percent. Because without us, they wouldn’t exist.”

For the first time, Trump also explicitly spoke of compensation from Israel, which he said “wouldn’t exist” without US military intervention.

The reimbursement demand comes after Trump and his Republican party took a drubbing in midterm elections, which the president has conceded was partly due to public discontent over the Iran war.

The US president has since declared the war “effectively over” militarily, while defending his decision to start the conflict as “a very good decision”.

Here’s what to know about Trump’s demand for repayment, and what it could mean for the US and its allies:

Which countries does Trump want compensation from?

Trump — for the first time — singled out Israel, which was a direct participant in the war against Iran from the outset.

“We decapitated their [Iran’s] nuclear arsenal,” he said. “If I didn’t do that, there would be no Israel right now. Israel would be gone.”

Previously, Trump has said he would seek repayment from Gulf countries that benefit from the US military presence around the embattled Strait of Hormuz, where US forces have been escorting vessels.

“We’re protecting a very rich portion of the world, we’re spending money, and so what we’ve done is we’re going to be reimbursed for protection,” Trump said during a press briefing in July.

He named Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait as countries that should pay.

But while Israel jointly launched the war on Iran with the US, Gulf countries have said that they were not even informed about Washington’s plans, and have since borne the brunt of Iran’s retaliatory attacks. As members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), they have called for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

How much has the Iran war cost the US?

$47.1bn as of mid-October, according to the US military.

But the full cost is likely to be even higher, as that figure excludes the cost of repairing damage to US military bases across the Middle East.

The Congressional Budget Office in September estimated the conflict would carry an additional cost of $2bn-$3bn for each month it continues.

Will Trump actually seek repayment from allies?

Probably not directly, analysts say.

Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s comments are “best understood as political signalling rather than a serious policy proposal.”

Gulf states in particular are likely to take Trump’s comments “with a grain of salt,” added Bader al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University and associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa programme.

“I think what [Trump] stated on an American news channel was for domestic consumption, and I think that’s how most of the Gulf states will take it,” said al-Saif.

Stefan Lukas, an analyst specialising in Middle East and North Africa security and foreign policy, also pointed to Trump’s domestic political considerations, saying the US president has been “looking for someone to blame … and has been doing everything in his power to divert attention from the midterm election results”.

Lukas told Al Jazeera it is unlikely that Washington’s Arab allies in the region will face large compensation payments “or anything similar”.

However, he suggested that Trump could be more serious about seeking economic concessions from Israel, particularly after announcing that the country would no longer receive US aid after the end of this year.

That is partly because, from Trump’s perspective, “Israel pushed him into a disastrous war with Iran”, Lukas said.

What would compensation look like?

Al-Saif said Trump could be “very innovative” in defining what constitutes repayment for the war, potentially pointing to existing trade agreements or investment from the Gulf.

“There’s many agreements for him to go back to and to claim,” said Al-Saif. “There have been a lot of [Gulf] pledges for investment in the US.”

Farid Boussaid, an assistant professor in Middle East politics at the University of Amsterdam, said Washington could push for further Gulf investment and present it as compensation.

“This will most likely be indirect and take the form of commercial investments in the US, buying of US weapons systems – on top of what has already been ordered – and investments into close associates of Trump’s financial dealings,” said Boussaid.

Trump has repeatedly made misleading claims about foreign investment and trade agreements in the past, portraying them as payments or gifts to the US.

After a July 2025 trade deal with the European Union, Trump claimed the bloc had given the US a $600bn “gift” that could be invested in “anything we want”. However, the framework agreement referred only to an expectation that European companies would invest $600bn across strategic sectors in the US through 2028.

The same month, Trump described a $550bn investment pledge from Japan, under a new US-Japan trade agreement, as being “like a signing bonus that a baseball player would get”.

During Trump’s first term, he repeatedly claimed that Mexico would pay for a border wall – which was never completed and which Mexico did not pay for. Trump later qualified his claim to say that Mexico would reimburse the US for the wall or pay for a “piece” of it, which also never happened. Trump at one point claimed that the benefits of a trade pact he negotiated with Mexico would cover the cost of the wall.

How will US allies react to Trump’s demands?

Having already suffered extensive financial losses during the war, the US’s Gulf allies will not take well to being asked to pay more for a war they did not start, say analysts.

Quilliam said Gulf leaders would likely respond to any demand for direct repayment with “quiet resistance”, arguing that they “already contribute significantly to the cost of regional security through defence cooperation, investment and economic partnerships with the US”.

Gulf states also pay for the maintenance of several large bases that the US uses for military operations in the region.

Boussaid said Gulf states will be particularly averse to such a demand as “the US-Israeli war led to considerable damage to their [civilian] and military infrastructure when Iran struck back”.

Al-Saif added that Trump’s “condescending language does not bode well for partners long invested in the relationship with the US”.

As for Israel, it looks unlikely to “reverse its longstanding role as a recipient rather than a provider of support in its relationship with the US”, according to Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani, assistant professor of politics and international relations of the Middle East at Durham University.

“While Israel and the United States continue to share intelligence and coordinate on regional security issues, any request for Israel to shoulder a meaningful share of the financial burden would run against established practice and Israel’s present resource constraints,” she said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s intimate relationship with a woman accused of being a Chinese spy has highlighted divisions in Washington over the export of advanced chips to China.

Huang, the head of one of the most critical firms in the global artificial intelligence race, has long been among Silicon Valley’s most powerful voices arguing against restrictions on high-end chip sales.

For years, the tech executive lobbied United States President Donald Trump to loosen export controls, finding allies in sympathetic administration figures such as David Sacks, Trump’s former AI tsar.

Whereas hawkish voices argued that Beijing should not have access to cutting-edge US technology on national security grounds, Huang and like-minded executives argued that China already had the computing power to make strides in AI and that wider uptake of US technology would help maintain its dominance in the field.

Jensen Huang’s lobbying now faces intense scrutiny following claims that former Megaspeed executive Alice Huang — with whom he had an affair — was an intelligence agent recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied the allegations, calling them “entirely groundless, speculative and intended to smear and malign China”.

Alice Huang has not publicly commented on the claims, which The New York Times and the Financial Times first reported, citing unnamed US intelligence officials.

Nvidia’s board of directors on Sunday launched an inquiry into Jensen Huang’s relationship, pledging to examine “all available information” while also expressing confidence in the CEO.

Jensen Huang, who cofounded Nvidia in 1993, has pledged to cooperate fully with the inquiry and expressed his commitment to protecting Nvidia and US national security.

Trump has meanwhile said the FBI too is investigating whether Huang’s affair led to any compromise on US national security.

Already, US lawmakers have invoked the controversy to push for tighter restrictions on China’s access to US chips.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Jim Banks on Monday called on the US Congress to take “decisive action” and pass their AI Overwatch Act, which would empower lawmakers to scrutinise and potentially halt exports of advanced chips to China and other adversaries.

“The Commerce Department should complement these efforts with immediate action to close export control loopholes and ensure that advanced AI chips are not going to China’s military,” Warren and Banks said in a joint statement.

Democratic House Representative Bill Foster also cited Jensen Huang’s relationship in a statement on Monday in which he called on his fellow lawmakers to get his Chip Security Act “across the finish line”.

The legislation, cosponsored by Republican House Representative Bill Huizenga, aims to prevent illicit smuggling to countries such as China by implementing measures to track the location of chips sent overseas.

Advocates of tighter restrictions now have a “much stronger political argument” and are likely to make use of it, said Rui Ma, a tech industry consultant and founder of Tech Buzz China.

“Chip exports to China have been deeply divisive in Washington, and Huang has been one of the strongest advocates for keeping that market open,” Ma told Al Jazeera.

“If his influence is diminished by this investigation, regardless of its eventual findings, those pushing for tighter restrictions will be in a much stronger position,” she said.

Trump, who has forged a close relationship with Jensen Huang since returning to the White House, has taken several actions to make it easier for chip makers to do business with China, while also maintaining significant export controls.

In May last year, the US Department of Commerce announced that it would scrap the previous Biden administration’s “AI Diffusion Rule”, which would have imposed caps on chip exports to more than 100 countries, including some US allies.

In December, Trump said he had granted Nvidia approval to sell its second-most powerful chip, the H200, to China under an arrangement that would see 25 percent of sales paid to the US government.

Nvidia, which controls an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the market for graphics processing units (GPUs) used to run frontier AI, welcomed the decision at the time, saying it would “support high-paying jobs and manufacturing in America”.

On the other hand, Trump has resisted calls to allow exports of Nvidia’s top-of-the-line Blackwell chips, which deliver about 2.5 times the performance of the H200.

“I think recent events likely increase attention on export control loopholes, and add momentum to bills already being discussed in Congress, like the Chip Security Act,” Erich Grunewald, a senior researcher at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, a Washington, DC-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.

While export controls have spurred contentious debate, their effectiveness has been called into question amid China’s steady advances in AI development.

Authorities and analysts have documented widespread smuggling of restricted chips into China, mainly through Southeast Asia.

Chips with compute power equivalent to 1.6 million Nvidia H100s made their way to China in violation of export restrictions up to the end of 2025, according to an estimate by Epoch AI.

Chinese companies have also been able to bypass US law by remotely accessing compute capacity supplied by Nvidia-powered data centres in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

Gabriel Wildau, managing director at global business advisory firm Teneo, said claims that Huang had been ensnared in an espionage campaign deserved to be treated with skepticism given the anonymous leaks and motives to discredit him and his company.

“President Trump shows no sign that he intends to disrupt the current US-China rapprochement, but he may face new pressure from Congress and hawkish voices inside his administration to address the remote access issue,” Wildau, who focuses on political risk analysis in China, told Al Jazeera.

Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have already met twice this year: The US president visited Beijing in May, and the Chinese leader reciprocated with a state visit to Washington in September. They are scheduled to meet again next week when Trump visits Shenzhen for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. And they are expected to meet a fourth time in 2026 in December, when Trump hosts the G20 summit in Miami.

“The risk is that Washington acts to close this loophole [in the aftermath of the Huang controversy], and Beijing regards the action as a violation of the bilateral truce,” Wildau said, referring to the trade truce Trump struck with Xi during their summit in South Korea last year.

Chris Clague, an associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said the revelations about Jensen Huang would inevitably undermine the “legitimate” argument in favour of allowing tech transfers between the US and China.

“This has made it a little bit easier for his detractors to poke holes in that,” Clague told Al Jazeera. “It’s indicative of the tensions that exist between the US and China, which are never going away, but it shouldn’t derail efforts at finding some sort of compromise.”

ATLANTA — Former President Biden writes in his White House memoir that Donald Trump, at once his predecessor and successor, has deeply damaged the country and world with an administration determined to “tear down institutions and inflame hatreds.”

And the 83-year-old Democrat said the 80-year-old Trump’s years of lies about his 2020 defeat to Biden and the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol should “follow him to his grave.”

Biden’s sweeping indictment comes in the first excerpt of “Promise Me, America,” published Monday by the Atlantic. The 46th president’s full memoir is set for a Nov. 17 release. Biden said that while doctors are encouraged by his response to cancer treatment, his activities promoting the book will be limited because of his health.

“Donald Trump led an insurrection,” Biden wrote of the attack by Trump supporters as Congress met to certify the 2020 election won by the Democrat. “His goal was to remain in power after the American people had voted him out of office.

“The rioters weren’t ‘peaceful protesters,” he wrote. “They came armed to stop the official certification of a legitimate election.” He chided Trump for later issuing more than 1,500 pardons of the offenders.

“To this day, Trump and his supporters continue to preen and posture like they’re supporters of law enforcement,” Biden wrote. “Here’s my view: You don’t get to turn a blind eye to cops being punched, speared, sprayed, and brutalized and call yourself a friend of law enforcement. What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave.”

Biden also laments Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and his aggressive reversal of many of his policies, especially those intended to address climate change.

“All presidents must confront a feeling that their legacy is vulnerable to the pendulum of politics and the whims of their successors,” Biden wrote. “In my case, that feeling was magnified by the dismissive and destructive nature of Donald Trump, who seemed unable to tolerate the idea that someone else’s accomplishments might be worth building on rather than tearing down.”

The memoir’s release comes on the heels of Biden’s fellow Democrats trouncing Republicans in the midterm elections, securing stunningly broad House and Senate majorities and flipping control of several statehouses in a comprehensive rebuke of Trump’s second presidency. But Trump’s return to power two years earlier was itself a rejection of Biden’s one White House term, and many voters still harbor skeptical views of his presidency and his party.

In a lengthy social media post on Sunday, Biden pitched his memoir as the best way he can explain his presidency, “the challenges we faced, the decisions I made and why I made them.”

During his four years in office, Biden confronted the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, and he worked to restore global alliances that Trump frayed. But he faced widespread concerns about his age, and he abandoned his reelection bid after a disastrous June 2024 debate with Trump. Dogged by lingering inflation and other concerns, Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, lost to Trump that November.

Months after leaving office, Biden announced that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He opened up about his condition in his Sunday social media post, saying he “won’t be able to do as many conversations about my book as I’d hoped” and urging people to let the book speak for him.

Biden said his doctors “continue to be encouraged by how I’ve responded to treatment.” But, he acknowledged, “Some days are better than others. It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down.”

In the excerpt, Biden recounts an unusual Oval Office meeting with Trump days after the 2020 election — well before the Jan. 6 riots.

“‘You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends,’” Trump said, according to Biden.

Trump even commented “that he’d been relieved he didn’t have to run against me,” Biden added.

Public polling at the time Biden dropped his reelection bid showed him trailing Trump, and Democrats pushed for him to yield out of fear that he could not win.

Biden said he used the meeting to give Trump “a tour of the world,” including the Ukraine-Russia war, NATO alliances, Israel and Gaza and China-U.S. relations. Biden said Trump “focused on the personalities” of world leaders rather than the substance of international relations.

He said that two-hour meeting left him worried Trump would indeed dismantle much of his presidency. He wrote that Trump’s opening weeks — his Day One executive orders and everything that followed — confirmed his worries about a “crueler government” that “tried to tear down institutions and inflame hatreds” and a president who “took a wrecking ball to our traditions.”

The memoir’s title echoes an earlier Biden book, “Promise Me, Dad,” that he wrote about his son Beau’s cancer and death — a parallel that implicitly acknowledges the former president’s age, condition and the reality that he may not have a long post-presidency to see the direction of the country and the evolution of his legacy.

In that first book, released between Biden’s vice presidency and his 2020 presidential bid, he explained that the title came directly from a father-son conversation around Thanksgiving in 2014.

“Promise me, Dad. Give me your word that no matter what happens, you’re going to be all right,” Biden recalled Beau saying. Beau Biden died six months later.

In his Sunday post, Biden repeated an argument he made often when campaigning and during his presidency, saying the U.S. is unique because it was “built on an idea” that “all of us are created equal.”

“Promise me, America,” he concluded, that “we’ll never forget it.”

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

A lawsuit had sought to block border wall construction in the Big Bend National Park by targeting the waivers that sidestep environmental protections.

The United States Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to build a border wall through a remote section of Big Bend National Park in West Texas.

In its decision on Monday, the court granted the government’s emergency request to lift a lower court’s injunction that had paused construction while the matter was litigated.

The injunction, it said, “impedes the Government from advancing its ‘compelling interests’ in border security and integrity”.

The border wall has long been a signature part of Trump’s platform to restrict immigration into the US.

During his first successful bid for the presidency in 2016, for instance, he rallied supporters with chants of “Build the wall!”

But the push to expand the border barrier through the popular national park has met pushback from conservationists, local officials and some members of Trump’s own Republican Party.

Big Bend National Park includes mountain ranges and desert that serve as a home to endangered species like the Mexican long-nosed bat.

Opponents say the plan to build the wall through the park would disrupt the ecologically and culturally significant landscape.

The Trump administration, however, has depicted the project as an urgent priority for national security and immigration control. It has described the Big Bend area as an artery for irregular border crossings and drug trafficking.

US District Judge Kathleen Cardone blocked the construction in October, noting that while the Big Bend sector makes up more than 25 percent of the US-Mexico border, it accounts for only 0.3 to 2.2 percent of migrant apprehensions.

“Therefore, if the Big Bend Sector is an area of high illegal entry, so is every other sector, and the waiver authority would apply to the entire US-Mexico border,” Cardone wrote.

The Supreme Court, however, said the government was “exceedingly likely to prevail” on its argument that Cardone lacked jurisdiction under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which limits the ability of lower courts to rule on border barriers.

Under that law, district courts can only hear claims alleging a violation of the US Constitution. The Supreme Court found that the challengers’ claim did not qualify, writing that “there is no such thing as a ‘constitutional’ major-questions claim”.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only justice to indicate she would have denied the government’s request. She did not explain her reasoning.

The Center for Biological Diversity was among the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, along with Friends of the Ruidosa Church and a local river guide and landowner.

The lawsuit challenged waivers used by the agency to fast-track border construction and sidestep environmental and conservation laws.

Without those waivers, plaintiffs said that construction would have to comply with laws such as the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act to alter the landscape in “one of the most remote and ecologically and culturally significant landscapes in the United States”.

After initially congratulating Democrats on their midterm wins, which he said he was “absolutely willing to accept,” President Trump posted a baseless missive to social media about not trusting early ballot totals or voting machines.

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” he wrote.

The post was a return to the unsubstantiated election denial that has animated his political career since its inception. It was also the latest swing in public messaging from the president and his administration since Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress and key governorships across the country last week.

Trump — notoriously hard to pin down and prone to meandering tangents — has waffled for nearly a week now on several key policy positions. Other leaders in his administration have split on the same issues, further confusing the public.

On Friday, Trump named Stephen Miller — chief architect of his administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown — as his new chief of staff, which many took as an unambiguous sign that Trump intends to double down on those policies through the second half of his term.

In a “60 Minutes” interview taped the same day and aired Sunday, Trump said that some of those same policies were “too tough,” and that he was open to working with Democrats to find a pathway for undocumented but law-abiding immigrants to remain in the country legally.

On Monday, Trump said he hadn’t told Miller to change his approach, that his administration has a “very strong deportation policy” and that there would be “no amnesty, no anything” for undocumented immigrants, though the administration will be focusing on “the worst of the worst.”

“My policy hasn’t changed,” he said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted, “If you are here illegally, we will find you, arrest you, and DEPORT you.”

After Vice President JD Vance last week blamed the party’s stunning losses squarely on the Iran war, Trump acknowledged that the war — and the spiking gas prices it caused — probably hurt his party at the polls.

But he has since dismissed growing calls from both sides of the aisle for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to be fired, claimed the war has already been “won,” and suggested Americans’ displeasure with the economy was based on little more than bad messaging on the nation’s economic “numbers,” which he claimed are strong.

Hegseth said he wasn’t going to get into a “finger pointing exercise” over Vance’s remarks, but that the war “doesn’t have to be necessarily popular” to be necessary.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s shifting postelection messaging.

Leading Democrats, smelling political blood and preparing to take control in Washington, have seized on Trump’s vacillations and doubling down on unpopular positions to paint him as badly out of touch and stubbornly resistant to the will of the American people.

After his Friday appointment of Miller, for example, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote, “The American people just delivered Donald Trump a historic rejection. So naturally, he hands keys to the architect of his most cruel and inhumane policies. Absolutely disgraceful.”

After Trump’s post Monday about voting machines, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote, “Donald Trump’s pathetic return to election denialism was inevitable. He can whine all he wants, but nothing will stop this inescapable truth: For the last two years of his presidency, Trump will face the largest Democratic congressional majorities in decades, all because he has been an unprecedented failure.”

Experts who have long studied the president’s rhetoric said it should come as no surprise, as it is perfectly in line with his mantra of never admitting defeat, never accepting blame and never showing weakness — even in the face of an overwhelming defeat.

“He is caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.” “He’s seen the anger of the country, but he’s trying desperately to blame someone else — when all of the data says that this was mostly about him and the results or failures of his policies.”

After Republicans suffered substantial midterm losses in 2006, President George W. Bush acknowledged his party got a “thumping” and immediately fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was closely tied to the unpopular Iraq war. After Democrats suffered losses in 2010, President Obama acknowledged what he called a “shellacking” and also recalibrated, becoming less “post-partisan” in his messaging and more pragmatic, Rowland said.

Trump’s message about working with Democrats on certain issues could be seen as his own attempt to pivot, if only slightly, Rowland said, but it has been completely undermined by his moves to elevate Miller and reject accountability from Hegseth and others tied to the Iran war.

More than anything, Rowland said Trump’s baseline instinct is to project masculine power and deny culpability for any political failings, in part to hold on to his MAGA base, which is “pretty much all he has left,” and in part to resist any move by Republican moderates to reclaim power in the party.

“He doesn’t want to send any messages of weakness that would allow the remaining Reagan Republicans to kind of stick their heads back up and try to become involved again in conservative politics,” and is loath to “fire any of the men who screw up for him” lest he undercut his message of masculine power, Rowland said.

Trump is ultimately desperate to leave a mark — as evidenced by his ballroom and other vanity projects in Washington — and cares less about substantial policy accomplishments than “his name being in lights in historical terms,” Rowland said.

In his “60 Minutes” interview Sunday, Trump repeatedly avoided accepting blame. Instead, he suggested those who disagreed with him were wrong or misunderstand the reality before them.

He said the American people’s displeasure with the economy, for instance, was due to “bad messaging,” which he blamed in part on the press not covering “positive news for Republicans.”

Others in his administration have also dug in on pre-midterm messaging about the Trump administration being on the side of the American people, ignoring the fact that the electorate clearly and resoundingly rejected its policies last week.

Miller took an immediately combative tone after his promotion to chief of staff was announced, writing on X that Trump has saved the nation “from those who would destroy it,” and that the “mission now is more clear than ever: Fight with all of our soul to support our President and defend this magnificent Republic.”

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote on X, “While Americans enjoyed their weekend, the patriots of [ICE] worked around the clock to arrest and remove dangerous criminals from our communities, including murderers, pedophiles, and sexual predators.”

Over the weekend, Hegseth posted a video to U.S. military troops, telling them, “Don’t blink. Ignore the noise. Never hesitate.”

“You see, all this is politics. You do real things. 
You stay the course. And as always, President Trump leads the way. And I’ll assure you, we have only just begun to fight,” Hegseth said.

Whether such bravado will hold is unclear.

On Monday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth, calling for his ouster on eight charges, including for “waging the Iran war despite no declaration of war, statutory authorization, attack on the United States, or imminent threat”; for launching “extrajudicial killings” against alleged drug smugglers in offshore boats; and for the “kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader,” a reference to the U.S. capture of now-former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

About the same time, Trump posted an AI-generated video of Ultimate Fighting Championship Chief Executive Dana White serving as White House press secretary, telling reporters to “sit down and shut up.”

Hours later, he and White were actually in the White House briefing room — where Trump defended the Iran war as “won” by the U.S., called Massie a “loser” and said he will “stand by” Hegseth even if he’s impeached.

“He won two wars,” Trump said.

United States President Donald Trump has signalled that he considers the US-Israeli war against Iran “effectively” at an end, after meeting with mediators from Qatar.

In a surprise briefing on Monday, Trump reiterated his position that the US had destroyed Iran’s military. But his remarks suggested he faced pressure from allies in the Middle East to bring hostilities to a close.

“Iran, militarily, is effectively over. We’re just keeping it the status quo,” he said. “We’re doing that really at the behest of countries that are their neighbours.”

The US president clarified that the “status quo” would involve continuing the US naval blockade against Iranian ports, as well as the newly announced Task Force Iron Gate, which seeks to cut off trade by land and through the Caspian Sea.

“Much was discussed with respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump said.

“Most importantly, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and others would prefer the status quo, that we remain as is — in other words, a continuation of the greatest naval blockade in the history of our country. Probably in the history of the world.”

Trump’s comments come shortly after he and Vice President JD Vance hosted Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani at the White House to discuss the Iran war.

The prime minister posted on social media that he was “grateful for the positive discussions on reaching a deal and bringing peace to the region”.

It is unclear whether Trump’s latest statements significantly change US posture in the war. Trump himself declined to commit to any long-term ceasefire.

“I don’t guarantee anything,” he told the White House briefing room. “But if we do have to go back in, we are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Iranian officials, meanwhile, dismissed Trump’s latest remarks as a distraction. Both sides have claimed victory throughout the conflict.

“The war on Iran has already wrecked the US government. But Washington flails like a desperate gambler,” Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei wrote in a post on social media.

“FOLD YOUR HAND. STOP manufacturing FAKE NEWS about imaginary talks.”

Separately, through Iran’s state-aligned Tasnim News Agency, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei had called for an end to the situation, which he described as “neither war nor peace”.

Pezeshkian added that Iran was open to further negotiations but would not be coerced. “We will not surrender to force and bullying,” he said.

Since the war on Iran began on February 28, the conflict has spilled into surrounding countries and roiled international trade.

Almost as soon as the US and Israel began their attacks, Iran moved to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for fossil fuels and fertiliser, among other goods.

Iran has also responded to US and Israeli strikes with missile and drone fire in countries like Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE, with many of the attacks targeting US military installations.

Other, related conflicts have since emerged. Saudi Arabia has renewed its fighting with the Iran-backed Houthis, and Israel began its occupation of southern Lebanon, as well as deadly airstrikes.

In the nearly nine months since the war began, the US offensive against Iran has grown sporadic, with intermittent exchanges of fire. In recent days, for instance, the Trump administration announced “minor strikes” against Iran’s Qeshm Island.

It also offered a $20m reward for the “information about Iran’s nuclear program, including its facilities, equipment, and associated personnel”.

After the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, Trump had claimed that Iran’s uranium enrichment programme had been obliterated. But he has since made curtailing Iran’s nuclear programme a central premise for the ongoing war.

Iran has long denied seeking a nuclear weapon, maintaining its uranium enrichment programme is for the purposes of civilian energy generation.