President Donald Trump said U.S. and Iranian officials met Tuesday, shortly after he threatened in his address to the U.N. General Assembly that he may “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if a deal isn’t reached soon to end nearly seven-month war. Trump told reporters about the meeting but offered few details about the talks.
Trump returned to the U.N. General Assembly at a tumultuous moment for the world — and for his presidency.
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The president used his address to tick off progress — including adding private sector jobs, stemming illegal migration and curbing crime — before defending his decision to start a war with Iran. He accused Iran of stalling to make a deal to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz and negotiate an endgame to the war until after the midterm elections in the U.S.
The global economy, meanwhile, continues to roil from the war.
Trump later held talks with new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
Also, Trump is hosting Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington this week as economic and tech competition escalates between the two countries. Both leaders are aiming to stabilize fragile ties, though no major agreements are expected. The meeting itself is seen as significant given the deep differences and a lack of trust between the United States and China.
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Later the delegation’s head, Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodríguez, rejected what he called the “falsehoods” and “slanders.”
“The US government is unable to accept that Cuba is, and has the right to be, a fully independent and sovereign country,” Rodríguez wrote on X.
“The economic blockade, including the energy siege, only threatens Cuba and the rest of the nations. It is an act of genocide and collective punishment. We are a country of peace and we deserve peace,” he said.
The joint military command said in a statement that his threats during his speech to the U.N. General Assembly were intended for “domestic propaganda” rather than reflecting realities on the ground.
The statement added that repeated U.S. threats amid what it described as military “wear and tear” showed “strategic desperation,” warning that Iran is “in full preparedness to inflict even more severe, crushing, and unpredictable blows” to the U.S. and Israel.
The former vice president said it is “abhorrent” for the president to strip CNN, Politico and MS Now of their White House press credentials.
“That man is afraid of the voice of the people and that the people understand and know what he’s doing,” she told reporters after an event with Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
The media outlets have filed a joint federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s actions as a violation of the First and Fifth amendments.
As Harris has ramped up her political activity in this midterm election year, she has navigated Trump carefully. She criticizes her 2024 presidential campaign rival when asked, as she did during her book tour last year. But she has not been as aggressive as some other potential 2028 presidential candidates in issuing statements or social media posts at every notable turn of Trump’s turbulent second presidential term.
In a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker said that had the White House asked him for advice, he would have suggested that Trump not invite the Chinese leader “based on all of the troubling issues we have with President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Wicker suggested a list of topics that Trump could discuss with Xi at the state dinner on Thursday, even though “I would not have scheduled such a thing.”
“As guests converse over the meal, the president might inquire about the purposes of China’s massive military buildup, or about China’s clear support for Iran,” Wicker said.
Wicker said that “during every minute of dialogue” Trump should keep in mind that “his guest is a brutal, unelected and oppressive dictator who seeks to dominate his neighbors and whose massive military arsenal is aimed directly at the United States of America.”
The former vice president and Michigan Senate nominee spent more than an hour sitting side-by-side at a Black-led birth center for a roundtable about Black maternal health and mortality.
“I’m here to support Dr. El-Sayed because on this subject, I know he will be a champion,” Harris said.
It is Harris’s opening campaign trip of the midterms’ fall campaign stretch.
For El-Sayed, it was an opportunity to have the first Black vice president vouch for him in Wayne County, where he struggled with Black voters in his narrow primary victory last month.
Harris said the election was a chance to provide a “stopgap” against the Trump administration.
She will attend a local NAACP event later Tuesday.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said during a news conference that 34-year-old Damon Matai Seei was arrested on Tuesday and appeared in federal court in Salt Lake City to be arraigned.
It wasn’t immediately clear who Seei’s attorney was.
Prosecutors said Seei discarded the mail-in ballots in a dumpster soon after his shift began in early June, when Utah was conducting a primary election. Officials did not give a motive, but Melissa Holyoak, the U.S. attorney for Utah, said Seei indicated there was no political agenda.
The Trump administration has pledged an additional $31 million in flood assistance for Nepal as it struggles to recover from devastating floods that hit the Nepalese-Chinese border last month.
The new funding announced on Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly brings the total amount of U.S. flood aid to $36 million since the August 26th disaster, two senior officials said.
Several million dollars of the assistance is being devoted to forensic analysis and identification of victims. Sixty-nine Americans remain missing and are presumed dead on the Nepalese side of the border.
The U.S. president said that his two diplomatic representatives, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, had “a very productive meeting today” with Iranian mediators.
Trump suggested there is momentum for a peace deal with Iran. The president has previously that the war with Iran that began at the end of February would only last a few weeks, only for the conflict to continue and keep energy prices elevated.
Trump was speaking at a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council and was joined by officials from Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The oil industry’s top lobbying group is warning the Trump administration that a possible ban on diesel exports could exacerbate refining challenges and hurt consumers.
Trump said Tuesday he has asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to examine whether an export ban could help stem rising domestic diesel prices, which have spiked above $6 per gallon.
Mike Sommers, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, said that while he understands “Americans are hurting from rising diesel costs driven by an unprecedented disruption to global refining capacity” because of the Iran war, an export ban “would only compound the problem.”
Sommers said “the answer is more supply and more flexibility — not new restrictions that risk making a difficult situation worse.”
Farm state senators, including Republicans, have urged an ban on diesel exports.
The president has asked members of the U.S.-created “Shield of the Americas” bloc to collectively impose sanctions on two dozen criminal gangs and cartels that his administration has accused of “narcoterrorism” throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Trump made the call at a meeting with leaders and senior officials from the bloc held at United Nations headquarters on Tuesday on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly. Should the group agree, its members will join the United States in blacklisting 24 gangs as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
That designation brings with it a variety of sanctions depending on each nation’s laws and opens them up to potential military action.
“I’m asking all nations in the Shield of the Americas to formally designate narcoterrorists as common threats to stability and apply crushing sanctions against all 24 US designated foreign terrorist organizations,” Trump said. It was not immediately clear if all the members had agreed.
The former vice president and 2024 presidential nominee is at Birth Detroit, a Black-led birth center, with Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee.
Harris and El-Sayed are sitting beside each other at a U-shaped table with community representatives to talk about policies that affect health outcomes for Black women and their children.
El-Sayed needs to shore up his support among Black voters as he tries to hold a critical Senate seat for Democrats. El-Sayed’s primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, carried the Detroit area and Republican nominee Mike Rogers has been campaigning there hoping to limit the usual Democratic advantage.
For Harris, the visit launches the public phase of her midterm campaigning for fellow Democrats. Some Democrats around the country have said they don’t want the 2024 presidential nominee’s help as she considers whether to seek the presidency again in 2028.
Harris lost Michigan narrowly two years ago.
Ukraine has continued to press the U.S. for more Patriot interceptors to defend against Russia’s ballistic missiles, but is yet to get any confirmation, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters at the United Nations on Tuesday
“They are positive to help us, but I didn’t get the very concrete answer,” Zelenskyy said.
Defense experts say the U.S. has been experiencing a global shortage of Patriot interceptors because many have been expended to defend against Iranian attacks on U.S. and allied bases in Middle East.
Zelenskyy spoke of the urgency of needing the weapons, which can shoot down Russia’s more advanced ballistic missiles. The shortage in Ukraine has left Kyiv and other cities increasingly exposed to devastating attacks.
“I’m asking United States to help me now, to help our people, to save our people,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon described HBCUs as “engines of opportunity” in announcing the funding increase during a White House summit of school leaders.
Trump has long called himself a champion of HBCUs. During his first term, Congress added $250 million a year for HBCUs. And last year the administration redirected nearly $500 million in federal funding toward HBCUs and tribal colleges, an investment covered primarily by cuts to other colleges serving large numbers of minority students.
Trump also signed an executive action last year that pledged the annual White House summit, an advisory board and other support for HBCUs. While that executive action won praise from some Black universities, it drew pushback from the NAACP, which described the president’s executive action as hypocritical coming on the heels of efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across the country.
The first lady held a luncheon in New York City for members of her Fostering the Future Together program.
Several upcoming events will be hosted by her counterparts during the ASEAN summit in the Philippines, a European regional meeting in Poland and a Caribbean regional meeting in St. Kitts and Nevis.
Melania Trump said she will host a meeting during the G20 summit in Miami in December.
Nearly 60 countries have joined the program, which encourages countries to support children through technology and education.
She also announced new partnerships with several leading technology companies. Tim Cook, the immediate past CEO of Apple, was in the audience.
“The future of our world will be determined by what we do for our children today,” Melania Trump said.
City Attorney David Chiu, a Democrat, alleged that by offering early access to Trump’s post on U.S. policy, Trump Media & Technology –- which owns Truth Social –- violated federal ethics laws and facilitated insider trading.
“This scheme turns the public trust into private profit,” Chiu said in a statement. “It is corruption, plain and simple.”
The move comes weeks after Trump was sued for making money off of the new paid service. Trump Media argued that the plaintiffs were trying to silence him.
In a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a Democratic senator says the president’s 250-foot (76-meter) “Triumphal Arch will cast a shadow over some of our nation’s most historic monuments and memorials.”
Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, join other lawmakers opposing the project.
Earlier, Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., said Trump’s plan to house drones and snipers at the arch for national security is “a ludicrous pretext to force construction through, just as he did with his wildly expensive White House ballroom boondoggle.”
Sitting next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the United Nations, Trump told reporters that both Russia and Ukraine want to see the war between them end.
The U.S. president struck an optimistic tone about concluding the conflict.
Trump said he’d be willing to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin again, although he didn’t commit to where or when.
“I think we’re going to make a deal,” he said. “And I don’t want to say what the deal is. We talked about it a lot, including with President Putin, and I think something’s going to happen.”
Trump also said the U.S. is discussing with Ukraine the production of Patriot missile interceptors there.
More than 100 Democratic lawmakers are calling on Homeland Security officials to cease any efforts to interfere with a comprehensive investigation into the shooting of a Venezuelan man by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Austin, Texas.
The lawmakers said in their letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE Director David Venturella they are deeply concerned ICE is attempting to swiftly deport Wilber Rafael Garces Perez to impede an independent investigation.
“Mr. Garces Perez is a key witness to this shooting, and given ICE’s history of obscuring the facts in similar investigations, he must not be removed,” the lawmakers wrote.
They said Garces Perez and the ICE agent who short him must remain in Texas until a thorough investigation is complete.
The Democratic lawmakers called on DHS officials to respond by next Monday on why agents used deadly force, whether they followed policy requiring them to render medical aid and whether ICE will release all bodycam footage.
They also called for Garces Perez to be released from detention so he can receive medical treatment, though he was in the hospital on Monday night, according to his attorney.
In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the senators expressed concern about the health and safety of Reza Valizadeh, a former broadcast journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Persian language service, on the two-year anniversary of his detention.
“We ask that his freedom and welfare be an urgent priority,” wrote Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and others.
They noted that Rubio himself had recognized Valizadeh as “wrongfully detained.”
Valizadeh is serving a 10-year term in the notorious Evin Prison on charges stemming from his work, and his health has significantly deteriorated in custody, they said.
Florida Republican Byron Donalds, who is running for governor, overhauled his campaign website, which now no longer includes prominent references to President Donald Trump.
Donalds’ earlier website included a photo of him with the president and said “Trump-Endorsed” and “Endorsed by President Trump!”
The change was first reported by the Miami Herald.
The new site hasn’t totally removed references to the president, whose social media post praising Donalds is still included in a rotating display of similar posts from others and includes a photo of the president under an endorsements section.
Donalds’ campaign said in a statement it’s proud to have the president’s endorsement and called the attention on the changes “FAKE NEWS.”
The shift comes as some Republican candidates have quietly begun to distance themselves in subtle ways from Trump now that they’ve won contested primaries in which his endorsement was often the most coveted prize.
With voters facing higher fuel prices ahead of the midterm elections, Trump is exploring a ban on selling diesel abroad.
“I’ve called for it,” the president said in response to a reporter’s question “I’ve called for it within my people. I’ve been talking about it.”
The president said he has asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to examine if an export ban could help to curb inflation.
Bessent said at Trump’s prompting: “We’re examining that, whether it’s feasible in terms of the overall refining capacity and whether a full or partial ban would work.”
Trump said the timeline for the decision would be “fast.”
Trump told reporters U.S. and Iranian officials met on Tuesday for talks he said went on for three hours.
Earlier, Trump had threatened in his address to the U.N. General Assembly that he may “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if deal isn’t reached soon to end the nearly seven month war.
Trump offered few details. “It was a very good meeting,” he said.
