Trump news – live: President returns to golf course while looming Hurricane Dorian sparks evacuation of one million people
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump has failed to inspire confidence in his handling of Hurricane Dorian, returning to his Virginia golf course on Labor Day after wrongly warning the storm could come as far inland as Alabama and claiming never to have previously heard of a Category 5 natural disaster, despite this being the fourth of his presidency.
With Dorian causing devastation in the Bahamas and bringing mass evacuations to Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, Mr Trump has been branded “the global poster-boy for white nationalism” by London mayor Sadiq Khan and is under renewed pressure to take meaningful steps on gun control following the latest mass shooting in Texas.
The president had also spent his Saturday playing 18 holes after ducking out of Second World War commemorations in Poland and on Sunday resumed old Twitter beefs with ex-FBI director James Comey and the Federal Reserve and started a new one by attacking Will & Grace star Debra Messing.
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In the last hour, Trump has continued to bash out retweets from the National Hurricane Center (so that's Dorian off the to-do list then) and resumed attacking the press.
"All I do is call them out for the horrible things they have said," he gripes, which is at least true. That is all he does.
On his point about fact-checking, the media seems to spend more and more of it's time trying to keep up with the many inaccuricies he spouts. See this morning's two false claims about Dorian by way of an example.
This Statista graph details the economic consequences of the most damaging hurricanes to have struck the US over the last 28 years.
It's interesting that Trump says he's never heard of a Category 5 storm as the second, third and fifth most costly ever arrived during his first year in office!
Speaking of which, yesterday's FEMA press conference appears to be the fifth time he's made the same claim.
Trump is now retweeting the news - courtesy of the US Coast Guard and the Ventura County Fire Department in California - of the rescue operation underway off the coast of Santa Cruz Island after a boat caught fire. As many as 34 people are feared dead.
Here's Phil Thomas's breaking report on the disaster.
An update on Mike Pence's travel plans in Ireland - he's going massively out of his way to humour his boss by staying at the Trump golf resort at Doonbeg on the west of the country while taking meetings in Dublin on the east.
Two contrasting messages for Labor Day - Hillary Clinton hails the historic achievements of the American labour movement, Trump picks a fight with a union leader he saw on TV for criticising him and complacemently brags about having the support of the workers in 2020 as though they had no minds of their own.
Hurricane Dorian has just been downgraded to a strong Category 4, bringing wind speeds of 155 mph.
Remember, you can follow its progress below live.
Florida governor Rick Scott tells residents of the Sunshine State to stay vigilant in spite of the downgrade as Dorian continues to inch closer, its exact path uncertain and prone to change.
Mandatory evacuations in Florida are in place for vulnerable coastal areas.
South Carolina governor Henry McMaster meanwhile has a compulsory evacuation order of his state's entire coast active, covering around 830,000 people, with state troopers making all lanes on major coastal highways one-way heading inland.
Georgia's governor Brian Kemp has in turn ordered evacuations for that state's Atlantic coast.
Trump, remember, is golfing.
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