Trump news: President defends gun rights and ICE raids, amid controversy over thumbs-up photo with El Paso baby
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump is facing criticism after new video footage emerged of him bragging about the size of the crowd at his El Paso rally earlier this year as he visited people recovering in hospital having been injured in last Saturday’s Walmart mass shooting, in which 22 people died.
The president is seen comparing his audience favourably to that summoned by “crazy” Beto O’Rourke, the local politician and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who has led the community – and the condemnation of President Trump – since the tragedy.
Mr Trump heads off on his summer golfing holiday on Friday with new gun control legislation no closer to realisation, his trade war with China still raging and the opposition-led House Judiciary Committee plotting an impeachment inquiry.
Speaking with reporters before departing the White House for the weekend, Mr Trump said that he received a “beautiful” three-page letter from Kim Jong Un and predicted that the two leaders would have more talks to try resolving the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Mr Trump has said he’s not bothered by the flurry of missiles that Mr Kim has launched in recent days, rattling US allies in the region.
The president said they were all short-range missiles and reiterated that North Korea has never broken its pledge to pause nuclear tests.
Mr Trump said Mr Kim told him in the letter that he was upset about recent US-South Korea military exercises, which North Korea sees as a threat.
The two leaders have met three times — in Singapore, Hanoi and the Korean Demilitarized Zone late last month — but no new talks have been scheduled.
At their second meeting in Vietnam in February, Mr Trump rejected Mr Kim’s demand for widespread sanctions relief in return for dismantling the North’s main nuclear complex, a partial disarmament step.
Mr Trump said he’d received the letter on Thursday. “It was hand-delivered. It wasn’t touched by anybody,” Mr Trump told reporters on Friday at the White House.
“It was a very positive letter. I think we’ll have another meeting. He really wrote a beautiful, three-page letter ... a really beautiful letter," he said.
Additional reporting by AP. Please allow a moment for our liveblog to load
As trailed on Air Force One on Wednesday, Trump repeated his pledge to free disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich on Twitter last night...
...which offers a perfect opportunity to re-run this classic Celebrity Apprentice clip in which the president fires Blagojevich: "Your Harry Potter facts were not accurate! Who did the research?"
Donald Trump is speaking with reporters outside of the White House before departing for New York, and has said there is tremendous support for coming sense background checks when it comes to gun purchases.
The president defended the ICE raids in Mississippi and said immigrants who enter the country illegally will be removed.
Donald Trump said Joe Biden “is not playing with a full deck,” suggesting the former vice president is not fit to be president but that he would be “thrilled” to run against the current Democratic frontrunner in the 2020 elections.
An explosive new report says a US State Department official was the head of a Washington chapter for a white nationalist group and published extremist propaganda online.
Matthew Gebert, who serves as a foreign affairs officer in the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources, actively promoted white nationalist sentiments and was a prominent member of white nationalism circles, the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s Hatewatch reported Wednesday.
Hatewatch said Mr Gebert often discussed the need for a country exclusively built for white people that featured a “nuclear deterrent.” His wife, Anna Vuckovic, was also a blogger who published white nationalist views, according to the report.
Donald Trump boasted about the crowd size at his February rally in El Paso, Texas while visiting a hospital in the area on Wednesday after a gunman killed 22 people at a local Walmart over the weekend.
The president can be seen making the comments in cellphone footage unearthed shortly after his controversial visit to the diverse southern community, where he was met with critics and protestors who urged Mr Trump to enact gun control reforms.
“I was here three months ago,” he said to medical staff and first responders at the hospital.
“That was some crowd,” he added, before chiding former Texas congressman and 2020 presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke. “And we had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto. Beto had like 400 people in a parking lot, they said his crowd was wonderful.”
Story to come...
President Trump says he agrees with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un about military exercises undertaken jointly by US and South Korean forces. Kim has often painted them as a provocation. Speaking to the press outside the White House today Mr Trump said: "I've never liked it either."
The president said he had received another letter from Kim, which he described as "great". Pyongyang has carried out more missile tests recently but Mr Trump said he expected more talks at resolving the standoff with North Korea over its nuclear arsenal soon,
"Hollywood is racist," says the president. Speaking to reporters before heading to his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club for a holiday, the president complained about conservative voices being banned on Twitter, before abruptly shifting his focus to Hollywood.
He said: "Hollywood - I don't call them the elite, the elites are the people they go after in many cases. But Hollywood is really terrible. You talk about racist, Hollywood is racist. What they're doing, with the kind of movies they're putting out, what Hollywood is doing is a tremendous disservice to our country."
The president says there should be "meaningful background checks" on gun owners following the latest mass shootings. Referring to the National Rifle Association, the powerful lobbying group backing gun rights, he said: "We'll see where the NRA will be. We have to have meaningful background checks."
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