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Trump Georgia rally disrupted by protesters
Donald Trump’s speech to a small crowd of supporters in Dalton, Georgia, was just disrupted by protesters holding up signs against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who were forced out of the crowd by Trump supporters, including a man wearing a yellow Gadsden flag as a cape.
Two of the signs denounced the idea of sending ICE officer to the polls on election day, which the administration has refused to rule out.
After he began speaking again, Trump praised “the woman in the yellow cape”.
“She went up there, ripped them out of their seats and threw them the hell out of here. Where’s the woman with the yellow cape, then? She was great,” Trump said.
Key events
California elections officials under threat of prosecution from Trump
The Trump administration is escalating its fight with California ahead of next month’s midterm elections, warning that local officials who process and tabulate ballots submitted by suspected noncitizen voters are putting themselves at risk of criminal investigation and potential prosecution.
The letter on Friday from senior justice department officials and obtained first by the Associated Press is the latest salvo in an ongoing tussle with heavily Democratic California, coming just a day after the Trump administration sued the state to prevent it from counting mail-in ballots from people the federal government has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their immigration status can be confirmed.
“The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant. Noncitizen voting in a federal election is a federal crime – and knowingly facilitating such conduct is equally unlawful,” warns the letter from Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general at the justice department.
It adds: “If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”
The letter is addressed to the Los Angeles county counsel’s office and also is copied to the California secretary of state, Shirley Weber, and the Los Angeles county registrar, Dean Logan, effectively putting the entire state on notice.
Mollie Reilly
Capitol Police warned congressional offices on Friday to be on watch for suspicious mail, after several members of Congress reported receiving envelopes containing unknown substances or other suspicious packages this week.
Among them was Washington representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat.
“This seemingly deliberate and widespread attack on our democracy and elections is unacceptable,” said in a Friday statement.
Maxwell Frost, a Democratic congressman who represents Orlando, Florida, said his office was evacuated Friday due to a suspicious package.
And California representative Jimmy Panetta, also a Democrat, told KRON4 a staffer in his Santa Cruz district office opened mail that contained a “white powdery substance.”
“My priority is the safety and security of my staff and, thankfully, she and the other staff have been initially cleared by medical officials,” Panetta said.
The FBI is investigating the letters, officials said Thursday.
Mollie Reilly
After wrapping up his rally in Dalton, Georgia, Trump is now off to a Republican Committee fundraiser in Palm Beach, Florida. The event is closed to press.
David Smith
And so Katie Zacharia joins the mayfly ranks of Liz Truss, Anthony Scaramucci, New Coke, CNN+ and Quibi. To say she burned twice as bright and half as long would be too kind. She went out like a firework on a soggy night.
The White House confirmed on Friday that Zacharia is leaving her role as press secretary after just five days on the job. No one was surprised after a lacklustre press briefing debut and scrutiny over her legal credentials.
But even more importantly, Zacharia lived by the sword and died in the one arena that Donald Trump truly cares about: television.
She reportedly got the job by closely monitoring the US president’s public schedule and tracked his active hours on Truth Social to predict exactly when he would be watching TV. She then timed her own appearances on air to make sure she caught his eye. The fact that she fitted the glossy blond aesthetic from what Trump calls “central casting” also helped.
But TV also proved her undoing. On Thursday, Zacharia gave a series of interviews to Trump-friendly outlets in a desperate bid for redemption. Instead, she sealed her own fate with more hapless performances.
She must have expected Fox News host Sean Hannity, who has even spoken at Trump rallies, to give her an easy ride. But even he was sceptical when she admitted she had “stepped up to the plate with very little prep time” for the first briefing. Hannity asked: “Am I hearing that you think the staff should have prepped you better?”
Zacharia rejected the notion that she had only taken questions from conservative outlets, incorrectly asserting that the Daily Mail is “not known to be a conservative outlet”. Hannity also quizzed her about her dubious legal credentials. “Why not just say, ‘I went to Pepperdine law school, and then took a different career path, and I took the bar once and didn’t pass?’”
Zacharia tried again on Fox & Friends but ran into host Lawrence Jones, who said: “You know, Katie, it’s been a tough week for you. It’s not an easy job to be the press secretary and you never want to be the story.”
He also asked: “Do you think you still have the confidence of the president?” Zacharia responded, “I’m standing here,” referring to the fact that she was speaking from the White House north lawn.
Her exit hours later was met with widespread ridicule – and a measure of human compassion for someone whom Trump had subjected to a very public humiliation.
Trump plays old clip from CNN polling analyst who said last night 'Trump’s numbers are absolutely garbage'
Donald Trump has concluded his lengthy speech to hundreds of supporters in Dalton, Georgia, wrapping up just short of the one hour and 40 minute mark.
Close to the end of the remarks, Trump asked his aides to play a video clip for the crowd, which showed a CNN polling analyst, Harry Enten, pointing out that the president was still popular with voters who describe themselves as “MAGA Republicans.”
Trump has played this clip, from an August broadcast, at multiple stops on his current campaign tour, as if to block out less flattering recent polls that find him at record-low approval ratings from the public as a whole.
In a more recent segment broadcast on Thursday morning, that Trump did not play for the crowd, Enten explained to CNN viewers this week that a new Fox News poll shows that Trump’s overall approval rating has fallen to 36%, with 64% disapproving of the job he has done as president.
As Enten noted, the most dramatic shift was among voters under 30 surveyed by Fox. In October 2024, that demographic had a net positive approval of Trump of plus-3. Now, the same group disapproves of Trump by 50 points.
On Thursday night, Enten was asked on another CNN show about Trump’s current standing in polls and said this: “Trump’s numbers are absolutely garbage, they’re trash.”
“He has the highest disapproval rating of all time when it comes to inflation going into a midterm election,” Enten continued. “In fact he has the worst inflation net approval ratings that I’ve ever seen for any president, we’re talking all the way back to James Earl Carter. He’s the first guy ever to hit minus 50 points or worse on the net inflation.”
Trump repeats lie that Abdul El-Sayed is 'a member of the Muslim Brotherhood'
During his speech in Georgia, which has blown past the 90-minute mark, Donald Trump just repeated the lie he has told multiple times this week about Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, telling supporters that the Michigan Senate candidate is “a member of the Muslim Brotherhood”.
Despite Trump’s false statement, there is no evidence that El-Sayed, the US-born son of Egyptian immigrant parents, is a member of the Egyptian Islamist opposition group. El-Sayed has flatly denied that he has any ties to the Egyptian group.
Trump made this false claim on Thursday in public remarks and in a video message recorded in the Oval Office and posted on the president’s social media platform.
As if to make the anti-Muslim racism of his message entirely clear, the president has insisted on referring to Abdul El-Sayed as “Mohammed” each time he’s told this lie.
In Georgia, Trump rails against Ossoff who said he would be 'delighted for the president to come every day between now and the election'
As Donald Trump continues to rail against senator Jon Ossoff at his rally in Georgia, it is worth noting that Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent and a fierce Trump critic, said on Thursday that he would be “delighted for the president to come every day between now and the election”.
Speaking on MS Now, Ossoff said Trump was welcome to campaign against him in Georgia because “the public is turning against this administration.”
“They see, on the one hand, the total incompetence,” Ossoff continued. “The nation plunged recklessly into a war that they don’t know how to win or to end, a global energy crisis, record high diesel prices, record high prices for healthcare.”
“It costs more today than ever before in our country’s history to fill up your truck, to stock your fridge, to power your home,” the Democratic senator continued. “And then everybody can see that at the same time, the first families raking in billions of dollars from all over the world. The president’s adorning his office in gold. People are fed up and they’ve had enough.”
Trump repeats false claim about praise from Saudi king
Donald Trump’s remarks to supporters in Georgia are mainly a rehash of previous speeches, filled with false claims we have debunked repeatedly, suggesting that the president is not a regular reader of the Guardian.
“Less than two years ago, our country was dead. Now we have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said, before claiming, as he has in the past, that this was an observation made to him by the Saudi king during his visit to that country last year.
“So that statement was true. The king of Saudi Arabia, when I was over there, he said, ‘A short time ago, you had – you were a laughingstock’ – meaning our country was a laughingstock, all the way, all the way around the world, everybody was laughing at the USA,” Trump said. “‘And in a very short period of time, you made it the hottest country,’” the president continued, attributing this remark to the Saudi king.
As the Guardian has reported previously, Trump did not meet the Saudi king, who is elderly and not often seen in public, during his visit last year. Instead, he was hosted by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. There is also no evidence that the Saudi prince made this statement to Trump, but there is video of Trump making a version of that claim to Prince Mohammed during an address to a US-Saudi investment event in Riyadh on 13 May 2025.
“The days of economic misery under the last administration are rapidly giving way to the greatest economy in the history of the world,” Trump said before directly addressing the crown prince in the audience. “We are rocking. The United States is the hottest country, with the exception of your country, I have to say, right? … No Mohammed… You’re hotter. At least as long as I’m up here, you’re hotter. But groceries, gasoline, energy and all other prices are down with no inflation. We have no inflation.”
Two weeks after his return to the US, Trump began saying that this observation had been made not by him, but to him. “I went to Saudi Arabia,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on 28 May 2025. “The king told me, he said, ‘you got the hottest com-’ we have the hottest country in the world right now.,” Trump said. “Six months ago this country was stone cold dead. We had a dead country.”
As he repeated the story, again and again, Trump began to also attribute his own claim, that the US was “dead” under Joe Biden, to the Saudi king as well. In remarks at the Nato summit in the Hague in June 2025, Trump insisted that the Saudi king had told him: “A year ago, your country was dead. You had a deadhead running it. You had a country that was dead”.
Since then, Trump has repeated the tale dozens of times.
Trump repeats imaginary tale about being blamed for high prices on second day of his term
Speaking in Georgia, Donald Trump is spending most of his time defending his record as president, rather than discussing Republican candidates at the rally who are up for election next month.
Much of what he said was simply not true.
To take one example, the president repeated an entirely imaginary story he has repeated frequently in recent weeks, about how he was supposedly blamed for high prices by reporters on the second day of his term, in January 2025.
“When I came in, it was January 20th. I came in and on January 21st I had a news conference and some of those same people were at the news conference and they were screaming at me. I was only there for less than one day, substantially less than one day. And I’m having a news conference. I thought it would be a victorious conference. I thought the fake news would be saying, ‘Oh, sir, what a great race you ran,’” Trump said.
“My first news conference, January 21st. So I take office on the 20th. I figured maybe I won’t have a news conference. So the next day I have a news conference and I’m waiting for accolades from the press. And they said, what about the cost of eggs? What about the cost of beef?” Trump claimed.
In fact, a review of the transcript from that news conference reveals that no such exchange took place on 21 January 2025, when he was mainly pressed on the pardons he signed the day before for Capitol rioters convicted of violence against police officers on January 6 2021, in support of his attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election.
Trump Georgia rally disrupted by protesters
Donald Trump’s speech to a small crowd of supporters in Dalton, Georgia, was just disrupted by protesters holding up signs against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who were forced out of the crowd by Trump supporters, including a man wearing a yellow Gadsden flag as a cape.
Two of the signs denounced the idea of sending ICE officer to the polls on election day, which the administration has refused to rule out.
After he began speaking again, Trump praised “the woman in the yellow cape”.
“She went up there, ripped them out of their seats and threw them the hell out of here. Where’s the woman with the yellow cape, then? She was great,” Trump said.
Trump boasts about helping defeat Jon Ossoff in 2017 House race, skips over his failed effort to stop him in 2020 Senate race
As he has in the past, Donald Trump just bragged to supporters in Georgia about what he called his key role in helping to defeat Democrat Jon Ossoff in a 2017 special election for a Georgia House seat, but made no mention at all of the fact that he also campaigned hard against Ossoff in the 2020 Georgia Senate race that Ossoff won, when he defeated the Trump-backed Republican David Perdue.
“Ossoff was leading by a lot and they called me in to help. It was a special election,” Trump recalled. “And I came in and I held a massive rally for the person, very nice woman. And we ended up beating Ossoff. So I beat him. And that was in 2017. I beat him once and now we’re going to beat him more importantly a second time.”
Trump failed to mention that the second time he campaigned against Ossoff was at a rally in Valdosta, Georgia, on 5 December 2020 – ahead of the runoff election Ossoff won in January 2021.
That rally was supposed to encourage Georgia Republicans to vote for Perdue, and a second Republican Senate candidate, Kelly Loeffler, but Trump devoted most of his speech to complaining about his loss in the 2020 presidential election and giving voters the idea that the elections were “rigged” against Republicans.
Weeks later, both incumbent Republican senators, Perdue and Loeffler, lost runoff elections to their Democratic opponents, Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, which flipped control of the Senate from Republican to Democrats.
Trump begins Georgia rally by claiming Mike Collins is better-looking than Jon Ossoff
Donald Trump is now speaking to a relatively small crowd in a hangar at Dalton municipal airport in Georgia in support of Republican candidates for the US Senate, Mike Collins, and governor, Rick Jackson.
He quickly moved on to repeating his familiar attack on Democratic senator Jon Ossoff, claiming that he looks like Pee-wee Herman, the 1980s character played by the actor and comedian Paul Reubens.
The president then claimed that Mike Collins, who trails Ossoff badly in public polls, was “a good looking man”.
“And he’s all man,” the president continued. “He’s all man. I’m not sure about Ossoff.”
Earlier this week, Trump also praised what he called the physical attributes of another Republican in a tight Senate race, Jon Husted, praising his chin, hands and “ass”.
Trump enters Georgia rally to dark theme music for the Undertaker, former pro wrestler
Donald Trump has just taken the stage in Dalton, Georgia. If Republicans gathered there were hoping for an upbeat take on the current political climate for their party, they will have been disappointed that the president walked to the stage to the dark theme tune used by a former pro wrestler called the Undertaker.
Trump arrives at Georgia rally for Republican Senate candidate, with echoes of 2020 loss
Donald Trump’s helicopter has just touched down at an airport in Dalton, Georgia, where he will be giving a speech in support of the Republican Senate candidate, Mike Collins, who is polling well behind the incumbent Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff.
We will bring you updates on Trump’s speech once he takes the stage, but he was proceeded by an earlier speaker, Kelly Loeffler, the current head of the Small Business Administration (SBA), who lost a Senate race in the state in the 2020 cycle, despite visits to the state by Trump.
Loeffler lost her Senate seat to Raphael Warnock in a January 2021 runoff election, on the same day that Ossoff also won his seat in a runoff, defeating Republican David Perdue. Trump had campaigned in person in Georgia for both candidates.
Here's a recap of the day so far
Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary, has been fired from her role after just five days, a White House source confirms to the Guardian. This comes after Donald Trump told reporters on Friday that he asked Zacharia to “reconsider” the job, following days of intense scrutiny around her legal credentials and a widely panned press briefing.
Zacharia’s astonishingly brief tenure means that she now holds the record for shortest-serving White House press secretary in US history. During her first, and final, week in the role Zacharia had to answer for several dubious claims about her legal credentials, before she admitted to failing the California bar exam before moving to China, where she allegedly worked as an “associate” at a law firm in Beijing. Nonetheless, Zacharia defended her decision to refer to herself as a “lawyer”. Speaking to the Guardian fewer than 24 hours ago, Zacharia had only got the job offer four days before taking the podium for her debut press briefing, but said it was “unknown” how often she would engage with the media.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is heading to Georgia where he’ll hold a rally on behalf of two Republicans with less than two weeks until the midterm elections. This comes as Democrats in key Senate battlegrounds have outpaced Republicans when it comes to direct campaign donations, according to the most recent Federal Electoral Commission (FEC) quarterly filings. More here
Elon Musk spoke to Donald Trump about slowing down Ukraine’s Starlink access, according to a report from the Telegraph. Citing four unnamed sources familiar, Musk reportedly approached the president with a proposal to introduce speed limits on the system. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the Ukrainian military’s access to Starshield has not yet been fully restored, while his feud with Trump continued this week after the US president slammed Kyiv’s recent strikes on Russian refineries – claiming it ran afoul of his self-imposed “energy ceasefire” that he announced last week.
Also today, a bipartisan group of senator called for an investigation into the reported disruption of US-maintained Starlink satellites for Ukraine. Led by Republican senator Thom Tillis and Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, the lawmakers called on the Pentagon’s inspector general to examine these incidents. In a letter, the senators wrote that to use Starshield, a modified version of Starlink’s satellite network built for governments and defense agencies, “Ukraine needs access to unlimited speeds, which was its service arrangement prior to this reported restriction”.
Bipartisan group of senators call for investigation into disrupted Starlink access
Also today, a bipartisan group of senator called for an investigation into the reported disruption of US-maintained Starlink satellites for Ukraine.
Led by Republican senator Thom Tillis and Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, the lawmakers called on the Pentagon’s inspector general to examine these incidents.
In a letter, the senators wrote that to use Starshield, a modified version of Starlink’s satellite network built for governments and defense agencies, “Ukraine needs access to unlimited speeds, which was its service arrangement prior to this reported restriction”.
They added that they were “particularly alarmed by incidents in which US diplomatic, military, and security personnel were unable to reach designated bunkers during Russian air raid”, amid the reported disruptions.
“The possibility that American personnel were endangered by preventable disruptions, inadequate coordination, or decisions made by their own government demands immediate scrutiny and accountability,” the senators noted.
Elon Musk reportedly spoke to Trump about slowing down Ukraine’s Starlink access
Elon Musk spoke to Donald Trump about slowing down Ukraine’s Starlink access, according to a report from the Telegraph.
Citing four unnamed sources familiar, Musk reportedly approached the president with a proposal to introduce speed limits on the system.
This comes after a Reuters on Friday that the order to throttle Starshield, the military version of Starlink’s satellite internet network, had come from inside the White House, according to two US officials and a western official briefed on the matter. They did not identify the White House official who had made the decision, but said the Pentagon had been informed that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military had to be slowed.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the Ukrainian military’s access to Starshield has not yet been fully restored, while his feud with Trump continued this week after the US president slammed Kyiv’s recent strikes on Russian refineries – claiming it ran afoul of his self-imposed “energy ceasefire” that he announced last week.
“All [Zelenskyy’s] doing is making the world oil price higher,” Trump told the Newsmax television channel. “Well, I think that’s a disgrace.”
However, his comments slamming Ukraine come as Russian missiles and drones that have systematically slammed into power plants in Kyiv and Kharkiv this week, as my colleague Andrew Roth reports.
The president has touched down in Georgia, ready for his rally to support Republican nominee for US Senate, Mike Collins, and the GOP contender for governor, Rick Jackson. Both are facing tough races against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms, respectively.
George Chidi
Reporting from Dalton, Georgia
Dan Hackworth finds north-west Georgia more hospitable to his conservatism than the Oregon community he left behind when he retired.
“Everywhere we go here the people are super friendly, and we don’t get a lot of the negative stuff yelled at you like we did up in the north-west,” he said.
Hackworth, a Trump voter on his way to the president’s appearance at the local airport, found himself in a parking lot a few miles away marveling at a gathering of anti-Trump protesters waving flags.
“I like Donald Trump,” Hackworth said. “I think he’s done fantastic for the country. I think the immigration problem that we’ve had for many, many years, has been a detriment to this country. And him trying to shut down the border and control the influx of not just illegal aliens but terrorists and communists, and people who want to do this country nothing but evil has been fantastic.”
He contemplated the apparent loss of some support for the president over the last year among conservatives.
“We’re in a real conservative area where I live, and I don’t get out with a lot of other people. I’m not involved in community stuff in this area. So I don’t really notice that where I live. But nationwide, I think he has. I think a lot of people are a little bit disturbed with the war in Iran, but I do like the idea that he is standing up for Israel. If we weren’t standing up for Israel, things would be a whole lot worse over there, I think Israel would be fighting and getting wiped off – trying to be wiped off – the face of the Earth.”
Hackworth described the Islamic republic as “absolutely pure and adulterated evil” and that higher gas prices were an acceptable tradeoff for preventing their acquisition of a nuclear weapon. “They will do anything to punish western values and if they got a bomb, they would absolutely use it.”
Asked what advice he would give the president, Hackworth talked about healthcare.
“I’d like him to find a way to make medical costs more efficient,” Hackworth said. “If a hospital wants a MRI machine, they have to pay whatever it is – millions of dollars. If the government would make a contract just like they do with the military [to say] we want X number of medical machines, and we ‘re going to give them to these different hospitals. We’re going to share the medical information. That type of stuff would make our healthcare costs go down, cause the hospitals wouldn’t have to pay so much money to get these machines, It’s like the military world.
“But you just described a command economy. Isn’t that communism?” I asked.
“A guy can kind of see that,” he replied. “But we do it. The states do it. Every state does it. What do they do, they need pickups, they go to GM and the state buys however many pickups every year and then they go here and buy so many things and give them out. Well, it’s basically the same thing. But our healthcare costs are absolutely insane, and that really needs to be worked out.”
