Donald Trump is on day three of his four day visit to Scotland – and clearly in the mood to make some waves.
Although it would seem he’s primarily here for a golfing holiday at his two Scottish resorts in South Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire, Trump has also squeezed in several visits with international leaders.
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He has already sat down with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen and UK prime minister Keir Starmer. A separate chat with Scotland’s first minister John Swinney is scheduled for this evening.
While Stop Trump Coalition protesters have been campaigned against his arrival outside the US consulate in Edinburgh, the president has been making major statements on both domestic and international politics from his Turnberry gold course.
Here’s everything that has happened through his visit so far:
1. He changed the 50-day deadline for Putin
Trump declared he was “disappointed” with Vladimir Putin’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, especially after giving him 50 days to end the war – or face secondary sanctions.
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So Trump said he was to cut that time down to 10 or 12 days, adding: “There’s no reason in waiting. I want to be generous but we just don’t see any progress being made.”
3. Trump insisted he did not visit Epstein’s island
Trump claimed he “never went” to the island owned by the late convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, also known as Little Saint James, where many of the alleged offences took place.
The US president has been facing major backlash in the States, particularly with his MAGA base, recently.
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It comes his administration announced it would not be releasing any further files on the former financier, who was friends with Trump for over a decade.
But Trump told reporters today: “I did turn it down but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down. I didn’t want to go to his island.”
He also claimed: “For years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffery Epstein. I wouldn’t talk because he did something that was inappropriate.
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“He hired help and I said don’t ever do that again. He’s stolen people that work for me, I said don’t ever do that again. He did it again and I threw him out of the place. I threw him out and that was it.”
4. He weighed in on the small boats crisis
When asked how the UK should deal with the migrants who arrive on British shores illegally, he spoke about the US immigration policy and said no one had come into the country illegally in the last month.
“If you’re stopping immigration and stopping the wrong people, my hats are off to you,” Trump said.
He added that he knows “nothing about the boats” but he welcomed Starmer’s strong opposition to it.
“Anyone here illegally should not be allowed in,” he said.
5. The president casually claimed he’s stopped six wars
The US president alleged to have stopped six wars since he was sworn into the Oval Office in January, adding: “I’m averaging around a war a month.”
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He referred to India and Pakistan, and Congo and Rwanda. It’s not clear which other conflicts he is referring to, especially as the Ukraine war and the Israel-Gaza crisis are both ongoing.
6. Trump attacked Sadiq Khan
“I am not a fan of the London mayor [Sadiq Khan]. I think he has done a terrible job. He’s a nasty person,” Trump said.
Starmer tried to defuse the tension, cutting in: “He’s a friend of mine actually!”
But Trump continued: “No I think he’s done a terrible job.”
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Asked for his response on the UK’s “divided” world and Reform UK Nigel Farage, Trump said: “I like this man [Starmer] a lot and I like Nigel.
He said one is “slightly liberal” and the other “slightly conservative”, but they are both “good men”.
“Nigel is a friend of mine and Keir is a friend of mine,” he said.
Trump was clearly overlooking the major tensions between the two political figures who tend to disagree on almost all subjects.
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8. Trump resumed his usual attacks on wind power
The US president tore into Scotland’s offshore wind turbines, calling the “ugly” – while also praising the UK government’s plans to build three nuclear reactors, calling nuclear power “safe”.
But he claimed the UK could get oil and gas out of the North Sea instead, which he claimed would be cheaper – and less ugly.
“Wind is the the most expensive form of energy and it destroys the beauty of your fields and your plains,” Trump claimed.
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9. The US has struck a deal with EU
Oh and, before meeting Starmer, Trump also struck a major trade agreement.
On Sunday, Trump and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal with 15% tariffs – half of what he initially threatened – on most goods going into the States from the trade bloc.
In exchange, the EU will have to invest in US energy products – which will prevent a potential trade war between the two allies.
The UK’s trade deal secured a 10% tariff in May, but many European allies suggested it was a bad agreement so are unlikely to be happy with this one.
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There’s already been some backlash from France, Germany and Ireland over the deal.
Asked by reporters why the US gave a better deal to the UK than the EU, he said: “We have a very special relationship with this country.”
He said his mother was born there and that it “always has an impact” and says he “wants to see this part of the world to do well”.
US President Donald Trump hung up on a CNN reporter during a phone call Tuesday that lasted a mere 30 seconds after the journalist questioned him about resurfaced images showing Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s 1993 wedding to his second wife, Marla Maples.
While appearing on Erin Burnett OutFront on Tuesday, reporter Andrew Kaczynski shared details about the abrupt phone call with Trump that ended in name-calling.
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The call took place after CNN’s KFile found photos of Epstein and Trump that had not been widely reported on before. One photo showed the disgraced financier and sex offender attending Trump’s Plaza Hotel wedding to Maples.
In a separate image, Epstein was seen with Trump and his children at a Harley-Davidson Cafe that same year.
CNN also released a video of Trump and Epstein chatting with each other at a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in New York in February 1999.
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Kaczynski told host Burnett that the call, in which he asked Trump about the images, ended with the president slamming CNN as “fake news” and hanging up after he refused to answer questions about his past connection to Epstein.
“We were not on the phone very long. I think our call was about 30 seconds or so,” Kaczynski told Burnett. “But when I asked him about the wedding photo, he said, he sort of paused for a second and then said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ before calling CNN ‘fake news’ and then hanging up on me.”
In a statement to CNN, Kaczynski said, White House communications director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.”
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Cheung added: “The fact is that the president kicked [Epstein] out of his club for being a ‘creep.’”
Kaczynski’s heated yet ultra-brief conversation with Trump comes after the Department of Justice and FBI released a two-page memo earlier this month, claiming their Epstein investigation determined that there was no evidence Epstein was murdered or had a “client list” of powerful figures he could potentially blackmail.
Following the memo release, Trump faced scrutiny over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files, particularly from his own base. Since then, both Republicans and Democrats have called on the president and his administration to release more information.
Vice President JD Vance said Elon Musk made a critical error attacking President Donald Trump and his so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
“I think it’s a huge mistake for him to go after the president like that,” Vance told podcaster and comedian Theo Von in an interview released on Friday. “I think that if he and the president are in some blood feud, most importantly it’s going to be bad for the country, but I don’t think it’s going to be good for Elon, either.”
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The two were taping an episode of Von’s podcast, This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, as Trump and Musk publicly traded barbs on Thursday.
As Vance and Von spoke, Musk shared a post to X, formerly Twitter, accusing Trump of holding off on the release of files about late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein due to Trump being mentioned in them.
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“The fucking shit-missile is in the cannon,” Von said, before reading the post aloud to Vance.
Vance acknowledged his loyalties would always be with Trump and defended the president against Musk’s accusations, saying Trump never did “anything wrong” with Epstein. Vance praised Musk’s work with the Department of Government Efficiency and suggested Musk could just be lashing out due to frustration with the political process.
“I hope that eventually Elon kind of comes back into the fold,” Vance said. “Maybe that’s not possible now, because he’s gone so nuclear.”
Vance said it’s unfair for Musk to go after Trump for the Big Beautiful Bill — arguing it’s good but not perfect — and that Congress made the bill, not Trump.
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“I just think it’s a huge mistake for the world’s wealthiest man, I think one of the most transformational entrepreneurs ever, to be at this war with the world’s most powerful man, who I think is doing more to save the country than anybody— and I’m 40 years old — anybody in my lifetime,” Vance added.
Vance also addressed a post in which Musk suggested Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vance, calling it “totally insane.”
Vance wasn’t the only Trump administration official to learn of Musk’s feud with the president while taping a podcast. FBI Director Kash Patel was taping a podcast with Joe Rogan when Musk sent the Epstein post, prompting the podcast host to exclaim, “Jesus Christ, that’s a crazy thing to say.”
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“I’m just staying out of the Trump-Elon thing, that’s way outside my lane,” Patel said. “I know my lane, and that ain’t it.”
Donald Trump and Elon Musk have had an almighty falling out on social media over the last 24 hours after months of intense friendship.
The drama has unfolded rapidly, as the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man – who were in a deep “bromance” just weeks ago – mercilessly tear chunks out of each other online.
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As it looks less and less likely that they will be able to reconcile, here’s a look at the best moments from the sudden eruption of news coming out of the US – and a glance back at how we got here…
A Quick Recap…
Musk invested $291.5m in Trump’s presidential campaign a year ago and began to speak at his rallies.
After Trump was re-elected to the White House, Musk was rewarded by being appointed to lead the new, informal advisory body DOGE (department of government efficiency).
The pair suddenly seemed inseparable, turning up public events together everywhere.
Musk – a former Democrat – started to refer to himself as the “first buddy” to the president, while Trump called him a “star” and once promoted his electric car company Tesla outside the White House.
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In February, the tech magnate even posted on X: “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man.”
But tensions began to emerge after Musk began to distance himself from the president’s trade war.
He then left Doge last month, after 130 days in the role but insisted that it was always a fixed-term position and there was no bad blood.
Initially they remained on good terms and Trump threw him a lavish goodbye party.
But any cordial relations fell away when Musk suddenly described Trump’s “big, beautiful tax bill” as a “disgusting abomination” on X earlier this week, and called on the House of Representatives to “kill the bill”.
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The president said he was “disappointed” with Musk’s comments, adding with finality: “Elon and I had a great relationship, I don’t know if we will anymore.”
He even claimed Musk had “Trump derangement syndrome” and missed being in government – and then it started to get really ugly…
Donald Trump, left, claps as Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in October
via Associated Press
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What’s been said?
1. Musk: Was Trump replaced by a ‘body double’?
Last night, the SpaceX boss reposted historic social media posts from the president, including ones saying deficits should not be permitted.
Writing on his social media platform X, Musk wrote: “Where is the man who wrote these words? Was he replaced by a body double!?”
He also accused Trump of “ingratitude” adding: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election.”
2. Trump: Elon was ‘wearing thin’
The president hit back on his own social media platform Truth Social, claiming Tesla boss Musk went “crazy”.
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He said: “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV [Electric Vehicle] Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!) and he just went CRAZY!”
3. Trump: ‘Terminate Musk’s contracts’
The president said the “easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts”.
4. Musk: Trump ‘is in the Epstein files’
Without evidence, Musk wrote on X: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
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5. Trump: Musk ‘turning against me’
“I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago,” Trump wrote. “This is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress, It’s a Record Cut in Expenses, $1.6 trillion dollars and the Biggest Tax Cut ever given.”
6. Musk ‘supports’ impeachment
After Trump threatened to terminate his contracts, Musk said he would “immediately” decommission its Dragon spacecraft – the only US spacecraft which can carry crew to and from International Space Station.
He backtracked a few hours later, saying he would not decommission it – but he still reposted a post calling for Trump’s impeachment.
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And, amid a series of other tweets, he wrote: “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.”
7. Trump considers selling his Tesla
According to CBS, the president might sell the product he bought from Musk’s company earlier this year to promote the brand outside the White House.
He also described Musk to ABC News as “the man who has lost his mind”.
Former US Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday took an apparent swipe at billionaire Elon Musk over his stance on empathy, while conceding that she is deeply concerned about the current state of the world, in one of the few public appearances she’s made since leaving office.
Speaking at the Australian Real Estate Conference, Harris alluded to recent remarks by Musk, who has now significantly scaled back his role in the Trump administration — a stark contrast to his constant presence by President Donald Trump’s side in the early days of his second term.
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“There was someone that is very popular these days, at least in the press, who suggested that it is a sign of the weakness of Western civilisations to have empathy,” Harris said, according to The Guardian, without naming Musk.
“Imagine. No, it’s a sign of strength to have some level of curiosity and concern and care about the well-being of others,” she continued.
During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in March, Musk suggested that while caring for others is important, it’s a double-edged sword.
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“The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilisation, which is the empathy response.”
Musk has limited his role in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative he repeatedly touted, amid polls showing that the public was souring on him and signs of trouble for his electric car company Tesla, seeming to stem in part from his involvement in the Trump administration. But what appears to have been a “turning point” for Musk was the defeat of the conservative candidate he backed in the race for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, according to The New York Times. Musk privately acknowledges his involvement was counterproductive, the Times added.
The tech billionaire, a major donor in Trump’s 2024 campaign, has also said he will scale back his political donations going forward.
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“In terms of political spending, I’m gonna do a lot less in the future,” he told an economic forum in Qatar last week.
“I think I’ve done enough,” he added.
Harris, who is reportedly mulling a run for California governor following her defeat in the 2024 presidential race, also expressed profound concern about the current state of the world amid Trump’s pursuit of his America First agenda.
“I do worry that it is important that we remember history,” Harris told the audience, according to The Guardian, without referencing Trump. “It’s important that we remember the 1930s. It’s important that we remember that history has taught us that isolation does not equal insulation.”
US President Donald Trump marked Memorial Day by posting an all-caps rant on social media that attacked Democrats as “scum” and condemned federal judges as “monsters.”
Trump’s grievance-filled message on Truth Social on Monday, posted on a day of sombre reflection for most Americans, saw the president also smear immigrants as “criminals” and “mentally insane.”
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The president reportedly deleted an earlier version of the post in favour of a simple “happy Memorial Day!” before publishing the attack again with the typographical errors corrected.
In the post, Trump wished a “happy Memorial Day to all,” including the “scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds, who allowed 21,000,000 million people to illegally enter our country, many of them being criminals and the mentally insane, through an open border that only an incompetent president would approve.”
He added that US judges were “on a mission to keep murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members, and released prisoners from all over the world, in our country so they can rob, murder, and rape again — all protected by these USA hating judges who suffer from an ideology that is sick, and very dangerous for our country.”
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The president added that he hoped the Supreme Court “and other good and compassionate judges throughout the land” would save the country from “the decisions of the monsters who want our country to go to hell.”
Many of Trump’s policies have faced opposition from the lower courts, notably over his plans to crack down on immigration.
One federal judge has found that members of his administration may be liable for contempt after ignoring his order to turn around planes deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
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In a spree of Memorial Day posts, Trump also praised his own tariffs policy, claimed that the “golden age” of America is coming, and let rip at Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Trump also said he wants to pull $3 billion in taxpayer cash from Harvard University in the ongoing fight with the Ivy League school.
Elon Musk flipped out at a journalist who dared to question the billionaire’s success as President Donald Trump’s federal spending hatchet man.
The tech billionaire told Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain, a respected former BBC broadcaster, that “it’s like talking to a computer” when she suggested his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) risked falling short of its $2 trillion savings target.
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On Tuesday, Musk was interviewed by Husain via video at an economic forum in Qatar, and was asked about DOGE not meeting the goal.
She reminded Musk of his pledge — at a high-profile rally for Trump at Madison Square Garden in New York on October — that he’d cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal government budget.
Experts had dismissed the $2 trillion aim as extremely unrealistic since it would equate to almost all discretionary funding, including programs for transportation, education and housing, so well beyond the fraud and waste Musk has said repeatedly would make up the bulk of the cuts.
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DOGE has itself said it has only slashed $160 billion to date.
“You’ve talked about $4 billion a day being saved,” Husain said. “And I think everyone can agree that combating waste and inefficiency in government is a very good thing, but if you add that up, it’s not gonna get to $2 trillion over the lifetime of DOGE.”
Musk appeared not to understand or hear the question, so Husain repeated herself.
“I mean, I feel you’re somewhat trapped in the NPC dialogue tree of a traditional journalist,” Musk snapped. The term NPC derives from video games and refers to a “non-playable character.”
“So it’s difficult when I’m conversing with someone who’s trapped in the dialogue tree of a conventional journalist because it’s like talking to a computer.”
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In a defense of DOGE’s work, Musk went on to stress the organisation “is an advisory group” and “we’re doing the best we can.”
He conceded the three branches of government “are to some degree opposed to that level of cost savings.”
The defensive response is the latest sign that the world’s richest man’s dream of transforming Washington, DC, has turned into a nightmare.
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Almost ever-present at the president’s side in the early days of the second Trump administration, the Tesla CEO has since scaled back his day-to-day involvement with DOGE following political and consumer backlash that was threatening his business interests.
Trump signalled their relationship was changing when he effectively said farewell to the tech billionaire at a Cabinet meeting last month.
“He wants to get back home to his cars,” the president said.
In the same interview with Husain, Musk revealed he plans to significantly cut his political spending, saying he has “done enough.”
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The GOP donor spent at least $250 million to get Trump elected last year.
WASHINGTON — If you’re interested in finding Donald Trump’s precise words as he lied about his failed coup attempt in his Jan 20 remarks at the US Capitol soon after his inaugural speech, good luck with that.
Same with his Feb 12 thoughts in the Oval Office on how magnetism, in his view “a new theory,” doesn’t work on the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford.
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Or his statements in the Feb 28 meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, berating the Ukrainian president and empathising with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin instead.
Ditto with his April 14 explanation of how well he is doing with “the cognitive” compared to previous occupants of the White House.
The self-proclaimed “most transparent” White House in history, as it turns out, has little interest in making the vast majority of Trump’s speeches and interactions with journalists readily accessible to the public whose taxes pay for their transcription, publishing just 29 transcripts of the 146 public remarks Trump made in his first 100 days in office.
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Trump’s White House posted transcripts for only 11 of the 40 speeches in which Trump did not take questions from the media, and for only one of his six formal news conferences, according to a HuffPost review. And of the 98 media “availabilities” in which Trump took questions from reporters informally — a practice that his aides point to as proof of his great accessibility — only 15 of the transcripts have been made public.
Previous White Houses, going back decades, made all of the transcripts compiled by the non-political stenography office, staffed by career civil servants, available in printed form, via email and on the White House website, as a matter of course. Trump’s first-term staff also published all his remarks, with the exception of his speeches at rallies and fundraisers. Trump’s second-term White House stopped emailing transcripts to its press list just five days after taking office, and of late has largely stopped posting them on the website, too. As of Thursday morning, the last transcript from Trump on the site is from March 13.
Trump aides would not explain their decision to withhold 80% of the transcripts that have been prepared. White House communications director Steven Cheung, however, did insult HuffPost for asking the question:
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“You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent. The president regularly does multiple press engagements per day and they are streamed live on multiple platforms. We’ve even granted low-level outlets like HuffPo [sic] additional access to events, because we’re so transparent. For anyone to think otherwise proves they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Stop beclowning yourself,” he wrote, demanding that his statement be published “in full.”
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said transcriptions of a president’s remarks have always been seen as historical records, not things to be politicised. “Making the words of the president readily available is part of the accountability obligation of the White House,” she said.
“The public has the right to know what the leader says … It’s a mark of a democratic system,” she added, saying that she could not speculate as to why Trump is withholding most of his transcripts’ release. “Trying to figure out why this White House does what it does requires a skill far beyond mine.”
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, meets with US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 28.
Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
‘Utterly Fucking Off The Rails’
While it is true that videos of nearly all of Trump’s public remarks are available on C-SPAN, YouTube or other websites, they are not easily searchable by topic or keyword. There are private firms that transcribe his words, but they are not comprehensive and not well-known to the public.
Indeed, Trump critics say that increasing the difficulty of finding his exact words on any given topic is precisely the point of keeping most of the official transcripts a secret. After 10 years of hearing him, Trump’s outlandish claims and constant lies have become mere background noise to many Americans, they argue, while actually reading his statements hits in a different way.
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“They know the transcripts will reveal, on paper, the word salad and incoherence that characterises Trump,” said Norman Ornstein, a political scientist with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “It is much easier to pore through written transcripts and compare them, which will show inconsistencies and reversals.”
Andrew Bates, a top press aide in the Joe Biden White House, said his counterparts in the Trump White House clearly understand that reading what Trump has said does not reflect well on him. “He keeps saying things that are a liability, like talking about dolls and pencils. Or just getting confused,” Bates said.
The Biden press office famously altered punctuation in a transcript to make it seem that Biden was criticising a smaller subset of Trump supporters than the transcript originally suggested. The Biden team, nonetheless, released that transcript and appears to have released all those prepared by the stenography office, totaling well over 2,000 over four years.
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The Trump press shop, in contrast, appears to have decided that the best way to avoid negative media coverage of his transcribed remarks is to not release them in the first place. A comparison of the posted transcripts versus the remarks for which the transcripts have been withheld suggests an effort to conceal Trump’s most outrageous, factually inaccurate or lie-filled statements.
On Inauguration Day, for example, while the transcript for the official speech given immediately after Trump took the oath of office is available on the White House website, a second one he gave to congressional Republicans soon afterward is not.
In that one, he again pushed his oft-repeated lies about January 6, 2021, the day he encouraged a mob of his followers to march on the Capitol and then tried to use their assault on police officers and other violence to remain in power despite having lost the 2020 election. Trump bemoaned that his staff talked him out of including that material in his actual inaugural address.
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“You can’t put things in there that you were going to put in, and I was going to talk about the J6 hostages, but you’ll be happy because you know it’s action, not words that count, and you’re going to see a lot of action on the J6 hostages, see a lot of action,” he said in a 1,232-word section that repeatedly blamed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for all that happened on Jan. 6. “And I was going to talk about the things that Joe [Biden] did today with the pardons of people that were very, very guilty of very bad crimes like the unselect committee of political thugs where they literally, I mean, what they did is they destroyed and deleted all of the information, all of the hearings. Practically not a thing left.”
Three weeks later, following a swearing-in ceremony for his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump offered nonsensical answers to a variety of questions, including one about waste and fraud in the federal government. Trump launched into a 1,710-word rant on military contractors, including the builders of the newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, which uses a high-tech electromagnetic catapult system to launch airplanes to reduce stress on their airframes and landing gear.
“Take a look at the Gerald Ford, the aircraft carrier, the Ford. It came ― it was supposed to cost $3 billion; it ended up costing like $18 billion, and they make, of course, all electric catapults, which don’t work. And they have all magnetic elevators to lift up 25 planes at a time, 20 planes at a time,” he said, not appearing to understand the rationale for the new designs. “And instead of using hydraulic, like on tractors, that can handle anything from hurricanes to lightning to anything, they used magnets. It’s a new theory, magnets are going to lift the planes up, and it doesn’t work.”
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At the end of that month, Trump and Vice President JD Vance attacked Ukraine’s Zelenskyy for not being sufficiently grateful to the United States before Trump turned to his familiar defense of Putin, who continues to slaughter Ukrainian civilians to this day through aerial attacks on residential areas.
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. You ever hear of that deal?” Trump said during a 206-word tangent again recounting his grievances.
“That was a phony ― that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam, Hillary Clinton, Shifty Adam Schiff. It was a Democrat scam, and he had to go through that, and he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war, and he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bedroom, it was disgusting. And then they said, ‘Oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia,’ the 51 agents, the whole thing was a scam, and he had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff.”
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Six weeks later, during a visit by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who is housing deportees whom Trump claims are criminal illegal immigrants, Trump was asked how many more people he intended to ship there. Trump responded with a 417-word answer that quickly veered into boasts about his mental acuity.
“By the way, I took my cognitive exam as part of my physical exam, and I got the highest mark. And one of the doctors said, ‘Sir, I’ve never seen anybody get that kind of ― that was the highest mark.’ I hope you’re happy with that, although they haven’t been bugging me too much to take a cognitive. But I did do my physical, and it was released. I hope you’re all happy with it. I noticed there’s no questions, so probably you are. But the cognitive, they said to me, ‘Sir, would you like to take a cognitive test?’ I said, ‘Did Biden take one?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did anybody take one?’ ‘No, not too many people took them.’ I said, ‘What about Obama, did he take one?’” Trump said.
“The totality of his statements clearly show that he is utterly fucking off the rails,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican consultant who became an early Trump critic. “Most of the Washington media is still playing the polite game of pretending this is a normal White House, and so they just move on and move on and move on eternally into the future.”
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‘What About The 38 Virgins?’
Trump’s usually rambling, often incoherent, at times downright deranged statements, of course, did not stop at the 100-day mark.
On Day 102, in a Rose Garden celebration of the National Day of Prayer, Trump suggested that Muslims are primarily terrorists willing to die to earn a reward of virgins in paradise: “Imams who I got to know in Michigan. I loved them. They were great, by the way. They said, ‘We don’t want to die.’ I said, ’Do you want to die? They said, ‘We don’t want to die.’ I said, ‘What about the 38 virgins?’”
On Day 106, in an Oval Office photo opportunity, Trump went on at length about his idea of reopening Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay. “I guess I was supposed to be a moviemaker. We started with the moviemaking, and we’ll end, I mean, it represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say the ultimate, right, Alcatraz, Sing-Sing and Alcatraz the movies,” he said in an answer that continued for 268 words. “But it’s right now a museum, believe it or not. A lot of people go there. It housed the most violent criminals in the world, and nobody ever escaped. One person almost got there, but they, as you know the story, they found his clothing rather badly ripped up, and it was a lot of shark bites, a lot of problems.”
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It’s unclear what motion pictures featuring the prison as a setting have to do with reopening Alcatraz or why Trump believed his Muslim supporters in Michigan would be entitled to only 38 virgins, just over half of the 72 customarily cited.
Among the posted transcripts are two media interviews he did. While Trump does numerous interviews — most of which include statements that make him seem ignorant or foolish or both — his press staff has posted only two softball interviews: One by informal Trump adviser and Fox News host Sean Hannity dated Feb. 18 as well as a two-minute one by Jamie Little, a Fox Sports NASCAR announcer at the Daytona 500 race that Trump had attended two days earlier.
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And while the stenography office transcribes every White House briefing and question-and-answer session aboard Air Force One by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, she and her staff have released only two. One was her first briefing on Jan. 29, in which she promised to always tell the truth, which she then immediately followed with an absurd falsehood about $50 million worth of condoms being sent to the Gaza Strip. The second was the Feb. 20 briefing in which she and other aides celebrated Trump’s first month in office.
Leavitt did not respond to HuffPost queries for this story.
Trump’s refusal to release transcripts created at taxpayer expense is just one piece of his effort to diminish independent news media. He has seized control of the White House press pool, which covers his events that take place in confined spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One, from the White House Correspondents Association, which had administered it since its inception decades ago.
Trump and his staff have replaced journalists from legitimate news organizations with pro-Trump cheerleaders in many of the pool seats.
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Trump also excluded the Associated Press from the pool because it refused to bend to his will and call the Gulf of Mexico by the name Trump decreed by fiat, the Gulf of America. When a federal judge ruled that Trump could not treat the AP any differently than it treats other wire services, he responded by ending assigned pool slots for all three wires: the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg.
On Trump’s current excursion to the Arabian Peninsula, his first extended foreign trip since he retook office in January, not one US wire service print reporter has been part of the pool aboard Air Force One or in meetings with various officials — thereby degrading news coverage for thousands of news outlets with billions of readers in the United States and globally.
Not only does the prime minister have little in common politically with his American counterpart, but he and his top team openly criticised Trump during his first term in office.
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Now, Starmer is much more muzzled. He has to act in the national interest, and he needs to keep the UK-US special relationship alive.
But Trump, while still friendly to the prime minister, has certainly not made life easy for him.
Here’s a look at just some of the chaos the US president has caused for Downing Street in his first 100 days…
While the Republican made it clear during his campaign that he would push to end the war as soon as possible, his public condemnation of Kyiv left many allies stunned – and delighted the Kremlin.
So Starmer has been walking a tightrope as he tries to make it clear that he still supports Ukraine while also avoiding any direct criticism of Britain’s supposed closest ally.
Trump has also echoed Kremlin claims that Zelenskyy was a “dictator without elections”, leaving Starmer to point out that the Ukrainian leader was democratically elected in 2019 and that Ukraine cannot have more elections while under martial law.
Vice President JD Vance, right, speaks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, as President Donald Trump listens in the Oval Office at the White House, Feb. 28, 2025, in Washington.
via Associated Press
And while Starmer’s government has made it clear that it would support Ukraine for as long as possible and that Kyiv would be at the heart of any negotiations, Trump has tried to force Zelenskyy’s hand over the peace talks.
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He withdrew military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv after their disastrous meeting in the Oval Office, only resuming the support once Zelenskyy said he was ready to accept a ceasefire deal.
Some reports even credited Starmer with using direct diplomacy to get the US president and Zelenskyy talking again.
But the prime minister’s spokesperson has still had to address Trump’s outlandish claims about the war.
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For instance, when the president called one particularly deadly Russian strike on the Ukrainian civilians “a mistake”, Starmer’s representative said the attack was “beyond the pale” and “barbaric”.
And, when Trump suggested Ukraine give up the occupied peninsula of Crimea in the name of peace, the PM made it clear: “It’s up to Ukraine to determine its own future.”
Defence
Trump effectively forced Europe to spend more rearming itself by announcing the US would no longer provide a military backstop for the continent.
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This did enable Starmer to step forward as a new leader in Europe, less than a decade after Brits voted for Brexit.
This group of countries have promised to back Ukraine in the event of a US-brokered deal with Russia, and Starmer has even offered to put British “boots on the ground” as peacekeepers.
The PM’s hike in defence also hit him on the domestic front, as he had to take funding from the international aid pot to boost the military – meaning even members of his own party accused him of “betraying the world’s most vulnerable children”.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer addresses military personnel onboard HMS Iron Duke in Tallinn, Estonia, Tuesday Dec. 17, 2024.
via Associated Press
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Tariffs
Starmer and his team have spent months both before and after Trump was elected trying to curry favour with the Republican.
The PM even extended an invitation for an unprecedented second state visit to the UK, to try and appeal to Trump’s fondness for the Royal Family.
But Trump still slapped the UK with a 10% import tax on all British goods going into the States on April 2, in his sweeping tariff announcement.
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That came on top of a global 25% levy on cars and aluminium. So much for the UK’s special relationship with the US.
Starmer is trying to boost the British economy after putting “growth” at the heart of his government – but has failed to deliver on it so far.
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His team have been desperate to do what the Tories never could and secure a trade deal with the States.
The hope is that an economic partnership would not only lower the tariffs on UK goods entering the US.
But in the absence of any firm action from the States, Starmer has also started to look over to the EU.
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He is set to sign a formal declaration committing to “free and open trade” with the bloc, according to a leaked draft seen by POLITICO.
The two allies will look at a “new strategic partnership” between London and Brussels based on “maintaining global economic stability and our mutual commitment to free and open trade.”
But the UK prime minister could now be on a collision course with the Trump administration, as such a deal may upset the US agenda.
The diagnosis was delusional on Truth Social early on Thursday.
US President Donald Trump cast himself as a doctor performing surgery in a post regarding his “Liberation Day” onslaught of trade-war escalating tariffs.
“The operation is over!” Trump wrote. “The patient lived, and is healing. The prognosis is that the patient will be far stronger, bigger, better, and more resilient than ever before. Make America great again!”
If healing can be defined as global markets plummeting after Trump’s announcement of a 10% across-the-board tariff on foreign goods (plus much more for major trade partners like China and the European Union), then congratulations, “Dr Trump.”
But we’re thinking he could use a dose of reality.
