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‘It’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine’: Trump slams Zelenskyy and defends lifting Russian sanctions
Trump again rebuked the idea that his move to waive sanctions for Russia last week was ultimately to hand Moscow a win.
“I’m supporting stopping the war between Russia and Ukraine,” Trump told reporters. “Frankly, Zelenskyy is not helping matters much. I think he doesn’t want to stop it, but I want to see people not die.”
In response to Zelenskyy saying that the US president is on the “wrong side of history”, Trump snapped back.
“If he would have listened to me, he would have made a much better deal a long time ago, and he’d have a million people living from his side,” Trump said. “I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine …. Very little land has moved, but a million people, a tremendous number of people, are dead.”
Key events
Trump repeats wildly false claims that inflation is down and schools are performing transgender surgeries
Donald Trump’s ongoing speech to supporters in Kansas is filled with false claims he has made previously at rally after rally. Among the whoppers the president told are that inflation, which is up since he took office and started a war with Iran that has driven global oil prices sky-high, is down.
“We’ve got it cooked, the inflation,” Trump said. “Once that oil comes down, that’ll be the final straw.
Democrats, the president claimed in another wildly false tale that he tells day after day, are in favor of “transgender for everybody – the absolute mutilation of your children, where your son Timmy comes home five days later as Sarah and you don’t even know about it.”
“The worst thing they did to us is allowing 25 million people into our country totally unchecked, totally unfettered,” the president also said, wildly inflating the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
Trump repeats racist false claim that rioting in France is related to immigration
Speaking in Kansas on Monday, Donald Trump repeated his entirely imaginary theory that the wave of protests and rioting in France is being led by immigrants.
In fact, as the Guardian’s Jon Henley reports from Paris, a month-long student protest by over crumbling and crowded classrooms “converged with broader frustrations over soaring living costs, rapidly widening inequality and falling public spending, bringing together students, teachers, trade unionists and a resurrected gilets jaunes movement.”
Those largely peaceful protests were hijacked by masked groups who torched vehicles, ransacked businesses and set fire to Limoges’ city hall.
Despite on-the-ground reporting on the protests from news organizations across the political spectrum, Trump and Republicans, including Fox News hosts, have insisted that the rioters in France are immigrants.
“If you want to see what is at stake in this election, just look at what’s happening in France, a once great nation that is being conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists who hate Christianity,” Trump said, desperate to return to his obsession with nativist resentment and racism.
“They hate, frankly, the Western civilization itself,” the president went on. “And as we’re seeing in Europe, globalists, left-wing politicians have treasonously imported millions and millions of Third World migrants who are totally incompatible with West, and they are incompatible with Western values. They despise everything about France, and they’re destroying that country. And we’re not going to let that happen to this country.”
Protesters disrupt Trump rally in Kansas, where Republican fear losing US Senate seat
Protesters disrupted the first minutes of Donald Trump’s speech to a Republican midterm campaign rally in Kansas, where his party is concerned that his deeply unpopular policies could cost incumbent Republican senator Roger Marshall his seat, in the face of a strong challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton, a mega-church pastor.
Protesters quickly disrupted the event, before being led out.
US attorney in Texas threatens to hunt down ‘crooked local election administrators’
Amid concerns that the Trump administration could use the power of the federal government to intimidate voters from casting ballots against Republicans in the midterm elections, the senior federal prosecutor in south Texas released a menacing social-media video on Monday, promising to hunt down “crooked local election administrators”.
The prosecutor, Aaron Reitz, is a former chief of staff to senator Ted Cruz, who was appointed US attorney for the southern district of Texas by a panel of federal judges, bypassing the usual Senate confirmation process.
Far from presenting himself as a non-partisan official, Reitz ran unsuccessfully for Texas attorney general this year, finishing fourth in the Republican primary despite promising voters he would use that office “to destroy the left”.
In the video statement released on Monday, Reitz warns that he is on the look out for “crooked local election administrators.”
“They have a duty to prevent illegal voting, and I’m here to make sure they do their job,” Reitz says. “And it means no fraud, accurate voter roles, honest paperwork, secure ballots, and lawful procedures are essential to a fraud-free election.”
“So, let me be clear: if you violate federal election law, I will hunt you down and prosecute you,” Reitz warns.
“Election day is Tuesday, November 3rd,” he concludes. “We’ll see you out at the polls.”
David Smith
Our colleague David Smith reports from Park City, Kansas, where Donald Trump is scheduled to address a Republican campaign rally, that the president’s false claim that rioting in France is driven by immigrants preceded him.
Donald Trump’s latest campaign rally has kicked off with something unusual: riots in France.
With supporters still filing into a 5,000-seat multi-purpose arena in Park City, Kansas, giant TV screens played about 10 minutes’ of Fox News coverage of the unrest that has gripped Paris and other cities. It included commentary blaming the trouble on the French government’s immigration policies.
That matches current Republican talking points, which seized on the unruly protests to demonise multiculturalism and defend “America first” nationalism ahead of the midterm elections.
As he set off for Kansas, Trump told reporters at the White House that he had warned French president Emmanuel Macron he was “making a big mistake”. Trump said: “The whole world was coming in, and as you know, Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon, and that wasn’t the deal … We closed our borders. He didn’t.”
The official White House X account posted on Monday. “If you import the third world, you become the third world.” Vice-president JD Vance and an array of Republican politicians have lined up to make the same argument.
House Speaker Mike Johnson posted: “France is descending into chaos because they wanted OPEN BORDERS – just like the socialist Democrats in America. What we are witnessing is a chilling warning for all Americans of what happens if the radical Marxist insurgent left gets their way.” Senator Eric Schmitt added: “The anti-civilization Left is devouring France. It will devour America if we let it.”
Trump is in Kansas to rally for Republican Roger Marshall, facing a surprisingly tough challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton, who has outraised him by a big margin. No Democrat has won a US Senate seat in Kansas since 1932.
As our colleague Jon Henley reports from Paris, the rioting in France is unrelated to immigration.
A month-long protest by high school pupils over crumbling and crowded classrooms converged with broader frustrations over soaring living costs, rapidly widening inequality and falling public spending, bringing together students, teachers, trade unionists and a resurrected gilets jaunes movement.
Those largely peaceful protests were swiftly hijacked by masked groups who torched vehicles, ransacked businesses and severely damaged public infrastructure, including setting fire to Limoges’ city hall and invading that of Marseille.
Trump’s claim ‘a million’ Ukrainians have been killed contradicted by evidence
Before we move on from Donald Trump’s latest attempt to blame Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for the death of “a million” Ukrainians since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, it is worth pausing for a moment to explain that this number, which Trump has been repeating for two years, is false.
While the exact death toll is not known, a study published in July by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, estimated that “Ukrainian forces have suffered somewhere between 525,000 and 625,000 casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) and between 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities between February 2022 and June 2026.”
The same study concluded that the Russian military “has suffered 1.4 million battlefield casualties and as many as 450,000 deaths since its February 2022 full-scale invasion”.
Despite the evidence, Trump has been wildly inflating the Ukrainian death toll in public comments for two years. On the campaign trail in October 2024, Trump claimed that there were “millions of dead people” as a result of the war in Ukraine at that time.
Four months later, after he returned to the Oval Office, Trump told a national prayer breakfast in Washington that there were “probably 800,000 Russians; 600,000 – 700,000 Ukrainians, young people, just laying on a battlefield dead”.
Two months after that, when Trump was asked to comment on Russia’s Palm Sunday attack on Ukraine, Trump said “This country would’ve never allowed that war to have started if I were president. That war is a shame. Millions of people are dead”.
Last week, Trump attacked Zelenskyy for resisting the Russian invasion, saying: “You’ve lost 30% of your country and you’ve had over a million people killed.”
In August of this year, the United Nations reported that more civilians were killed or injured in Ukraine in July than in any month since March 2022.
Overall, since 24 February 2022, the UN said it has verified that at least 16,874 civilians killed have been killed in Ukraine, including 820 children, and 51,273 injured, including 3,126 children.”
Vance speech disrupted by protester shouting ‘release the Epstein files’; he replies with a racist joke
A protester disrupted a speech by JD Vance, the US vice-president, in North Carolina on Monday, shouting “Release the Epstein files! God bless our children!” before being led away.
The protester, who was positioned directly behind Vance during a midterm campaign rally in support of Republican candidates, was seen on a live video stream standing up and shouting about 10 minutes into the vice-president’s speech.
As the man was led away the crowd booed the interruption, and chanted “U!S!A!”
Vance then attempted to joke that the man, a person of color who spoke with an American accent, must be an undocumented immigrant.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to have to amend something I said earlier. I said that we have had zero illegal border crossings in the United States of America,” Vance said to laughter from the crowd. “But one isn’t bad, right?”
As he was dragged out of the rally, the man shouted that he was an American citizen.
New Reuters poll shows Trump’s approval rating dropping to a record low
A new poll by Reuters shows that only 31% of Americans approve of Donald Trump’s performance in office, a percentage point lower than the survey from two weeks ago and a record low for the president.
It comes as Trump embarks on another campaign sprint to help beleaguered Republicans in competitive midterm races.
When asked which party they would vote for if the elections were held today, 47% of registered voters in the nationwide poll picked Democrats, while 35% chose Republicans.
‘It’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine’: Trump slams Zelenskyy and defends lifting Russian sanctions
Trump again rebuked the idea that his move to waive sanctions for Russia last week was ultimately to hand Moscow a win.
“I’m supporting stopping the war between Russia and Ukraine,” Trump told reporters. “Frankly, Zelenskyy is not helping matters much. I think he doesn’t want to stop it, but I want to see people not die.”
In response to Zelenskyy saying that the US president is on the “wrong side of history”, Trump snapped back.
“If he would have listened to me, he would have made a much better deal a long time ago, and he’d have a million people living from his side,” Trump said. “I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine …. Very little land has moved, but a million people, a tremendous number of people, are dead.”
Ahead of leaving for a campaign rally in Wichita, Kansas, Donald Trump again claimed – without evidence – that the riots throughout France were due to mass migration.
“I told Emmanuel [Macron], you should close up your borders,” the US president said. “I’ve known him for probably eight or nine years. I told him as soon as I met him, I said, ‘you’re making a big mistake’. We closed our borders. He didn’t.”
Alice Speri
Attorneys for Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who has become the symbol of the Trump administration’s crusade against pro-Palestinian speech, have petitioned the US supreme court to review his case – the final chapter in a months-long legal saga that could determine countless foreign citizens’ ability to challenge their detention by US immigration authorities in federal court.
Khalil, a US permanent resident who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, was arrested in his Columbia housing in March 2025, the first of several foreign students and scholars the Trump administration targeted over their advocacy for Palestinian rights. He was detained for more than three months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Louisiana before a federal judge in New Jersey, where he had been briefly held before ICE moved him, ordered him released while his immigration process proceeds.
“This fight is not only about whether I get to stay in this country, it’s really about whether anyone in this country can speak out for Palestinians without being punished for it,” Khalil said during a press conference on Monday.
The US departments of state, justice and homeland security did not respond to requests for comment.
The government has cited an obscure McCarthy-era law to argue that Khalil and the other scholars’ pro-Palestinian expression posed a threat to US foreign policy objectives.
So far, no court has fully weighed in on the constitutionality of the law, with legal arguments instead focused on whether district courts have the authority to order people released from immigration detention while their immigration cases are under way. Khalil’s attorneys and immigrants rights advocates warn that if the supreme court rules the district courts lack such authority, that would effectively result in people the government has detained unconstitutionally to languish in immigration detention with no recourse, potentially for months or years.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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The justice department announced the arrest of 28 legal permanent residents in California “who are charged in criminal complaints with federal crimes, including that they fraudulently registered to vote in US elections, electoral contests in which most of them cast illegal and fraudulently obtained ballots”. Non-citizen voting is extremely rare, and the 28 who have allegedly committed crimes, would be an exceptionally small fraction of the 174 million people who were registered to vote in the 2024 presidential election. The arrests come just days after the administration sued the Golden state, to prevent it from counting mail-in ballots from people the federal government has allegedly identified as “likely” noncitizens.
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New polling also shows that a majority (66%) of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself. Looking at that data from the Washington Post and ABC even further, 34% of Republicans believe Trump is enriching himself – a 12-point jump from last September. More here
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Meanwhile, Trump heads to Kansas today to kick off a seven-state campaign blitz this week in parts of the country he carried in 2024, as unexpectedly tight races in GOP strongholds stoke fears of sweeping Democratic gains in next month’s midterms. With 15 days until the 3 November vote, Trump’s rally on the outskirts of Wichita aims to shore up the incumbent Republican senator Roger Marshall, who is locked in a dead heat with his Democratic opponent Adam Hamilton. He’ll follow up with rallies in the Carolinas, Iowa, Florida, Georgia and Michigan over the next six days.
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More US representatives reported today that their offices had been sent suspicious letters, after the FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service said they were investigating letters sent to state officials and election offices across the country containing an “unknown substance” last week. On Monday, congressman Suhas Subramanyam, a Virginia Democrat, said his office in Leesburg received an envelope “containing a suspicious substance” and staff were “promptly evacuated”. Similarly, in Maine, Democratic representative Chellie Pingree said that her office also received “a suspicious letter consistent with those received by many other congressional and election offices in recent days”.
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In a bipartisan call with GOP Senator Thom Tillis and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine’s access to Starlink satellite services “remain degraded” and “disruptions to US intelligence sharing” persist, when it comes to the “early warning of Russian ballistic missile launches”. Last week, the two lawmakers called on the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate Ukraine’s disruptions accessing Starshield – the military version of Starlink’s satellite network built for governments and defense agencies – and in a statement today they said that Zelenskyy reiterated his “willingness to halt strikes on Russian energy facilities as President Trump has proposed, but only if [Vladimir] Putin agrees to the same”.
Joseph Gedeon
A man who heckled the Democratic candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed and demanded he disavow the Muslim Brotherhood at a Michigan town hall is a former aide to the Republican senator Josh Hawley, according to congressional staff records.
At the event on Saturday, an attender who gave his name only as “Tommy” shouted from the crowd, asking whether El-Sayed would disavow the movement. El-Sayed answered: “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” then turned the question around, asking whether the man assumed he wouldn’t.
Tommy said he had simply not heard El-Sayed reject the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements. Under Trump the US has moved to designate certain chapters of the group as foreign terrorist organizations.
Over nearly five minutes at the town hall, El-Sayed pointed to how the question shouted by Tommy carried an implication of “dual loyalty”, comparing it with the doubts once raised about John F Kennedy’s Catholicism, and told the room he was running for the Senate and “happen[s] to be Muslim”.
He then asked Tommy whether he would disavow any attempt to read religious doctrine into American law. Tommy said he would not. El-Sayed answered that it was Tommy who needed to understand the constitution, drawing cheers, and the man left the room.
The questioner has since been identified as Thomas Teepell, whose staff records show he joined Hawley’s office as an intern in 2023 and rose to operations director before leaving in February. He then became political director for Philip Sarnecki’s Kansas gubernatorial campaign. Sarnecki lost the Republican primary on 4 August.
Teepell is the son of the Republican strategist Timmy Teepell, a longtime adviser to Hawley and the former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. The Handbasket first reported the identification.
The question echoes a line of attack that Republicans have tried to push against El-Sayed for weeks, including when Rogers raised alleged Brotherhood ties during one of their debates.
Zelenskyy tells lawmakers that Starlink services ‘remain degraded’; US intelligence sharing disruptions persist
In a bipartisan call with GOP Senator Thom Tillis and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine’s access to Starlink satellite services “remain degraded” and “disruptions to US intelligence sharing” persist, when it comes to the “early warning of Russian ballistic missile launches”.
Last week, the two lawmakers called on the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate Ukraine’s disruptions accessing Starshield – the military version of Starlink’s satellite network built for governments and defense agencies – and in a statement today they said that Zelenskyy reiterated his “willingness to halt strikes on Russian energy facilities as President Trump has proposed, but only if [Vladimir] Putin agrees to the same”.
Zelenskyy’s call with Washington lawmakers comes after he said that Ukraine did not receive a warning from the US about an impending Russian missile attack on Sunday evening, as my colleague Andrew Roth reports from Kyiv. On Friday, Trump waived a sweeping package of sanctions on Russia – a move he claimed was to prevent driving Russia “away from the bargaining table”.
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