Trump Georgia rally disrupted by protesters Donald Trump’s speech to a small crowd of supporters in Dalton, Georgia, was just disrupted by three 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.
Protesters hold up signs against ICE before being ejected from Trump’s campaign rally in Dalton, Georgia on Friday. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters After he began speaking again, Trump praised “the woman in the yellow cape”, apparently referring, incorrectly, to the man draped in a yellow Gadsden flag, with the slogan Don’t Tread on Me, who was among the first to confront the anti-ICE activists.
A Trump supporter in a MAGA cap and a Gasdsen flag helped force an anti-ICE protester out of a Donald Trump rally in Dalton, Georgia on Friday. Photograph: Mike Stewart/AP “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.
“I love the woman with the yellow cape. She was right on there. She’s pushing them around, slapping the guy around,” he added.
A Trump supporter in a MAGA cap and a Gasdsen flag helped force an anti-ICE protester out of a Donald Trump rally in Dalton, Georgia on Friday. Photograph: Mike Stewart/AP Key events
Closing summary This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
Katie Zacharia confirmed that her brief tenure as White House press secretary is over in a social media post filled with fulsome praise for Donald Trump.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced attempts by Trump and other Republicans to smear Abdul El-Sayed, by falsely claiming that he is linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, as clearly “racist”.
Before Trump visited Georgia on Friday to campaign against him, Democratic senator Jon Ossoff said that he would be “delighted for the president to come every day between now and the election”.
Speaking in Georgia, Trump spent 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.
Trump’s speech to a small crowd of supporters in Dalton, Georgia, was disrupted by three protesters holding up signs against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who were forced out of the crowd by Trump supporters, including a man wearing a yellow Gadsden flag as a cape who Trump mistook for a woman.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounces Trump’s ‘racist’ lie about Abdul El-Sayed During a visit to Michigan on Friday to campaign for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced attempts by Donald Trump and other Republicans to smear El-Sayed, by falsely claiming that he is linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, as clearly “racist”.
On Thursday, Trump recorded a social media video in the Oval Office in which he lied that El-Sayed, an American physician born in Michigan to Egyptian immigrant parents, is “a Muslim Brotherhood member”. There is no evidence that El-Sayed is or ever was part of that Islamist movement in Egypt.
El-Sayed has said that reports that his birth mother might have been associated with the group as a student in the 1970s, a decade before his birth, which have been pushed by a conspiracy theorist close to Trump, do not mean that he has “ties” to the group.
El-Sayed, who was raised by his father and stepmother – and grandparents – told NBC News on Wednesday, “I wasn’t raised by my mother,” and has never talked to her about her days as a student activist in Egypt, when she might, or might not, have been associated with the Islamist opposition to Egypt’s dictatorship.
After she ate at a Culver’s in Michigan Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez was asked to comment on the smear by a reporter for TMZ. “On the scale between real and racist, where does this whole Muslim Brotherhood thing fit?” the reporter asked.
“I think it it falls into racist, very clearly,” the progressive congresswoman replied.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke to TMZ in Michigan on Friday. She went on to comment on El-Sayed’s distance from his mother, and argued that he is not defined by whatever political associations his relatives in Egypt might have had in the past.
“As someone who is familiar with Abdul’s story – he’s talked about this – it’s a very vulnerable thing,” Ocasion-Cortez said. “When Abdul was born, his parents separated very shortly afterwards and his mom left and so he was raised by his dad.”
“I think what’s hard about this is that people are, you know, throwing really painful and insulting and racist stuff around, but it also hits, you know, a little boy in Detroit that grew up without his mom,” she added.
“It doesn’t define Abdul at all,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “How many of us have had a family member that has either dealt with addiction or gotten in trouble or what have you and they are distant or estranged or what have you and that has nothing to do with you as a person?” she asked.
“The fact of the matter, none of this has to do with Abdul,” she argued. “ And if you take any person and zoom out far enough, with every person that they’ve known or grown up with, of course you’re going find whatever you’re going find.”
“It’s just got nothing to do with him,” she said. “He’s he’s one of the most patriotic people I’ve ever met.”
Katie Zacharia posts resignation statement saying it ‘was an honor’ to work for ‘kind, wonderful, gracious’ Trump Katie Zacharia confirmed that her brief tenure as White House press secretary is over in a social media post filled with fulsome praise for Donald Trump.
“President Trump is such a kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic, and hardworking man. There’s nobody who will ever come close to making America great the way he has and is,” Zacharia wrote on X. “It was an honor to work for him.”
In a similarly worded message posted on Instagram she added: “I wish more Americans appreciated him.”
Zacharia later edited the text of her post on X to match the one on Instagram.
Zacharia’s post was accompanied, on both platforms, by a photograph of her standing beside a seated Trump in the Oval Office – and a blurred out map of what looked to be part of an island on his desk.
Fox News, which played a central role in convincing the viewer-in-chief, Trump, that Zacharia was not up for the job, first reported the statement.
Zacharia stumbled through surprisingly tough interviews with the Fox host Sean Hannity on Thursday night, and with three Fox morning hosts, including Hannity’s fiance, Ainsley Earhardt, on Friday.
As he left the White House on Friday without Zacharia, Trump mentioned that he had seen both of those “rough” interviews.
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 National 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.”
Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, appeared on MS Now on Thursday night. “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.