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The new documentary “Bodyguard of Lies” from See It Now Studios looks back at America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, featuring testimony from government insiders and newly released footage. John Sopko, the former Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, joins “CBS Mornings Plus” for more.
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U.S. fighter jets were scrambled Wednesday to identify and intercept four Russian warplanes flying near Alaska, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement.
NORAD said two Russian Tu-95 long-range strategic bombers and two Su-35 fighter jets were flying in the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), which is international airspace that abuts U.S. and Canadian sovereign airspace.
NORAD responded Wednesday by sending an E-3 early warning and control aircraft, along with four F-16s and four KC-135 tanker planes, “to positively identify and intercept” the Russian aircraft in the Alaskan ADIZ.
Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency/Getty
NORAD said Russian military activity in the ADIZ is common and not considered a threat, but it was the latest in a series of flights by Russian aircraft seen by many as testing the preparedness of U.S. and allied NATO nations. It came as officials in Denmark continued investigating still-unattributed, large drones that flew close to Copenhagen Airport on Tuesday and Wednesday, disrupting traffic.
Danish police have said the drones were operated by a “capable actor.”
European nations have been on alert amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Russian drones were shot down by Polish and allied NATO warplanes after crossing into Polish airspace on Sept. 9. Ten days later, Estonia said several Russian fighter jets entered its airspace.
The Russian planes entered the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone on Wednesday about one month after a very similar incident, which also saw the U.S. scramble fighter jets for an interception.
In late August, NORAD said it had detected and surveilled a Russian military reconnaissance aircraft inside the ADIZ after intercepting the same type of spy plane over the region three times in the preceding days.
In September 2024, NORAD posted dramatic video of a Russian jet flying “within just a few feet” of NORAD aircraft off the coast of Alaska. At the time, a U.S. general said the conduct of the jet’s crew was “unsafe, unprofessional, and endangered all.”
The ADIZ is “a defined stretch of international airspace that requires the ready identification of all aircraft in the interest of national security,” NORAD said.
None of the situations thus far has resulted in Russian warplanes entering U.S. or Canadian sovereign airspace.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday he was surprised by President Trump’s post arguing the Eastern European country could regain all of its territory captured by Russia.
Mr. Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that Zelenskyy’s forces are “in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form” with Europe’s help. The unexpected remarks — which called the Russian military a “paper tiger” — came after Mr. Trump met with Zelenskyy for about an hour Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
The comments appear to mark a dramatic shift for Mr. Trump, who said last month he expected “some swapping of territories” as part of an eventual Russia-Ukraine ceasefire deal. Russia occupies large parts of eastern Ukraine, including territories captured in 2014 and in the current war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Asked later Tuesday by Fox News’ Bret Baier if he was surprised by the U.S. president’s about-face, Zelenskyy laughed and responded, “a little bit.”
Zelenskyy said he and Mr. Trump had a positive conversation on Tuesday, and he believes Mr. Trump’s position on territorial swaps has changed.
“I think he understands for today that we can’t just swap territories. It’s not fair,” he said.
During their meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters that Zelenskyy was “putting up one hell of a fight,” and he believes the “biggest progress” is that the Russian economy is “terrible.” But the U.S. leader didn’t appear optimistic about a quick resolution to the war, telling reporters, “It looks like it’s not going to end for a long time.”
Mr. Trump has pressed both Russia and Ukraine to reach a ceasefire deal to end their more than three-year-long war, which began when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
But a deal has remained elusive as both sides’ public positions remain far apart. The Kremlin has pushed Zelenskyy to fully withdraw from large swaths of eastern Ukraine, an idea Zelenskyy has rejected as unfair and unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Ukraine has sought international security guarantees to deter another Russian attack if the current conflict ends.
Mr. Trump has lashed out at both Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin at various points. He met with Putin in Alaska last month, but he has criticized the Russian leader for continued strikes on Ukraine, and said last week that Putin had “really let me down.”
The U.S. president also pressed NATO countries earlier this month to stop buying Russian oil and to impose hefty tariffs on China, which has remained aligned with Russia, writing that those moves could “be of great help in ENDING this deadly, but RIDICULOUS, WAR.”
Separately, Mr. Trump said Tuesday that he believes NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft that enter their airspace, after Russian drones entered Poland earlier this month and Russian fighter jets allegedly entered Estonian airspace.
At other points, though, Mr. Trump and Zelenskyy have had a rocky relationship. An Oval Office meeting between the two leaders earlier this year descended into a shouting match, and Mr. Trump has occasionally blamed Zelenskyy for the war.
During his interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Zelenskyy said he believes his relationship with his American counterpart has improved.
“I think we have better relation[s] than before,” Zelenskyy said. “I think we didn’t have close relation[s] because we didn’t have, maybe, time. I don’t know.”
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Copenhagen, Denmark — Flights at Copenhagen Airport resumed early Tuesday after being suspended or diverted overnight because of drone sightings. Police reported two to three large, unidentified drones were seen Monday night, forcing outgoing flights at Scandinavia’s largest airport to be grounded and others diverted to airports nearby.
“Copenhagen Airport has reopened after being closed due to drone activity. However, there will be delays and some canceled departures. Passengers are advised to check with their airline for further information,” the airport’s website said.
Local media showed a significant police presence in the vicinity of the airport.
A drone incident the same evening at the Oslo, Norway, airport forced all traffic to move to one runway, according to Norwegian broadcaster NRK. Traffic later returned to normal and it’s unclear who was responsible.
The unknown perpetrator in Copenhagen was a capable drone pilot with the ability to fly them many miles to reach the airport, Jens Jespersen of the Copenhagen Police said during a news conference Tuesday morning. The pilot seemed to be showing off their skills, he said.
STEVEN KNAP/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP/Getty
“The number, size, flight patterns, time over the airport. All this together… indicates that it is a capable actor. Which capable actor, I do not know,” Jespersen said.
Police chose not to shoot down the drones due to the risk posed by their location near the airport full of passengers, planes on runways and nearby fuel depots, he said.
Investigators are looking at how the drones reached the airport — whether it was by land or possibly on boats coming through the strategic straights into the Baltic Sea.
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Jespersen said authorities could not rule out the possibility of the drones being part of a Russian hybrid attack.
Security concerns in northern Europe have been heightened following an increase in Russian sabotage activities and multiple drone and fighter jet incursions into NATO airspace in recent weeks, which have seen some of America’s European NATO allies accuse Moscow of serious provocations amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Russian drones were shot down by Polish and allied NATO warplanes after crossing into Polish airspace on Sept. 9. Ten days later, Estonia said several Russian fighter jets entered its airspace.
Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics said on social media that Russia was testing NATO’s political and military response and aiming to reduce Western support for Ukraine by compelling countries to redirect resources toward the defense of alliance countries.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday denied that Russian planes entered Estonia’s airspace, saying they remained in international airspace and accusing European nations of “escalating tensions and provoking a confrontational atmosphere.”
Jonatan Vseviov, who heads the Estonian foreign ministry, told the country’s ERR public broadcaster, however, that the government had “irrefutable evidence” of the Russian incursion, adding: “The fact that Russia is provocatively and dangerously violating the airspace of a NATO country is one thing. The fact that it is openly lying to the whole world about it is another.”
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MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Monday called Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip a “genocide,” marking a decisive shift in her government’s stance on the conflict — and putting it at odds with the United States.
Sheinbaum, who is one of a handful Jewish heads of state, has come under increasing pressure from members of her leftist coalition to more forcefully condemn Israel’s assault on the small Palestinian enclave, where at least 65,000 people have died and more than half a million are trapped in famine.
Speaking to journalists at her daily news conference, Sheinbaum said Mexico stands “with the international community to stop this genocide in Gaza.”
Claudia Sheinbaum, 63, is the first Jewish leader of Mexico, a nation that is overwhelmingly Catholic.
Her comments came amid a meeting in New York of the United Nations General Assembly, where several countries, including France, Britain, Canada and Australia, have formally recognized Palestine as a state. Mexico has formally supported Palestinian statehood for years.
Sheinbaum, 63, is the first Jewish leader of Mexico, a nation that is overwhelmingly Catholic. She grew up in a secular household and rarely talks about her Jewish identity.
Sheinbaum, who entered politics from the world of leftist activism, has long supported the Palestinian cause. In 2009, she wrote a letter to Mexican newspaper La Jornada fiercely condemning Israel’s actions in an earlier war with Gaza, where 13 Israelis and more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians and militants had been killed.
Sheinbaum evoked the Holocaust, saying “many of my relatives … were exterminated in concentration camps.”
“I can only watch with horror the images of the Israeli bombing of Gaza,” she wrote. “Nothing justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians. Nothing, nothing, nothing, can justify the murder of a child.”
The latest conflict broke out in 2023 after Hamas fighters broke through a border fence encircling Gaza and killed more than 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians.
Israel responded with a punishing assault on Gaza from air, land and sea, displacing nearly all of the strip’s 2 million people and damaging or destroying 90% of homes.
Since taking office last year, Sheinbaum has repeatedly called for a cease-fire and reiterated Mexico’s support for a two-state solution in the region, but until Monday she had refrained from categorizing what is unfolding in Gaza as a genocide.
That was possibly to avert conflict with the United States, which has given more foreign assistance to Israel than any other country globally in the decades since World War II, and which has supported the war on Gaza with billions of dollars in weapons and other military aid.
Sheinbaum, whose nation’s economy depends heavily on trade with the U.S., has spent much of her first year in office seeking to appease President Trump on the issues of security and migration in order to avoid the worst of his threatened tariffs on Mexican imports.
Her comments on Gaza come amid growing global consensus that Israel is committing genocide.
The world’s leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The International Assn. of Genocide Scholars recently passed a resolution that says Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition as spelled out in the United Nations convention on genocide.
And this month, a U.N. commission of inquiry also found Israel has committed genocide.
An Israeli flag waves over debris in an area of the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel last month. Israel’s assault on the Palestinian enclave has killed at least 65,000 people.
(Maya Levin / Associated Press)
“Explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities and the pattern of conduct of the Israeli security forces indicate that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group,” the commission wrote.
It added that under the Genocide Convention, other nations have an obligation to “prevent and punish the crime of genocide.”
Israeli officials dismissed the report as “baseless.”
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KYIV, Ukraine — Russia launched a large-scale missile and drone attack targeting regions across Ukraine early Saturday, killing at least three people and wounding dozens more, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said attacks took place across nine regions, including Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Kyiv, Odesa, Sumy and Kharkiv.
“The enemy’s target was our infrastructure, residential areas and civilian enterprises,” he said, adding that a missile equipped with cluster munitions struck a multi-story building in the city of Dnipro.
“Each such strike is not a military necessity but a deliberate strategy by Russia to intimidate civilians and destroy our infrastructure,” he said in a statement on his official Telegram.
Zelenskyy said he expected to meet U.S. President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly next week. He also said the first ladies of Ukraine and the United States would likely hold separate talks focused on humanitarian issues involving children.
His comments, which he made on Friday, were embargoed until Saturday morning.
At least 30 people were wounded in the attack in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, local governor Serhii Lysak said. Several high-rise buildings and homes were damaged in the eastern city of Dnipro.
In the Kyiv region, local authorities said there were strikes in the areas of Bucha, Boryspil and Obukhiv. A home and cars were damaged. In the western region of Lviv, Gov. Maxim Kozytsky said two cruise missiles were shot down.
Russia launched 619 drones and missiles, Ukraine’s Air Force said in a statement. In total, 579 drones, eight ballistic missiles and 32 cruise missiles were detected. Ukrainian forces shot down and neutralized 552 drones, two ballistic missiles and 29 cruise missiles.
“During the air strike, tactical aviation, in particular F-16 fighters, effectively worked on the enemy’s cruise missiles. Western weapons once again prove their effectiveness on the battlefield,” the Air Force said in a statement.
Russia’s Defense Ministry denied its aircraft violated Estonia’s airspace, after Tallinn reported three fighter jets crossed into its territory on Friday without permission and remained there for 12 minutes.
The incident, described by Estonia’s top diplomat as an “unprecedentedly brazen” incursion, happened just over a week after NATO planes downed Russian drones over Poland, heightening fears that Moscow’s war on Ukraine could spill over.
In an online statement published early Saturday, Moscow stressed its fighter jets had kept to neutral Baltic Sea waters more than 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from Estonia’s Vaindloo Island in the Gulf of Finland.
“On September 19, three MiG-31 fighter jets completed a scheduled flight from Karelia to an airfield in the Kaliningrad region,” it said, referencing the Russian enclave sandwiched between Polish and Lithuanian territory.
“The flight was conducted in strict compliance with international airspace regulations and did not violate the borders of other states, as confirmed through objective monitoring,” the statement said without providing details about the monitoring operation.
On Friday, Estonian officials said Tallinn had summoned a Russian diplomat to protest, and also moved “to start consultations among the allies” under NATO’s Article 4, which states that parties would confer whenever the territorial integrity, political independence or security is threatened.
Zelenskyy said that Ukraine and its partners have laid the groundwork for long-term security guarantees and that he hopes to gauge how close they are to finalizing such commitments during next week’s meetings in New York.
He said European nations are prepared to move forward with a framework if the United States remains closely engaged. He noted that discussions have taken place at multiple levels, including among military leadership and general staffs from both Europe and the U.S.
“I would like to receive signals for myself on how close we are to understanding that the security guarantees from all partners will be the kind we need,” Zelenskyy said.
Zelenskyy said sanctions against Russia must remain on the table if peace efforts stall, and that he plans to press the issue in talks with Trump.
“If the war continues and there is no movement toward peace, we expect sanctions,” he said, adding that Trump is looking for strong steps from Europe.
Copyright © 2025 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
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Israeli strikes killed at least 14 people overnight in Gaza City, said Palestinian health officials, as Israel ramps up its offensive there and urges Palestinians to leave.
Dr. Rami Mhanna, the managing director of Shifa Hospital, where some of the bodies were brought, said the dead included six people from the same family after a strike hit their home early Saturday morning. They were relatives of the hospital’s director, Dr. Mohamed Abu Selmiya, he said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said five other people were killed in another strike close to Shawa Square.
Israel’s military didn’t immediately respond to questions about the strikes.
In recent days, Israel has been urging hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering in Gaza City to move south to what it calls a humanitarian zone.
Leo Correa / AP
Palestinians have streamed out of the city — some by car, others on foot. Israel opened another corridor south of Gaza City for two days this week to allow more people to evacuate. But many Palestinians in the famine-stricken city are unwilling to be uprooted again, too weak to leave or unable to afford the cost of moving.
Aid groups have warned that forcing thousands of people to evacuate will exacerbate the dire humanitarian crisis. They are urging for a ceasefire so aid can reach those who need it.
The latest Israeli operation, which started this week, likely pushes any ceasefire farther out of reach. The Israeli military, which says it wants to “destroy Hamas’ military infrastructure,” hasn’t given a timeline for the offensive, but there were indications it could take months.
The death count in Gaza has climbed over 65,100, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government, since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists stormed into southern Israel and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Over 250 people were also abducted as hostages. Forty-eight hostages remain in Gaza, with fewer than half believed to be alive.
Abdel Kareem Hana / AP 
The Gaza Health Ministry does not say how many of the dead were civilians or militants. Its figures are seen as a reliable estimate by the U.N. and many independent experts. Israeli bombardment in the territory has also destroyed vast areas of the strip, displaced around 90% of the population and caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with experts saying Gaza City is experiencing famine.
On Friday, UNICEF said lifesaving therapeutic food meant for thousands of children in Gaza was stolen from four of its trucks. The statement said armed individuals approached the trucks outside their compound in Gaza City, the drivers were held at gunpoint while the food was taken.
“They were intended to treat malnourished children in Gaza City where famine is declared … it was a life-saving shipment amid the severe restrictions on aid delivery to Gaza City,” said Ammar Ammar, a spokesperson for UNICEF.
In a statement Friday, Israel’s army blamed Hamas for stealing the food.
Abdel Kareem Hana / AP 
Israel accuses Hamas of siphoning off aid and using it to fund its military activities, without providing evidence. The U.N. says there are mechanisms in place that prevent any significant diversion of aid.
The incidents come as Western countries plan to recognize Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City next week. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Malta, Belgium, Portugal and Luxembourg are all expected to recognize Palestinian statehood in the coming days.
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These are dark times, the average cynic might argue.
But do not despair.
If you focus on the positive, rather than the negative, you’ll have to agree that the United States of America is on top and still climbing.
Yes, protesters gathered Thursday outside “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in Hollywood to denounce ABC’s suspension of the host and President Trump’s threat to revoke licenses from networks that criticize him, despite repeated vows by Trump and top deputies to defend free speech.
You can call it hypocrisy.
I call it moxie.
And by the way, demonstrators were not arrested or deported, and the National Guard was not summoned (as far as I know).
Do you see what I mean? Just tilt your head back a bit, and you can see sunshine breaking through the clouds.
Let’s take the president’s complaint that he read “someplace” that the networks “were 97% against me.” Some might see weakness in that, or thin skin. Others might wonder where the “someplace” was that the president discovered his TV news favorability rating stands at 3%, given that he could get caught drowning puppies and cheating at golf and still get fawning coverage from at least one major network.
But Trump had good reason to be grumpy. He was returning from a news conference in London, where he confused Albania and Armenia and fumbled the pronunciation of Azerbaijan, which sounded a bit more like Abracadabra.
It’s not his fault all those countries all start with an A. And isn’t there a geography lesson in it for all of us, if not a history lesson?
We move on now to American healthcare, and the many promising developments under way in the nation’s capital, thanks to Trump’s inspired choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as chief of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Those who see the glass half empty would argue that Kennedy has turned the department into a morgue, attempting to kill COVID-19 vaccine research, espousing backwater views about measles, firing public health experts, demoralizing the remaining staff and rejecting decades worth of biomedical advances despite having no medical training or expertise.
But on the plus side, Kennedy is going after food dyes.
It’s about time, and thank you very much.
I’m not sure what else will be left in a box of Trix or Lucky Charms when food coloring is removed, but I am opposed to fake food coloring, unless it’s in a cocktail, and I’d like to think most Americans are with me on this.
Also on the bright side: Kennedy is encouraging Americans to do chin-ups and pushups for better health.
Are you going to sit on the radical left side of your sofa and gripe about what’s happened to your country, or get with the program and try to do a few pushups?
OK, so Trump’s efforts to shut down the war on cancer is a little scary. As the New York Times reported, on the chopping block is development of a new technique for colorectal cancer prevention, research into immunotherapy cancer prevention, a study on improving childhood cancer survival rates, and better analysis of pre-malignant breast tissue in high-risk women.
But that could all be fake news, or 97% of it, at least. And if it’s not?
All that research and all those doctors and scientists can apply for jobs in other countries, just like all the climate scientists whose work is no longer a national priority. The more who leave, the better, because the brain drain is going to free up a lot of real estate and help solve the housing crisis.
Thank you, President Trump.
Is it any wonder that Trump has been seen recently wearing a MAGA-red hat that says “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!”
Well, mostly everything.
Climate change appears to be real.
The war in Ukraine didn’t end as promised.
The war in the Middle East is still raging.
Grocery prices did not go down on day one, and some goods cost more because of tariffs.
As for the promise of a new age of American prosperity, there’s no rainbow in sight yet, although there is a pot of gold in the White House, with estimates of billions in profits for Trump family businesses since he took office,
But for all of that, along with an approval rating that has dropped since he took office in January, Trump exudes confidence. So much so that he proudly wears that bright red hat, which he was giving out in the Oval office, and which retails for $25.
It’s another ingenious economic stimulation plan.
And there’s an important lesson here for all of us.
Never admit defeat, and when things don’t go your way, stand tall, adjust your hat, and find someone to blame.
We should all have our own hats made.
Doctors could wear hats saying they’ve never gotten a diagnosis wrong.
Dentists could wear hats saying they’ve never pulled the wrong tooth.
TV meteorologists could wear hats saying — well, maybe not — that they’ve gotten every forecast right.
I’m having hats made as you read this.
LOPEZ IS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!
Please don’t have me fired, Mr. President, if you disagree.
As for Jimmy Kimmel, I’m offering this idea free of charge:
If you ever get your job back, you, your sidekick Guillermo, and the entire studio audience should be wearing hats.
KIMMEL WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!
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Steve Lopez
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Chequers is the U.K. prime minister’s country house. Located about 40 miles northwest of London, it is a formidable estate, though no match for the environs of Windsor Castle where Mr. Trump spent Wednesday.
The home was constructed in the mid-1500s, about 200 years before the United States came into being, and it has served as the official country residence of Britain’s prime ministers since 1921.
Stefan Rousseau/Pool via REUTERS
Highly secured and well out of public view, Chequers has been the venue for a number of important meetings and negotiations. Famous visitors over the years have included many European leaders, U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In 1941, then-U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was at Chequers when he learned that the Japanese navy had attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II.
President Trump’s Marine One helicopter touched down on the grounds of the U.K. prime minister’s official country residence Thursday.
Mr. Trump was greeted by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria, and they walked into the house for a day of closed-door talks and a separate meeting with business leaders.
Mr. Trump and Starmer are expected to discuss a range of issues Thursday, including trade. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said Starmer’s government is hoping to negotiate “a little bit better deal” to ease trade restrictions including U.S. tariffs.
The leaders are expected to formally announce a U.S.-U.K. “Technology Prosperity Deal,” boosting ties in AI, quantum computing, and nuclear energy, with companies including Google, Microsoft and Nvidia on board to formalize some $42 billion of investments in the U.K.
The wars in Gaza and Ukraine are also likely to come up, as Starmer has joined several other countries in announcing plans to recognize a Palestinian state if Israel fails to meet certain conditions, including agreeing to a ceasefire with Hamas and letting in more humanitarian aid.
Chris Furlong/Getty 
On the war in Ukraine, Starmer and other European leaders have pushed Mr. Trump to take a harder line on Vladimir Putin, who’s blown past a series of deadlines issued by the president for Putin to meet directly with Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy to negotiate a ceasefire.
Mr. Trump has recently said “it takes two to tango,” suggesting he could still impose new sanctions against Russia, but he said America’s NATO allies first had to halt all purchases of Russian energy.
By Tucker Reals and Sara Cook
President Trump bid farewell to King Charles and Windsor Castle on Thursday and boarded his Marine One helicopter for the short flight to Chequers, the official country residence of the British prime minister, Keir Starmer.
He’s to hold a bilateral meeting, behind closed doors, with Starmer, and will also join a reception with business leaders, before the two leaders hold a joint news conference.
On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump will leave Chequers and fly back to the U.S.
President Trump and first lady Melania were feted by King Charles III on the first full day of their state visit, the British royals putting on the kind of display they have long been known for — giving their U.S. visitor full military honors and a glittering state banquet at Windsor Castle.
There were protests in London, and even at Windsor the night before the Trumps arrived, deriding the U.S. leader’s policies and highlighting his past ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But police estimated a crowd of only about 5,000, and as the protesters were in central London, about 20 miles from Windsor, they were well out of Mr. Trump’s earshot as he enjoyed the royal treatment.
DOUG MILLS/POOL/AFP/Getty 
The day included a military honor featuring more than 1,000 British troops marching in formation, a military flypast — albeit toned down due to rain, a visit to the late Queen Elizabeth II’s tomb, and then a formal state banquet where Mr. Trump sat at the center of a dining table more than 150 feet long.
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An independent panel of experts commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council has concluded “on reasonable grounds that the Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have committed and are continuing to commit” acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
In its report published Tuesday, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel — which was established by the HRC in 2021 — said it had collected and analyzed evidence in relation to alleged human rights violations committed by all parties in the Israel-Hamas war, which Israel launched in response to the Hamas-orchestrated Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack.
“Today, we witness in real time how the promise of ‘never again’ is broken and tested in the eyes of the world. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a moral outrage and a legal emergency,” Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission, said at a Tuesday news briefing. “There is no need to wait for the International Court of Justice to declare it a genocide. All states are obligated to use whatever means within its (their) power to prevent the commission of genocide. And so we urge member states to ensure accountability for any crimes that have been committed and prevent further crimes from being committed, not just in Gaza, but the entire occupied Palestinian territory.”
Israeli’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar called the report “fake.”
“The report relies entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others,” Saar said, echoing the language used in past Israeli government statements responding to accusations it is committing genocide. “In stark contrast to the lies in the report, Hamas is the party that attempted genocide in Israel — murdering 1,200 people, raping women, burning families alive, and openly declaring its goal of killing every Jew.”
Genocide is defined under international law as the commission of certain acts against a group “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Those acts include “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu/Getty
In its report, the commission said it found that Israeli authorities and security forces, “have committed and are continuing to commit the following actus reus of genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, namely (i) killing members of the group; (ii) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (iii) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (iv) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
The commission also said statements made by Israeli authorities have demonstrated “direct evidence of genocidal intent,” and that, alongside circumstantial evidence of similar intent, “the Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have had and continue to have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Based on its analysis, the commission said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had, “incited the commission of genocide and that Israeli authorities have failed to take action against them to punish the incitement.”
ABIR SULTAN/POOL/AFP/Getty 
“The Commission concludes that the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the comission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” the report said.
“The commission has not fully assessed statements by other Israeli political and military leaders, including Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, and considers that they too should be assessed to determine whether they constitute incitement to commit genocide,” the commission added.
The report said Israel should “immediately end the commission of genocide in the Gaza Strip” and implement a permanent ceasefire, allowing the free flow of humanitarian aid into the Palestinian territory. It also called on other U.N. member states to “employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent the commission of genocide in the Gaza Strip,” including stopping the transfer of arms and other equipment to Israel.
A number of scholars and international and Israeli human rights groups had previously accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
In August, the International Association of Genocide Scholars — a group of academics specializing in the subject — declared in a resolution that Israel’s actions in Gaza since the 22-month war began constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The group has in turn faced heavy criticism from Israeli officials and Jewish groups about the way they operate and acquire members, though they have since suspended their membership system in response to what they call a “campaign of spam and harassment.”
In July, Israeli rights group B’Tselem and the Physicians for Human Rights organization accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
The International Court of Justice is also hearing a case, brought by South Africa’s government, that accuses Israeli forces of committing genocide.
Israel has dismissed all of the claims, insisting they are “biased and false” and based on misinformation spread by Hamas.
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After a night of heavy airstrikes, the Israeli military announced Tuesday that its expanded operation in Gaza City “to destroy Hamas’ military infrastructure” has begun, and warned residents to move south. Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adree announced the expansion of Israel’s operation in a post on X, renewing a warning for Gaza City’s famine-stricken residents to evacuate.
Many Palestinians — tens of thousands of whom had sought shelter in Gaza City after fleeing areas further north amid Israel’s offensive against Hamas — have said they’re unable to evacuate due to overcrowding in southern Gaza and the high price of transport.
The Israel Defense Forces announced the launch of the next stage of “Operation Gideon Chariots,” saying two divisions had begun pushing into the heart of Gaza City, with two regular divisions operating in the surrounding area. It said a third division would join the operation in the coming days.
“They will surround Gaza City on all sides,” the IDF said.
Ebrahim Hajjaj/REUTERS
After weeks of threatening an expansion of the Israeli military operation in Gaza City, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz also signaled on Tuesday that it had begun.
“Gaza is burning,” he said early in the morning. “The (Israel military) is striking with an iron fist at the terrorist infrastructure and soldiers are fighting heroically to create the conditions for the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas. We will not relent and we will not go back — until the completion of the mission.”
The United Nations estimated on Monday that over 220,000 Palestinians have fled northern Gaza over the past month, after the Israeli military warned that all residents should leave Gaza City ahead of the operation. An estimated 1 million Palestinians were living in the region around Gaza City before the evacuation warnings.
Abdel Kareem Hana/AP 
Palestinian residents reported heavy strikes across Gaza City on Tuesday morning. The city’s Shifa Hospital said it received the bodies of 20 people killed in a strike that hit multiple houses in a western neighborhood, with another 90 wounded arriving at the facility in recent hours.
“A very tough night in Gaza,” Dr. Mohamed Abu Selmiyah, director of Shifa Hospital, told The Associated Press
“The bombing did not stop for a single moment,” he said. “There are still bodies under the rubble.”
The Israeli military did not respond to immediate requests for comment on the strikes but in the past has accused Hamas of building military infrastructure inside civilian areas, especially in Gaza City.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled Tuesday from Israel to the energy-rich nation of Qatar for talks with its ruling emir, whose country is still incensed over Israel’s strike last week that killed five Hamas members and a local security official.
Arab and Muslim nations denounced the strike at a summit Monday but stopped short of any major action targeting Israel, highlighting the challenge of diplomatically pressuring any change in Israel’s conduct.
Egypt, however, escalated its language against Israel, with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi describing the country as “an enemy” in a fiery speech on Monday in Qatar during the Arab leaders’ summit.
QATARI MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS/AFP/Getty 
It was the first time an Egyptian leader had used the term since the two countries established diplomatic ties in 1979, said Diaa Rashwan, head of Egypt’s State Information Service.
“Egypt is being threatened,” Rashwan told the state-run Extra News television late Monday.
El-Sisi’s remark comment played prominently across Egyptian newspapers’ front pages on Tuesday through Cairo has taken no steps to change its formal diplomatic status with Israel.
Rubio spent about an hour meeting with Qatar’s leader before heading back to the airport, where he was next scheduled to fly to the United Kingdom, where President Trump is set to arrive for an official state visit on Tuesday evening.
“We have a very short window of time in which a deal can happen” to end the war in Gaza, Rubio warned before arriving in Doha. “It’s a key moment — an important moment.”
Rubio said “a negotiated settlement” still remained the best option, while acknowledging the dangers an intensified military campaign posed to Gaza.
Amir Cohen/REUTERS 
“The only thing worse than a war is a protracted one that goes on forever and ever,” Rubio said. “At some point, this has to end. At some point, Hamas has to be defanged, and we hope it can happen through a negotiation. But I think time, unfortunately, is running out.”
Separately, a team of independent experts commissioned by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It issued a report Tuesday that calls on the international community to end the genocide and take steps to punish those responsible for it.
Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission and has accused it and the HRC of anti-Israel bias. A statement from Israel’s Foreign Ministry Tuesday says it “categorically rejects this distorted and false report.”
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A barrage of airstrikes killed at least 32 people across Gaza City as Israel ramps up its offensive there and urges Palestinians to evacuate, medical staff reported Saturday.The dead included 12 children, according to the morgue in Shifa Hospital, where the bodies were brought.In recent days, Israel has intensified strikes across Gaza City, destroying multiple high-rise buildings and accusing Hamas of putting surveillance equipment in them.On Saturday, the army said it struck another high-rise used by Hamas in the area of Gaza City. It has ordered residents to leave as part of an offensive aimed at taking over the largest Palestinian city, which it says is Hamas’ last stronghold. Hundreds of thousands of people remain there, struggling under conditions of famine.One of the strikes overnight and into early morning Saturday hit a house in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, killing a family of 10, including a mother and her three children, said health officials. The Palestinian Football Association said a player for the Al-Helal Sporting Club, Mohammed Ramez Sultan, was killed in the strikes, along with 14 members of his family. Images showed the strikes hitting followed by plumes of smoke.Israel’s army did not immediately respond to questions about the strikes.Hostages’ relatives rally in IsraelMeanwhile, relatives of Israeli hostages held by Hamas rallied in Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand a deal to release their loved ones and criticized what they said was a counterproductive approach by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in securing a resolution.Einav Zangauker, the mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, described Israel’s attempted assassination of Hamas leaders in Qatar this week as a “spectacular failure.”“President Trump said yesterday that every time there is progress in the negotiations, Netanyahu bombs someone. But it wasn’t Hamas leaders he tried to bomb — it was our chance, as families, to bring our loved ones home,” Zangauker said.Some Palestinians are leaving Gaza City, but many are stuckIn the wake of escalating hostilities and calls to evacuate the city, the number of people leaving has spiked in recent weeks, according to aid workers. However, many families remain stuck due to the cost of finding transportation and housing, while others have been displaced too many times and do not want to move again, not trusting that anywhere in the enclave is safe.In a message on social media Saturday, Israel’s army told the remaining Palestinians in Gaza City to leave “immediately” and move south to what it’s calling a humanitarian zone. Army spokesman Avichay Adraee said that more than a quarter of a million people had left Gaza City — from an estimated 1 million who live in the area of north Gaza around the city.The United Nations, however, put the number of people who have left at around 100,000 between mid-August and mid-September. The U.N. and aid groups have warned that displacing hundreds of thousands of people will exacerbate the dire humanitarian crisis. Sites in southern Gaza where Israel is telling people to go are overcrowded, according to the U.N., and it can cost money to move, which many people do not have.An initiative headed by the U.N. to bring temporary shelters into Gaza said more than 86,000 tents and other supplies were still awaiting clearance to enter Gaza as of last week.Gaza’s Health Ministry said Saturday that seven people, including children, died from malnutrition-related causes over the past 24 hours, raising the toll to 420, including 145 children, since the war began.The bombardment Friday night across Gaza City came days after Israel launched a strike targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar, intensifying its campaign against the militant group and endangering negotiations over ending the war in Gaza.Families of the hostages still held in Gaza are pleading with Israel to halt the offensive, worried it will kill their relatives. There are 48 hostages still inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed to be alive.The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, abducting 251 people and killing some 1,200, mostly civilians. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 64,803 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. It says around half of those killed were women and children. Large parts of major cities have been completely destroyed, and around 90% of some 2 million Palestinians have been displaced.
A barrage of airstrikes killed at least 32 people across Gaza City as Israel ramps up its offensive there and urges Palestinians to evacuate, medical staff reported Saturday.
The dead included 12 children, according to the morgue in Shifa Hospital, where the bodies were brought.
In recent days, Israel has intensified strikes across Gaza City, destroying multiple high-rise buildings and accusing Hamas of putting surveillance equipment in them.
On Saturday, the army said it struck another high-rise used by Hamas in the area of Gaza City. It has ordered residents to leave as part of an offensive aimed at taking over the largest Palestinian city, which it says is Hamas’ last stronghold. Hundreds of thousands of people remain there, struggling under conditions of famine.
One of the strikes overnight and into early morning Saturday hit a house in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, killing a family of 10, including a mother and her three children, said health officials. The Palestinian Football Association said a player for the Al-Helal Sporting Club, Mohammed Ramez Sultan, was killed in the strikes, along with 14 members of his family. Images showed the strikes hitting followed by plumes of smoke.
Israel’s army did not immediately respond to questions about the strikes.
Meanwhile, relatives of Israeli hostages held by Hamas rallied in Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand a deal to release their loved ones and criticized what they said was a counterproductive approach by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in securing a resolution.
Einav Zangauker, the mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, described Israel’s attempted assassination of Hamas leaders in Qatar this week as a “spectacular failure.”
“President Trump said yesterday that every time there is progress in the negotiations, Netanyahu bombs someone. But it wasn’t Hamas leaders he tried to bomb — it was our chance, as families, to bring our loved ones home,” Zangauker said.
In the wake of escalating hostilities and calls to evacuate the city, the number of people leaving has spiked in recent weeks, according to aid workers. However, many families remain stuck due to the cost of finding transportation and housing, while others have been displaced too many times and do not want to move again, not trusting that anywhere in the enclave is safe.
In a message on social media Saturday, Israel’s army told the remaining Palestinians in Gaza City to leave “immediately” and move south to what it’s calling a humanitarian zone. Army spokesman Avichay Adraee said that more than a quarter of a million people had left Gaza City — from an estimated 1 million who live in the area of north Gaza around the city.
The United Nations, however, put the number of people who have left at around 100,000 between mid-August and mid-September. The U.N. and aid groups have warned that displacing hundreds of thousands of people will exacerbate the dire humanitarian crisis. Sites in southern Gaza where Israel is telling people to go are overcrowded, according to the U.N., and it can cost money to move, which many people do not have.
An initiative headed by the U.N. to bring temporary shelters into Gaza said more than 86,000 tents and other supplies were still awaiting clearance to enter Gaza as of last week.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Saturday that seven people, including children, died from malnutrition-related causes over the past 24 hours, raising the toll to 420, including 145 children, since the war began.
The bombardment Friday night across Gaza City came days after Israel launched a strike targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar, intensifying its campaign against the militant group and endangering negotiations over ending the war in Gaza.
Families of the hostages still held in Gaza are pleading with Israel to halt the offensive, worried it will kill their relatives. There are 48 hostages still inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed to be alive.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, abducting 251 people and killing some 1,200, mostly civilians. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 64,803 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. It says around half of those killed were women and children. Large parts of major cities have been completely destroyed, and around 90% of some 2 million Palestinians have been displaced.
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Warsaw — Poland’s most senior officials on Friday dismissed President Trump’s suggestion that a major Russian drone incursion into Polish airspace could have been a mistake by Vladimir Putin’s military.
“We would also wish that the drone attack on Poland was a mistake. But it wasn’t. And we know it,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a message posted on social media.
Polish authorities said they had recovered parts of 17 Russian-made drones, which fell without causing any injuries or major damage in the east of the country on Wednesday.
Polish and allied NATO fighter jets from Holland were scrambled to intercept the drones — a first such response to aerial Russian military incursions into NATO airspace since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago.
Agencja Wyborcza.pl/Tomasz Stanczak via REUTERS
Poland’s relatively new, conservative President Karol Nawrocki, in a social media post on Thursday, called the Russian drone incursion “nothing more than an attempt to test our capabilities and response. It was an attempt to test the mechanisms of action within NATO and our ability to respond.”
Other European capitals and the European Union also labelled the raid a Russian test of the NATO alliance’s resolve in the face of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, but Mr. Trump suggested otherwise.
“It could have been a mistake,” he told journalists late Thursday when asked about the incident. A day earlier, Mr. Trump issued a brief reaction to the incident, saying on his Truth Social platform: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”
The White House did not offer any clarification of Mr. Trump’s remarks.
Previously, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said in a social media post that the U.S. stood “by our NATO Allies in the face of these airspace violations and will defend every inch of NATO territory.”
brichuas/Getty Images 
Poland’s Deputy Minister of Defense Cezary Tomczyk also rejected Mr. Trump’s suggestion on Thursday that the drone incursion could have been inadvertent.
“I think this is a message that should reach President Trump today: there’s no question of a mistake – this was a deliberate Russian attack,” he told the Polsat News television network.
“On the night that 19 Russian drones crossed into Poland, 400 (drones) plus 40 missiles crossed into Ukraine,” added Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski in a video message shared on social media, ahead of a visit to Ukraine’s capital. “These were not mistakes.”
Poland has requested a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the Russian drone incursion, which is set to take place Friday afternoon.
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As the people killed in Israel’s surprise strike on a Hamas meeting in the Qatari capital were buried at Doha’s Grand Mosque on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to launch new attacks on the country — a close U.S. ally — if it refused to eject the U.S.- and Israeli-designated terrorist group’s political representatives.
Qatar’s government has condemned Israel’s Tuesday strikes, saying the “criminal attack constitutes a blatant violation of all international laws and norms, and poses a serious threat to the security and safety of the State of Qatar and its people.”
The U.S. has relied on Qatar to act as a go-between with Hamas, with which it has long had ties. Working through Hamas’ political office in Doha, both the Trump administration and the Biden administration before that have pushed hard, along with Egypt, to broker a ceasefire in the nearly two-year war between Israel and Hamas, sparked by the Palestinian group’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack. Senior Israeli officials have also traveled to Qatar many times to take part in these negotiations since the war began.
Qatar also hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, the Al-Udeid Air Base, where thousands of American military personnel are stationed.
Security Camera/Anadolu/Getty
President Trump, in a post on his Truth Social network on Tuesday, said the White House had been “notified by the United States Military that Israel was attacking Hamas which, very unfortunately, was located in a section of Doha.”
American officials told CBS News that the U.S. was notified of the attack by Israel as it was about to happen, and that the U.S. did not coordinate with Israel on planning the strikes.
“This was a decision made by Prime Minister Netanyahu, it was not a decision made by me,” Mr. Trump said in his social media post. “Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a Sovereign Nation and close Ally of the United States, that is working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker Peace, does not advance Israel or America’s goals.”
He called “eliminating” Hamas “a worthy goal,” but added that he had spoken with both Netanyahu and leaders in Qatar, and had assured the prime minister in Doha, “that such a thing will not happen again on their soil.”
For his part, Netanyahu has continued to defend the attack and suggested Israeli could launch another one.
“I say to Qatar and all nations who harbor terrorists, you either expel them or you bring them to justice,” Netanyahu said Wednesday. “Because if you don’t, we will.”
Ronen Zvulun/REUTERS 
Netanyahu drew a parallel between Israel’s attack in Doha and the U.S. invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2002 terrorist attacks on the United States.
“We went after the terrorist masterminds who committed the October 7th massacre. And we did so in Qatar, which gives safe haven, it harbors terrorists, it finances Hamas,” Netanyahu said.
President Trump said in his social media post that, in their phone calls, Netanyahu “told me that he wants to make Peace,” but some regional officials have said the attack in Doha doomed any chances for a brokered end to the war in Gaza.
Qatar’s prime minister said Netanyahu had “killed any hope” of returning the remaining 48 Israeli hostages held by Hamas, 20 of whom are believed to be alive in Gaza.
Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said, before appearing Thursday at the United Nations, that Israel’s attack had inflamed anti-Israeli sentiments among many Arab nations in the Middle East, telling CNN: “I think that what Netanyahu has done yesterday (Tuesday), he just killed any hope for those hostages.”
KARIM JAAFAR/AFP/Getty 
Al Thani spoke as thousands of Palestinians continued to flee Gaza City ahead of Israel’s ongoing offensive there. The numbers leaving the city have grown in recent days, though many have not heeded Israel’s orders to leave because they say they no longer have the strength or money to relocate.
The Israeli military’s plans for the next phases of its operation in what it calls Hamas’ last remaining stronghold are aimed at taking over the largest Palestinian city, which is already devastated from earlier raids and is now experiencing famine, according to the world’s leading expert body on food crises.
The plans have drawn widespread condemnation and added to Israel’s global isolation, which intensified further this week following the strike on Qatar.
Al Thani was expected to attend a U.N. Security Council meeting later Thursday, part of a diplomatic push by Qatar after the strike. The Foreign Ministry in Doha also said Thursday that it was convening an emergency Arab-Islamic leaders summit next week in Qatar to discuss the attack.
Qatar TV/REUTERS 
Hamas said Tuesday that its top leaders survived the strike but that five lower-level members were killed, including the son of Khalil al-Hayya — Hamas’ leader for Gaza and its top negotiator — as well as three bodyguards and the head of al-Hayya’s office.
Hamas, which has sometimes only confirmed the assassination of its leaders months later, offered no immediate proof that al-Hayya and other senior figures had survived. Israel has not confirmed the identities of any members of the group killed by its strikes.
Qatar has hosted Hamas’ political leadership for years in Doha, in part over a request by the U.S. to encourage negotiations between the militant group and Israel. Israel had also approved this arrangement and before October 7, 2023, it had also given its blessing for Qatar to channel millions of dollars of cash support to Hamas each month.
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Washington — House Republicans voted Wednesday to repeal the legal justifications used to attack Iraq in 1991 and 2003, the latest attempt by Congress to revoke the president’s authority to wage war.
The move follows President Trump’s decisions to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and strike a boat allegedly carrying illicit drugs in the Caribbean.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have long questioned leaving the authorizations in place, arguing it allows presidents to abuse their power.
The House adopted the measure in a 261 to 167 vote. It was supported by 212 Democrats and 49 Republicans. The bipartisan amendment is linked to the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed later Wednesday. The amendment was sponsored by Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York and Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas.
During floor debate, Meeks said the authorizations are “long obsolete” and “risk abuse by administrations of either party.”
“It is time for Congress to reclaim its constitutional authority over matters of war and peace,” Meeks said.
Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was objecting to the amendment for “procedural reasons.”
“We have, I think, probably large agreement on reasons to sunset things,” Mast said. “But it should not be done in absence of doing something of this gravity in the proper way.”
A similar measure passed the Democratic-controlled Senate in 2023, with the support of 48 Democrats and 18 Republicans. But it never received a vote in the Republican-controlled House.
In the House, 219 Democrats and 49 Republicans voted to repeal the 2002 authorization in 2021. But it stalled in the Senate. Both chambers had a Democratic majority at the time.
Congress adopted the 2002 authorization ahead of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that led to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The 1991 authorization was approved during the Gulf War.
“We should not be operating under a 23-year-old authorization of the use of military force,” Roy said. “We don’t need to have Congress effectively modern-day declaring war and leaving it in place for a quarter of a freaking century, or in this case, 34 years since 1991.”
In 2020, Mr. Trump used the 2002 authorization as part of the legal justification for an airstrike that killed Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.
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BEIRUT — Israel on Tuesday ordered the evacuation of the entire city of Gaza, the first time it has done so in the run-up to its planned full invasion of the largest urban center in the Gaza Strip’s north.
Home to roughly 1 million residents before the war, Gaza City still has hundreds of thousands of residents who are enduring famine conditions and fearful of displacement to other parts of an enclave where nowhere has proven safe in Israel’s almost-two-year campaign to destroy Hamas.
Six Palestinians died of hunger on Tuesday, according to Palestinian health authorities, increasing the death toll of starvation victims to 399.
“There’s no place left to go, not in the south, not in the north, nothing,” said Bajess AlKhaledi, a Gaza resident interviewed on Tuesday by Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera English. “We’re completely trapped.”
The evacuation order came the same day Israel launched an attack on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital of Doha.
Some 50,000 have left northern Gaza to areas south, according to the United Nations and partner humanitarian agencies on Sunday. They warn that hundreds of thousands are expected to stay put in Gaza City because of logistical and financial difficulties, and that plans for large-scale displacement would amount to forced migration — a war crime under international law.
It remains unclear when the Gaza City invasion will start, though Israel has already called up tens of thousands of reservists and destroyed dozens of high-rise residential towers in recent days. The Israeli military said the towers were being used by Hamas, a charge Hamas denied.
The Israeli military says it controls some 40% of the city.
“All of this is only the introduction, only the beginning of the main intensive operation — the ground incursion of our forces, that are now getting organized and gathering, into Gaza City,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address on Monday.
“To the residents of Gaza, listen to me carefully: You have been warned; get out of there!”
Israel claims Hamas remains bunkered in Gaza City and has vowed to destroy its remaining bastions there to prevent it from regrouping, despite repeated warnings by the U.N. and rights groups that no area in the enclave could handle large-scale displacement.
“Gaza is being obliterated, reduced to a wasteland,” said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, in a social media post on Tuesday.
“There is no safe place in Gaza, let alone a humanitarian zone. It is a large and growing camp concentrating hungry Palestinians in despair,” Lazzarini wrote.
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza, meanwhile, called for “immediate protection” of hospitals and medical crews, and warned of “a humanitarian catastrophe that threatens the lives of thousands of patients and wounded individuals.”
The majority of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents have already suffered multiple displacements since the war began, as Israel’s military campaign has attacked designated “safe zones” and left wide swaths of the Strip obliterated. Famine, spurred by a months-long total blockade by Israel, stalks additional victims every day.
Israel’s plans to invade Gaza City continue even as torturous back-and-forth negotiations with Hamas received a push from President Trump over the weekend.
On Sunday, Trump issued what he called a final warning to Hamas to accept a deal he proposed.
Details remain scant, but the agreement stipulates the Palestinian group release all hostages in its custody in exchange for the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israel jail.
“The Israelis have accepted my Terms. It is time for Hamas to accept as well,” Trump said on Truth Social. “I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!”
Hamas responded in a statement on Sunday that it was ready to “immediately” sit at the negotiating table to release all hostages. In return, Hamas wants “a clear declaration” from Israel to end the war, a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and the formation of an independent committee to administer the Strip.
It added that it wanted guarantees Israel would adhere to the agreement. Israel broke a U.S.-brokered ceasefire in March. It did not respond to another U.S. proposal in August that Hamas accepted.
Israel has also demanded Hamas surrender and lay down its arms. The group says it will not disarm until Israel agrees to the creation of an independent Palestinian state over Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which would have East Jerusalem as its capital. East Jerusalem is considered occupied under international law, though Israel says it is part of its capital.
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Israel’s military said Tuesday that it had “conducted a precise strike targeting the senior leadership of the Hamas terrorist organization,” amid reports of large explosions in Qatar’s capital city, Doha.
Qatar’s government quickly issued condemnation of what it called a “cowardly Israeli strike,” which it said had violated international law.
The Israel Defense Forces did not confirm the location of the strikes in its statement, but said it targeted leaders of Hamas who, in the IDF’s words, had for years “led the terrorist organization’s operations, are directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre, and have been orchestrating and managing the war against the State of Israel.”
The IDF said its operation on Tuesday was called “Summit of Fire.”
Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/REUTERS
The Al-Jazeera television network said an ongoing meeting of Hamas leaders in Doha was struck, as they gathered to discuss a recent U.S. ceasefire proposal to end the war in the Gaza Strip.
“Prior to the strike, measures were taken in order to mitigate harm to civilians, including the use of precise munitions and additional intelligence,” the IDF said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released a statement Tuesday saying the “action against the top terrorist chieftains of Hamas was a wholly independent Israeli operation. Israel initiated it, Israel conducted it, and Israel takes full responsibility.”
The U.S. State Department and the office of President Trump’s special envoy on the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, did not immediately reply to CBS News’ requests for comment on unconfirmed reports that the Trump administration was given advanced warning about Israeli strikes in Doha.
Hamas, long designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and the European Union, has maintained a primary political office in Doha for years, through which it has conducted most of its diplomacy since the war in Gaza was sparked by the group’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
Qatar is a close ally of the United States and also hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, Al-Udeid Air Base.
The Qatari government condemned what it called a “cowardly Israeli attack that targeted residential compounds housing several members of Hamas’ political bureau in the Qatari capital, Doha.”
Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/REUTERS 
“This criminal act constitutes a blatant violation of all international laws and norms and poses a serious threat to the security and safety of Qatari citizens and residents,” Dr. Majed Al Ansari, spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in the statement. “Qatar reiterates its firm stance that it will not tolerate this reckless Israeli behavior and continued destabilization of regional security, nor any act that targets its sovereignty and safety. Investigations are being conducted at the highest level, and further details will be announced as soon as they become available.”
In a post on social media, the U.S. Embassy in Doha said it was aware of “reports of missile strikes occurring in Doha,” and it announced a shelter-in-place order for embassy facilities.
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Over the weekend, President Trump shared a doctored AI image of himself as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, the crazed cavalry commander in the 1979 Vietnam War film, “Apocalypse Now,” crouched in a black Stetson hat in front of a flaming Chicago skyline abuzz with black helicopters.
“‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
Trump has long promised to deploy the National Guard to America’s major urban hubs. But his unprecedented push this summer to deploy military convoys into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — and drumbeat of threats to send yet more into cities from Baltimore to San Francisco — has left many Americans divided on whether his administration is trying to protect people in Democratic-controlled cities or wage war on them.
When Trump first sent troops into L.A. in June, he argued federal immigration agents needed protection from locals who tried to obstruct them from fulfilling their mission. In August, he deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., seizing on instances of violent crime to claim a public emergency.
And now he has paired the issues of crime and immigration as he threatens Chicago, deploying militaristic imagery and rhetoric that break longstanding American norms.
As Trump goads Democratic-led cities, dubbing them poorly run “hellholes,” Americans are grappling with a fundamental question of American democracy: Is Trump simply fulfilling his election mandate to ramp up deportations and combat crime, as he and his supporters argue, or ushering in a new era of American authoritarianism?
Trump’s critics warn that he is exaggerating crime in American cities to score political points. In deploying troops to Los Angeles and D.C., they argue, Trump is setting up a military police state that targets political opponents, tramples on due process, installs loyalists over institutionalists, and erodes longstanding distinctions between the military and domestic law enforcement.
“This is how authoritarians behave, this is not how the leader of a free democracy behaves.” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “He is taking a page from authoritarian rulers around the world who have used crime as an excuse to consolidate power and suppress rights.”
Conservatives tend to brush aside such concerns, arguing that Trump’s deployment of troops simply delivers on a campaign promise. They note he ran on a platform of mass deportations and fighting crime in major cities.
“There’s a problem to be dealt with there,” said James E. Campbell, professor emeritus of political science at the University at Buffalo. “He has the constitutional authority to employ the National Guard, and that’s part of the powers of commander in chief in Article II. What’s peculiar here is some cities don’t want the help — or at least the leaders of the cities.”
While the courts will ultimately settle the legal questions of what Trump can do, he seems to be betting that he can put Democratic leaders in a defensive position at a time when polls show the vast majority of Americans are worried about crime.
When Illinois’ Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker pushed back this weekend against Trump’s Chicago plans, accusing the president of “threatening to go to war with an American city,” Trump insisted he was not spoiling for a fight.
“We’re not going to war,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We’re going to clean up our cities.”
Democrats say Trump is scaremongering about crime in American cities to score points against his political enemies, noting that homicides and other violent crimes have dropped over the last five years in cities across the nation.
According to a recent analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, a policy think tank, violent crime is lower in most cities than the pandemic peak of 2020-21. But the report noted that most of the decline in the national homicide rate has been driven by large drops in cities with high homicide rates, such as Baltimore and St Louis. More than half of sample cities continue to experience homicide levels above pre-2020 rates.
For many Americans, crime remains a potent political issue.
About 81% of Americans and 68% of Democrats, according to a recent survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, see crime as a “major problem” in large cities.
But it remains to be seen if Americans will warm to Trump’s hard-line tactics: about 55% of Americans in the AP poll said it’s acceptable for the U.S. military and National Guard to assist local police in big cities, but less than a third support federal troops taking control of city police departments.
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Throughout the 2024 election, Trump threatened to deploy the National Guard to fight crime.
“In cities where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order, where the fundamental rights of our citizens are being intolerably violated,” he promised in his Agenda47 campaign platform. “I will not hesitate to send in federal assets including the National Guard until safety is restored.”
Still, there was some shock when Trump deployed the National Guard and U.S. Marines to L.A. in June after a clash erupted in the heavily Latino city of Paramount as immigration agents ratcheted up his deportation agenda.
The conflict fell short of an all-out collapse of law and order. After Border Patrol agents were spotted setting up a staging area outside a Home Depot, hundreds of protesters gathered, some hurled rocks at federal vehicles as agents fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades at the crowd. Within hours, Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard soldiers to L.A.— against the will of California Gov. Gavin Newsom — to protect federal agents and property.
Sending in the National Guard without a governor’s consent was a highly unusual step. The last time it happened was in 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect civil rights marchers marching from Selma to Montgomery.
But L.A. was not a one-off for Trump. In August, Trump announced he would take federal control of Washington, D.C.’s police department and activate National Guard troops to help “reestablish law and order.” The city, he said, had been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
Dist. Atty. Brian Schwalb, the elected attorney general of the District of Columbia, argued “there is no crime emergency” in D.C. “Violent crime in DC reached historic 30-year lows last year,” Schwalb noted, “and is down another 26% so far this year.”
But Trump put Democrats on the defensive as he seized on a handful of violent cases in the nation’s capital: two Israeli embassy staffers fatally gunned down in May, a congressional intern shot dead in June and an administration staffer assaulted in an attempted carjacking in August.
And he has adopted a similar strategy as he threatens to send troops to Chicago, highlighting a violent Labor Day weekend, in which nine people were killed and more than 50 injured across the city.
Chicago has long struggled with violent crime, but city officials note that homicides and shootings have declined, putting the city on track for its lowest homicide rate in half a century.
Mayor Brandon Johnson said homicides are down 30% in the last year in Chicago and his police department has taken 24,000 guns off the street, most of which came from Republican-led states, since he took office in May 2023.
“This stunt that this president is attempting to execute is not real. It doesn’t help drive us towards a more safe, affordable, big city,” Johnson said last month as he called on Trump to release $800 million in violence prevention funds that the federal government cut in April.
Already, Trump has declared implausibly quick results in curbing crime in Washington, D.C..
“D.C. was a hellhole and now it’s safe,” the president declared less than two weeks after deploying troops to the nation’s capital. “Within one week, we will have no crime in Chicago.”
When asked about Trump’s strategy, Adam Gelb, the president and chief executive of the Council on Criminal Justice, said the obvious challenge was the Trump administration’s solutions tended to be, “by definition, short term dopamine hits and not sustainable long term solutions.”
“That’s what history tells us: we can have short-term impact with shocks to the system like this, but they tend to be fleeting.”
Asked what would happen if the shock to the system was permanent, Gelb said he did not know.
“It hasn’t been tested,” Gelb said, “not in this country with respect to deployment of troops in massive numbers.”
Ultimately, Gelb said, Trump’s incursion into cities was “testing Americans’ tolerance for crime and militarization.”
“If there’s a perception that these tactics are responsible for dramatic reductions in crime,” he asked, “will people become more tolerant of them?”
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Trump has suggested that Americans will allow him unlimited powers if he is perceived as stopping crime.
“Most people are saying, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants,’ ” Trump said last month in a televised Cabinet meeting. “I am not a dictator, by the way,”
“I’m the president of the United States,” he added. “If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”
Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at UCLA, said Trump is “the most extreme case yet of a leader who comes to power in a long-established democracy and wants to act like an authoritarian — to break down all restrictions on his power and intimidate his enemies.”
Most alarming of all, he said, was the Trump administration’s purging of professionals from federal agencies such as the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in favor of loyalists.
The co-author of “Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st century,” Treisman said Trump’s aims appeared to closely resemble those of Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, or Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador.
“I would like to believe that he will face a lot more obstacles than those leaders did,” Treisman said.
Even if a majority of Americans think Trump is right that crime is a problem — or a substantial number support indefinite occupations of American cities or the elimination of due process — some argue that doesn’t make it democratic.
“There’s no such thing as electing a president to undo democracy and violate the rule of law,” Goitein said. “He can’t say, ‘Well, the American people elected me to shred the Constitution.’ ”
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Jenny Jarvie
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Vladimir Putin is on a roll the past few weeks. First President Trump invited him to Anchorage. Then he got a three-way hug with China’s President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a summit in China. And an invitation to a grand military parade in Beijing.
Since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Putin had been shunted to the fringes of summit group photos. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he had been treated as a pariah by the United States and Europe. Indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, he could travel only to countries that wouldn’t arrest him. In short, Moscow was not being treated with the respect it believed it deserved.
Trump thought that by literally rolling out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska — and clapping as the Russian loped down the red carpet — he could reset the bilateral relationship. And it did. But not the way Trump intended.
The Alaskan summit convinced the Russians that the current administration is willing to throw the sources of American global power out the window.
Trade partners, geopolitical allies and alliances — everything is on the table for Trump. The U.S. president believes this shows his power; the Russians see this as a low-cost opportunity to degrade American influence. Putin was trained by the KGB to recognize weakness and exploit it.
There is no evidence that being friendly to Putin and agreeing with Russian positions are going to make Moscow more willing to stop fighting in Ukraine. Overlooking Russia’s intensifying hybrid attacks on Europe, in February, Vice President JD Vance warned Europe that it should be focusing instead on the threat to democracy “from within.” This followed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth‘s assurances that Ukraine would never join NATO. Trump has suggested that U.S. support for NATO and Europe is contingent on those countries paying up. In an event that sent Moscow pundits to pop the Champagne, Trump told Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office that he just didn’t “have the cards” and should stop trying to beat Russia.
Did any of this bring Putin to the negotiating table? No.
In fact, the Kremlin indicated a readiness to talk with Trump about the war only when Trump threatened “very, very powerful” sanctions in mid-July. This time, he seemed serious about it. The Alaska summit happened a month later. The tougher Trump is with Russia, the more likely he is to get any kind of traction in negotiations. It’s unfortunate that the president has now gone back to vague two-week deadlines for imposing sanctions that never materialize.
Russia believes it will win the war. China has been a steady friend, willing to sell Russia cars and dual-use technology that ends up in drones that are attacking Ukrainian cities. It has also become Russia’s largest buyer of crude oil and coal. Western sanctions have not been biting the Russian economy, though they have nibbled away at state revenues. Europe and the United States have not been willing to apply the kind of economic pressure that would seriously dent Russia’s ability to carry on the war.
Putin keeps saying that a resolution to the war requires that the West address the “root causes” of the war. These causes, for Russia, relate to the way it was treated after losing the Cold War. The three Baltic nations joined Europe as fast as they could. Central and Eastern European countries decided that they would rather be part of NATO than the Warsaw Pact. When Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine started asking for membership in the European Union and NATO, Russia realized it wouldn’t be able to convince them to stay with economic appeal or soft power. It had to use force. Unable to demonstrate the attraction of its suffocating embrace, or the value of its Eurasian Economic Union, Russia believed it had to use force to keep Ukraine by its side. It reminds one of a grotesque Russian expression: “If he beats you, it means he loves you.”
The real “root cause” of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s inability to accept that centuries of empire do not confer the right to dominate former colonies forever. Mongolia learned this. As did the British. And the French. And the Ottomans. The Austro-Hungarians.
Eventually this war will end. But not soon. Russia is insisting on maximalist demands that Ukraine cannot agree to, which include control over territory it hasn’t managed to occupy. Ukraine will not stop fighting until it is sure that Russia will not attack again. Achieving that degree of certainty with flimsy security guarantees is impossible.
In the meantime, Ukrainian cities on the frontline will continue being wiped out, citizens in Kherson will continue being subjects of “human safari” for Russian drone operators, people across Ukraine will continue experiencing daily air raids that send them scurrying into shelters. Soldiers, volunteers, civilians and children will continue dying. Trump appears to care about the thousands of daily casualties. Most of these are Russian soldiers who have been sent to their death by a Russian state that doesn’t see their lives as worth preserving.
Trump is understandably frustrated with his inability to “stop the killing” because he has assumed that satisfying Russian demands is the answer. The opposite is true: Only by showing — proving — to Russia that its demands are unattainable will the U.S. persuade the Kremlin to consider meaningful negotiations. Countries at war come to the negotiating table not because they are convinced to abandon their objectives. They sit down when they realize their goals are unattainable.
Alexandra Vacroux is the vice president for strategic engagement at the Kyiv School of Economics.
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Putin has successfully leveraged recent diplomatic engagements to break out of international isolation, using meetings with Xi Jinping and Modi, along with Trump’s invitation to Alaska, to demonstrate that Western attempts to sideline Russia have failed. These high-profile gatherings signal to the world that Russia remains a significant player on the global stage despite sanctions and international legal proceedings.
Trump’s accommodating approach toward Putin represents a fundamental misreading of Russian psychology and strategic thinking, as Putin was trained to recognize and exploit weakness rather than respond to friendship with reciprocal gestures. The president’s willingness to question support for NATO and suggest contingent relationships with allies signals to Moscow that American global influence can be degraded at low cost.
Russia only demonstrates willingness to engage in meaningful negotiations when faced with credible threats of severe consequences, as evidenced by the Kremlin’s indication of readiness to talk only after Trump threatened “very, very powerful” sanctions in July. Conversely, accommodating gestures and vague deadlines for sanctions that never materialize encourage Russian intransigence.
The fundamental driver of the conflict stems from Russia’s inability to accept the end of its imperial dominance over former territories, not the grievances about post-Cold War treatment that Moscow frequently cites. Russia’s resort to force against Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova reflects its failure to maintain influence through economic appeal or soft power, revealing an outdated imperial mindset that refuses to acknowledge former colonies’ right to self-determination.
Meaningful negotiations will only occur when Russia recognizes that its maximalist territorial and political demands are unattainable through military means, requiring sustained pressure rather than premature concessions. Current Russian demands for control over territory it hasn’t occupied and Ukraine’s complete capitulation demonstrate that Moscow still believes it can achieve total victory.
The Russia-China partnership faces significant structural limitations that constrain the depth of their cooperation, despite public declarations of “no limits” friendship. While both nations conduct joint military exercises and maintain substantial trade relationships, their military collaboration remains “carefully managed and circumscribed by each nation’s broader strategic interests,” with no mutual defense agreements or deep operational integration between their armed forces[1].
India’s apparent warming toward China and Russia reflects strategic autonomy principles rather than genuine alignment toward an anti-Western axis, as fundamental tensions between New Delhi and Beijing persist over unresolved border disputes and strategic competition in the Indian Ocean region[2]. Recent diplomatic gestures may be tactical responses to trade tensions rather than indicators of a permanent realignment away from partnerships with Australia, Japan, the European Union, and other democratic allies[2].
The potential for wedging strategies between Russia and China remains viable due to underlying structural tensions and competing interests, particularly in Central Asia where both powers seek influence. American policymakers increasingly recognize that the “reverse Nixon” approach of driving wedges between Moscow and Beijing could exploit inherent limitations in their partnership, as their relationship represents neither unlimited friendship nor a completely stable alliance[4][5].
China’s military cooperation with Russia serves Beijing’s interests in testing tactics and equipment while maintaining careful distance from direct involvement in conflicts that could jeopardize its broader strategic goals[1]. Chinese support for Russian drone production and dual-use technology transfers reflects calculated assistance that stops short of full military alliance, suggesting Beijing prioritizes its own strategic flexibility over unconditional support for Russian objectives[3].
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Alexandra Vacroux
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President Trump on Monday continued to flirt with the idea of mobilizing National Guard troops to combat crime in Chicago, just a day after he had to clarify that he has no intent to “go to war” with the American city.
The push to militarize local law enforcement operations has been an ongoing fixation for the president, who on Saturday used war imagery and a reference to the movie “Apocalypse Now” to suggest that the newly rebranded Department of War could descend upon the Democrat-run city.
Trump clarified Sunday that his post was meant to convey he wants to “clean up” the city, and on Monday once again floated the possibility of deploying federal agents to the city — a move that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, has staunchly opposed.
“I don’t know why Chicago isn’t calling us saying, please give us help,” Trump said during a speech at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. “When you have over just a short period of time, 50 murders and hundreds of people shot, and then you have a governor that stands up and says how crime is just fine. It’s really really crazy, but we’re bringing back law and order to our country.”
A few hours earlier, Trump posted on social media that he wanted “to help the people of Chicago, not hurt them” — a statement that Pritzker mocked as insincere, saying that Trump had “just threatened an American city with the Department of War.”
“Once again, this isn’t about fighting crime. That requires support and coordination — yet we’ve experienced nothing like that over the past several weeks,” Pritzker said in a post on X. “Instead of taking steps to work with us on public safety, the Trump administration’s focused on scaring Illinoisians.”
The White House did not respond when asked whether Trump would send National Guard troops to Chicago without the request from the governor. But the Department of Homeland Security announced in a news release Monday that it was launching an immigration enforcement operation to “target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago.”
For weeks, Trump has talked about sending the military to Chicago and other cities led by Democrats — an action that governors have repeatedly opposed. Most Americans also oppose the idea, according to a recent CBS/YouGov poll, but the Republican base largely sees Trump’s push as a means to reduce crime.
If Trump were to deploy U.S. forces to the cities, it would follow similar operations in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles — moves that a federal judge last week said was illegal and that amounted to Trump “creating a national police force with the President as its chief” but that Trump sees as victories.
In his Monday remarks, Trump claimed that he “saved Los Angeles” and that crime is down to “virtually nothing” in Washington because he decided to send military forces to patrol the cities. Trump downplayed instances of domestic violence, saying those are “much lesser things” that should not be taken into account when trying to discern whether his crime-fighting efforts have worked in the nation’s capital.
“Things that take place in the home, they call crime. They’ll do anything they can to find something,” Trump lamented. “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime. Now, I can’t claim 100%, but we are a safe city.”
Trump said “we can do the same thing” in other cities, like Chicago and New York City.
“We are waiting for a call from Chicago,” Trump said. “We’ll fix Chicago.”
As of Monday afternoon, Pritzker’s office had yet to receive any “formal communication or information from the Trump administration” about potential plans to have troops deployed into the city, said Matt Hill, a spokesperson for the Illinois governor.
“Like the public and press, we are learning of their operations through social media as they attempt to produce a reality television show,” Hill said in an email. “If he cared about delivering real solutions for Illinois, then we would have heard from him.”
Pritzker, in remarks posted on social media Sunday, said the Trump administration was trampling on citizens’ constitutional rights “in the fake guise of fighting crime.”
“Once Donald Trump gets the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law — what comes next?” he said.
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Ana Ceballos
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