Trump news at a glance: president insists he won't let Putin ‘mess around with me' at summit on Ukraine
Amid concerns from European leaders that the Russian president will cajole Trump into imposing a settlement on Ukraine, the US president told reporters on the eve of Friday's talks in Alaska: 'I am president, and he's not going to mess around with me.
'I'll know within the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes... whether or not we're going to have a good meeting or a bad meeting. And if it's a bad meeting, it'll end very quickly, and if it's a good meeting, we're going to end up getting peace in the pretty near future.'
Meanwhile in Washington DC, the White House said there would be a round-the-clock presence of local and federal law enforcement officers after Trump's federal takeover of its police department and dispatch of national guard troops.
Here are the key US politics stories at a glance:
Donald Trump has said he believes Vladimir Putin is ready to make a deal on the war in Ukraine as the two leaders prepare for their Alaska summit, but his suggestion the Russian leader and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy could 'divvy things up' may alarm some in Kyiv.
The US president implied there was a 75% chance of Friday's Alaska meeting succeeding, and that the threat of economic sanctions may have made Putin more willing to seek an end to the war. He also said a second meeting – at present not confirmed – between himself, Putin and Zelenskyy would be the more decisive.
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The president falsely claimed crime in Washington DC was the 'worst it's ever been', amid an ongoing federal takeover of the city's police department and deployment of the national guard and federal agents in the city.
'Washington DC is at its worst point,' Trump said from the Oval Office on Thursday. 'It will soon be at its best point.' He also baselessly accused DC law enforcement officials of giving 'phony crime stats' and said 'they're under investigation'.
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Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said she had sent 'sanctuary city' letters to the mayors of 32 cities and a handful of county executives warning that she intends to prosecute political leaders who are not in her view sufficiently supportive of immigration enforcement.
'You better be abiding by our federal policies and with our federal law enforcement, because if you're not we're going to come after you,' she told a Fox News reporter on Thursday. 'Our leaders have to support our law enforcement.'
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Democratic lawmakers in Texas said they were ready to return to the state under certain conditions, ending a nearly two-week-long effort to block Republicans from passing a new congressional map that would add five GOP seats.
The lawmakers said on Thursday they would return as long as the legislature ended its first special session on Friday, which Republicans have said they plan to do. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has said he will immediately call another special session.
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The first lady has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and has threatened to sue if he does not.
Biden, the son of the former president Joe Biden, alleged in an interview this month that Epstein had introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump. The statements were false, defamatory and 'extremely salacious', Melania Trump's lawyer, Alejandro Brito, said in a letter to Biden.
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An influential US medical journal is rejecting a call from the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children, the journal's editor told Reuters.
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Donald Trump cold-called Norway's finance minister last month to ask about a nomination for the Nobel peace prize, Norwegian press reported on Thursday.
A lawsuit filed on behalf of two mothers and their four minor children claims the two families were unlawfully denied due process and deported by Ice to Honduras.
Ron DeSantis said Florida would open a second immigration jail as a federal judge weighs whether to close the facility in the Everglades known as 'Alligator Alcatraz'.
Catching up? Here's what happened on 13 August 2025.
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