The Latest: Trump targets ‘the enemy from within’

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Although the military is designed to handle foreign threats, President Donald Trump emphasized his vision of using it for domestic purposes during a speech to top U.S. military officials on Tuesday.

“It’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control,” the president said. His remarks referred to criminals and immigrants who are in the country illegally.

Trump was joined by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the unusual gathering of hundreds of U.S. military leaders who were abruptly summoned to Virginia from around the world for an unveiling of new directives to end “woke” culture in the military.

The president has already demonstrated an eagerness to deploy troops against U.S. citizens, having deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles over immigration enforcement protests earlier this year and most recently in Portland, despite objections from leaders in both states.

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Duckworth said after Trump’s and Hegseth’s Quantico speeches that “the least qualified Defense Secretary in history” should resign.

She also said Trump’s idea to use U.S. cities as training grounds for the military is un-American.

The event itself, which involved considerable expense for generals and admirals to travel from around the world, amounted to a “partisan diatribe” that wasted military commanders’ time and taxpayer money, Duckworth said.

She said Hegseth’s rules changes for the military effectively encourage hazing. She called it “utterly appalling,” adding that Hegseth, a veteran himself, should be aware that troops have died as a result of hazing.

His changes to some rules of engagement, the senator said, will “create more enemies of America and make it more likely those enemies would torture captured American troops.”

Sen. John Kennedy is arguing that Democrats’ demands in the government funding fight are not really about policy, but instead placating the demands of their political base.

“This shutdown is about politics,” The Louisiana Republican said in a floor speech.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer did indeed face fierce backlash from liberal groups for allowing a government funding bill to advance to a final vote in March. This time, Democrats have made clear policy demands and are arguing that President Donald Trump is at fault for refusing to compromise with them.

But as a shutdown approached, Kennedy also predicted that it would be difficult to resolve the impasse if funding lapses after midnight.

“We’re not going to give into their demands,” Kennedy said.

The order promises $50 million in new funding for a childhood cancer data initiative created during Trump’s first term, with more potential new funding possible after that.

White House officials said the goal is using that data -- combined with AI technology -- to speed up diagnostic trials, sharpen diagenesis and strengthen prevention efforts.

They said it was too early to discuss what companies or technologies might be involved.

Announcing the order in the Oval Office, Trump said of AI, “It’s gonna be so accessible to everybody.”

He was surrounded by young cancer survivors and their parents who briefly told their stories. When the finished, Trump was moved enough to murmur “We’re not gonna top that” and call an end to the session.

President Donald Trump said his administration is close to reaching a deal with Harvard University after a monthslong conflict with the Ivy League school.

On Wednesday, Trump initially said a deal had been reached but then said officials were “close to finalizing” the agreement. “We haven’t done it yet,” he said at the White House.

A truce with Harvard would end a clash that has tested the independence of America’s colleges.

The White House has targeted Harvard with a series of investigations and billions of dollars in funding cuts as it presses for changes to its policies and governance.

Trump came into office saying he would cut funding for schools that defied his agenda, vowing to eliminate “wokeness.”

History’s first American pope repeated his call for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. But Leo also expressed hope for the plan to put an an end to the war as he left his country estate in Castel Gandolfo late Tuesday.

“It seems that it is a realistic proposal,” he said. “There are elements that I think are very interesting, and I hope Hamas accepts it in the established timeframe.”

Leo also expressed concern about the fate of the flotilla bringing aid to Gaza. The 50-plus boats are expected to try to breach the Israeli naval blockade overnight when they get within 150 nautical miles of Gaza.

Leo said he understood the flotilla organizers’ desire to respond to the “true humanitarian emergency” in Gaza. But he expressed concern for the potential of violence.

The Italian government has warned flotilla organizers that Israel may treat their incursion as a “hostile act” and has urged them to stop. Italy has proposed an alternative delivery site in Cyprus and then assured organizers that the Catholic Church would get it to Palestinians.

As Democrats watch the minutes tick down to a government shutdown, they are acknowledging that the funding lapse could cause disruptions for many Americans even as they prepared to vote against a Republican bill that would keep funding mostly at current levels.

Instead, they called on their Republican counterparts to sit down to discuss extending health care benefits.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the no. 2 ranked senator in the Democratic Caucus, said in a floor speech, “On the Democratic side, we think this is a battle worth fighting.”

But Republicans have shown no interest in attaching health care policy to a funding bill. They have called on Democrats to fund the government before having a debate on health care subsidies and berated Democrats for trying to use government funding as leverage to force a negotiation.

A group of labor unions filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Office of Management and Budget, its Director Russ Vought, Office of Personnel Management and its Director Scott Kupor, claiming that the Trump administration violated the law by threatening to perform a mass firing of federal workers during a shutdown.

The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees are plaintiffs in the suit.

They allege that the administration’s plan to fire federal employees during a shutdown is an unlawful abuse of power designed to punish workers and pressure Congress and violates the very laws that govern how shutdowns are supposed to function.

“Announcing plans to fire potentially tens of thousands of federal employees simply because Congress and the administration are at odds on funding the government past the end of the fiscal year is not only illegal – it’s immoral and unconscionable,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a news release.

Concern has lingered among Democrats that some senators may vote with Republicans to prevent a shutdown.

New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Sen. Angus King have declined to say how they will vote. But they did appear together in an informal hearing on the impacts of expiring ACA tax credits, saying the issue needed to be addressed now.

“There’s real urgency to extending the ACA premium tax credit payments now, because kicking the can down the road is going to make a real difference,” Shaheen said.

“The clock is ticking. Each day we wait makes the solution harder,” she added. “Waiting to act will leave more Americans uninsured.”

King told the Associated Press after the hearing that he hadn’t decided how he would vote, but that the hearing “underlines the importance of this.”

The development raises Democratic hopes for flipping his seat in Congress.

“Congress is so dysfunctional that there is no value in the work,” Schweikert said as he confirmed his candidacy to The Associated Press in an interview.

“You work at a feverous pitch. You try to do high quality, intellectually robust work and you have to deal with the reality,” he said, pointing to the difficulty of getting co-sponsors for serious spending and budget legislation.

This frustration is partly why he’s running for governor. He said Arizona, by contrast, has the potential for wage and job growth with new leadership in the state’s highest office.

Schweikert plans to officially launch his campaign Wednesday and will finish his current congressional term, his consultant Chris Baker said, as he squares off against lobbyist and housing developer Karrin Taylor Robson and House Freedom Caucus member Andy Biggs. Both support Trump’s agenda, and the president has given both his endorsement.

▶ Read more about the race for Arizona governor

With two months left in the Atlantic hurricane season, authorization for the National Flood Insurance Program is set to expire at the end of Tuesday if Congress doesn’t pass a spending bill.

Millions of policyholders rely on the NFIP to secure flood coverage that’s rarely part of standard homeowners policies and is required for mortgages in areas deemed high-risk.

While NFIP claims can still be paid during a lapse, new policies cannot be sold and existing ones can’t add coverage or be renewed.

Past freezes have wrought havoc on real estate transactions in flood-prone areas. When NFIP authorization lapsed for about 30 days in June 2010, an estimated 1,400 home sales were canceled or delayed daily, according to the National Association of Realtors.

An attorney for veteran investigative reporter Catherine Herridge said in an email that her legal team is “considering options for further review” after an appeals court panel ruled against her in a contempt fight.

The appeals court upheld a judge’s ruling holding Herridge in civil contempt for refusing to divulge her source for a series of Fox News stories about a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged.

Herridge’s lawyer, Patrick Philbin, said: “Ms. Herridge remains committed to protecting reporters’ First Amendment rights and confidential sources.”

Tourists walking through the Capitol halls stopped to watch the looped video message on a wide screen TV stationed in front of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office.

It began with a title screen “Democrats on shutdowns in their words” and showed past comments from lawmakers when they condemned potential shutdowns. The videos included Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Rep. Katherine Clarke, the Democratic Whip, as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley.

“Under President Trump their tune has suddenly changed…” a message reads before shifting to news headlines that describe how Democrats have called for a government shutdown if a bipartisan deal isn’t reached to extend the current federal budget.

The Argentinian government said on X that its president, Javier Milei, will meet with Trump on Oct. 14.

The meeting comes after the U.S. government announced plans to extended a $20 billion swap line to Argentina that helps to backstop its economy with access to American dollars. The move by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was shortly ahead of Argentina’s Oct. 26 midterm elections.

Milei is also an political ally of Trump, having spoken in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. Trump, in his remarks at the event, praised Milei. “We’re very proud of you,” he said.

Janessa Goldbeck, who served in the Marines and is now CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, said the defense secretary’s speech Tuesday was more about “stoking grievance than strengthening the force.”

She said Hegseth’s plan for loosening the rules for discipline in the military confuses abuse with toughness and is the “mark of someone who’s never seen the real thing.”

“It takes no strength to hit a recruit — it takes real strength to teach one,” she said.

“I had a front-row seat every day to the extraordinary training our recruits receive from the most disciplined, professional Marines in the fleet,” Goldbeck said of her experience at Marine boot camp in California, while Hegseth “never served as a drill instructor and never trained a recruit.”

The secretary “has a cartoonish, 1980s comic-book idea of toughness he’s never outgrown,” she said. “Instead of focusing on what actually improves force readiness, he continues to waste time and taxpayer dollars on He-Man culture-war theatrics.”

Police in a small Chicago suburb that houses a federal immigration building have launched three separate criminal investigations against federal agents.

Two involve alleged hit-and-run incidents while a third delves into allegations that agents fired chemical agents toward a reporter.

Armed immigration agents outside the center in Broadview have used increasingly aggressive tactics that local police say are unnecessary, dangerous to residents and raise serious concerns.

“We are experiencing an immediate public safety crisis,” Broadview Police Chief Thomas Mills told reporters Tuesday.

The processing center in Broadview, a community of about 8,000 people, has been at the front lines of a Chicago-area immigration operation.

U.S. District Judge William Young agreed with several university associations that the policy they described as ideological deportation violates the First Amendment. The Tuesday ruling came after a trial.

An email to the Homeland Security department for comment wasn’t immediately returned.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, said the Secretary of Defense’s speech Tuesday seemed more geared toward generating public relations content than “aligning the leadership around a set of ideas that the Trump administration is going to pursue.”

Clark said there had been some expectation that Pete Hegseth was going to delve into budget priorities, military investments or the new national defense strategy, which the Pentagon is expected to release sometime in the near future.

Clark said the message didn’t match the gravity of an event that drew hundreds of senior military leaders into one room.

“You’d think that the purpose of that would have been something more dramatic and important than grooming standards and physical fitness standards,” he said.

Elisa Cardnell, president of the Service Women’s Action Network, criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s statements about female troops and physical fitness, noting standards haven’t been lowered for women serving in combat roles.

She said he erroneously conflated combat standards with physical requirements for military service, which are adjusted for gender and age.

“A 50-year-old man, like a general, isn’t going to be doing the same number of push ups as a 17-year-old female,” Cardnell said.

But the requirements for serving in the infantry, for example, are the same for men and women, whether it’s carrying a certain amount of equipment or marching a certain distance, Cardnell said.

“Women and men going into combat roles meet the same high standards,” she said. “And those have never been lowered.”

Trump and fellow Republican leaders in Congress have been falsely claiming that Democrats are threatening to shut down the government unless they can get money to pay for health care for people living in the U.S. illegally.

Asked to explain what he means, Trump lashed out at the reporter and answered by talking about his crime crackdown in Washington, D.C.

Trump said no health care system can handle the amount of people that have come into the U.S. illegally.

“We all have big hearts. I have a bigger heart than you do,” he told CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang.

The Republican president then spoke for several minutes about reduced crime in the nation’s capital.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau has met with the vice president of Equatorial Guinea in Washington after the Trump administration approved a waiver of corruption sanctions that allowed him to travel to last week’s U.N. General Assembly and other U.S. cities.

The State Department says Landau met with Teodoro “Teddy” Nguema Obiang on Monday and “reaffirmed joint commitments to deepen commercial and economic ties, combat illegal immigration, and advance security cooperation.”

Obiang is accused of pilfering his impoverished country’s resources to feed a lifestyle of luxury cars, mansions and superyachts but earlier this month was given a temporary pass on U.S. corruption sanctions to travel to the U.N. and cities such as Miami and Los Angeles. The Associated Press reported in early September that Obiang was likely to get the waiver.

“I don’t think they have thought through what I believe the OMB director is going to do while government is shut down, I think they’re going to make it very painful,” said Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican.

Kennedy said he had “no inside information” about how Russ Vought, the White House’s director for the Office of Management, planned to respond to a potential government shutdown.

“I just know Russ, and he is an expert on the budget, and he’s an expert on pressure points,” Kennedy said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Russ punishes them the rest of their natural lives, or at least during a shutdown.”

Trump’s top negotiator expressed confidence Tuesday that the Supreme Court will uphold Trump’s use of a 1977 law to impose massive taxes — tariffs — on almost every country.

“We believe the court will defer to the president,’’ U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a discussion at the Economic Club of New York.

Trump has invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to declare national emergencies (over trafficking of drugs and immigrants and the nation’s longstanding trade deficits) to impose double-digit tariffs on most countries and specific ones on China, Canada and Mexico.

But a specialized trade court in New York in May ruled Trump had overstepped his authority in using the law to impose sweeping tariffs. And last month, a federal appeals court largely upheld that decision. The Supreme Court is set to hear the case in November.

Greer also said his 250-person agency will stay open even if Congress can’t break an impasse and keep the government open after 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. “We’re going to be going on all pistons even if we shut down,” he said.

The president’s library foundation is celebrating after officials in Florida approved a deal that will allow Miami Dade College to serve as the future home of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.

“No monument can fully capture the scale of my father’s legacy, but this library will stand as a tribute to the leader who reshaped history and restored America’s strength,” said Eric Trump, president of the library’s foundation. He said that, “Once completed, the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library will be visible for miles into the Atlantic, a bold landmark on Miami’s skyline and a lasting tribute to the achievements my father continues to deliver for this nation.”

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet voted Tuesday to give nearly three acres of prime downtown Miami real estate next to the historic Freedom Tower, appraised at more than $66 million, to the foundation that’s planning the president’s post-administration archives.

They argued the property would provide a “greater benefit to the public” and “increase economic development activities” as Trump’s library.

The president continued to attempt to blame congressional Democrats, despite Republicans controlling both chamber of Congress and the White House.

“They are shutting it down, we’re not shutting it down,” he said.

Trump also threatened political retribution unless a funding deal is reached.

“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible that are bad for them, and then irreversible by them,” he said, suggesting reductions to federal programs Democrats support.

Trump didn’t elaborate but said actions during a shutdown could include “cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”

As he announced a new partnership with Pfizer that would lead to more investments and lower prices, Trump said other drug manufacturers will follow suit.

And if they don’t, the president threatened to impose tariffs on those companies.

“Nobody wants to play that game. So they’re all gonna be good,” Trump said in response to a question from a reporter.

He said Pfizer was “right at the top,” while the Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly “has been fantastic also.” Other companies are coming to the White House next week and “we’re making deals with all of them.”

Asked about the Democrats’ message to federal workers getting furloughs and layoffs in a shutdown, one said the Trump administration has already fired tens of thousands of employees — before any shutdown.

“They’re letting people go left and right,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, because “it’s working at dismantling the federal government.”

“We do not want to shut the government down,” she said. “The Republicans are in charge here. They need to come to the table.”