Trump News

Donald Trump’s approval rating has plunged to just 37 percent – one of the lowest of his presidency – as Democratic victories in the 2025 off-year elections signal growing voter frustration with the president and the GOP, according to political analyst Marina Dunbar.

Dunbar, a Guardian U.S. fellow, wrote Friday that this week’s results reveal more than just local political dynamics.

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from forcing federal workers to set their email auto-replies to messages blaming Democrats in Congress for the government shutdown.

From the outset of the shutdown weeks ago, multiple executive branch departments have directed employees who are out of the office due to the shutdown to put partisan political messages in their automatic responses.

President Donald Trump erupted Friday on Truth Social, declaring it a “total disgrace” that next year’s G20 summit will be held in South Africa – and vowing that no U.S. officials will attend the global gathering as long as “human rights abuses” continue there.

“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa,” Trump wrote Friday. “Afrikaners (People who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also French and German immigrants) are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated. No U.S. Government Official will attend as long as these Human Rights abuses continue.”

President Donald Trump appeared to doze during a press conference on Thursday, drawing both mockery and shock from political analysts.

In a conversation about it on Friday, however, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace simply burst into laughter.

“Unherd” writer Richard Hanania on Friday noticed a strong correlation between President Donald Trump’s recent collapse in popularity and another pertinent event in Washington, D.C.

“Trump approval finally beginning to really decline,” said Hanania on X. “Turning point was around October 27. What has been the cause?” he posted.

The Nasdaq Composite had its worst week since April this week, numbers show.

Market Watch attributed the flop to the tech industry and the government shutdown. Yahoo Finance cited "seesaw stretches for 'Magnificent Seven' stalwarts Nvidia (NVDA) and Tesla (TSLA). The S&P 500 and the Dow also closed out the bumpy week in the red as persistent worries about an AI bubble and Big Tech valuations run high."

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday urged a New York appeals court to overturn Donald Trump’s felony conviction – an “extraordinary” move by federal officials on behalf of the sitting president as he seeks to erase his criminal conviction.

According to a new report in Bloomberg, Justice Department lawyers filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that Trump’s conviction last year in the Manhattan hush-money case was improper. The brief cites the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling granting presidents broad immunity for acts committed while in office.

President Donald Trump demanded that U.S. Senators "not leave town" for the weekend unless they resolved the government shutdown.

Trump made the remarks just an hour after leaving the White House for Mar-a-Lago on Friday.

Former special counsel Jack Smith sent Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) a new letter about setting the record straight with his public testimony, Politico reported on Friday.

The letter, written by lawyers for Smith, delivered a sly jab at President Donald Trump for leveraging law enforcement against his political enemies while alleging that Smith had done so.

After President Donald Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, threw a fit at a reporter during a diplomatic lunch for asking her about what the administration is doing to address cost-of-living issues, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was visibly impressed, even joking that he needed to hire her for his own administration.

"He signed the largest middle-class tax cut in six months, in six months, in record time," Leavitt said, referring to Trump's megabill that predominantly extended tax cuts for the top 1 percent while giving families making under $50,000 less than a dollar a day in tax cuts on average. "Affordability is what the American people elected this president to do, and he is doing it, and you guys refuse to cover it, and you refuse to cover that the previous administration created the worst unaffordability crisis in American history!"

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) rejected an offer by Democrats to end a government shutdown.

On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offered to vote for a Republican government funding bill if it included a one-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies.