Judge rules Trump can’t require citizenship proof on federal voting form – US politics live | US politics

Key events

The day so far

The White House announced a new rule restricting the ability of credentialed journalists to freely access the offices of press secretary Karoline Leavitt and other top communications officials in the West Wing, near the Oval Office. A memorandum issued late today bans journalists from accessing Room 140, also known as “Upper Press”, without a prior appointment, citing the need to protect potentially sensitive material. It said the change would take effect immediately.

Donald Trump announced that he has renovated the bathroom inside the Lincoln bedroom at the White House, and shared an image of the lavish white-and-black-marbled remodel. Trump has renovated other parts of the White House, including his heavily criticized demolition of the East Wing to build a $300m ballroom, paving over the Rose Garden and decorating the Oval Office with gold.

Trump’s request to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form cannot be enforced, a federal judge ruled. US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington DC uled that the proof-of-citizenship directive is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers, dealing a blow to the administration and its allies.

Trump is set to sit down with Norah O’Donnell, a CBS anchor, this afternoon in what would be the president’s first interview with the network since its parent company Paramount settled a $16m lawsuit with him. It comes as CBS is in the midst of a deliberate reposturing aimed, at least in part, to the center and the right.

Trump said that the US and Canada will not restart trade talks, but that Canadian PM Mark Carney had apologized to him for an Ontario political ad that featured Ronald Reagan saying tariffs spell disaster.

New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul called on the Trump administration to “release emergency nutrition assistance for the 3 million New Yorkers set to lose their Snap benefits tomorrow”. Hochul said that her administration “remains prepared for the worst” and is “fast-tracking over $100 million for food banks and pantries” and has declared a state of emergency.

It comes as two federal judges ruled almost simultaneously this afternoon that the Trump administration must continue to fund Snap, the nation’s biggest food aid program, using contingency funds during the government shutdown. The rulings came a day before the US Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the program, which serves about one in eight (or 42 million) Americans.

The US will not send any high-level officials to the upcoming Cop30 climate summit in Brazil, a White House official told Reuters, alleviating some concern among world leaders that Washington would send a team to scupper the talks.

Public tours in the White House will resume in December, according to a statement from the office of the first lady. They had been suspended indefinitely in August amid construction for Trump’s controversial $300m ballroom project.

Trump denied that he is considering strikes inside Venezuela, even amid reports that his administration may expand its counter-drug campaign in the Caribbean. It comes as the UN high commissioner for human rights said today that US military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean allegedly carrying illegal drugs from South America are “unacceptable” and must stop.

The president reaffirmed that the US would resume nuclear testing, and did not answer directly when asked whether that would include the traditional underground nuclear tests common during the cold war. “You’ll find out very soon, but we’re going to do some testing,” Trump told reporters onboard Air Force One as he flew to Palm Beach, Florida, when asked about underground nuclear tests. “Other countries do it. If they’re doing to do it, we’re going to do it, okay?”

A Republican-dominated Ohio panel adopted new US House districts that could boost the GOP’s chances of winning two additional seats in next year’s elections and aid Trump’s efforts to hold on to a slim congressional majority. You can view the map here.

Trump called on the Senate to scrap the filibuster, so that the Republican majority can bypass Democrats and reopen the federal government. The filibuster is a way for a relatively small group of senators to block action by the majority. The filibuster rule allows a minority of 41 senators to prevent a vote on most kinds of legislation. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, a Republican known for defending Senate traditions, has repeatedly rejected proposals to weaken or remove the 60-vote rule.

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Donald Trump arriving at Palm Beach international airport earlier, in West Palm Beach, Florida. He’s spending the weekend at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach.

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Updated at 17.43 EDT

White House issues new rule restricting access for journalists

The White House has announced a new rule restricting the ability of credentialed journalists to freely access the offices of press secretary Karoline Leavitt and other top communications officials in the West Wing, near the Oval Office.

A memorandum issued late today bans journalists from accessing Room 140, also known as “Upper Press”, without a prior appointment, citing the need to protect potentially sensitive material. It said the change would take effect immediately.

It follows restrictions put in place earlier this month for credentialed reporters at the Department of Defense, who were asked to sign a pledge not to gather any information – including unclassified documents – that had not been authorized for release. It prompted dozens of journalists to vacate their office in the Pentagon and returned their credentials. The department promptly announced a “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” featuring 60 journalists from far-right outlets.

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Trump unveils renovated Lincoln bathroom amid furore over East Wing demolition

Earlier today, Donald Trump announced that he has renovated the bathroom inside the Lincoln bedroom at the White House, and shared an image of the lavish white-and-black-marbled remodel.

“I renovated the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House. It was renovated in the 1940s in an art deco green tile style, which was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform, attaching a photo showing that version. “I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble. This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”

It comes as Trump has renovated other parts of the White House, including his heavily criticized demolition of the East Wing to build a $300m ballroom, paving over the Rose Garden and decorating the Oval Office with gold.

The Lincoln bedroom was originally used by Abraham Lincoln as his office and cabinet room.

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Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican congressperson, caused a fracas when she cursed at and berated law enforcement at the Charleston international airport yesterday, Wired reports.

According to an incident report, Mace cursed loudly at police officers and made repeated derogatory comments towards them. “She repeatedly stated we were ‘fucking incompetent’, and ‘this is no way to treat a fucking US representative’,” the report states.

The report also says that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supervisor told officers that Mace had treated their staff similarly and they would be reporting her to their superiors.

“Any other person in the airport acting and talking the way she did, our department would have been dispatch (sic) and we would have addressed the behavior,” the incident report concludes.

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Updated at 17.34 EDT

Federal judge rules Trump can’t require citizenship proof on the federal voting form

Donald Trump’s request to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form cannot be enforced, a federal judge ruled today.

US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington DC sided with Democratic and civil rights groups that sued the Trump administration over his executive order to overhaul US elections.

She ruled that the proof-of-citizenship directive is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers, dealing a blow to the administration and its allies.

“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her opinion.

The ruling grants the plaintiffs a partial summary judgment that prohibits the proof-of-citizenship requirement from going into effect. It says the US Election Assistance Commission, which has been considering adding the requirement to the federal voter form, is permanently barred from taking action to do so.

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Trump to sit with CBS News in first interview after lawsuit – report

Donald Trump is set to sit down with Norah O’Donnell, a CBS anchor, this afternoon, Semafor is reporting, in what would be the president’s first interview with the network since its parent company Paramount settled a $16m lawsuit with him.

Trump sued CBS News and Paramount over the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election. Despite serious doubts about whether Trump’s legal argument would stand up in court, Paramount decided to settle the lawsuit for $16m in July.

According to Semafor’s report:

CBS is in the midst of a deliberate repositioning aimed, at least in part, at gesturing to the center and the right.

The network decided against renewing the contract of Stephen Colbert, the late night host who has regularly needled Trump and expressed support for mainstream Democrats (critics, internally and externally, said Colbert was increasingly too expensive to maintain).

Following new owner David Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount, he quickly bought the Free Press and installed its founder Bari Weiss atop CBS News; Weiss had made a name for herself as an opinion writer who critiqued what she believed was the illiberal and censorious online left in academia, progressive politics and the news media. CBS also appointed a new ombudsman who had previously run the Hudson Institute, a conservative thinktank.

In recent months, the Trump administration’s pressure has altered editorial policies at the network. CBS agreed earlier this year to release full transcripts of future 60 Minutes presidential interviews. And following criticism from homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s team over an interview on the network’s Sunday show, Face The Nation, CBS News announced that in the future it would only air unedited interviews on the program.

Trump has returned the favor by publicly nodding in the network’s direction. On Air Force One earlier this month, he speculated with the press corps about who would be the next anchor of CBS Evening News, and praised the Ellisons.

“Larry Ellison is great, and his son, David, is great. They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine. And they’ll do the right thing,” Trump said. “And it’s got great potential. CBS has great potential.”

In addition to praise from the president and some one-on-one access, Trump’s decision, for the moment, to bless Paramount could help it improve its business in other ways. The New York Post reported that people close to Trump believed Paramount had the inside track with federal regulators in its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery; its most likely rival potential bidder, Comcast, faces a more steep regulatory hurdle if Trump’s statements about the company are considered.

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Updated at 17.28 EDT

Trump says US and Canada will not restart trade talks

Donald Trump said earlier today that the United States and Canada will not restart trade talks, but that Canadian PM Mark Carney had apologized to him for an Ontario political ad that featured Ronald Reagan saying tariffs spell disaster.

“I like (Carney) a lot but what they did was wrong,” Trump said. “He apologized for what they did with the commercial because it was a false commercial.”

Trump last week called off negotiations over the ad aired by the Canadian province, adding that he was raising tariffs on Canadian goods by an additional 10%.

The ad by the Ontario government featured former president Reagan, who was known for his support of free marks and free trade, saying that tariffs on foreign goods lead to trade wars and job losses.

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Updated at 16.09 EDT

A ground stop had been in effect at New York’s JFK airport until 7.30pm ET due to staffing shortages in the air traffic system, according to the New York City emergency management department, but according to Reuters, it was lifted around 3.30pm ET.

In a statement earlier on Friday, the New York City department had said that flights headed to JFK were being held at their departure airports.

The department also said that JFK, as well as nearby airports LaGuardia and Newark are all “under FAA traffic restrictions” this evening and are under ground delay programs due to staffing shortages and wind in the region.

As of 3.30pm ET, it seems as though the ground delays are still in place.

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Updated at 17.23 EDT

New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has called on the Trump administration to “release emergency nutrition assistance for the 3 million New Yorkers set to lose their SNAP benefits tomorrow”.

“No state should have to sue the federal government to ensure families can put food on the table,” she said. “But when Washington Republicans refused to act, New York took them to court to mitigate this crisis.”

Hochul said that her administration “remains prepared for the worst” and is “fast-tracking over $100 million for food banks and pantries” and has declared a state of emergency.

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Updated at 15.23 EDT

Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, the ranking member of the Senate agriculture committee, which oversees the food aid program, has released a statement following the court’s decision decision, saying that Trump officials “now have no excuse to withhold food assistance from Americans”.

“The court’s decision confirms what we have said all week: The administration is choosing not to feed Americans in need, despite knowing that it is legally required to do so,” said Klobuchar. “The court was clear: the administration is ‘required to use those Contingency Funds as necessary for the SNAP program.’”

If the administration decides not to issue Snap, Klobuchar said that it “is purely a cruel political decision, not a legal one.”

“They should immediately act – as the court has required – to ensure food assistance continues to go to families in need” she added.

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Updated at 15.22 EDT

The day so far

Two federal judges ruled almost simultaneously this afternoon that the Trump administration must continue to fund Snap, the nation’s biggest food aid program, using contingency funds during the government shutdown. The rulings came a day before the US Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the program, which serves about one in eight (or 42 million) Americans.

The US will not send any high-level officials to the upcoming Cop30 climate summit in Brazil, a White House official told Reuters, alleviating some concern among world leaders that Washington would send a team to scupper the talks.

Public tours in the White House will resume in December, according to a statement from the office of the first lady. They had been suspended indefinitely in August amid construction for Trump’s controversial $300m ballroom project.

Donald Trump denied that he is considering strikes inside Venezuela, even amid reports that his administration may expand its counter-drug campaign in the Caribbean. It comes as the UN high commissioner for human rights said today that US military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean allegedly carrying illegal drugs from South America are “unacceptable” and must stop.

The president reaffirmed that the US would resume nuclear testing, and did not answer directly when asked whether that would include the traditional underground nuclear tests common during the cold war. “You’ll find out very soon, but we’re going to do some testing,” Trump told reporters onboard Air Force One as he flew to Palm Beach, Florida, when asked about underground nuclear tests. “Other countries do it. If they’re doing to do it, we’re going to do it, okay?”

A Republican-dominated Ohio panel adopted new US House districts that could boost the GOP’s chances of winning two additional seats in next year’s elections and aid Donald Trump’s efforts to hold on to a slim congressional majority. You can view the map here.

Donald Trump has called on the Senate to scrap the filibuster, so that the Republican majority can bypass Democrats and reopen the federal government. The filibuster is a way for a relatively small group of senators to block action by the majority. The filibuster rule allows a minority of 41 senators to prevent a vote on most kinds of legislation. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, a Republican known for defending Senate traditions, has repeatedly rejected proposals to weaken or remove the 60-vote rule.

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Updated at 15.08 EDT

US judge blocks Trump administration from suspending Snap food aid benefits

A federal judge in Rhode Island has blocked the Trump administration’s plan to suspend all Snap food aid benefits for millions of Americans amid the ongoing government shutdown, Reuters reports.

US district judge John McConnell in Providence issued a temporary restraining order at the behest of cities, nonprofits and a union who argued the US Department of Agriculture’s suspension of Snap starting from Saturday was unlawful, and told the administration it “must distribute” aid using a set of emergency funds – and potentially other sources – and pay the benefits as soon as possible.

He ruled minutes after another judge in Boston ruled that the suspension was likely unlawful in a related case pursued by a coalition of Democratic-led states that also sought to avert the suspension.

That judge has ordered the Trump administration to indicate by Monday if it would provide either full or partial SNAP benefits in November.

“There is no doubt and it is beyond argument that irreparable harm will begin to occur if it hasn’t already occurred in the terror it has caused some people about the availability of funding for food, for their family,” McConnell said during a virtual hearing.

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Updated at 14.38 EDT

US will not send officials to Cop30 climate talks, White House says

The US will not send any high-level officials to the upcoming Cop30 climate summit in Brazil, a White House official has told Reuters, alleviating some concern among world leaders that Washington would send a team to scupper the talks.

Brazil will host a high-level leaders’ summit next week before the two-week UN climate negotiations begin in the Amazonian city of Belem.

Earlier this month, the US threatened to use visa restrictions and sanctions to retaliate against nations that would vote in favor of a plan put forward by the United Nations shipping agency, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from ocean shipping.

Those tactics led a majority of countries at the IMO to vote to postpone by a year a decision on a global carbon price on international shipping. The White House official said Donald Trump has already made his administration’s views on multilateral climate action clear in his astonishing speech at last month’s United Nations general assembly, where he called climate change the world’s “greatest con job” and chided countries for setting climate policies that he said “have cost their countries fortunes”.

“The president is directly engaging with leaders around the world on energy issues, which you can see from the historic trade deals and peace deals that all have a significant focus on energy partnerships,” the White House official told Reuters.

The Trump administration has pursued bilateral energy deals in its trade negotiations to boost US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports with countries like South Korea and also the European Union. On Friday, the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said there is “room for great energy trade between China and the United States” given China’s need for natural gas as the two economic giants negotiate over tariffs.

Trump announced on his first day in office that the US would exit the 10-year-old Paris climate agreement, taking effect in January 2026, and the state department has been reviewing the US’s engagement in multilateral environmental agreements. Earlier this year, the US also put pressure on countries negotiating a global treaty to reduce plastic pollution not to back an agreement that would set plastic production caps.

The White House official told Reuters that “the tide is turning” on prioritizing climate change, pointing to a memo circulated this week by billionaire and longtime climate philanthropist and investor Bill Gates, who said it is time to pivot away from focusing on meeting global temperature goals and claimed that climate change will “not lead to humanity’s demise”.

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Updated at 14.00 EDT

White House to resume public tours in December

Public tours in the White House will resume in December, according to a statement from the office of the first lady.

“The White House will reopen its doors for public tours on Tuesday, December 2, 2025, with an updated route offering guests the opportunity to experience the history and beauty of the People’s House. In celebration of the holiday season, all December tours will feature the White House Christmas decorations on the State Floor,” it said.

Public tours were suspended indefinitely in August amid construction for Trump’s controversial $300m ballroom project.

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Updated at 13.36 EDT

China “made a real mistake” by threatening to shut off exports of its rare earths, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent told the Financial Times (paywall) in an interview published today.

US and Chinese leaders had reached an “equilibrium” but warned that China would not be able to keep using its critical minerals as a coercive tool, Bessent told the paper, adding that China “made a real mistake” by “firing shots” on rare earths.

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