Trump and Xi set to ‘consummate’ TikTok deal during China trade talks: Live updates

The Trump administration, which frequently touts the president’s diplomatic prowess and has publicly angled for a Nobel Prize, jokingly claimed credit for stopping a lesser-known conflict on Sunday: The Console Wars.

“NUMBER 9: President Trump presides over the end of the 20-year Console Wars,” the White House wrote on X, referencing the long-running inability of PlayStation gamers to have access to titles in the Microsoft-exclusive Halo franchise.

The post came after GameStop also issued a mock-treaty announcement following the news that Halo: Combat Evolved will be coming to PlayStation in 2026.

Sami Hamdi, a British journalist and activist and outspoken critic of the Israeli war in Gaza, was arrested by U.S. immigration agents Sunday at San Francisco International Airport.

“Earlier this morning, ICE agents abducted British Muslim journalist and political commentator Sami Hamdi at San Francisco Airport, apparently in response to his vocal criticism of the Israeli government during his ongoing speaking tour,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations civil rights group wrote on X.

Hamdi had spoken at a gala for the group on Saturday in California and was heading to Florida for another event prior to his arrest.

“We can confirm that Mr. Hamdi has not been deported and remains in custody,” CAIR added. “Our attorneys and partners are working to address this injustice.”

Read on for all the details.

Gavin Newsom clearly has no love lost for Donald Trump.

In an interview with CBS News aired on Sunday, the Democrat compared the president to an “invasive species.”

“He’s an invasive species for the country, for the world,” Newsom, who is frequently at odds with Trump, said. “He’s a wrecking ball, not just the symbolism and the substance of the [demolition of the White House] East Wing, but he’s wrecking alliances, truth, trust, tradition, institutions.”

The governor said that the state doesn’t need such a military-style operation and pointed to California’s ongoing cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to remove dangerous criminals from the state prison system.

“That’s not what this is about and everybody knows it,” Newsom said. “You don’t just randomly show up at a carwash and tell me it’s about the worse of the worst.”

Donald Trump is continuing to urge expecting mothers and new parents not to use Tylenol, reiterating the administration’s unsupported claims that the painkiller causes autism.

“Pregnant Women, DON’T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, DON’T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday.

The post also repeated many of the president’s scientifically unsupported claims that parents should delay immediately giving their children full doses of recommended vaccines.

Last month, we reported on why the administration’s claims about Tylenol and autism are inaccurate.

A Republican senator has escalated his opposition to the Trump administration’s war on alleged narcotics traffickers in the Caribbean Sea, which it is pursuing without congressional authorization.

Sen. Rand Paul was on Fox News Sunday, where he described the military campaign against vessels in the region as “extrajudicial killings”, a term which implies that he believes the entire effort to be illegal absent a mandate from Congress. He also described them as “wrong”.

“I would call them extrajudicial killings. This is akin to what China does, what Iran does with drug dealers,” the senator claimed. “They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it’s wrong.”

Paul went on to point out that the Trump administration was, without constitutionally required approval from the Legislative Branch, changing the terms of engagement for narco-traffickers. What was previously a matter of law enforcement — where deadly strikes on vessels without warning would be completely prohibited — the White House was now treating the situation as a military matter, where the senator noted that people are often killed without due process of a trial and sentencing.

John Bowden reports from Washington.

Ahead of a controversial August summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin, the State Department’s internal intelligence agency took a more dim view of the question than other sectors of the administration, warning the president of Putin’s reluctance to end the conflict in assessments and presidential briefings, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“We kept standing firm,” John Williams, who resigned earlier this year from his post as director of the State Department’s Russia-Eurasia analysis in the intelligence bureau, told the paper. “We didn’t see that [Putin] had incentive to negotiate an end to the war.”

“In the Intelligence Community, differing perspectives aren’t just normal—they’re necessary,” the office of the administration’s Director of National Intelligence said in a statement in response to the reporting. “That debate is how we ensure our decision-makers have the most accurate picture possible to protect the safety and freedom of the American people.”

More details in our full story.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager with an estimated net worth near $600 million, claimed Sunday he can relate to farmers anxious over Trump’s tariffs because he’s a farmer too.

“In case you don’t know it, I’m actually a soybean farmer, so I have felt this pain,” Bessent told ABC News on Sunday.

Bessent reportedly owns $25 million worth of farmland across North Dakota he rents to producers.

Bessent added in his ABC interview that a soon-to-be-announced trade deal with China would bring relief, though he declined to “get ahead of the president” and disclosure exactly how.

Donald Trump is actually glad the government is shut down, according to Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut.

“One of the reasons that President Trump is refusing to negotiate is because he likes the fact the government is closed because he thinks he can exercise ling-like powers,” Murphy told CNN on Sunday. “He can open up the parts of the government that he wants. He can pay the employees who are loyal to him. This is a leader who is trying to transition our government from a democracy to something much closer to a totalitarian state.”

Murphy, who serves on the Appropriations Committee, pointed to the recent private donation of $130 million, reportedly from a top Trump campaign donor, to fund U.S. troops during the shutdown as an example of Trump’s increasingly personalist style, which often involves making major moves without consulting Congress.

“This is part of what happens in totalitarian states — the leader, the regime only, decides what things get funded and what don’t often in coordination with their oligarch friends.”

Analysts within the Trump administration reportedly had clashing opinions this summer over whether Russian President Vladimir Putin actually wanted to end the war in Ukraine, as the president prepared to meet him for a summit in Alaska.

The Central Intelligence Agency had a relatively optimistic outlook, The Wall Street Journal reports, while the State Department’s internal intelligence team was more doubtful.

As the year wears on, it seems the latter party may have been correct, or at least more in line with the president’s present thinking.

Trump has sanctioned major Russia oil companies this month in a bid to force Putin’s hand, and the White House called off a meeting Trump claimed would take place with the Russian leader in Budapest in the coming weeks.

Donald Trump may be in Asia, but that hasn’t stopped the president from returning to his repeatedly debunked and false claim that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged and he was the true winner.

In a Truth Social post on Sunday, the president compared the 2020 election to the recent NBA gambling scandal and seemed to call on federal officials to launch prosecutions.

“The 2020 Presidential Election, being Rigged and Stolen, is a far bigger SCANDAL,” Trump wrote. “Look what happened to our Country when a Crooked Moron became our “President!” We now know everything. I hope the DOJ pursues this with as much ‘gusto’ as befitting the biggest SCANDAL in American history!”

In the post, he also claimed without evidence that California’s effort to pass a redistricting ballot measure to counter a Trump-led GOP effort to add more seats in Texas was “totally dishonest” with “Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped.’”