Protester with ‘Trump is a war criminal’ banner removed from Trump rally in New York state
Donald Trump’s speech to supporters in Rockland county, New York, was just disrupted twice by protesters, the first time by a woman waving a banner that read: “Trump is a war criminal”.
Video of the disruption from an ABC News producer showed that the woman’s banner was pulled away by a Trump supporter in a red hat before the woman was led away by police officers.
The president then digressed from his prepared remarks to fondly reminisce about how, after his 2016 campaign rallies were frequently disrupted by protesters, his supporters started beating the demonstrators.
“It’s dangerous to do it, and to do it in this crowd is not a good thing. You don’t want to do it in Trump crowds,” Trump said. “Do you remember originally I used to have a lot of that? You know, the first couple of months I’d have people screaming and they learned it’s just not a good thing to do. It’s not good. It’s just sort of dangerous.”
Minutes later, a second protester disrupted the speech. The president then narrated the ejection of the protester, and stressed that he was telling the people removing the person to not be violent “for legal reasons”.
“So we have another little disturbance back there,” Trump said. “It’s already cleared up. What are you doing back there to these people? Boy does that get cleared up. That the guy raises his hand, starts screaming something and within about two seconds, it’s over. I don’t know what happened … Don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt him. I do that for legal reasons. This way I can say that’s a great thing to say. Do not hurt him under any circumstances. And now I can say I’m innocent.”
A third person who loudly booed Trump was also removed.
Key events
Trump invites family of college student allegedly killed by immigrant to share their grief, then uses their pain for a political attack
Donald Trump just completed what was effectively a campaign rally for Republicans in New York state, leaving the stage to the strains of the song he called “the gay national anthem,” the Village People’s 1978 hit, YMCA.
During the 90 minute event, Trump repeated many of his familiar talking points, false claims and boasts, before inviting Republican congressman Mike Lawler and the Republican candidate for governor, Bruce Blakeman, to make their pitches ahead of the elections in November.
Later, Trump also invited the family of Sheridan Gorman, a Loyola University freshman from the area who was killed in Chicago in March by a suspected gunman who is an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela.
In a series of wrenching moments, the murdered teenager’s sister, mother and father addressed the crowd, describing their grief that, as her mother said, “her life was stolen by a man who should have never been in this country”.
Trump sought to blame the murder on his predecessor. “This savage animal who stole Sheridan’s life, entered illegally from Venezuela and was released into our country by crooked Joe Biden,” the president said of Jose Medina, who, according to court documents, came to the US to seek asylum in 2023, after suffering brain damage from a shooting.
Medina reportedly turned himself in at the border in Texas, was detained for months and asked to be deported to Colombia but was instead put on a bus and sent to Chicago on one of many buses filled with migrants that were sent from Texas to states run by Democrats that year.
Medina’s public defender in Chicago released a photograph showing that a portion of his frontal lobe had been blown off by a gunshot in 2018, when he was the victim of an armed robbery in Colombia.
“Jose has the mentality of a child; he is missing a portion of his brain. He cannot read, cannot write,” his public defender, Julie Koehler, said.
After the family spoke, Trump tried to turn the family’s grief into a political argument in support of the Republican candidate for New York governor, attacking the Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, for a new state budget passed on Thursday that limits cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
“He came through open borders. Nobody checked him. Totally unvetted,” Trump said, falsely, of Medina, who surrendered and was detained in Texas. “Terrible person, an animal.
“Just yesterday, New York state passed a budget packed with provisions to obstruct federal immigration enforcement and keep this a deadly sanctuary state”, the president said. Turning to Bruce Blakeman, he added: “Bruce, hopefully he’ll get that un-passed very quickly.”
US president again boasts about passing dementia screening test
In his ongoing remarks to supporters at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York, Donald Trump once again boasted about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a standard test to detect early signs of dementia, which he wrongly cast as an intelligence test.
As he has before, on multiple occasions, Trump claimed that he “aced” the test and described a complex mathematical problem as an example of how hard the test is, and claimed he got the right answer, but did not say what it was.
“Toward the end, like they had a question like: ‘Pick a number, sir, any number’. ‘Okay, 203 multiply times nine, divide by two. Add on 1,324. Subtract 1292. Sir. Multiply it out one more time. By 19. What is the answer, sir?’ And I got it right.”
“One doctor said, ‘I’ve been doing this test for 20 years. I’ve never seen anybody ace it’.”
The president also repeated many of his familiar yarns, lies and skits, including, but not limited to: his crude impression of a fictional female weightlifter losing to a transgender rival; his false claim that “the King of Saudi Arabia” told him that the US under his leadership is “the hottest country in the world”; his claim that he had no idea that the price of eggs, which he railed about during the 2024 campaign, was a concern after he took office; his lie that foreign nations have pledged to invest $18 trillion in the US; his story about a conversation with an overweight friend who complained about the cost of GLP-1 shots.
“A friend of mine who’s very fat called me,” Trump said. “He’s begging me not to tell his name because he’s actually become quite famous. I tell the story often, so he calls me up … He said, ‘President, I’m in London. I just paid $87 for the fat drug. He said, it’s the fat shot …I said, ‘It’s not working on you, Charles. Not working at all’… But he knows the price. He goes, ‘I paid $87, and in New York two weeks ago, I bought the same damn thing for $1,300’, and it really made an impression.”
Protester with ‘Trump is a war criminal’ banner removed from Trump rally in New York state
Donald Trump’s speech to supporters in Rockland county, New York, was just disrupted twice by protesters, the first time by a woman waving a banner that read: “Trump is a war criminal”.
Video of the disruption from an ABC News producer showed that the woman’s banner was pulled away by a Trump supporter in a red hat before the woman was led away by police officers.
The president then digressed from his prepared remarks to fondly reminisce about how, after his 2016 campaign rallies were frequently disrupted by protesters, his supporters started beating the demonstrators.
“It’s dangerous to do it, and to do it in this crowd is not a good thing. You don’t want to do it in Trump crowds,” Trump said. “Do you remember originally I used to have a lot of that? You know, the first couple of months I’d have people screaming and they learned it’s just not a good thing to do. It’s not good. It’s just sort of dangerous.”
Minutes later, a second protester disrupted the speech. The president then narrated the ejection of the protester, and stressed that he was telling the people removing the person to not be violent “for legal reasons”.
“So we have another little disturbance back there,” Trump said. “It’s already cleared up. What are you doing back there to these people? Boy does that get cleared up. That the guy raises his hand, starts screaming something and within about two seconds, it’s over. I don’t know what happened … Don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt him. I do that for legal reasons. This way I can say that’s a great thing to say. Do not hurt him under any circumstances. And now I can say I’m innocent.”
A third person who loudly booed Trump was also removed.
Here’s a recap of the day so far:
Trump announces Aaron Lukas as acting director of national intelligence after Tulsi Gabbard steps down as national intelligence director. Gabbard shared a statement on X, confirming that she is resigning from her post as national intelligence director, citing her husband’s illness. Gabbard told the president she is “deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the last year and a half”.
Trump swears in Kevin Warsh as the new chair of the Federal Reserve as his administration struggles to shrug off mounting concerns over affordability. Warsh will confront a darkening economic outlook, with inflation hitting a three-year high of 3.8% in April.
Trump claims he selflessly gave up IRS settlement in return for $1.8bn fund ‘helping others’. Amid almost a week of reactions from Democrats and Republicans to Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund, Trump said: “I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!”
Marco Rubio said Trump ‘disappointment’ with Nato will be discussed at summit. While meeting with foreign ministers of the military alliance, Rubio emphasized that he expected the rift would be discussed at the July meeting in Ankara, making the summit “one of the more important” in Nato’s 77-year history.
Bruce Blackman, currently a county executive of Nassau county, New York, is vying to be the governor of the state this November, challenging the incumbent Kathy Hochul. Seven of the 10 people to hold that county executive office since 1938 have been Republicans.
On the DNC’s autopsy report released Thursday, Trump said that it was riddled with typos.
Trump is hitting many of the talking points he has been hitting recently, that the GOP is against: illegal aliens all over the country, rigged elections, voters voting without voter ID, transgender people participating in sports and in support of eliminating mail-in ballots.
Companies and rich people are leaving New York, Trump said adding that the streets were dirty and riddled with crime. The Guardian has not verified his claims of companies and people in high tax brackets leaving the city or state of New York.
Mike Lawler and Bruce Blakeman, both running for seats in the upcoming election will turn this around for the GOP, Trump said.
Trump speaks at community college event in New York state
Trump has begun speaking at Hudson Valley, talking about how much New York means to him, and how the GOP must take it back.
“New Yorkers are people who built Wall Street into the world’s financial capital, who turned Broadway into the heart of American culture and entertainment, who dug the Erie Canal, and launched 1,000 innovations that built the middle class, the middle class of our country, who really built the country,” he said.
Trump will appear with incumbent Mike Lawler, representative from New York, and talk about affordability, tax cuts and upcoming midterm elections.
President Trump touched down in Suffern, New York, to speak at an event Rockland Community College Eugene Levy Fieldhouse a little after 3pm. The event is expected to begin shortly.
In her tenure as DNI, Tulsi Gabbard has been in the spotlight a number of times, including most recently in March when Gabbard testified that her office seized voting machines from Puerto Rico at the request of the office of the US attorney in Puerto Rico.
The prosecutor in question has been the center of a push by Trump supporters to revive a long-discredited conspiracy theory purporting to link Venezuela to Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the Guardian has previously reported. Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the conspiracy theory maintains, controlled electronic voting machines worldwide and remotely manipulated results in 2020 to deprive Trump of a presidential victory.
The Guardian reported, in February, Gabbard blocked NSA from sharing a report about foreign intelligence with the White House chief of staff, according to a whistleblower.
The highly sensitive communique, which has roiled Washington over the past week, was brought to her attention. But rather than allowing NSA officials to distribute the information further, Gabbard took a paper copy of the intelligence directly to the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to the whistleblower’s attorney, Andrew Bakaj. One day after meeting Wiles, Gabbard told the NSA not to publish the intelligence report.
In September the Guardian reported that Gabbard did not inform the White House that her office was revoking the security clearances of 37 people – including top deputies to the CIA director, John Ratcliffe – before it happened in August, according to three people familiar with matter.
The move caused consternation because it resulted in the White House not having an opportunity to closely vet the list before it became public and there appeared to be no paper trail from the president directing the effort, the people said.
After wishing Tulsi Gabbard’s husband a swift recovery, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff said the departing DNI’s only advantageous contribution to US national security was her resignation, on a post on X:
While the circumstances around her departure are deserving of our sympathy, let’s be clear: Tulsi Gabbard’s only positive contribution to our nation’s national security is her resignation.
She politicized intelligence. She dismantled critical agencies keeping Americans safe. She weaponized the IC to pursue baseless election fraud claims. And more.
We must ensure that her tenure — marked by a devotion to the person of the president and not to the security of the country — represents a terrible exception at DNI and not the new normal.
Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Nicole Saphier, sells an herbal supplement that contains an ingredient prohibited by the US military and which health experts have warned can cause liver damage.
Dr Nicole Saphier’s record of selling dietary supplements, which are only loosely regulated in the US, has raised concern among doctors and consumer advocates, some of whom allege she sells “snake oil”.
Amazon said it had opened an investigation into the products after the Guardian inquired whether they were in compliance with the company’s policies on supplement sales.
“Nobody who prides themselves as rigorous about science is in the supplement business,” said Dr Peter Lurie of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food and health watchdog organization. Lurie has been an outspoken critic of what he called wellness industry “grifters” inside health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement, who he said sold consumers poorly regulated supplements with unsupported claims.
The surgeon general is considered America’s doctor, responsible for communicating the best scientific information to Americans about how to improve their health. Previous surgeons general have issued influential warnings on tobacco use and educated the public about Aids.
Saphier specializes in breast cancer as a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New Jersey and is a former contributor to Fox News. She is Trump’s third pick for the job after his first two failed to advance in the Senate.
Reacting to Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation, Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the vice-chairman of the Senate’s select committee on intelligence, said his thoughts were with Gabbard and her family as her husband battles cancer and he appreciated the different leadership roles she has undertaken in her career.
On the next DNI, Warner said:
The Director of National Intelligence is entrusted with one of the most serious responsibilities in government: providing objective, fact-based intelligence to policymakers and the American people, regardless of politics or pressure from the White House … The next DNI must be committed to restoring trust in the office, protecting the integrity of our intelligence, and ensuring our nation’s intelligence professionals can speak truth to power, without fear or interference.
Trump announces Aaron Lukas as acting director of national intelligence
In a post on Truth Social, the president announced Aaron Lukas, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, as the acting director of national intelligence to replace Tulsi Gabbard, whose resignation will come into effect on 30 June.
Trump regretted Gabbard’s departure and wished good health to her husband, who is battling a rare form of bone cancer. He said:
Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her. Her highly respected Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Aaron Lukas, will serve as Acting Director of National Intelligence.
