Katie Zacharia addresses media in first briefing as White House press secretary – live

Katie Zacharia said today the administration has asked Kimberley Guilfoyle, the US ambassador to Greece, to resign.

“She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well,” the new press secretary said at her first media briefing.

A reminder that Guilfoyle was under immense scrutiny after the Wall Street Journal reported on a series of questionable acts prior to securing her role in Athens. This included an alleged threat to a host country official, accepting improper gifts and services and offering to wield influence inside the administration in return for the payment of a $100,000 credit card bill.

Zacharia also said she would travel with the president for his upcoming allies in Alaska, Arizona and Montana, in the final three-week sprint until the midterm elections.

She has also run through many of the White House talking points touting the administration’s self-proclaimed achievements.

“Real wages are up 1.2% since President Trump took office, with average annual earnings outpacing inflation by $800,” Zacharia said. However, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), inflation, which sits at 3.4%, is still outpacing wage growth, currently at 3.1%.

Katie Zacharia has just stepped up to the podium as she kicks off her tenure as White House press secretary.

“I want to thank President Trump for his trust that he has placed in me. I have wanted to work for him for a very long time,” Zacharia told a briefing room packed with reporters. “I’m looking forward to working with each of you as well, especially as we are in the middle of the midterm blitz, with energy and excitement never seen before.”

Today we can expect a ruling from federal judge on the administration’s attempts to ban CNN, Politico and MS Now from the White House.

A reminder that Judge Timothy Kelly temporarily blocked Donald Trump from blocking the newsrooms, and extended this pause until Tuesday 13 October. In court last week, a lawyer for the three outlets insisted that the ban violated the first amendment, and that the administration’s reasoning was squarely based on the fact that Trump does not like their coverage. He also undermined the justice department’s claims that the newsrooms compromised national security through their reporting.

Kelly has also expressed criticism at the White House’s decision to revoke access without providing ample notice to CNN, Politico and MS Now.

The outlets are requesting that Kelly extend his temporary restraining order while the litigation plays out. We’ll bring you the latest as we hear more.

Ahead of her White House podium debut, Katie Zacharia reportedly monitored Donald Trump’s public schedule every day, and monitored his Truth Social, and made sure she was on-air when she assumed he might be watching, according to Politico, citing a person familiar with the matter.

That source noted that and a number of high-profile conservative anchors – including from Fox News, Newsmax and OANN – also backed Zacharia for press secretary. She is now set to the sixth person to hold the role throughout both of Trump’s terms in office.

It is a date keeping US healthcare providers up at night: 1 January 2027.

As the midterm elections loom, everyone from hospital leaders and to patient advocates are focused on the New Year, when Republicans scheduled the most controversial elements of their healthcare reform law to go into effect.

Millions of Medicaid beneficiaries will be required, though a maze of government paperwork, to show they’re working 80 hours per month. And that’s just the marquee change.

“The costs to the family – and society as a whole – cannot be overstated,” said the American Academy of Pediatrics president, Dr Andrew Racine.

HR 1, also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and signed into law by Donald Trump on 4 July 2025, cut roughly $1tn in federal spending from the healthcare industry – the biggest clawback of federal health spending ever. Paired with Republicans’ refusal to extend subsidies for plans in Obamacare marketplaces, the cuts are expected to result in about 17 million newly uninsured individuals through 2034.

Although the US has one of the most widely privatized healthcare systems in the world, nearly half of all health spending is paid for by government – whether federal, state or local, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS). Nearly 40% of US health spending in 2024 was from just two programs: Medicare and Medicaid, the public health insurance programs for the aging and low-income. To put the scale of the $1tn cut into context, Medicaid spent $937bn in 2024, according to the CMS.

As a result, advocates, researchers, hospital leaders and doctors are all expecting more medical debt, more delayed care and more people losing coverage for which they technically qualify.

“There couldn’t be a clearer link,” said Dr Luke Messac, an emergency physician at Mass General Brigham and a historian who has written about medical debt. “We saw that when Medicaid eligibility was expanded the flow of medical debt rapidly declined and sustained that decline.

“The easiest way to reverse that trend – to make medical debt more of a problem – is to yank people off Medicaid and leave them uninsured and unprotected.”

At 9.30am ET we will bring you the latest from the White House, when Katie Zacharia, the new press secretary, holds her first briefing for reporters. Zacharia – who recently served as a communications adviser to parent company of Truth Social – has replaced Karoline Leavitt. The new press secretary is also a frequent commentator on conservative talkshows, often defending the Trump administration’s policies.

Here’s a bit more about Zacharia’s background:

Donald Trump will begin his day in Washington before traveling to Alaska to campaign ahead of the November midterms, where he’ll take the stage at 7:30pm ET.

A reminder that Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican senator, is facing a competitive re-election battle against former Democratic congresswoman Mary Peltola. It’s the president’s second rally in as many days, after his appearance in Youngstown, Ohio on Monday.

Alaska is also home to Lisa Murkowski, another Republican senator who frequently breaks with the president. Most recently, Murkowski was one of a handful of GOP lawmakers who condemned Trump’s recent deal to lift sanctions on Russian diesel to ease the price at the pump for consumers.

The Kremlin said that it did ⁠not ​see any direct link between a deal on exporting Russian diesel to the United States and ⁠Moscow’s own stance on the Ukraine peace talks.

It was commenting on a Reuters source-based story, which reported that US ⁠President Donald Trump’s envoys had told Ukrainian officials on Friday that ​the deal to allow Russian diesel ‌exports was part ‌of an attempt to draw Russia back into negotiations over a ‌possible peace settlement in Ukraine.

“I don’t see any direct connection here,” Kremlin spokesman Peskov told a daily conference call with reporters.

“This is in fact a highly mutually beneficial area of Russian-American cooperation. It serves the interests of the United States, the global ‌energy markets, and the Russian Federation. That is why it is happening.“

There is a manic quality to Donald Trump’s desperate dash to do something, anything, ahead of November’s midterm elections to convince beleaguered Americans that he can make the pressures his policies have imposed on their livelihoods go away.

The US president offered to lower barriers against beef imports to limit surging meat prices, only to consider backtracking under pressure from the cow lobby. He offered to stop diesel exports, only to find oil companies were not interested. He weakened fuel efficiency standards, claiming this would trim the price of a new car (and forgetting to point out it will also raise spending on gas.) In early October he started mailing $500 checks to nearly a million people touting his healthcare “wins”. Oh, and he promised adult Americans a $5,000 check if Republicans maintain control of Congress. That, too, will go nowhere.

In the face of such setbacks, maybe Trump felt he had to demonstrate he still can get something done. Still, it is somewhat counterintuitive that the administration, in the shape of Vice-President JD Vance, decided to broadcast the one initiative it did manage to bring to fruition: ejecting more than 750,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance marketplaces, on grounds that they are not entitled to federal subsidies.

Trump could argue that the cuts fit within the administration’s promised commitment to restore fiscal discipline. But that part of the platform – which came as Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, promised to trim the budget deficit to 3% of US gross domestic product – was never more than a rhetorical feint.

Most Americans think Donald Trump is profiting off the presidency in unethical or illegal ways and is focused more on his wealth than helping people like them, a new AP-NORC poll finds.

As Trump’s family business pulls in record money from new ventures helped by his policies, the survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that when it comes to allegations that Trump is profiting from the presidency, about six in 10 US adults believe he is either illegally profiting or doing something unethical but not illegal.

Only about two in 10 think the Republican president is doing nothing wrong, while a similar share say they don’t know enough to say.

At the same time, just over half of Americans say Trump has prioritized his personal financial interests “a lot” since returning to the White House, while only about one-quarter say he puts the same emphasis on the country as a whole. Few US adults, about one in 10, say he’s focused “a lot” on people like them.

Donald Trump’s new press secretary Katie Zacharia is due to give her first press conference at the White House later this morning.

The president on Friday announced that he had picked Zacharia to be the next White House press secretary, lining up a conservative commentator he called a “devoted fan” to be his most prominent spokesperson.

Zacharia replaces Karoline Leavitt, who left the role at the end of August after the birth to her second child.

“It is my Great Honor to have just appointed, as Press Secretary, Katie Zacharia,” the president wrote in a social media post on Truth Social.

“She has an unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning. She is, likewise, a devoted fan and member of MAGA!” Trump added.

The New York Times was first to report that Zacharia has been selected for the role.

Donald Trump on Monday tried to boost senator Jon Husted’s reelection campaign by attacking two groups of immigrants during a rally in Ohio.

Trump also gave a shoutout to representative Max Miller, the Republican congressman who refused to stop running for reelection after facing accusations of domestic abuse, pointing him out in the audience.

“Thank you, Max, for coming,” Trump said. “Thank you. Very good.”

Trump focused, however, on a favorite issue — immigration. Trump has long targeted Minnesota’s large population of Somali immigrants and on Monday he linked that group to Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.

During a presidential debate two years ago, Trump falsely accused the latter group of eating pets. Referencing those allegations Monday, Trump said “I was right” and boasted that Haitians were being driven out of the country by his administration’s policies .

“If you want to stop Ohio from being plundered, ransacked and destroyed like Minnesota is being destroyed, we’re going to stop it,” Trump said. “Just like we did with Springfield, we’re going to stop it, we’re not going to let it happen.”

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar said she will “not be silenced” and called a search of her Washington home part of President Donald Trump’s “intimidation” campaign.

Democratic representative Omar, an outspoken critic of the president, said she was being targeted as one of the Republican’s “political enemies”.

It comes as Trump targeted the congresswoman during a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, last night. He said Somalia, where Omar was born, is “one of the worst countries ⁠anywhere on the planet”.

He said:

She comes from one of the worst countries ⁠anywhere on the planet. What a mess they have done – Somalia.

He urged supporters to vote Republican “if you want to stop Ohio from being plundered, ransacked and destroyed like Minnesota’s being destroyed”. In response, the crowd of Republican supporters chanted: “Deport, deport.”

US authorities conducted a predawn raid of Omar’s home in Washington, DC, on Monday as part of an ongoing investigation, the Justice Department said.

A person familiar with the investigation said it is ⁠related to alleged immigration fraud, and part of ⁠the probe concerns the Somali-born lawmaker’s immigration paperwork filled out ​by her late father when she was a child.

Omar wrote on social media that the US government is being weaponized to target a political enemy of the president.

“For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns,” she said. “This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.”

In a statement, US House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and other members of the party’s leadership in the chamber said the raid was “deeply disturbing and raises serious questions” about the weaponization of the federal government against Trump’s enemies.

In other developments:

• A federal judge has ordered Donald Trump’s administration to temporarily halt the broadcast of taxpayer-funded television ads promoting the president ahead of the 3 November midterm elections. Effective as of 6.45pm ET on Sunday, US district judge Jennifer L Rochon of the southern district of New York issued a temporary restraining order aimed at the ads that is meant to stay in effect for at least 14 days.

• The New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, compared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s recent shooting of a man in the Manhattan enclave of Marble Hill to a mass shooting scene – and called for an end to the agency’s operations in his city. Mamdani’s joined MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff for his first media interview since ICE agents shot and wounded Oscar Belgal, 28, during an enforcement operation while he was in his car with his five-year-old child also inside.

• The Republican US senator Roger Marshall says he has finally paid off a bakery debt – after six years and repeated collection attempts reported by a Kansas business that had supplied a large order of treats for a 2020 election watch party. “We have absolutely no idea how this happened”, the Kansas senator wrote in a social media post containing a screenshot of the payment on a $678.75 invoice from Holly’s Sweet Treats as well as his $1,300 payment. “And we have repaid the bill … double.”

• A businessman wanted for years in the US for allegedly paying bribes to top Venezuelan officials in exchange for lucrative state contracts in Venezuela has been taken into custody. Alvaro Pulido was indicted in Miami federal court in 2019 and again in 2021 as part of an investigation into his longtime business partner, Alex Saab, a one-time ally of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.