Trump news at a glance: president insists he won’t let Putin ‘mess around with me’ at summit on Ukraine

Trump says Putin ready to make Ukraine deal

Donald Trump has said he believes Vladimir Putin is ready to make a deal on the war in Ukraine as the two leaders prepare for their Alaska summit, but his suggestion the Russian leader and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy could “divvy things up” may alarm some in Kyiv.

The US president implied there was a 75% chance of Friday’s Alaska meeting succeeding, and that the threat of economic sanctions may have made Putin more willing to seek an end to the war. He also said a second meeting – at present not confirmed – between himself, Putin and Zelenskyy would be the more decisive.

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Trump tightens grip on DC policing

The president falsely claimed crime in Washington DC was the “worst it’s ever been”, amid an ongoing federal takeover of the city’s police department and deployment of the national guard and federal agents in the city.

“Washington DC is at its worst point,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Thursday. “It will soon be at its best point.” He also baselessly accused DC law enforcement officials of giving “phony crime stats” and said “they’re under investigation”.

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Bondi threatens to prosecute leaders not complying with immigration officers

Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said she had sent “sanctuary city” letters to the mayors of 32 cities and a handful of county executives warning that she intends to prosecute political leaders who are not in her view sufficiently supportive of immigration enforcement.

“You better be abiding by our federal policies and with our federal law enforcement, because if you’re not we’re going to come after you,” she told a Fox News reporter on Thursday. “Our leaders have to support our law enforcement.”

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Texas Democrats prepare to return to state after two-week absence

Democratic lawmakers in Texas said they were ready to return to the state under certain conditions, ending a nearly two-week-long effort to block Republicans from passing a new congressional map that would add five GOP seats.

The lawmakers said on Thursday they would return as long as the legislature ended its first special session on Friday, which Republicans have said they plan to do. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has said he will immediately call another special session.

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The first lady has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and has threatened to sue if he does not.

Biden, the son of the former president Joe Biden, alleged in an interview this month that Epstein had introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump. The statements were false, defamatory and “extremely salacious”, Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, said in a letter to Biden.

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Medical journal rejects RFK Jr call to retract vaccine study

An influential US medical journal is rejecting a call from the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children, the journal’s editor told Reuters.

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