Makeup covers the back of Trump’s right hand as he points toward Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the White House on July 22.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images file

“In this environment, people will seize on whatever seems to confirm what they suspected, and that’s obviously not a great situation for getting accurate information,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political science professor at Dartmouth University. “What we’ve seen illustrates the way that everyone is vulnerable to misinformation and online rumors.”

Speculation continued Saturday morning when a photographer took a picture of Trump in a golf shirt, heading out of the White House with a grandchild. Online, people scrutinized the photo for indications that he might not be well.

The next day, Trump posted a photo of himself on Truth Social golfing with former NFL coach Jon Gruden, who resigned from the Las Vegas Raiders in 2021 after having sent offensive emails, although Trump didn’t say when the photo with Gruden was taken. That prompted a fresh round of questions.

A White House aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Trump golfed with Gruden on Sunday.

Trump directly addressed his health Sunday on Truth Social, saying, “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE.”

But Monday, rumors swirled anew when images on X and elsewhere appeared to show someone throwing a trash bag out of a second-floor White House window, seemingly at odds with usual protocol. The videos got millions of views.

What happened remains unclear. The White House aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a contractor tossed out the bags during regular maintenance at the White House while Trump was away.

Asked about the images Tuesday, Trump said the windows are sealed, which would contradict that explanation. He said the video was most likely an “AI-generated” fake.

This wasn’t the first time the internet throbbed with commentary about Trump’s health. In September 2020, Trump posted on social media a denial that he had suffered “a series of mini-strokes” — without anyone having suggested that he had. And in October 2020, he was diagnosed with Covid-19 in a scare that gripped the government two months before the rollout of vaccines. He spent three days at Walter Reed.

Inside the White House on Tuesday, aides took note of the most recent buzz surrounding Trump’s health but didn’t seem to believe it amounted to much of anything.

“The made-up speculation online is crazy and baseless, and it’s clearly being pushed by Democrat activists and left-wing lunatics,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “President Trump is perfectly fine and has a tremendous amount of energy. He has been completely transparent about his health with the public, unlike his predecessor, who went weeks without speaking to the media and spent a third of his presidency sleeping on vacation.”

A Biden spokeswoman declined to comment.

The kerfuffle seemed to subside after Trump’s appearance Tuesday, but internet conspiracy theories often prove tough to quash. As evening approached, “#Trumpdead” was once again trending on X.

Trump says he was ‘very active over the weekend’ and swipes at speculation ‘there must be something wrong with him’ – key US politics stories from Tuesday 2 September

Donald Trump has dismissed speculation that he is in ill health, saying he was busy on the Labor Day weekend giving media interviews and visiting his Virginia golf course.

“I was very active over the weekend,” Trump, 79, told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Asked about rumours on social media that he may have died, he called them “fake news”.

The president complained that he had done several news conferences last week “then I didn’t do any for two days and they said ‘there must be something wrong with him’.”

“It’s so fake. ‘Is he OK, how’s he feeling, what’s wrong?’”

Speculation about his health swirled on X over the weekend, with posts citing his lack of a public schedule late last week and a JD Vance interview in which the vice-president told USA Today he was confident the president was “in good shape” but suggested he was prepared to step in if anything happened to Trump.

Here’s the day’s Trump administration news at a glance.

 

The US House of Representatives oversight committee on Tuesday released thousands of pages of records related to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein from the department of justice.

The release comes as the Trump administration has been embroiled in months of controversy over its decision not to release additional files in the case. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and was alleged to have abused hundreds of girls.

The 33,000 pages included years-old court filings related to Epstein and his former girlfriend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as what appears to be bodycam footage from police searches and police interviews. The files appear to contain information that is already public knowledge.

 

The records were posted online as the Trump administration was facing renewed attention on the investigation into Epstein. With Congress back in session this week, Democratic and Republican representatives had planned to hold press conferences to demand greater transparency from the administration in the case.

Donald Trump, a longtime friend of Epstein and part of his rich and powerful social circle, has, in recent weeks, tried to avoid the subject. Earlier this year he sued the Wall Street Journal for its reporting on his relationship with Epstein on a birthday note Trump was alleged to have written to him. The president has called the recent Epstein controversy a hoax.

The White House has urged Republican lawmakers not to support a discharge petition from Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, which would force the release of all of the Epstein files.

James Comer, the Republican chair of the committee, said there was no need for the discharge petition since the committee had subpoenaed the records. The question of how many of the files will be released by the committee remains unanswered.

Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, said the petition was “moot” because of the release.

“It’s superfluous at this point, and I think we’re achieving the desired end here,” he said.

Johnson was among a bipartisan group of lawmakers who met with survivors of abuse by Epstein and Maxwell.

The Trump administration has faced intense criticism, even from its fervent supporters, over its decision not to release additional files related to Epstein. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from July found that most Americans and the majority of Republicans believe the government is hiding details about the case.

Most of the documents released this week were already public, including records from the 2005 investigation into Epstein which contained a notation indicating the inquiry had been released previously in a 2017 public records request. The files include a recording of a police interview of an Epstein employee who told law enforcement “there were a lot of girls that were very, very young” visiting Epstein’s Florida home but said he couldn’t say for sure if they were minors.

The release appears to have done little to alleviate the controversy. Robert Garcia, the top Democratic representative on the House oversight committee, chided Republicans for releasing material that he said was almost entirely already available information.

“The 33,000 pages of Epstein documents James Comer has decided to ‘release’ were already mostly public information. To the American people – don’t let this fool you,” Garcia said in a statement.

US House committee releases batch of Epstein records as White House fights release of all files – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of another day in the life of the second Trump administration, with Donald Trump once again stepping before the cameras, but still hiding his bruised right hand beneath a layer of makeup. We will be back on Wednesday. Here are the latest developments:

• The Republican-led House oversight committee released more than 33,000 pages of documents related to the federal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender whose long friendship with Donald Trump has raised questions about what the president knew and when he knew it.

• Democrats called the limited release a ruse by Republicans, given that 97% of the Epstein records posted online were already public, and renewed their calls for all of the Epstein files to be released.

• In a post on his social network on Tuesday, Donald Trump wrote that the US military killed 11 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua in a strike on a boat in international waters.

• While the White house shared video of the US military strike on a small speedboat off the coast of Venezuela, the administration offered no evidence that the 11 passengers who were killed were smuggling drugs, and there were questions about what legal authority licensed the use of lethal force.

• A US appeals court reinstated Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on Tuesday, ruling that her attempted firing by Trump was unlikely to survive her legal challenge.

• Trump announced that he is moving US Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, and then offered false of misleading answers to questions from reporters on court rulings that his use of troops for law enforcement in Los Angeles was illegal, and so are most of his tariffs.

• The president claimed that video of a garbage bag being tossed out a White House window must have been “AI-generated” even though his aides had already acknowledged that the video was genuine.

Watching from afar, Donald Trump channeled his bitterness at not being present for China’s huge military parade, to mark the surrender of Japan 80 years ago, ending the second world war, into a post on his social network.

As President Xi Jinping of China oversaw a celebration that downplayed the role of the United States in defeating imperial Japan, Trump posted: “The big question to be answered is whether or not President Xi of China will mention the massive amount of support and ‘blood’ that The United States of America gave to China in order to help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader.”

The US president added a somewhat confusing reference to the leaders of Russia and North Korea, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, who were greeted as honored guests.

“May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration”, Trump wrote. “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”

While the White House, the president, the secretary of state, the defense secretary and the deputy chief of staff have all shared video of the US military strike on a small speedboat off the coast of Venezuela on Tuesday, with barely suppressed glee, the administration has offered no evidence that the 11 passengers who were killed were smuggling drugs, or cited any clear legal authority for the use of lethal force.

“Drug trafficking is not a capital crime; it doesn’t carry a death sentence”, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer at the American Immigration Council, observed. “I genuinely cannot think of anything under U.S. law that would permit premeditated government assassination of people suspected of drug trafficking.”

“Even if they had ironclad proof, the fact that they had the boat under clear surveillance means they could have stopped it in U.S. waters, arrested the people on board, and tried them in a court of law”, he added. “What legal excuse could they have for killing them? Can’t think of one!”

“There is zero evidence of self-defense here. Looks like a massacre of civilians at sea. Even if they had drugs aboard, that’s not a capital offense”, Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, noted on Bluesky in response to the video of the attack.

“Lethal force against a civilian vessel in international waters is a war crime if not in self-defense”, he added. “If not in self-defense, only non-lethal actions, such as warning shots or disabling fire, are allowed. ‘Not yielding to pursuers’ or ‘suspected of carrying drugs’ doesn’t carry a death sentence.”

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, described the strike against suspected members of a transnational gang, Tren de Aragua, which the administration added to a list of terrorist groups in February, as an act of war. “We are going to age combat against drug cartels that are flooding American streets and killing Americans”, he told reporters, while referring questions about the legal authority for the strike to the White House counsel’s office.

A senior defense official likewise told The Intercept that “the U.S. military conducted a precision strike against a drug vessel operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization.”’

During his first term and then again during his campaign to return to office, Donald Trump repeatedly called for “everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts”.

Tuesday’s extrajudicial execution of the suspected drug smugglers comes decades after Trump loudly campaigned for the execution of five young men of color, who were wrongly accused of raping a female jogger in New York’s Central Park.

A US appeals court reinstated Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on Tuesday, ruling that her attempted firing by Donald Trump was unlikely to survive her legal challenge.

The court said that FTC members may not be fired by a president without cause, saying that the law on this point has been clear for nearly a century.

“The government is not likely to succeed on appeal because any ruling in its favor from this court would have to defy binding, on-point, and repeatedly preserved Supreme Court precedent,” two judges wrote in the majority opinion.

Judge Neomi Rao, who was nominated by Trump, dissented, arguing that federal courts likely have no authority “to order the reinstatement of an officer removed by the President.”

“Amid the efforts by the Trump [administration] to illegally abolish independent agencies, [including] the Federal Reserve, I’m glad the court has recognized that he is not above the law”, Slaughter posted in response. “I’m eager to get back first thing tomorrow to the work I was entrusted to do on behalf of the American people.”

The FTC enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws.

Trump himself had appointed Slaughter to her first term on the FTC in 2018. Joe Biden then made her the FTC’s acting chair in January 2021, and appointed her to a second term in 2023, which is to end in September 2029.

Under the FTC’s bipartisan structure, no more than three of the five commissioners can come from the same party. Congress placed restrictions on the hiring and firing of commissioners in an effort to insulate the agency from partisan politics.

Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC in March, in a major test for the independence of regulatory agencies.

The dispute over Trump’s firing of Slaughter and fellow commissioner Alvaro Bedoya will likely end up before the US supreme court, which ruled 90 years ago that FTC commissioners may be dismissed only for good cause, such as neglecting their duties. Bedoya formally resigned in June to take another job and is not part of the case.