Donald Trump suggested on a conservative podcast released on Monday that Republican state officials “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.
Trump framed the issue as a means to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. Claims that noncitizens are voting in numbers that can affect an election are a lie. But it raises concerns about potential efforts by the president to rig the November midterm elections.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, responded to Trump’s comments on Tuesday. “That statement alone makes clear that this threat to our election security, the basic premise of our democracy, is forward looking, to 2026, to 2028,” he said. “This is about whether these same tactics we’re seeing now, or worse, will be used to disrupt free and fair elections.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later told reporters that the president “believes there has obviously been a lot of fraud and irregularities that have taken place in American elections, and again, voter ID is a highly popular and commonsense policy that the president wants to pursue and he wants to pass legislation to make that happen for all states across the country”.
US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer also weighed in on X, writing that “Democrats will fight and block Trump’s calls to nationalize elections”.
“The very pillars of American society, democracy and the rule of law will prevail over cult of personality,” he added.
Trump suggests Republicans should ‘take over’ elections to protect the party
Trump’s comments to Dan Bongino, the podcast host and short-lived former deputy director of the FBI, come less than a week after FBI agents served a criminal search warrant to obtain nearly 700 boxes of ballots and other election material from Fulton county, Georgia, long a target of Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
Outrage in Mexico at Trump praise for ‘legendary’ 19th-century US invasion
A message from Donald Trump celebrating the 19th-century US invasion of its southern neighbour – and the subsequent loss of more than half its territory – has touched a historical nerve in Mexico, with some seeing it as a veiled threat of future incursions.
Reacting to the US president’s statement, which described the invasion as “a legendary victory”, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, said during her morning news conference on Tuesday: “We must always defend our sovereignty.”
Tulsi Gabbard running solo 2020 election inquiry separate from FBI investigation
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is running her own review into the 2020 election with Donald Trump’s approval, working separately from a justice department investigation even as she joined an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia last week.
US shoots down Iranian drone flying towards aircraft carrier, navy says
The US military says it shot down an Iranian drone that “aggressively” approached the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Shahed-139 drone was flying toward the carrier “with unclear intent” when an F-35 fighter jet shot it down, US Central Command said on Tuesday.
New Epstein files fail to quell outrage as advocates claim documents are being withheld
The release of about 3m Jeffrey Epstein investigative files has failed to quell outrage over justice department officials’ handling of these disclosures, with advocates claiming potentially millions of documents are still being withheld.
Trump says he is seeking $1bn in damages in Harvard dispute
Donald Trump has announced that his administration is seeking $1bn in damages from Harvard University, the latest step in a long-running battle with the university over allegations of antisemitism.
In a Truth Social post late on Monday, Trump accused the Ivy League school of being “strongly antisemitic”, adding that Harvard president Alan Garber “has done a terrible job of rectifying a very bad situation for his institution and, more importantly, America itself”.
What else happened today:
Donald Trump on Tuesday signed legislation to end a government shutdown hours after it was approved by the House of Representatives, as top Democrats warned they would block further funding to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if their demands for restrictions on Trump’s mass deportation campaign are not addressed.
After months of trading insults – from “sick man” and “drug trafficking leader” on one side, to “accomplice to genocide” with a “senile brain” on the other – the first meeting between Donald Trump and Gustavo Petro ended with pleasantries, autographs and a Maga cap.
Don Lemon says about a dozen federal agents came to his Los Angeles hotel to arrest him overnight on 30 January, even though the former CNN anchor’s attorney had told authorities he would turn himself in to face federal civil rights charges over his coverage of an anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a Minnesota church service.
New York is creating a team of legal observers that will don purple vests to monitor and record the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement officers as they seek to detain and deport immigrants, the state’s attorney general said on Tuesday.
Georgia’s Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, inquiring into the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, at the scene last week of an FBI seizure of Fulton county election records from 2020.
The Trump administration has turned to an unusual weapon in its attempt to resurrect coal mining: a cartoon lump of coal, complete with giant eyes and yellow mining garb, called “Coalie”.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 2 February 2026.
