Nov. 2, 2025, 8:59 p.m. ETThe president said he would not allow Nvidia to sell its most advanced chips to China. “We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced,” Trump said, according to a transcript of his interview with “60 Minutes” released by CBS. Jensen Huang, the head of the company, said on Friday that he was eager for the Silicon Valley chip-making company to resume selling advanced semiconductors in China. Trump had suggested before his meeting with China’s president in South Korea last week that the two leaders would discuss Nvidia’s most powerful A.I. semiconductors.Nov. 2, 2025, 8:27 p.m. ETPresident Trump offered some praise for Bari Weiss, the newly appointed editor in chief of CBS News, calling her “a great new leader,” though he added, “I don’t know her.” CBS’s owner, Paramount, paid to settle Trump’s lawsuit against “60 Minutes.” The Trump administration then approved Paramount’s sale to Skydance, which later appointed Weiss.“One of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership,” Trump said. “I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”Nov. 2, 2025, 8:13 p.m. ETAsked during his “60 Minutes” interview to clarify whether he would try to run for a third term, which is barred by the constitution, Trump said he didn’t think about such a move. He has, however, mused about the prospect repeatedly.Trump then said the Republican Party had an “unbelievable bench” of presidential contenders. “I do love JD Vance. I like Marco Rubio,” he said.Nov. 2, 2025, 8:08 p.m. ETAddressing the prospect of a war with Venezuela in his interview with “60 Minutes,” President Trump said, “I doubt it. I don’t think so,” but he refused to rule out land strikes when pressed.The U.S. military has conducted 15 strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific in the past month, targeting vessels suspected of smuggling drugs. A broad range of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the strikes were illegal extrajudicial killings because the military was not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.Trump added that he believed President Nicolás Maduro’s days were numbered. He previously confirmed that he authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert action in Venezuela.Nov. 2, 2025, 8:03 p.m. ETTrump told “60 Minutes” that he had discussed denuclearization with both President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China. He defended his decision to order the testing of nuclear weapons earlier this week. “I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test,” Trump said, claiming that China and Russia were both testing their nuclear weapons.China has rapidly expanded its nuclear stockpile and has deployed missiles in new silos. But it has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1996. Russia has not conducted a confirmed test since 1990, although it did recently declare that it had tested two exotic delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons. Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, earlier Sunday said the administration’s testing would not involve nuclear explosions and would instead focus on “the other parts of a nuclear weapon” to ensure they were working properly.Nov. 2, 2025, 7:52 p.m. ETTrump told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he did not instruct the Department of Justice to prosecute Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General. But in a Truth Social post in September, Trump implored his Justice Department to take legal action against James, who he called “guilty as hell.”Nov. 2, 2025, 7:51 p.m. ETWhen asked about his deportation campaign targeting people with non-criminal records, President Trump said, “I need landscapers, and I need farmers more than anybody, OK?”But, he added in his interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” the United States must start off with a policy. “And the policy has to be, ‘You came into the country illegally. You’re going to go out,’” he said.Nov. 2, 2025, 7:46 p.m. ETPressed on what he was doing to reach an agreement with Democrats to end the government shutdown, President Trump told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview recorded Friday that he would not be “extorted by the Democrats.” He repeated his call to have Republicans end the filibuster, something Senate Republicans have rejected. “Republicans have to get tougher,” Trump said in the interview, which aired on Sunday night.Nov. 2, 2025, 7:40 p.m. ETWhen a federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to continue funding SNAP benefits, Trump said his “government lawyers” were looking into the legality of funding the food stamp program during the shutdown. He dodged a question on Air Force One on what those lawyers told him, saying Democrats should just “vote to open the country.”Nov. 2, 2025, 7:38 p.m. ETPresident Trump said he will not attend the Supreme Court arguments about his emergency use of tariffs. “I don’t want to call a lot of attention to me. It’s not about me, it’s about our country,” he said, speaking to reporters on Air Force One.Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesNov. 2, 2025, 7:36 p.m. ETPresident Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he was not considering providing long-range, U.S.-made missiles to Ukraine. Trump previously suggested that he would provide the weapons to Ukraine, then he spoke to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and backed off the offer. Trump and his top aides have argued America needs the weapons for its own security concerns.“Sometimes you have to let them fight it out,” Trump said. “They’re fighting, they’re fighting it out.”Nov. 2, 2025, 7:30 p.m. ETPresident Trump once again raised the possibility of military action in Nigeria while speaking to reporters on Air Force One. “Could be,” Trump said when asked if he envisioned deploying U.S. troops or aircraft to Nigeria.“I envision a lot of things,” he added. “They’re killing Christians, and they’re killing them in very large numbers. We’re not going to allow that to happen.”Trump on Saturday threatened Nigeria with potential military action and said the United States might cut off aid, accusing the West African country’s government of failing to protect Christians. Nigeria has denied the accusations and defended the country’s efforts to protect religious groups. Parts of the country have long suffered violence at the hands of extremist groups, including Boko Haram, an Islamist terror group that has attacked Christians and Muslims it does not consider faithful enough.Nov. 2, 2025, 5:06 p.m. ETIn another excerpt of his interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” set to air tonight, President Trump was asked about videos showing immigration authorities shoving a young mother, deploying tear gas in Chicago or smashing car windows. Trump said he did not believe the tactics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other immigration officials had gone too far. “I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the, by the judges, by the liberal judges,” Trump said, adding that he was OK with the tactics captured on video. “You have to get the people out.”Nov. 2, 2025, 4:47 p.m. ETThe Trump administration has created a new page on the official White House website resembling an account on the social media website, MySpace, for Democrats. The fake page features the caption “shut it down!” alongside a doctored image of Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, with a mustache and a sombrero, which Jeffries previously said was racist. It is the latest example of the brash, at times vitriolic, trolling by the White House as the government shutdown grinds to its five-week mark. President Trump, however, has mostly kept the issue of the shutdown at a distance, even as American families are worried about losing food stamp benefits and hundreds of thousands of workers have no idea when they will be paid again.Nov. 2, 2025, 4:45 p.m. ET“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are systems tests,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox News on Sunday. “These are not nuclear explosions.”Credit...Alex Brandon/Associated PressThe nuclear testing ordered by President Trump will not involve nuclear explosions, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Sunday, clarifying that the testing would involve “the other parts of a nuclear weapon” to ensure they are working properly.Mr. Wright’s comments came four days after Mr. Trump made the declaration that he was ordering the U.S. military to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with other countries, raising the specter of a return to the worst days of the Cold War.“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are systems tests,” Mr. Wright said in an interview on the Fox News show “The Sunday Briefing.” “These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions.”Mr. Wright said Americans in places like Nevada, where the United States has a nuclear test site bigger than the state of Rhode Island, should not expect to see a mushroom cloud.On Wednesday — minutes before he met with President Xi Jinping of China in South Korea — Mr. Trump said in a social media post that he was ordering the Pentagon to step up testing of nuclear weapons.“We’ve halted it years — many years — ago,” Mr. Trump later told reporters, referring to the last U.S. explosive test of a nuclear weapon in 1992. “But with others doing testing, I think it is appropriate that we do also.”But detonation tests are not common anymore: The only nation that has been regularly doing nuclear tests in the past quarter-century is North Korea, and its last explosive test was in September 2017.China has rapidly expanded its nuclear stockpile and deploying missiles in new silos but it has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1996. Russia has not conducted a confirmed test since 1990, although it did recently declare that it had tested two exotic delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons: a nuclear-powered cruise missile and an undersea torpedo, called Poseidon, that could cross the Pacific to the West Coast of the United States. (The United States itself routinely tests unarmed missiles.)In 1993, the Clinton administration announced plans for a treaty in which nations would forgo nuclear blasts. Although the 1996 test-ban treaty never officially went into force, it created a global norm of not testing the destructive bombs.Washington is currently undergoing an effort to replace its warheads with updated versions. The overall cost of the sprawling program over three decades is estimated at $1.7 trillion.Mr. Wright on Sunday said that testing was underway on the new nuclear systems.“And again, these will be nonnuclear explosions,” Mr. Wright said. “These are just developing sophisticated systems so that our replacement nuclear weapons are even better than the ones they were before.”Nov. 2, 2025, 3:51 p.m. ETCredit...Andrew Kelly/ReutersDr. George Tidmarsh, the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug division, resigned on Sunday amid an investigation into criticism he aired publicly about a drug tied to a former business associate.Dr. Tidmarsh said he believed the review was opened in retaliation to concerns he raised last week about the legal basis of a new program for the rapid approval of some new drugs.Dr. Tidmarsh, a drug industry veteran who joined the agency in July, said in an interview Sunday that he believed the new program injected politics into the drug review program, superseding decisions based on science.He was placed on leave Friday pending the outcome of an investigation by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services. On Sunday, he offered his resignation and Emily Hilliard, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, said it had been accepted. But on Sunday evening, Dr. Tidmarsh maintained that he was still on administrative leave.Dr. Tidmarsh said he was told Friday that the leave was related to a complaint lodged by Kevin C. Tang, a major investor in a company that makes the drug voclosporin, a treatment for a type of lupus affecting the kidneys. The complaint involved a post that Dr. Tidmarsh wrote on LinkedIn in September that criticized that drug as having “significant toxicity.” The company’s stock dropped 16 percent.Mr. Tang had been the board chairman of a different company that Dr. Tidmarsh ran as chief executive before leaving “to pursue other interests” in 2019.In the post that Dr. Tidmarsh later deleted, he also publicly criticized some aspects of the agency’s decision-making.Ms. Hilliard said on Sunday evening that Dr. Tidmarsh was placed on leave “after the office of the general counsel and the office of the inspector general were notified of serious concerns about his personal conduct.”Dr. Tidmarsh also said that he did not want to work in a “toxic environment” that he attributed to Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency’s chief medical and scientific officer, who also oversees vaccines and gene therapies. Dr. Prasad was ousted from the agency in July but brought back.The tumult at the F.D.A. is just the latest in a series of ousters, firings and high-profile disagreements under the nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Several of his top staff members were pushed out or resigned in recent months.The most high-profile so far was the firing of Susan Monarez after she had served only a month as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She told senators that she was fired after she had refused to sign off on recommendations from Mr. Kennedy’s vaccine advisory panel, which he has filled with mainly vaccine skeptics.Dr. Tidmarsh said his concerns stemmed from the F.D.A.’s announcement in mid-October that it would approve a slate of drugs in record time. The program was meant to convey quick authorizations to drugs that reflected the administration’s priorities, which included addressing unmet medical needs or supporting lower pricing. Candidates for the program included a drug meant to help people break their addiction to vaping and another meant to help children who were born deaf.“The effort was going to basically change the entire paradigm of the legal underpinnings of drug approvals that have for decades supported the actions on the safety and effectiveness of drugs,” Dr. Tidmarsh said. “There was insufficient legal support for what they wanted to do, and so I didn’t agree.”Dr. Tidmarsh said the issue came to a head last week when officials met to make the agency’s first official approval decision. The process typically takes months, and involves extensive review and formal opportunities for dissent among agency scientists. But it was expected to be completed in a day.“I didn’t know the legal underpinnings so all I did is say ‘I don’t think this is a decision,’” he said. “‘I see this as practice run,’ because no one had given anything about the process, the legality of it.”Nov. 2, 2025, 12:20 p.m. ETPresident Ahmed al-Shara of Syria speaking at a polling station in Damascus last month.Credit...Louai Beshara/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPresident Ahmed al-Shara of Syria will visit Washington this month for the first time since he came to power, another step in the transformation of the former rebel leader once wanted by the United States as a terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head.A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans for the meeting, said he will meet with President Trump on Nov. 10 at the White House.In September, Mr. al-Shara visited New York and became the first Syrian president to address the United Nations General Assembly in 58 years.The U.S. special envoy for Syria, Thomas J. Barrack Jr., said on Saturday that Mr. al-Shara will be in Washington to “hopefully” sign an agreement to join 88 other countries in the global coalition to defeat the Islamic State. He was speaking at the Manama Dialogue, an annual security conference in the Gulf nation of Bahrain.Speaking at the same conference, Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani of Syria confirmed on Sunday that Mr. al-Shara would visit the U.S. capital in November and said the reconstruction of Syria would be among the topics to be discussed, according to Syrian state media.Mr. al-Shara led the rebel offensive almost a year ago that ended more than five decades of dictatorship under the Assad family. A former Islamist rebel once linked to Al Qaeda, Mr. al-Shara has since redefined himself as a statesman and expanded Syria’s foreign relations in a bid to help his country rebuild after a brutal and destructive civil war that lasted nearly 14 years.In December, the U.S. government dropped the $10 million bounty on Mr. al-Shara’s head. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the revocation of the terrorist designation for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that Mr. al-Shara led before he overthrew President Bashar al-Assad.Mr. al-Shara founded the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda before breaking ties with the terrorist group in 2016.Now he and his government appear set to join the U.S. and dozens of other countries in fighting another terrorist group.Though the Islamic State lost its last territorial foothold in Syria in 2019, it continues to have a presence in the country, especially in the vast desert region in the center, and carries out occasional attacks.As Syria goes through a rocky political and security transition after the war, there are fears that the terrorist group could re-emerge and try to free thousands of its former fighters who are held in Syrian prisons guarded by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces.Ismaeel Naar and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.Nov. 2, 2025, 11:39 a.m. ETSpeaker Mike Johnson blamed Democrats for the lapse in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits that began this weekend amid the ongoing government shutdown. “They had the opportunity to have SNAP benefits flow, to let air traffic controllers be paid, to take care of all these problems and pay the troops,” he said Sunday on “Fox News Sunday.” “And they said no.”Roughly 42 million SNAP receipients are at risk of having their benefits cut after the program ran out of funding as a result of the shutdown. Johnson said President Trump has “heroically funded” the program, although it remained unclear how the administration would respond to a judge’s order to resume funding benefits this week using an existing emergency reserve.Nov. 2, 2025, 11:13 a.m. ETThe Federal Aviation Administration has slowed down flights to several airports across the country so far on Sunday. Departures to San Francisco International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport are delayed because of air traffic controller shortages. In Texas, an elevated absence rate of Transportation Security Administration officers is also causing longer security lines at Hobby Airport and Bush Intercontinental Airport, with both airports warning that wait times could exceed an hour.A shortage of controllers, who were stretched thin even before they began working without pay during the shutdown, set off cascading delays on Friday.Credit...Carlos Barria/ReutersNov. 2, 2025, 10:47 a.m. ETIn an excerpt of an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” set to air tonight, President Trump was asked whether he would order U.S. forces to defend Taiwan if it were invaded by China. “You’ll find out if it happens,” Trump replied. He declined to specify what action the U.S. would take, if any, in response to an invasion of the democratically governed island, which Beijing claims as its own. He also said President Xi Jinping of China never brought up the issue when the two leaders met in South Korea last week.Nov. 2, 2025, 9:51 a.m. ETSecretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said the vessel “was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling,” but did not provide evidence to support the claim.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe U.S. military killed at least three people in another strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Saturday, in the latest attack on vessels that the Trump administration has claimed are being used to smuggle drugs. It was the 15th announced strike in the offensive that began in early September.Announcing the attack on social media, Mr. Hegseth posted a video that appeared to show an explosion. He said the vessel “was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling,” but he did not provide evidence to support the claim. He said Saturday’s strike took place in international waters.The latest attack raised the toll of the campaign to about 65 people killed, including a man who is presumed dead after a search by the Mexican Navy failed to find someone whom the United States described as surviving an attack on Oct. 27 in the eastern Pacific Ocean.A wide range of specialists in laws governing the use of force have decried the killings as illegal because the military is not allowed to deliberately target civilians who pose no threat of imminent violence, even criminal suspects.The administration says the strikes are lawful because President Trump determined that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels. The Pentagon has about 10,000 U.S. troops ashore and afloat in the region, and another 5,000 are on their way aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford and its accompanying warships.Nov. 2, 2025, 9:33 a.m. ETTransportation Secretary Sean Duffy told ABC’s “This Week” that Americans should expect air travel to get worse the longer the government shutdown goes on. “We will delay, we will cancel any kind of flight across the national airspace to make sure people are safe, but there is a level of risk that gets injected into the system when we have a controller that’s doing two jobs instead of one,” Duffy said. “If the government doesn’t open in the next week or two, we’ll look back as these were the good days, not the bad days. It’s only going to get worse.”Credit...Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNov. 1, 2025, 5:18 p.m. ETA federal court ordered the government to continue funding food stamps during the shutdown and make full payments by Monday or partial payments by Wednesday.Credit...Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesOne day after ordering the Trump administration to continue funding food stamps during the shutdown, a federal court gave the government a choice. It can either make full payments by Monday, or partial payments by Wednesday, to spare low-income Americans from hardship.The written order by Judge John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island underscored the vast uncertainty that still surrounds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, whose roughly 42 million recipients remain in the dark as to when they may see their next round of benefits.A spokeswoman for the White House budget office did not respond to a request for comment. Late Friday, President Trump predicted that food stamp aid would “unfortunately be delayed” in November, and warned that the payments would not begin until he received “appropriate legal direction” from the court.The legal saga began earlier that day, when Judge McConnell told the Trump administration that it must tap an existing, emergency reserve in order to pay for SNAP starting Saturday, when its typical budget was set to run out. Absent that intervention, the administration’s actions would have cut off assistance to the roughly one in eight Americans who are enrolled in the program.But the thrust of the judge’s order raised logistical questions. The SNAP reserve totals about $5 billion, less than the roughly $8 billion needed to pay full SNAP benefits each month. Even if they used the money, officials at the Agriculture Department had also warned they might have to slash benefits by more than half, and that it could take weeks to pay them out because of technical constraints.So, on Saturday, Judge McConnell clarified his ruling, citing the president’s request, and offered the Trump administration a timeline.He said the government “must make” a partial payment by Wednesday, but he also encouraged federal officials to explore the use of a second source of money that might allow it to pay SNAP benefits more quickly and in full. He pointed specifically to a pot of funds at the Agriculture Department largely composed of tariff revenue, which the government had used earlier in the shutdown to preserve another federal nutrition program.The judge said that the two funding sources, combined, could reduce any delay in delivering SNAP benefits, and alleviate “irreparable harm” facing families — and he ordered the administration to make those full payments by Monday.It remained unclear how the Trump administration might proceed — or, potentially, if it might appeal the ruling. The Justice Department appeared to signal the mere possibility in a late Friday filing with the court, hinting that it was “considering whether any emergency relief is required.”A spokesman for the agency did not respond to a request for comment.