The Latest: Trump agrees to have his super PAC, not taxpayers, pay for his ads

In response to a major backlash, President Donald Trump says he will stop using taxpayer funds for television advertisements glorifying himself and instead tap his super PAC to cover such costs going forward. Trump defended the use of at least $1.5 million in federal funds to pay for the ads, saying Monday that they were “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.”

Trump on Monday criticized election officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County after about 3,000 ballots were mistakenly mailed six days early to voters . The vendor error will have no effect on the ballots or the process, the recorder’s office said. Maricopa County has about 2.5 million registered voters.

Trump has approved the execution by firing squad of Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan for a 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. The U.S. military has not carried out the death penalty since 1961. The Army secretary will decide its time and place, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote in a post on X .

The Latest:

During his rally Monday night in Nebraska, Trump was going through his usual insistence that gas prices are only temporarily high and worth it as part of his war on Iran.

Then he added a new wrinkle, floating the idea that Tehran could “take out” two major American cities.

“They could take out a city,” he said. "Let ‘em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego.”

He continued as the crowd laughed and cheered: “This is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who may run for president in 2028, answered on X, calling Trump “deranged and dangerous.”

Trump has a history of denigrating U.S. cities, especially the largest ones that lean heavily Democratic. Los Angeles was among the cities where Trump deployed federal military personnel for what he said was a crackdown on crime, despite local authorities not wanting the troops.

At a recent North Carolina campaign rally, Trump said the state’s cities are “blood-soaked killing fields.” North Carolina’s violent crime rate ranks in the middle third of states, according to FBI statistics.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the role of diplomacy in resolving conflicts as he began a three-nation tour of NATO allies in Iceland, where concerns over the Trump administration’s often brusque approach to traditional friends and partners have stirred unease.

Rubio met Tuesday with Icelandic Foreign Secretary Thorgerdur Katrín Gunnarsdóttir at Reykjavik’s Hofdi House, the site of the 1986 summit between former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that is widely regarded as the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

“The house symbolizes diplomacy’s role in ending the Cold War and defeating communism,” Rubio posted on social media after the talks that took place just days before the 40th anniversary of the landmark Oct 11-12 meeting.

Despite an agreement signed last month between the U.S., Denmark and Greenland that eased fears of Trump taking over Greenland. Iceland has been uneasy about Trump’s intentions toward it after posting a map showing the colors of the U.S. flag sprawling across all of North America and including Iceland and Greenland.

Political advertising warns about Democratic plots to defund the police. Campaign events feature law enforcement unions and tough talk about law and order. Stump speeches boast about record low levels of violent crime .

From coast to coast, Republicans are focusing on public disorder, illegal immigration and violent crime in midterm campaigns as voters sour on their party’s handling of the cost of living and the war with Iran.

The messaging reflects a belief that lawlessness is safer political ground in the midterms despite Donald Trump’s own criminal record for paying hush money to a porn star, making him the only president to be convicted of a felony. Democrats have tried to counter the attacks by recruiting candidates with law enforcement backgrounds and emphasizing their own anti-crime plans, but Republicans believe it’s a rare opportunity to go on the offensive in an otherwise challenging year.

Trump returned to the topic on Monday night in Nebraska , warning about how the country used to be before he returned to the White House.

“We had a border with people pouring in, crime like nobody’s ever seen,” he said.

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Trump has approved the execution by firing squad of Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan for the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.

The U.S. military has not carried out the death penalty since 1961. The Army secretary will decide a time and place for the execution, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote in a post on X .

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, walked into a medical building where soldiers were getting medical checkups, shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun. Thirteen people were killed and more than 30 injured.

He said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims and made almost no effort to defend himself at trial. He told jurors that evidence would show he was the shooter and described himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.”

Trump’s approval triggers a series of procedural steps toward carrying out the execution, but Hasan could put them on hold — potentially for years — with a habeas corpus appeal in the civilian federal court system, according to an article published in May in the magazine Army Lawyer.

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Trump on Monday criticized election officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County after about 3,000 ballots were mistakenly mailed early to voters.

The miscue, blamed on a vendor error, would have no effect on the voters who received the ballots, the county recorder’s office said. Maricopa County has about 2.5 million registered voters.

The president , as he typically does ahead of an election , has been ramping up his rhetoric around voting as Election Day draws near in this year’s midterm elections, with control of Congress at stake.

His latest comments referred to a vendor error that came to light over the weekend. The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, which is run by Republican Recorder Justin Heap , said Sunday that Runbeck Election Services told the office that it “mistakenly mailed 3,126 early ballots the previous day,” six days before they were scheduled to be sent to voters for this year’s midterm elections.

The ballots were mailed to the correct voters, are still valid and can be completed and returned normally by those voters, the recorder’s office said in a statement.

Jeff Ellington, president and CEO of Runbeck Election Services, said Monday that Maricopa County was not at fault in the snafu.

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President Donald Trump said Monday that he will stop using taxpayer funds for television advertisements glorifying himself, which sparked a major backlash, and instead tap his super PAC to cover costs going forward.

In a post on his social media site, Trump defended the ads, which cost at least $1.5 million in federal funds and have drawn intense criticism. Trump said they were “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.”

“This is a rather standard thing to do,” the president wrote, while blaming intense criticism for using taxpayer funds on the ads on the “Radical Left.” But the president added that he’d “decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.”

That is Trump’s political war chest , which had amassed more than $400 million by the end of July. Trump has begun to tap it to boost Republican candidates around the country ahead of midterm elections.

Trump provided no details on reimbursing taxpayers for ads that already aired, nor how he would go about having his political organization pay for such future advertising.

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