After a week-long absence from the public eye, Trump held a series of Q&A events in the Oval Office – but he looked pretty sleepy, and appeared to doze off. Here’s all the bizarre moments from the last 24 hours in Trumpworld
He’s alive! Donald Trump‘s latest week-long absence from public appearances has come to an end – with two Oval Office Q&A sessions in as many days. The first of these, on Wednesday afternoon, was a late addition to his schedule – with some suggesting he’d been keen to show “proof of life” after an unusually long absence from public view. And they both went about as you would expect. Trump looked sleepy and sounded croaky and slow. He was told how great he is repeatedly by toady sycophants around him, before being increasingly combative with the media he invited in to question him. Vintage Trump 2.0.
Meanwhile, in Trumpworld
- The reflecting pool is ‘done’ – a month late
- He won’t say if the slush fund is dead
- He attacked a journalist for asking about it
- Crowd sizes are a thing again
- He has a very weird definition of “ceasefire”
- And Trump is probably going to nominate Todd Blanche as Attorney General
Here’s what you need to know
Trump appears to doze off in the Oval Office…again
At an event in the Oval Office about “clean beautiful coal”, which does not exist, Trump was repeatedly praised by various sycophants who were delighted by his commitment to fossil fuels. Trump on the other hand, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for extended periods of time.
He keeps falsely suggesting election fraud is happening in California
As I noted the other day, it takes California a long time to count votes. It just does. But it’s not remotely unusual for a Primary election, like the one that took place on Monday night, to take a week to count. Some of this is down to the fact that postal ballots are accepted right up to the end of polling day – and this year, with a massively split ticket, many Democrats waited until the last minute to decide which candidate to vote for. Of course, the other thing about elections in America is that Republicans vote early, and in person – and in-person votes are counted first. So while the initial results suggested Trump-backed Republican Steve Hilton – yes, David Cameron’s former ‘blue-sky thinking’ guru – was in the lead, as more postal ballots are counted that is likely to change quite dramatically. I also predicted that Trump would use this as an excuse to claim there is some kind of irregularity happening in the count, which there is absolutely no evidence of. Lo and behold, in the Oval Office this evening, Trump – who had just got done branding the American media “corrupt” – said he hoped journalists would “look at” the California Primary count. “They think it’ll take 7 or 8 days to count the votes, can you believe this?” he said. “The numbers are looking strange because without any vote counting the numbers dropped very precipitously for the two Republicans that are doing well, or had been doing well. I hope you’re all watching it because I’m watching it very closely.”
See, it’s easy to laugh this off as Trump returning to his usual schtick. But this is exactly what he’s going to do in November when Republicans get a pummelling in the midterms – and he’s not going to let it go.
He keeps compared the reflecting pool to a series of skyscrapers for some reason
Trump keeps showing people a large board featuring diagrams comparing the length of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool with the height of several skyscrapers. I’ve watched this a number of times, and it still remains entirely unclear why. In any case, today in the Oval Office he said the reflecting pool is finished now and water is being pumped back into it. Trump said on April 27th that it would take “one week” to complete the work. It has taken five weeks and one day.
He won’t say the slush fund is dead – and angrily berated a female reporter for asking
At an impromptu Q&A in the Oval Office on Wednesday night, Trump refused to say whether the $1.8 billion slush fund is dead or just on hold. “I’d have to ask the lawyers, I don’t know,” Trump said to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, before launching into a spirited defence of the people convicted of taking part in a violent attempt to overthrow the government and keep him as President after he lost the 2020 election. He said: “People like you [Collins] have abused our people.”
Collins attempted to interject, noting it was Republicans who eventually stood in the way of the slush fund plan. “Be quiet,” he snapped back. You should be ashamed of yourself. You used to be conservative from Alabama. CNN does such false reporting, but now they have new ownership, so maybe it’ll straighten it out. It’s hard to straighten garbage out.” Ms Collins said: “I’m still from Alabama.”
He bragged about the size of his crowd on January 6th
“They went there with love,” Trump said of the rioters, some of whom were convicted of beating police officers with weapons. “Tremendous crowd. I believe it’s the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to by twice. Bigger than anything. There was so much love.”
He also bragged that he’d had a bigger crowd than Martin Luther King
“That’s where Martin Luther King made his great speech with a million people,” Trump said of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. “I had the same amount of people. They said he had a million people and I had 25,000 people. I had more people.” This is, of course, untrue. Trump has only spoken at the Lincoln Memorial twice – one the night before his first inauguration, the other at a July 4th celebration in 2019. It’s not clear which speech he was referring to, but neither event drew anything like the kind of crowd Dr King spoke to in August 1963. (Unless he means January 6th, in which case oh boy oh boy)
He gave a bizarre definition of “ceasefire”
Asked what a ceasefire meant to him, in the context of the war in Iran, Trump gave a particularly unorthodox definition. “In that part of the world,” he said, “ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.”
Blanche to get nominated as Attorney General…but faces a tough confirmation
Trump is expected to officially nominate Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer, to be made Attorney General permanently. Blanche has been auditioning for the job for months, most recently serving as acting Attorney General following the sacking of Pam Bondi. He also really hates it when people refer to him as “Trump’s former personal lawyer”, just so you know.
But his confirmation is going to be a slog. Even before he incensed a raft of influential Republican Senators with his now-ditched ‘slush fund’ plan, there were enough members of the upper chamber who are serving out their lame-duck sessions and in no mood to give Trump an easy win with a controversial character.
Scott Bessent gives bizarre defence of Trump’s stock trading
Beaker-esque Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave a pretty weird defence of Donald Trump’s stock trading at a Congress committee last night. Set upon by Democrat Elizabeth Warren over the 3,400 trades worth hundreds of millions of dollars Trump benefited from in the first three months of 2026, Bessent trotted out the usual excuse: “President Trump is not sitting in the Oval Office engaging in a high-frequency trading strategy. Clearly, he had an outside manager who was doing that.” None of which makes it impossible, nor implausible that Trump is guilty of insider trading. Indeed, Trump bought a million dollars of Nvidia stock the week before he loosened export controls so the firm could sell chips to China. He also invested heavily in Robinhood and the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (BNY), before those two firms were revealed as partners in the Trump Accounts project. But presented with this, he kind of didn’t deny that it looked awfully like something the Securities and Exchange Commission might be tempted to take a look at. “So you’re going to sit here with a straight face and say it’s not a conflict of interest for the President of the United States to do that?” Senator Warren asked. Bessent replied: “I’m going to say this body needs to get its house in order first.” Warren went on: “Secretary Bessent, you said last year if any private citizen traded the way members of Congress do, “the SEC would be knocking on their door. So, my question is, should the SEC be knocking on President Trump’s door to start an investigation over this trade?” He replied: “Again, if this body wants to ban individual stock trading, which I would advocate for yourself, start there. And if you want legislative action to continue, that’s your prerogative.” Again, none of this is a denial. It’s a pretty weird approach to take.
Trump fumes over House passing war powers vote
A fuming Donald Trump last night declared a House of Representatives vote approving a “war powers” resolution that would halt the war against Iran to be “meaningless. Trump is particularly livid that four House Republicans joined the Democrats in supporting the resolution. “The Democrats are fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social. “They would rather have our Country fail than give me another, of many, victories. The four Republicans, that’s a whole other story – They’re GRANDSTANDERS! They should be ashamed of themselves.” House Speaker Mike Johnson had tried to prevent an outcome that would show the mounting opposition to the war, abruptly sending the House on recess last week when it looked like a resolution was about to be passed. But displeasure has only grown as the conflict drags on and as Trump struggles to negotiate a plan for peace. “Enough is enough,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who led the effort.“It is time for the president to do the right thing,” he said. “The people are tired of suffering because of his war of choice — suffering at the gas pump, suffering at the supermarkets.”