The White House has a brand new press secretary, and lots of good news 13 October 2026

Katie Zacharia read out the brochure. I checked the small print

A first for Fibberd: a trip across the Atlantic. I normally stick to Westminster, but this was too good a specimen to leave alone, and you’ll recognise the moves from over here. Katie Zacharia was on Newsmax as recently as 5 October, telling Greg Kelly “I’m a lawyer”. Popular Information searched all fifty states and DC and found no record of her ever being admitted to the bar; today, according to The New Republic, she told reporters she passed it when she “moved to China”. OK. Trump named her press secretary on 9 October. She started on Monday. This morning she took the podium for the first time.

Fourteen minutes. Eight of them were a list of good news, read like a sales brochure. Six were questions, from three reporters, before Marine One called. The whole thing is below, transcribed from the White House’s own video and checked against the NBC and C-SPAN captions, because there is no official transcript yet. Then I checked every claim in it against the actual data, comparing like with like: the same months, the same measures, the same length of time in office.

Here’s the thing. Not all of it is made up, and that is the trick. The numbers are real, and then they’re rounded up, measured from the flattering month, or quietly moved from “pledged” to “delivered”. A steel plant that won’t make steel until 2030 is “the largest ever built”. A 35% stake becomes “majority control”. Money “enforced” becomes money “recovered”. Factory jobs turn out to be electricians in data centres. Click a marked phrase or a note to read the check. Enjoy.

Source video: White House video
The scorecard: 9 true, 6 false, 12 misleading, 4 unsupported
Reporting cutoff: 13 October 2026, 17:41 BST
How to read

Katie Zacharia, White House press secretary, 13 October 2026, 09:44 EDT:

Good morning. I am so honoured to work for President Trump and the American people as the new White House press secretary. I want to thank President Trump for his trust that he has placed in me. I have wanted to work for him for a very long time. I’m looking forward to working with each of you as well, especially as we are in the middle of the midterm blitz, with energy and excitement never seen before in the history of midterms, thanks to President Trump.

Just look no further than last night in Youngstown, Ohio, where President Trump delivered another blockbuster rally out on the trail. The arena was overflowing with enthusiasm as thousands came out to support President Trump¹, as well as special guest Jake Paul and football legend Jon Gruden. The president also announced the Department of War has officially selected Cleveland, Ohio as the new home for the US Navy’s submarine component repair centre. This massive 46,000 square foot facility² will manufacture, repair and maintain key parts for virtually all new and existing submarines. This is historic.

Everyday Americans are showing up in droves to attend these rallies because of President Trump’s America First agenda of lower taxes, higher wages and, one of my favourites, secure borders. But it doesn’t stop there. President Trump is planning to hold rallies in Alaska, Arizona, Montana, where I will be with him, and Georgia, building off of the incredible momentum generated over the last several days from his stops in Tennessee, New York, Texas and Nebraska. He is an energetic president. Attendance is at record highs³ as enthusiastic, hard-working Americans are lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump and Republicans.

1 Misleading

Monday night, the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, capacity up to 7,000. The guests check out: Jon Gruden introduced Trump and Jake Paul spoke. Thousands came, which is also true. No official attendance figure has been given.

“Overflowing” is where it goes wrong. The Akron Beacon Journal reported that “rallygoers filled just over half of the event center”, with at least a third of the seats blocked off. The local station, WFMJ, headlined “high in energy despite sluggish attendance numbers”. The Irish Times had two open sections empty and the rear tiers closed.

To be straight with you, one local outlet, Mahoning Matters, did run “Youngstown crowd overflows Covelli Centre”. It is the only one I could find. So which is it? Most of the reporters in the building say half full.

Akron Beacon Journal, via Yahoo; WFMJ; Irish Times; Mahoning Matters; Newsweek

2 Misleading

Trump announced this from the stage at the Youngstown rally. As of today there is no Navy or Department of War release, and the City of Cleveland says “there are no specific details to share at this time”. No site, no cost, no jobs, no date. It follows an August memorandum telling the department to find a site within 90 days.

The 46,000 square feet is Trump’s own figure. That is about the size of one large American supermarket. For scale, the Anduril shipyard she brags about two minutes later is more than 2,000,000 square feet, over forty times bigger. A repair centre is a good thing for Cleveland. Massive it isn’t, and confirmed it isn’t either.

News 5 Cleveland; Fox 8; White House, August 2026 memorandum

3 False

Nobody publishes rally attendance, so there is no official record to set. What can be done is to compare the same towns. Mobile, Alabama: about 30,000 in 2015, roughly 8,000 this month. Vandalia, Ohio: about 10,000 in 2016, just over 4,000 now, on the Washington Post’s count. In Clarksville, Tennessee, on Saturday, a Reuters photo showed whole sections empty.

Fair’s fair: Durant, Oklahoma (about 4,000) and Grand Island, Nebraska (5,800, the fire-code limit) were full. Smaller rooms fill more easily. Which is rather the point, isn’t it?

Daily Beast analysis and Washington Post figures, as reported by Raw Story; Clarksville, Raw Story; rally list

It’s not hard to see why. President Trump is fighting and delivering for American workers every minute of every day. Real wages are up 1.2% since President Trump took office, with average annual earnings outpacing inflation by $800.⁴ Under Biden, real wages fell nearly 4%, with the average private sector worker’s annual purchasing power declining by nearly $3,000 annually.⁵ President Trump is the first president in modern history to actually lower prescription drug prices⁶, delivering the biggest drop in 63 years.⁷ President Trump has created more than 1 million private sector jobs in his second term⁸, including nearly 112,000 factory construction jobs⁹ and 72,000 manufacturing jobs this year alone.¹⁰

4 True

This one checks out. Real average weekly earnings for private workers went from $383.16 in January 2025 to $387.92 in July 2026 (in 1982-84 dollars), up 1.24%, or about $824 a year in today’s money. With August’s figure it is a touch better: 1.46%.

Two things she left out. Real hourly pay is up only 0.53%. And the gain stopped last November: weekly pay peaked at $390.42 in November 2025 and has slipped since; over the last twelve months real hourly pay has fallen.

Like for like, the first 19 months of each recent term: Trump 2 +1.5%, Trump 1 +1.6%, Obama 2 +1.4%. Normal, then. Not quite “fighting and delivering every minute of every day”.

BLS, real average weekly earnings (CES0500000012) and real average hourly earnings (CES0500000013); real earnings release, August 2026

5 Misleading

The number is real: real weekly earnings fell 3.9% from January 2021 to January 2025, about $2,714 a year in today’s money. “Nearly $3,000” is rounding up.

The trick is January 2021. In the pandemic millions of low-paid workers lost their jobs, so the average wage of the people still working shot up. The all-time high in the series is May 2020. Start Biden’s clock there and of course it falls.

Measure from before the pandemic, February 2020, and real weekly pay at the end of Biden’s term was about $966 a year higher. Inflation under Biden hurt, and that is a fair attack. This isn’t the way to make it.

BLS, CES0500000012; FactCheck.org on the same claim, December 2025

6 False

The prescription drug price index has fallen over twelve months under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Trump’s first term (down 2.4% by December 2020) and Biden (down 2.7% by August 2021, with eleven of the twelve months of 2021 negative). On the annual average, 2021 is still the record fall.

So “the first president in modern history” is not even the first Trump. What experts credit for this year’s fall: cheaper GLP-1 weight-loss drugs as competition arrived, patents expiring, and the first ten Medicare negotiated prices, which started in January 2026 under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Because of course.

BLS, CPI prescription drugs (CUUR0000SEMF01); FactCheck.org, August 2026; AP, August 2026

7 True

The index fell 3.06% in the year to July 2026, the biggest fall since March 1963 (3.16%). Sixty-three years, as she says. It beats Biden’s 2021 fall by a third of a percentage point, and by August it had eased to 2.95%.

BLS, CUUR0000SEMF01

8 True

Private payrolls are up 1,006,000 from January 2025 to September 2026 (preliminary). Start from December 2024 and it is 930,000. Total jobs are up only 776,000, because the federal workforce shrank by 328,000.

Same 20 months, like for like: Trump’s first term added 3.57m private jobs and Obama’s second 4.28m. So it is true, and it is about a quarter of either. Not quite the boom in the brochure.

BLS, private payrolls (CES0500000001), federal employment (CES9091000001)

9 False

The government series that actually counts people building factories, industrial building construction, is down 6,000 since January 2025. Spending on building new factories has fallen 29%, from $236bn to $168bn a year. Over the last 19 months of Biden it rose 18%.

I searched every likely series for something that gives 112,000. Only one does: “nonresidential specialty trade contractors”, up 111,500 since December 2024. That is electricians, plumbers and concrete crews on all non-residential work: offices, warehouses, hospitals and a great many data centres. It is also a figure for the whole term, not “this year alone”. Factories, it isn’t.

BLS, industrial building construction (CES2023621001) and nonresidential specialty trade contractors (CES2023800201); Census via FRED, manufacturing construction spending (PRMFGCONS)

10 True

Manufacturing employment is up 72,000 from December 2025 to September 2026. Correct, and the best start to a year since 2022.

Notice the window, though. In 2025 manufacturing lost 113,000 jobs. Over the whole term it is down 21,000. Of the last four presidents at this point, he is the only one with fewer manufacturing jobs than when he started. “This year alone” is doing a lot of work there.

BLS, manufacturing employment (CES3000000001)

And thanks to President Trump, we are once again bringing back American energy dominance, because energy security is national security. President Trump secured the biggest oil deal in world history, delivering the US majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela.¹¹ He had a historic one-day war, and now we are, have a booming economy and a, a great relationship with Venezuela.¹² The US achieved record domestic oil and gas production in 2025 and record crude and petroleum product exports in 2026.¹³

Building off of his historic boom in energy production, in the first 15 months of this administration we have secured trillions of dollars in new investments¹⁴, trillions of dollars, including $1.4 trillion from the United Arab Emirates, $600 billion from Apple and $340 billion from Amazon.¹⁵ No other president could have gotten these deals done.

11 False

The deal, announced on 28 and 29 August, covers seventeen fields with “proven potential” of 65 billion barrels, plus eight undeveloped blocks, for 25 years. The concessions go to a private company, North American Blue Energy Partners. The US government gets a 35% passive stake in its parent, held through the Department of War, plus a veto on board appointments and the right to buy 20% of the oil at cost.

A passive 35% stake in a company is not majority control of anything, and the reserves stay Venezuela’s. 65 billion barrels is about a fifth of the country’s total. No text of the agreement has been published, and nobody has ranked it the biggest in world history, apart from the people selling it.

Enerdata; LatinVex; FDD, 2 September 2026; Michigan Public

12 Misleading

On 3 January US strikes hit Caracas and Delta Force seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flew them to New York. The raid was short. People died: Venezuela’s defence minister put it at 83, its interior minister at 100, independent monitors counted 55 by 5 January, and Havana says 32 Cuban personnel were killed.

The “great relationship” is with the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy, whom nobody elected. A booming economy? Whose? Hmm.

AP via GBH, 3 January 2026; Al Jazeera; Deccan Herald

13 True

US crude averaged a record 13.66m barrels a day in 2025, and gas was a record too. Total exports of crude and products hit a monthly record of 13.61m barrels a day in April 2026.

But 2023 and 2024 were also records, under Biden, for both oil and gas. Growth in 2025 was 3.0%, against 7.9% in 2023. The export record beat one set in December 2023, the Energy Information Administration links this year’s surge to disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, and exports have fallen every month since April. The line was going up before he arrived.

EIA, crude production (MCRFPUS2), exports (MTTEXUS2), Today in Energy, July 2026

14 Misleading

20 January 2025 to 13 October 2026 is twenty-one months. Small thing. The bigger thing is “secured”. The White House investments page lists pledges with no dates and no line between money promised and money spent.

When people have checked, the totals shrink. Bloomberg Economics judged about $7tn of the White House’s $9.6tn (late 2025) to be real pledges at all. PolitiFact rated Trump’s “$18 trillion to $22 trillion” claim False. Pledges are fine. Calling them secured is the brochure talking.

White House, investments page; Bloomberg; PolitiFact, December 2025

15 Misleading

The UAE’s $1.4tn is a ten-year, non-binding framework from May 2025, about two and a half times the UAE’s entire annual economy. The Peterson Institute says it might have to borrow to meet it. The US-UAE Business Council counts just over $100bn of deals announced so far.

Apple’s $600bn bundles earlier multi-year pledges with a $100bn top-up from August 2025. Amazon’s $340bn appears on the White House page as “AI infrastructure, data centers and cloud expansion”. I could not find any Amazon announcement of that sum. Data centres Amazon was building anyway, perhaps?

White House, investments page; Peterson Institute, via the Boston Globe; Semafor, May 2026

Just weeks ago, President Trump announced that Mesabi Metallics will build a massive $15 billion steel complex in Iowa¹⁶, the largest steel plant ever built in the United States.¹⁷ This facility, a historic facility, will create 1,750 new permanent jobs and support up to 6,000 construction jobs and generate an estimated $95 billion in economic output.

In addition, President Trump and Anduril announced Arsenal 2, the biggest American shipyard push since World War II¹⁸, in Maryland. This new facility will create about 3,100 direct jobs and support more than 11,000 indirect jobs.

President Trump also unveiled a South Korea energy investment package of up to $200 billion in the United States.¹⁹ This is an amazing deal. This includes as much as $120 billion to build a, to build eight large-scale nuclear power plants, something we’ve needed as the United States, and something President Trump promised on the campaign trail, and something President Trump is delivering on, just like he delivers on every promise.²⁰ In addition to that, we will be a, we will be, there is $54 billion tied to the Alaska LNG pipeline and terminal to service the Pacific Rim and sell fuel to our allies, as well as $22.3 billion for a 6 gigawatt natural gas power facility in Texas.

16 True

Trump announced it in the Oval Office on 28 September: Mesabi Metallics, a Minnesota company owned by India’s Essar Group, nearly $15bn for a plant in eastern Iowa, 1,750 plant jobs, 5,000 to 6,000 construction jobs and about $95bn of output over construction and the first ten years. Every figure matches.

What wasn’t said: no town, no construction start date, first steel not until 2030. And the company’s record. Its Nashwauk project in Minnesota was first proposed in 2008. Essar Steel Minnesota went bankrupt in 2016. Minnesota cancelled Mesabi’s mineral leases in 2021 after it paid half of a required $200m, and the leases went to Cleveland-Cliffs. “Will build” is a brave verb. Fingers crossed.

WJLA; Star Tribune; Steel Market Update, 2021

17 Misleading

At 7.5m tons a year, rising to 10m, it would be the largest steel plant in the United States by capacity. If it is built. Right now it is an artist’s impression of a field in Iowa, with first steel pencilled in for 2030.

Manufacturing.net

18 Unsupported

Arsenal-2 is real and big. Announced on 6 October at Sparrows Point in Baltimore County: Anduril puts in $3.7bn, the Navy has a contract worth up to $2.9bn, and Trump says taxpayers get a 40% stake. 187 acres, more than two million square feet, autonomous submarines first and Virginia-class sections later. Operations start in 2030.

The 3,100 and 11,000 jobs are Anduril’s own estimates. “The biggest since World War II” is Trump’s line, and nobody has measured it, including him. Maryland’s governor worked on the deal for a year and was kept off the stage. Funny, that.

Spectrum News; WMAR; The Next Web

19 Misleading

The numbers match the announcement of 30 September: $120bn for eight reactors (including $20bn of contingency), $54bn for Alaska LNG (Trump himself said $50bn) and $22.3bn for a gas plant in Encinal, Texas, fully running by 2032. It all sits inside the $350bn Korea pledged in July 2025 to get its tariff down to 15%.

Seoul hasn’t signed up to most of it. Korea’s trade ministry says “no decision has been made” on Alaska LNG. President Lee says it happens only if it is commercially viable, and each reactor has to stand up on its own. Only the Texas plant is confirmed to proceed. Korea reportedly caps this kind of investment at about $20bn a year, so $200bn is a decade away, even if every bit of it happens.

Euronews; Kuwait Times; Interesting Engineering

20 Unsupported

I could not find a campaign promise that matches this package. And “delivers on every promise” arrives one paragraph after a steel plant due in 2030 and a Korean deal Seoul hasn’t agreed to. Let’s keep going.

Not only is the Trump administration bringing in trillions of dollars to invest throughout the country, but we are also protecting your tax dollars by addressing fraud head-on. Since taking office, the Trump administration has uncovered over $260 billion of fraud, stopped $72 billion of fraud annually through administrative actions²¹, and recovered $58.9 billion through indictments, settlements and civil monetary penalties.²²

21 Misleading

The numbers match the fraud tally JD Vance announced on 25 September. The White House defines “uncovered” as “total estimated fraud identified through data analysis”. An estimate, not money back. Nearly half of it, $122.9bn, is the Small Business Administration, whose big fraud problem is the pandemic loans of 2020 and 2021. Old fraud, newly counted.

The New York Times found cases that began under Biden, payment pauses counted as fraud “stopped”, and items that appear twice. The totals moved three times in two months: $230bn in August, $245.7bn around 23 September, $260.7bn two days later. No itemised list has been published.

For scale, the Government Accountability Office estimates the government loses $233bn to $521bn to fraud every year. $260bn found over twenty months is less than one year’s low estimate. Nice work if you can get it.

White House, fraud ledger; New York Times, via the Inquirer, 27 September 2026; Boston Globe; GAO, GAO-24-105833

22 False

The White House’s own page doesn’t call the $58.9bn recovered. It calls it “enforced”, which counts indictments, settlements and penalties: money charged or agreed, not money in the bank. The New York Times found that one pending referral of $22.2bn in overdue small-business loans makes up more than a third of it. A similar referral before it recovered about $1bn.

“Recovered” is the one word the ledger itself doesn’t use. Funny, that.

White House, fraud ledger; New York Times, via the Inquirer

Above all, President Trump is working to secure the Western Hemisphere for centuries to come. President Trump signed an unprecedented agreement giving the United States lasting control over security interests in Greenland.²³ President Trump has used the power of tariffs to stop China from producing fentanyl precursor chemicals.²⁴ Those fent…, the fentanyl killed many of our citizens, and he is hard at work in ensuring that that won’t happen. And here at home, fentanyl trafficking across the southern border is down 56%²⁵, and fentanyl-linked deaths plunged 22% in a single year because of President Trump.²⁶ This is a president, an administration that is looking out for you, the American people, and I’m thrilled to officially be part of this incredible journey together.

And with that, I will take your questions. Here in our new media seat, we have Nick Gilbertson from Breitbart.

23 Misleading

There is a real agreement, signed at the UN on 22 September by Trump, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Jens-Frederik Nielsen. The US can expand Pituffik, gets new defence areas at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, and broad access across the island. It has no end date and survives Greenland independence.

It also reaffirms “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark”, and AP reports the expanded US presence stays under Danish control. As for unprecedented: a 1951 agreement already gave the US open-ended defence areas in Greenland for as long as NATO lasts. Bigger than before, yes. Control, no.

AP, via the Anchorage Daily News; 1951 Defence of Greenland agreement

24 False

In February 2025 the US put a 20% “fentanyl” tariff on China, then halved it in November 2025 in return for “substantial cooperation”. On 10 November 2025 China began requiring export licences for 13 precursor chemicals going to the US, Mexico and Canada.

That is a licence on exports to three countries. It is not a ban on making them, and there is no licence for shipping them anywhere else. The White House’s own line at the time was that China “will stop the shipment of certain designated chemicals to North America”. Shipment, to North America. Not production.

Reuters factbox; SCMP; Global Sanctions

25 Misleading

Nobody measures fentanyl trafficking. Customs and Border Protection measures what it catches. The numbers that give 56% are southwest border seizures in 2025 against the 2023 peak (down 57%). The peak was under Biden, and seizures had already fallen 21% in his last year.

Like for like, October to August this year against the same months last year: down 11.7%. Fewer seizures could mean less fentanyl coming over. Or cartel infighting, or routes nobody is watching. The Washington Office on Latin America calls the cause “unclear”. Not “because of President Trump”.

CBP, nationwide drug seizures; WOLA, November 2025

26 Misleading

Deaths from synthetic opioids over the twelve months to December 2025 were 38,506, down 21.3% on a year earlier. The latest figure, to April 2026, is down 19.6%. So 22% is generous rounding.

The fall began in the summer of 2023, and the year before Trump took office it was bigger: down 34.6% during 2024. Two thirds of the drop from the peak happened before 20 January 2025. Every death that doesn’t happen is good news. The credit just belongs to someone else.

CDC, provisional drug overdose deaths (dataset)

Nick Gilbertson, Breitbart:

Hi, Katie. Welcome to the briefing room and congrats on the new position. One of the things that your predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, did is open this room up to more voices, not less. […] Can you tell us what you plan to do to continue to ensure that, um, new media voices continue to be heard here at the White House?

Zacharia:

Yeah. Well, firstly, my predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, did an incredible job, and I completely agree with the choice of new media seat. We are absolutely going to keep it, and we’re going to expand on it to the extent possible.²⁷ We love new media and we want to be able to embrace it.

Gilbertson:

[…] Is it only going to intensify here in the next couple of weeks up to midterms?

Zacharia:

Absolutely. You can expect more of the midterm blitz. Uh, just now we’ve added Kentucky, and we have a few other stops as he goes down to, uh, Florida. So it’ll be Georgia, Kentucky and Florida.

Peter Doocy, Fox News:

Um, you’re starting as White House press secretary three weeks before a midterm cycle that President Trump himself says will be very tough for Republicans. Is your job just to speak about White House matters, or is it to make things less tough for Republicans in the midterms?

Zacharia:

Well, but Peter, I get to do what I was doing on the outside already, which was hoping to amplify, multiply and expand upon President Trump’s incredible agenda for the American people.²⁸ And what I hope to do in this position is to take that into an official capacity and only build on, only amplify and only multiply to the extent possible all of the wins he’s making for Americans, for, for Americans to understand how much has changed in this brief period of time, what he’s been able to accomplish. My goal is to be able to communicate that in complete tandem with the president, as he is his own best spokesperson and will absolutely be leading the way, as with that…

Doocy:

And I want to ask you a policy question. Has the US stopped sharing intel with Ukraine?

Zacharia:

I’ll have to get back to you on that.²⁹

27 True

Karoline Leavitt created the new media seat, and Breitbart got today’s first question from it. Keeping it is true as of today. Expanding it is a promise, and I’ll check.

PBS NewsHour

28 True

Peter Doocy asked whether her job is the White House or helping Republicans win. Her answer: the same thing she did on the outside. She was a cable news guest until a week ago; her last appearance was on Newsmax on 5 October.

Federal staff aren’t supposed to campaign on the job, which is what the Hatch Act is for. HuffPost says her opening broke it. Nobody has filed a complaint that I can find. But at least we know what the job is.

Popular Information, on her Newsmax appearance; HuffPost; US Office of Special Counsel, Hatch Act overview

29 Unspecified

The question has a background. On 10 October Axios reported a Ukrainian official saying Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, threatened to cut Kyiv off from US intelligence if it kept hitting Russian oil refineries. A US official denied any threat was made. In March 2025 the US did pause intelligence sharing for about a week.

Day one, so “I’ll get back to you” is fair enough. I’ll be watching to see if she does.

Militarnyi; RBC-Ukraine; Al Jazeera, March 2025

Alina Shirazi:

[…] First of all, on Kimberly Guilfoyle: the Daily Mail has been reporting on her since last year. The president said yesterday to reporters that he is considering firing her. Do you know a timeline for that? And also, potentially, who could be on the short list to replace her if he does?

Zacharia:

Uh, we have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign.³⁰ She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well.

Shirazi:

[…] A personal question. […] Karoline Leavitt left because she wanted to spend more time with her family. And also, did she give you any advice on how to handle this job and the people in this room?

Zacharia:

[…] And as far as your second question is, yes, Karoline has been an incredible support. She gave me great and wonderful feedback on how to balance. […] So I intend to, to the extent possible, include my family, include my kids in my work. Though my work will be demanding, they will always be a priority. And I, I… President Trump is the most family-friendly president we’ve ever had. He has hired more women with families.³¹ And the fact that he knew I had four kids and he knew that this job would be demanding and still placed his trust in me shows that I know I’m capable of being able to step up to that. So thank you for that question.

In fact, I am going to end it because President Trump is heading out to Marine One for our historic trip to Alaska³², and we can ask him all of the questions out there. So, thank you so much.

Ends about 09:58 EDT. Fourteen minutes.

30 True

Kimberly Guilfoyle, ambassador to Greece, has confirmed she is leaving. The Wall Street Journal reported in late September that she asked a Trump donor to pay a $100,000 credit card bill and offered access to officials in return; there are also reports about gifts and private planes. Her lawyers deny any wrongdoing. On Monday Trump said: “Well, we’re looking at it… We’re not happy.”

Out of the job, and a wonderful asset. Both at once, apparently.

AP, via ClickOnDetroit, 11 October 2026; Jerusalem Post

31 Unsupported

Nobody publishes a count of White House hires “with families”, and there is no measure of family-friendliness across presidents. So this one is a feeling.

Worth remembering what the question was: her predecessor left the job in August to spend more time with her young family.

32 Unsupported

The Alaska trip is a campaign rally this afternoon in Wasilla, run by the Trump 47 Committee, to shore up Senator Dan Sullivan, who trails Mary Peltola in some polls before the 3 November election. The Anchorage Daily News says it is his second Alaska campaign rally; the first was in Anchorage in July 2022. Historic is one word for it.

Anchorage Daily News; Alaska’s News Source