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President Donald Trump arrived in the United Arab Emirates Thursday for the last leg of his first major foreign trip. Air Force One was given a fighter jet escort into the country’s airspace, just as Saudi Arabia and Qatar offered on the first stops of his Mideast trip.
Trump was greeted by UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and later visited the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque — among the largest mosques in the world. He is attending a state dinner at the presidential palace in Abu Dhabi.
The Russian president sent a delegation to planned peace talks in Turkey. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy had previously said he’d participate only if Putin showed up. But Trump said he was not surprised that Putin was a no-show. “I didn’t think it was possible for Putin to go if I’m not there,” he said in an exchange with reporters.
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The president says he’s ready to accept a donated jet from Qatar, despite concerns that it could be less secure, costly to retrofit and a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on foreign gifts.
The American comedian did a set Thursday before President Trump’s visit to a military base in Qatar that included a joke about a mixed-race baby and drugs as well as one that compared the base’s Qatari hosts’ attire to Klansman robes.
In an agency-wide town hall on Thursday, acting FEMA chief David Richardson reiterated the agency’s intention to “return primacy to the states” in the upcoming hurricane season, which begins in 17 days, asserting that “indeed we are to some degree, to a great degree, ready for disaster season ‘25.”
The comments come during a period of agency upheaval. Richardson replaced acting chief Cameron Hamilton last week, one day after Hamilton told a congressional committee that he did not think FEMA should be eliminated. It has lost roughly 2,000 full-time staff since Trump took office, about one-third of its full-time workforce.
The acting chief also said FEMA will begin a “mission analysis” as part of a longer-term transformation to ensure the agency is only doing tasks it is assigned by law.
“We will not be doing anything that isn’t in the statute,” Richardson said. “If we are, we are wasting the American people’s money.”
