The Latest: Trump welcomes China’s Xi Jinping to Washington for state visit
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington Wednesday evening, where he received a rare greeting from President Donald Trump, who met his counterpart at the base’s airport instead of waiting for him to drive to the White House.
Trump’s decision to greet Xi shows how far the U.S. president is going to honor China’s leader as he made his first state visit to the U.S. capital in more than a decade.
Meanwhile, a judge heard arguments Wednesday but did not rule from the bench in a case on Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds. It’s the latest development in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes. The administration has doubled down on its contention that it has the right to decide who can set foot in the White House, while the outlets call the ban a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment.
Also, Iran’s president said Wednesday that his people have been “victims of terrorism” by the United States, delivering a rare wartime speech on the second day of the U.N. General Assembly. Trump, on the U.N. General Assembly stage a day earlier, said he could “annihilate” the Islamic Republic. Toward the end of his speech, Masoud Pezeshkian called out Trump by name.
Here's the latest:
After a brief exchange with President Trump on the tarmac, Xi walked over a few steps to shake hands with Melania Trump and bid farewell to the couple. Xi had a smile on his face and looked relaxed.
Both Xi and his wife Peng were seen entering their vehicle, and the Trumps waited a while before walking off.
The two leaders are set to meet Thursday for formal talks.
The president appeared to be the only one dressed in cold-weather attire. He took gloves on and off multiple times for rounds of handshakes with Xi and Peng.
It was about 65 degrees F (18 degrees C) with a brisk breeze, according to the National Weather Service.
The 100-foot (30-meter) red carpet unfurled as Xi stepped off his plane outside Washington recalled a similar, extra-long one the U.S. laid out for Russian President Valdimir Putin when he touched down at a U.S. air force base in Alaska last summer.
This time, Trump and first lady Melania Trump, shook hands with Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, before appearing to chat and exchange pleasantries that couldn’t be heard.
There was a 21-person honor guard, a flyover from two B1 bombers, flower presenters, platoons from each military service and the flags and anthems of both countries.
When Putin arrived in August 2025, he shook hands with the President Trump while both grinned. The first lady wasn’t present.
Trump and Putin then took the unusual step of climbing into the U.S. president’s limo to share a ride that whisked them to ultimately unsuccessful talks about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Two American children presented bouquets of yellow-colored flowers to the Chinese leader and his wife as the U.S. president and first lady welcomed them at Joint Base Andrews.
A giant red carpet was rolled out at the bottom of the red stairs leading down from Xi’s jet. It took several U.S. service members and an animated director of sorts to unroll the carpet, steer it into place and get it straightened out.
Chinese officials briefly waited at the entrance of the jet while the carpet was adjusted.
The Chinese president’s plane was greeted with a long red carpet, a salute with battery guns, a 21-person honor cordon and a flyover from two B1 bombers.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump took the unusual step of appearing in person to greet Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan.
As part of the ceremony, the national anthems of both China and the U.S. were played.
China offered Trump an elaborate welcome ceremony when Air Force One touched down for his visit to Beijing in May, involving top officials and school children acting as greeters, but Xi did not attend personally.
The Chinese president’s jet touched down at Joint Base Andrews at about 5:40 p.m. Wednesday.
The Air China jet landed while U.S. troops were gathered nearby for a welcome event.
President Donald Trump and Melania Trump were waiting at the base for a rare airport welcome for Xi and Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan.
The president and first lady Melania Trump arrived at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland via chopper, then stepped into the presidential limo to wait for Xi’s arrival.
The president saluted waiting Marines upon climbing off his helicopter, then fixed his coat on the windy tarmac.
The motorcade eventually drove past a riser with assembled media waiting to cover Xi’s arrival.
Trump could be seen looking at the reporters in attendance before the motorcade headed to a white tent next to the airport terminal.
Iowa District Judge Scott J. Beattie dismissed Trump’s lawsuit that accused The Des Moines Register and its former pollster J. Ann Selzer of misrepresenting the state of the 2024 presidential race, rejecting the president’s claim that the newspaper’s poll coverage violated Iowa’s consumer fraud law.
Selzer and the Register described the lawsuit as a conspiracy theory and an affront to free speech protections.
Trump and his team have filed several lawsuits against media organizations accusing them of bias, calling into question the boundaries of First Amendment protections for speech and press. Some of those lawsuits have ended in settlements.
Trump filed the lawsuit against Selzer, The Des Moines Register and the newspaper’s parent company in December 2024, accusing them of fraudulently publishing inaccurate poll results to damage him and help Democrats, saying coverage of polls is not protected speech.
In the end, it was all kisses and laughter as President Donald Trump hailed his “fantastic” relationship with Denmark and Greenland after signing a new security deal that America’s European allies hope will close one of the most dangerous chapters in transatlantic relations.
Trump’s territorial ambitions over Greenland almost broke the NATO military alliance and shattered trust with one of America’s oldest and closest partners.
Interestingly, one place may emerge from this standoff as the real winner: Greenland itself.
“I cannot stress it enough: This is the first time that we are venturing into a binding agreement as a country,” Naaja Nathanielsen, one of Greenland’s two lawmakers in the Danish parliament and a former government minister in Nuuk, told The Associated Press. “That is a huge step forward in our quest for more self-autonomy.”
The five major networks on Wednesday were poised to continue their ban on filming Trump coverage. At Joint Base Andrews, where the president is set to formally welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping later Wednesday, journalists from Fox News, CBS and NBC were present but not shooting, and some appeared to be breaking down their cameras.
Other television outlets whose crews were present, according to signs on their tripods and cameras, were NewsNation, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network, One America News and LindellTV.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become House speaker if Democrats win control in fall, chided Republicans for trying to distance themselves from Trump on the Iran war and other issues.
“On one hand, they want Donald Trump’s MAGA money. I mean, they’re feeding at the trough of Donald Trump’s MAGA money,” he said. “And on the other hand, they want to pretend that they creating distance between Donald Trump and themselves.”
Jeffries held a news conference at the empty House chamber, criticizing Republicans for cutting short the legislative calendar to go home and campaign.
A judge has heard arguments but did not rule from the bench in a case on Trump’s ban of three news outlets from White House grounds.
Wednesday’s hearing marked the latest development in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.
Trump banned the outlets beginning Friday, assailing what he called “fake news.” More recently the president has said negative coverage was dangerous for the country.
The outlets argued they were singled out because of the content of their coverage — in other words, viewpoint discrimination and called the ban a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment.
In court arguments over Trump’s ban of three media outlets from White House grounds, the administration continues to defend the move as constitutional.
Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik told the court Wednesday that “access to the White House is a privilege, not a right.”
The case is being heard by U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, whom Trump appointed in 2017 and who ordered a CNN journalist’s access restored in a similar case in 2018.
Arguments began with attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr. calling the ban against CNN, MS NOW and Politico an “unprecedented, unreasonable punishment” and saying there was “not a semblance of due process.”
The White House confirms that the president, who has put athletics front and center in his second term, will attend the matchup Saturday.
No. 1 Texas is traveling to No. 14 Tennessee for the Southeastern Conference opener in Knoxville. It’s the first meeting between the two marquee football programs since the 1969 Cotton Bowl.
The move follows Trump’s attempt to rebrand the technology in his address to the UN General Assembly.
“Following the president‘s remarks at the GA today, please change all references of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to ‘Super Intelligence’ in our documents and positions. We will be using ‘SI’ in all remarks, positions and press elements moving forward,” said an email sent Tuesday to employees by Michael Drager, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
That bureau is in charge of U.S. diplomatic missions to all U.N. and multilateral agencies around the world. The email was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear if other State Department bureaus would follow suit.
The heads of major AI companies are pleading with the United Nations to set controls over the burgeoning technology they are designing to save the world or at least its people.
“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer, Anthropic said.
“We could lose control of the future to AI,” his competitor, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
Both testified Wednesday to the U.N. Security Council. They said the countries of the world, through the council, have to set safeguards that would be actual controls to prevent the technology from getting too powerful to reign in. They also called for the world to make sure that the power of AI isn’t concentrated in one company or country.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Rubio said the Trump administration was hopeful that Putin would accept the invitation despite differences over Russia’s war with Ukraine and other matter.
“In order to solve problems, you have to meet with the people that you disagree with or the people that you might have some issues with, so we’ve invited President Putin to the G20,” Rubio said. “We think it’s an opportunity for him to engage not just with the president, but with other world leaders. We hope that’s, an invitation he’ll accept.”
Trump will host G20 leaders at his Miami country club in December.
The problem started with the Texas Department of Public Safety, which allows people to register to vote or update their registrations when they renew their driver’s license.
State officials blamed an unspecified error dating to October 2025. It meant that applications were not being forwarded to the person’s home county, where they are processed and verified.
Now those counties are dealing with nearly a year’s worth of backlogged applications. Several county officials say they will need to hire temporary workers to handle the crush. Early in-person voting in Texas for the midterm elections starts Oct. 19.
The size of the backlog statewide hasn’t been determined, but the Texas Association of County Election Officials says it’s in the tens of thousands for some of the most populous counties. In Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, it’s about 45,000 voter registration applications.
The State Department is asking Americans to report foreigners suspected of U.S. visa fraud for potential deportation and criminal prosecution.
The department said in a statement Wednesday that it had launched an online portal to make it easier to report such cases.
The department said tips from “upstanding and concerned” members of the public have been responsible for the revocation of visas from many of the tens of thousands of people who either lied on their applications or were violating the conditions of their stay in the U.S.
“This new online tool provides a convenient and reliable way for the public to submit crucial information for prompt review and action,” the statement said.
The finding from a survey conducted in mid-September by the Pew Research Center comes just as Chinese President Xi is about to arrive in Washington for his first state visit to the U.S. in 11 years.
Americans were asked on the survey to evaluate how warm and positive or cold and negative they feel about China, using a scale from zero to 100.
About one-fifth of the Americans now have warm views about China, the analysis found, up from about 11% in 2021, when public sentiments fell to the lowest point in Pew’s 10-year trend in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than half of Americans feel cold about China, but it’s down from about 7 in 10 from five years ago.
Ukrainian President President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is urging world’s leaders to keep choking Russia’s revenues and impede its war efforts.
He’s telling the U.N. General Assembly that “Russia’s revenues must remain a target.”
He says that trade, and the money it brings in, gives more time to the war. That, he says, is “why we insist on limiting trade with the aggressor.
Russia gets its turn Saturday to address the assembly.
President Vladimir Putin hasn’t traveled to the gathering in years, sending Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov instead.
Before Trump’s tariffs, half of U.S. soybean exports went to China.
Since then, exports dropped from nearly $18 billion in 2022 to only $3 billion in 2025, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
“No one can replace the Chinese market,” said Dave Walton, a farmer from Wilton, Iowa.
Brazil and Argentina have made gains.
Brazil exported a record 108.7 million metric tons of soybeans in 2025, up 11.7% from the year before, with about 80% going to China, according to Brazil’s National Association of Cereal Exporters.
Walton says he’d like to see the U.S. tariffs removed.
“We think of Xi as a friend to American agriculture,” said Walton, who is the vice president of the American Soybean Association.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is warning Trump not to give China greater access to advanced semiconductor chips and equipment as part of talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
Schumer is touching on voter concerns about the safety of artificial intelligence and contrasting Democrats’ call for greater regulation with the president’s call to “encourage it, not rein it in.”
“We must reject the false choice Trump keeps making,” Schumer told reporters.
“We can and must both maintain our lead on AI by restricting China’s access to our technology and put up guardrails to mitigate AI’s risk,” Schumer said.
The showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes is moving to a courtroom in the nation’s capital.
A judge will hear arguments Wednesday on whether the president’s move banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds violates the Constitution.
The Trump administration argues that the reporting of the three outlets poses a threat to national security. The administration plans to double down on its contention that it has the right to decide who can set foot in the White House.
The outlets say they were singled out because of the content of their coverage. They called this a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment and asked the court to immediately restore their access.
As state and local election officials prepare for what could go wrong administering the midterms, they’re planning not just for what foreign adversaries might try — but how the Trump administration could interfere.
At a panel Wednesday for the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta said officials are working on what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers or National Guard troops show up at polling places, or if ballots are seized.
Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel said one concern is the possibility that federal law enforcement officials would get in the way of voting by mail even after the Supreme Court rejected mail ballot restrictions.
Saudi Arabia is facing increasing attacks from Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Rubio pledged for the second time in three days that the United States will “live up” to its commitments to the Saudis but declined to say what that would entail.
“They are a strategic defense partner. The U.S. has made commitments to them. We will live up to those commitments,” he said, adding that “obviously, the president has many options available to him.”
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