Trump Team Scrambles to Backpedal on Slip About Arms Sale to China

Selling weapons to China is suddenly off the table. It’s unclear how it got on the table in the first place.

U.S. Ambassador David Perdue told Fox News Sunday that “President Trump continues to say: Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,” and that “he actually asked [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] would he like to buy some at one point.”

But hours later, the Trump administration aggressively attempted to cover its own tracks. Two U.S. officials denied any such plan while speaking with The Wall Street Journal . One source told the daily that the White House had no intentions of selling weapons to Beijing, while the other acknowledged that it’s already illegal to do so. That ban circles back to Taiwan, which relies on U.S. weapons to deter Chinese encroachment.

China has reaffirmed for years that Taiwan is an inalienable part of its territory, and that it intends to formally reunite with the island nation. More than 23 million people live in Taiwan, and its sovereignty is highly contested due to a complex history of colonization.

The U.S. has provided material defense support to Taiwan since 1979, when Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act. The law binds the U.S. to resist anything that would jeopardize Taiwan’s national security.

The White House rattled Beijing when it made an $11 billion arms sale to the island in December, with a separate $14 billion package expected down the line. Donald Trump has since held off on advancing that larger sale, despite urging from Senate Republicans ahead of Xi’s visit last week.

“It is difficult to imagine ​how the United States might credibly project influence deterrence in the Indo-Pacific if the price of keeping up diplomatic appearances ​is denying our partners key deterrent capabilities,” Senators Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ahead of the state visit.

Trump has not commented on the abeyance since. However, Xi made his position regarding U.S. involvement in the region abundantly clear. On Thursday, Xi told Trump that he hoped America would take the “correct position” of opposing Taiwan’s independence.

Taiwanese Deputy Foreign Minister Francois Wu commented on the summit on Saturday, telling reporters in Taipei that maintaining military sales and providing Taiwan the support to defend itself was an “important U.S. interest” due to the island’s dominating semiconductor industry, reported Reuters .

Attorney General Todd Blanche crashed and burned while trying to defend President Donald Trump’s ever-increasing restrictions on the press.

Speaking on ABC’s This Week Sunday, Blanche struggled to keep his composure while facing questions a federal judge’s temporary injunction on Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House.

Last week, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s decision had little to do with national security, as the Justice Department had argued in court, and that the president’s initial statements indicated that the ban stemmed from the media’s coverage of the Republican Party.

“Well, I’m not going to get into what the judge says, the litigation is ongoing. But our position has been clear from the beginning. What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security,” Blanche said.

When ABC host Martha Raddatz pressed him for a single example, Blanche appeared to claim that any negative reporting the president was inaccurate.

“Give you an example of when CNN doesn’t report accurately? You cannot be asking me that!” Blanche said. “They don’t even disagree. There’s not even a real dispute that the information coming out of CNN and some of these other networks is wholly and completely, almost 100 percent, negative towards the president.”

Raddatz reminded Blanche that the judge ruled that the ban had nothing to do with national security, and the attorney general doubled down.

“At some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue and it’s not right for the people of the United States to have to put up with it,” Blanche said.

Blanche blew up when Raddatz asked whether the Trump administration planned to screen reporters.

“I did not say that! I did not say that! You don’t get to put words in my mouth! You don’t get to put words in my mouth! That’s not the way it works,” he cried.

Then Blanche balked at a question what the First Amendment meant to him, and insisted that news coverage did not have to be positive for the Trump administration.

“But you heard what the president said: ‘They want to try to diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration,’” Raddatz said.

“For you to pick out seven words and say, ‘Oh, that’s what the president means,’ that’s extraordinarily disingenuous,” Blanche said.

Clearly, the Trump administration simply can’t stand when the press reports on what the president actually says.

Despite the judge’s order, the Trump administration has continued to lash out at the press. Over the weekend, the president blocked CNN from traveling with him on Air Force One.

FBI Director Kash Patel appears to have spent his weekend schmoozing with a man his own department fired under suspicions of being a double agent in 2008.

Patel attended the wedding of former acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, who resigned in disgrace in December.

On Sunday, Israeli-born federal prosecutor Sigal Chattah shared a photo from the festivities, featuring herself, Habba, her new billionaire husband Turhan Mildon , and Ali Abdelaziz, a former UFC manager and NYPD and FBI informant suspected of being a double agent.

According to the 2013 book Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America , Abdelaziz was initially hired by the NYPD to serve as a mole against Muslims of America, a Virginia-based group, but was dropped after they after administered a polygraph test and suspected he was a double agent. The FBI tried to deport him but was unable to, according to the book’s authors.

This is at least the second time Patel and Abdelaziz have been pictured together.

“Why, that’s Ali Abdelaziz is on the far left. Manages a lot of Russian, Belarusian and Chechen MMA fighters including Khamzat Chimaev, who is close to Kadyrov. Abdelaziz was an FBI informant until the Bureau dropped him because they suspected he was a double agent,” The Insider’s Michael Weiss wrote on X . “Looks like Ka$h (far right) has forgiven and forgotten. These MAGA weddings are Mos Eisley cantinas for counterintelligence.”

Patel also drew backlash for appearing with Chattah, who made headlines last year for allowing senior Israeli government official Tom Alexandrovich to return to Israel on bail after being arrested in a sting operation for soliciting sexual acts from a minor.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that his country is “fully prepared for the war to be resumed” following President Trump’s threats to “annihilate” Iran during his U.N. General Assembly speech.

“We stand firm in the face of any new aggression, even if it comes to a doomsday war. It is up to President Trump to choose. He wanted unconditional surrender in the war in two days, and now, it is eight months they are fighting with no result. A new aggression would be certainly the same,” Araghchi said Sunday to Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press .

Donald Trump made an apocalyptic threat to Iran during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, where he mused driving “them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.” The crazed speech was met with walkouts from delegates, including the Iranian contingent.

Despite Trump’s ominous words, he seemed optimistic a peace deal with Iran following his speech, with America’s Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner reportedly holding a three-hour meeting with Iranian representatives on the sidelines of the assembly. Iran offered a truce that involves reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the U.S. ending its blockade of Iranian ports, lifting sanctions on Iranian oil exports, unfreezing an estimated $12 billion in Iranian assets, and a region-wide ceasefire that includes Yemen and Lebanon.

On Saturday, though, Trump rejected the proposal, claiming that Iran’s motivation for seeking a deal was because they are “losing so badly.”

“They want to make a deal, and I think that’s fine,” Trump said. “I’d like to make a deal too. But that deal would not be acceptable.”

Trump’s seem ignorant of the fact that Iran believes it is operating from a place of strength and remains defiant in the face of the U.S. president’s threats. The terms that Iran is offering are more favorable to itself and would require the U.S. to make concessions, albeit similar ones to June’s memorandum of understanding between the two countries that later fell apart.

But Trump continues to be stubborn, and the U.S. and global economies continue to suffer, along with civilians across the Middle East, as this war drags on with dwindling hopes for peace. Not even the impending midterm elections seem to be enough to spur Trump to push harder for a resolution.

What does it say that President Donald Trump’s biggest fans are starting to abandon him?

Fractures have begun to form among the Front Row Joes , a group of steadfast Trump supporters that devote their lives to attending every single one of the president’s rallies, Politico Playbook reported Monday.

Rick Frazier, who’s been to more than 100 Trump rallies, told Playbook he wasn’t planning to vote in November’s midterm elections. He claimed that Trump “can’t be trusted.”

“Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex … those are big nos for me,” Frazier told Playbook. “He himself as a no-war president. That didn’t work out.”

Frazier told Playbook that 95 percent of the Joes, however, were still “unwavering.” But some are breaking away.

The first major defector was Trisha Hope, who joined the Joes in 2018 and funded her travels by selling a book of Trump’s social media posts and swapping her apartment in Austin for an R.V.

Hope defected in July 2025 after she watched Trump push back on a question Jeffrey Epstein during a Cabinet meeting. “Are you still talking Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked for years,” the president said.

“It was like a dagger in my heart,” Hope told Playbook. “It was like a light switch went on and a veil lifted, and I saw him for who he was, and I have not been able to unsee it since.”

After watching Trump’s handling of his military campaign in the Middle East, Hope’s concerns were validated. She believes he is a “fraud and a liar.”

“If we do lose the midterms and he is impeached again, I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment,” Hope told Playbook.

Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary who produced a documentary the Joes, told Playbook that the defections raise concerns ahead of the midterm elections the attitudes of Trump’s soft supporters who were never die-hard MAGA fans.

With just weeks until the midterms, Trump appears to be in hot water with Republicans over his mishandling of the war against Iran and skyrocketing diesel prices . While Trump isn’t actually on the ballot this time around, the president has made every effort to make voters feel like he is .