There will be no shortage of topics in the air when President Donald Trump holds a rare solo news conference on Wednesday at 5 p.m. in New York City. Trump is hosting the press conference, only the second during his 20 months as president, following the United Nations General Assembly. Trump's remarks can be watched on CSpan, with a live stream available on the White House's YouTube channel below. There will be much to discuss from the U.N. meeting, including Trump's claim Wednesday that China was interfering in the 2018 midterms in an effort to harm his administration as a result of the steep tariffs he has placed on Chinese goods. Trump also hinted earlier in the day that he will give further information about a planned second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. During the assembly, Trump has also spoken in harsh terms about both Iran and Venezuela. But there is also sure to be plenty of interest in getting Trump's response to major domestic issues. Just hours before Trump's scheduled press conference, a third woman came forward with an allegation of sexual misconduct against the president's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The claim, by Julie Swetnick, was released by lawyer Michael Avenatti, who has also been representing adult film star Stormy Daniels in her cases against the president. Following the allegation, Trump hit out directly at Avenatti. "Avenatti is a third rate lawyer who is good at making false accusations, like he did on me and like he is now doing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh," Trump wrote on Twitter. "He is just looking for attention and doesn't want people to look at his past record and relationships - a total low-life!" Trump has stood firmly behind Kavanaugh and cast doubt on his accusers, which also include Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez. Ford and Kavanaugh are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday. Trump could also face questions about his Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Earlier in the week, it was widely reported that Rosenstein had either resigned or was about to resign amid fear of being fired following a New York Times story that claimed he had discussed secretly recording the president and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later clarified the situation, stating that Rosenstein and Trump had talked over the phone and would meet on Thursday once the president had returned to Washington D.C. from New York City.<doc-sep>Speaking to reporters at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, US President Donald Trump...Addressing the Security Council earlier in the day, US President Donald Trump warned Iran that his administration will soon go beyond previous sanctions regimes by imposing the “toughest” financial penalties ever designed.In his speech, the president continued his rhetorical broadside against the Islamic Republic for a second day, after dressing down Tehran the day before in a speech to the General Assembly.“The Iranian regime exports violence, terror and turmoil. It illicitly procures sensitive items to advance its ballistic missile program,” Trump said, calling on international partners to pressure Iran to end its missile work. The president once again criticized a nuclear deal with Iran endorsed by the council three years ago, saying a “horrible, one-sided deal allowed Iran to continue its path to a bomb and gave Iran a financial lifeline when they needed it the most.”Michael Wilner contributed to this report.<doc-sep>As foreign leaders and diplomats descended on New York City over the past week for the annual United Nations General Assembly, there was an air of apprehension surrounding the arrival of Donald Trump. One year earlier, after all, Trump had threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea; slammed Iran as a “rogue nation”; and intimated that he might invade Venezuela. Subsequent appearances on the world stage—in Singapore, Brussels, and Helsinki over the ensuing 12 months—merely cemented Trump’s reputation as a reality-TV bully. “The big question coming into this week was when Trump might blow up and go off script,” Richard Gowan, a senior fellow at the United Nations University, told me. “It was all going surprisingly O.K. until the press conference,” he added. Just after 5 P.M. on Wednesday, Trump went full Trump. Besieged by questions from reporters about the latest allegations of sexual misconduct against his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the accusations he, himself, has faced from more than a dozen women, Trump launched into a nearly 90-minute rant. Jumping from topic to topic, Trump blasted the allegations against Kavanaugh as a “big, fat con job”; incorrectly claimed that only “three or four” women had accused him of sexual misconduct; praised his handling of North Korea; boasted about his “very, very large brain”; and denounced all of the “fake” people at the press conference. At times, he seemed to be enjoying himself. Even by Trumpian standards, it was a stark display of the president’s uninhibited rhetorical style and rejection of basic political norms. More important, from the perspective of the General Assembly, was what Trump’s manic performance suggested about America’s diminished power on the world stage. The president of the United States, far from representing U.S. hegemony, looked weak and small—preoccupied with the Mueller probe and disloyal aides, insecure about his achievements, and fearful of Republicans losing control of Congress. “It was clear throughout that domestic politics and midterms were on top of his agenda,” said Gowan. “Focused on events at home, Trump was notably less effective at the U.N. than in 2017.” Last year, Trump drove the agenda at the General Assembly with his sharp attacks against Kim and set much of the diplomatic community on edge with his vicious rhetoric and threats against American allies. This year, however, Trump was notably eclipsed by the charisma of French President Emmanuel Macron and even the absent Chinese President Xi Jinping. “I didn’t like what he said last year, but I thought he mastered the U.N. game pretty well. . . . This year he never demonstrated the same mastery,” Gowan continued. “Now, after the press conference, we know why—although we could have guessed. His head is full of the SCOTUS process and his on political position. The U.N. is an afterthought.” A day earlier, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, Trump had appeared listless and soporific as he recycled talking points assailing “globalism” and enumerating his successes. At one point, the chamber broke out in uncomfortable laughter when Trump declared that his administration “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The reaction clearly surprised the president, who quipped, “Didn’t expect that reaction but that’s O.K.”—eliciting more guffaws from the audience. It was a remarkable moment. “The hall laughed at him,” one foreign diplomat told me, noting that they had never seen that before. But it was also emblematic of how the world sees Trump, after a year in which the president alienated allies, withdrew from the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, and was allegedly described as mentally unfit by senior administration officials. (One week before the U.N.G.A. meeting, The New York Times reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had suggested secretly recording Trump in the White House as part of a plan to invoke the 25th Amendment, which provides the Cabinet with the ability to remove a president from office if he or she cannot “discharge the powers and duties” of the office.) “I think it’s a sad day when the president of the U.S. is laughed at,” Julianne Smith, who led NATO policy at the Pentagon and served as deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, told me Tuesday. “Today showed just how much damage he’s done to America’s standing in the world. It also showed just how out of touch he is with how most of the world views his presidency. He was genuinely surprised to hear them laugh. That’s another bad sign. His advisers aren’t helping him understand how the world looks at America today.” The problem isn’t that other heads of state don’t take Trump seriously, the foreign diplomat said, but that many have given up on working with his administration, and no longer care about giving the U.S. president their respect. Pacific nations including Australia, South Korea, and Japan—all U.S. allies—have formed their own trading bloc after Trump pulled out of the Trans Pacific Partnership. In Europe, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has called on the E.U. to stop relying on the U.S. and to assert their own manifest destiny. Indeed, when the camera briefly turned to the German delegation during Trump’s speech, its representatives were laughing amongst themselves, apparently mocking the president. “His whole speech is concerning to say the least. It seems like he likes to touch new lows just for the sake of shocking us,” the foreign diplomat explained. “It makes you laugh though.” The leadership void has elevated regional powers like France and Germany in Europe; Russia and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East; and China in Asia. But this new order has also created confusion and disorder on the world stage, especially among smaller nations, according to Sarah Margon, the Washington director for Human Rights Watch. “They are still dependent on the United States despite the absence of credibility on so many different issues,” she told me. “They still turn to the United States for legitimacy, for support, and, in some cases, financial resources.” In the past, America’s power had provided a pillar of stability, for better or for worse. Now, Margon said, “I think there is a real fear that by lending U.S. legitimacy and credibility to some of these issues and claiming them finished he is actually creating more threats, more disunity. . . . The U.S. has a long history of sort of shaping and engaging on political or geopolitical outcomes and instead Trump is focusing on these bellicose biases.” Yet there is also a creeping fear, among the foreign dignitaries who were snickering at Trump, that they, too, might become victims of the populist-nationalist anger that swept him into power.“The people in that room are the foreign-policy establishment and they are largely in power still, in most of the major countries, but they are losing influence and they are losing influence precisely because the message that Trump articulates,” said Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of the Eurasia Group. “His opposition to globalism has a lot of momentum, a lot of momentum in the United States and has momentum in lots of countries.” “There are an awful lot of people that like that message,” Bremmer continued. “Not in that room—but there are a lot of people. And for the foreign-policy establishment not to be willing to recognize that is a really big problem.”<doc-sep>
USA TODAY President Donald Trump will hold a press conference at the United Nations in New York at 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, on the tail end of his bilateral meetings with U.N. members and his speech before the United Nations General Assembly. Earlier Wednesday, Trump wielded the gavel for a meeting of the U.N. Security Council in which he spent a bit of time chastising certain U.N. members for their attempts to influence the elections of the United States, including Russia and China, whom he accused of election meddling without any reference to evidence. Trump spoke about his hope for a continued Middle East peace process, but spent a portion of his speech asserting that Iran is continuing to sponsor terrorism, and Trump threatened future sanctions on the regime. In return, a number of the heads-of-state gathered around the table had harsh words and warnings for Trump in relation to the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran, also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal. In addition, a few leaders prodded Trump on the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Agreement as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The press conference also represents the rare opportunity for the press corps to directly question the president about a number of current news items, including the floundering nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States, the possible firing of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and his oversight of the Robert Mueller investigation, and whether or not Rosenstein's firing may constitute obstruction of justice. USA TODAY will provide live coverage of the press conference in the player at the top of this page.