President Donald Trump accepted an invitation on Thursday from King Charles III for a second state visit to the United Kingdom.

The invite came in a letter presented to Trump by U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is meeting with Trump at the White House regarding ending the war in Ukraine.

‘This is really special. This has never happened before. This is unprecedented,’ Starmer said as he was sitting next to Trump in the Oval Office. 

‘I think that just symbolizes the strength of the relationship between us. This is a very special letter. I think the last state visit was a tremendous success,’ he continued. ‘His majesty the king wants to make this even better than that.’ 

‘What I haven’t got yet is your answer,’ Starmer then said, drawing laughs. 

‘The answer is yes, on behalf our wonderful First Lady Melania and myself, the answer is yes and we look forward to being there and honoring the king and honoring really your country,’ Trump responded. ‘Your country is a fantastic country.’ 

Trump described Charles ‘beautiful’ and ‘wonderful man.’ 

‘I’ve gotten to know him very well actually, first term and now, a second term,’ he added. 

Starmer said he would ‘happily’ take Trump’s acceptance of the invite to King Charles III.

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., claimed earlier this month that ‘no president’ has presided over more plane crashes during his first month in office than President Trump. But data obtained by Fox News Digital shows there were more plane crashes during that same time period under President Biden. 

‘No president has had more planes crash in their first month in office than Donald Trump,’ Swalwell posted on X Feb. 17, a comment viewed over 7 million times on X. 

Department of Transportation data provided by a senior administration official contradicts that data and shows more plane crashes during the first few weeks of President Biden’s term.

Swalwell had posted in response to a small plane crash in Georgia that left two dead.  

There were 55 aviation accidents in the United States between Biden’s inauguration Jan. 21, 2021, and February 17, 2021, compared to 35 during the same period for Trump.

Worldwide there were 91 aviation accidents during that same time period for Biden and 50 during Trump’s first few weeks. 

‘Eric Swalwell is a habitual liar and fraud, who continues to beclown himself every single day because he suffers from a debilitating and severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his brain,’ White House communications director Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital. 

‘As an elected official, he should actually tell the truth for once, but it’s understandable he’s incapable of that since he has Fang Fang on his mind all day.’

Swalwell told Fox News Digital in a statement he was referring to commercial airliners, although his initial post stated ‘planes.’

‘There have been two U.S. commercial airliner crashes, where people died or were seriously injured in Trump’s first month,’ Swalwell said. ‘Please show me a president who had more in their first month.’

Several Democrats have blamed Trump for high-profile plane crashes in recent weeks, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who suggested Trump’s cuts to the FAA were to blame in the Toronto crash, which resulted in serious injuries but no deaths. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back at the time, pointing out that the ‘crash unfortunately took place in Canadian airspace with Canadian air-traffic controllers overseeing it.’  

She then disputed the Democratic attack line about Trump firing FAA officials. 

‘And the facts about the FAA are that no air-traffic controllers have been let go by Secretary Duffy or this new administration. In fact, Secretary Duffy has put great emphasis on hiring the best and the brightest air-traffic controllers who want to be part of the FAA,’ she argued.

Fox News Digital’s Gabriel Hays contributed to this report

United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer is meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday at the White House hours after Trump told his Cabinet that he wouldn’t provide security guarantees to Ukraine ‘beyond very much.’ 

Trump, who met with French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House on Monday regarding Ukraine, is expected to sit down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tomorrow in Washington. 

The meeting between Trump and Starmer will include much discussion about the president’s efforts to bring the conflict to an end through a peaceful resolution, a senior administration official said. They will later hold a joint press conference at 2 p.m. ET.

As Trump was greeting Starmer Thursday, the president was asked if he was confident he could get a peace deal done on Ukraine, to which he replied ‘We can and we will.’

‘On issues like Ukraine, thank you for changing the conversation to bring about the possibility that now we can have a peace deal,’ Starmer later said alongside Trump in the Oval Office. ‘And we want to work with you to make sure that peace deal is enduring, that it lasts, that it’s a deal that goes down as a historic deal, that nobody breaches. And we’ll work with you, to make sure that absolutely happens.’

Starmer pushed the United States on Wednesday to provide a security ‘backstop’ for any potential European peacekeepers in Ukraine, according to Reuters. 

‘I’m absolutely convinced that we need a lasting peace, not a ceasefire, and for that to happen we need security guarantees,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘Precisely what that layers up to, what that looks like, is obviously a subject of intense discussion.’ 

Starmer reportedly added that his ‘concern is if there is a ceasefire without a backstop, it will simply give him [Putin] the opportunity to wait and to come again because his ambition in relation to Ukraine is pretty obvious, I think, for all to see.’ 

However, Trump said Thursday that ‘I don’t like to talk about peacekeeping until we have a deal. I like to get things done.’

‘We have to make a deal first. Right now, we don’t have a deal,’ he added.

Trump also said during a Cabinet meeting Wednesday that ‘I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much, we’re going to have Europe do that, because… Europe is their next-door neighbor. But we’re going to make sure everything goes well.’ 

‘I’ve had very good conversations with President Putin. I’ve had very good conversations with President Zelenskyy. And until four weeks ago, nobody had conversations with anybody,’ Trump said Wednesday. ‘It wasn’t even a consideration. Nobody thought you could make peace. I think you can.’ 

‘We’re going to do the best we can to make the best deal we can for both sides,’ Trump added. 

The Trump administration’s lawyers have spent significant time in court this month fighting dozens of requests filed by legal groups, labor organizations and a litany of other state and local plaintiffs across the country – and so far, most judges haven’t granted these requests.

The courts ‘are rightfully saying we don’t have jurisdiction over this,’ or, in certain cases, that plaintiffs ‘aren’t proving harm,’ Fox News legal editor Kerri Kupec Urbahn, a former spokesperson for Attorney General Bill Barr, said of the numerous legal challenges to Trump’s agenda. 

The lawsuits, totaling more than 80, are aimed at blocking or reversing some of Trump’s most controversial actions and executive orders. 

Nearly all plaintiffs are seeking, in addition to the long-term injunctive relief, a temporary restraining order, or TRO, from a federal judge that would block the order or policy from taking force until the merits of the case can be heard. 

Almost all these requests for emergency relief have been rejected in court, with judges noting that plaintiffs lacked standing, and ordering both parties to return for a later hearing date to consider the merits of the case.

Some Trump allies and legal commentators have criticized the many lawsuits as a way for plaintiffs to skip over the traditional administrative appeals process and take their case directly to the courts instead – a pattern they say has prompted the wave of rejections by federal judges. 

There is an internal review process for agency-specific actions or directives, which can be challenged via appeals to administrative law judges or an agency-specific court. 

But doing so for executive orders or presidential actions is much more difficult.

According to information from the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register, a president’s executive order can be revoked or modified only by the president or via the legislative branch, if the president was acting on authority that had been granted by Congress.

Since the latter is not immediately applicable to the Trump-era orders many of the lawsuits hinge on, that leaves the courts as one of the limited arbiters for determining whether to let stand the orders or action in question. 

That means the requests for injunctive relief are considered in a sort of two-part wave of proceedings, since most – if not all – Trump-era complaints include both the request for the TRO and for the preliminary injunction. 

The TRO requests are the first wave of ‘mini-arguments’ to come before U.S. judges tasked with reviewing the complaints. 

They are heard immediately and require plaintiffs to prove they will suffer irreparable injury or harm if their request for relief is not granted— a difficult burden to satisfy, especially when the order or policy has not yet come into force. 

(As one judge remarked earlier this month, the court cannot grant TRO requests based on speculation.)

The courts then order both parties to re-appear at a later date to consider the request for preliminary injunction, which allows both sides to present a fuller argument and for the court to take into account the harm or damages incurred. 

‘The bottom line is that courts typically do not grant requests for emergency relief at the start of a lawsuit,’ Suzanne Goldberg, a Lawfare contributor and professor at Columbia Law School, wrote in a recent op-ed. 

‘Instead, they wait to decide what remedies a plaintiff deserves, if any, until after each side makes its legal arguments and introduces its evidence, including evidence obtained from the other side through the discovery process.’

These near-term court victories have buoyed Trump allies and the Department of Government Efficiency, allowing DOGE, at least for now, to continue carrying out their ambitious early-days agenda and claiming ‘victory.’ 

‘LFG,’ Elon Musk cheered on X recently, in response to a court’s rejection of a request from labor unions seeking to block DOGE access to federal agency information.

Other accounts have praised the overwhelming court rejections of emergency restraining orders as evidence that the Trump administration, and DOGE, are ‘winning’ – a characterization that legal experts warn is largely premature.

In fact, they’ve noted, the slow-moving legal challenges and nature of the court calendar are features, not bugs.

This includes efforts to block or curtail DOGE from accessing internal government information or firing agency employees; lawsuits aimed at blocking the Trump administration’s transgender military ban; and complaints seeking to block the release or public identification of FBI personnel involved in Jan. 6 investigations, among many other things.

But that’s not because every one of these actions is legitimate. Rather, legal experts say, the near-term ‘victories’ hinge on the limited power a judge has to intervene in proving emergency relief, or granting temporary restraining orders.

Judges, including U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, noted previously that fear and speculation alone are not enough to curtail DOGE access: plaintiffs must prove clearly, and with evidence, that their workings have met the hard-to-satisfy test of permanent or ‘irreparable’ harm.

Rule 65 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure states that plaintiffs must be able to show evidence that a rule, action or policy in question will result in ‘immediate, irreparable harm’ to satisfy a TRO request. 

That’s a difficult burden of proof, and a near impossible one for plaintiffs to satisfy, especially for an action that has not yet taken effect. 

One exception is the Trump administration’s ban on birthright citizenship. 

The request for immediate relief, was granted by multiple U.S. district courts judges, who sided with plaintiffs in ruling that hundreds of children born in the U.S. were at risk of real harm. 

It was also upheld by a U.S. appeals court last week, setting the stage for a possible Supreme Court fight.

But barring that, most of the lawsuits will play out in the longer-term, Goldberg, wrote in the Lawfare op-ed.

‘Stepping back, the current litigation landscape of TROs and preliminary injunctions may seem quite extraordinary… But considered in context, these many provisional orders suggest that even more extraordinary are the government’s threatened actions, both in their likely unlawfulness and their potential for irreparable harm,’ she said.

Billionaire Elon Musk, now also a senior adviser to President Trump, met with Senate Republicans in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Caucus on Thursday at the White House to discuss the work they’ve been doing and to get briefed on DOGE’s findings. 

The meeting was led by caucus Chairwoman Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who has spearheaded efforts to audit and cut bloat in the government for years. 

‘The Senate DOGE Caucus has hit the ground running to save taxpayer dollars,’ Ernst told Fox News Digital in an exclusive statement. ‘I was proud to bring my colleagues together to coordinate efforts with Elon, so we can continue to streamline our work. We are just getting started to make government more efficient and protect taxpayers to ensure Washington works for the American people.’

The discussion was the first opportunity for senators in the caucus to hear from Musk directly regarding the discoveries he and DOGE have made. 

The goal of the gathering was to share work between the Senate and Musk’s DOGE, and to discuss how they could be most helpful in the legislature, Ernst’s office shared with Fox News Digital.

At the White House, Musk told senators that DOGE’s work is essential and detailed his plans to create savings, a source familiar told Fox News Digital. 

During the meeting, they presented to Musk the various areas that senators are already focused on, using a divide and conquer strategy. Some of the Republicans have targeted government spending, while others have sought to address the national debt, concerning flows of money to labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology and much more. 

The senators further talked with Musk about how congressional action could make Washington, D.C., more efficient going forward and protect American taxpayers from funding extravagant projects. 

In attendance at the meeting were Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Mike Lee, R-Utah, Rick Scott, R-Fla., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Steve Daines, R-Mont., Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., Roger Marshall, R-Kan., James Risch, R-Idaho, Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, Jon Husted, R-Ohio, Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, John Cornyn, R-Texas, Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., Katie Britt, R-Ala., Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., and John Hoeven, R-N.D.

Musk similarly met with President Donald Trump and his Cabinet at the White House on Wednesday.

The White House’s DOGE spokesperson did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are set to sign a landmark mineral deal Friday that represents a breakthrough in their relationship, but leaves the work of hashing out the financial details for a later date.

‘This is in some ways an agreement to make an agreement,’ said Doug Klain, policy analyst at Razom for Ukraine.

Even so, it was an abrupt turnaround from last week, when Zelenskyy rejected the initial terms for a deal. Trump, finding Zelenskyy ungrateful for U.S. help, declared him to be a ‘dictator’ and said Ukraine ‘never should have started’ the war. 

So how did both parties turn things around? Here’s what we know about the deal so far: 

Reconstruction investment fund 

Unlike an earlier iteration of the deal, the newest version, approved by the Ukrainian Cabinet on Wednesday, establishes a fund with joint U.S.-Ukraine ownership instead of 100% U.S. ownership. 

Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Wednesday Ukraine would be funneling half of its revenues from future oil, gas and mineral projects into the fund, with some of that money being reinvested for more development. The deal would exclude existing natural resources projects. 

The deal says that once both sides sign on to the initial framework, negotiations will begin on a ‘subsequent agreement’ on who will control how much of the fund and its operation.

Two sides still far apart on grant repayment 

The U.S. initially demanded Ukraine offer $500 billion worth of its rare earths and other minerals as back payment for about $185 billion in aid. The latest versions of the deal do not include a concrete figure for how much of the mineral revenues the U.S. would receive or the size of the stake the U.S. would hold in the fund. 

At a Wednesday news conference, Zelenskyy still said his country would not be repaying the U.S. for any of the aid that has already been allocated. 

‘I will not accept (even) 10 cents of debt repayment in this deal. Otherwise, it will be a precedent.’ 

But Trump seemed satisfied with the latest negotiations. 

‘We’re doing very well with Russia-Ukraine. President Zelensky is going to be coming on Friday. It’s now confirmed, and we’re going to be signing an agreement,’ he said Wednesday. 

The agreement has little in the way of details on how the U.S. would benefit financially.

‘Perhaps U.S. companies will be contracted to do all the work of extraction, and could make big profits that way; perhaps the U.S. government would award itself an annual sum from the fund; or perhaps there would be a stipulation that U.S. companies could purchase the minerals at discounted rates,’ explained Peter Harris, a political science professor at Colorado State and fellow at restraint-minded group Defense Priorities. 

But rare earth mining is a long and arduous process. ‘It could be decades before anyone makes a dime from Ukraine’s untapped natural resources,’ said Harris. 

What Ukraine wants from the deal: security guarantees

Ukraine is looking for help from across the world to keep Russia out in the future if they can agree on terms to end the war. 

But Zelenskyy is desperate for U.S. participation since he does not believe European security guarantees alone are enough to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading again.

U.S. officials have insisted America will not put boots on the ground. ‘I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much – we’re going to have Europe do that because we’re talking about Europe is their next-door neighbor,’ Trump said Wednesday.

U.S. officials have also told Ukraine to read between the lines: if the U.S. has significant financial interests, potentially even workers on the ground in the region, it will defend those interests. 

‘The Ukrainians are not quite convinced by that argument,’ said Klain. ‘It’s reminiscent of 1994, the agreement Ukraine made with the U.S., Russia and others to give up its nuclear arsenal, and the U.S. would say, ‘If anybody threatens your sovereignty, we’ll have your back.”

‘Ukraine does not want to get burned again.’

The agreement includes a vague reference that ‘supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace,’ according to the Kyiv Independent. 

Harris said a ‘backdoor security guarantee’ through a minerals deal amounted to ‘bad policy’ for the U.S. 

‘It [does not] serve the U.S. for large numbers of American workers to be stationed in an unstable post-conflict zone,’ he said. ‘Uncertain access to Ukraine’s natural resources is not worth risking a NATO-Russia war.’ 

Putin dangling Russian-controlled minerals to Trump 

Ukraine controls over 100 major deposits of critical minerals, according to the Kyiv School of Economics, along with some oil and gas reserves. Its reserves hold titanium, lithium, graphite, rare earths and other minerals key to the energy and tech sectors. 

Trump wants revenues from the minerals as repayment, but he could also be looking to break China’s monopoly on the rare earth metals used in phones, solar panels and other electronics. 

Putin, meanwhile, said he is open to offering the U.S. access to rare minerals, including those from Russia’s ‘new territories’ – those captured in its war on Ukraine. 

He said a U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal is not a concern and Russia ‘undoubtedly has, I want to emphasize, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine,’ in televised remarks. 

‘As for the new territories, it’s the same. We are ready to attract foreign partners to the so-called new, to our historical territories, which have returned to the Russian Federation,’ he added.